The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (60 page)

On the next try, the lighter’s top sprang open. Henry’s thumb flicked at the wheel. Indy felt sparks, but the lighter didn’t ignite. “Damn thing,” Henry grumbled. “I think it needs fluid.”

Wonderful.

“C’mon,
work.”
Henry shook the lighter, tried again. “There we go. I got it.”

Instantly, Indy felt the flame on his fingers. “Dad, burn the rope, not my hand.”

For the next few minutes, Henry held the lighter against the rope. Once, the flame went out, and he fumbled again until he reignited it.

Indy’s back ached from holding the awkward position. He gritted his teeth and tried to hold his hands steady. The stink of the burning rope saturated the air and made his nose itch again.

As the rope finally began to smolder and burn, Indy heard Henry curse.

“What happened?” Indy asked.

“I dropped it.”

Indy craned his neck, but couldn’t see where the lighter had fallen. He knew the only way to retrieve it was for them to tip the chairs over. Then they’d have to work on their sides. He said as much. “You ready to try it?”

Henry didn’t answer him.

“Dad?”

“Junior, there’s something you ought to know.”

Indy misinterpreted his father’s apologetic tone. “Don’t get sentimental now, Dad. Save it until we’re out of here. Okay?”

Indy smelled something. “Hey, what the hell’s burning?”

“That’s what I was going to say. The, uh, floor is on fire.”

“What?”
Indy cranked his head as far as he could and saw the tongues of fire. “All right, let’s move. Rock your chair. Do what I do.”

They inched their way slowly across the room and away from the burning carpet. The chairs scraped against the floor and nearly toppled.

“Head for the fireplace.”

They rocked and hopped in their chairs, moving toward the only safe place in the room. Behind them the fire seemed to feed itself, spreading fast, racing across the rug.

Indy rubbed his hands up and down, trying to get them free of the rope. As they wobbled into the fireplace, nearly toppling their chairs, Indy’s foot kicked out and accidently hit the lever that opened the hidden door. The fireplace floor rotated like a lazy Susan, and they found themselves in a communications room. Four Nazi radiomen wearing headphones sat behind an elaborate panel of dials, switches, and meters. Their backs were turned to them, and for a moment they didn’t see Indy or Henry.

“Our situation has not improved.” Henry whispered his sentiments, but his voice was still too loud.

One of the radiomen glanced over his shoulder and was startled to see the two men tied back-to-back in their respective chairs.

Henry groaned. “Now what, Junior? Got any more good ideas?”

Indy looked around frantically for the lever that would turn them back. The radioman was already rising from his chair and alerting his partners. Indy spotted the lever directly in front of them and kicked out a leg. It was too high to reach with his foot. There was only one other way that he could think of to activate it.

“Push off with your feet,” he yelled. He rocked forward as hard and fast as he could. His head struck the lever, and the floor rotated again just as the radioman pulled out a revolver and fired several shots.

The bullets pinged against the closing door.

Indy and Henry were out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. The carpet, drapes, and furniture were all ablaze. Greasy plumes of smoke burned their eyes; fire leapt for the ceiling. Indy coughed; he could hardly breathe.

“We were better off back there,” Henry shouted above the roar of the blaze.

Indy didn’t waste his breath answering him. He had been working at the burned rope around his wrists, and suddenly his bonds broke. He slid off the chair and quickly unraveled the ropes around his father’s wrists.

He hurriedly looked around. He spotted a grating inside the chimney, and tested it with his hand. The fireplace started to rotate again. “Quick, up here.” He stood on one of the chairs, and grabbed the grating and pulled himself up through the opening in the center. He wedged himself between the walls, reached down and grasped his father by the arm. He pulled him up through the grating just as the four radiomen revolved into the burning room.

Their pistols were drawn. They looked at the empty chairs, conferred a moment; then two of the men returned to the communications room. The other pair shielded their eyes and moved cautiously toward the flames.

Indy knew they weren’t going to be able to remain much longer in the chimney. Besides the fact that their positions were awkward, the heat of the fire was funneling up the chimney. A minute passed, and the radiomen returned from the communications room. As soon as they ventured away from the fireplace, Indy, then Henry, dropped from the chimney.

