The Shadow Project by Scott Mariani
‘Shit,’ Jeff’s whisper chuckled in Ben’s ear.
They kept moving. The ground was sloping ever upwards and the gaps in the trees were getting wider. The mountain towered overhead.
Ben operated the zoom facility on his goggles, and the magnification of the grainy image in his eyepieces expanded from xl to x10. He slowly, carefully scanned the terrain. Nature could do so much in sixty-five years to alter a landscape. The ravages of the weather, landslides, vegetation growth. It was hard to associate the crisp lines of Kammler’s technical drawings with the rugged landscape in front of them.
But then he did a double-take, and held his breath as he zoomed in closer. Yes, there it was. Carefully blended with the tangle of overgrown bushes and brambles, visible only to someone who was looking for it, a thick sprawl of military camouflage netting veiled a rocky alcove right at the base of the mountain about sixty yards up ahead. He stared at it a moment longer, then zoomed the goggles back down to xl magnification.
The question was, what was behind it? If it corresponded to the drawings, it was the twenty-foot-high steel doorway carved into the mountain by Hitler’s slave army a lifetime earlier.
More tyre tracks were visible in the decayed leaf matter underfoot as they crept closer to the hidden entrance. Ben kneeled and put his hand to the ground. Fresh mud, the tread marks clearly imprinted. Someone had been here within the last twenty-four hours.
Jeff’s voice rasped in Ben’s earpiece. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move.’ Ben froze, then turned his head very slowly to see Jeff pointing to a spot an inch from the toecap of his boot.
The tripwire was barely visible in the dirt, just a short section of it raised up enough to catch on an unsuspecting intruder’s foot. It was almost certainly wired to a silent alarm somewhere inside the facility. Someone was definitely in there, and they didn’t want to be found.
It took them almost half an hour to cover the last few yards, checking every inch of ground as they moved. Then, breathless with tension, they finally reached the camo netting. And carefully, very carefully, peeled back its edge.
Ben nodded in satisfaction. Sixty-five years’ worth of brambles and moss and ivy had been recently clipped away to reveal the tall steel doors, exactly as in the drawings but now craggy and pitted with corrosion. He ran a gloved finger down their central edge and saw where some of the rust had flaked away from being opened. Moving his hand across to one of the massive hinges, he found it sticky with fresh grease.
But even if they’d been able to open them, going brazenly in through the front doors to face an unknown force of opposition wasn’t an option Ben wanted to consider. When he’d studied Kammler’s plans back in Switzerland, he’d spotted another way in that he liked a lot better. With just one reservation – one he didn’t want to think about.
He stepped carefully away from the entrance. Now that he had his bearings, he had a pretty good idea of where to look. About two hundred feet up the mountainside and about three hundred feet to the left, the goggles on maximum zoom picked out what looked like the mouth of a rusted-out old oil drum protruding from the rocks, partially obscured by a shrub. He signalled to Jeff to follow him.
When they reached the oil drum, Ben saw he’d been right. It was the mouth of a chimney, six feet wide, and from Kammler’s drawing he knew that its shaft drilled straight down about two hundred feet through solid rock to a chamber below. It had been hard to tell from the faded handwritten labels on the drawing what the purpose of the chamber was. He said nothing to Jeff as he unslung the rope coil from his shoulder and secured one end to a big rock. He tested the knot, then dropped the other end of the rope down the shaft. Jeff did the same as Ben climbed over the lip of the chimney and lowered himself down slowly fist under fist, clasping the rope between his boots to control his descent. He swayed from side to side as he went down, touching the metal sides of the vertical tunnel. Everything was a uniform green in his eyepieces, but he knew that if he flipped them up he’d be in total blackness. He glanced up, and saw Jeff’s boots overhead as he slid down after him.
It was a long way down through the claustrophobic space, and after a couple of minutes Ben’s arms were screaming. He worried about running out of rope and finding himself dangling helplessly over an unknown drop. But the rope kept coming, and after another thirty seconds he knew he was getting near the bottom from the indescribable stench that was rising up to meet him.
