At last a shadow appeared, then a part of the body that created it. It was a monstrous outline that did not enter before looking about across the near perimeter one more time.
“Don't shoot yet, Sam,” Nina whispered. “Wait until he is inside.”
“Aye, I know,” Sam nodded softly without tearing his eyes away from his target. Joanne was petrified, but to some measure she felt quite secure between the two seasoned relic hunters. Her untrained hands clutched the gun, but she had no intention of using it. Instead she pinched her eyes shut as the floorboards cracked under the entering weight and she heard Sam's hammer click.
Chapter 26 — Verfluchte Erde
The first enormous shadow crept over the doorway and stepped inside. It was then that they noticed it was only one man, holding two flashlights.
“Oh my God! It is Virgil!” Joanne shrieked and jumped up to embrace the boat captain.
“You guys were gone too long, so I got worried,” the Canadian relayed nonchalantly. “Also, the bay is extremely tempestuous and no fun to endure with only my radio as company.
“My friend, you scared us half to death,” Sam exhaled with a puff. He holstered his gun back in his boot and patted Virgil on the arm. Nina sheathed her knife and grabbed her gun from Joanne.
“What? What did I do?” Joanne asked her.
Nina clipped a small lever in place and said casually, “The safety was off.”
“Oh shit! I'm sorry,” Joanne gasped.
“No worries,” Nina smiled, “I'm sure we could have figured out how to work Mr. Hecklund's boat.”
Sam and Virgil chuckled at Nina's shocking sobering of her friend. After Virgil tore himself away from the grateful teacher and buried his hands in his sides and said, “It would have been better if Miss Jo had tried to shoot me a few paces from this building. At least there nothing would have happened!”
He was joking, they thought, but he confirmed his statement by pointing out the toilet window.
“No, really. Out from there to the marker on the rock hill it lies. All the way there and across about say, two hundred meters,” he reported.
Nina thought she knew what he was referring to but she wanted to make sure. “What lies there?”
“'The Place of No Happening,' the spot I told you about earlier,” he informed her. “Why do you think they built the weather station to the other side?” His jolly demeanor kept confusing the others into thinking he was jesting, but he insisted it to be true. “Nothing can happen on this piece of land.”
“I just cannot get past how silly that sounds,” Nina repeated.
“Come, I'll prove it to you,” he challenged.
“Sure thing,” Nina joined in.
“Excuse me, you two, but shouldn't we be using our last battery power on what we came here to find? You two can always come up here and debunk or confirm what you are disagreeing about,” Sam suggested. “For now we need to recover what the blueprint is holding.”
“I agree with Sam,” Joanne threw in her lot, as if it mattered.
“What blueprint?” Virgil asked.
Nina sidled up next to him and showed him what looked like a floor plan, only this one started to the outside of the structure and continued in the direction of the barren patch where nothing supposedly happened. Virgil, a boat builder and part-time construction agent, figured out the diagram in a second.
“Oh, this chamber is along a subterranean tunnel heading northward under the 'Place of No Happening.' The entry point would be the drainage duct that goes into the underground sewerage system,” he explained without a flinch.
“Into the toilet?” Sam winced again.
“No, well, yes, sort of. Um, the cleanout, and…” he sighed at the revelation that he was the only one who knew what he was talking about. “A pipe comes up to the ground surface on one side and runs to a main sewer line on the other side. In this case, I suppose that other side ran right into the water on the other side,” Virgil clarified. “This entry point on the blueprint points to the septic tank below the barrens out there. Do you guys have any idea if they have any tools around here?”
“They have some gear at the wall base in the sleeping area,” Sam recounted from his earlier exploration. “What do you need?”
“Anything that can dig a shallow grave,” Virgil said in an eerie voice that had Sam in stitches, but as the big man went to retrieve a shovel, Sam looked at the girls, “God, I hope he’s joking.”
A few minutes later Virgil was hacking at the toilet floor to gain access to the septic tank, he stretched his back. Satisfied with the developments and eager to assist, he asked, “So what are we looking for down there?”
“The Olympias Letter,” Nina mentioned plainly. “I have claustrophobia. I will not be joining you in another dark, confined space, Sam. I had my fill in the Vault last time.”
“Vault?” Joanne asked.
Nina waved it off. “Long story.”
After Virgil employed his strength to wedge open the cleanout lids that had not been touched in over seventy years. They had been buried under ten inches of soil and iced over, acting as covers to a widened pipeline, larger than any standard drainage chute required by regulation. It was the clue they needed that this was not just architecture; it was an antique attempt at finding a hidden object of obscure value.
With a look of abject misery on his face, Sam got ready to go down the pipeline that led to the septic tank. “I don't suppose the Place of No Happening stretched down into the ground either?”
“Apparently not. That was probably why the Nazi's did not try to dig from the top soil. I wonder why they didn't finish what they started?” Nina mused, her arms folded, looking down over Sam.
“Because what they started probably finished them,” Joanne told Nina.
Sam gave her a long leer. “Thank you, Miss Earle. Thank you for that.”
“Sure thing, hon,” Joanne answered, to Nina's delight.
“Sam, we’re right there with you. Just holler if you run into any shit down there,” Nina tried to console, but ended up collapsing with Joanne in a fit of laughter. She hadn’t meant the pun. She hadn’t even seen it coming before she said it.
“I would come with you, my friend, but I'll never fit in there,” Virgil tried to comfort Sam.
“Thanks, Captain Hecklund,” Sam replied, trying to prepare himself for the horrid experience.
Down into the dark he sank deeper and deeper, crawling by the faint white light in his right hand. In his coat he had tucked his handheld camera to procure footage should he discover anything of interest.
“How do I get myself into these shitty situations?” he moaned in the solitary darkness where even the sound of the chilling winds would have soothed him here in the deathly silent sarcophagus of the historical assumption some Nazi had scribbled on a piece of paper. “Operation Olympias, for Christ's sake. It just reeks of trouble.”
Only then did Sam realize all the puns going to waste on his preoccupation with the imminence of the septic tank. Had it been another time and someone else was doing the dirty work and he was not freezing his balls off, he may have found his accidental utterings as amusing as the women did. Not soon after starting, he saw a separate entrance, an exit from the chute he was leopard-crawling down. He stopped to light the way and scrutinize the next part.
“Okay, found the big shit pit!” he howled out loud, hoping the others could hear him. Worming his way through the hole, the tunnel birthed him into an empty tank the size of an average spare room. Even though Sam did not want to see what he was standing in, he had to film it like the obsessive archivist he innately was. His handheld sounded its tone to announce that it was on. Sam used the best setting along with his dwindling flashlight beam to capture the place. “Looks like a tomb down here,” he noted to the rolling camera. “Like an underground mausoleum.”