The Project (19 page)

“You can’t stop us,” Luke said. “We have to do this.”

Gerda shook her head. “Nazi Germany, in 1944, is at war. You will not last a day without proper papers. And Berchtesgaden at the end of the war was a secure zone. Even the German public was not allowed to enter.”

“Then help us,” Ms. Sheck said.

Gerda looked away. “Now you are asking too much.”

“Are we?” Luke asked. “Is it too much to ask that we stop Adolf Hitler from killing millions of innocent people?”

“Hitler was a great man,” Gerda said.

“Hitler was a madman,” Tommy said.

“He could have been a great man,” Gerda said. “He should have been a great man.”

“If you don’t help us, Gerda, millions of people will die,” Ms. Sheck said. “This time it’s not up to Hitler. It’s not up to your brother, Erich. Right now, it’s on your shoulders. Could you really go dancing and partying knowing that you could have saved so many lives but did nothing?”

There was a long silence.

“Forget about her; forget about the papers,” Luke said. “We have to go now or we will lose them.”

A small, tired voice seemed to come from somewhere deep inside Gerda. “Wait. We have a few minutes. I know where he is heading. And I can make you the right papers.”

She turned and indicated with a glance that they should follow her.

“Thank you, Gerda,” Ms. Sheck said.

On the way up the staircase, Gerda said, “From Obersalzberg, Erich will commandeer a car and drive down to Berchtesgaden town, to the Bahnhof, the railway station. In those days, the train to Munich ran just twice a day, so he will wait there for the train. At Munich, he will change trains for Berlin. He is taking the plans directly to the Führer.”

“Why 1944?” Luke asked. “Why not take the plans back
to 1939 and give them to Hitler at the start of the war?”

“We did not find the Vitruvian chamber until 1944,” she said. “If Erich was to appear, out of nowhere, talking about a project that was yet to exist, he would likely end up in a Gestapo interrogation cell instead of the Führer’s private office.”

She held on tightly to the handrail as she walked, the stairs difficult for her. She continued. “The settings on the chamber are not so exact either. An inch could throw out your destination by years. Our accuracy is within a month at the best. Erich is aiming for September of 1944, which will still give our scientists time to build the bomb before the end of the war.”

At the top of the stairs, she led them down a passageway to the office they had noticed earlier.

From a folder in a drawer in the desk, she took blank identity cards emblazoned with the wolf’s hook. In another drawer were official-looking rubber stamps and an ink pad. A laser printer sat on the desk next to the computer, and a digital camera in the corner was connected to a photo printer on a table by the wall. Some old-style paper sat in a tray on the table.

“I’m not good with computers,” Gerda said. “But if one of you boys can help, I will tell you what information you will need.”

“You bet,” Tommy said, settling down behind the computer. He took a quick snap of Luke with the digital camera, and Luke left them to it. He went scouting around through the other offices to see if there was anything they could use.

He found his and Tommy’s backpacks and brought them back to the office. There was nothing he wanted from his own, but Tommy’s held all sorts of interesting devices.

While Tommy and Gerda finished their IDs, Luke started skimming through
Leonardo’s River
. Not bothering to read the text, just flipping through the diagrams and the measurements.

Tommy handed Luke an ID card. It looked odd. It was in German, for sure, but all the writing was backward, mirrored like the plans for the atomic bomb.

There were also some ID papers and a travel permit, mirrored as well.

Luke queried Tommy, but Tommy just shook his head.

“Gerda says that is how they are supposed to be.” He shrugged. “Beats me.”

Luke looked at it. He was now officially a Werewolf.

Luke handed Tommy his backpack, and his friend’s eyes lit up. He dropped to one knee and began sorting through his bag of tricks.

“Nothing metal,” Luke reminded him. “Or even with metal in it. It could be disastrous.”

“I know,” he said. “But a lot of these things are made from aluminum, plastic, and glass. They’re spy gadgets, so they’re designed to get past metal detectors.”

“What about zippers?” Luke asked, glancing quickly at Ms. Sheck. He did not want to take his jeans off in front of her.

