his foot off the gas pedal, bleeding speed; then the car was up and over and back on level ground. A wooden bridge loomed through the windshield. Even as his brain analyzed the structure and warned,
Fisher felt the car go vertical and had a momentary wave of vertigo. The Range Rover stopped, tailgate jutting skyward through the bridge’s deck. Fisher had a split second to refocus, and then the car was moving again, plunging straight down. He felt his belly fill his throat. The headlights illuminated only blackness, but then Fisher saw a shimmer of water, wet stones, steep-sided rock walls. The hood crashed into the ground. Fisher was thrown forward against his seat belt. His chest slammed into the steering wheel. The horn began blaring.
Moving slowly, carefully, with the sound of gravel grating on steel, the vehicle was moving again, tail end tipping forward. With a surprisingly gentle crash, the Range Rover landed on its roof, rocking gently a few times before coming to a stop. Upside down, Fisher looked over his shoulder and saw the creek water begin rising against the tailgate window and trickling through the weather seals. He took stock of the Rover; the steel cage had done its job. Aside from a slight dent in the sheet-metal roof, the cabin seemed undamaged. Nor was the rising water a worry. The creek was shallow, a foot or two at most. His driver’s window was still open, and through it water had begun to trickle. It was surprisingly cold, almost instantly numbing the skin of his hand.
His big problem was the horn. As he had, upon reaching the clearing Hansen and the others would have probably stopped. Faced with no tire treads to follow in the mulch, they would have had to explore each road, if only for a few dozen feet to determine if the Range Rover had passed that way. The blaring horn had just negated that delay.
Right palm braced against the roof, Fisher unbuckled his seat belt with his left and eased himself down, then turned onto his belly and crawled into the backseat. Working from feel alone, he found the handle to the Pelican case and dragged it forward onto the passenger seat. He spun himself around again, stuck his legs out the open window, and began crawling backward, dragging the case out with him. Once clear of the car, he got up, stepped out of the water onto the bank, and found a clump of bushes where he crouched down.
He took stock of his surroundings. The ravine was no more than twenty feet deep, but the walls were nearly vertical, with only the sparest of weeds and plants growing from the dirt. It was climbable, Fisher decided, but he doubted he had the time. To his left, past the bridge, the ravine disappeared into the darkness. To his right, a hundred feet away, was something interesting: a clearly man-made concrete wall sitting at a forty-five-degree angle to the streambed. After a few more moments, his eyes adjusted and he could make out a darker rectangle set into the facade.
From the road above came the revving of an engine. Headlights swept over the bridge’s uprights.
Fisher got up, hefted the Pelican case over his shoulder, and sprinted for the concrete facade. He was there ten seconds later and immediately realized it wasn’t a mine. The rectangle he’d seen was actually a rusted steel door flanked by angled facades. On the door a square white sign with red letters told Fisher where he was: VERBOTEN. SIEGFRIEDSTELLUNG WESTWALL.
This was no mine entrance, but rather part of the Siegfried Line, a span of defensive forts and bunkers built by Germany during WWI and again in the 1930s in answer to France’s Maginot Line. The Siegfried stretched almost four hundred miles from Kleve, on the border with the Netherlands, to Weil am Rhein, to the north on the border with Switzerland, and was made up of almost twenty thousand bunkers, tunnels, ramparts, dragon’s teeth tank traps, and termite-mound machine-gun emplacements.
Aside from selected locations along the line that had been rendered safe and turned into tourist attractions or museums, the Siegfried Line was closed to the public. It was, however, one of the biggest draws in Europe for urban spelunkers, which probably explained the rusted padlock and snipped chain lying at the foot of the door Fisher now faced. Several of the hinges had been pried free as well, and the door hung askew. Water poured through the gap, trickled down the jumble of smooth stones Fisher had traversed to get here, and then down into the ravine.
He looked over his shoulder in time to see one of the Audis pull up to the bridge. Fisher set the Pelican case down, grabbed the edge of the door with both hands, and heaved. With a squeal, the door opened a few more inches. He heaved again and gained another three inches, then once more and the door shuddered open enough for him to squeeze his hips through. He reached back and pulled the Pelican in behind him just as a flashlight skimmed over the concrete facade.
Whether he’d been spotted, he didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. They knew he wouldn’t have had time to climb out of the ravine. The bunker was his only chance.
13
Fisher stood in the dark for a few moments, catching his breath and thinking. The fight-or-flightresponse in his brain was advocating the latter, but he quashed the impulse. There was a damned good reason the German government had closed the Siegfried to the public. After almost eight decades of, first, bombardment, and then neglect and exposure to the forces of Mother Nature, these bunkers were death traps. Dozens of careless explorers had died or disappeared in these catacombs over the last ten years, most of them having stumbled off blind drops or through crumbling concrete floors. Fisher checked the OPSAT, hoping against hope he might find some semblance of a map of the bunkers, but there was nothing.
Hansen was sharp and learning quickly; how the team had reacted upon spotting him outside Ernsdorff’s estate had proven that. Similarly, here Hansen would not put all his eggs in one basket but would probably split his team. Two would come straight after him, and two would circle around and look for another entrance. And one would stay behind at the cars, standing guard over the entrance should Fisher reemerge.
Fisher opened the Pelican case, stuffed the remaining contents, including his credit cards and passports, into his formfitting Gore-Tex camelback rucksack, then shoved the case aside. He found another short coil of paracord in his sack’s side pocket and knelt before the door. He flipped the Tridents down and switched to night vision. In washed-out green and gray, the rusted door filled his vision. Above the latch was a U-shaped handle. Fisher gave it a tug and found it surprisingly solid. He rolled onto his butt, pressed the soles of his feet against the door, and shoved once, then again, and the door groaned shut.
He looped one end of the paracord through the handle and secured it with a taut-line hitch, then threaded the other end through a rusted eye bolt in the jamb. He repeated the process, knotting and looping until he was out of line. He cinched the paracord with a bowline and stepped back to examine his handiwork. It wasn’t perfect, he decided, but it would slow them down. The door hadn’t sealed completely, but the gap was narrow enough that it would take some steady pressure on the door and persistent knife work to saw through the paracord.
He took a moment to get his bearings. The origin of the “creek” was a jagged, ten-foot-long crack in the ceiling through which a thin sheet of rainwater was pouring. In the night vision he could see this wasn’t an unusual feature of the bunker: Water sluiced down the walls, gushed from holes in the ceiling, and ran in rivulets across the concrete floor, in some places pooling in corners and depressions, in others finding yet more cracks in the floor. From somewhere below, Fisher could hear the splattering of water.
The bunker was laid out along a center alley roughly thirty feet wide and who knew how long. Branching off from both sides of the alley were concrete stairwells, one leading up to pillboxes and machine-gun emplacements, the other leading downward into what Fisher assumed had once served as living quarters and storage areas. Fisher walked to the nearest stairwell and peered down. There was nothing. The concrete had long ago collapsed, filling the shaft halfway to the top. He mounted the steps leading up to a pillbox and, careful to stay below the horizontal
