Kingdom of Darkness

Copyright © 2014 Andy McDermott

The right of Andy McDermott to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by

Headline Publishing Group in 2014

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 8075 6

Cover illustration © Lee Gibbons

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About Andy McDermott

Andy McDermott is the bestselling author of the Nina Wilde & Eddie Chase adventure thrillers, which have been sold in over 30 countries and 20 languages. His debut novel,
The Hunt For Atlantis
, was his first of several
New York Times
bestsellers.
Kingdom of Darkness
is the tenth book in the series, and he has also written the explosive spy thriller
The Persona Protocol
.

Andy’s novels have received critical acclaim for their epic globetrotting scope and non-stop thrills, described as ‘pulse-racing adventure’ (
Northern Echo
) with action scenes that ‘explode off the page’ (
Daily Express
), while Andy himself has been called ‘a new master of the genre’ (
Le Figaro
) and ‘one of Britain’s most talented adventure writers’ (
Evening Post
).

A former journalist and movie critic, Andy was the editor of respected UK magazines
DVD Review
and the iconoclastic film publication
Hotdog
. Born in Halifax, he now lives in Bournemouth.

About the Book

1943 – Occupied Greece

The SS unit’s mission was simple: round up Jews for the concentration camps. But beneath an isolated farmhouse, they find a far greater bounty – a hidden shrine to Alexander the Great and an urn filled with water possessing mysterious qualities. The Nazis take the treasure in the name of Hitler and disappear . . .

Present Day – Los Angeles

Archaeologist Nina Wilde and her husband Eddie Chase are sought out by a young man, desperate to warn her about a planned raid on Alexander’s newly-discovered tomb in Egypt. But before he can explain more, he is assassinated by a wanted Nazi war criminal – who has barely aged in seventy years.

As Nina and Eddie search for answers, they discover that the most evil regime in history is threatening to rise again. But the Nazis seek more than power. They are also hunting for the greatest prize of all – immortality . . .

By Andy McDermott and available from Headline

Featuring Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase

The Hunt for Atlantis

The Tomb of Hercules

The Secret of Excalibur

The Covenant of Genesis

The Cult of Osiris

The Sacred Vault

Empire of Gold

Temple of the Gods

The Valhalla Prophecy

Kingdom of Darkness

The Persona Protocol

Praise

Praise for Andy McDermott:

‘Adventure stories don’t get much more epic than this’
Daily Mirror

‘An all-action cracker from one of Britain’s most talented adventure writers’
Lancashire Evening Post

‘If Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler collaborated, they might have come up with a thundering big adventure blockbuster like this . . . a widescreen, thrill-a-minute ride’
Peterborough Evening Telegraph

‘True Indiana Jones stuff with terrific pace’
Bookseller

‘A true blockbuster rollercoaster ride from start to finish . . . Popcorn escapism at its very best’
Crime and Publishing

‘A rip-roaring read and one which looks set to cement McDermott’s place in the bestsellers list for years to come’
Bolton Evening News

‘Fast-moving, this is a pulse-racing adventure with action right down the line’
Northern Echo

‘A writer of rare, almost cinematic talent. Where others’s action scenes limp along unconvincingly, his explode off the page in Technicolor’
Daily Express, Scotland

‘McDermott writes like Clive Cussler on speed. The action is non-stop’
Huddersfield Daily Examiner

For Kat

Prologue

Greece, 1943

The military convoy ground through the darkness towards its next destination.

In the lead car, a Kübelwagen utility vehicle, SS-Sturmbannführer Erich Kroll used a torch to check a map of the farmland 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 sympathisers amongst the local population.

The Nazis had their own sympathisers, though. Fascist collaborators had provided their new masters with lists of those suspected of harbouring fugitives, and now the SS was checking each one. On this night, they already had five prisoners in the truck behind: two Jewish women and a boy found in a farm’s loft, as well as the farmer and his wife. A good catch, but Kroll hoped to find more.

The blond man 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 harbouring 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 stormtrooper 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. 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 muddy road led up a hillside to an old house near its summit. Jaekel pulled up outside the front door. The truck jolted to a halt alongside, 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 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 readied their weapons as sounds of activity came from inside. ‘How long do we give them?’ asked SS-Obersturmführer Rasche.

‘Thirty seconds,’ Kroll told his senior lieutenant. ‘Then we kick the door down.’

Rasche smiled, manic eyes widening. ‘I hope they don’t rush.’ One hand went to a dagger in a sheath on his belt, the hilt bearing the
Totenkopf
death’s-head of the SS. ‘I always like to make an example of someone.’

‘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!’

The clunk of a heavy bolt, then the door opened. An elderly man nervously peered out. ‘What do you want?’