“They don’t set off metal detectors either,” Tommy said.

“But you can’t wear jeans in 1940s Germany, or T-shirts. You’ll stand out a mile,” Ms. Sheck said.

“In 1944 this was my nursery,” Gerda said, looking around at the walls. Her eyes seemed to fill with distant memories. “Erich’s room was next door. He was about your size. You should find what you need.”

She spent a few minutes explaining how they should dress, then handed Luke an aluminum key, shiny and light, and said, “You will need reichsmarks. There is a safe in an office on the other side of the corridor.” She walked to the doorway and pointed it out to Luke. “You will find whatever you need in there.”

“Why don’t you come with us?” Luke asked. “Try and persuade your brother to change his mind.”

Her eyes dropped to the floor. “Now you really are asking too much,” she said quietly, and Luke realized that in at least part of her heart, she still hoped that her brother would succeed.

They descended again to the chamber, but before they could enter, she reached out and took Tommy’s and Luke’s hands in hers.

“You are good boys,” she said. “Be very careful. My brother is dedicated to this mission and will do anything to see it through.”

“You be careful,” Ms. Sheck agreed.

“Ms. Sheck,” Luke said, “you have to stay right here. Make sure no one goes anywhere near the chamber. If someone adjusts any of these ropes, changes the settings, then we’ll have no way to get back.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’ll be waiting right here for you.”

Without another word, Luke ducked under the low hatch, and with every fiber of his body now buzzing from the massive magnetic fields that surrounded him, he climbed in toward the center of the chamber.

The buzzing intensified and every hair on his body stood on end. His skin began to crawl as though a million tiny ants were covering him. The muscles in his body began to twitch with a mild electrical shock. His heart seemed to pause its beating.

Then the charcoal-black walls of the chamber were gone. And there was nothing beneath his feet.

He was falling.

L
uke’s legs buckled underneath him as he landed, more from the shock than the height, which was probably no more than half a yard.

It was pitch-black. He sat still for a moment, stunned, then realized that he had better move before Tommy landed on top of him. He rolled out of the way just as there was a heavy thump and Tommy said, “Ow!”

“You all right?” Luke asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. Where are we?” Tommy asked.

“I think we’re exactly where we were,” Luke said.

“Then what happened to the chamber?” Tommy asked.

“I don’t think they’ve built it yet,” Luke replied.

There was a cracking sound from Tommy’s direction, and the cave suddenly filled with a vague green glow.

Tommy had a glow stick in his hand.

It was just enough for them to see that the cave was deserted, although tidy piles of timber and coils of
rope were spread around the circumference.

“It looks like they’re about to start building it,” Tommy said.

Behind them, work had already started on the massive metal wall that would become the shield for the magnetic chamber, and a number of heavy metal plates were stacked near the wall, alongside a cranelike machine, a block and tackle suspended from a tall wooden frame.

Wooden crates full of bolts and nuts sat next to welding equipment.

There was no sign of the components of the chamber itself. That made sense, Luke thought. They couldn’t start building the chamber until the shield was completed.

A large white cross had been chalked on the floor, slightly smudged from their landing on top of it.

“
X
marks the spot,” Tommy said. “What’s that about?”

“That’s to help them find their way home,” Luke said.

“How’s that?” Tommy asked.

“They’d need to return to exactly the same spot to go back through the chamber,” Luke said. “So would we. Make sure you don’t smudge it any more.”

“You bet,” Tommy said, stepping quickly away from it.

“I wonder what the date is,” Luke said.

It was Monday, November 27, 1944, according to the calendar they found in one of the offices.

“Look at this,” Tommy said, holding up his ID papers. In normal time, the words on the paper had been reversed, but now they looked normal.

“How could that be?” Luke asked.

“I think that when you go through the Vitruvian chamber and switch into a different time, everything somehow gets reversed. Like reversing the poles of a magnet.”

“Even us?”

“I guess.”

Luke pulled up the leg of his jeans and looked at his right knee. He had gashed it pretty badly that night on the bridge. But there was no mark at all. He lifted the left side. There it was. A half-healed wound. It had switched sides!

