“There’s the trail,” he said. “Get in front of the corporal’s machine and make him follow you.”
The BMW sped quickly ahead, and taking over the lead, Grenzmann’s rider turned the small pursuit party back up the hill and toward the center of the stone circle. When they arrived there, Grenzmann saw that the tracks went down one side of the dip but did not come up again.
“What did I tell you?”
Grinning broadly, he held up his hand and brought the pursuit party to a halt.
“They must be hiding down there,” he said. “Turn off your engines and dismount. We’ll go the rest of the way on foot. Better bring a flashlight, Corporal.”
With machine pistols slung around their necks, the four Germans descended along the path to the door of the open burial chamber.
“This is a strange place,” said Donkels. “A temple or, more likely, a grave. It’s certainly not the sort of place you want to be entering at night, I’d have thought. These stone circles were made by people who believed in magic and witchcraft. And you desecrate a site like this at your peril.”
“Donkels is right,” said Hagen. “That’s a grave in there. Best leave whoever it belongs to well alone, if you ask me.”
“Nonsense,” said Grenzmann. “It’s perfectly obvious that they’re hiding in here. Which means that this grave has already been desecrated. Not that it is of any concern to us. We’re German soldiers, not a bunch of old women. It’s just a question of going in here and getting them.”
Corporal Hagen stared nervously into the entrance. A strange smell filled the air; he sniffed it suspiciously. “Maybe so,” he said. “But sometimes old women know best. And it is very dark in there. Perhaps it would be better just to wait here until the morning. It couldn’t do any harm, could it? If they are hiding in there, it’s not like they can go anywhere else now, is it?”
“It might be a trap,” suggested Donkels. “Suppose they’re armed.”
“Give me that flashlight,” demanded Grenzmann, and stepped through the doorway.
Reluctantly, the three SS men followed him along a wide stone passage that turned to the left as it descended down a gentle slope.
“He doesn’t lack courage,” Hagen whispered to the other two. “I’ll say that for him.”
“Is that what you call it?” said Donkels. “If you ask me, he’s going to get us all killed. I’ve got a funny feeling about this place. As a matter of fact, ever since we got started, I’ve had a peculiar feeling about this whole business. As if there was something not quite right about these wild horses and this child.”
“Maybe there will be treasure,” said Hagen, trying to look on the bright side. “Perhaps, like Heinrich Schliemann, we’ll find the Ukrainian version of the treasures of Troy and all die rich men.”
Talk of treasure lifted the hearts of the Germans for a moment.
“As long as we don’t just die,” said the third SS man. “Like Schliemann.”
“Silence in the ranks,” hissed Captain Grenzmann.
As the passage came to an end, he moved the beam of the flashlight from the floor to the roof, revealing a high, vaulted ceiling that was covered with paintings like the ones they’d seen back in the waterworks.
“What is this place?” breathed Hagen.
“These are the same paintings we saw back at Askaniya-Nova,” said Donkels. “Aren’t they?”
“Nonsense,” said Grenzmann, and pointed the beam of the flashlight straight ahead of them into the thick darkness. “Those were much more recent. These cave paintings are the real thing.”
Another, even stranger, sight met their widening eyes—so unutterably remarkable and unearthly that the Germans were stunned into silence as they tried to make sense of what they were looking at in the impatient beam of Grenzmann’s flashlight.
The three SS men gasped, and even Grenzmann felt his jaw drop; all thoughts of the original objects of their pursuit were momentarily forgotten.
“Incredible,” he said.
It was a life-sized war chariot that resembled an ancient exhibit in the world-famous Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The charioteer appeared to be a young female wearing a breastplate and helmet, with a spear in her hand, and she stood on a waist-high, semicircular chariot that was well equipped with arrows and javelins. Two horses were hitched side by side by a yoke, and next to them stood an enormous hunting dog. But what made the chariot group so marvelous to the Germans was that it appeared to be mostly made of solid silver, and their fear now gave way to greed.