‘Something stinks pretty bad down here,’ Jeff’s voice said in his ear.
It was a combination of every bad smell in the world. Burnt animal grease and decaying matter left to fester in water that was beyond stagnant. Putrefaction and filth of a kind that Ben didn’t even want to imagine. Just as the smell was as bad as he thought it could get, it got worse. Moments later his feet splashed down into something that felt like mud. Cold liquid squelched thickly up around his legs and into his boots. He swallowed, fighting the bile that wanted to well up in his throat.
He let go of the rope and let his arms dangle by his sides to let the muscles recover. He was standing in what appeared to be a square stone-built chamber about thirty feet across. The squelchy soup was up to his knees. He looked down. It didn’t seem like mud, but it was thick and cloying.
Then he looked up. And saw the rats. Hundreds of them, scuttling along the edge of the stonework above the surface. Dropping down and swimming through the filth, their long tails wriggling behind them.
Jeff landed beside him, rubbing his hands. His face was contorted in disgust behind the goggles. ‘What the fuck is this place?’
Ben didn’t reply. He raised one foot with a sucking sound and started trying to wade towards the nearest wall. Embedded in the stone, steel rungs led up to the iron grate of a hatchway ten feet or so above their heads. He prayed it would be open.
Something hit him softly between the shoulders. He heard a high-pitched squeaking in his ear, and instinctively reached over his shoulder. His gloved fingers closed on something soft and furry. He flung the rat away, saw it twist in midair, its jaws snapping. It landed with a splash. Then another was scuttling up his leg, biting at his clothes. He lashed out and felt its back break.
They started wading quickly towards the edge, sloshing through the filth as fast as they dared without tripping and falling into it. Something nudged Ben’s knee. At first he thought it was another rat, but then he looked down and realised.
There were things in the liquid. Things that had lain undisturbed for a long time had suddenly started floating to the surface as their feet churned up the sediment at the bottom.
The human skull bobbed away from him, staring sightlessly up at him in the green vision of his goggles. It was scorched and blackened and rat-gnawed, missing its jawbone. A bullet had shattered everything above the left eye socket. The teeth were torn out.
Then Ben felt something give way with a wet, brittle crunch under his boot. He stumbled. Another skull floated up, crushed and black and burnt. Then a section of rib cage, like the remains of an old boat. He kicked them away in disgust.
It was what he’d feared from studying the plans of the facility, and now he saw that his suspicions had been right. The chamber was the crematorium for the slave workers who had perished building Kammler’s secret domain. The undiscovered mass grave of tens of thousands of nameless victims of the SS general’s brutality. They were standing on human remains. Stacks of charred bone. The piled ash of burnt flesh and clothing, mixed with rainwater seepage over the years to create a sickening mulch.
They splashed through the horror. Ben’s fingers closed on the bottom rung of the ladder and he hauled himself up the wall, closely followed by Jeff. There were gagging sounds in his earpiece as he reached the hatch, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep from vomiting himself. He muttered a prayer, pushed his fingers through the iron grating and gave it a hard shove.
It didn’t move. It was either rusted shut, or it was locked from the inside. They were shut in here with the dead.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Far away from where Ben and Jeff were trapped inside the crematorium chamber, separated by millions of tons of solid rock and a maze of tunnels and corridors, Adam O’Connor was on his hands and knees on the concrete floor of the vault, surrounded by dismantled electronic components, mechanical linkages, magnetic coils, bits of wire. A chaotic mess of spanners and screwdrivers and soldering irons and voltmeters lay scattered around him.
