team are split up for reasons we have not yet ascertained. But
according to our informants, Wilson and some others are moved by a
train filled with SS troops and concentration-camp prisoners to
somewhere in the southern Harz Mountains. Alas, we do not know where, though we do have reason to believe that the area around Nordhausen, in Thuringia, is littered with large, well-disguised underground factories where the n.a.z.i secret weapons are produced with the help of slave labour from nearby camps. We believe Wilson is
destined for one of those hidden factories."
"And the rest of his team?"
Pialowicz shrugged. "About a week after Wilson is moved out, the
rest of the team, including Schriever, Miethe, and Habermohl, is put on
a train heading for Prague, in Bohem, in Czechoslovakia. We have no
idea why. Nor do we know their final destination." Pialowicz shrugged
again, then raised his hands in the air. "This is all I can tell you." "It"s a h.e.l.luva lot," Bradley replied. "More than you realize." Pialowicz smiled for the first time, then stood up and said, "For me
you will please find Kryzystina?"
"We will," Bradley said.
He watched the young man walk out of the annex, sat there for a
few minutes in silence, trying to calm his excitement, then followed
him out of the church.
Too excited for coherent thought, he walked around the shattered
town, letting the sun shine on his face, observing the appalling ruins
and the troops and civilians moving around them, pa.s.sing tanks buried
in rubble and overturned, scorched trucks, eventually arriving at
another church, which also was damaged. Stepping inside, he had to
adjust to the gloom. Then he saw hundreds, maybe a thousand or more,
refugees on the floor, lying on mattresses, surrounded by bits of
furniture, making coffee and soup on small paraffin burners, and
attending to the wounded and the dying, for whom there was still no
room in the remains of the hospital. Light beamed obliquely on them,
illuminating motes of dust, covering them in a silvery haze that made
them look slightly unreal.
It was a dream of life and death, of suffering and self- sacrifice, and
Bradley had seen it too many times on his journey through France.
Nevertheless, he was shaken, torn between faith and despair, and he
turned away from it, from man"s stupidity and n.o.bility, and hurried
back to the Church of St Pierre, to continue his work.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Ernst"s growing conviction that h.e.l.l might be on earth was made concrete when, after his painful farewell to Ingrid, he returned to the Harz Mountains. For a week that seemed like a year, he divided his time between the nightmarish daily routine of the underground factories in Nordhausen and Wilson"s flying saucer construction plant nearby, just outside the old walled town of Kahla.