The Valhalla Prophecy (68 page)

The military convoy ground through the darkness shrouding the muddy country road toward its next destination.

In the lead car, a four-seater Kübelwagen utility vehicle, SS-Sturmbannführer Erich Kroll used a torch to check a map of the farmlands around the town of Pella. His Waffen-SS unit, soldiers of Hitler’s feared
Schutzstaffel
elite force, were on a mission direct from the Führer: to locate and round up any Jews remaining in the Nazi-occupied zone for deportation to the concentration camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz. The operation had, by now, been mostly completed to German satisfaction, but, Kroll mused, the
Juden
were as hard to eradicate as rats—and the task had been made harder by Jewish sympathizers among the local population.

The Nazis had their own sympathizers, though. Fascist collaborators had provided their new masters with lists of those suspected of harboring fugitives, and now the SS was checking each one. On this night, they already had five prisoners in the truck behind them, two Jewish women and a boy found in a farm’s outbuilding, as well as the farmer and his wife who had been sheltering them. A good catch, but Kroll hoped there would be more.

He swapped the map for his list. The next target was the property belonging to the Patras family. According to his information, they liked their privacy, keeping to themselves. That alone made them worthy of a visit from the SS; even if they were not harboring any enemies of the Reich, they still needed reminding who was now in charge of their land.

The Kübelwagen’s headlights picked out a crossroads ahead.

“Go right,” Kroll ordered the driver, Jaekel. The young storm trooper had already impressed the unit commander, shrugging off a vicious slash across his face from a knife-wielding Jew in order to bayonet him and the family he was protecting. At the moment, the scar was still a raw red line, the stitches visible; in time, it would be a stirring reminder of his bravery and a magnet for women.

The car made the turn, the truck and half-track behind it following. The road led up a hillside to the house near its summit. Jaekel pulled up outside the front door. The truck jolted to a halt behind it, the half-track heading around the building to watch for anyone trying to run from its rear.

Kroll marched to the door and pounded on the wood with a gloved fist. “Open up!” he barked in Greek. He had studied the ancient form of the language in his youth; learning its modern derivation to a reasonable standard had not been difficult. “This is the Waffen-SS—we are here to search your property for Jewish fugitives. You are ordered to let us in, immediately!”

He stepped back and waited impatiently. Behind him, his men held their weapons at the ready as sounds of activity came from inside. “How long do we give them?” asked Rasche, Kroll’s senior lieutenant.

“Thirty seconds, no more,” Kroll told the SS-Obersturmführer. “Then we kick the door down.”

Rasche smiled, manic eyes widening. “I hope they don’t rush. I always like to make an entrance.”

“Open the door at once!” Kroll shouted. He heard
voices behind it; that the occupiers had not immediately complied suggested they were trying to conceal something. “You have ten seconds! Nine! Eight! Seven!” Submachine guns came up.

A clunk as a heavy bolt was shifted, then the door opened a crack. An elderly man nervously peered out. “What do you want?”

“You heard me,” Kroll snapped. He shoved the door open, sending the old man reeling back. “You are Alejo Patras?” he demanded.

“Yes, I am,” Patras replied.

“Who else is in the house?”

“My wife, Kaira, my two sons, and my oldest son’s wife and their daughter. But we have nothing to hide here, we are just farmers.”

“Five others,” Kroll told his men before turning back to Patras. “Bring them all here, now. Anyone who is not here in one minute will be shot when they are found.” He made a show of raising his left arm to check his watch.

Patras called out urgently. Before long, others filed into the stone-floored hallway: an old woman and a couple in their thirties, the wife fearfully holding a six-year-old child. The German regarded his watch again. “Where is your other son? He is running out of time!”

“Dinos!” cried Patras, following it with an exhortation for him to hurry. Seconds ticked by, Rasche’s malevolent smirk widening as he fingered his gun—then a door banged somewhere deeper inside the house. Running footsteps, and a man in his twenties hurried into the hall.

Kroll’s cold gaze turned upon him. “What were you doing?” he demanded in Greek. “Why were you hiding from us?”

“I—I wasn’t hiding,” the young man insisted. “I was in the cellar, I didn’t hear you.”