“Maybe that’s why Leonardo wrote lots of his notes backward,” Luke realized. “He was actually writing them normally.”

“Yeah, but when he brought them back through the chamber, they got mirrored!” Tommy added. “That would also explain why the atomic bomb plans were mirrored when we saw them.”

The early hour of the morning was a stroke of luck, as the corridors of the bunker system were deserted. Luke’s and Tommy’s footsteps echoed eerily. Soft breathing sounds came from the rooms on either side.

They spoke little, for fear of waking someone, and found their way to the room that Gerda said had been Erich’s. A metal-framed bunk was in the far corner of the room, and slight stirrings came from the thin shape under the bedclothes.

Tommy remained outside while Luke tiptoed to a small freestanding wooden closet by the bed and searched for the specific clothes that Gerda had suggested. The breathing
sounds from the bed stopped abruptly as he shut the closet door, but resumed again after a moment, and he crept out of the room.

A door at the end of the corridor was marked with a large red cross, and on impulse, Luke looked inside, finding a nursing station.

He had an idea. He rummaged through some drawers until he found a long length of bandage, which he wound around his scalp and jaw and fastened with a pin.

He was the victim of an air raid and couldn’t speak, he told Tommy. If they needed any more details, Tommy would have to make them up on the spot.

It seemed creepy to Luke to be wearing young Erich Mueller’s clothes. But it was even creepier when they finished dressing, in an empty room, and looked at each other. Luke shuddered, looking at Tommy, and knew that Tommy must have felt the same way about him.

They were both dressed in brown shirts, black shorts, and white knee-high socks. The uniform of the
Hitlerjugend
. The Hitler Youth.

The shoes were black leather. They fit Luke okay but were too big for Tommy. He solved that with an extra pair of socks crammed into the toes.

There was a leather satchel in the room, and Tommy took it, stuffing gadgets into it from his backpack, which he then stowed under one of the bunks.

They found the safe and extracted a thick wad of money from it.

The corridors of the bunker were heated by long metal
pipes that ran along the wall just above the floor. As they ascended the stairs out of the bunker, the temperature seemed to drop a degree for every step they took. Luke returned to Mueller’s room and retrieved a couple of heavy woolen coats from the closet, along with mittens and hats. The hats were a strange woolen type with a peak, while the coats were brown, with black fur lining the collar.

Dressed more warmly, they left the bunker system and found their way up to the Hotel zum Türken.

The spacious and luxurious front drawing room was empty at that hour, and they settled down into a couple of overstuffed armchairs and waited for the first light.

At dawn, acting as if they had every right to be there—Tommy’s first law of spying—they strolled down to the village to catch the alpine bus to Berchtesgaden town.

It had snowed overnight, and their feet crunched through a few inches of crisp white flakes as they walked into the village.

It was very different by daylight.

A huge, snow-covered mountain dominated the village, and not much farther away, a range of majestic alps punctured the skyline. Jutting out from a cliff top in the distance was a building perched right on the edge of the cliff. This was the famous Eagle’s Nest, its concrete structures softened by thick snow.

They passed a huge, regal-looking house with grand pillars and archways, and he saw Tommy looking at it in wonder.

“That’s the Berghof,” Luke said. “Hitler’s holiday house.”

For some reason, that more than anything else brought
home to Luke where they were,
when
they were, and what they were doing there. They were standing outside the house of the evil tyrant who was responsible for World War II. The man who had conquered most of Europe but was eventually defeated by the combined might of the Allied forces.

If Mueller had his way and Hitler got the bomb, then his conquests would not stop at Europe. He would rule the world.

There were armed SS soldiers in a guardhouse that straddled the road up to the Berghof and the Hotel zum Türken. They were there to prevent people from getting in and were not worried about two Hitler Youths leaving the area. The guards waved them through with a quick glance, and Luke and Tommy headed down to the village to find a bus stop.

Smoke poured out through vents on the side of the bus, which was an old, unheated contraption that smelled of coal. It lurched precariously around corners that had only recently been plowed for snow, and Luke wondered if they would survive the trip to the railway station.