Eden's Gate

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Eden's Gate
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Table of Contents
PART TWO
-
THREE DAYS LATER
For Laurie,
as always
Special thanks to my son Kevin Hagberg
for the nifty idea, his support, and
his constant love
REICHSAMT 17
JUNE 1, 1945
Water was rushing somewhere, the sound hollow and frightening in the confines of research Chamber Gamma. A very slightly built man dressed in striped pajamas, the Star of David patch sewn on his left breast, stopped to cock an ear. Rows of beakers, chemicals, bunsen burners, two gas chromatographs, and six powerful microscopes were arranged as final, silent, terrible witnesses to the horrors that had gone on down here since 1943.
The other sound he'd been hearing since early this morning came again; deep throated, almost below the level of hearing, in that place where you can only feel it. A thudding, like a pile driver. Distant. Somewhere above.
Manny Goldfine went back into the connecting tunnel between labs and shined the weak beam of his dying flashlight on the rough concrete ceiling. The thump came again, and dust filtered down. Explosions? He'd been trying to locate the exact source for three hours, and the sounds were bringing him, as he feared they would, toward the main elevator shaft. They were trying to get in. But that way was blocked for now. He and Sharon had seen to that last night. Then, around two in the morning, he wasn't exactly sure of the time, he'd held her frail body in his arms and watched her die like the others, with long, wheezy gasps as she fought to bring air into her blood-filled lungs. In the end she'd looked up at him with love, and somehow managed to reach up with clawlike fingers to
brush at the fleck of blood she'd coughed up on his shirt. She'd been fastidious all her life.
“I'm sorry, my darling,” she had whispered, and then she'd died.
For a long time Manny sobbed because of the life he and his wife had never had; for the children they'd not been allowed to conceive and raise; for the picnics, and plays, and concerts they'd not seen; for the trip to Paris she'd talked about since they were kids together in Berlin.
Then he had gone on a berserk rampage against the bastard Nazis who had done this horrible thing, not only to them, but to all their friends and relatives, and to their beautiful country. He'd raged against the bodies of the German scientists and SS guards, especially
Leutnant
Grueber, whose body lay in corridor B. He'd kicked the heartless bastard until his skull was crushed.
Afterward he'd lain in a heap in the corridor near his wife's body, and waited for his own merciful death to come. The Germans would never again reach this place. He and the others had sealed off all the passages leading to the surface one hundred meters above. They were on the shores of Lake Tollense, so water had always been a problem; now it would be their salvation. They'd sabotaged the pumps and placed explosives against the west wall, on the other side of which was the bottom of the lake. When the wall went, this place would flood instantly with no way of pumping it out short of draining the lake.
For some reason he had lasted longer than the others. He'd been alone with the bodies of five hundred Jews, some of them test subjects, some of them scientists like him, and one hundred Nazis plus the SS guards. During the night he was sure that he could hear them crying out in anguish; crawling toward him, seeking help, or revenge. Do research or die, they had told him. Do it
well
or your wife will die in front of your eyes. And their souls were coming for him now; for the terrible things he and the others had discovered and perfected.
Something in his heritage, he supposed, made him survive while others died.
Grossvater
Goldfine had lived to his hundredth birthday, and uncles Benjamin and David were both in their nineties when the Nazis came for them. They'd probably still be alive if they had not been murdered. Gassed, cremated. They'd all heard the stories, even down here. He was weak from hunger and overwork, but he was not sick. No heaviness in his chest. No blood in his stools, in his nostrils, none on his handkerchief.
Another much heavier thump came, and this time small pieces of the ceiling rained down on his head, the dust so bad now that it made him cough. He hurried to the end of the corridor and opened the heavy steel door. It was the last one in the complex. All the others, down every interconnecting tunnel, all the way back to the dormitories that butted against the west wall, were in the locked open position. When the waters came the bunker would flood in seconds. Nothing would live down here. Nothing would
ever
live down here; the horrible secrets would be buried forever.
Looking back the way he had come, he could just make out the detonator switch lying on the floor next to Sharon's body where he'd spent the night. Wires led all the way back to the explosives on the west wall. He could have turned the switch last night. He should have done it. He certainly wanted the peace; to be with his wife; no pain, no suffering, and especially no sorrows or loneliness. But something inside of him, some curiosity about how the end would play out had gotten the better of him. And then the explosions had begun. The SS was trying to get back in to save its own, or to reclaim the weapon hiding down here. Use it against innocent women and children. The indiscriminate killer. He had to see, to make sure.
He stepped through the doorway into the arrivals and security hall as an even larger explosion came from directly overhead. He was shoved back by the concussion as a big section of concrete ceiling caved in; tons of rubble, dirt, stone, concrete, reinforcing bars half buried the room and knocked him off his feet.
“It's our responsibility to ourselves to live, Manny,” Sharon had told him. But she was wrong, God bless her. They had a greater responsibility to the human race. But she didn't understand, and she was frightened, so he had comforted her at that moment.
Goldfine picked himself up and staggered back to the half-buried doorway. He'd lost his flashlight, but the tunnel was no longer in darkness. For a second or two he thought that he was hallucinating, but then he realized that he was seeing daylight for the first time in more than two years.
Mindless of the sharp rocks and jagged steel that tore at his hands and knees, he crawled up the pile of rubble so that he could look outside. There was light streaming down through the thick dust.
Something moved above. Figures. He could suddenly feel a cool breeze, and then he saw them. Soldiers. Two of them; no, three or
four. Peering down from twenty or thirty meters up the jagged shaft the explosions had opened.
Soldiers, the thought solidified in his mind. They were SS. He was sure of it.
Scrambling backward, he hit the rubble-strewn floor of the tunnel running. They were coming. He was already too late. God in heaven, forgive him.
Someone was shouting at him from above. His ears were still ringing from the last explosion but he didn't think they were speaking German. It was another language. Polish, maybe. He couldn't be sure. Possibly it was a trick. The bastards did that sometimes.
He stumbled and fell, smashing his face on the floor so hard that he blacked out for a moment. When the fuzz cleared he was lying next to Sharon's body. Her mouth and chin were bloody, the front of her striped pajamas black with crusted blood. Her eyes were half open, and milky; her hair was matted, and her skin was deathly white. But he loved her. She was the most beautiful creature that God had ever put on earth. Kind, gentle, understanding.
The shouting was much louder now, and there was more light. Goldfine tenderly kissed his wife on the lips, then without further hesitation picked up the detonator, raised the handle, and twisted it sharply to the right.
A huge explosion rocked the foundations of the bunker. Goldfine looked up as a solid wall of water raced down the tunnel directly toward him at the speed of a freight train.
“God have mercy—,” he said, and he joined his wife.
 
