Remo used his flame to ignite the other torches. The mass of men moved down the hallway. Adolf Kluge lagged behind.
A feeling of intense claustrophobia had enveloped Kluge. He couldn't allow it to get the better of him. Not if he hoped to succeed in his plan to kill the others. Steeling himself, Kluge trailed the rest down the hallway.
"Why are there skeletons everywhere we go lately?" Remo griped as he picked his way through a litter of bones.
The hallway had ended in a large chamber. Above them could be heard the muted roar of the Danube. The chamber had been constructed in such a way that-even after all these years-the river had not burst through.
The broken bones of murder victims were spread all around this large room. In spite of the dampness, they cracked like scattered potato chips beneath the heels of the intruders.
"Siegfried would not want his secret made known," Chiun explained. "Doubtless these are the bodies of those who constructed this place."
"They are likely the men who moved the gold, as well," Heidi offered from her spot at Remo's elbow.
"What did he do if you didn't help him?" Remo asked.
There was a sconce at the wall just inside the door. Remo put his torch there. It was bright enough to illuminate the entire room, which was roughly the size of a high-school classroom from the time when such rooms held more than five students, one teacher and fifteen teacher's aides.
There were at least two more rooms leading off of the one they were in. Weird shadows danced along the moist, moss-covered walls.
Beyond the skeletal remains on either side of the chamber were two large piles of slime-coated rock. Lichens and moss sprouted from every conceivable crevice in the huge stone piles. A narrow space ran up between the mass of slippery rock into the next chamber.
Beyond the right pile, a relentless drip reminded them of the nearness of the Danube above their heads. An elaborate sluice system constructed at the sides of the slightly slanted floors carried the dripping water away.
"I guess ol' Siegfried did it to you again, Chiun," Remo commented sadly, looking around the fungus and ooze filled room. "I've got to hand it to him, though. I almost believed this one."
The Master of Sinanju wasn't listening. His eyes held an eager glow as he handed his torch back to Remo. Remo took it, confused.
"What's with him?" he asked, turning to Heidi. She wasn't listening, either. Both Heidi and Kluge broke away from the pack, their faces awed. They moved with nervous reverence after the Master of Sinanju.
When they came up behind him, Chiun was already crouched next to the nearest pile of moss-covered stone. Heidi and Kluge didn't look at one another. Didn't blink. Didn't dare take their wide eyes off the hands of the old Korean.
Chiun snaked a bony hand toward the rock pile. Remo had no time to voice his disgust before the Master of Sinanju had clasped firmly on to one of the slippery stones atop the main pile. Spiriting it to his chest, Chiun used his free hand to brush away the years of slimy growth that had built up atop the stone.
Remo had just opened his mouth to complain when he spied an odd glimmer in the bright torchlight within the cavern. It came from Chiun's hand. And its color was gold.
Stunned, Remo took a step forward.
Both Heidi and Kluge watched in wonder as Chiun's long fingernails expertly wiped away years of residue that had built up atop the object that all of them now knew was not merely a piece of rock.
It came clean with surprising ease. When he was finished, Chiun held in his hand a single brick of solid gold. He turned to Remo.
"Behold," Chiun said, with quiet awe. He held a grand arm out toward the mossy piles within the cavern, "the long shame of Master Bal-Mung is lifted. I give to you the Nibelungen Hoard."
Chapter 25
The decision was made by the Master of Sinanju to haul the entire Nibelungen Hoard from its ancient resting place in one massive move.
Every available man, with the exclusion of Chiun himself, formed a line into the farthest rooms within the underground catacombs. Piece by piece, the lumps of gold were passed forward. There were also crates brimming over with fabulous jewels. Although the wooden boxes had originally been preserved in the same manner as the block carving map, given the soggy conditions of the tunnels in which they had been stored, they had not held up as well. However, most were strong enough to survive being passed down the line of waiting men.
When the back room was clear, the line leapfrogged out into the next room, passing the gold farther out into the corridor. From the corridor, they moved to the stairs, and from the stairs, outside.
In this manner, the rear room was cleared out in just under five hours.
