Bones. They were looking at the skeletons of a dozen men.
“Holy God,” Quentin said, playing his flashlight across the skulls. “These must have been the men who brought this train down here.”
“Dead men tell no tales,” Jake said.
They all knew he was right. These were the mainline grunt soldiers who had helped hide this gold, men who could never be trusted again.
“Let’s check out the next one,” Quentin said.
They went to the next boxcar. When the door slid open, there was nothing inside. They continued to the next car, and the next, and the next. Aside from the bones of the men who had brought it here, the “gold train” was completely empty.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They followed the track backward from the last car. It disappeared quickly into a massive wall of rock, what had once been another section of the tunnel but was now essentially part of the mountain itself.
“No way out here,” Quentin said, stating the obvious.
They walked back up the length of the train, past the nose, following the tracks to the opposite end. As they neared the rock wall, they saw the faintest glow of sunlight, filtered through the rocks that blocked this end of the tunnel.
“It’s caved in,” Quentin said, “but not nearly as much as the other side.”
“At least we have air,” Jake said. “We won’t suffocate.”
As they got closer, they saw something else on the tracks. It was a classic handcar, half-buried in the rubble that had sealed off this end of the tunnel, the kind of car with the seesaw handle to make it run, right out of an old cartoon. What wasn’t right out of an old cartoon was the remains of the man on the car.
He was mostly a skeleton at this point, almost but not quite as desiccated as the dead men they had found in the boxcar. Dried skin and a few locks of hair clung to his skull. His clothes were rat-eaten rags. They could only see him from the waist up, because everything below that was covered by the rubble.
“What is this?” Quentin stepped closer, dusted off the dirt from the deck of the handcar, and picked up an old book that had been lying close to the man’s head. He opened the pages gently.
“It’s an old logbook of some kind,” he said. “Dates, numbers. But wait.”
There was writing on the last page. German words that Quentin couldn’t understand, but at the bottom of the page was a signature. He closed the book and looked back at Jake, Kate, and Nick.
“I think we just found Egger’s grandfather.”
* * *
It might have been one hour that passed. Time was already starting to lose its meaning. They were all thirsty now. They were all hungry. Everyone was doing their absolute best not to accept the feeling of panic and despair.
Jake climbed up on the rubble that filled the tunnel exit, trying to find a cell phone signal. There was none. He started moving some of the rubble by hand. Nick and Kate joined him, shoveling the dirt and sand with their fingers. All they needed was one slim gap to climb through, but every time they cleared a small hole in the wall it would immediately get filled up with even more debris.
It made them more thirsty, more hungry. It made it even harder to keep the fear at bay.
“I think I know what happened here,” Quentin said, standing over the remains of Egger’s grandfather.
Jake, Kate, and Nick stopped working and sat down on three of the larger rocks in the pile.
“They drove this train into this section of the tunnel, near the exit. Grandpop here was in charge of the operation. He worked directly for Göring. Egger told us that himself.”
Jake nodded. “He did.”
“Göring was the number two man in the Reich,” Quentin went on. “It makes sense he’d be directing this. Once the train was here, they blew up one tunnel behind it.” Quentin nodded toward the opposite end of the train. “They already had their secret passageways built, full of booby traps, leading down here.” Quentin paused again, nodding to the narrow passageway that had brought them here. “So now all they had to do was blow up this end, right? Seal the train in for good?”
“Right,” Nick said, “but—”
“But he didn’t!” Quentin said. “He killed the men, left this end open. At least for a time.”
“Why would he do that?” Nick asked.
“Because it was a double cross,” Quentin said. “The oldest story in the world. This was a perfect opportunity to move the gold out, one load at a time, on this handcar. The railway was empty then, remember? I bet it was just Göring and Egger’s grandfather at that point. Save it for themselves instead of sharing it with everyone else in the Reich. Göring was a straight rat bastard, don’t forget.”
Quentin looked back toward the train. “It explains why the train is empty. And why he’s here.” Quentin kicked the handcar, then looked up and down the tracks like he was playing the movie in his head. “Göring and Egger’s grandfather are taking the last load out. They’re going to blow the tunnel when they’re done. That’s when Göring decides that having it all for himself is even better than sharing it with anybody. All Göring has to do is get out and then blow the tunnel on top of Egger’s grandfather here. Who now knows he’s trapped in this rubble, knows he only has a few minutes to live. He writes these last words in his book.”
“If that was true,” Nick said, “then he’d be lying in a pile of gold. That last load he never got to take out.”
Quentin kicked at the dirt beneath the handcar. Then he bent down, picked up a handful of coins, and brushed them off. He tossed one to Jake, one to Nick, one to Kate. As Kate shined her light on it, she saw the bright gold finish, the eagle stamped into the face, holding the wreath, and in the center of the wreath a swastika.
“This is all fascinating,” Nick said to his father. “But it’s not going to help us get out of here.”
“You’re right,” Quentin said. “We’re just as trapped as Herr Egger.”
Each one of them took their own moment of silence to consider that fact, until Nick looked up at the train.
“Maybe we’re not,” Nick said. “Come on, I may have a crazy idea.”
He led them back to the train and climbed up into the cab.
“What are you thinking?” Quentin asked, looking up at him from the ground.
“See if the tank has any water in it,” Nick said.
Quentin climbed up the side of the locomotive to check the tank. “I think it does,” he said.
“Are you telling me this is a steam engine?” Jake asked. “They were still using those in the 1940s?”
“Yes,” Quentin said as he hopped down from the tank into the cab and leaned his head out the window. “The Germans made a lot more steam engines during the war. The price of diesel fuel was killing them, but steam was still cheap and easy.”
“You actually think you can get this thing running?” Jake asked.
“It’s possible,” Quentin said. “If this was a diesel engine, we wouldn’t have a chance. The fuel would be dead by now. But the tank is closed so the water never evaporated. And coal never goes bad.”