Hearts of Stone (33 page)

‘That may be so, but I am the ranking officer here and they are
my
orders. Be so good as to carry them out.’

‘Sir, I must protest—’

‘Then protest when we return to Lefkada!’ Steiner snapped. ‘For now, you will do as I say. I am your superior officer and if you question my authority again I will ensure that your insubordination is punished as swiftly and as harshly as possible. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir. But . . .’

‘But what, Hauptmann Dietrich?’ Steiner glared, defying the man to challenge him again.

Clenching his jaw, Dietrich saluted. ‘At your command, sir.’

‘That’s better. Carry out my orders at once. Then we can make our way to the site and I can complete my mission, as you have completed yours.’

‘Yes, sir.’

As the Hauptmann turned to his men, Peter eased himself up and returned to the side of the SS officer. He spoke in a low voice so that they would not be overheard. ‘Sir, he will be sure to report the matter to Salminger.’

‘Let him, if he dares. My orders come from Reichsführer Himmler, and I doubt he will take kindly to having them overridden by a junior field officer, or even his regimental commander.’

Peter saw that it would be pointless to pursue the subject and turned the conversation in a different direction. ‘At least the prisoner may provide some useful intelligence on the
andartes
, sir. The Oberstleutnant will be grateful for that anyway.’

Steiner glanced at the youth trembling as he sat hunched a short distance away. ‘That wretch? I doubt he will tell us anything of importance. He looks like a simpleton.’

Peter nodded. ‘Shall I have him released then, sir?’

He fully expected his superior to acquiesce and was on the point of turning round to tell the youth to join the other villagers inside the church when Steiner shook his head.

‘He might not provide any useful information but he might yet prove a useful example.’

‘Sir?’

Steiner rose stiffly to his feet and stretched his back. ‘I told you, Muller. These backwards peasants need to learn who their master is, and learn to fear him. And so they must be given a lesson, no?’

Peter frowned, and then felt a terrible stab of ice down the length of his spine as Steiner reached for his holster. ‘Sir, the villagers have already learned a lesson. Dietrich’s men have ransacked their homes and is about to burn several to the ground. That will be lesson enough for these people.’

‘I think not. They need a more telling example of the price to be paid for offering defiance to Germany.’ He drew his pistol and walked towards the youth.

Peter kept up with him. ‘There’s no need for this. Please, sir. Please . . .’ He swallowed anxiously and continued. ‘For pity’s sake, Heinrich, don’t do this.’

Steiner stopped abruptly and swerved round angrily. ‘Don’t dare to address me in such an informal manner ever again, Leutnant. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir, I understand well enough, but there are some things, some actions, that do not advance our cause. Harming the boy is one of them. We know these people well enough to know they will avenge him some day.’

‘I am not interested in their petty vendettas. Stay out of my way, Muller. I shan’t warn you again. I have tolerated your insolence so far out of respect for your father. Don’t test my patience any further.’

Peter swallowed nervously. ‘I apologise, sir. I meant no offence. Just to offer advice, as is the duty of any good officer.’

Steiner sniffed. ‘The duty of a good officer is to obey his superiors and to lead those below him.’

He stood over the petrified young islander, his pistol hand hanging at his thigh. Lifting his chin, Steiner addressed the captive harshly in Greek. ‘Up! On your feet!’

When the boy proved too terrified to obey, the SS officer stepped forward and kicked him, screaming, ‘UP!’

The explosion of violence and anger shook the boy into action and he scrambled up and pressed himself back against the wall of the church, his limbs shaking uncontrollably.

Keeping his pistol at his side, Steiner smiled. ‘That’s better! What is your name, boy?’

The youth’s jaw slackened and he licked his dry lips, his chin quivering. Steiner softened his tone. ‘Come now, tell me your name. That can’t hurt you, or your friends hiding out in the hills. Tell me that at least.’

‘M-Manolo . . .’

‘Now, Manolo, you must realise that you are in bad trouble. Those friends of yours have led you astray and left you behind to be taken by my men. You owe them nothing. Your only duty now is to yourself, and your family, who would grieve if anything happened to you. Right?’

The youth nodded hesitantly.

‘So I will give you a chance, Manolo. Tell me where they are hiding. Take me to their cave, or whatever shelter they are using, and I will set you free. Not only that, I’ll give you a reward and the promise of my protection. You’ll be perfectly safe . . . What is it to be, Manolo?’

The youth stared back, and then by some determined effort of self-control he stiffened his spine and raised his head. ‘I will say nothing.’

