“Loren?” Giordino asked with grim concern.
Pitt shook his head and tossed the strange instrument to Giordino. “We were hoodwinked. This car was a decoy, operated by an electronic robot unit and driven by someone in the helicopter.”
Mancuso stared wildly about the limo. “I saw her get in,” he said dazedly.
“So did I,” Giordino backed him up.
“Not this car.” Pitt spoke quietly.
“But it was never out of your sight.”
“But it was. Think about it. The twenty-second head start when it left the track and drove under the stands to the parking lot. The switch must have been made then.”
Mancuso removed the handkerchief, revealing a neat slice just above his ear lobe. “It fits. This one was never out of our sight once we hit the highway.”
Mancuso broke off suddenly and looked miserably at the demolished limo. No one moved or said anything for several moments.
“We lost her,” Giordino said as if in pain, his face pale. “God help us, we lost her.”
Pitt stared at the car unseeing, his big hands clenched in anger and despair. “We’ll find Loren,” he said, his voice empty and cold as Arctic stone. “And make those pay who took her.”
Part 3
Ajima Island
31
October 12, 1993
Bielefeld, West Germany
THE FALL MORNING was crisp with a biting wind from the north when August Clausen stepped out of his half-timbered house and gazed across his fields toward the slopes of the Teutoburg Forest near Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia. His farm lay in the valley, bordered by a winding stream that he had recently dammed up. He buttoned up his heavy wool coat, took a few deep breaths, and then walked the path to his barn.
A big hardy man just past seventy-four, Clausen still put in a full day’s work from sunup to sundown. The farm had been in his family for five generations. He and his wife raised two daughters, who married and left home, preferring city living in Bielefeld to farming. Except for hired hands during harvesting, Clausen and his wife ran the farm alone.
Clausen pushed open the barn doors and mounted a large tractor. The tough old gas engine turned over and fired on the first revolution. He slipped the transmission into top gear and moved into the yard, turning on a dirt road and heading toward the fields that had been harvested and cultivated for the next spring planting.
Today he planned to fill in a small depression that appeared in the southwest corner of a lettuce field. It was one of the few outdoor chores he wanted to get out of the way before the winter months set in. The evening before, he had set the tractor up with a front-end scoop to move dirt from a mound near an old concrete bunker left from the war.
One section of Clausen’s land was once an airfield for a Luftwaffe fighter squadron. When he returned home after serving in a Panzer brigade that fought Patton’s Third Army through France and half of Germany, he found a junkyard of burned and destroyed aircraft and motor vehicles piled and scattered over most of his fallow fields. He kept what little was salvageable and sold the rest to scrap dealers.
The tractor moved at a good speed over the road. There had been little rain the past two weeks and the tracks were dry. The poplar and birch trees wore bright dabs of yellow against the fading green. Clausen swung through an opening in the fence and stopped beside the depression. He climbed down and studied the sinking ground close-up. Curiously, it seemed wider and deeper than the day before. He wondered at first if it might be caused by underground seepage from the stream he had dammed. And yet the earth in the depression’s center looked quite dry.
He remounted the tractor, drove to the dirt pile beside the old bunker that was now half hidden by bushes and vines, and lowered the scoop. When he’d scraped up a full load, he backed off and approached the depression until his front wheels were on the edge. He raised the scoop slightly with the intention of tilting it to drop the dirt load, but the front of the tractor began to tip. The front wheels were sinking into the ground.
Clausen gaped in astonishment as the depression opened up and the tractor dove into a suddenly expanding pit. He froze in horror as man and machine fell into the darkness below. He was mute with terror, but he instinctively braced his feet against the metal floor and clutched the steering wheel in a tight grip. The tractor hurtled a good twelve meters before it splashed into a deep underground stream. Huge clods of soil struck the water, churning it into a maelstrom that was soon blanketed by clouds of falling dust. The noise echoed far into unseen reaches as the tractor sank into water up to the top treads of its high rear tires before coming to rest.
The impact drove the breath from Clausen’s body. An agonizing pain shot through his back, and he knew it meant an injured vertebra. Two of his ribs, and perhaps more, cracked after his chest impacted against the steering wheel. He went into shock, his heart pounding, his breath coming in painful gasps. Bewildered, he hardly felt the water swirling around his chest.
Clausen blessed the tractor for landing right side up. If it had tumbled on one of its sides or top, in all probability he’d have been crushed to death or pinned and drowned. He sat there trying to comprehend what had happened to him. He looked up at the blue sky to get a grasp of his predicament. Then he peered around through the gloom and the drifting layers of dust.
The tractor had fallen into the pool of a limestone cave. One end was flooded but the other rose above the pool and opened into a vast cavern. He saw no signs of stalactites, stalagmites, or other natural decorations. Both the small entry cave and the larger chamber appeared to have low six-meter-high flat ceilings that were carved by excavation equipment.
Painfully he twisted out of the tractor seat and half crawled, half swam up the ramplike floor leading into the dry cavern. Knees sliding, hands slipping on the slimy coating covering the cave’s floor, he struggled forward on all fours until he felt dry ground. Wearily he hauled himself up into a sitting position, shifted around, and stared into dim recesses of the cavern.
It was filled with aircraft, literally dozens of them. All parked in even rows as if waiting for a squadron of phantom pilots. Clausen recognized them as the Luftwaffe’s first turbojet aircraft, Messerschmitt-262 Schwalbes (Swallows). They sat like ghosts in their mottled gray-green colors, and despite almost fifty years of neglect, they appeared in prime condition. Only mild corrosion on the aluminum surfaces and flattened tires suggested long abandonment. The hidden air base must have been evacuated and all entrances sealed before the Allied armies arrived.
His injuries were temporarily forgotten as Clausen reverently walked between the planes and into the flight quarters and maintenance repair areas. As his eyes became adjusted to the darkness, he became amazed at the neat orderliness. There was no sign of a hurried departure. He felt the pilots and their mechanics were standing at inspection in the field above and expected back at any time.
He entered a state of rapture when it struck him that all the wartime artifacts were on his property, or under it, and belonged to him. The worth of the aircraft to collectors and museums must have ranged in the millions of deutsche marks.
Clausen made his way back to the edge of the underground pool. The tractor looked a sorry sight with only the steering wheel and upper tires rising out of the water. Once more he gazed up at the hole to the sky. There was no hope of climbing out on his own. The opening was too high and the walls too steep.
He wasn’t a tiny bit worried. Eventually his wife would come looking for him and summon neighbors when she found him standing happily in their newly discovered subterranean bonanza.