The camels picked up speed, spooked by the loud noise behind them. Kate saw Duckworth grimacing in pain as he held on tight to his driver. This wasn’t great therapy for a man just out of the hospital.
“Hold on!” Kate’s driver said, cutting hard to the left, again at the exact instant that every other camel made the same move.
Another DPV roared past on their right. This time Kate could see the driver’s face as he realized what was about to happen, his last moment on earth before the land mine exploded.
When Kate looked back one more time, she saw no other vehicles behind them. Her relief was cut short when one more DPV appeared on the horizon. As it quickly closed the gap, she saw that it was being driven by Franz, who made the vehicle look like a toy, his body cramped into the cab and his head sticking out above the windshield. The driving sand whipped against his face, so hard it was probably already drawing blood, but he kept coming at top speed.
As Franz neared the camels, his strategy became clear to Kate. He hadn’t even bothered to bring a gun with him. He was going to knock them all down like bowling pins.
Kate looked around desperately, trying to find some way to stop him. Then she spotted the knife in the belt of the driver. “I’ll pay for this,” Kate said, as she pulled it from his belt. It was sharp and heavy, with a six-inch blade. She weighed it carefully in her hand, turning her body as much as she could without falling off.
Kate waited for Franz to get closer, then she threw the knife. It lodged into Franz’s right arm. Franz looked at it like it was a mild inconvenience, pulled it out with his left, and threw it into the sand. He picked up speed and approached the last two camels in the pack.
“Wahid!” the driver of one of the two lead camels yelled. “Athnan! Thlatht! Ainqisam!”
The camel drivers split off at exactly the same time, three camels going left, three going right. It created a moment of indecision for Franz. One moment too many.
He tried to pull right, quickly changed his mind, then went left, but it was too late. The explosion of the land mine threw him from the vehicle, catapulting him Mad Max–style as he turned end over end in the open space between the camels. For a split second, he caught Kate’s eye. A moment of recognition, maybe even a good-bye, and then his body hit the sand, where he slid a good forty yards. As soon as he stopped sliding, he tried to raise his head, but then his airborne vehicle landed on top of him and burst into flames.
The camels finally slowed down. Kate’s driver patted his on the neck. “Batal,” he said, one of the few Arabic words that Kate knew. It meant hero.
Kate rubbed the camel on his rump, said the same word. “Batal.”
* * *
After another thirty minutes in the desert, they reached the small oasis town of Bir Lehlou. There were many more of the same simple, single-story buildings like Egger had claimed for his Zitadelle, but instead of sociopaths pacing around in desert camo, here were Sahrawi of both genders, all dressed in their djellabas of every color, and children running around chasing a soccer ball.
“Those bastards thought they were being clever,” Duckworth said to the group, “picking a spot in the no-man’s-land between Morocco’s territory and the Sahrawi’s. They didn’t realize, it works both ways. I could have rolled a tank into that place, and nobody would have noticed. Or cared.”
“Instead you chose camels,” Nick said.
“When in Rome. But seriously, these good folks did not care for those men coming in here, taking one of their old outposts and planting land mines. They were quite eager to help me. Which reminds me, by the way, you’re all going to help pay for a new wing on the school.”
“Glad to do it,” Nick said. “But how do we get out of here?”
“There’s an airstrip half a kilometer away,” Duckworth said, “with the jet waiting for us. Will that do?”
They all thanked the Sahrawi one more time and headed over to the airstrip, a simple ribbon of pavement laid out on the flat desert floor. Food and cold beverages were waiting for them.
Kate sat next to Nick as the jet took off, and looked out at the vast open expanse below. “We got the professor back,” she said. “But that was only Item One on my list.”
“Now we return to the hunt,” Nick said, nodding to their fathers. They were on the other side of the plane, strapped in on either side of the table.
“Tell me about this logbook,” Lewis said. “Every detail you can remember. Especially that last page.”
“I can do better than that,” Duckworth said, taking out a piece of paper. “I didn’t understand half of it, but I did write it all down.”
“Brilliant!” The professor took the paper and studied it carefully.
“I understood the part about the betrayal,” Duckworth said, “but then I got lost right around here. What’s Tiefbrunnen vom Eisenmann?”
“That’s the part that got Egger excited,” Quentin said. “He acted like his grandfather had sent down a message from heaven.”
The professor wasn’t listening to them anymore. He was staring at the words on the page, mouthing them to himself over and over, just as Egger had done. Tiefbrunnen vom Eisenmann, Tiefbrunnen vom Eisenmann.
“Brunnen is ‘well,’ ” he finally said. “Tief is ‘deep.’ And of course the Germans will always make a compound noun by joining the words together. Tiefbrunnen, deep well. But vom Eisenmann. Of the iron man?”
They all thought about it for a moment, until Professor Lewis slapped his own head. “The iron man!” he said. “That was Göring’s nickname!”
“The same man he worked for,” Quentin said. “The man who betrayed him.”
“That’s right,” Lewis said. “Which tells me exactly where we have to go next!”
CHAPTER TWENTY
After everything they’d been through in the past twenty-four hours, including a trip on a jet from Austria to Northern Africa, their next step, ironically, would be flying the same jet back to Austria.
“It’s called Lake Toplitz,” Lewis said. He was using Duckworth’s laptop, connected to the jet’s onboard Internet. “The closest airport is Salzburg.”
Duckworth got up to tell the pilot about the next destination. Nick and Kate came over to join the conversation.
“I’ve heard of Lake Toplitz,” Nick said.
“There was a Nazi naval station there during the war,” Lewis said. “It’s a very deep lake, very secluded. They tested depth charges there. Maybe torpedoes, too. They also used it as a sort of dumping station, like when they printed a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of counterfeit notes for Operation Bernhard. When they scuttled that plan, they dumped all of the notes in the lake. Some people think you can even find sunken aircraft if you go all the way to the bottom. There’s even a legend that there’s a flying saucer down there.”
“And gold?” Nick asked.
Lewis nodded. “All part of the legend. Maybe we’re about to prove it’s really true. At least the gold part.”
“But what makes this lake the deep well of the iron man?” Kate asked.