‘You heard me,’ Kroll snapped. He shoved the door, sending the old man reeling back. ‘You are Alejo Patras?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Patras replied.

‘Who else is in the house?’

‘My wife Kaira, my two sons, and my elder son’s wife and 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 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, with an exhortation for him to hurry. Seconds ticked by, Rasche’s malevolent smirk widening as he fingered his knife – then a door banged deeper inside the house. Running footsteps, and a man in his twenties hurried into the hall.

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

‘I – I wasn’t hiding,’ the young man insisted. ‘I was in the cellar, I didn’t hear you.’

‘Search the cellar,’ Kroll ordered, not taken in by the protestation of innocence. ‘Look for hatches, hidden doors – anywhere people might hide.’

Rasche addressed one of the troopers. ‘Rottenführer! With me.’ A squat, round-faced man named Schneider followed him out, putting a hand over his mouth to hold in a wet cough.

Kroll waited as his unit searched the house. One by one they returned, reporting no sign of fugitives. The elder Patras appeared relieved to be vindicated, but the Nazi commander detected a rising tension in his sons – particularly the younger.

Only Rasche and Schneider had not yet come back. ‘Obersturmführer!’ Kroll called. ‘Have you found anything?’

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

Kroll glanced at the huge stormtrooper, whose head reached to just centimetres beneath the ceiling beams. ‘Sturmmann, go and help him.’

Walther’s arm snapped into a rigid Hitler salute, his fingertips 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 realised, the whole family’s. ‘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, Ipromise.’

‘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 at gunpoint. The cellar entrance was a crooked door at the rear of a cramped pantry, stairs leading down a steep passage lined in whitewashed stone. A flickering lantern provided weak illumination below. The SS leader noticed the polished curve to each stone step; the passage was either regularly travelled 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 walls. Grunts of exertion came from around a corner. Beyond it, Kroll found his three men at what appeared to be a dead end – except that Walther had managed to get his thick fingers into a gap that had been hidden behind some barrels and was pulling at it. Wood creaked with each tug.

‘There’s a mark 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.

A tense silence – then the younger son shoved his mother aside, lunging at Kroll—

The gunshot was deafening in the confined space.

Blood gouted 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. His mother screamed.

‘Open the door!’ yelled the Nazi leader. The young girl shrieked in terror as the other SS troopers slammed her parents against the wall. ‘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 wall and pulled aside a stack of boxes. Behind them, at floor level, was a small nook. He slipped his hand inside, fingers curling around a concealed catch.

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

‘How many people are hiding?’ 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. ‘We have protected it for many generations, many centuries.’

Kroll regarded him for a moment, then addressed Walther. ‘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 outwards.

The Nazi leader shone his torch into the newly revealed darkness to find another set of steps heading downwards. He directed his light to the bottom. There was a chamber below.

‘Sir,’ warned one of the stormtroopers, a thin-faced man named Gausmann, as Kroll began to descend. ‘If someone’s down there, they could be armed.’

Kroll stopped, shining his torch back at his prisoners. ‘If 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 second set of stairs seemed even older than the first, the irregular stones in the whitewashed walls held in place by the weight of those above them rather than mortar. But the room beneath had been built with more care, he saw as it came into view. 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 centre 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, jewellery, statuettes, even armour and weapons; the spoils of several lifetimes. Amongst them was something that immediately seemed out of place – a clockwork mechanism, bronze or brass. He quickly dismissed the anachronism as a later addition to the collection, his gaze instead going to the figure at the chamber’s far side. The marble statue of a man, flakes of coloured paint still visible on the pale 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 word on its plinth:
ανδρƐ
ας
– 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 were hiding it from us!’

‘Not just from us,’ Kroll said 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, “Servant and friend 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 a pile of coins.

‘Philistine,’ Kroll muttered as he read more 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 the thought as ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly be true! But . . .

His gaze fell upon something behind the statue. It was a pithos, an earthenware jar as tall as a man and a metre across at its broadest. More Greek text was inscribed upon it. He went to the vessel to read some of it, then stood on tiptoes to examine the wide 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.

‘Forget the gold – we may have found something even more valuable.’ Kroll turned, ignoring his subordinate’s look of confusion. ‘The old man and his family. Bring them down here!’

Rasche shouted an order up the stairs. The surviving members of the Patras clan were quickly hustled into the hidden chamber, their dismay at their secret having been revealed mirrored by the amazement and raw greed on the faces of the Nazis. ‘Andreas,’ Kroll said to the patriarch in Greek, indicating the statue. ‘He is who I think, isn’t he? Andreas the cook, from the
Alexander Romance
?’