To one side, a few swaybacked draft horses hung their heads dully from beneath a lean-to of salvaged wood planks and piled stones. Goats and a few sheep ambled through the camp.
The soldiers had the site surrounded. A few dead bodies in ragged clothes and furred jackets lay sprawled here and there. The living looked little better. The camp’s residents had been hauled from their wagons and heavy tents.
Shouts rose from deeper in the camp as the last of the Gypsies were rounded up. A spatter of automatic gunfire sounded. Kalashnikovs. Yuri observed the grim-eyed crowd. Some of the women were on their knees, sobbing. The dark men were steely in their black regard of the intruders. Most were bloody, wounded, broken-limbed.
“Where are all the children?” Yuri asked.
The answer came from his other side, bright and brittle as the ice frosting these highlands. “Barricaded in the church.”
Yuri turned to face the speaker, Captain Savina Martov, the mission’s intelligence officer. She was buried in a black overcoat with a fur-lined hood. Her black hair was a match to the hood’s fringe of Russian wolf.
She lifted a slender arm toward a steeple rising beyond the wagons and tents. It appeared to be the only permanent structure here. Built all of local stone, the church blended into the surrounding crags.
“The children were already assembled in the structure before our forces arrived,” Savina recounted.
Dobritsky nodded. “Must have heard the motorcycles’ engines.”
Savina met Yuri’s eyes. Morning light danced in her green eyes. The intelligence officer had her own thoughts. It had been Savina who had delivered a cache of research papers to Yuri’s institute, notebooks and reams of data from Auschwitz-Birkenau, specifically the work of Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp’s “Angel of Death.”
Yuri had many sweat-soaked nightmares after reading through the material. It was well known that Dr. Mengele had performed all manner of horrible experiments on the prisoners, but the monster bore a special fascination for Gypsies, especially their children. He would ply them with treats and chocolates. They came to call him “Uncle Pepe.” This was all done just to get the children to better cooperate. Eventually he had them all slaughtered—but not before he discovered an especially unique pair of Gypsy twins.
Two identical girls. Sasha and Meena.
Yuri had read those notes with a mixture of fascination and horror.
Mengele had kept meticulous notes on the remarkable twins: age, family history, lineage. He tortured the twins’ family and relatives to uncover more details, verified by testing with the girls. Mengele accelerated his experiments. But as the war drew to a close, he was forced to prematurely terminate his tests. He killed the twins with injections of phenol into their hearts.
Mengele had scrawled his frustration near the end.
Wenn ich nur mehr Zeit gehabt hätte…
If only I’d had more time…
“Are you ready?” Savina asked Yuri.
He nodded.
Accompanied by Dobritsky and another soldier, the pair headed into the camp. He stepped around a corpse sprawled facedown in a pool of frozen blood.
The church appeared ahead. It was all stacked stones, no windows. A single door stood closed, constructed of hewn beams of stout wood, banded and studded in copper. The building looked more like a fortress than a church.
Two soldiers flanked the doors with a steel battering ram.
Dobritsky glanced to Yuri.
He nodded.
“Break it down!” the lieutenant ordered sharply.
The men swung the ram and smashed the door. Wood splintered. It held for two more swings. Finally the door burst open with a crack of thunder.
Yuri shadowed Savina and stepped forward.
Small oil lamps lit the dark interior. Rows of pews lined either side, leading to a raised altar. Children of all ages cowered among the benches, strangely silent.
As Yuri continued toward the altar, he studied the children. Many bore disturbing deformities: pinheaded microcephaly, cleft lips, dwarfism. One child had no arms at all, only a torso. Inbreeding. Yuri’s skin pebbled with unease. No wonder the rural folk around here feared this Romani clan, told tales of spirits and monsters.
“How will you know if these are the right children?” Savina asked with clear disgust in her voice.
Yuri quoted from one of the tortured interviews recorded by Mengele. “The lair of the chovihanis.” The place was where the twins had been born, a secret kept by the Gypsies going back to the founding of the clans.
“Are these the ones?” Savina pressed.
Yuri shook his head. “I don’t know.”
He continued toward a girl seated before the altar. She clutched a rag doll to her chest, though her own garb was little better than her doll’s. As Yuri neared, he noted the child seemed perfect, spared of any of the deformities. In the dim light, the pure crystal blue of her eyes shone brightly.
So rare among the Romani.
Like the twins, Sasha and Meena.
Yuri knelt in front of her. She seemed not to notice him. Her gaze passed straight through him. He sensed there was something wrong with this child, possibly worse than any of the other deformities.
Though her eyes never seemed to focus any sharper, she lifted a hand toward him. “Unchi Pepe,” she lisped in a thin Romani voice.
A wash of fear swept through Yuri. Uncle Pepe. The pet name for Josef Mengele. It had been used by all the Gypsy children. But these children were too young to have ever seen the insides of a concentration camp.
Yuri stared into those vacant eyes. Did the child know what Yuri and his research team intended? How could she? Mengele’s words haunted him:
If only I’d had more time…
That would not be Yuri’s problem. His team would be granted all the time it needed. The facility was already under construction. Far from prying eyes.
Savina stepped closer. She needed an answer.
Yuri knew the truth; he’d known it the moment he stared into this girl’s face. Still he hesitated.
Savina placed a hand on his elbow. “Major?”
There could be no turning back, so Yuri nodded, acknowledging the horror to come. “Da. These are the chovihanis.”
“Are you certain?”
Yuri nodded again, but he kept his gaze fixed on the child’s blue eyes. He barely heard Savina order Dobritsky: “Collect all the children into the trucks. Eliminate everyone else.”
Yuri did not countermand those orders. He knew why they were here.
The child still held out her hand. “Unchi Pepe,” she repeated.
He took the tiny fingers into his own. There was no denying it, no turning back.