The Doomsday Testament (2 page)

Berger nodded, his face a frowning mask of concentration, the expression he thought conveyed ideological commitment, but which only made him look as if he suffered from chronic constipation. Brohm was surprised at his own feelings. He should be anxious at being volunteered for such a hazardous enterprise. Instead, it was as if this cave had been waiting for him all his life. It held no terrors, quite the opposite. He felt as if he were being welcomed.

Gruber checked their bindings and roped himself into line behind Jigme. Twelve-foot lengths of hand-tested climbing rope linked the five men and each had been issued with a torch and spare batteries. Like the others, Brohm’s pack contained food and water for three days. The Germans carried side arms, although for the life of him he couldn’t think what they were going to shoot. With a nod to Berger, Gruber jerked the rope linking him to the Tibetan. ‘Go,’ he ordered.

They walked in reverential silence, like pilgrims entering a cathedral. Jigme’s steps were tentative, as if every footfall had the capacity to plunge him down a shaft to the centre of the earth. He swept the ground in front of him with the torch and then swept it again. The beam lit up the tunnel for ten or twelve paces ahead, but beyond it lay the darkness of the tomb, unforgiving
and
eternal. Superstition was as central to Jigme’s life as it is to every Tibetan, but nothing had prepared him for the inner terror he felt as he inched his way forward. Familiarity brought no lessening of the fear, because each step took him further from safety and closer to the demons that inhabited this place. He knew nothing of Atlantis, but his finely tuned senses told him they were not alone in the darkness. If he could, he would have broken free and fled back to the surface, but Gruber had tied his knots with a climber’s efficiency. There was no escape.

Roped behind Gruber, Walter Brohm could feel his leader’s impatience at their slow progress, but it was clear no amount of threats would make the Tibetan guide move any faster. A barely discernible draught tickled the back of Brohm’s neck and made him think there must be another opening somewhere ahead. Given the angle of their descent it seemed unlikely, but at least the draught meant the air down here was relatively fresh. Most of Brohm’s senses, though, were concentrated on his immediate surroundings. He allowed Gruber to pull him along and used the torch to study the tunnel walls. What could have created a shaft as uniform as this? He would have expected some signs of erosion, most probably from an ancient water source, but there were none. Instead the walls, which surprisingly dripped with moisture, appeared as smooth as glass. And the perfect circle was an illusion. Beneath his feet the floor of the tunnel was horizontal, though uneven. In the torchlight it looked like the petrified surface of a lake.

As he marched, his mind discarded the possibilities one by one until he was able to see the tunnel in an entirely different way. The walls didn’t just look like glass, they
were
glass, or at least vitrified stone. Whatever had made this passage had created a heat so intense that it had actually
melted
the rock. He had recognized the great saucer in the plateau above as the impact crater of a meteorite, a celestial object, in this case a very large one, which had struck the earth several thousand years earlier. It appeared that some element within the meteor had survived the impact, retaining enough mass, heat and power to allow it to cut through the solid rock in much the same way as the new armour-piercing shells from the experimental weapons facility at Stuttgart cut through layers of metal. The possibilities were fascinating.

He couldn’t be certain how far they had travelled when he heard the sound, but his disbelieving brain told him it must be more than a mile. At first it was just a whisper in the still air that brought Jigme to a faltering stop. Gruber snarled at him to go on, but it took a sharp push in the back with a pistol barrel to encourage the Tibetan’s feet to move. Brohm felt the tension grow with every step and the sound increased in volume until it became hauntingly familiar. It was impossible. What they could hear was the solemn rhythmic chant of the Buddhist monk. A few steps later they saw the flickering yellow shadow light of an oil lamp ahead, accompanied by the faint, rancid scent of yak butter oil.

Gruber pulled Jigme to a halt and untied him so that
they
could move forward side by side, signalling with the pistol for the others to follow. By now the musical chanting echoed from the walls and it was clear it came from more than one voice. Astonished, they approached the small chamber that marked the end of the tunnel. It was wider than the shaft and Brohm noticed evidence of tool marks that told him this, at least, was man-made. Gruber muttered what might have been a curse or a prayer and Brohm heard gasps from behind as the others reached the chamber. What he found there made him wonder if he had gone mad.