Indy immediately pulled the lever to rotate the fireplace. As they started to revolve, he saw the door across the room open and momentarily glimpsed the startled face of Colonel Vogel. Flames swept toward the Nazi as air from the corridor was drawn into the room. The colonel leapt back, barely escaping the rush of fire and smoke.

“Halt!” one of the radiomen yelled as he spotted Indy and Henry disappearing behind the fireplace.

“They’re going to be coming back again,” Henry warned as soon as they were inside the communications room.

“I know. I know.”

Indy smashed a wooden stool against the floor, breaking off a leg. The wall started opening just as he reached over his head and jammed it into the gears controlling the movement of the wall. The door stopped after only opening a few inches. The radiomen were sealed inside the burning room.

Henry stared at the door, listening to the men’s screams. Indy knew his father was horrified at what he had just done. It was that or die. That was the reality. Kill or be killed.

He turned away and searched for a way out. There had to be another exit, another secret door, a window, something. He ran his hands over the walls, knocked his knuckles against them, listening for a hollowness.

“You won’t find the way out
that
way,” Henry told him. “Let’s sit down and work this out.”

“Sit
down
?” Indy’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”

“Stop panicking. I often find if I sit down calmly, the solution soon presents itself.”

Henry slumped down into an overstuffed sofa. As he did, it budged slightly, and started to tilt forward as a section of the floor opened.

Indy leaped onto the sofa, realizing that his father had found the exit. “I see what you mean,” he yelled as they slid down a ramp for several hundred feet until they were deposited on a dock. They were inside an enormous cavern that covered an underground causeway. The cavern obviously had been transformed into a Nazi storage depot.

They hurried over to a stack of large shipping crates. “We must be inside the mountain, below the castle,” Henry whispered.

Indy perused the array of gunboats, speedboats, and supply vessels. “Great. More boats.”

They waited until a Nazi patrol had passed, then darted across the dock to one of the boats. Indy revved up the engine just as Vogel appeared on the dock.

The colonel stopped and glanced over the boats as the engine roared to life. He ran with several Nazis to the nearest speedboat and climbed aboard. A moment later Vogel’s boat sped away from the dock in search of the two Dr. Joneses.

Indy and Henry had already abandoned the boat and appropriated a motorcycle and sidecar. Indy was at the bike’s wheel, and his father squashed into the little connecting car.

“Would you say this has been just another typical day for you?” Henry shouted as they roared along the dock.

“Better than most,” Indy yelled back, accelerating toward a circle of light he hoped was the way out of the mountain. If it wasn’t an exit, he wasn’t sure what the next move would be.

Maybe there wouldn’t be any next move.

The road and waterway suddenly came together at the mouth of the cove. The rattle of machine-gun fire exploded from a boat. “Get down!” he shouted to his father, who complied without argument.

Indy ducked low on the motorcycle, and a moment later they burst into the bright morning sunlight. The road veered sharply away from the canal and away from the immediate threat.

Indy glanced down at Henry, who was peeking up over the side of the car now, checking to make sure the coast was clear. “And we’re just starting a new day.”

As the motorcycle raced toward a crossroad, the sign indicated Budapest to the right and Berlin to the left. Indy slowed at the intersection and turned right.

“Hold it!” Henry yelled. “Stop!”

“What’s wrong?” Indy braked the motorcycle and glanced over at his father.

Henry just kept motioning him to stop so Indy pulled off the road and into the bushes, out of sight from any curious eyes.

He dismounted from the motorcycle and stretched as Henry climbed out of the sidecar. “So what are you waving your hands about?”

“Turn around. We’ve got to go to Berlin.”

Indy pointed in the other direction. “But Brody is
that
way, Dad.”

“My diary is
this
way,” Henry answered, jerking his thumb in the other direction.

“We don’t need your diary.”

“Oh, yes we do. You didn’t tear out enough pages, Junior.” He glared defiantly at Indy.

“All right, tell me. What is it?”

“He who finds the Grail Cup must face the final challenge—devices of a lethal cunning.”

“You mean it’s booby-trapped?”

