Read The Doomsday Testament Online
Authors: James Douglas
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General
The Doomsday Testament
1937, Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet in search of the lost land of Thule.
1941, Heinrich Himmler spent a huge fortune, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of concentration camp prisoners, to turn Wewelsburg Castle in Germany into a shrine to the SS.
Art recovery expert Jamie Saintclair thought he knew his grandfather, but when he stumbles upon the old man’s lost diary he’s astonished to find that the gentle Anglican clergyman was a decorated hero who had served in the Special Air Service in World War Two. And his grandfather has one more surprise for him. Sewn in to the endpaper of the journal is a strange piece of Nazi symbolism.
This simple discovery will launch him on a breathless chase across Europe and deep into Germany’s dark past. There are some who will kill to find that which is lost, and although he doesn’t know it, Saintclair holds the key to its hiding place.
THE
DOOMSDAY
TESTAMENT
James Douglas
For Kara
I
1937, Changthang Plateau, Tibet
ERNST GRUBER SQUINTED
into the ice-flecked wind, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes firmly on the retreating figure ahead. The muscles in the backs of the German’s legs felt as if they were on fire and his chest like he was breathing hydrochloric acid, but the pain gave him a certain sense of masochistic satisfaction. If
he
was suffering, how much more so were the lesser men following the near vertical scar in the sterile, corpse-grey rocks that provided them with a path up the mountain?
Not the Drupka guide, Jigme. Like all his people, the nomads who scratched a living in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth, he was a wiry urchin of a man capable of incredible feats of endurance. His metronomic step didn’t falter – no matter how steep the incline or difficult the footing. It had been five days since the expedition set out from their base camp by the freshwater lake. Today they had already marched
for
four ankle-crushing hours across country devoid of either water or vegetation, but still he showed no sign of tiring. Gruber, a vastly experienced explorer who had climbed some of the highest mountains in the Himalayas and ten years earlier had led the first German expedition across the Gobi Desert, delighted in testing himself against such men, but he knew his companions would be destroyed if they maintained this pace.
‘
Bkag pa! Gcig chu tshod
.’ He shouted the order to halt for an hour, but it must have been lost in the wind for the guide maintained his pace, or perhaps he just didn’t want to stop. These people were like that. Stubborn. Like a donkey he would plod on until his stomach told him it was time to eat one of the barley dumplings that were the only sustenance he appeared to need. Gruber increased his pace until he was close enough to grasp the Drupka tribesman by the arm. ‘
Bkag pa!
’ he repeated.
The guide grinned and nodded, although he was puzzled why the loud European with the frightening eyes and unhealthy red face persisted in addressing him in his unintelligible Tibetan. ‘We stop soon. Very close,’ he assured Gruber in bastard English.
‘No. Stop now,’ the German ordered.
The grin didn’t falter, but Jigme wondered again what had made him agree to take these demanding, ill-mannered foreigners to the special hole in the ground. His cousin, now a Buddhist monk in far-off Lhasa, had told him of it when Jigme had made his solitary visit to the Tibetan capital on a pilgrimage to the Jokhang
Temple
. The Germans had sought him out at his village because of the English he had learned from a Yakshir holy man who had been trapped for a season on the plateau and died of hut fever wishing he was back in a country called Leds. Normally the parties he led were only interested in finding special rocks to hit with their little hammers, or to shoot the gentle Kiang, the wild ass which didn’t have the sense to run away from a man with a rifle. The Germans were different. They had asked him about the old people, which amused him because, in the village, they had been surrounded by old people. It took time before he realized they meant the enlightened ones, who had passed beyond life, which was even more amusing because the enlightened were spirit creatures now, their earthly bodies exposed and consumed by the vultures, the buzzards and the foxes. How could one find a ghost, especially if the ghost didn’t want to be found? But the large foreigner insisted that these old people had lived in holes far below the ground. Did he know of any such holes? Now they were a few hours from their goal and he wanted to stop. Truly they were beyond comprehension.
‘Stop now,’ he agreed at last, pointing to a piece of stony but relatively flat ground just ahead on the left. ‘You rest, eat, look at rocks.’
Jigme carried on a few paces before settling comfortably on the steep path with his pack beside him. He sat, cheerfully considering the twenty goats he had been promised, and the handsome wife they would bring him. The wind had dropped now and a watery
sun
blinked myopically through the thin cloud, showing the surrounding hills in all their arid magnificence. Far to the south-east was just visible the vast, snow-crusted bulk of Quomolonga, which the Europeans spoke of as Everest. One by one, the five members of Gruber’s research team staggered to the rest area, leaving the porters, carrying their sixty-pound loads of supplies and equipment, to crouch where they halted.