Captain Second Rank Aleksei Konalev, standing in the turret of his tank twenty meters from where the Special Bunker Demolitions Squad had been working all morning, felt, rather than heard, the deep underground explosion. His first instinct was to duck; he'd been fighting without leave for nearly three years. But then he thought that something terrible had gone wrong, and the team had either had an accident with their explosives, or they had run into another booby trap.
“
Yeb vas
,” he swore. It was the goddamn Nazis. The war had been over for more than a month, and yet they were still finding their deadly little surprises lying around.
They were just above the lake here; the windows in the church steeple in the town of Neubrandenburg a few klicks to the north
twinkled in the bright sun. A second after the explosion a huge depression appeared on the surface of the lake a couple of hundred meters off shore.
Konalev reached for his binoculars at the same moment a tremendous geyser of water shot out of the shaft the squad had excavated into the bunker. Mud, concrete, rocks, steel, and bodies were blasted one hundred meters into the pale blue sky. In three years of war, Konalev had never seen such a fantastic sight, and his mouth dropped open. The sound was like a thousand tanks bearing down on him, and he looked up in time to see something very large and black falling out of the sky directly toward him.
“Move, move, move!” he screamed at his driver. He ducked down into the turret and slammed the hatch shut an instant before his tank was hit with a solid, metallic bang so hard that the turret jammed on its track, and the entire tank was shoved backward at least ten meters.
But his crew had been under fire before. The driver had the engine in reverse and was racing backward, as more debris rained down on them, hitting them like heavy caliber machine gun bullets being fired from above.
The gunner, blood streaming down from a gash where he'd hit his forehead, was peering through the periscope. “I don't see any enemy fire!” he shouted. “Where are they, sir? I can't see them!”
“Easy, Yuri.” Konalev shouted him down. “We're not under fire. It was an explosion.” Konalev keyed his radio, but all he was getting was static. The antenna had probably been knocked out by whatever had hit them.
The driver, looking through his periscope, backed off the accelerator, and the tank ground to a halt. He looked up, a confused expression on his battle-hardened features. “Fish,” he said.
“What is it?” Konalev demanded.
“It's raining fish, sir,” the driver said in wonder. “Out of the sky, fish were falling.”
“Still?”
The driver turned back to the periscope. “No, sir. They're all over the ground, but they've stopped falling.”
Konalev climbed back up into the turret, and he had trouble opening the hatch, but it finally gave with a squeal of metal on metal.
The scene was like something his old grandmother used to read to him out of the Bible. Water swirled around a large depression
where the bunker entrance had been. Fish lay everywhere. Huge waves raced across the lake, and debris of all kinds littered an area at least two hundred meters in diameter.
But Konalev's eyes were drawn to a steel door lying on the front deck of his tank. It was the object that had been blasted out of the bunker and had fallen on them. A large skull and crossbones was painted on the door, beneath which was the legend: VORSICHT. Danger.

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