“Give the cellar a full search,” Kroll ordered, not taken in by the protestation of innocence. “Look for hatches, hidden doors, false compartments—anywhere people might hide.”

Rasche nodded, then addressed one of the men watching the family. “Rottenführer! With me.” The trooper, a squat, round-faced man named Schneider, followed him out.

Keeping an eye on the prisoners, Kroll waited as his unit searched the house. One by one they returned, reporting that they had found no sign of fugitives. The elder Patras appeared relieved to be vindicated, but the Nazi commander detected a rising tension in the faces of his sons—particularly the younger.

Only Rasche and Schneider had not yet come back. Kroll went to the doorway through which they had gone. “Obersturmführer!” he called. “Have you found anything?”

A pause, then: “I’m not sure. Is Zoller there? We need him to move something.”

Kroll glanced at the huge storm trooper, whose head reached to just centimeters beneath the ceiling beams. “Sturmmann, go and help him.”

Zoller’s arm snapped into a rigid Hitler salute, his fingertips actually brushing the plaster overhead. “At once, Herr Sturmbannführer!” Hunching down to fit through the doorway, he headed for the cellar.

There was now definite concern in the brothers’ expressions—no, Kroll realized, the whole family’s. Even the young granddaughter had the look of a child whose lie was about to be exposed. “If you are hiding Jews down there, you will be treated just like them,” he warned the group. “Give them up now, and I may be lenient.”

The elder Patras shook his head. “This is a very old house, it has many cubbyholes. But we are not hiding anyone, I promise.”

“I would prefer to see for myself,” Kroll replied with a sneer. He listened as thumping sounds echoed up from below. Then—

“Sturmbannführer!” Rasche shouted. “Come quickly!”

“Bring them,” Kroll snapped to his men. The prisoners were hustled along in his wake, guns pressed against
their bodies. The cellar entrance was a crooked door at the back of a cramped pantry, stairs leading down a steep passage lined in whitewashed stone. A flickering lantern provided weak illumination at the bottom. The SS leader led the way underground, noticing the polished curve to each stone step; the passage was either regularly traveled, or had been here for a very long time.

He reached the foot of the stairs. The lantern revealed a grotto-like space, sacks and boxes lining the irregular walls. Grunts of exertion came from around a corner. Beyond it, Kroll found his three men standing at what appeared to be a dead end—except that Zoller had managed to get his thick fingers into a gap that had been concealed behind some barrels and was pulling at it. Wood creaked with each tug.

“There’s a mark on the floor from a hidden door,” explained Rasche, pointing at a faint line arcing across the flagstones. “But we can’t get it open.”

Kroll drew his Luger and faced Patras as the family was pushed into the subterranean space. “How does it open? Tell me now, or I will shoot your wife!” He pointed the gun at the old woman’s head. She gasped in fear.

There was a tense silence—then the younger son shoved his mother aside, lunging at Kroll—

The gunshot was deafening in the confined space.

A jet of blood sprayed across the cellar from a bullet wound in Dinos’s throat, almost black in the low light. Kroll stepped back as the young man collapsed at his feet, twitching like a dying fish. His mother screamed.

“Open the door!” Kroll yelled. The young girl shrieked in terror as the other SS troopers slammed her parents against the walls. “Open it, or I’ll kill you all!”

“Wait, wait!” cried the horrified Patras. “I’ll open it!”

His older son shouted in protest even as gun muzzles were jammed against him, but Patras scurried to the dead end and pulled aside a stack of boxes. Behind them, at floor level, was a small nook. He slipped his hand inside, curling his fingers around a concealed catch.

A loud
clack
came from behind the fake wall. “It will open now,” he told Kroll. “Please, let my family go!”

“How many people are hidden back there?” the German demanded.

“None, there is nobody there. It is just a room. Take what you find and go, I beg you!”

Again, his son protested. “Father, no! You can’t let them into the shrine!”

The last word caught Kroll’s attention. “What shrine?” he said, rounding on the elderly man. “What’s back there?”

The conflict on Patras’s face told him that the Greek did not want to give up his secret. “It … it is our family’s heritage,” he finally said, each word practically forced from his lips. “We have protected it for many generations, many centuries.”

