The Doomsday Testament (39 page)

The first door they knocked on was opened by a young woman who answered their questions politely, but was unable to help them. She directed them to the house furthest away from the road. ‘Talk to old Werner. He was here then.’

‘
Guten tag
.’ The thick-set figure worked steadily with a hoe in the centre of an immaculately tended vegetable garden. He looked up and nodded at Jamie’s greeting. Werner had pale unreadable eyes, a bulbous nose and ruddy, time-worn features framed by heavy grey whiskers. As Jamie and Sarah waited by the house he came towards them using the hoe as a crutch to offset a pronounced limp.

‘May I help you?’ he asked.

Jamie explained why they were in the area and Werner’s face clouded.

‘Englanders, yes?’

Jamie nodded. He didn’t see any point in explaining Sarah’s ancestry.

The old man gave a bitter laugh. ‘What is it you English say – “Don’t mention the war”? Good advice. It is a long time ago, better to forget, especially around here. Don’t be deceived by the pretty scenery. Bad things happened, just as they happened everywhere. Bad things.’ He leaned on the hoe, and sighed heavily, staring at the ground.

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but Jamie shook
his
head. There was no point in stirring up unwanted memories. He thanked the German for his time and turned to go.

They were halfway to the car when Werner surprised them. ‘
Ach
, wait,’ he called. ‘It was a long time ago, but maybe an old man keeps things locked away for too long. Perhaps it is time to face it. Come, I will make coffee.’

While they sat in the tiny kitchen, Werner served his coffee without asking how they liked it; strong, dark and with a liberal lacing of schnapps. He hunched over his mug and stared at the table, his face wearing the pained expression of a man entering a confession box. Eventually he said: ‘Yes, it happened as you said. Right across there. Of course, most of the old trees are gone now, replaced by that olive desert you see. Not many people left to remember it, but I was here.’ He looked up from under the thick grey brows. ‘You say your grandfather was one of the men in the second jeep?’

Jamie nodded.

‘Then your grandfather probably killed my brother.’

The room seemed to go cold and Jamie felt Sarah’s hand close on his beneath the table.

‘I’m sorry.’

Werner shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. Erich was seven years older than me, loyal and brave; he died fighting for what he believed, but he killed a lot of my friends and he gave me this.’ He thumped his leg and they heard the sound of hollow plastic muffled by his thick Tweed trousers. ‘You have heard of Werewolf?’

‘My grandfather mentions it in his journal. Some kind of Nazi guerrilla organization.’

The old man shook his head. ‘A joke. Broken-down SS like Erich leading boys who should still have been at school against men with machine guns and tanks. He was convalescing here, after being wounded in the head on the
Ostfront
, when the local gauleiter ordered him to organize a Werewolf cell and harass the enemy. I was fourteen years old and frightened. Just a boy. Hitler was dead. People said the war was finished, but Erich would not believe it. I just wanted it to be over and be at home with my mother. You are surprised? You thought we were all fanatics in the Hitler Jugend?’

Jamie smiled politely.

‘There were nine of us. Myself, Erich, my friend Pauli and a few others from the school. We made camp in the woods on the other side of the road – like being a boy scout except we had a machine gun and a few old Mauser rifles and a couple of fausts. Truth is, I think the war had driven Erich mad. He said we should take the fight to the Amis. Some of the boys started crying. I told him: “No we are going home.” He was my brother, I thought he would listen, but he screamed that I was a traitor and hit me in the mouth with his pistol. When I said I would not fight, he shot me in the leg.’ He turned to Sarah. ‘Do not be sorry for me. I was fortunate. In Erich’s eyes I was guilty of mutiny and he had every right to shoot me dead or string me up from the nearest tree. It happened to many. Of course, the other boys were too frightened then to do anything.
They
carried me to this house, my mother’s house, and left me here.’

Werner slurped at his coffee and licked his lips.

