Waited for their vision to acclimatise to the dark, then started preparing for the task ahead. They didn’t speak as they went through the old routine that had once been their whole way of life, pulling on the woodland camouflage clothing, lacing up their boots, re-checking and dividing up the weapons. The armament was simple but effective: two silenced Heckler & Koch MP5 machine carbines, two Browning pistols and two slim, double-edged, black- bladed killing knives in leg sheaths. In addition to that, Ben carried a cut-down Ithaca combat shotgun across his back while Jeff slung a stubby grenade launcher round his shoulder.
Aside from the weaponry and ammunition in their packs, they each had a coil of slim, lightweight but very strong rope, which they slung diagonally around their bodies. Sub-vocal radio mikes and earpieces allowed them to communicate across a distance in the softest of whispers. The final piece of equipment for each of them was the ex-military Gen 3 zoomable night-vision goggles that attached to a head harness. Capable of operating in virtual zero-light conditions, the goggles turned the world a grainy, surreal sea-green.
The two men set off, moving like ghosts in single file. They made their way cautiously along the track, scanning far and wide ahead of them as they walked. The ground was rising steadily upwards, the wild forest slowly thinning out as they approached higher ground and the base of the mountain.
Ben couldn’t stop thinking about what they were going to find there. Were Adam and Rory O’Connor still even alive? He battled his doubts away to the back of his mind and walked on. His goggles illuminated the way ahead in an eerie glow. He could sense Jeff’s presence behind him, but the only sound he could hear was the beating of his own heart and the gentle sigh of the mountain breeze through the branches.
The crack of a twig and a rustle of foliage at two o’clock. Ben froze, raised his MP5.
The bear’s eyes glowed like green torches in Ben’s goggles as it stopped in the middle of the path and turned to look at them. Then it ambled on unhurriedly, its shaggy coat rippling as it walked. It slipped into the trees on the other side of the track and disappeared.
‘Shit,’ Jeff’s whisper chuckled in Ben’s ear.
They kept moving. The ground was sloping ever upwards and the gaps in the trees were getting wider. The mountain towered overhead.
Ben operated the zoom facility on his goggles, and the magnification of the grainy image in his eyepieces expanded from xl to x10. He slowly, carefully scanned the terrain. Nature could do so much in sixty-five years to alter a landscape. The ravages of the weather, landslides, vegetation growth. It was hard to associate the crisp lines of Kammler’s technical drawings with the rugged landscape in front of them.
But then he did a double-take, and held his breath as he zoomed in closer.
The question was, what was behind it? If it corresponded to the drawings, it was the twenty-foot-high steel doorway carved into the mountain by Hitler’s slave army a lifetime earlier.
More tyre tracks were visible in the decayed leaf matter underfoot as they crept closer to the hidden entrance. Ben kneeled and put his hand to the ground. Fresh mud, the tread marks clearly imprinted. Someone had been here within the last twenty-four hours.
Jeff’s voice rasped in Ben’s earpiece. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move.’ Ben froze, then turned his head very slowly to see Jeff pointing to a spot an inch from the toecap of his boot.
The tripwire was barely visible in the dirt, just a short section of it raised up enough to catch on an unsuspecting intruder’s foot. It was almost certainly wired to a silent alarm somewhere inside the facility. Someone was definitely in there, and they didn’t want to be found.
It took them almost half an hour to cover the last few yards, checking every inch of ground as they moved. Then, breathless with tension, they finally reached the camo netting. And carefully, very carefully, peeled back its edge.
Ben nodded in satisfaction. Sixty-five years’ worth of brambles and moss and ivy had been recently clipped away to reveal the tall steel doors, exactly as in the drawings but now craggy and pitted with corrosion. He ran a gloved finger down their central edge and saw where some of the rust had flaked away from being opened. Moving his hand across to one of the massive hinges, he found it sticky with fresh grease.
But even if they’d been able to open them, going brazenly in through the front doors to face an unknown force of opposition wasn’t an option Ben wanted to consider. When he’d studied Kammler’s plans back in Switzerland, he’d spotted another way in that he liked a lot better. With just one reservation – one he didn’t want to think about.
He stepped carefully away from the entrance. Now that he had his bearings, he had a pretty good idea of where to look. About two hundred feet up the mountainside and about three hundred feet to the left, the goggles on maximum zoom picked out what looked like the mouth of a rusted-out old oil drum protruding from the rocks, partially obscured by a shrub. He signalled to Jeff to follow him.
When they reached the oil drum, Ben saw he’d been right. It was the mouth of a chimney, six feet wide, and from Kammler’s drawing he knew that its shaft drilled straight down about two hundred feet through solid rock to a chamber below. It had been hard to tell from the faded handwritten labels on the drawing what the purpose of the chamber was. He said nothing to Jeff as he unslung the rope coil from his shoulder and secured one end to a big rock. He tested the knot, then dropped the other end of the rope down the shaft. Jeff did the same as Ben climbed over the lip of the chimney and lowered himself down slowly fist under fist, clasping the rope between his boots to control his descent. He swayed from side to side as he went down, touching the metal sides of the vertical tunnel. Everything was a uniform green in his eyepieces, but he knew that if he flipped them up he’d be in total blackness. He glanced up, and saw Jeff’s boots overhead as he slid down after him.
It was a long way down through the claustrophobic space, and after a couple of minutes Ben’s arms were screaming. He worried about running out of rope and finding himself dangling helplessly over an unknown drop. But the rope kept coming, and after another thirty seconds he knew he was getting near the bottom from the indescribable stench that was rising up to meet him.
‘Something stinks pretty bad down here,’ Jeff’s voice said in his ear.
It was a combination of every bad smell in the world. Burnt animal grease and decaying matter left to fester in water that was beyond stagnant. Putrefaction and filth of a kind that Ben didn’t even want to imagine. Just as the smell was as bad as he thought it could get, it got worse. Moments later his feet splashed down into something that felt like mud. Cold liquid squelched thickly up around his legs and into his boots. He swallowed, fighting the bile that wanted to well up in his throat.
He let go of the rope and let his arms dangle by his sides to let the muscles recover. He was standing in what appeared to be a square stone-built chamber about thirty feet across. The squelchy soup was up to his knees. He looked down. It didn’t seem like mud, but it was thick and cloying.
Then he looked up. And saw the rats. Hundreds of them, scuttling along the edge of the stonework above the surface. Dropping down and swimming through the filth, their long tails wriggling behind them.
Jeff landed beside him, rubbing his hands. His face was contorted in disgust behind the goggles. ‘What the fuck is this place?’
Ben didn’t reply. He raised one foot with a sucking sound and started trying to wade towards the nearest wall. Embedded in the stone, steel rungs led up to the iron grate of a hatchway ten feet or so above their heads. He prayed it would be open.
Something hit him softly between the shoulders. He heard a high-pitched squeaking in his ear, and instinctively reached over his shoulder. His gloved fingers closed on something soft and furry. He flung the rat away, saw it twist in midair, its jaws snapping. It landed with a splash. Then another was scuttling up his leg, biting at his clothes. He lashed out and felt its back break.
They started wading quickly towards the edge, sloshing through the filth as fast as they dared without tripping and falling into it. Something nudged Ben’s knee. At first he thought it was another rat, but then he looked down and realised.
There were
The human skull bobbed away from him, staring sightlessly up at him in the green vision of his goggles. It was scorched and blackened and rat-gnawed, missing its jawbone. A bullet had shattered everything above the left
