From on high came the muffled boom of the bomber as it flashed on for a fifteen minute run toward the Russian border. On its return flight, another fifteen minutes, it would attempt to make contact with them. That gave Solo and Kuryakin exactly thirty minutes to find Orangeberg, dig up one grave, and reach a decision. One half hour to discover if they were right or wrong about the cemetery sleeping quietly in the lowlands beyond Oberteisendorf.
Kuryakin tamped the earth down on the remainder of his parachute. He grunted in satisfaction and replaced the entrenching tool on the hook fastened to his pack. The wind billowed his flying suit as he turned to Solo.
“It’s your expedition, Napoleon.”
“All expenses paid. I make the cemetery out due north of us according to the compass. Maybe a thousand yards. Not too bad a drop, considering.”
“Recognize anything yet?”
“Hard to tell. Landmarks at night are always a fooler. But there’s a reasonable familiarity about the neighborhood. Shall we go?”
“Let’s,” grinned Kuryakin, his teeth flashing in the darkness. “I haven’t dug a grave in years.”
They worked toward the direction Solo’s wrist compass indicated, finding the going amazingly even. The land was low, flat and undisturbed by foliage of any kind. Had it been a moonlit night, it would have been a cakewalk. Yet the extreme darkness was a blessing in disguise. They were, after all, in enemy territory, Golgotha’s back yard, and while the possibility of land mines, booby traps and electronic alarm systems was not to be discounted there was no time to worry about incalculables.
They pushed on, finding the ground easy to traverse, watching the shadowy distance unfold before them, identifying each indistinguishable clump of earth and darkness as a potential enemy until they reached it. Solo had his automatic pistol at the ready. A nighthawk cawed once and they both waited for the tell-tale sound of men moving that might follow. None came. They moved on.
The earth narrowed and the high walls of a gorge rose about them, only to level off into more flatland. Solo spotted a familiar rise in the terrain and his hopes rose with it. Something about the topography was eminently right, now. Yes, yes—there it was. The earth stopped and suddenly a long, knee-high bunker of concrete was before them. Here and there, a gleaming tombstone winked white in the darkness, its stone angles catching random stabs of reflected light.
“Napoleon—” Kuryakin whispered.
“Yes. Orangeberg. Let’s find a dead one.”‘
“Right. No sense in pushing our luck. We’ll take the first one we come across. I want to stay as close to the wall as possible.”
“Check.”
They slipped over the wall, careful to keep their many items of equipment from making undue noises. Their boots made contact with soft dry ground. The even, terraced nature of the earth was not lost on them. A row of headstones, barely twenty-five yards away, poked eerily into view.
The utter desolation of Orangeberg was now readily apparent. An almost palpable silence hung over the cemetery. An aura of everlasting stillness. Solo had seen Orangeberg from the air and understood the vast size of the place. Yet down here, the sensation was one of telescoping in size, as if in microcosm—it was only another burying place like a million other nameless ones all over the world. It was an odd sensation. The miles had shriveled down to the twenty-five yards that was as far as his eyes could make out in the darkness. Were it not for the silvery shafts of the headstones just before them, they might have stood in any gloomy vacant lot.
There seemed to be no caretaker’s house or night watchman to contend with. Yet it was impossible to tell. They would have to operate as though discovery were imminent and they might have to shoot their way out any second.
Solo reached the headstone that was closest, a square slab of marble, barely knee-high. It was placed directly between two oblong arches of granite.
“Here,” he whispered, unfastening his shovel from the pack on his back. “This one will do. The smaller the better.”
Kuryakin nodded and moved abreast of him.
Solo bent down, cupping his pencil Hash and beaming it directly on the slab. The engraved Old English lettering on the stone was bold and final in its epitaph:
WILHELM VANMEYER
1919—1959
Requiescat en Pace
Solo and Kuryakin exchanged dour glances.
“Latin and German don’t exactly go together,” Kuryakin muttered.
“No,” Solo agreed. “But these are a collection of books we can’t afford to judge by their covers. Dig.”
Grimly, they set to, easing their spades into the ground. It was tougher going than they might have expected. Here, on the outer perimeter of the cemetery, the earth was considerably harder. Ruefully, Solo now remembered a peculiarity of burying grounds: the borders of most of them tended to be the less ideal ground for interment. Which was why most vaults and crypts turned up at the entranceways and gateways of cemeteries. Not because the richest corpses wanted to be showed up front. Still, it should be only a matter of moments—if there were no interruptions.
They dug quickly, making a dark mound of uncovered earth to one side of the slab. It didn’t take too long. Solo’s spade thucked hollowly on a box of some kind. The sound spurred them on. Soon they had cleared a sufficient amount of space about the top of a simple pine coffin.
The box had not been six feet down. Three was much nearer the mark.
“If there’s a skeleton in there, I promise to defect to the Russians,” said Kuryakin.
“Fair enough. And I’ll do the Watusi in Macy’s window on Christmas Day. Ready?”
“Ready.”
The lid came off, pried loose by their straining fingertips, after Solo had raced a claw hammer about the edges to speed things along. There was a creak of wood and suddenly the lid was free, pulling back in Kuryakin’s startled hands. Overhead, the wind sighed across the graveyard, as Solo thumbed his pencil flash on once again and played its beam over the contents of the coffin.
A twinkling galaxy of clustered stars lay revealed in the dime-sized circle of light.
Round silver balls, identical with the one placed between the toes of Stewart Fromes’ corpse, lay boxed by the thousands in the coffin before their eyes. The coffin. was filled almost to lid level with them. They were like some mammoth collection of ball-bearings saved by a fanatic collector of the things. But Solo knew they were nothing so harmless as all that.
“Bingo,” said Solo, “and end of the search.”
“Napoleon,” Kuryakin said in an odd, tight voice. “Don’t move too fast. We’re being infiltrated upon and though I hate to say so—we’re surrounded.”
Solo cursed and turned the pocket flash off, rolling to the ground. Yet even as he did so, the dark cemetery lit up with the brightness of full daylight as powerful searchlights trained their traveling beams on the headstones that marked the bogus resting place of Wilhelm Vanmeyer.
“You will stand as you are and do nothing,” the funereal voice of the man called Golgotha yelled hollowly across the open ground, “or you will most certainly die before we have a chance to talk again.”
GOLGOTHA AGAIN
THE SEARCHLIGHTS were blinding. Caught in the merciless exposure, Solo and Kuryakin were like two shafts sticking in a mammoth circular dartboard. Beyond the dazzling glow of the beams, once their eyes had become adjusted to the light, they could barely make out the tall shadows of the men behind the glare.