The Black Gate (25 page)

“They’re all mad,” Mina whispered.

Baumann slammed a knee into von Falkenstein’s crotch, but the older man used the reflexive doubling over to his advantage to drive Baumann back hard against the railing. The younger man lost his grip on von Falkenstein’s gun hand for just a moment, but that was all von Falkenstein needed. Jamming the pistol under Baumann’s ribs, he pulled the trigger three times. Three holes appeared in Baumann’s lower back and sprays of blood arced out to fall into the abyss.

As von Falkenstein backed away, running the back of one hand across his mouth, Baumann slumped to the catwalk beside the open door to the cage.
 

The other men on the catwalk began to charge toward von Falkenstein, leaping over their fallen comrade, but stopped when von Falkenstein shot the lead man, who stumbled and fell to the grating, his hands over the bullet wound in his throat, blood spraying from his carotid artery.

Quickly, von Falkenstein stripped out of his clothes, leaving them on the grate.
 

“He’s going to send himself through, the fool,” Peter hissed.

“Not before Baumann,” Mina replied, pointing.

While the enraged SS soldiers held von Falkenstein’s attention as he stripped, Baumann, still alive, had pulled himself to the edge of the open trap door of the cage.
 

“No!” Von Falkenstein roared as he caught sight of Baumann tumbling from the catwalk toward the gate. He fired a shot at him and missed. The soldiers on the catwalk charged again. Von Falkenstein turned and fired, dropping yet another man, but this time they didn’t stop. He pulled the trigger once more, but the pistol was empty. Throwing it to the floor, he turned and leaped through the trap door in a perfect high dive toward the darkness.

Peter watched Baumann fall, losing sight of him just before he hit the threshold of the gate. He looked at his watch, marking the time.
One hundred twenty-three point seven eight seconds
.

The soldiers, twenty-seven of them, were running along the catwalk. Like
Fallschirmjäger
jumping from a plane, they leaped through the trap door feet first, their arms crossed over their chests. Every one of them shouted “
Heil
Hitler!” as he leaped.

Peter began running to the stairs that led up to the command platform. “We’ve got to shut down the gate! Before they come through!”

“I can’t fight nearly that many,” Mina agreed as she trotted beside him, her eyes straying to the people trapped in the corral, who recoiled from the sight of her blood-splashed body.

“It’s not Baumann’s men that we have to worry about,” Peter told her, cursing as he stumbled. He would have fallen had Mina not taken his arm and held him up, gently, but with the force of a giant lifting a moth on its fingertip. “It’s the other things on the far side that I’m worried about.”

“Help us!”

They turned to the plaintive cry from a woman who had stepped away from her terrified comrades and reached for Mina through the gaps in the fence that held her and the others captive. Peter recognized her as one of the kitchen staff. Baumann hadn’t stopped at the
Organisation Todt
laborers to fuel his planned feeding frenzy. “
Fräulein
Hass, have mercy! Please help us!”

Mina slowed, and Peter grabbed her arm. “We don’t have time! Baumann will drop through the gate in less than two minutes!”

She paused, uncertain.
 

“If we can shut down the gate before Baumann emerges,” Peter said, “he and the others will be trapped on the other side and these people will be safe.”

Mina opened her mouth to reply, but her words were stolen by the thunder of gunfire and an unearthly bellow from the tunnel that led down to Level Three. Both of them turned to stare as a group of soldiers emerged, blasting away at some unseen pursuer.
 

“Oh, God,” Peter said, changing his mind and letting go of Mina. “Get them out of there.”

Stepping up to the fence, she grabbed the top wire and snapped it like thread, grimacing as arcs of what to the captives would have been lethal current danced over her arms. She did the same for the other three wires, casting them aside. Her coveralls were charred and smoking in patches, but she was otherwise unharmed.

“Run!” Mina shouted to the stunned crowd. “Get to the surface if you can!”

Peter wasn’t sure where they could run to, but at least they might have a chance. Taking Mina’s arm, he turned and ran to the stairs leading to the command platform and began to climb. His right leg gave out halfway up, and Mina wrapped her arm around his waist to keep him from falling.
 

