Jack nodded in acknowledgement as the jeep drove off, and then turned back to the entrance just as the door opened and Hiebermeyer came out. He was wearing a spotless white shirt and pressed trousers, the first time Jack could remember since their schooldays not seeing him in dusty khaki excavation gear. His right wrist was bandaged and hanging in a sling. With his other arm he swept back his remaining strands of hair, still glistening from the shower, and pushed his little round glasses up his nose. Jack watched him close his eyes and breathe deeply a few times. His glasses had steamed up on leaving the Portakabin, and he took them off and cleaned them on his sleeve, then peered around and spotted Jack. His shoulders slumped with relief and he walked over, putting his hand on Jack’s arm. ‘I heard the jet take off. It’s really good to see you. I read your email update on the dive on my phone in the decontamination room. It’s like a sauna in there.’ He wiped his face with his hand. ‘Diving to Atlantis again. Pretty amazing stuff. Human sacrifice, you think?’
Jack pointed at the sling. ‘Your wrist?’
‘Just a sprain. It was slippery in there. Everything’s covered in a sticky decomposition product, kind of yellow-green.’ He rubbed his forehead with his sleeve, then pushed his glasses up again. Jack looked with concern at his pale face and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Are you okay, Maurice? You look whacked.’
Hiebermeyer exhaled slowly, looked down at the ground for a moment and then nodded. ‘ Ja,’ he said. ‘ Mein Gott.’ He looked at Jack again, his eyes lacking their usual exuberance, and then angled his head upwards and took a deep breath through his nose. ‘I can still smell it, Jack. That decomposition product. We were encased in CBRN suits inside the bunker, but as soon as I took mine off in the scrubbing room, the stench was overpowering. I’d already thrown up inside my suit in the bunker, and I’m afraid I did it again. Not impressive for the hardened Egyptologist used to rotting mummies, but Major Penn says it happens even to the toughest of his team.’
Jack pulled out a small bottle of water from his khaki trouser pocket. ‘Have something to drink.’
Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘Not yet. I couldn’t stomach it. Not until we get away from this place.’
‘It was that bad?’
‘I’ve been down some pretty unpleasant holes in my life, but nothing like that. Count yourself lucky you’re not going in there.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jack said abruptly. ‘I thought that was why I was here.’
‘Come with me. Let’s sit down.’ Hiebermeyer steered Jack past the guards to a seating area beneath some bushes about fifty metres away, a place set up for the excavation team to relax. They were alone and out of earshot of the guards. Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on a bench and put his head in his hands, then took a deep breath and pressed his hands together, staring back pensively at the bunker site. Jack sat down beside him, and Hiebermeyer turned to him. ‘I have to tell you about what we found in there. And about what we didn’t find.’
Jack suddenly felt a yawning sense of apprehension. What wasn’t there. This was what had kept him up at night over the past months. ‘Go on.’
‘First, the good news. The bunker’s full of antiquities and works of art. There was one open crate filled with paintings. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, for a start. It’s incredible, though the Raphael had been left exposed and is probably beyond recovery. And there are crates of archaeological treasures. It looks as if most of them are from Himmler’s collection at Wewelsburg Castle, the objects looted by the Ahnenerbe from around the world in the 1930s that I’d always dreamed of finding. The only crate we looked inside was already open, its lid prised off some time in those final days in 1945. Inside were carefully packaged boxes, all labelled. One of them had prehistoric symbols on it that I recognized from cave art, the kind of thing the Nazis would have interpreted as precursor Aryan runes. But many of them had been packaged more than fifty years before the war, evidently left unopened for some future occasion. I recognized Heinrich Schliemann’s handwriting, Jack. Schliemann’s. They must be the lost treasures from Troy that he hid away, possibly rediscovered by the Nazis somewhere in Germany or when they conquered Greece in 1941. I’d always wondered what lay beneath Schliemann’s house in Athens.’
Jack’s heart was pounding. ‘The palladion?’
Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘It had been there, Jack. We found the impression of a swastika in the packing straw in one corner of that crate, a heavy object about two hand’s breadths across. But someone had taken it. There’s no sign of it elsewhere in the bunker. We already knew the palladion had been in that salt mine in Poland, right? Some time in the final months of the war it was brought here, and some time in the final hours before the forest was bombed it was taken away again.’