He hated the machine almost as much as he hated the woman who’d tortured his son. All his rage, all his frustration at the situation he’d been plunged into against his will, were obsessively focused on it. His shirt stuck to him with sweat. Days of beard growth covered his jaw, and his eyes were stinging from lack of sleep. His trousers were worn through from kneeling on the rough concrete, his hands were lacerated from all the rusted bolts he’d had to slacken in the confined space of the machine, his fingers covered in burns from soldering the thousands of corroded connections he’d found. Any one of them could have accounted for the fact that, so far, he just simply could not get the fucking thing to work. Every time he found a new problem his heart would soar, thinking this is it; only to sink again when he fixed it and put everything back together again, hit the big red activation knob … and the machine still just sat there.
Silent. Dead. Laughing at him. Just like it was now. Adam would have punched the loathsome thing, but his knuckles were too bruised and swollen from the hundreds of times he’d already done that.
He turned round and looked at Pelham. Every hour that Adam spent down here working on the Bell, Pelham was right there with him. Except that while Adam toiled and sweated and chewed his lip in terror of what was going to happen if he failed, Pelham had taken to lounging in a big armchair he’d had brought down for him, coolly reading newspapers and magazines while sipping on a long drink.
‘This is hopeless,’ Adam croaked. ‘It’ll never work.’
‘You’ll keep trying,’ Pelham said without looking up. He flipped a page of the magazine he was reading. Took another sip of his drink.
‘This thing is scrap metal. And even if it didn’t have mice living in it, and every linkage wasn’t seized solid, and every damn wire wasn’t crusted up with corrosion, and the valves weren’t rotted away to nothing, I still couldn’t make it work.’
Pelham put down the magazine. ‘We had an agreement, Adam. And frankly, your attitude is starting to wear out my patience.’
Adam dropped the spanner he was clutching and staggered to his feet, racked with cramp. He advanced on Pelham, enraged by the man’s obtuseness. ‘Listen to me. I’m not fixing a broken boiler here. This thing isn’t like some household appliance that you just plug in. It’s the most arcane piece of scientific hardware I’ve ever seen, and you’re asking me to fix it with bits of crap from the local toolshop. I can’t work in these conditions. I need a lab. I need more people. I need proper equipment. Maybe if we could just break the whole thing down and analyse every component, we could—’
‘This is it,’ Pelham said, motioning at the room. ‘This is as good as it gets. Live with it.’
‘You don’t understand how complex this thing is,’ Adam shouted.
‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ Pelham said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’
Adam could feel his face turning crimson as his shouts reverberated around the inside of the vault. ‘And if I can’t get it to work, then you know what? You know whose fucking fault that’ll be? Not mine. Yours, asshole. Your fault, because if you fuckers hadn’t killed my colleagues, if Michio and Julia were here with me now, the three of us might have figured it out. The way things are, you can do what you want, but you’ll never see this thing working. Understand? It can’t be done. So why don’t you just pick up the phone and tell your employers, whoever the fuck they are, that it’s over? That’s it. And then you’re just going to have to let me and my son go back to our lives.’ By the end of the tirade his shouts had diminished to a sob. He couldn’t talk any more.
There was silence in the vault. Adam steadied himself against the machine, panting.
Pelham spoke softly. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Adam? Your nerves are ragged. You feel weak and confused and you don’t know how you can go on.’
Adam’s head sagged. He screwed his eyes shut and felt dizzy. He was one breath away from bursting into tears. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘If I could just sleep a while. Please. Then I’ll keep trying. I promise. Forget what I said. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.’
Pelham got up from his armchair, walked calmly over to Adam and put an arm benignly around his shoulders. ‘Can I tell you a story? I was a soldier once. Not your normal infantryman. We were something… special. Our selection training was very intense. You wouldn’t believe the things we had to do. Just when we thought we’d been tested to the absolute limit, they moved it to the next level.’ He smiled. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like to be hunted like an animal, can you? Alone in the dark, running scared, no food except what you can catch with your bare hands, no shelter, no sleep for days on end. But that’s what they did to us. They were teaching us to stretch the limits of what we thought possible, and those days taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that those extremes of fear, pain, fatigue were my friends, because they concentrated my mind. Made me find reserves of strength within myself that I’d never dreamed of. That’s how I kept going. I made it through.’ Adam stared wordlessly at him.