Kroll regarded him for a moment, then addressed Zoller.

“Open it.”

The big man slotted his fingers back into the gap. This time, there was little resistance when he pulled. The hidden door swung outward, one corner rasping faintly against the floor.

“Step back; let me see.” Kroll shone his torch into the newly revealed darkness to find another set of steps heading downward. He directed his light to the bottom. There was a chamber below.

“Sir,” warned one of the storm troopers, a thin-faced man named Gausmann, as Kroll began to descend. “If there is someone down there, they could be armed.”

Kroll stopped, shining his torch back at his prisoners. “If it turns out anyone is down there, kill the family,” he said. Their lack of reaction told him that they did not speak German. “But … I don’t think he’s lying. Rasche, follow me.”

The assault unit commander led the way down the second set of stairs. These seemed even older than the first, the irregular stones in the whitewashed walls held in place by the weight of the ground above them rather than mortar. But, as it came into view, he saw that the
room at the bottom had been built with more care. Elegant columns supported the ceiling of the roughly circular space.
Ancient Grecian architecture
, Kroll thought, directing his torch beam over the nearest.
But later than the Classical period
 … He turned his light into the center of the room—and froze.

“My God!” he gasped, astonishment reducing his voice to a whisper.

The shrine was filled with treasure.

Gold and silver glinted everywhere his torch beam darted. Coins, jewelry, statuettes, even armor and weapons: the spoils of several lifetimes, all arranged as if on display to the figure at the chamber’s far side. A marble statue of a man, flakes of colored paint still visible on the pale white stone, watched over the room of wonders.

Kroll heard Rasche let out an exclamation, but he ignored the SS section leader, advancing on the statue. The light picked out a name on the plinth. Αυδρέας:
Andreas
. A common enough Greek name, but what had this man done to arouse such adulation?

Rasche’s own torch flitted excitedly over the gleaming riches. “It’s a fortune!” he said. “It must be worth millions of marks. And those farmers have been hiding it from us!”

“Not just from us,” Kroll said quietly as he examined some of the items in more detail. The inscriptions upon them were in Greek—
ancient
Greek. “These are thousands of years old.” He illuminated a line of carved text beneath the name on the plinth. “It says, ‘Friend and follower of the king Alexander’… Does it mean Alexander the Great? It must do!”

“I’ll take your word for it, sir,” said Rasche. “I never studied Greek.”

“You should always study the past, Obersturmführer,” Kroll replied, reading on with growing intrigue. “It can teach you a lot. Especially when it concerns Alexander the Great. He was born near here, near Pella—it was the capital of Macedonia.” He stepped
back, almost reflective. “Alexander was my childhood hero, actually; he was the greatest military leader in history, never defeated in battle. He’d conquered most of the known world before he was thirty years old. If he’d lived longer, who knows what else he could have accomplished.”

“Sir,” Rasche replied, with clear disinterest. He moved to prod at one of the piles of coins.

“Philistine,” Kroll muttered as he read more of the text. It
was
referring to Alexander the Great, he was sure. “These dates, they’re long after Alexander died. But this Andreas, the inscriptions say he knew Alexander personally.…”

He regarded the statue. The man it portrayed was old, bald-headed with a long beard, yet still had the upright posture of youth. The remaining scuffs of paint on its face were enough to give the impression that it was looking back at him, expression almost challenging. “Andreas, Andreas …” he whispered, searching his memory. The name was connected to Alexander’s, somehow, but the link was elusive—

Suddenly it came to him. The rational part of his mind instantly dismissed it as ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly be true! But …

His gaze fell upon something behind the statue. It was a pithos, a large earthenware jar as tall as a man and almost a meter across at its broadest. More Greek text had been inscribed upon it. He went to the vessel, having to stand on tiptoes to examine the spout. It had been sealed, black pitch around a silver stopper. The rim was silvered too, as if the jar’s interior was lined with the precious metal.

“Silver,” he said out loud. However ludicrous it sounded, the connection between Andreas and the Macedonian conqueror had now solidified in his thoughts.

“And gold,” said Rasche, coins clinking from his fingers.