The interior of the chamber was one large concrete vault, stretching over a hundred meters in each direction. Steel beams ran from floor to ceiling every ten meters. It was filled with crates, dimly lit by the glow of a half-dozen lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. The ladder they’d climbed down was in the exact center.
“Someone must come down here to change the lightbulbs,” Turcotte said. “So there has to be a way out.”
Yakov pointed toward the left. “There is a door over there. I would think maintenance of this room was Pasha’s job.”
“This is the Archives?”
“We best hope it is. I would prefer not to fall through any more pipes.” Yakov rubbed dust off the side of the nearest crate, exposing Cyrillic writing. “‘Recovered from German Aviation Ministry, 1945.’”
Turcotte looked around and spotted a rusty crowbar resting against one of the crates. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” He jammed the edge under one of the borders and pried it up. After several minutes’ work, he had the side off, revealing a thick glass surface, heavily covered in dust. The case was six feet high by four wide and deep. It looked as if it had not been touched in decades, as did most of the piles of boxes and files in the room.
Turcotte rubbed the sleeve of his shirt against the glass, leaving streaks, gradually clearing a few inches. He leaned forward.
“Oh, jeez!” he hissed, stepping back as he saw the dark black eye staring back at him out of the yellow-colored orb, the sphere floating in some liquid.
“Ah, Okpashnyi’s twin,” Yakov noted. “We are in the right place.”
Turcotte looked more closely. He could see the crude sutures where the sphere had been put back together after autopsy.
Turcotte checked the other crates nearby. There were several wood boxes with the Nazi eagle stenciled on them. He flipped open the lid on the closest one. It was full of files. He pulled the front file out. A drawing of Okpashnyi was the first piece of paper in there.
“You read German?” he asked Yakov.
“A little.”
“Can you tell which of these are important and which aren’t? Which one holds the Spear if it is here?” Turcotte asked.
“I will check.”
As Yakov moved about rubbing dust off crates, Turcotte pulled out his SATPhone. He knew it wouldn’t work this far underground, but it was a sign of the straits they were in that he flipped open the cover anyway and pressed the on button. As he had expected, nothing but static came out of the earpiece.
“This is strange.” Yakov’s voice floated through the room.
Turcotte walked over to where the Russian was prying open the top on a crate. “What do you have?”
“Files reference the Ark.” Yakov pulled a folder out of the crate and opened it. He quickly read the opening page. “An after-action report from an SS reconnaissance.”
“Where?”
“Turkey.” Yakov’s lips were moving as he read. “In 1942.” He turned a page and held out a photo. “Aerial recon.”
Turcotte took the black-and-white picture. It showed a snow-covered mountainside. “What am I looking at?”
“Mount Ararat.”
“Ararat.” Turcotte made the connection. “Noah’s Ark?” He shook his head. “Wrong ark.”
“When you are not certain what you are looking for,” Yakov said, “you cannot afford to ignore anything.” He was looking at the photo. He tapped the corner with a thick finger. “What is that?”
A long object was embedded in the ice. Turcotte had some experience with overhead imagery, but the quality of this photography was poor. “Probably a spur of rock.”
“Or Noah’s Ark?” Yakov asked.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” Turcotte asked, even as he threw the folder into Pasha’s satchel. “Let’s keep looking. We’ve got to find the Spear.”
CHAPTER 23
The hours just before dawn were von Seeckt’s favorite. He would lie in his bed, looking out the window at the desert, the darker mass of the mountains in the distance. Above the mountains were the stars, and he often thought about seeing those same stars as a child in the mountains of southern Germany. Sometimes he even thought he could see the mothership pass by overhead; the newscasts said one could occasionally see it with the naked eye when the tumbling ship reflected light.
He remembered the first time he saw the mothership, nestled in its crater inside the cavern now known as Hangar One at Area 51. World War II raged around the planet, but all he could do was stare at the long black, cigar-shaped alien craft and feel the impact of how puny man was, how insignificant in the true scale of the universe.
He was not surprised when the door to his room silently swung open, letting in light from the hallway. The door closed just as quickly, returning the room to its original dimness.
A dark figure moved across the tile floor and stood at the side of the bed, looking down on the old man.
“Do it quickly,” von Seeckt said.
The figure didn’t move. “What have you told them?”
“I have done as instructed. I told them nothing they didn’t already know or wouldn’t have found out soon. Just enough to get them going in the right directions. They have people looking in Moscow and at the Giza Plateau. They look for things we have searched for. Maybe they will have better luck.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” the figure said. “It is all about power and knowledge, and ours is growing.”
“If we were so brilliant, why did it come to this?” Von Seeckt looked out at the desert. “Spare me the speech.”
“Have they found the Spear of Destiny?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the key we seek?”
“I don’t know.” A hint of a smile played across the old man’s lips. “You ask me many questions after boasting how your knowledge was growing.”
“I don’t have time for games. The Ark of the Covenant?”
“They seek that at Giza as many have sought it there in the past. There is no reason to believe they will have any more success.”
“I think you are wrong there.” The figure pulled out a small device, which it hurriedly whispered into, then returned to its resting place. “What else have they found?”
Von Seeckt was still looking out the window, but he waved a hand to take in his room. “Does it look like I’m in the information loop from the Cube?”
“Then you are no longer needed.”
“You had already decided that before you came in,” von Seeckt said.
“True… ” The word reached von Seeckt’s ear at the same time as the black blade made of alien metal punched through the skull into the brain, killing him instantly.
They had been slowly descending in what Tolya suspected was a large spiral for quite a while now. He had no idea how deep they were, but he suspected that if a nuke did hit Moscow, they would not be immediately killed. They were circling the object, so he felt reasonably certain this would lead them to the target.
“Sir!” The commando backed up from the steel door he had just opened, his finger on the trigger.
Tolya edged around the man to see what had caused his reaction. It was the first door they had encountered in quite a while. It had taken two men to unscrew the latch that held it shut. Tolya doubted that Katyenka or those who had been with her were on the other side, but he saw no need to pass it by.
Tolya shone his light into the opening. A large chamber was revealed, the end of which was blocked by the numerous objects poking up from the floor. Tolya’s brain had to process what he was seeing for a few seconds before it accepted the reality… hundreds of mummified bodies impaled on stakes set into the floor.