‘But not every man passed the test,’ Pelham went on. ‘Some were broken. They gave in. And you know what they said, those losers, as they were being carried off, crying like babies? “I’m tired.”’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is, I could let you go back to your cell right now, so that you could spend the next ten hours sleeping. But the truth is, Adam, I don’t think it’s going to help you to give in like that. Deep down, I think you have the strength to keep going. You just need help to find it within yourself.’ He walked away from Adam and went over to the table beside his armchair. On it was a radio handset.
‘What are you doing?’ Adam said numbly.
Pelham picked up the radio. ‘Irina, this is Pelham. Respond, over.’
A pause, then a fizz of static. Reception was poor inside the mountain. But then Adam heard the woman’s voice reply and he felt his knees going weak.
‘Fetch the boy,’ Pelham told her. ‘Bring him down to the vault. You know what I’m saying. Over and out.’ He turned off the radio.
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘No, no. You don’t have to do this. I’ll—’ Pelham pointed at the machine. ‘You’ll make it work, believe me,’ he said. ‘When she’s cutting your son’s face off, five minutes from now right here in this room while you watch, I guarantee that’s going to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Let’s see how tired you are then.’
Chapter Fifty-Eight
‘Again. On three.’
Dangling side by side from the filthy rungs of the ladder, Ben and Jeff kicked against the iron grate of the crematorium hatchway one more time. The dull clang resonated through the chamber.
‘I’m going to puke,’ Jeff mumbled.
‘Again,’ Ben said. They’d been trying for what seemed like forever, and he could only hope that nobody had heard the noise. They swung their weight back from the hatch, then lashed out in unison.
This time, the clang of their boots on the iron grate was mixed with a screech as hinges rusted solid for over half a century gave way and the hatch moved. Not much, just an inch. But it moved, and Ben felt the relief scorch through his veins like whisky.
‘We’re nearly there. Once more.’
The final kick sent the hatch crashing open.
‘You go first,’ Ben said, and Jeff wasted no time in clambering past him and crawling out of the hole. Ben followed. After a few feet he was able to stand, and looked around him through his night-vision goggles.
They were in the rough-hewn stone anteroom from where the SS soldiers must have
Ben thought about Don Jarrett, the Holocaust denier. Another trip to Bruges suddenly seemed like a very good idea.
If he ever got out of this.
Up three pitted stone steps and they were in a passageway. The air was dank and foul, but it felt like pure oxygen after the obscenity of the crematorium. The passage wound onwards. They unslung their weapons and flipped off their safeties as they came to an unmarked doorway. Ben counted one – two – three. A deep breath and they pushed through.
The light hit them. Across the corridor in which they found themselves, cobwebbed lamps strung together by loose wires threw a dim, yellowish glow that was unbearably bright with their goggles. They flipped them up, blinking to adjust their vision.
There was nobody about. They turned left and kept moving. They were on full battle-alert now, in that state of heightened awareness in which every muscle was tight, every nerve jangling and the mind racing with constant anticipation of what could be waiting around every corner. Life never felt more vivid than when death was just an instant away.
A door opened up ahead. Voices. Two men. Ben and Jeff pressed themselves flat into a shadowy alcove in the wall. Footsteps approached, and as the voices grew louder Ben could hear the two men were speaking Croat.
‘I’m not gonna take much more shit from that bastard Pelham,’ one of them was complaining bitterly sotto voce, as though he thought Pelham might be listening.
‘Relax,’ the other one said in a more laconic tone. ‘Think of the money.’
‘No fucking amount of money is worth being stuck in this hole. I hate this place.’
The men walked past where Ben and Jeff were hidden in the shadows, close enough to smell their body odour. The complaining one was stick-thin inside a rumpled leather jacket, with a facial twitch and long, greasy hair scraped back in a thin ponytail. The laconic-sounding one wore a khaki cold weather field shirt that looked like Russian military issue. His shaven head glistened in the lamplight.