“Eight years ago I found the clues that would take us safely through the traps. They were in the
Chronicles of St. Anselm
.”

“Well, can’t you remember what they are?”

“I wrote it down in the diary so I wouldn’t have to remember.”

Indy heard a roar and glanced out to the road just in time to see two Nazi motorcycles racing by, headed in the direction of Budapest.

“The Gestapo and half of Hitler’s Wehrmacht is after us now, and you want to turn around and head right into the lion’s den.”

“Yes. The only thing that matters to me is the Holy Grail.”

“What about Marcus?”

“Marcus would agree with me. I’m sure of it.”

Indy rolled his eyes. He’d heard
this
litany so many times, he could have recited it in his sleep. “You scholars. Pride and plunder. Jesus Christ.”

Henry’s hand stung Indy’s cheek. The blow wasn’t hard, but it surprised him. He had been joking, but his father had obviously taken offense. He touched his cheek and frowned at him.

“That’s for your blasphemy,” Henry snapped. “Don’t you remember anything from reading
Parzival
? Didn’t you learn anything from Richard Wagner or Wolfram von Eschenbach? In the hands of the knight, Sir Parzival, the Grail is a sacred talisman of healing. But under the control of the malefic Klingsor it is a tool for black magic.”

He shook his head scornfully at Indy. “The quest for the cup is not archaeology. It’s a race against evil. If the Grail is made captive to the cult of the Nazis, the armies of the darkness will march over the face of the earth.” Henry glared at him. “Do you understand me?”

Myth and reality were intertwined in his father’s world. They were virtually inseparable. He was living the myth. “I’ve never understood this obsession of yours, and Mother didn’t, either.”

He glared back at his father. The mention of his mother was a challenge. For the first time in more than thirty years, he heard his father talk about her.

“She did. Too well. Because of it, because she didn’t want me worrying about her, she kept her illness from me until all I could do was mourn her.”

Their eyes locked, and for those few moments Indy knew they were equals. At last his father had spoken to him of his mother’s death and told him his feelings, even admitted fault. The very mention of her resolved an old wound between them.

He clasped a hand on his father’s shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s get on our way to Berlin, Pop.”

F
LAGS, BANNERS, AND STANDARDS
displaying the swastika were waved frantically back and forth, over and over again, in a rhythmic motion that reflected the mounting frenzy of the massive crowd. At the center of the rally was a bonfire fueled by a ten-foot-high mound of books. At the periphery of the fire college students and Nazi Brownshirts fed the flames with more and more books. Many of them were classics that had been deemed blasphemous or unpatriotic by the Nazis and their sympathizers.

Indy walked toward the square, buttoning the tunic of a Nazi uniform that was several sizes too large for him. When they had arrived in Berlin, they had driven around on the motorcycle until they found a uniformed Nazi who was separated from his unit. Henry had acted as if he were ill and collapsed on the sidewalk a few feet away from the soldier. When the man had stopped to see what was wrong, Indy had rushed up and asked him to help carry his father to someplace quiet. When they reached the alcove of a building, Indy had knocked the Nazi cold and stripped off his uniform.

Henry, still dressed in street clothes, hurried along beside Indy, gawking at the chaos around them. “My boy, we are pilgrims in an unholy land.”

“Yeah, too bad it’s real life, not just the movies,” Indy said, nodding toward a motion picture cameraman who was filming the scene.

Indy suddenly stopped dead and stared ahead at the platform.

“What is it?” Henry asked.

Indy nodded toward the raised dais. It was occupied by high-ranking officials of the Third Reich, who gazed out over the rally like royalty overseeing their subjects. Among them were two familiar faces: Adolf Hitler and Dr. Elsa Schneider.

“Oh, my God,” Henry moaned, and shook his head. “On the right hand of the fiend himself. Do you believe she’s a Nazi now?”

Indy said nothing. He threaded his way through the crowd, Henry right behind him like a shadow, and moved as close to the platform as he dared.

A woman stood next to a cameraman who was trying to get a shot of Hitler, Elsa, and others in the High Command. Indy pegged her as the director, because she kept shouting and waving her hands to attract the attention of those on the dais. There was so much noise and confusion, she was having a hard time of it.