‘Mama did her best with the leg, but when the gangrene came . . .’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘But that was later. Three days after Erich wounded me I heard the shooting and the explosion, over there. I wanted to go, but I couldn’t move and I think Mama would have stopped me in any case. But I could see from the window the jeep burning and the flashes of the tracer rounds from the woods. When the firing stopped I was torn. Should I be elated at my friends’ victory? Was I a coward, who had walked away from them? And what would the Amis do when they discovered this thing? Erich had boasted about a place in France that the SS had taught a lesson, and I had heard him talking in his sleep about things that happened in Russia that freeze my blood even now. Surely the Amis would burn our farm and hang us all? Then the shooting started again and I knew that the weapons doing most of the firing were not German. It only lasted for a moment. Then silence. All I could hear was Mama sobbing. I think she knew even then that Erich was dead. A few minutes later there were four or five individual shots. Very slow, very deliberate. Each one like a punctuation mark. I knew they were shooting the wounded. Before they went, the Amis buried their dead and left our boys for the crows.’

‘They shot wounded children?’ Sarah demanded incredulously. ‘But the war was over. They knew that.’

‘Oh, yes, young lady, they shot little Pauli and the
rest
. I saw the bodies when they were brought here to be buried. You say the war was over, but war doesn’t end just because someone says it is ended. It finishes when people stop shooting at each other. Erich’s war was only ever going to finish when he was dead. The pity is that he took so many good boys with him.’

Jamie struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. He had read Matthew’s account of the ambush as a heroic charge against a determined enemy and superior odds. The references to boys and children were clear enough, but somehow, in reading the journal, his mind had only absorbed one side of the story. Matthew’s enemy had been hard-eyed fanatics, however young. They had struck, like cowards, from the forest and he had paid them back in their own coin. Only now, as old Werner rummaged through a drawer and produced a sepia-tinged picture of a grinning schoolboy football team, did he fully understand how young they had been. Had Matthew looked into an injured child’s eyes and pulled the trigger? If he had, it turned everything he had learned on its head.

‘I’m on the right, the big lad with the blond hair. Star centre forward. Pauli is the dark-haired kid in the front row. He was a good pal, Pauli. A good pal.’

‘What happened afterwards. Was there some sort of inquiry?’

The German laughed –
haw, haw, haw
– as if Jamie had made a hilarious joke. ‘You think anybody cared about a few Bavarian farm boys who were too stupid to surrender when they had the chance? Back then, the only
war
crimes were German war crimes. The only victims were the Jews. A few months later a graves registration unit turned up and they eventually buried the dead Amis in the military cemetery at Dürnbach, with the shot-down Allied airmen, escaped prisoners who didn’t make it home and the poor bastards the SS marched to death when they closed the PoW camps. Erich and my friends are over there at Saulgau.’

They finished their coffee and sat in silence for a while. Jamie stood up to go. There was nothing else to learn here.

Werner looked up, but the rheumy eyes were still somewhere in the past. ‘Before they moved the bodies to Saulgau, they were stored in the barn. I sneaked in to see Pauli one last time. It was a mistake. He had been under the earth for three months, you understand, and he was no longer the Pauli I remembered. My advice to you, my young friend, is to turn back now. There is no profit in digging up the past. If you continue, all that lies in wait for you is sorrow.’

THEY REACHED BLUMBERG
in the early evening but any chance of continuing on Matthew’s route towards the Swiss border just five miles away was fast fading along with the daylight. Sarah bought a local map from the tourist centre as the staff were closing the doors and Jamie booked them into a
gasthaus
in the centre of town. When they met outside the hotel, he pointed to hills that formed the southern boundary of the valley.

‘Those must have been where Matthew took the Germans.’

Sarah studied the map she’d bought and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I think maybe it’s those high ones in the distance. See . . .’ She showed him the map. ‘There are two hamlets to the south between Blumberg and the Swiss border. Epfenhofen and Futzen. Beyond them is the start of that miniature mountain range he mentioned.’

‘The Hoher Randen?’

‘That’s right. By the look of this, both of them are
possibles
.’ She studied him seriously. ‘Jamie, why don’t you just read the final pages of Matthew’s journal and get this over with.’

