The Amber Room - v4 by Steve Berry

Author:Steve Berry [Berry, Steve]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-02-18T15:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

THIRTY-FIVE

Stod, Germany

Monday, May 19, 10:15 a.m.

Wayland McKoy marched into the cavern. Cold damp air enveloped him, and darkness overtook the morning light. He marveled at the ancient shaft. Ein Silberbergwerk. A silver mine. Once the “treasury of the Holy Roman Emperors,” the earth now lay spent and abandoned, a sordid reminder of the cheap Mexican silver that drove most of the Harz’s mines out of business by 1900.

The whole area was spectacular. Knots of pine-clad hills, stunted scrub, and alpine meadows, all beautiful and rugged, yet an eeriness permeated. As Goethe had said in Faust: Where witches held their Sabbath.

It had once been the southwestern corner of East Germany, in the dreaded forbidden zone, and stilted border posts continued to dot the forest. The minefields, shrapnel-scattering trap guns, guard dogs, and barbed-wire fences were now gone. Wende, unification, had put an end to the need for containing an entire population and opened opportunities. Ones he was now exploiting.

He made his way down the wide shaft. The trail was marked every thirty meters by a hundred-watt bulb, and an electrical cord snaked a path back to the generator outside. The rock face was sharp, the floor rubble strewn, the work of an initial team he’d sent in last weekend to clear the passage.

That had been the easy part. Jackhammers and air guns. No need to worry about long-lost Nazi explosives, the tunnel had been sniffed by dogs and surveyed by demolitionists. The lack of anything even remotely concerned with explosives was worrisome. If this was indeed the right mine, the one Germans used to stash the art from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich museum, then it would almost certainly have been mined. Yet nothing had been found. Just rock, silt, sand, and thousands of bats. The nasty little bastards populated offshoots of the main shaft during winter, and of all the species in the world, this one had to be endangered. Which explained why the German government had been so hesitant about granting him an exploration permit. Luckily, the bats left the mine every May, not to return until mid-July. A precious forty-five days to explore. That had been all the German government would grant. His permit required the mine be empty when the beasts returned.

The deeper he strolled into the mountain, the larger the shaft became — which also was troublesome. The normal routine was for the tunnels to narrow, eventually becoming impassable, the miners excavating until it proved impossible to burrow any farther. All the shafts were a testament to centuries of mining, each generation trying to better the one before and uncover a vein of previously undetected ore. But for all its width, the size of this shaft still concerned him. It was simply far too narrow to stash anything as large as the loot he was searching for.

He approached his three-man work crew. Two men stood on ladders, another below, each boring holes at sixty-degree angles into the rock. Cables fed air and electricity. The generators and compressors stood fifty meters behind him, outside in the morning air.

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