The Doomsday Testament(70)

In his mind, Jamie saw the valley from the dam wall, fearsome and rugged, hemmed in by the trees and chopped deep into the surrounding landscape. From there it had looked as if you could hide an army in it, but up close it was different. Narrow and constricted, like a winding rabbit’s burrow, but with no handy escape passages. He remembered once seeing a ferret sent into a rabbit warren. The squeals of terror and the bloodied, dead-eyed bundle hanging from the hunter’s jaws had stayed with him for years.

Yet for all the feeling of being a hunted beast, he was now calm enough to think on a second level. This valley was where Walter Brohm had pointed him in Matthew Sinclair’s journal. His eyes searched for any clue that might tie in with the map or the sun symbol. The same thought had occurred to Sarah and she slowly realized that their original plan had a major flaw. She’d barely said a word since their tumble down the hillside and the sound of her voice startled him.

‘Even if the Black Sun wasn’t an abstract piece of symbolism, we’re talking about something based on the road grid around here sixty years ago. Hell, we don’t even know if there were any proper roads. How many of these tracks have been added or have become overgrown in the meantime? And did you see those fancy little trains in the tourist brochure? This would have been a logging and mining area during the war. You can bet your new boots that the rail network in the Harz Mountains was a lot different in nineteen forty-five.’

Jamie didn’t pause as he unslung the rucksack and retrieved the journal and the map. ‘All right, I’ll go with that. But let’s look at it from a slightly different angle. There is one constant in this landscape. Water.’

‘You mean the river.’

‘That’s right, so let’s assume legs one and five are the river, running directly through the target area. It means we’re only looking for two more landmarks to pinpoint the position.’

‘Sounds pretty thin to me.’

‘It is, but we also have the clue in the diary—’

They were interrupted by shouts from upstream. Simultaneously they dived into the shelter of a fallen tree. Jamie noticed with alarm that the gun Sarah had taken from the dead Nazi at Wewelsburg had appeared miraculously in her right hand. He tried to think rationally. The men in front of them were making no attempt to conceal themselves and by the sound of their voices they were still something like a hundred paces away. Behind them, the valley curved away to the south at an angle that would always keep them out of sight of their pursuers if they could only stay far enough in front. There was still a chance. He waved Sarah back. She looked at him as if he was crazy and shook her head.

‘There are only two or three of them,’ she whispered. ‘We can take them as they go past. Get your gun out.’

‘I haven’t got it.’

‘What?’

‘I lost it when we jumped.’

She closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘Jesus, Saintclair, how did I get stuck with you?’

‘We have to go.’

Her expression said no, but she squirmed backwards away from the tree and he followed. When he was certain they couldn’t be seen they got to their feet and ran north.


Gustav heard the shouts from the shelter of the trees lining the clifftop. He’d been disappointed when Saintclair and the woman had jumped, but not surprised. Frederick had warned him not to underestimate Saintclair’s abilities or resolve. The original position had given him a better view of the bank downstream than up and he’d soon realized that the fugitives must be heading north, which suited his purpose perfectly. From his new viewpoint he scanned the river through the MP5’s telescopic sight. His fist tightened on the pistol grip as the two running figures came into view and the stubby barrel of the suppressor ranged on the targets. He moved the rate of fire selector to a three-round burst and caressed the trigger. He was firing from above and at an acute angle, which gave the shot a degree of difficulty that might have made another man hesitate, and he was using a weapon that was far from ideal, but Gustav was supremely confident of his ability. He willed himself to relax, sucked in a breath and slowly released it. And fired.





XXXV


8 MAY 1945, noon. I pushed them hard and they hated me for it. The way began steeply, at first in the trees where we were all plagued with buzzing black flies and the sweat coursed from their faces in streams, then for a short while in the open. Brohm complained until he ran out of wind. Klosse cursed me under his breath. Strasser looked as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. I took pity on them when we reached a runnel that flowed through a clearing beside a steep ravine, and they gratefully sat down to drink from the water bottles and eat the last of the bread. The intelligence briefing I’d been given indicated that this was one of the quietest sectors of the German–Swiss border. The line wanders erratically and with no apparent reason from the point where it dissects the Untersee, the western part of Lake Constance, as far as Klettgau, where it turns back on itself and takes a huge bite out of Swiss territory, making it entirely arbitrary whether a farm or a hamlet is German or Swiss. From what we’d seen there was no doubt who had the best part of the bargain. Even though they were better off than the people in Germany’s bombed-out cities, the inhabitants of southern Bavaria had been on starvation rations for the best part of two years. This was smuggling country and I had no doubt that some food and drink got past the border guards in exchange for gold and valuables, but it must have been galling for a farmer on one side of the valley unable to feed his starving beasts to look across at the untouched land of milk and honey over the way. There would be mines, of course, but only on the Swiss side, and that wasn’t my problem. The guards who patrolled the German side of the ten-foot border fences had been low-grade foreign conscripts and in any case were long gone. The Americans would make sure there was no interference from the Swiss.