‘Do you think I haven’t been tempted? I’m like an addict with a drugs stash. My fingers keep twitching towards the journal. But I won’t give in because I’m certain this is how Matthew wanted it to be. In a way, this is his true last will and testament. When we go up there tomorrow he’ll be with us. I have a feeling that if we break his rules we’ll never find the answers.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’

‘If I’m wrong, we go home. Maybe we forget the Sun Stone ever existed?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No, I don’t either. Since Tibet, I feel as if it’s part of me. I suppose we’ll just have to go back and start all over again. Walter Brohm’s Black Sun led us to the Harz and the research facility. On the day he walked away from there he took his research papers, or at least a summary of them, with him. Remember what Matthew said about the day he first met him?’

‘He said two of them were the most evil men he’d ever met. Did that mean he’d already formed some kind of instinctive bond with Brohm?’

‘I think maybe he had, but that’s not the point. One of them had a briefcase on his knee. It has to be Brohm. He must have cut a deal with the Americans. Brohm was a player. He would always keep an ace up his sleeve. When he left the Harz bunker and got rid of all the evidence he had already made sure the crown jewels were hidden in
a
safe place. The papers in the briefcase were just bait. Enough to tempt whoever saw them, but with the key elements missing. The Sun Stone was Brohm’s passport to a new life in the United States and he would only hand over the location, and that of his main research, when he was in neutral Switzerland.’

‘But once he reached Switzerland, he disappeared, along with the others?’

In the gathering gloom she saw his eyes fix on the fading blue line of the distant mountains. ‘That’s right. And tomorrow I think we’ll be a step closer to finding out why.’

Next morning they set out for Epfenhofen, a tiny community of farms and houses distinguished by an astonishing hangman’s loop of railway line that encircled the place like a noose. From beneath the railway viaduct they studied the tree-covered slope which rose almost vertically from where they stood. To their right, a narrow path led into the trees.

‘This could be it,’ Jamie suggested.

‘Let me see the journal.’ He handed it over and she turned the pages until she reached the passage she was looking for. ‘Matthew says here that after Stan got out of the jeep at the beginning of the track he drove a further two miles before ordering the Germans out. I don’t see how anyone could drive up that track.’

They searched the base of the escarpment, but it quickly became clear that she was right. The only drivable route south from the village was the main road. Epfenhofen was a dead end.

‘It must be the next one then,’ Jamie said with more confidence than he felt.

The village of Futzen was just over a mile to the west and as he scanned the countryside around him Jamie felt his heart beat faster.

‘This looks more promising,’ Sarah said, echoing his thoughts. From the road they saw that farmland sloped gently up from the village towards the hills and Switzerland, and even from a distance they could make out tracks linking the fields.

The landscape reminded Jamie of something from his past and he tried to remember the artwork it came from. An image popped into his head from nowhere. ‘
The Great Escape
!’

‘What?’ Sarah looked at him as if he was mad.

He laughed and pointed to the view. ‘I thought this reminded me of a painting, but it’s a film. They used to show it on TV every Christmas before we had a hundred satellite channels.’ Still, she looked mystified. ‘Surely you remember? Steve McQueen on a motorbike trying to jump the barbed wire between Germany and Switzerland. The scenery was just like this. Meadows and dirt roads and the Alps in the distance.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe it wasn’t my kind of movie. Did he make it?’

He looked at her curiously. ‘No, but it was a good film.’

‘Did it have a happy ending?’

He shook his head. ‘Not really. The Gestapo shot fifty unarmed prisoners of war.’

When they reached the village they worked their way along a network of streets to the south, where they were able to look across the fields towards the wooded hills beyond. The same railway that strangled Epfenhofen formed the southern boundary of the village and as they sat in the car an ancient steam train huffed its way past trailing a stream of green carriages and emitting a cheerful whistle. They looked at each other.

‘You sure we woke up in the right century?’

‘I’m beginning to wonder.’ Jamie studied the track directly ahead of them. Bounded by trees on one side and a marshy ditch on the other, it cut, arrow straight, across the fields and rose into the trees. ‘This is it.’

Sarah shot a glance at him. ‘You can’t be sure.’