“We only have thirty seconds left!” He told her after looking at his watch. “We’ve got to hurry!”

Mina lifted him clear of the steps, her arm an iron band around his midsection that barely allowed him to breathe, before racing upward.

They had just reached the command platform when the air raid siren began to wail.

INTO HELL

“We’ve reached the initial point.” The bombardier of the lead Lancaster bomber made a slight adjustment to his bombsight as the crosshairs scrolled over the small town of Glösingen nearly six miles below. He felt the pilot, following the remote course indicator in the cockpit, give the plane just a touch of left rudder. “On course to target.”
 

“Roger,” the pilot said, his voice tense.

“We’re not going to miss this time,” the bombardier muttered to himself. Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft had confirmed good weather over the target that morning, which was the first break in the heavy cloud cover that had enshrouded Arnsberg since the failed raid four days before. The air was clear as glass, with nothing more than a few wispy clouds to the north. RAF Bomber Command and 617 Squadron had put those four days to good use, converting more bombers to carry the huge Grand Slam bomb. The squadron had put nineteen Lancasters into the air that morning, six with Grand Slams and thirteen with Tallboys.
 

The bombardier narrowed his eyes in concentration as the curving Ruhr River came into view. “A bloody pasting you’re going to get today, Jerry.”
 

***

“
Hoth, shut down the gate!
” Peter shouted over the keening wail of the air raid siren and the sounds of battle and slaughter coming from the lower part of the chamber.
 

The scientist turned from his console to look at him and slowly shook his head. But his refusal wasn’t out of spite. Peter could see the terror in his eyes, and sweat beaded his face and neck.

Peter and Mina skidded to a stop beside him. Hoth cringed away from her. “Damn you, man,” Peter cried, “shut it down before it’s too late! You know what’s going to happen with that many men going through!”
 

Only fifteen seconds remained on the mission counter, the numbers rapidly spinning down.

“I’m sorry,” a familiar voice said from behind them, “but the gate will remain open.”

They whirled around to find Kleist holding a gun in one hand and a liquid sprayer in the other. His white lab coat was smudged with soot and streaks of blood, and the fabric along the bottom was ripped, shredded. A gash ran across his left temple, and he blinked behind his thick spectacles as blood dripped into his eye.

“I was wondering when you would show up,” he told them as he took a step closer. “I did not expect the
Herr Professor
, and he took me from behind when he emerged from the elevator. But you two…”

He broke off as Hoth reached for the control panel. Kleist shot him in the head, and the portly scientist’s body slumped over the panel.

The other men of the operations team got up from their positions and fled for the elevator.
 

“You fool!” Peter shouted, taking a step toward Kleist.

“No!” Mina stepped in front of him as Kleist fired again.

Peter felt as if someone had punched him hard in the gut. He put a hand to his uniform just above his navel and felt something warm, wet.

Mina turned as Peter’s legs buckled and he went to his knees. “Peter?”
 

He looked up at her and held out his fingers, covered in blood. “He shot me,” he said quietly before the world lost all its color.

With a bestial snarl, Mina whirled back toward Kleist, baring her teeth as her eyes glowed like hot coals.
 

But her snarl turned into a shriek of agony as she was enveloped in the mist blasted from the sprayer Kleist was holding. The smell of ozone, which was nearly overpowering when the gate was in operation, was overwhelmed by that of ammonia, the same chemical concoction Kleist had used on her when she’d come through the gate. Her skin began to bubble and melt away.

Kleist laughed, but not for long. Instead of curling into a ball of pain, Mina leaped forward, driving a hand, fingers extended like a sword blade, through the center of his chest, smashing through flesh and bone to take hold of his heart.

Eyes and mouth wide open in shocked surprise, Kleist crumpled to the floor as she yanked the organ, still frantically beating, from his body. Dropping it to the floor with a wet splat, she staggered out of the cloud of mist. Grabbing Peter by his uniform collar, she dragged him clear.