Against the far wall, at the end of a passage more than a mile below ground, three ancient, milk-eyed Buddhist monks sat cross-legged in saffron robes. Their lips moved in an unceasing incantation that made no allowance for the entry of the strangers.

‘They’re blind,’ Gruber said incredulously. Then after a second’s thought, ‘Why do they need lamps?’

‘For the air.’ Brohm found himself whispering. ‘The flames burn off oxygen and draw air from the surface. Without the lamps the air down here would soon become unbreathable.’ He saw now that the side of the chamber was stacked high with stocks of food, water and dampened sacks of yak butter, which meant these ghostly cave dwellers were resupplied from the outside world at least every few months. But his eyes, like all the others, were drawn to the centre where an ornate golden casket sat upon what could only be a ceremonial altar.

‘Why don’t they acknowledge us?’ Junger hissed. Like a man in a dream, Brohm moved towards the altar.
Second
by second a realization had been growing in the geologist that made him want to shout out loud. Sweat ran down his back and his hands were clammy as he reached for the casket.

‘For them you do not exist,’ Jigme answered Junger’s question, his voice shaking like an old man’s, ‘except as demons. They are chanting a spell to make you vanish.’

‘What is it?’ Brohm found Gruber at his shoulder, his eyes fever bright. Atlantis was forgotten. All that mattered was the casket.

Obviously of great antiquity, it was about two feet long by eighteen inches wide and eighteen deep. At first Brohm thought it was made of solid gold, but the moment he laid hands on it he realized it was actually wood covered in gold leaf. Representations of the Buddha and various Indian deities had been carved along its length. What puzzled and then excited him was the fact that when he picked it up it
weighed
as much as gold. He didn’t dare answer Gruber’s question truthfully. For one thing he still wasn’t certain yet, for another Gruber was too stupid to understand.

‘We can’t afford to open it to find out, but I believe what this box contains could be of vital importance to the Reich. It must be returned to the homeland immediately. And in absolute secrecy.’

Gruber stared at him, then nodded. ‘What about the monks?’

Brohm had already decided. ‘Kill them.’ Junger drew his pistol.

Together, they turned to Jigme. ‘And him?’

The tears running down the Tibetan’s cheeks turned the habitual grin into a tragic mask. He was still wearing his smile when Walter Brohm shot him between the eyes.

JAMIE SAINTCLAIR KNEW
instantly that something was wrong because of the smell, or rather the lack of it. When he arrived at the house on a Sunday afternoon he could expect to be met by the comforting, salty-sweet aroma of roasted beef. Today all he could smell when he opened the back door was sour milk from the open carton beside the stainless-steel sink.

‘Granddad?’

He walked through to the front room his mother had grandly called the lounge, with its fussy ornaments, drab, functional wallpaper, and decades-old furniture. It was cool in here, but that was normal; the old man never turned on the heating before October. What concerned Jamie more was the stillness. The house was always quiet since his mother had died. But never this still.

‘Granddad?’

He opened the door that led to the stairs.

‘Oh, Christ.’

Something sucked the contents of his stomach into his chest and he struggled for breath. He felt as if his feet had been kicked from under him and the roof had fallen in at the same instant. His eyes automatically looked away, as if his mind was convinced that what he’d seen wouldn’t be there when he looked back again.

But it was there, in a tangled heap lying inside the front door at the bottom of the stairs. The long arms and legs that had always reminded him of a demented stick insect splayed at impossible angles and the neck, in its plastic, clerical collar, twisted so that the old man’s dull blue eyes seemed to focus on his left armpit.

‘Granddad?’ Instinct made Jamie reach for the throat to check for a pulse, but he stopped halfway when he realized how pointless the gesture was. If the broken neck wasn’t evidence enough of death, the yellowy-grey pallor of his flesh and the way it seemed to hang off the bones confirmed that Matthew Sinclair had been lying here for days. It looked as if he’d lost his footing on the stairs. Just lately he’d been having trouble moving around, even with the walking stick that Jamie’s subconscious mind noted should have been lying somewhere, but wasn’t.