Jack closed his eyes, trying to contain his disappointment. The palladion, the most sacred object of the Trojans. He remembered his dive with Costas six months before in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow, and their desperate fight with three of Saumerre’s men at the place where the palladion had been hidden. What did the Nazis want with it? Who had given the order to move it here, to this bunker? Six months ago they had worked out that the reverse swastika of the palladion had been the symbol of the Agamemnon Code, a secret Nazi code activated near the end of the war that was somehow connected with the purpose of the bunker. He turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘You’re sure it wasn’t taken recently?’
‘Not a chance. The bunker was sealed in by tons of fallen trees and soil after the Allied bombing raid in April 1945. Nobody’s been in there since.’
‘So that’s the bad news?’
‘Not all of it, Jack.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
Hiebermeyer put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad Hugh Frazer isn’t with us any more. He’d lived his life since the war wondering what had gone on here, what had happened to his friend Major Mayne. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to break it to him. It was a terrible sight, Jack. It’ll stay with me always.’
‘You found him?’
‘And the American colonel, Stein. They’d both been shot at close range by a 9mm Walther P38. We know that because the pistol and the shell casings are still there. The pistol belonged to another body, with an SS tattoo on his arm. It looks as if he and Mayne were caught in a death embrace, with Mayne’s knife in his ribcage.’
Jack swallowed hard. ‘Where were the bodies?’
Hiebermeyer lowered his arm from Jack’s shoulder, stared at the ground and spoke quietly. ‘At the far end of the chamber with the crates was a sealed room, a laboratory. The American was found outside the doorway, Mayne and the SS man just inside. The door had swung to on its hinges afterwards, nearly but not quite shutting. What I saw inside, beyond those bodies, was a scene of even greater horror.’ He put his hand to his forehead, and paused. ‘There were badly adiposed bodies, Jack, naked and strapped into gurneys. They were partly preserved in their own body liquor. That’s where the awful yellow-green slime came from. Thank Christ the Egyptians mummified their bodies.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘The forensic anthropologist with the army team reckons they were being used as guinea pigs, as live victims for research. She thinks they were being dissected alive, to ensure that the Nazi scientists could extract living viruses and bacteria from their organs. Two of them looked as if they’d been abandoned halfway through. They’d died horribly, in agony. And they weren’t the only ones. You remember you authorized an IMU geophysics team to come over here last month and survey the site of the concentration camp? They thought there was nothing remarkable in the results, but then the forensics guy saw something unusual that has just been confirmed.’
Hiebermeyer took a crumpled sheet out of his pocket, his hand shaking slightly, and passed it to Jack. It was the printout of an archaeological resistivity survey. Jack smoothed it out and put it on his knees. He could identify buried foundations, visible in the contrast of black-and-white features that showed where walls had been. It looked like the survey of a Roman fort, with long barrack buildings and an organized layout of smaller huts. Hiebermeyer pointed to several hazy areas that obscured parts of the buildings. ‘That’s new-growth forest, trees that grew on the bombed-out site. But look here, at the top right-hand corner.’ He pointed to a long, rectilinear feature at least ten by thirty metres in area, like a wide section of boundary ditch. Jack looked up from the sheet to the bunker, traversing his eyes along the forest boundary beyond and trying to visualize the place before the airfield was constructed. Hiebermeyer pointed to a low line of bush to the north-west. ‘The team crawled around in the undergrowth and found a track about a kilometre long between the bunker and that ditch, with impressed tyre marks from large vehicles. Yesterday the forensics lady had a hunch about the ditch. She put a borehole down, and came up with lime, lots of it. They pulled back immediately and sealed off the site behind a guarded perimeter. She said she knew instantly what she was looking at. She’d worked on mass-burial sites from the Balkans wars of the 1990s and was sure the lime had been used to slake corpses, put down here in such quantities because the bodies were contaminated. We think the people on the gurneys inside the bunker were only the last batch of victims, the ones left to die an awful death when the Nazi scientists abandoned this place as the Allied front line came closer in 1945. I can only imagine that Mayne and the American saw those bodies, probably the last thing they ever saw after they’d made their way into this place. But the normal procedure had clearly been to take the corpses from the bunker to the ditch. The forensics lady reckons it could hold five thousand bodies, stacked ten deep.’