“Oh, God,” Peter moaned, looking at the countdown timer as he desperately clung to consciousness. He managed to get to his feet, leaning on one of the consoles. Mina stood beside him, gasping in pain as her body began to heal itself.
 

The lower half of the chamber was writhing, bloody pandemonium. The things from the cell block had followed the fleeing soldiers up the service tunnel Peter and Mina had taken. Now a pitched battle raged below the gate, with the mob of freed laborers darting to and fro among the combatants like a school of terrified fish. None of them knew the freight elevator in the tunnel could have taken them to the surface. Instead, those who could break free of the monstrosities made for the personnel elevator, which only a few could ride at a time.
 

The timer spun down to zero. Without ceremony, Baumann’s naked body dropped from the ring into the center of the maelstrom. A moment later, von Falkenstein followed.

Like two stones tossed into a pond, the new arrivals caused a ripple effect among the men and beasts around them. Peter stared as the two newly minted immortals quickly shook off the effects of the transit, then threw themselves upon one another in a savage frenzy.

“Peter,” Mina cried, “we’ve got to shut down the gate before the others come through!”
 

“Too late,” Peter rasped as another figure fell through the gate, the first of the soldiers who had followed von Falkenstein. The other SS soldiers emerged in quick succession, landing atop one another in the receiving cage in an undignified heap. Peter pointed to the inner edge of the great ring, where the solid black was peeling away from the superconductor, the gap between filled with millions of arcs of cyan lightning. “The gate’s destabilizing.”
 

The last of the SS men fell from the gate, but he never made it to the receiving cage. With a terror filled scream, he was seized by a tentacle that whipped out of the gate behind him. The tentacle was attached to an amorphous nightmare the size of a blue whale that plummeted through the portal, slamming to the floor below with a deep thud that reverberated through the cavern. More tentacles sprouted from its churning red flesh, lashing out to snatch up more victims, human and otherwise. The tentacles pressed their squirming prey into puckers that opened in the beast’s flesh, where their bodies began to dissolve, as if by an extremely caustic acid.

He tore his eyes away from the dreadful spectacle as Mina took his arm. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

He shook his head. “There’s no time.” Reaching inside his tunic, he took out the two journals and handed them to her. “If I don’t make it, you’ve got to get these to Aaron Connelly in the OSS,” he told her. “He’ll know what to do with them. To decipher them, there’s a book in my library that he’ll need. It’s called…”

“
You traitorous whore!
”

The two of them looked up to find von Falkenstein, naked and covered in blood, standing over them. Peter caught himself before he looked directly into the professor’s eyes, but it was clear from the expression on von Falkenstein’s face that he had gone mad.

With a roar of fury Mina leaped, sending the journals spinning across the floor. She slammed into von Falkenstein, knocking him backward a dozen paces. Laughing, he got to his feet and charged toward her. The two collided like freight trains, trading blows in blurred motion as they did a dance of death across the command platform.
 

Peter pulled himself along the floor toward Hoth’s console. He could shut down the gate, but one look into the pit of carnage below told him that even if he did, it would be too late. He saw Baumann and a handful of his immortal soldiers now fighting as a team, alternately feeding on the panicked civilians and fighting off the monstrosities that continued to emerge from the gate. Looking back at the battle raging behind him between Mina and von Falkenstein, he knew their contest could have only one outcome. Just as he had been as a mere human, von Falkenstein was larger and stronger. Mina was holding her own for now, but that couldn’t last. And if von Falkenstein survived, all would be lost in the end. With infinite time on his side, he would eventually resurrect the gate technology and continue his disastrous pursuits.

There was only one option left.

Focusing on his grim purpose, he pushed Hoth’s body onto the floor and took his place in the blood stained seat. Hoth’s log book was where it always was, clipped to the left side of his control panel. It had the coordinates and notes for every one of the transits since the project began. Peter turned it to the first page and studied the very first entry. With painstaking care, he entered the coordinates into the keyboard on the console. Hoth had told him once that changing the coordinates while the gate was open was theoretically possible, but von Falkenstein had never allowed it for fear of damaging the ring. Peter did not have the luxury of waiting for a better time.