Jamie slumped down on the bottom stair and closed his eyes. No tears. Not yet. Because the prevailing emotion wasn’t grief, but loneliness. His grandfather was – had been – his last living relative. No uncles or aunts. No cousins, at least that he knew of. He tried to
imagine
the old man as he had been, and came up with a narrow, bony face dominated by a Belisha beacon of a nose whose rosy light was fuelled by the cheap Scotch he claimed was the only thing that helped him sleep. Grey, thinning hair and benign, kindly amusement in eyes shadowed by the tropical diseases that were the legacy of his years in Africa. A prayer formed in his head, but he knew the old man was already with the God who had sustained him for so long. Matthew had been a ‘good’ man in the truest sense of the word. Every waking hour and spare penny dedicated to helping others. Every new day an opportunity to be a better person.

Jamie put his hand to his mouth and choked back a sob. The guilt that had been lying dormant was growing now – why hadn’t he insisted on staying with him? – but the shock was wearing off. A switch clicked in his head telling him to move: to
do
something.

He knelt beside the still figure and bent to kiss the cold brow.

‘Goodbye, Granddad.’

It was ten days before he felt strong enough to return to the house, his mind still numbed by that peculiar detachment that follows a period of intense grief. Only now had he been able to overcome the dread that had been keeping him away from the unwanted, but necessary task of sorting out his grandfather’s papers and putting aside anything of monetary or sentimental value before the house clearers came in.

This had been his home for eighteen years, shared
with
his mother and grandfather, before he’d left for university. Like his mother, the house was a product of the fifties; a functional five-room cube of brown pebbledash with a tile roof, neat windows and a small, carefully tended garden. Semi-detached, of course; she could never have afforded what she called a ‘proper’ house in Welwyn, and Matthew’s meagre church pension didn’t stretch far. He remembered the day she’d died and the unexpected sense of release he’d experienced. At last he’d been free of the smothering influence that had kept him wound tight since the day he was old enough to understand it.

Matthew had changed nothing in the year since she’d gone. The house had become a shrine to her. Every corner had memories for Jamie. Strawberry teas at the kitchen table where she’d wiped jam from his face with a damp facecloth. The scent of her perfume as she’d leaned over him in twin-set and pearls to complete a jigsaw in the front room. His grandfather helping with an elusive Latin verb when he was about twelve, at what must have been one of the hardest times. He shook his head. Where to begin? The papers, he supposed, which were stored in the polished bureau in the corner.

He kept it up for half an hour, sorting through insurance documents and gas bills, before boredom inexorably drew him to a collection of his mother’s leather-bound photo albums. He flicked through the pages of regimented pictures, each perfectly positioned and in its proper place. The early ones were mostly photographs of him as a baby, alone or with his mother or
grandparents
. But here was five-year-old Jamie, deadly serious, ready for his first day at school in cap, purple blazer and tie, with his proud mother at his shoulder. In the picture, her hair was a dark, lustrous brown. How could he have forgotten that? Margaret Saintclair had been a snob, an unbridled and unapologetic snob who had somehow kept her status as an unmarried mother from her toffee-nosed acquaintances as she’d clawed her way to become chairwoman – not chairperson, God forbid – of the local bridge club. For all her faults she had loved him, and loved him as only the single mother of an only child can show love: single-mindedly to the point of obsession. It had taken him a long time to understand what she and his grandfather had gone through to ensure that he was equipped to take on the world. In a way, she had donated thirty years of her life to him. She’d even given up her name – plain old Sinclair – as part of the plot to give him the best possible chance when he went to Cambridge: driven, almost bullied, by her to win a scholarship from the local grammar school.

As he leafed through the pictures he realized that he’d always thought of his mother as old, but she hadn’t been old at all. She wasn’t quite sixty-three when she died.

Another picture. Her proudest moment, his graduation with a First in fine arts and modern languages. Jamie barely recognized himself in the stern-faced young man in the one-size-fits-all, hired robe, even though the photograph had been taken less than ten years earlier. While the other students had spent most of their time drinking and carousing, he’d never been able to
escape
his mother’s telepathic control. If he remembered correctly, the popular term for the image he’d created for himself had been ‘Young Fogey’ and he’d cheerfully embraced it, right down to the tweed jacket and briar pipe, for Christ’s sake. Oh, he’d had his moments, and the girls who seduced him, usually for a dare, had gone away pleasantly surprised and reasonably well-satisfied, but he’d never indulged in that relentless pursuit of the female flesh his fellow undergraduates felt was their duty.