The Tracie Tanner Collection, page 70
Shovelful after shovelful, she lifted the moist earth free of the pile and scattered it behind them, tossing it along the tunnel floor. Next to her, Gruber did the same. They worked without speaking, heavy breathing and the occasional grunt the only sounds.
Tracie kept a wary eye on the boulder, but for the time being it showed no signs of dislodging. It had fallen into the dirt toward the left tunnel wall, so Tracie and Gruber concentrated their efforts on the right side, as far away from it as possible.
Ten minutes of steady digging lowered the pile several inches. Ten more and Tracie guessed they were close to having sufficient clearance to pass. She stepped back and bent over, hands on her knees, breathing heavily.
Gruber had stopped digging to take a break. He spit on the floor and between panting breaths said, “Remind me again why in the hell I ever wanted to do this job?”
“Glory,” she replied. “Oh, and the everlasting gratitude of your superiors in Washington.”
Gruber burst out laughing.
Tracie almost shushed him, concerned about causing further cave-ins, but decided against it. Whatever his deficiencies as a covert operative, and despite the fact he came across as a slimy womanizer, the man meant well, and his previous statements to her had made clear the fact that he was torturing himself over his failure in the field. A little laughter would do wonders for him.
Besides, she had to admit the sound lifted her spirits as well. She was at least fifteen feet underground, surrounded by rats and insects and probably snakes and who knew what else, working in secret for a boss who didn’t give a damn about her, knowing if she died down here beneath a crumbling abandoned German factory, no one would ever know what had happened.
Precious few besides her parents would even notice she was gone.
So let Gruber laugh. It would do wonders for him, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for her, either.
His laughter died away and he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeves. “You’re okay, you know that, Quinn?”
“Right back atya,” she said.
“So…now that we’re bonding and getting to know each other and all, does this mean you’ll sleep with me when we get out of here?”
“Jesus, Gruber, do you ever give up?”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying. Besides, my daddy always told me you can’t catch a fish if you don’t throw your line in the water.”
“Your pole’s not coming anywhere near me, got it?”
He burst out laughing again and Tracie found herself giggling like a teenager. This might be the most surreal moment of my life, she thought. Thousands of miles from home, chasing buried Nazi treasure and fending off the advances of a handsome but disgraced spy.
She realized with a start of surprise that she was exactly where she wanted to be. She loved her job. Despite the constant loneliness and unrelenting danger, the heartbreak and the isolation and the gunshot wounds and the sociopathic boss and the unfair firing and everything else she had endured—and I’m not even thirty yet, she thought with another giggle—she loved her life.
She wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Not for a million dollars.
Not even for three hundred million dollars.
“Let’s get moving before this marvel of Nazi engineering falls down on top of us,” she said.
37
November 19, 1987
10:10 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
There was now enough room to squeeze between the top of the dirt pile and the tunnel’s damaged ceiling, but just barely. Tracie went first, clawing her way up the big mound, which was now unstable, the result of being chopped at and dug out by a pair of shovels after sitting undisturbed for perhaps a decade or more.
She was nearly to the top when the loose dirt gave way and she found herself sliding back toward the ground, out of control. Gruber was standing directly below her, though, and he stopped her momentum, grabbing her with one hand on her upper right leg and another on her butt. He gave a firm shove and she was able to climb/claw/swim her way upward again, this time reaching the top thanks to the added momentum Gruber had provided.
She cracked her skull on a support beam and barely noticed. She had climbed straight into one of the thick spider webs hanging from the ceiling, and she flailed her hands and arms, brushing the webs out of her hair and off her face, feeling her stomach begin to turn. She had stared down men with guns, single-handedly rescued the sitting U.S. secretary of state, gone toe-to-toe against deadly Soviet operatives, but this was worse than all of those things put together.
Tracie hated spiders.
She realized she was moaning involuntarily and clamped her mouth shut.
From below, Gruber said, “Thanks for the free feel.”
“You’re welcome, but I’m still not sleeping with you,” she answered. She swallowed hard, choking back the bile that had threatened to spew out her mouth, doing her best to ignore the massive spider web.
She took a deep breath and then rolled onto her belly. Her upper body hung toward Gruber, and she extended her arms.
“Take my hands,” she said, “and I’ll support you while you climb.”
“First I get to cop a feel and now we’re holding hands,” he said. “I consider this extremely promising.”
“You’re relentless, aren’t you?”
“It’s part of my irresistible charm.” He reached up with both arms and they locked hands, each grabbing the other’s wrists.
“Now, climb,” Tracie said, and as his legs churned against the loose dirt, she began squirming backward, counting on gravity to take over and provide enough leverage to assist in getting Gruber’s much bulkier body up and over the mound. His face scraped the side of the pile as he climbed and she could hear him spitting dirt and coughing, but he continued moving.
