The Belial Rebirth, page 1
Books By R.D. Brady
Hominid
The Belial Series (in order)
The Belial Stone
The Belial Library
The Belial Ring
Recruit: A Belial Series Novella
The Belial Children
The Belial Origins
The Belial Search
The Belial Guard
The Belial Warrior
The Belial Plan
The Belial Witches
The Belial War
The Belial Fall
The Belial Sacrifice
The Belial Rebirth Series
The Belial Rebirth
The Belial Spear (coming in January 2021)
The A.L.I.V.E. Series
B.E.G.I.N.
A.L.I.V.E.
D.E.A.D.
R.I.S.E.
S.A.V.E.
The H.A.L.T. Series
H.A.L.T (coming in December 2020)
The Steve Kane Series
Runs Deep
Runs Deeper
The Unwelcome Series
Protect
Seek
Proxy
The Nola James Series
Surrender the Fear
Escape the Fear
Published as Riley D. Brady
The Key of Apollo
The Curse of Hecate
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“All is not set. The future remains uncertain. The path of Giza is still unwinding. The forces of evil will not sleep. Another showdown will come.”
- Prophesy of Max Finley
“Time brings all things to pass.”
- Aeschylus
Prologue
May 1, 1945
Wenceslas Mine, Poland
The air was stuffy and filled with the scent of gasoline and fear. The Allies’ advance had surged in the last few weeks. There was talk that the end of the war was near, and that the Führer’s forces could not hold out much longer.
It was not the ending the Nazis had promised.
In anticipation, the Beehive, as the Wenceslas Mine was nicknamed, was more abuzz than ever, rushing to complete Hitler’s most secret project.
Two SS officers in their brown uniforms, the swastika prominently outlined in red on their arms, walked by Marta Leitner. Their passage brought the scent of body odor and desperation more strongly toward her. She wrinkled her nose, her hand discreetly pressing down on the edge of her nose to reduce the offending smell’s impact, but she didn’t look up long from her desk.
She was so close.
She bit her lower lip as her curled brown bangs slipped from her bun and down her forehead. She ignored that as well. The calculations on the page held her complete attention.
Only two more minutes passed before she straightened, staring at the numbers. Was that it? Was she done?
She bent her head again, checking her math while a current of excitement raced through her. Her pencil tapped against the edge of the scarred wooden table, the only sign of the thrill that ran through her that she would allow.
Finally, she sat back, her mouth falling open. A smile burst across her face with a little gasp of delight. She slammed her hands over her mouth. Her brown eyes grew larger as she looked around quickly, but no one had heard the outburst.
She sat on a stool in one of the four labs in the Wenceslas Mine. The mines had been built under the Owl Mountains in southwestern Poland, eighty kilometers southwest of Wroclaw.
The Third Reich had taken over the mine two years earlier with the establishment of Project Riese under the express orders of Adolf Hitler in 1943. After the Allies began air raids on Germany, the Nazis knew they needed to move their manufacturing underground. The site had been created by POWs for arms manufacturing, but that was not its biggest contribution to the war effort. Covering a sprawling 90,000 kilometers, with seven entry points, it was essentially an underground city.
Very few within even the Nazis’ highest ranks knew of its existence because the Wenceslas Mine was the site of the creation of the greatest of Hitler’s Wunderwaffe. The scientists at the site had been entrusted with the most critical of the Führer’s technological weapons.
It was the site of the Die Glocke experiment.
A group of four scientists, all male, stood at a table across the lab arguing over the safety parameters of the experiment scheduled for later in the day.
Not one of them noticed Marta. No one ever did unless they needed something.
Marta studied her calculations again, looking for a mistake, a misplaced or transposed number. But there was no mistake. She had done it. Her mouth dropped open again.
She narrowed her eyes, staring at the four men who had been entrusted with the Die Glocke experiment. They had floundered for weeks, unable to make the necessary connections. But Marta had made them.
Marta had studied chemistry and physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She had taken graduate courses her sophomore year and achieved a double PhD in record time. Yet here, she did little more than check other scientists’ work and clean equipment.
As a woman, she was not viewed as a peer among the other scientists. At the university, she had been lucky to work with scientists unconcerned with matters of gender—the science was all that mattered.
But like so many things, the Reich had changed all of that. Now, gender was a factor, although not as critical as religion, ethnicity, and appearance. There was nothing she could do about her brown hair, sallow skin, and nearly copper eyes, but she had kept her Jewish heritage hidden. She knew what awaited her if it ever became known.
The scientists across the room ended their discussion. Nials Borger broke away from the group and headed for Marta. Nials was the personification of what the Reich wanted all their people to look like: tall, blond, with piercing blue eyes. He still somehow maintained a warm tan despite spending months down in the mines. Too alarmed by her ashen skin, which had only seemed to grow paler, and the weight that seemed to seep from her body daily, Marta had stopped looking at herself in the mirror a few months back.
