“Not only that, you’d better go and take a look at the side of the next enclosure,” Carl said as he turned and left.
The small group followed, feeling the emptiness of the giant mine far more than they had a few moments before. As Everett stopped, they saw he was gesturing upward at a sight that gave them all pause. Along a hundred feet of the next building’s wall, there were slashes in the material that looked as if some giant cat or something worse had attacked the composite material. The groupings of the slashes were in patterns of three. The rips were so long that it was as if whatever created the marks had punctured the material and then dragged great claws down the sides, exposing the interior to the outside elements.
“What in the world could have done that?” Appleby asked as he examined the edges of the ripped-apart and petrified material.
“If you’ll notice, most of the buildings are in the same shape. Whatever it was happened before the camp, or whatever it was, was destroyed by the earth movement,” said a familiar voice from behind them.
They all turned and saw Jack and the Vietnamese private as they eased themselves down from a long dead lava flow to the base of the building they were looking at.
Everett smiled, visibly relaxing for the first time since he had left the colonel to fight a battle he thought he should have been a part of. Jack was closest to Sebastian so he shook hands with him. He then walked over to Everett and shook his.
“So you made it, I see?” Carl said, relieved that his boss was still among the living.
“The president sent in the cavalry at the last minute-or at least Polish paratroopers.”
Everett smiled more broadly. “The times they are a’changin’.”
Niles took Jack’s hand and then Lee and Alice gave him a hug. Next was Charlie, but Jack held out his hand real fast before Ellenshaw could hug him. Pete smiled and nodded, but inside he was churning in total relief they hadn’t lost the colonel.
“You say you’re seeing the same kind of damage in other buildings?” Lee asked Jack.
“It looked…” Jack hesitated, “Hell, those marks looked… methodical to me.”
Ellenshaw was staring at the small Vietnamese sniper. He nodded his head toward him as he eased himself around the stern-looking Tram.
“Are you suggesting that the marks didn’t occur naturally when the ground erupted underneath these dwellings?”
“Hell, Doc, I don’t know,” Collins said. “But after all we’ve been through the past few years, I don’t assume anything that looks like that is a natural occurrence. I’m sorry, but those are some sort of claw marks.”
“This breeze,” Lee said, getting everyone’s attention. “It’s being generated someplace. I suggest we find out where, and then maybe we can find the place where the Germans found those artifacts.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jack said, looking at his watch. “I suggest we start by looking down there,” he said, pointing toward the back of the steeply sloping gallery.
“Is there any word on the status of Dark Star 3?” Alice asked when she noticed Jack looking at his watch.
Collins looked down as the others started to move away.
“The president said the Johnson Space Center lost all contact with them at 0930.”
Alice said nothing. Instead, she just took his arm.
“They still have a visual on it, and it is under power. They’ve lost telemetry, so that means they’re on their own.”
It took close to three hours of steady downhill walking to get to the far end of the excavation. Every few feet Jack, Carl, and Sebastian, and even the Vietnamese Tram, looked down and saw expended shell casings and more detonator cap covers for the German grenades. During one rest stop they compared notes. There were several differing calibers of the expended rounds. Everything from 7.62 to 5.56 millimeter casings were found. They had all come to the conclusion that sometime in the forties there had been one hell of a firefight in the excavation.
As the unnatural breeze inside picked up, they began to hear a wailing sound. The noise was unnerving to all in the group. Jack knew it to be air being pushed through a small opening in the rear wall that they were fast approaching, but the eerie sound made him edgy nonetheless.
“It seems we would have learned our lesson by now about places like this,” Everett said, slowing to allow Niles, Alice, and the senator to catch up. Bringing up the rear of the group were Sebastian and Tram. Wedged in between were the four scientists, who continually scanned the surrounding rock strata and the support beams of steel that had been installed by the Germans.
“You would think,” Jack said, as he examined the dead end of solid stone ahead. “But what do you expect out of a couple of stupid lifers?”
“I hear that,” Carl said, as he used the butt of his M-16 to hammer the rock he was leaning against. “Well, that wind is coming from somewhere,” he said, “but it’s not here.”
“Jack, you may want to take a look at this,” Niles called out as he eased the senator down once more. The old man was looking like he was pretty near the end and Jack was concerned for him, but knew better than to call an extended halt.
Collins and Everett nimbly hopped from the perch they had taken a quarter of the way up the large wall of rock.
“You know,” Everett said, looking back at the spot where they had just been, “the more I look at that, the more I think that was a cave-in or a rock slide of some kind.”
“I was thinking the same thing, swabby,” Jack said as they approached Niles.
“What is it, Doc? We’ve hit a dead end here.”
“It’s back here,” Compton said as he turned and entered a small cove of raised stone.
As Jack and Everett followed, Pete, Ellenshaw, Appleby, and the MIT engineer, Dubois, sat next to Alice and Lee. All of them took long pulls of water from clear bottles they had brought with them. The lighting allowed Jack to see that they were all growing tired. As Collins waited for Tram and Sebastian to join them, he remembered to use his radio to check in. So far, every hour on the hour, he had reported to the guard command watching the mine entrance.
“Charlie One actual calling CQ, come in, over.”
“Charlie One actual, this is CQ. Captain Mark-Patton, over.”
“Roger, radio check,” Jack said, barely able to hear the British officer from two and half miles below the surface of the mountain.
“Signal has slipped down to thirty percent, but clear at the moment,” Mark-Patton said.
“Roger, talk again in an hour,” Jack said, “Charlie One actual out.”
Collins placed the radio back on his belt. He came to a complete stop, as did the others. The vibration came upon them out of the ground. It felt mechanical at first, but then they all could feel it in their inner ears and knew it to be sound. The sound and vibration stopped as Jack looked up. The sixty-five-foot electrical cords holding the lamps were swaying-not much, but they were moving. So far the breeze that had them chilled had not been enough to move the thick, rotting wiring of the lighting system installed in the thirties and forties. Collins looked back and saw that the others, Lee included, had felt it too. The whole event lasted the duration of Jack’s radio check, and ceased just as he terminated the call.
“That was interesting,” Everett said, looking up at the swaying lights.
“Not as interesting as this,” Niles said as he gestured to a flat area fronted by a large rock wall. There, lined up in neat rows stretching for a quarter mile to the right and left, and unseen if you stayed on the trail leading to the dead end, were what looked like graves. Each one had a marker, some larger than others.
Collins and Sebastian reached for their large flashlights and shone them on the first few markers. The lighting here was far dimmer than the rest of the excavation, being blocked by a large lava wall created many millions of years before.
“Unknown Soldier.” Sebastian read the German words from the first marker. “Waffen SS, 12 December 1944.”
Jack shone his light down the first row until it became too weak to carry further.