‘I thought not.’ Steiner raised his pistol casually, pointed the muzzle at the youth’s face and pulled the trigger. There was a dart of flame, a deafening report and the youth’s head lurched back as blood and brains exploded vividly across the whitewashed wall behind him. The body sagged and crumpled on to the ground, a ragged hole in the forehead above wide eyes and slack jaw.

‘No . . .’ Peter shook his head. ‘No.’

Steiner returned his weapon to his holster and glanced at the body before he turned away. ‘That’s that. Once Dietrich has fired the houses, our business here is complete. Then we can get on with our real work, Muller.’

But Peter was not listening. He was till staring in horror at the body.

‘Muller!’

He tore his gaze away and saw the frown on Steiner’s face. ‘Sir?’

‘Pull yourself together. The boy was a criminal. The Gestapo would have shot him if I hadn’t. The only difference is they would have made him suffer first. It was an act of mercy.’

‘Mercy?’

Steiner shrugged. ‘This is war, Muller. Mercy comes in many guises. Now, that’s enough. We’re wasting time.’

Half an hour later the German column was climbing the track from the village towards the site of the abandoned dig in the valley above. Behind them several thick columns of smoke billowed into the afternoon air. The crackle of the flames carried clearly to Peter’s ears as he paused momentarily to look back at the square in front of the church. He could see the small ring of darkly clad figures gathered around the body. A woman was hunched over the youth and as he watched she tipped her head back and a thin, inhuman shriek echoed off the surrounding hills. Peter looked away quickly and swallowed. Then he breathed deeply and continued in the footsteps of Sturmbannfüher Steiner.

Chapter Thirty

T
he track leading up to the archaeological site had become overgrown. Where it skirted around the slope of a hill, the edge had collapsed in several places after the winter rains had coursed down and over the track. Little of it seemed familiar to Peter as the column advanced warily, the men constantly watching for signs of an ambush. He tried to recall the times when he had been driven up the track by his father. The memories flooded back and made his heart heavy. The man who had loved him and raised him to share his fascination with history was gone. The loss was still too raw to accept. So he shifted his thoughts to Eleni and Andreas and the occasions when he had walked this ground with his two friends. It seemed long ago, distant, and he felt an ache inside at the thought of them and the conflict that had separated them and turned them into enemies. It was a hard thing to consider Andreas and Eleni as such, and painful to reflect that they would now consider him to be a hateful foe. That much was clear from the reception that her parents had given Peter.

He tried to thrust the hurt of that evening aside and chided himself for being so sentimental. Perhaps Steiner was right. War changed everything. Only the weak and naive clung to the values of peacetime. And yet he shuddered at the image burned into his mind of the execution of the boy back in the village. So sudden, so shocking . . . so barbaric, as if all the beliefs he had once been raised to accept and cherish had been no more than a thin veil to be torn aside to reveal the bestial reality of human nature. Perhaps war was the real face of humanity, and peace was little more than a pretence of what human nature could be. No more than a mask dreamed up by idealists.

It was a terrifying thought, all the more so because Peter feared that it was the unadorned truth. In a world where bombers razed German cities to the ground and incinerated tens of thousands of civilians at a time, there was no place for compassion and mercy to be shown to the enemy whether they wore uniforms or not. All that mattered was the survival of Germany. He paused at that. How long ago was it since he had surrendered the notion of victory? Even if the Führer and his followers still spoke of victory and warned that it was treason to be defeatist, Peter knew he was far from alone in regarding the war as a fight for survival. The crushing defeat at Stalingrad could not be dismissed as a setback. Germany was being battered at the fronts while bombs rained down on the heartland. On that scale, what was one more death in a dusty square of an obscure village on an insignificant island?

Hauptmann Dietrich had stopped ahead and was waiting for Steiner and Peter to catch up. Dietrich fell into step with them and looked at his wristwatch before addressing the SS officer.

‘Sir, it’s already gone fifteen hundred.’

‘I thank you for that information,’ Steiner replied curtly. ‘So?’

‘We still have over two kilometres to march before we reach the site. I have no idea how long you propose to spend there, but we’ll need to leave in good time to return to the trucks before dark.’

‘We will return when I say so, Dietrich.’

‘Sir, it would be dangerous to have to blunder through these hills in the darkness. The
andartes
know the ground. We do not. If they set a trap for us then we could suffer heavy losses.’