Marta quickly covered her calculations, carefully ripping the papers from the notebook and sliding them closer to her.
A malicious gleam entered Nials’s eyes as he crossed the room.
Marta slipped the pages off the table and looked up at him from her seated position. “Marta, we will run the energy trial again this afternoon. You need to set up the experiment. It will need to be ready by one p.m. No mistakes.”
Marta swallowed down her annoyance. She had been at the university with Nials. He had been a below-average student. Five years her senior, he had bristled at a woman being in his classes and bristled even more at such a young one. The fact that Marta was regularly at the top of the class, while he was almost always at the bottom, further incited his anger.
But here, his money, connections, and sex had placed him in the top sphere of decision-makers. Marta had been given a choice between being killed or going to work for the Nazis. No choice was necessary for Nials. He had proudly worn his Nazi allegiance on his arm as he paraded around campus.
Marta inclined her head. “Of course.”
Nials stared down at her, his mouth drifting to the sides in disappointment. He always tried to get a rise out of her. It never worked.
He leaned forward. “We will use the power source in the experiment today. The energy levels are beyond anything we’ve ever seen. You are lucky to be a witness to this level of science. You should be grateful.”
“Oh, I am grateful,” Marta replied, her gaze moving past Nials to the box that held the power source that had arrived three weeks ago. As incompetent as Nials was, he was right about the energy source. It was incomparable to anything else.
A shiver of dread yet again rolled down Marta’s back as she imagined what the Reich would do with it.
The door to the lab flew open. Marta’s head snapped up, and even Nials whirled around. Jakob Sporrenberg stumbled in. Tall, with a wide, beefy face, Sporrenberg was the highest-ranking SS officer in the Beehive.
He was also an unintelligent brute, reminding Marta of a gorilla. But what he lacked in intelligence, he made up for with fanatical loyalty to the Reich. There was nothing they could ask him to do that he wouldn’t. The 42,000 dead Jews he left behind in Poland were proof of that.
Everyone in the room got to their feet. Marta did as well. Nials stepped to the side and bumped into her, his hands knocking into her side.
“Be careful,” he hissed at her as if she had been the clumsy one.
The room was silent as they waited for Sporrenberg to speak. No one had seen him since yesterday around noon. But everyone had heard the violence in his office. Something had happened.
Jakob scanned the room with red bloodshot eyes. “Everything must be prepared to move out. The trucks will arrive in four hours.”
“Moved? Where to?” Dr. Klaus Schieber, the head scientist, strode forward, his white coat flapping behind his gaunt frame.
“Argentina. The work will continue from there.”
Klaus shook his head. “It’s not possible that fast. We need more time. This is too important to the Führer to risk—”
Sporrenberg’s words lashed out across the room. “The Führer is dead.”
Marta gasped, grabbing onto the table. Hitler was dead?
“The Allies have conquered Berlin?” Nials asked.
“They are close. But our great leader has been killed.
Marta narrowed her eyes, watching him. He was lying. She didn’t doubt that Hitler was dead. The grief pouring out of the man was obvious. But he hadn’t been killed. Was it possible … could he have killed himself?
It seemed insane, but if the Allies were closing in, he would not want to be taken alive. Marta closed her eyes. It was over. The nightmare of Hitler’s rule was over. Pain and loss for all those who suffered at his hands crowded through her body. A sob rolled through her, and tears sprang to her eyes.
Sporrenberg’s head whipped toward her. He nodded, misreading her tears. “Yes, it’s true. But we will finish our Führer’s final wish. We will wipe his enemies from the face of the earth.”
Klaus snapped his heels together, extending his arm. “Heil Hitler!”
Nials quickly followed suit, as did the other scientists, soldiers, and technicians in the large room.
Only Marta refrained from the salute. Yet again, no one noticed. Fanaticism was stamped across all of their faces. She knew they would complete this project, and the world would pay in blood.
She could not let that happen.
Slipping her hand into her pocket, she felt the notes there and the promise they held. She wanted to check them once more, but if they were leaving today, there wasn’t time. And if she failed, well, that would be catastrophic for her but more importantly for the world.
Marta stood, her gaze focused on the power source across the room. Now she just needed to wait for her moment.
It took three hours. Marta grew more tense as the minutes, then hours passed. But there were too many people around, double the normal number as everyone prepared for the move.
Plus, she was being run ragged packing away notes and equipment. Finally, though, she saw her chance. Nials and Klaus had stepped from the room. Six soldiers lined the area, picking up crates and taking them outside.
Marta made her way to the crate that held the power source. It would be one of the last placed on the trucks. Shooting a glance at the SS guard with his back to her only ten feet away, she carefully propped open the top. She pulled the straw away and then pushed aside the red silk fabric. Nestled within it was the power source.
It was five inches in circumference, but not perfectly round, with angles cut into it. It looked like a massive diamond.
