Amber (11 page)

A spacious chamber
awaited them through the new door. Once again, though, no artifacts were present. Leopov frowned as she surveyed the new surroundings, lit only by half a dozen flashlights. “It’s the perfect size for the amber chamber. It could definitely have been brought here and put together.”

Bones threw his hands up. “What if somebody just made all these combination lock doors to throw us off the trail, and we’re just going to keep finding empty room after empty room?”

Professor spoke in a calming voice. “This might have been the final stopping point for the Amber Room before someone or several someones found it later and carried it away.”

The team had a glum air about them as they looked about the room. It was a daunting task, locating such an old treasure, and not knowing whether the clues they had come across were genuine, or were in fact deliberate attempts to mislead was frustrating. Maddock paced slowly along the left-hand wall of the chamber, combing every inch of it with his torch beam. He swept away a nest of cobwebs, and then brushed off some dust beneath those.

“Everybody look at this.”

The team huddled around him while he carefully wiped away more dirt from a spot on the cave wall. It was difficult to see, but under careful scrutiny the smooth wooden planks were unmistakable.

“A wall?”

“A door?”

The group speculated on what the thing Maddock had uncovered might be, but after a minute Bones stepped up and started clearing away even more cobwebs and dirt, and Willis soon followed. “I see crossbars,” Bones said after a couple of minutes.

“Looks like a door, all boarded up,” Willis confirmed. In fact, it was clear now that the original board Maddock had uncovered was in fact in front of a recessed space where a true door was fitted. Bones and Willis kicked in the boards and tore them out of the way. A simple wooden door lay behind it, with an iron handle. Bones tried it but it was locked.

“Allow me.” Willis took a step back, raised a leg and then kicked in the door, which stove to around the lock. Bones shone a flashlight through and, detecting no immediate threats, reached a hand in and unlocked it. He shoved the door open and swept his beam in front of him.

“Clear.” He stepped into the room, then adding, “But not empty!”

Excitedly, the rest of the team entered the new chamber and quickly saw that Bones was right. This room contained numerous cots, along with many human skeletons.

“The cots are very old,” Wagner noted, kneeling next to one and scrutinizing its construction. “German military.”

Leopov examined some of the clothing that was still intact on the piles of bones and skeletons. “This is odd, but some of these uniforms are Russian, as well as German.”

The team fanned out around the room, scouring it for anything else that might be of interest. Maddock called out from his position on the far wall. “Got another room here. Smaller one. I’m going in.”

He stepped into the adjacent space and bathed it with the light from his torch. A single bed. A tiny desk. And a skeleton with its armed wrapped around an object. Maddock got closer, eyeballed it, and saw a gleam of amber-colored light.

“Mr. Wagner, Professor! Check this out!”

The rest of the team filed into the small room, but it was only large enough to allow Professor and Wagner up close to the item Maddock had found. Wagner hunched down next to it and asked Maddock to move his hands away. “Just let me get a clear look!”

He leaned in closer for just that and then the group heard him gasp with excitement. Wagner left the object in place with the skeleton but looked up. “It’s the amber clock!”

Then, with great care, Wagner extracted the item from the bony grasp in which it had been held for what looked like many decades. He held it up for the group to see with all the relish of a hockey player showing off the Stanley Cup. A small sculpture of a clock tower flanked by twin vases, the amber and gold inlay positively radiating under multiple flashlight beams in the dark chamber.

“The amber clock! This was most definitely part of the Amber Room,” Wagner exalted. “It’s proof the room was here! This piece, for some reason or another, was left behind.”

Maddock glanced quickly around the chamber. “It’s a small room, probably private since it only had one cot. Maybe a private quarters for a senior officer...” Maddock trailed off and Leopov took up where left off.

“When the Germans came to take the amber panels away, this man—I assume he was a man-- must have hidden this piece for some reason. Perhaps simply for the monetary value, or perhaps more? If the panels were being crated out there...” She jerked a thumb at the larger cavern. “...then it might make sense that he would try to abscond with a small piece of it into his private quarters. Especially if he was an officer of some type, he could have gotten away with it unnoticed.”

“There’s something else here!” Maddock was rooting around the skeleton where the clock was. He dug around beneath the bones some more and came up holding a crumbling leather book of some type.

“Let me take a look.” Maddock handed the book to Professor, who gingerly opened its cover. Leopov shined her flashlight on the book while Wagner continued to fawn over the clock. Professor concentrated as he read the pages, which were handwritten in ink.