When he reached the spot where she had begun sliding backward, his feet slipped exactly as hers had done. He was too heavy and she was too light, and she felt herself being pulled toward the top of the pile again as he fell back toward the tunnel floor.
She shook her left hand free of his right and reached up, hoping to jam her hand against the ceiling support beam and halt their wrong-direction momentum. For a half-second nothing happened, and then white-hot pain exploded through her hand as her knuckles cracked the beam and took the brunt of not just her own weight but Gruber’s as well.
She grunted and cursed.
Forced her elbow to stay locked.
All she wanted to do was bend it and take the pressure off and relieve the pain that had exploded in her hand, but she refused to yield.
Refused to give up.
Their movement stopped.
For a moment nothing happened. They hung suspended, Gruber on one side of the pile, Tracie on the other, panting and cursing and trying not to think about how many knuckles she had just broken.
“Well?” she said through gritted teeth. “Are you going to climb or are you going to take another break?”
His answer was to kick his toes into the pile in an attempt to gain traction. He moved upward a few inches, then a few more, each gain increasing the pressure against her hand and arm, both of which were now burning.
Sweat poured down her face, even in the damp cool of the tunnel, and she could feel the grip of her good hand beginning to loosen on Gruber’s wrist. “I’m losing you,” she gasped, her resolve weakening. The pain was immense and the task seemingly impossible. How much could one person take?
Finally, with one manic burst of energy, Gruber pistoned his feet against the pile like a man racing a bicycle, and at the same time, he yanked upward against Tracie’s right hand, pulling hard with no warning.
The pain exploded and she screamed, forgetting the risk of cave-ins, forgetting her fear of spiders, forgetting everything except the dozens of fiery nails being hammered into her injured left hand.
And still she kept her elbow locked.
Gruber blasted over the top of the pile, his momentum carrying him forward like a freight train, and he cracked his skull against the support beam exactly as Tracie had done, and then he flopped over the top of the pile, the relentless pressure against her hand finally falling away. She fell backward, tumbling down the far side of the pile, caring about nothing besides cradling her hand to her chest.
She hit the tunnel floor and cracked the back of her head on the hard-packed ground and the pain was negligible when measured against the agony radiating outward from her left hand. The fire raced from her knuckles in one direction to the tips of her fingers, which she could not feel, and in the other direction up her forearm all the way to her elbow.
“Quinn!” Gruber called, and scrambled down the pile, hitting the floor next to Tracie in a shower of dirt and pebbles and, in all likelihood, more spiders. “Quinn, are you hurt? What happened? How the hell did you pull me up like that, anyway?”
“I’m still not sleeping with you,” she mumbled, rolling from her side onto her back and then forcing herself to sit up.
“Jesus Christ, Quinn,” he said, ignoring her comment. He had yanked his flashlight from his waistband and now he shined the beam down at her injured hand, an expression of horror clouding his handsome face. “Your hand. What the hell did you do to your hand?”
She tried to smile and managed a wince. “I jammed it against the support beam to stop our momentum when you began falling back down the dirt pile. Unfortunately I couldn’t open my fist in time, so instead of my palm striking the timber, it was the back of my hand.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said again. “Why didn’t you let go?”
“Well, that wouldn’t have accomplished anything, would it? I’d still be injured and you would be stuck on the other side of the pile.”
“Jesus Christ.” It seemed to be all he could manage. “Look at your hand. You need medical attention.”
For the first time, Tracie allowed herself a glance at her injury. It was gruesome. Blood flowed heavily, her skin ripped and torn, and the chalky greyish-white of exposed knucklebones peeked through the skin flaps in several places.
“You see any doctors around here? Maybe an infirmary somewhere up inside that wreck of a Nazi ammo factory?”
“Of course not,” Gruber said, showing annoyance for the first time. “And that’s exactly why we need to get you out of here and to a hospital.”
“Agreed. And we’ll do that the minute we complete our mission.”
He stared at her, jaw hanging open. “Complete our mission? With you bleeding to death? You’re insane, do you know that?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m not sleeping with you.”
He shook his head in disbelief, unsure of what to say or do.
She said, “I’m not going to bleed to death, Gruber. Get real. My hand’s been ripped open, it’s not like I severed my carotid artery. We’ll bandage it up and then you can drive me to the hospital after we get out of here.”
She had tried to keep the pain out of her voice but couldn’t quite manage it. It quivered and shook, and she could feel herself slipping into shock. The fire continued to rage in her hand, the knuckles a furnace, flames racing up her fingers and arm.
On the bright side, Gruber seemed to have given up on arguing. He shook his backpack off his shoulders and began rummaging through it for the few medical supplies they had packed before leaving their Wuppertal safe house. After a moment he lifted out an ace bandage and plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “The bandage isn’t even long enough.”
“We’ll make do. Just dump the alcohol over my hand and wrap it up.”
“This is going to hurt something awful.”
“Thanks for the warning. Get on with it.”
