“On his way,” Purdue said reassuringly. “I suppose we're going to need him to translate.”
“Aye, the interview carries on for almost 15 minutes before it is interrupted by this squeak that almost burst my eardrums,” she said. “Detlef, Milla wanted you to hear this for some reason. We have to keep that in mind. This might be pivotal to the location of the Amber Room.”
“That loud squeak,” Kiril suddenly muttered as he entered the front door with two bags and a bottle of liquor clutched under his arm, “is military interference.”
“Just the man we want to see,” Purdue smiled, coming to help the old Russian with the bags. “Nina has a radio broadcast in Russian. Will you be so kind to translate it for us?”
“Of course! Of course,” Kiril chuckled. “Let me have a listen. Oh, and pour me a drink there, please.”
While Purdue obliged, Nina played the audio clip on her laptop. By the bad quality in recording, it sounded much like an old broadcast. She could discern two male voices. One asked questions, and the other gave lengthy answers. Crackling interference persisted over the recording and the voices of the two men faded now and then, only to come back louder than before.
“This is not an interview, my friends,” Kiril told the group within the first minute of listening. “It is an interrogation.”
Nina’s heart skipped a beat. “Is it authentic?”
Sam motioned from behind Kiril for Nina not to speak, to wait. Intently the old man listened to every word, his face falling into a dark scowl. Occasionally he would shake his head very slowly, looking somber at what he had heard. Purdue, Nina, and Sam were dying to know what the men were saying.
Waiting for Kiril to finish listening had them all on tenterhooks, but they had to keep quiet so he could hear over the hissing of the recording.
“Watch out for the squeal, guys,” Nina warned when she saw the timer nearing the end of the clip. They all braced themselves for it, and rightly so. It split the atmosphere with a high pitched wail that persisted for several seconds. Kiril’s body jerked from the sound. He turned to look at the group.
“There is a gunshot in there. Did you hear it?” he said casually.
“No. When?” Nina asked.
“In that god awful noise, there is a man's name and a gunshot. I have no idea if the squeal was supposed to mask the shot or if it was just a coincidence, but there is definitely a gun shot,” he revealed.
“Wow, good ears,” Purdue said. “None of us even heard that.”
“Not good ears, Mr. Purdue. Trained ears. My ears have been trained to listen to hidden sounds and messages, thanks to years of radio work,” Kiril bragged, smiling and pointing at his ear.
“But a gunshot should have been loud enough to detect under that, even for untrained ears,” Purdue supposed. “Then again, it depends on what the conversation is about. That should tell us if it's even relevant.”
“Aye, please tell us what they said, Kiril,” Sam implored.
Kiril emptied his glass and cleared his throat. “It is an interrogation between a Red Army official and a Gulag inmate, so that must have been recorded just after the fall of the Third Reich. I hear a man’s name shouted outside before the shot.”
“Gulag?” Detlef asked.
“Prisoners of war. Soviets captured by Wehrmacht were ordered by Stalin to commit suicide when captured. Those who did not kill themselves — like the man interrogated in your clip — were considered traitors by the Red Army,” he explained.
“So kill yourself or your own army will?” Sam clarified. “Can’t catch a bloody break, these lads.”
“Exactly,” Kiril agreed. “No surrender. This man, the interrogator, he is a commander, and the Gulag is from 4th Ukrainian Front they say. Now, in this conversation the Ukrainian soldier is one of three men who survived…,” Kiril did not know the word, but he gestured with his hands, “…unexplained drowning at coast of Latvia. He says they intercepted the treasure that was supposed to be taken by the Nazi Kriegsmarine.”
“The treasure. The Amber Room panels, I presume,” Purdue added.
“Must be. He says that the plates, the panels, were crumbling?” Kiril struggled with his English.
“Brittle,” Nina smiled. “I remember they said that the original panels had become brittle from age by 1944 when they had to be removed by Heeresgruppe Nord.”
“Da,” Kiril winked. “He is telling about how they cheated the crew of the Wilhelm Gustloff and made away with the amber panels to make sure the Germans would not take those panels with them. But he says during the trip to Latvia, where their mobile units waited to pick them up, something went very wrong. The crumbling amber set free something that went into their heads — no, captain's head.”
“Excuse me?” Purdue perked up. “What went into his head? Does he say?”
“It may not make sense to you, but he says something was in the amber, trapped there for centuries and more centuries. An insect, I think, is what he says. It went into the captain's ear. None of them could see it again, because it was very, very small, like a gnat bug,” Kiril relayed the soldier’s account.
“Jesus,” Sam mumbled.
“The man says when the captain made his eyes white all the men did terrible things?”
Kiril frowned, thinking over his words. Then he nodded, satisfied his account of the soldier's bizarre statements was correct. Nina looked at Sam. He looked stunned, but he said nothing.
“Does he say what they did?” Nina asked.
“They all started to think like one man. They had one brain, he says. When the captain told them to drown themselves, they all walked onto the ship's deck, and without looking worried about it, they jumped into the water and drowned just off the coast,” the old Russian declared.
“Mind control,” Sam affirmed. “That is why Hitler wanted the Amber Room to be taken back to Germany during Operation Hannibal. With that kind of mind control, he would have been able to subjugate the world without much effort!”
“How did he know that, though?” Detlef wanted to know.
“How do you think the Third Reich managed to turn tens of thousands of normal, morally sound German men and women into uniformly thinking Nazi soldiers?” Nina challenged. “Haven't you ever wondered how those soldiers were so innately evil and irrefutably cruel when they wore those uniforms?” Her words echoed in the silent contemplation of her companions. “Think about the atrocities committed on even small children, Detlef. Thousands upon thousands of Nazis were of the same mind, the same level of cruelty, unquestioning of their despicable orders like brainwashed zombies. I bet Hitler and Himmler discovered this ancient organism during one of Himmler's experiments.”
The men agreed, looking shocked at the new development.
“That makes a lot of sense,” Detlef said, rubbing his chin, thinking about the moral corruption of Nazi soldiers.
“We always thought they were brainwashed through propaganda,” Kiril told his guests, “but there was too much discipline. That level of unity is not natural. Why do you think I called the Amber Room a curse last night?”
“Wait,” Nina scowled, “you knew about this?”
Kiril returned her reproachful look with a glare. “Da! What do you think we have been doing all these years with our numbers stations? We are all over the world, sending out codes to warn our allies, to share intelligence on anyone who might try to use them on people. We know about the bugs that were trapped in the amber because another Nazi bastard used it on my father and his company a year after the Gustloff disaster.”