Gruber assessed his companions as they passed, searching for signs of weakness or injury that would slow them down later in the day. The group had been put together to provide a broad range of expertise. As well as being the expedition leader, Ernst Gruber doubled as the team’s zoology and mapping specialist. Berger, the ethnologist; Rasch, the anthropologist, and Von Hassell, the cinematic cameraman, were all reliable mountaineers and experienced explorers, wiry, tanned and bearded. After them came Junger, the security man who always had something to smile about, even if the smile never quite reached his pale eyes. A few yards behind, and looking like a city accountant who’d taken a wrong turn, struggled Gruber’s deputy, Walter Brohm.
The men were of a similar age and had one other aspect in common. They were all officers of the SS Ahnenerbe – the Nazi Ancestral Research and Teaching Society – personally appointed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. During the five day trek through the mountains they had conscientiously recorded and photographed the wildlife and fauna, studied the ethnic make-up of the local tribes and taken geological samples
like
the naturalists they appeared to be. The true reason for their mission was Himmler’s obsession with the occult and his personal quest to discover the origins of the lost city of Atlantis and the ancient civilization of superhumans who had given birth to the Aryan race. According to ancient legend, these earliest Aryans, the Vril, practised a sophisticated form of mind control and had been led from the city before Atlantis drowned in the flood. After travelling through Asia they had created the legendary underground kingdom of Thule. If the expedition could find the entrance to Thule, Himmler believed he would gain access to all the secrets of the Vril.
As he distributed the rations, Gruber revealed for the first time that they were close to their destination. Walter Brohm noticed the eyes of his companions light up with anticipation and allowed himself a smile. They were the true believers, he was a realist – only here out of necessity, in the pursuit of advancement. A physicist with a fascination for geology, Brohm had no interest in lost cities, which was just as well because he very much doubted they were going to find one. He would loyally accompany the others into some dark cave where they would discover a few animal bones, or perhaps a Yeti, which Gruber would hail as the first Atlantean, and then he could go home to the comfort of his office and his laboratory. He knew Gruber didn’t like him, but that was of no consequence. The cloth-headed adventurer was one of those National Socialist enthusiasts who would run through a brick wall for his
Führer
– and was probably capable of doing just that. Walter Brohm was only interested in Walter Brohm. He had joined the Nazi party when it became clear nothing could stop Adolf Hitler from taking and holding power, and the Schutzstaffel, the SS, because he looked better in black than brown and it was the quickest way for an ambitious man to get on. He would never admit it, but he looked upon the secret rituals of the SS as a joke, although no worse than the Masons. With Germany expanding economically and militarily, the future had never looked brighter for a pastor’s son from stuffy old Dresden.
Two hours after they resumed their march, the expedition reached the edge of a gigantic depression several hundred feet deep and perhaps two miles wide. Brohm couldn’t suppress a flutter of excitement when he recognized what it was, but he guessed even now that Gruber was destined to be disappointed.
‘Where is the cave?’ the expedition leader demanded.
Jigme’s deep-set eyes, the product of a hundred generations of staring into Himalayan blizzards, twinkled and his grin grew wider. His cousin’s instructions had been very clear. ‘Secret place. You follow. I show.’ He skipped off down a barely visible track, with the rest of the group treading warily in his footsteps on the perilous slope.
The cave – more of a tunnel – lay hidden at the bottom of the eastern wall of the crater, partially screened by a rock fall and only visible to those standing directly
opposite
it. In any other part of the world it would long since have filled with rotting vegetation or silt washed down by the rains, but little vegetation grew on the Changthang and the plateau’s annual rainfall measured around ten centimetres and was absorbed instantly, as if the land were a giant sheet of blotting paper.
In front of the entrance, Brohm was amused to see Gruber and the others lose some of their former spark. They were big sky men, mountains and deserts were their natural habitat, not this wormhole. Yet he could hardly blame them. There was something menacing about that brooding black portal that would make even an expert caver hesitate. The curious thing for Brohm was that the entrance appeared to be almost exactly circular, so perfect that it might have been man-made. Beyond it, as far as his torch would reach, the tunnel floor descended at a fairly steep angle of about thirty degrees. From a geological viewpoint he found it fascinating.
Gruber studied the entrance somberly. ‘We’ll make camp for the night and go in tomorrow. I want everyone up at first light.’
After a meagre breakfast of barley dumplings and yak butter tea, Gruber made his dispositions.
‘Rasch, Brohm, Junger and I will make the initial descent, along with the guide, who will lead.’ Von Hassell, the cameraman, protested that he should be involved but Gruber waved him away. ‘You will have your opportunity. We’ll rope together as if we were on a climb and take it slowly, a foot at a time – we don’t
know
what the ground will be like. I don’t want to lose anyone. Berger will command on the surface.’ He raised a hand holding a whistle. ‘If there’s an emergency I’ll blow on this, but your first duty will be to ensure the porters don’t desert us.’