caravan. He’d bought it cheap, in cash, from a secondhand dealer in the Peak District just before he’d left Manchester. As soon as he’d got it, he’d sprayed it with military surplus drab-olive paint to help it blend into the rural environments where he planned on spending the rest of his days. Home might be a box on wheels, but he liked to keep it nice and tidy.
Lenny got out of the car and walked over towards the caravan, avoiding the tripwire that was carefully stretched between two trees and attached to an alarm circuit. His hidden cameras watched him from the foliage.
Next to the caravan was his folding table, his deck chair and the barbecue that he grilled his food on. He fancied some sausages tonight. He climbed the aluminium steps to his front door, took the keys from his pocket and undid the two heavy steel padlocks to let himself in. It was hot and stuffy inside, and he pushed open the windows to let some air circulate.
Still grinning to himself at having fooled Them yet again, he stepped over to the fridge and pulled out a can of Old Speckled Hen. Cracked the ring and raised the can in a toast to his cleverness.
‘I’ll have one of those too,’ said a voice behind him.
The can dropped out of Lenny’s fingers and hit the vinyl floor with a hiss of foam.
Lenny spun around.
The man from the castle walkway in Laugharne was standing in the doorway.
Adam gaped dumbly at Pelham, as if he’d been slapped.
‘That’s right,’ Pelham said, clearly enjoying the look on his face. ‘It’s here. I wasn’t joking when I said you were being given an incredible opportunity, Adam. You should be honoured. Welcome to the inner circle.’
‘You found it.’ Adam’s voice was hushed with awe.
‘It was found. Not by me. I’m just a man with a job to do, the same as you. Mine was to find someone who could make it work. We failed twice. Now you’re here, we’re not going to fail a third time.’ He cocked his head. ‘Are we, Adam?’
Adam was too stunned to formulate a reply.
‘Good. Now, enough talk. I want to show you something that very few people have seen in more than half a century.’
Adam was still speechless as Pelham led him out of the office. The guards were standing outside the door, weapons dangling at their sides. They stood to attention as their boss strode out of the doorway and followed, pointing the guns at Adam’s back. Pelham led the way back towards the hangar, past the corroded hulk of the Me 262 and over to a doorway on the far side of the huge space, where he stopped and gave a sharp command. One of the guards produced a large key and unlocked the door.
On the other side of it was a large circular chamber, fifty yards across. Light streamed in from holes in the rough dome of a ceiling and Adam could make out the marks of picks and chisels in the craggy stone walls. He shivered as he thought of the doomed concentration camp slaves who had carved this space out of the solid rock of the mountain under the watchful eyes and cocked weapons of their Nazi masters. The smell of death was soaked deep into the walls of this place.
Running around the circumference of the chamber was a circular metal walkway, with a rail at chest height. Adam stepped to the rail and peered over the edge. His eyes widened. The centre of the chamber was an abyss, a round vertical shaft about fifteen metres across that plummeted straight down further than the eye could see. A rusted iron gangway led across from the edge of the chamber to a steel cage housing an open-sided industrial lift, the kind Adam had seen in pictures of old mines. Pelham walked briskly across the clanking gangway, opened a mesh door, and Adam followed him wordlessly into the lift. One of the guards accompanied them, and the other went over to a switch panel on the wall.
As the lift groaned downwards and the craggy shaft walls rolled by, Adam saw that the guard was looking down at his feet, fingering his weapon a little nervously. Nobody spoke. Down and down. Adam estimated they must be hundreds of metres inside the mountain. There was no ventilation down here, and the air was thick and foul.
The lift touched down and they stepped out into a circular gallery like the one above. A single arched passage led off it, lit down its length by age-yellowed lamps. Pelham led the way. The passage widened steadily, then came to a dead end.
Facing them, glowing dully in the lamplight, was a giant steel door. It filled the entire wall, tall and wide enough to drive a Panzer tank through. It looked to Adam like the entrance to the world’s biggest bank vault. The rivets stamped into its edges were the size of baseballs, and six massive steel deadlocks cut deep into the rock. Painted onto the door’s matt grey surface was a sign with a skull-and-crossbones image and the words ‘VORSICHT: GEFAHRENZONE’ in stark red letters.
The danger warning was loud and clear. Whoever had put that door in place must have known what terrible forces were to be contained behind it. Adam wondered if his captors had even the slightest idea of what they were dealing with.
Pelham gave a command to the guard. The man nodded, unslung his weapon and handed it to his boss. Stepped towards the huge door, dusted his hands and took a grip on the giant metal wheel, crusted with age, that was connected by a system of gears to the bars of the deadlocks. The guard braced his feet apart, paused a beat and then grunted with effort as he put his strength behind the lock. The wheel turned with a squeak, and the deadlocks began to draw back. Another turn, a few more inches.
Standing there with his mouth open and watching the locks slowly grind back across the door, Adam suddenly realised he hadn’t breathed for about a minute. His heart was firing like a machine gun. Pelham watched his face, and a little smile curled at the edges of his mouth.
Adam gulped. He was about to witness something incredible, legendary. Something he’d spent years studying from afar, within the confines of his safe little world, relying solely on his own scientific knowledge and the sketchy evidence of a handful of witness accounts. The mythical Kammler machine. The lost Grail of super-esoteric science. Here he was about to lay eyes on it for the first time.
Now he knew that Michio and Julia had stood on this spot, not so very long ago. Had they felt the way he was feeling now, quaking with terror and yet, somewhere deep inside, burning up with excitement?
The thought screamed at him from inside his head.
The deadlocks had reached the end of their travel. The guard stepped away from the wheel, wiping the rust off his hands, then leaned his weight into the huge door and pushed hard. It began to open.
Adam felt Pelham’s hand on his shoulder, and walked towards the dark doorway. The air wafting out of the shadows smelled dank, and Adam shivered with the cold that suddenly tingled up and down his body.
Then Pelham flashed a torch, found the handle of a switch and yanked it. Lights flickered into life and Adam’s jaw dropped open.
He’d held an ingot of solid gold created inside a nuclear reactor. Watched the child-sized Honda ASIMO robot conduct a symphony orchestra. Stood inside a particle accelerator a mile underneath the ground as electrons slammed into one another at the speed of light. Witnessed the afterglow of a gamma ray burst when a giant star collapsed in on itself and a black hole was born. But he’d never seen anything like this before.
Under his feet, electric wires snaked like pythons towards the device in the middle of the vault. He followed them towards it.
Standing on a concrete plinth, the bell-shaped object was as tall as he was. He walked around its smooth sides, put out his hand and touched the cold steel casing.
Kammler’s secret creation, shrouded in mystery for sixty-five years, the greatest enigma of the twentieth century. Maybe of all time.
The Bell.
And here it was. Incredible.
The scientist in him was already hard at work, his eyes following the line of the joints in the strange metal