‘Really? I thought the mountain troops were supposed to be an elite force. An officer of the Waffen SS would show no such anxiety in the face of a handful of renegades and brigands.’

Dietrich took the insult with an affronted expression but was wise enough to keep his tone neutral as he responded. ‘I would not presume to lecture an officer of the SS in his area of expertise, sir. In the same manner, I would expect a brother officer to respect the specialism of myself and my men.’

‘Even a brother officer of the SS?’ Steiner grinned. ‘I know how the Wehrmacht looks down its nose at us, Dietrich. But we train as hard as you, and our commitment to Germany and the Führer runs deep and makes us a force to be reckoned with. By our own men, as well as the enemy. If you understand my meaning.’

Dietrich swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then be a good fellow and resume command of your men.’

They exchanged a brief salute before Dietrich increased his pace and made for the head of the column.

‘I find his attitude tiresome in the extreme,’ Steiner mused a moment later. ‘I’m thankful that you are only an artillery officer, Muller. I could not tolerate having to deal with two prima donnas today.’

Peter pressed his lips together and bit back on his anger towards the SS officer. They continued a little further before Steiner spoke again.

‘Are you not excited by the thought of returning to the site of your father’s greatest work? If I am right about what we may discover there, then Dr Muller’s name will rival that of Schliemann.’

‘It is an appealing prospect, sir, and no more than my father deserves. He gave his life to uncovering the secrets of the ancient world.’

‘And I played no small part in his work,’ Steiner added. ‘And now you follow in his footsteps, as my assistant. Perhaps we shall share some of the fame that will be accorded to the doctor. That would be quite an honour, and one we shall both richly deserve. I should think that the Reichsführer will decorate us both if this works out as I hope. We shall be heroes.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Peter forced himself to return the other man’s smile even as he felt contempt for Steiner’s naked attempt to take the credit for the long years his father had given to his exploration of the Greek islands.

Ahead of them he could see the entrance to the valley, the steep slopes of the hills on either side crowding the track. If the
andartes
were planning an ambush, that was a likely spot for it to take place. Hauptmann Dietrich had seen it as well and a moment later he halted the column and set two squads of men to scout the slopes either side of the track. He allowed them a hundred-metre head start before he waved the column forward again. They passed through the gorge that had been formed by the torrents that rushed out of the valley, leaving gravel and large stones in their wake. Peter recalled that his father had often had to hire islanders to clear the larger stones away to permit vehicles to gain access to the site and the neglect of recent years had left the track almost impassable to vehicles. The gorge had once seemed a place of spectacle and beauty to Peter but now it felt gloomy and threatening and he was glad when they had passed through it and emerged into the valley beyond. Above the crests of the surrounding hills the sky was overcast and the sun was only visible as a pale disc. Soon it would have passed beyond the rocky skyline and the shadows would begin to creep into the valley.

The track climbed on to higher ground that overlooked the dig, the closest that vehicles could come to the site, and Peter quickened his pace until he stood amid the stunted shrubs on the edge of the rise. Below, the valley floor stretched out and on it lay the corrugated roofs of the sheds that had stored the archaeologists’ tools and less valuable finds. The long table was still there, and the benches, but there was little sign of the area that had been divided up into grids and carefully dug up over the years that the German team had worked on the site. Nature had crept back over the trenches and heaps of spoil and blanketed them in tufts of spiked grass and saplings struggling to take over the abandoned dig. It was a melancholy scene, made more so by the dull light and the cool and clammy breeze that blew softly through the valley.

‘I never thought I’d see this place again,’ Steiner broke into his thoughts. ‘Not once the war began, at any rate. My life has changed a good deal since the days when I took a consuming interest in the past. It’s the future I look to now.’

Peter smiled to himself. It seemed strange that so much store was put on the past and the future when really it was only the present moment that a person could ever truly know. The rest was little more than stories doomed to eventually fade, or dreams of what might be. A strange mood gripped Peter, evoked by his most vivid memories of his father, when he had seen him at his happiest. And it was also a time when he himself had been happy and too content to know that he was living a blessed existence on the island.

‘Come on.’ Steiner gestured towards the ground in front of the shed. ‘We haven’t got time to waste reminiscing. We can do that later when we have what we came for.’

The column descended and Dietrich posted sentries around the perimeter of the site and ordered the rest of his men to fall out. Steiner and Peter crossed to the table. The SS officer sat on a bench, set his sidebag down and unfastened the straps so that he could take out his notebook. He flipped it open and Peter could see diagrams of the site, neatly labelled and interspersed with what were clearly original notes, and newer comments in the margins, written in red ink.

