Amber (8 page)

She shot him a quizzical glance. “Why do you ask?”

Bones appeared confused. “Isn’t this some kind of Russian national symbol?”

Maddock aimed his beam on the emblem, which was about a foot in diameter, while Leopov answered. “I would certainly recognize a Russian Imperial Eagle when I see one—“

“Russian Imperial Eagle!” Bones enthused.

Leopov shook her head. “...but the Russian Eagle is two-headed, while this one only has a single head.”

Maddock waved his light over the center of the eagle. “It has an ‘R’ carved on it, too. Is that for Russia?”

Leopov shook her head even faster. “Why don’t both of you shut up and I will explain.” Maddock and Bones looked at each other and shrugged. Leopov continued.

“This is not the Russian Imperial Eagle, which has two heads, one looking left and the other, right.” All of them gazed at the eagle on the wall again.

“Okay, I’m no expert,” Bones offered, “but this here eagle only has one head. So I concur.”

Leopov rolled her eyes and went on. “It is in fact the
Prussian
Eagle, from the Prussian Coat of Arms, and, as you may know, a perfect match for the eagle found in the amber chamber itself.”

They studied the emblematic bird some more, until Maddock asked, “So what’s the ‘R’ stand for?”

“Run for your life?” Bones said half-jokingly, looking around the subterranean space. No one laughed.

“Are you quite through clowning around?” She looked at Maddock and then her gaze lingered on Bones, who nodded. “I can stop now.”

Leopov shined her light on the center of the eagle. “It’s not just an ‘R’ you’re looking at, but actually a stylized ‘F’
and
‘R’, superimposed over one another. Look, do you see?”

Upon closer inspection, Maddock and Bones agreed that the letter carved into the center of the eagle’s chest was indeed actually two letters. Maddock rephrased his original question.

“Okay, so what’s R.F. stand for? Russian Federation?”

Leopov gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s
F. R.
It stands for
Fredericus Rex.
You may know him better as Frederick the Great. He was king of Prussia in the mid-1700s, when the amber chamber was commissioned.”

The eyebrows of Maddock and Bones rose toward the tunnel ceiling. Still, they had both reached their tolerance for Leopov’s lecturing. Bones stepped toward the eagle, which was carved into a stone disc set into the rock wall. Bones pushed on the wall to one side of the eagle.

“Maybe it’s actually a door. Why would someone put the Prussian emblem here for nothing?” Despite his best efforts, the wall did not budge nor give any other indication that there was anything special about it.

“Wait a minute...” Maddock looked around the small space. “That carving couldn’t be the one from the actual Amber Room, could it?”

Leopov shook her head yet again. “Impossible. This tunnel is much too small to contain even the disassembled panels.” She stepped over to the eagle and knelt before it. “And this,” she said, reaching out a hand to brush off some of the caked-on dirt from the eagle’s surface, “is not amber or gold. It’s just ordinary old iron, and set into stone, neither of which were used in the amber chamber.”

To emphasize this she rapped her knuckle on the eagle’s chest and turned away as she rose.

They heard a sharp
click
as the eagle slid sideways within the stone disc. Leopov froze in place but Maddock’s eyes, wide as saucers, compelled her to turn back around.

“Oh my God.”

Königsberg Castle

“Nobody move.” Maddock
froze in place as he stared at a recessed panel exposed when the eagle slid aside in the stone disc. He and Bones both shined their torches on it while Leopov swept hers in the opposite direction to see if anything had been triggered there. After a minute, when nothing had happened that they could tell, Maddock and Leopov advanced slowly on the dial while Bones hung back to keep watch over the wider area.

The recessed panel contained three small dials, one on top and two on bottom, each numbered 0-9 like a combination lock. After a few seconds Maddock pulled back and explained what they were looking at to Bones.

“Great, only 729 possible combinations. This could take a while unless one of you has got a better idea.”

Leopov considered this in silence while Maddock continued to stare at the dials.

Bones said, “I remember with the old bike combo locks you could put your ear on them and hear the tumblers fall into place as you turned the dial...”

“Let’s think about a combination before we try that.”

Leopov stared at him. “Think about numbers that were associated with the amber chamber.”

“The year it was made?” Bones suggested while pacing the tunnel.

“Three-digit numbers,” Leopov clarified.

Maddock turned each dial to 6. Nothing happened. “I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen, even if we did have the combination.” He looked around the wall. “I don’t see how this thing could open.”

Suddenly Leopov emitted a breathy gasp.

“You okay?” Maddock gripped her arm as Bones whirled around and spotlighted her with his torch.

“I'm all right. It’s just...it’s a long shot, but there were 565 candles in the amber chamber. When they were all lit they gave the room a golden glow that accentuated the natural beauty of the materials.”

