They kept walking. Ivan was glancing furtively around him all the time, keeping an even tighter grip on Rory’s wrist as he led the boy down passages he’d never seen before. ‘Quickly,’ Ivan kept saying. ‘Quickly.’ They came to a flight of steps leading downwards into murky shadows. Ivan turned on a flashlight and lit the way ahead. Down and down through a shaft that was carved out of the rock. It was echoey, and Rory could hear the steady plop of dripping water.
‘Is this where we’re meeting the other agents?’ he asked breathlessly, and heard his voice reverberate off the walls.
Ivan didn’t reply.
Then the staircase ended abruptly, terminating in an unfinished cul de sac. In the torchlight, Rory could see the pickaxe marks that scarred the rock face. The floor was littered with debris and old tools that had lain there so long, they’d rusted away to almost nothing. It was as though whoever had been digging the tunnel out of the solid rock had just stopped working one day, put down their tools and gone. He wondered what had happened. But more than that, he wondered why Ivan had brought him here. He turned and frowned up at his friend.
Ivan smiled in the beam of the flashlight. ‘We are safe down here,’ he said as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘It is just you and me now.’ Then he moved closer. His lips parted.
Rory stared for a second, and then he realised Ivan was trying to kiss him.
Adam O’Connor was cackling like a lunatic as Pelham paced the vault with the radio in his fist.
‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ The man’s composure had slipped away completely, and he was shouting in rage.
‘He isn’t here,’ said the woman’s voice through the spitting static.
‘How could he have got out?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied.
Pelham yelled into the radio, ‘I want him
‘Go for it, son,’ Adam giggled to himself. ‘We’ll show these bastards.’
Pelham threw the radio down and stormed over to him. ‘Oh, you think this is funny, do you, Adam?’
‘The look on your face,’ Adam laughed at him. ‘You should see yourself right now. Your little world is just falling down around you. How’re you going to explain this to your boss, asshole?’
‘Laugh at this,’ Pelham said. He reached his hand across his chest, pulled out the pistol that he wore under his jacket and cocked the action with a sound that rang around the stone walls. He aimed it in Adam’s face. His jaw tightened.
‘Shoot me then, jerkoff,’ Adam taunted him. ‘Let’s see you make the machine work after I’m dead.’
The gun wavered.
‘I’m all you’ve got,’ Adam went on, waving his arms like a wild man. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’
‘Wrong,’ Pelham said. He dropped his arm eighteen inches and squeezed the trigger. The pistol flashed and boomed in his hand.
Adam felt his leg get kicked out from under him and collapsed to the concrete floor, clutching his thigh. The blood began to pump out through his fingers. He pressed hard, desperately trying to stem the flow. He felt no pain, not yet. But he knew it would come. ‘You shot me,’ he mumbled in shock.
Pelham stood over him with the smoking pistol dangling loose at his side. ‘I could have shattered the femur or split the artery and made you bleed to death,’ he said calmly over Adam’s screams. ‘Next time I will. Get on your feet. Let’s try this again.’
Rory twisted frantically away as Ivan’s mouth sought his. He felt the material of his sweater rip in the man’s fingers. Backed away against the wall, bewildered and hurt. He’d thought until this moment that Ivan was his friend. Suddenly he was alone again.
Ivan came at him, and Rory lashed blindly out with his foot. The kick caught Ivan squarely in the groin. Rory stood rooted in horror for a second as Ivan dropped the torch and fell to his knees with both hands clapped over his testicles and his eyes rolling back in agony. The boy grabbed up the fallen flashlight, turned and ran as hard as he could back up the winding staircase. He could hear Ivan’s cries of pain and rage echoing up the carved-out shaft. Rory kept running like the wind. After what seemed like just a few seconds he could hear Ivan giving chase. He burst out of the mouth of the stairway and out into the lamplit corridor. He was lost now, his breath rasping in his ears, his heart in his mouth, no idea where to turn. The sole was flapping off his right trainer from where the kick to Ivan’s groin had torn it half away from the shoe’s upper. He pulled the shoe off and tossed it aside.
He could hear Ivan’s running footsteps behind him, but a quick glance over his shoulder told him the man was out of sight down the twisty passages. Rory came to another junction in the corridor. Big signs on the wall that he couldn’t understand. He turned right and kept going, hobbling on just one shoe for a few more yards until he knew he had to lose that one, too, or risk stumbling and twisting his ankle. He bent down and gripped the toe and heel of the shoe and yanked it off. The floor was cold and hard through his thin socks.
Rory stopped. Backed up a few steps to where he’d passed a round hole in the wall to his right. It was some kind of shaft, big enough for him to crawl into and hide. He shone the torch into the curving tunnel, put his hand to it and felt a breath of air caress his fingers. Maybe it led somewhere, and anywhere was better than here. He quickly climbed into it and started crawling as fast as he could down its length. Rusty metal under his hands and knees, not rock. It was a pipe of some kind, like an air vent, he thought.
And now he could really feel the breeze on his face. Cool, fresh, sweet air.
Air coming in from the outside.
Ben worked the rusted iron bolt loose, creaked open the iron door and peered inside at the long, low, dark chamber. It was a primitive dormitory – row upon row of rudimentary bunks with open latrines just a few feet away. Skeletons littered the floor. Scores of them, gnawed apart by rats, covered in dust and cobwebs.
‘Slave workers,’ he said to Jeff. ‘They must have starved to death down here when the Nazis abandoned the place.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jeff’s voice said in Ben’s earpiece.
They shut the door of the dormitory, and Ben grimly closed the bolt. He took the folded plan from his pocket, and studied it again. The gruesome discovery meant they were still in the lower levels, where the labourers had been housed. The next level up from there had been mainly for storage of equipment and provisions; then above that was the upper level with its complexes of operations rooms and offices, together with the barrack accommodation and shower blocks for the SS soldiers stationed at the facility. He and Jeff had agreed on the plane that it would be the most likely place to improvise a holding cell for a young hostage. As for Adam, it was Ben’s guess that the kidnappers would have put him to work in the strange vault-like chamber which, as far as he could tell from the faded drawings, was the location of the mysterious Kammler invention. Deep inside the mountain, the chamber was only accessible from a lift shaft on the upper level.
‘That’s where we need to head for,’ Ben said.
They moved stealthily onwards, using the map to find a crude service lift that rumbled up to the next level. They emerged cautiously into what looked like an underground car park, a broad arched concrete roadway leading off into the darkness. There was nobody about as they paused to get their bearings.
Jeff tapped the map with his gloved finger. ‘Judging by the layout, I’d say we were just about here. So we need to follow this road. Looks to me like there’s another service lift along there.’
They turned. Bright torchlight blinded them. From behind it, the vague shapes of two men stepped out of the shadows.
