The Steiner residence was a hive of police and forensic teams. The media were already at the gates, and pretty soon they’d be swarming all over Heinrich Dorenkamp for a statement about the tragedy that had seen Otto Steiner, heir to one of Europe’s biggest fortunes, fall to a horrible death. The newspapers and TV would be full of it that night and probably for the next week, until a fresh disaster came along to turn everyone’s heads the other way.
Silvia had been right. Dorenkamp didn’t even try to resist Ben’s request to see inside the safe. Five minutes after walking into the foyer, Ben was sitting alone at the billionaire’s Louis XIV desk, reading a sixty-page bound sheaf of waxy, yellowed papers that few eyes had seen since 1945. Each faded page was headed with a Nazi imperial eagle perched on a wreathed swastika, and the official seal of the SS.
Ruth wouldn’t have been disappointed. The documents had it all. Detailed diagrams and cutaway drawings of the mysterious Bell, showing all its bizarre internal workings. Column after column of technical data whose meaning Ben couldn’t even begin to decipher. Grainy photographs of what looked like some kind of enormous underground factory, a maze of tunnels and galleries, shafts and chambers, together with comprehensive plans of its layout. Everything he could have asked for was right here.
As well as some things that he didn’t need to know, but found himself reading with a chill in his spine. Buried near the back, yellowed and faded with age, was a written military order dated 1944, and Ben’s German was good enough to work out what it was. It was an order sanctioning the building of the secret facility under the supervision of the Kammlerstab, the general’s own personal staff. This hadn’t just been some disused munitions factory that Kammler had commandeered for his own use. The whole mammoth construction development had been undertaken for the single purpose of housing his special weapons project and keeping it a deadly secret from the outside world.
Two names were signed at the foot of the page. The upper scrawl belonged to Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS.
Underneath it was an ugly, spiky flourish of a signature. The ultimate sanction. The mark of Adolf Hitler himself.
The next few pages were a detailed report on the construction of the secret facility, showing plans of the temporary railway that had carried trainload after trainload of forced labourers from the concentration camps to work on the project. Among the figures in the right margin were statistics of the number who had died, from exhaustion or disease, or from electrocution or drowning or tunnel cave-in, during the build. Tens of thousands of them, their unspeakable suffering reduced to an anonymous typed entry in a report, and all just so that Hans Kammler could keep his machine hidden from Allied Intelligence. The place had been a death camp in its own right.
Ben had read enough. He put the papers down on the desk. Reached for Steiner’s phone and called Jeff at Le Val.
‘What’s happening?’ Jeff asked.
‘Plenty. I’ll explain when I see you. Is Brooke still there?’
‘She’s back in London,’ Jeff said. ‘Left this morning.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s worried about you. Listen, someone called Sabrina phoned, asking about Adam and Rory.’
‘That’s what I’m phoning you for, Jeff. I need your help.’
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ Jeff said.
‘I’m asking. Get over to the airport PDQ. I’m sending a private jet to collect you. You can’t miss it. It’s got the name Steiner written on the side in great big letters. I’ll be waiting for you in Bern, and I’ll brief you in the air.’
If Jeff was surprised, he didn’t react. Or maybe nothing Ben did surprised him any more. ‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘Just yourself,’ Ben said. ‘And as much tactical raid gear from the armoury room as you can stuff into two big holdalls.’
‘Sounds like fun. Where are we going?’
Ben picked up the sheaf of documents, flipped a couple of pages and looked again at the faded map that had been drawn by SS General Hans Kammler sixty-five years earlier.
‘We’re going to Hungary,’ he said. ‘To a hidden Nazi base inside a mountain.’
The luxury interior of a private jet seemed like a strange place to unzip two big eighty-litre NATO-issue grey canvas holdalls containing a small armoury of light weapons and munitions, survival gear, woodland-camouflage combat clothing, gloves and boots. The equipment spilled out over the plush carpet and Ben ran through it all. Jeff had chosen well. He nodded. ‘Perfect.’
By the time the jet had reached its ceiling altitude and was speeding eastwards towards Budapest, Ben was filling Jeff in on everything. Their destination was the largest mountain range in Europe: the Carpathians.
There was no telling what they were going to meet there. Otto Steiner might have hired a team of ten, or there could be a hundred armed mercenaries there holding the O’Connors. That was something to worry about when they got there.
It wasn’t long after Ben had finished briefing Jeff that the fast jet touched down on a specially-reserved runway at Budapest Ferihegy International Airport. Steiner’s influence had a lengthy reach, and Heinrich Dorenkamp wasn’t slack in obeying the orders he’d been given. Ben and Jeff carried the two holdalls to a private room where a sober official handed over the keys to a Porsche Cayenne Turbo 4?4.
The high-speed non-stop bullet train from Budapest to the remote city of Miskolc took one hour and forty-five minutes. Ben meant to beat that time, and the big 4.8-litre car was the tool for the job. They carved eastwards across the country with their cargo on the seats behind them. Dusk was settling and the full moon was on the rise over the plains and forests as they bypassed Miskolc and began the winding journey upwards through the foothills of the towering mountains, stopping every so often to check the copy of Kammler’s map. Upwards and upwards through dense woodland, the road carried them far away from any town or village until it had narrowed to a track. The Porsche was as good off-road as it was on tarmac, and they were jolted from side to side as Ben hammered it over the rutted ground, the powerful headlights picking out every rock and pothole.
Jeff pointed through the windscreen. ‘There. The old railway.’ Through the overgrown grass and brambles it was still possible to see where the earth had been banked to make way for the tracks ferrying the trainloads of death camp prisoners to their new home – for many of them, the journey to their grave. The rails themselves were long gone, hastily removed by the SS Building and Works Division in the closing months of the war before their presence could draw the eye of Allied aerial reconnaissance scouts. It had been many, many years since organised transport had come this way.
But someone else had been here, and recently. As the way became narrower and wilder through the tunnel of the trees, the Porsche’s headlights threw pools of shadow into tyre tracks in the dirt. It looked as though a number of vehicles had used the route, four-wheel-drives and maybe a car with a wide wheelbase or some kind of van.
Ben eyed the map spread out on the dashboard. Kammler’s drawings had been every bit as precise as could be expected from a man who was not only a trained engineer but a megalomaniac and a ruthless perfectionist. Everything was right. The co-ordinates were dead on. There was no question that the ominous black shape they could now see looming up ahead through the gaps in the trees, its rocky crags reflecting the light of the full moon, was Kammler’s mountain. They were close.
Ben killed the lights, driving by moonlight. After another couple of minutes he swung a right off the track and bumped the car through the undergrowth until it was masked by foliage. He and Jeff got out, pulled out the holdalls.