“I bet Catherine really dug that mood lighting for when she brought her horse—“

“Bones, c’mon!”

“What? I’m just—“

Leopov cackled. “Believe me, growing up in Russia, he wasn’t about to say anything I haven’t heard before.”

“Let me try it.”  Maddock set the top dial to 5, the lower left to 6 and then the lower right to 5.

Nothing happened.

“Hold on, maybe it’s left-to-right.” He set the lower left dial to 5 and the top—middle--dial to 6. The right-most dial was already turned to 5 from the previous attempt, completing the 5-6-5 combination, and so none of them were prepared when they heard a rumbling, grating noise as the wall itself began to swing inward.

“Jackpot!” Bones pointed his flashlight at the wall as it moved, pivoting from the right side. It moved with surprising speed and in seconds the former wall had swung all the way open to the right side, revealing a large room behind it. The trio hung back for a few seconds to ascertain whether an obvious threat awaited them in the new space, but all was quiet and the beams of their lights, without which the room would be cast in complete darkness, showed nothing sinister.

Maddock waved a hand toward the room and led the way in.

Inside were the remains of old crates. Some were in shattered pieces while others were stacked two or three high. The three of them split up and began combing the room. Before long it became apparent that all of the crates were empty. Bones saw a pile of something in one corner and moved to check it out.

Maddock watched as he slowed, bent down while he directed his flashlight, and then muttered some sort of epithet.

“What is it?” Maddock added his light to what Bones was investigating.

“Skeletons.”

Leopov dropped the piece of crate she’d been looking at and looked over at the pile of skeletons. “Bones found the bones.”

Maddock highlighted a piece of fabric still intact on part of one of the skeletons and went to it. Heavily caked with dust, he guessed the garment to be what was left of a pair of pants, an olive drab color. When he lifted it to see if there was anything underneath, it crumbled to dust.

“Got a belt buckle here,” Bones called out. Maddock and Leopov moved to join him. A worn strip of leather remained which had mostly been eaten away by rats and insects over the decades, but a dust-shrouded metal belt buckle glinted under the flashlight beams. Bones wiped away some of the dust to reveal an engraved hammer and sickle.

“These were Russian soldiers.” Leopov’s voice took on a solemn tone.

Maddock looked at Leopov. “At the end of the war the Russians invaded what was then the German city of Königsberg, right?”

“Correct. The Russians ended up winning that battle, which is why this city is now called Kaliningrad.”

Bones held up the belt buckle. “So why are there dead Russians in here but no dead Germans?”

Leopov stared down at the pile of skeletons as she answered. “My guess is that these could have been POWs—Russians held by the Germans at some point during the war.”

Dane looked around the murky space. “We are way down in an underground bunker. The Germans could have hid out down here for a long time...” He trailed off as he surveyed the large room. Bones got up and looked around some more. “This room was big enough to have contained the Amber Room, though, wasn’t it?”

Leopov glanced at the low ceiling. “Disassembled, yes.”

Maddock eyed the wooden crates. “And these crates?”

Leopov nodded. “They appear to be of sufficient dimensions and integrity to have carried the panels, yes.”

They combed through the room some more but found nothing else of interest. Maddock summed up their thoughts. “If we assume these crates once held the Amber Room panels, then it’s safe to say that down here underground, it probably survived the bombings.”

Leopov nodded. “Tells us nothing about where they ended up, unfortunately.”

Maddock snapped some flash pictures with his camera and then moved for the exit. “Let’s get back above ground and report in.”

They left the room, passing through the open stone wall into the tunnel again. Maddock paused and looked at the eagle and its hidden dials. “I wonder if we should try to move the wall back into position again.”

“How would that work?” Bones eyed the dials dubiously while Leopov continued toward the stairs, apparently uninterested in restoring the wall to its former state.

“The dials were all set to zero before we got here. So maybe if we—“

“Maddock, Bones: I hear something!”

The two SEALs turned around to see Leopov gazing up at the broken staircase. They ran over to her and tipped their heads toward the upper floors. Maddock was reaching for the walkie-talkie on his belt when he clearly heard the sounds of a scuffle coming from above. Something heavy being slid across the floor, breaking. A grunt. He dropped the radio and just yelled up, “Professor?”

A guttural cry echoed around the walls and then a dark shape came flying over the edge. With mounting alarm Maddock recognized the form as that of a human body, and then it smashed onto the remaining portion of the wooden stairway.

“Professor!” Bones yelled,
looking upward to see if anyone else was about to come flying over the edge. He still heard a commotion up there but no one answered. Maddock ran to the body that now lay motionless at what used to be the foot of the stairs. Relief flooded through him as he failed to recognize the person who had landed here.

“It’s not Professor or Willis!”

“Who is it?” Bones refused to take his eyes off the space above in case there was more trouble on the way, but Leopov knelt by the fallen man’s side. Maddock placed two fingers over the victim’s carotid artery, left them there for about twenty seconds, and then shook his head.