“It’s a journal, written in German.” He leafed through it quickly. Most of the pages contained entries of dense longhand, but there were a few illustrations as well. He stopped on a page with an artistic pencil drawing of a wolf, a large one, judging by the simple line drawing of a human male standing next to it, given for scale rather than to be part of a scene. The man’s head was even with the chest of the canine. The beast was fitted with a studded collar decorated with a swastika. Professor raised an eyebrow and then skipped to the last page, filled with more scrawled German. “We’ll probably want Mr. Wagner to translate this to be thorough, but I think I know enough to get the gist of it...”

He read some more while tracing a finger just over the lines he concentrated on. “The last entry says something to the effect of, ‘we’ve been taken ill, infected by the devil’s amber, quarantined and left to die. To escape the sickness, the amber panels will be reassembled in a new location. I have seen the light and it has shown me the curse that the eagle holds. It must be destroyed. Not even the waters of Golden Lake can wash it clean.’”

Professor looked up from the book. “That’s where it ends.”

Leopov sighed. “I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid of what?” Wagner finally looked up from the amber clock. “The curse?”

Leopov shook her head. “No. Not the curse. Something I consider to be much worse than the curse if happens to be true, although, it is deemed to be very farfetched. It may be connected to the curse, though.”

“Do tell.” Wagner carried the clock away from the skeleton which had gripped it for so many years. Maddock and Professor walked around the rest of the small room, making sure they weren’t overlooking anything else. Willis and Bones examined the area around the long-dead military officer to see if they could find additional items near where the clock was found while Leopov spoke.

“I have heard a rumor that there might be an ancient pathogen of some sort—a disease-carrying agent—imbued in some of the amber that makes up the panels of the room.” She paused a moment to let this sink in before continuing. “Over time, as the amber deteriorated, people were exposed and some grew sick, giving rise to the rumor of the Amber room curse.”

Professor turned to Leopov from where he’d been pacing the back wall. “Nice of you to bring that up now, I must say.”

Leopov threw her hands up. “I didn’t say anything before because it seemed so implausible.”

“There are a lot of dead soldiers in here—Russian and German. What if this was like the quarantine room for those who got sick from handling the amber panels to move the room? Anyway, if the panels do hold the potential for some kind of biological threat, and they’re still out there somewhere, we need to get our hands on them before the Russians do.” Professor turned back to the wall, looking for more possible hidden door switches.

Bones carefully put the skeleton back down from where he’d lifted it to look beneath it. “It’s starting to sound to me like the whole freaking Amber Room just needs to say lost.”

Willis turned around from the skeleton. “I hope that clock ain’t infected.” The mention of the clock made them all look for Wagner, who was last holding it.

“Hey, what happened to George?” Willis called out, “Mr. Wagner?”

“The clock’s not here, either,” Leopov noted.

Bones started walking to the larger chamber. “He must’ve gone to the other room. I’ll make sure he’s okay.”

Suddenly they heard a crashing noise in the distance. Maddock took off like a shot into the other chamber, the others following. The large room was empty, so Maddock and Bones ran for the exit. They emerged into the cul-de-sac with the bridge at one end, only the bridge was no longer there. It dangled into the chasm from the opposite side. The sound of retreating footsteps running fast echoed through the chambers.

Bones shook his head in disbelief while the others caught up to him and Maddock. “Wagner’s gone with clock!”

Maddock eyed the sizeable gap between them and the other side of the chasm. “And he left us stranded.”

“So we’re stuck
in here?” Willis’ eyes widened. “Man, what an old curmudgeonly son of a...I can’t believe that guy would sentence us to death just to steal a clock.”

Bones stepped back from the edge of the now bridgeless chasm, where he’d been peering down into the rocky void. “It’s more than just the clock. Once he found out where the Amber Room was taken, he figured he’d make sure the secret died with us. He couldn’t take us out in a direct fight—we outnumber him five to one, plus we’re freakin’ SEALs, so he had to trap us.”

Maddock held up a hand. “We should figure a way out of here before we talk about Wagner and the clock. These flashlight batteries will only last so long, and without light it will be considerably harder to find our way out.”

“Impossible, I’d say,” Willis said with a shudder.

“So then let’s get working on it.” Maddock looked around at the team. “Any ideas?”

Bones spoke up first. “Wagner read to me an account in the library about a Russian POW who escaped a Nazi bunker and was found a few miles from
Auerswalde,
mumbling the word ‘amber’.”

“Then this must be that bunker,” Leopov asserted. “So there
is
a way out.”

Professor appeared unconvinced. “If it hasn’t been caved-in or eroded or flooded over the years.”

Bones gauged the distance across the chasm and examined his very limited climbing supplies. “There’s no way even one of us can make it across that gap with what we have. If I thought I could make it, I’d go get help and come back, but...” He directed his flashlight to the cave ceiling many feet above and shook his head. “It’s just not doable, even for me. And especially not for Maddock.”