‘Where do we begin looking, sir?’

Steiner tapped the notebook. ‘Your father mentioned a cave, yet I was never aware of any cave during my time here. How about you?’

Peter shook his head, then looked up and briefly scanned the landscape. The dig and the surrounding area were on generally even ground. To one side a cliff rose up for a hundred metres or so with a tree-fringed crest looming over the site. Opposite the site another boulder-strewn slope stretched up to a rounded peak that dominated the centre of the island. There was no sign of a cave, and nothing that he could recall that indicated the presence of one.

‘If this cave contains a tomb then it would be reasonable to expect that it would have a large enough entrance to be obvious, unless it was intended that it be concealed,’ said Peter. ‘I think we should begin our search along the foot of the cliff there.’

Steiner looked up. ‘I agree.’

He called Dietrich over and explained his intentions. ‘The Leutnant and I are seeking a cave. I want you and your men to be on the lookout for anything that might help us locate it. Even the smallest fissure or hint that something has been covered over. They are to report anything they find to me at once. Clear?’

‘Yes, sir. How long do you propose to search the site?’

‘As long as it takes me, Dietrich. When I am finished, I will let you know.’

‘I understand, sir, and we can secure the site overnight, if you wish. But there is the question of the trucks. I have left twelve men behind to guard them. They will be vulnerable if they remain where we left them overnight. I must send them back to Lefkada, or reinforce them before nightfall.’

Steiner considered a moment before he responded. ‘Send half of your men back to protect the lorries, Hauptmann.’

‘Yes, sir. I will give the orders at once.’

Steiner nodded in acknowledgement and then flipped his notebook closed and stood up. ‘Well, Peter, let’s go and make your father a famous man.’

He led the way across the site towards the thin screen of trees and shrubs that grew out from the base of the cliff. ‘You start here. I’ll begin at the other end and work back towards you.’

‘What about Dietrich’s men, sir?’

‘What about them?’

‘We could use some help.’

‘I don’t think they would be helpful. This is work for the trained eye. We know what to look for. We know the clues: a shard of pottery, a fragment of a sculpture, an unusual formation in the terrain. Things that Dietrich’s men would overlook. Besides, the honour of discovery belongs to us alone, no?’

‘Very well, sir.’

He saluted and Steiner responded with a curt nod before he turned away and strode over the clear ground towards the point where the cliff ended in a jumble of fallen boulders half a kilometre away. Peter watched him go with a sense of relief. He was finding the SS officer’s company a strain on his nerves, far more so following the shooting in the village. Steiner had a cold streak in him and was determined to let nothing stand in the way of him winning favour with his superiors. Peter was not fooled by his moments of bonhomie and sentimental reference to their shared past. Steiner was merely trying to curry favour so as to complete his task more swiftly. When it was over he would almost certainly discard Peter, and all his father’s work, and claim the full credit for himself.

Looking up at the sky, Peter guessed that there was little more than an hour of good light left before dusk settled over the island. Barely enough time to search the base of the cliff. After that he and the others would face a cold night in the open before resuming their search in the morning. The prospect did not appeal to him, even though the terrain around him reminded him of happier times with his father and friends. Then the search for the treasures of the ancients had been a noble pursuit, carried out to extend the understanding of the past. Now, it was merely a looting expedition conducted on the order of a party leader who knew little of the past, nor cared much about it. If the tomb was here then it would simply be a prize of war, not accorded the care and reverence that his father would have approached its discovery and unearthing. For a moment Peter was tempted by the notion of not revealing the tomb if he chanced on it before Steiner. It would be better that it was left alone until the war was over and the matter handled in an unhurried way by experts who did not have to look over their shoulders in fear of the
andartes
, or who worked under the guns of German soldiers . . .

Yes, he hoped that he would be the one to discover the tomb, and then have the courage to conceal his find from the SS officer.

Easing his way through the gorse bushes growing at the end of the cliff, Peter began to work his way along, eyes scanning the ground for any sign of an opening in the rocks, or an inscription carved into their surface. The failing light made the task more difficult and he had only gone fifty metres or so when he heard a distant shout and paused. It took an instant before he realised the defiant cry had been in Greek. Then a fusillade of shots crashed out, the sharp note of rifles and the harsh clatter of automatic fire. A moment later the first grenades exploded, the roar of their detonations echoing round the steep sides of the valley.