“He didn’t make it.”

They examined the deceased man more closely. Caucasian, tall, medium build. Leopov rifled through his pockets and turned up only a folding knife and some chewing gum—no ID, no guns.

Maddock tried the radio again and received no audible response. Suddenly they heard shuffling from above and a long cord of some sort dropped into the room. Bones looked up and saw Willis’ smiling face peering down at him.

“You guys okay? Sorry to drop that trash on you, but we had no choice.”

“Where’s Professor?” Maddock called up.

“He’s okay. Doing a perimeter check now to make sure this guy doesn’t have any buddies hanging around. We know he had at least one other guy with him but he ran off.” Willis’ voice echoed throughout the chamber.

Bones, meanwhile, had moved beneath the dropped cord, which dangled within six feet of the floor. “You call this a rope? What is this crap?”

“Sorry,” Willis shouted down. “We didn’t have any real rope so I found a few extension cords and tied them together. At least they’re the heavy-duty outdoor ones.” Bones assessed the makeshift climbing gear skeptically.

Willis sensed his apprehension. “Don’t worry, it’s good to go up here, tied nice and neat. All you gotta do is use it to get your big ole butt back up here.”

“Easier said than done,” Bones muttered as he examined the nearby wall for climbing hand- and footholds.

“Can you get up there with that, Bones?” Maddock looked like he doubted it. Leopov appeared downright worried.

“That’s how we’re supposed to get out of here?”

Bones smiled. “Have no fear. I’ll climb out first and rig something a little sturdier with the one real rope I do have.”

“Please do.” She looked down at the dead man. “Before his friends come looking for him.”

Bones climbed part of the way up the still-standing portion of the stairs. He jumped and was able to grab onto the extension cord, swinging in the air, turning, while he secured his grip around the orange wire. When he stopped spinning he reached out a foot and wedged a toe into a crack in the wall where the mortar had fallen out.

He took the one rope he had and fashioned a jury-rigged harness by tying it to the extension cord such that it made a loop of several feet a person could sit in. He tested it out himself, figuring that if it would support his weight, Maddock and Leopov could take turns without problems. He sat on the rope while putting both hands on the vertical extension cord. Planting both feet against the wall, he was able to ascend by “walking” up while pulling on the cord until he reached the section of the stairway that was still intact. He hung from it with both hands while still harnessed to ensure it would hold his weight, then pulled himself up until he was sitting on the lowest step, his legs dangling into open space. From there he turned around, stood, and walked up the stairs until he let Willis’ outstretched hand pull him up onto the floor of Dom Sovietov.

“Germans!”

“Probably a bunch of David Hasselhoff fans,” Bones muttered.

Before Willis could reply, Professor came running up to them from around the corner. “Bones! You guys okay? Where’s Maddock and Zara?”

“We’re all okay but now we have to haul them up out of there. I just wanted to make sure I could do this. Be right back.”

Bones went back to the edge of the stairs and got back into his makeshift rope harness. He descended into the tunnel once again and this time carried up Leopov in his lap.

She gave him a look while she wrapped her arms around him as he climbed. “Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this.”

“Oh I’m not. That’s a carabiner in my pocket.”

A couple of minutes later he deposited her safely on the remaining stairs. She walked up to Professor and Willis while Bones dropped the rig down to Maddock. “I know how you always want to take lead, so here’s your chance, bro.”

“Your Sherpa service is only for foxy Russian agents, is that it?”

“She’s only foxy until you listen to her talk.” Bones ignored the gesture Leopov directed his way.

They heard a grating sound from below and then Maddock appeared directly beneath the dropped climbing rig.

“What’s that noise?” Professor asked.

“It’s the wall sliding back into place. I reset the combination and it worked. I’ll explain when I get up there, but Bones and Zara know what I’m talking about.”

“Good work,” Leopov said. “Cover our tracks.”

Maddock quickly made his way up and then all five of them convened at the top of the stairs. “So what happened up here?”

Professor pointed down into the tunnel. “Willis was scouting up ahead while that guy ran up out of the basement and attacked me. He ended up on the wrong side of things, as you can see. But he tried to stab me. With this.”

He held up a German WWII SA dagger. The knife was old, with a silver German eagle inlaid into a chipped wooden handle, the blade featuring a prominent engraving reading, “
Alles fur Deutschland
.”

“What’s that mean?” Bones looked at Professor, much to Willis’ irritation.

“All for Germany.”

“All for killing Pete Chapman is more like it.”

Professor gave a nervous laugh. “Right.”

Maddock pointed out toward the exit in the distance. “How about all for getting out of here and letting Command know we found evidence that the Amber Room wasn’t destroyed in Königsberg Castle?”