Gruber sighed heavily and unscrewed the plastic cap. Then he lifted it and said, “I’m sorry about this, Fiona.” In one motion, he poured the contents over Tracie’s hand even as she held it cradled against her chest.
The pain blasted into the stratosphere.
It doubled.
Tripled.
She wouldn’t have thought it could get any worse than it already was, but it did. The liquid seared and burned, it was gasoline poured over a campfire.
She screamed again, the sound of her anguish booming down the tunnel and echoing back to them. Her vision wavered, the two flickering flashlight beams fading to pinpricks in the dark tunnel as consciousness threatened to desert her. She panted. She lowered her head almost to the hard-packed ground, willing herself not to pass out.
Seconds ticked by that felt like hours, and then Tracie felt herself return—more or less—to the land of the living. The fire continued to blast through her hand, stinging and throbbing, the pain dwarfing even that of getting shot, something she had experienced more than once.
“Bandage it up,” she said weakly. “I’d do it myself, but wrapping one-handed would take time we don’t have. Phoenix is in disarray right now with the elimination of Adolph Hitler and his devil-spawn son, but once the organization’s remaining leaders recover enough to start thinking clearly, this will be the first place they come.”
Gruber nodded. He reached out and moved her arm gently away from the protection of her body. Then he reached under her hand and began straightening her fingers. The bones ground together and electric shocks blasted through the waves of fire already burning through her injury.
“No,” she gasped. “Leave the fingers bent. You’re going to do more damage if you try to straighten them. Just stop the bleeding and protect the area as much as possible. We’ll leave the real medical stuff to the professionals after we get out of here.”
Tracie’s flashlight had fallen to the ground when she tumbled down the dirt pile, and its beam illuminated Gruber’s face at a crazy angle. Most of his features were covered in shadow, but she could still clearly see the skepticism in his expression.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t even know if the bandage is long enough to effectively stop the bleeding. You really did a number on that hand.”
“Believe me, I’m not likely to forget that any time soon,” she said. “Just do the best you can. Sitting here talking about it isn’t getting us anywhere.”
Without another word, Gruber placed the rolled-up bandage under her palm and began paying it out, rolling it around her hand, over the fingers and knuckles and then under, over and under, again and again.
The pain had begun to recede, just a bit, but now the fiery agony returned, and Tracie felt her gorge rising, and she turned her head and vomited on the ground, splashing herself and Gruber with stomach acid and partially digested food.
Gruber never said a word. He continued to wind the bandage around her injury, over and over.
38
November 19, 1987
10:20 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
“Sorry about puking on you,” Tracie said weakly.
They sat side by side on the tunnel floor, propped up against the dirt pile they had just cleared at such a high cost. The Ace bandage had been long enough to fully cover the injury, but Gruber’s concerns about stopping the bleeding seemed well founded. Tracie could already see a dark maroon smudge beginning to soak through.
“No problem,” he answered. “I figured it was just your way of reinforcing your message to me.”
“What message is that?”
“That you’re not going to sleep with me.”
Tracie chuckled. It was the best she could manage at the moment; a full-fledged laugh was out of the question.
Her breathing had returned more or less to normal, though, and while the pain in her left hand was still there, throbbing and noxious, she knew it was as manageable as it was going to get. She simply had to wall it off, compartmentalize it, acknowledge it and then move past it. She had done exactly that before, many times, and she would do it again today.
“Let’s keep going,” she said, “before this tunnel collapses once and for all and we end up sleeping together down here permanently.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “The sooner we get this done and get out of here, the happier I’ll be, even if it bring me that much closer to getting my head chopped off back at Langley.”
He looked over at Tracie. “I mean that figuratively, of course. Although you know Stallings pretty well. Maybe he’ll do it literally, too.”
She pushed herself to her feet, trying to ignore the pain in her hand and mostly succeeding. “Stallings is a teddy bear,” she said. “You just have to know how to handle him.”
“Teddy bear,” Gruber repeated. “From what I’ve heard, he’s more like a rabid, rampaging killer grizzly.”
“I suppose that characterization would work, too,” she said as she began trudging forward. She prayed there were no more hidden surprises waiting for them in the darkness, but doubted that prayer was going to be answered.
“How much farther do you think it could possibly be?” Gruber asked. “I mean, the Nazis buried the treasure underground in a secret location, probably known only to a select few. What would have been the advantage in hauling it farther down the tunnel than was necessary?”
It seemed a rhetorical question, since Tracie would have no way of knowing the answer any more than Gruber would. He was walking next to her with his head down, eyes on the tunnel floor. He looked exhausted and dispirited. The joking persona he had exhibited just seconds ago had disappeared.
“If I say I have a hunch that we’re getting close, would you believe me?”
“Not really.”
“Then look for yourself.” She rotated her flashlight toward him and waited for him to raise his eyes from the ground, then nodded toward the tunnel ahead. She aimed her light into the darkness and heard the sharp intake of breath as Gruber followed the beam.