Dane rolled his eyes at Bones. “Then we’ve got to find another way out.” He pointed back into the two-room chamber. “Maybe there’s a way out of there that we didn’t notice because we weren’t looking for it.” The team turned around and walked back into the larger of the two rooms, where the array of beds and old bones greeted them anew.

Maddock slid a cot to the side from where it had been and examined the cave floor beneath it. “Let’s look underneath everything, see if there’s some kind of trapdoor or something.” The five of them upturned everything that moved but when they were done they had uncovered only the same cave floor as the rest of it.

Maddock exhaled heavily and stood in place, thinking. “We’re missing something. There’s got to be a way out of here.”

“At least we won’t die of thirst in here,” Bones said, cupping his hands beneath a drop of water that fell from the ceiling. Maddock shined his light up and saw a moist area on the ceiling from which the water dripped. He focused on the spot, trying to discern more detail.

“People, shine your lights up here. Check this out. You too, Bones, stop drinking it and look at the source.”

Bones stopped licking his hand and tipped his head back while aiming his light upwards. Willis, Professor and Leopov added their beams to the cave ceiling as well. With the additional illumination, Maddock could see what appeared to be loose dirt or mud caked on the cave ceiling, as well as...”See those? Are those tree roots?”

A moment of quiet ensued while everyone contemplated this. Professor was the first to break the silence. “I think so! Trees...and dirt!”

Bones recalled aloud how there was water dripping in the tunnel earlier that sloped upwards. Leopov aimed her flashlight at the rest of the ceiling. “The rest of it’s dry. It’s just that one spot.”

Professor made eye contact with Maddock. “I’ll wager that spot must be a hole in the rock that’s been filled in with earth, but when it rains the water seeps through and drips into the cave.”

Maddock agreed, his stormy blue eyes alight with possibilities. “I don’t want to get our hopes up too much, but if we can find a way to get up there and take a look, maybe we can use something to dig around some and see if we can clear a large enough opening to fit a person through.”

Bones looked over at the cave wall. “Too bad it’s right in the center of the ceiling or I might be able to climb up to it. But I’m not Spiderman, I can’t crawl upside-down on the ceiling once I climb the wall.”

Professor’s gaze roved around the room along with his flashlight’s beam. “These cots have metal frames. I think with a little reconstruction we can create a makeshift ladder of some sort.”

No one had any better suggestions, so they set about removing what fabric remained on the cots and then gathering the metal frames in the center of the chamber. All told it was a decent amount of tubular iron bars, and together they were able to stack them in such a way that, with four of them holding them in place, they just might make for a serviceable ladder.

Willis singled out Bones. “You’re tallest. I nominate you to make the climb.”

Bones muttered something unintelligible under his breath but broke off a length of metal pole from one of the unused cots and brought it to the foot of the jury-rigged ladder. He tightened the straps on his backpack and then held the length of tubing in his mouth while putting a foot up on a cross-brace. Next he grabbed onto a couple of bars up higher and pulled himself up until he could step to a higher brace. With the others holding the assemblage of bed pieces in place, it was just stable enough for him to make an ascent.

When he reached the top of the pile of bars, he had to let go with his hands and stand. The rest of the team illuminated the soft spot in the ceiling so that he would have both hands free. Bones then took the bar from his mouth and reached up with it and began to scrape away the mud from the cave ceiling. It fell in wet globs, some of it landing on Bones’ face while still more rained down on those holding the makeshift ladder in position.

“Thanks for the mud bath, man.” Willis quickly swiped wet earth from his left eye.

“Maybe it’ll help your complexion.” Bones continued to scrape away at the ceiling, now encountering a thick web of tree roots to shove aside. He went off balance once while forcing a root back with the bar, but managed to recover enough to grab the uppermost cot bars before falling all the way back down. He got back to it, and after a few minutes, a sucking sound was heard and a thick gob of wet earth dumped from the ceiling.

Utterances of disgust from those below were drowned out by Bones yelling, “Light! I see light!”

The opening was still miniscule, no larger than a few inches, and irregularly shaped, but the glimmer of daylight galvanized him to action. Bones kept going with his makeshift pry bar, balancing precariously on the very top of the rickety cot assemblage. He broke through root knots, gouged pockets of hard-packed earth out of the way, and dodged clumps of wet debris raining down on him as he worked. Finally, he had a view of the sky, dazzlingly bright after so much time underground.

But how to reach it? The opening was just wide enough now for him to fit through, but still about four feet above his outstretched hands. Bones disentangled the thick root he’d been eyeing until it dangled down out of the hole in the ceiling. Then he tossed the pry bar into a corner of the room and readied his climbing rope. Below, the team chattered excitedly about seeing a sliver of sky.