When they were only halfway through the first room and he realized just how monumental an undertaking this was going to be, Remo had Heidi help him to contact Colonel Heine on the radio.
When Heine had informed him earlier of the location of Kluge's trucks, Remo had warned the colonel to hold his men back while he and Chiun dealt with the neo-Nazi situation. Having seen with his own eyes the way Remo had walked through the heaviest firefight of his career, Heine was loath to upset the American.
Remo now told the colonel that the situation was under control. Heine spluttered for a moment until Remo reminded him of the pain he caused the colonel's hand. The colonel promptly agreed to abandon the Black Forest.
They worked for twelve hours straight. Kluge and his Border Police defectors had only three trucks on hand. They weren't enough to put so much as a dent in the huge pile of gold and jewels stacked around the windswept clearing.
Dawn was breaking on their second day of backbreaking labor. The skinheads still hauled treasure up from below. They were weary from their many hours of ceaseless effort.
Remo was just coming back from getting a drink at the river. Chiun danced happily up beside him. "It is a magnificent sight, is it not?" the Master of Sinanju proclaimed as he viewed the massive stack of moss-encrusted treasure.
"Metal and rocks," Remo said with a bland shrug. He wiped at the grime on his forehead.
Chiun waggled a playfully admonishing finger at him.
"Do not sulk, Remo. It does not suit you." Chiun flapped over to inspect a crate of flawless diamonds that hadn't seen the warming rays of the morning sun in fifteen centuries.
"Funny. I think it suits me just fine," Remo grumbled. He trudged back over to the mouth of the cavern.
AS THE WINTER SUN broke over the damp riverside meadow, Adolf Kluge was as far away from its warming rays as he could have imagined. Filthy and sweating profusely, he was crawling on his belly in a narrow shaft that ran parallel to the long corridor at the bottom of the old stone stairs.
The dull yellow glow of his flashlight shone brightly off the slippery walls of the man-made tunnel. The air was thick with the smell of overgrown moss. For Kluge, it was like crawling through a massive, fungus-filled laboratory petri dish. The years of mossy growth felt like one giant sponge. As he squished ahead on all fours, his pants and jacket grew sopped at the front.
The feeling of claustrophobia Kluge had experienced in the corridor outside was magnified a hundredfold in this cramped interior.
As he made his way along the cave, he pulled in deep, measured breaths. He had heard that this was supposed to have a calming effect. Kluge found that it did not.
It should only be a few feet up ahead. Everything else had been the way the map had described. There was no reason to think that it wouldn't be here, as well.
It was the Siegfried map that held the key. The Nibelungen king might have planned for the Hoard to be uncovered in a far distant future, but the future he had envisioned would have been measured in a few short decades. His fifth-century mind could not have considered that the cave would lie undiscovered until the twentieth century.
Siegfried had imagined all along that this storehouse of treasure would be divided in his lifetime. But if it happened that the gold was uncovered at a time when he was aged and his mind was failing him, he wanted to be sure that he of all the interested parties would still hold a winning hand. That was why his section of the block carving was the only one to show a detailed route to the ancient booby trap.
The narrow tunnel opened into a long vertical shaft. Kluge found that he was able to stand upright. He shone his flashlight up the slick walls of the cramped enclosure. The ceiling was invisible behind a gnarled ganglia of dangling roots. To Kluge it was rather like being trapped at the bottom of a capped well.
Kluge turned the flashlight to his feet. He found what he was looking for immediately. It was a chiseled chunk of stone about three feet long. It appeared to be holding up another much longer support beam.
This long stone brace rose up to the ceiling, disappearing amid an interlocking series of carved rocks. Siegfried had anticipated that he might be infirm when at last he used this shaft, so it would have been designed to dislodge easily. But that was many years ago. There was no telling whether or not Kluge would be able to budge it.
The IV leader sat down at the mouth of the tunnel through which he had just crawled. The moisture from the cave seeped in uncomfortably at the seat of his trousers.
Twisting unhappily, he braced one foot up against the slimy side of the propped stone.