But it was more priceless than a diamond could ever be. Marta didn’t know how the power source had been found. It had simply shown up on a transport a month ago from Berlin. But she had no doubt it had been found and not created. It was too advanced for anyone to be that skilled. The energy emitted from it had blown the electricity in the lab the first day it had been tested. It had caused great excitement within the scientists; even Marta had been in awe of it.
It was a portable power source, its energy levels beyond the capability of their machines to measure. The other scientists hadn’t realized what it could do, much like they did not realize what the Die Glocke could do.
But Marta had known almost immediately. And when she could, she had written down the measurements they had taken of its energy output. Combined with the calculations she had done on the Die Glock, she now knew what the project could do.
And it was so much more than any of them suspected. And if they ever realized its true potential … She didn’t even want to think about that.
Without giving herself a chance to second-guess herself, she grabbed the sphere and slipped it into the bag at her side. Carefully closing the crate’s lid, she hurried toward the exit.
Klaus stepped into the hall. Two guards appeared at his shoulders. “Marta, where are you going?”
Marta skidded to a stop, her heart pounding. “I-I am not feeling well. I thought perhaps some fresh air would revive me.”
“It has been a troubling day. But there’s much work still to be done. Do not take long. The Führer is counting on us.” Klaus patted her shoulder as he passed.
No, the world is counting on me, Marta thought as she hurried past.
Marta kept her hand on the bag as she made her way down the hall. Warmth seeped through the burlap, encouraging her to go on. She kept her head down and stayed along the edge of the tunnel, trying not to attract attention. Everyone was too busy to pay her any mind.
It was a ten-minute trip to the surface. At the last stairwell, Marta ran. Not just because of the urgency of what she needed to do, but because she desperately wanted to be outside. She burst out of the door and stopped, closing her eyes. The day was overcast with a slight wind that stirred her hair. Marta drank it in. God, sometimes she felt like the walls inside the mine were closing in on her.
Someone stepped out behind her. She turned and saw a technician carrying a wooden box. He nodded at her. She returned the acknowledgment before heading to the left. The prisoners who had been forced to create the mine had also been forced to eke out a trail around the hillside, one lined with rocks.
Marta hurried forward. Time was of the essence. The trail was two hundred yards long and circled toward the clearing that was out of sight of the nearest mine entrance. Trees lined the path and, despite the tension running through her, Marta took the time to breathe deeply and appreciated the slight wind that was blowing. She missed being able to walk outside whenever she wanted. She missed the sun, the wind, even cloudy days, perhaps especially cloudy days. It always felt as if the world was smaller on those days, cozier. She used to love sitting with her mother in the window seat in the front parlor when it rained. They’d sit and just watch the world go by.
I miss you, Mama. Her breath came out in a tremble. But I will see you soon.
She lifted her gaze to the Bell’s testing ground as it appeared in the break of the trees. The theater, as it was called, was a long flat platform fifty feet in diameter and ringed by an interconnected series of concrete arches. There was no ceiling. To a layperson, it probably looked like a throwback to an old pagan altar space. Built a year ago, it had only recently been put to use.
And sitting in its center was the reason for its existence—a device that was the pinnacle of human technological ability. She did not agree with the Nazis’ policies, but she could not deny that they were better than anyone in the world at creating weapons of war. The Wunderwaffe was an array of high-tech designs.
A shiver ran through Marta at the thought of the damage they could have done. Marta knew a large part of the news reports on the weapons were simply propaganda. But the V-weapons had demonstrated how detrimental German weapons of war could be. There had been plans for highly armored submarines, aircraft carriers, anti-tank weapons, massive tanks, battleships, and an array of rocket-propelled weaponry. Most had never made it beyond the prototype phase. But even the rumor of them helped bolster German morale.
But some had succeeded, many of them simply improvements on weapons used in World War I. The Tiger tanks had destroyed Allied tanks, its KwK 36 gun shredding the opposition while its heavy armor plating kept it safe from even anti-tank rounds. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter helped them rule the air while the U-boats sank over 2,000 Allied ships. And then there was the Panzerfaust. A simple weapon, it was amazingly effective against tanks and could be used by just about anyone.
But none of those weapons, either the ones realized or just imagined, could do the damage of the Bell. It was so much more dangerous than anything that had been created before, and yet it looked so harmless. It stood in the middle of the theater, held upright by strong, taut cables attached to the archways. It was a bell-shaped metal object, standing nine feet wide and twelve feet tall. Someone had painted a swastika on its face. Marta had only seen it up close once, and she’d noted a series of inscriptions along the widest part of the Bell. They looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs, although it was not her area of expertise, so she couldn’t be sure. But what she did know was that the symbols were not German, Polish, or even Russian.
Marta did not know who had created the Bell itself. She wondered if perhaps it was beyond even the minds of the Nazi scientists. But she did not understand who would be capable of such a technological feat.
She knew that Himmler was attracted to objects from the occult and that he had sent people across the globe looking for ancient objects. As she stared at the Bell, she couldn’t help but think this was one of those acquisitions. And that it was much older than the Nazis’ dreams of world domination.