Bones yelled down. “Hold this rig steady, I’m going to make a jump for it.”

They gripped it hard and Bones flexed his knees, and then sprung. His leading hand grasped the dangling tree root, but it was slick with wet mud and his fingers slid along its length. He grunted with the exertion of using every iota of hand and arm strength to clutch onto the end of the root before he slid off. Cries of “Bones!” reverberated up to him from below as he kicked his feet in the air over the top of the cot ladder.

With the hand not grasping the hanging root, Bones unclipped his coil of climbing rope, a small grappling hook already clipped to one end. Knowing his time at the end of the root was very limited, he got the rope ready for action immediately, letting out some slack while gazing up to eyeball his grapple target. He spotted a large cluster of roots with sufficient space between them to allow for a good hold if he could get the hook up there. Then, holding his breath, he swung his grapple arm back and forth a few times to get some momentum going, aware that this was the part that might cause him to lose his grip on the root.

Now!
Bones released the rope and watched the grapple hook sail up through the hole in the cave ceiling. The sudden motion of his arm proved too much for his fragile hold on the plant part and he fell through the cave air, watching the hook as he dropped, knowing it was the only thing left to save him from what could be a debilitating, possibly even fatal, fall.

The grapple caught on the root ball Bones had aimed for, and his fall was broken before he would have made the entire trip to the ground. He dangled in space from the rope, waiting for a second to see if the hook would hold. When it did, he began climbing straight up the rope like a kid in gym class.

“C’mon, man, you got this!” Willis cheered.

Bones kept climbing, and the hook kept holding. He increased his speed as he gained confidence, and soon he was latching onto the same root structure the hook had found. Confident that the roots were securely embedded in the ground and that they would bear his full weight, Bones let go of the rope and put both hands on the roots. He pulled himself up until his feet sought and found purchase, then clambered higher until his hand felt actual dirt. He crawled out of the cave onto a foliage-covered mound and rested for a moment on his hands and knees.

“Bones, you okay?” Maddock’s voice spurred him to get up and safely crawl back toward the hole in the cave so that he could talk to them down there.

Bones shook his head a couple of times while exhaling hard. “I don’t know how that Russian guy got up here, but I hope he had an easier time of it than me. I’m outside! Hold on, let me rig something up.” He recovered his grappling hook from the root ball and then proceeded to tie the rope more securely to the lowest firm part of the roots.

“Look out below!” He dropped the free end of the rope in through the cave. Bones knew his fellow SEALs would have little trouble climbing the rope out of the cave, but worried a little about Leopov. He voiced his concern to the group.

“I don’t know what gives you the impression that I am incapable, but I will let my actions speak for me.” And with that Leopov shimmied up the rope, faster than Bones had, and before he knew it the big man was pulling the Russian out of the cave by the hand. She was sweating slightly, but other than that looked none the worse for wear. He looked her in the eyes.

“Nice work.”

She held his gaze for a moment then turned back to the cave opening to drop the rope back down. “Clear!”

Willis came next, followed by Professor, who called down to Maddock after he scrambled up out of the hole. “Make sure we didn’t leave anything down there, would you? We don’t want to have to go back in because Leopov left her purse down there or something like that.”

Willis ducked a playful swat from the Russian, who was smiling as she recovered from her exertion. Maddock made a quick sweep of both chambers and then reappeared below the ceiling aperture. “Nothing left behind that I can see. Here I come...”

Maddock made the ascent without incident and Bones hauled up his rope. Professor and Willis had already started scouting their new surroundings, and now they reported back. “We’re in the foothills of the mountains. Vegetation is pretty thick but we think we see a footpath that goes up.”

“Let’s get out of here. Keep an eye out for Wagner. He may go on the offensive if he spots us first, since he expected us to die in there.” Maddock made for the path and the team fell into line behind him. They trekked higher into the mountains, searching for a way down that wouldn’t be too noticeable.

Now that they were free from their immediate predicament, thoughts turned once again to their objective.  Professor held up the leather journal as they walked. “You think Wagner knows where the golden lake is?”

Bones shrugged. “Hell, even I know where it is. There’s only one lake associated with Nazi gold. Lake Toplitz, Austria, right?”

Leopov nodded in Bones’ direction. “I think you’re right. But do you know how many people have searched that lake? They’ve found munitions, old crates of forged British currency, other random stuff, but no treasure, and certainly not the Amber Room.”

Professor opened the journal. “But seeing as we know which lake we’re looking for, I think we’ve got something none of those searchers had. Hold up a second.” He stopped walking and stepped off the path while he leafed through some pages and then held the book open to a two-page spread. The others gathered around, eyes opening wide in surprise.

“A map.”