“Even seventy years after the end of the war, there are still relics sitting in fields and forests all over Europe. Most of them aren’t worth much—uniform buttons, shell casings, that sort of thing. But we search, nonetheless. I’ve found firearms, medals, and once an Enigma rotor—all with a good map, a thorough knowledge of the war, and a metal detector.”

“So what did this friend of yours find?” said Nemo.

“I wouldn’t call him a friend,” said Alex. “But he believed Himmler’s underground complex still existed. He thought Himmler hadn’t hidden there at the end of the war because it was filled with treasure he wanted to hide from the Allies. The Fox’s Den was supposedly in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps south of Munich—a big underground complex with a single entrance—easy to guard. This collector liked to brag about all the things he found on his research trips. I could never quite tell whom he was trying to impress—other collectors, or historians, or Aryan supremacist groups, or all three. One night I was talking with him online and he let slip that he had discovered the Fox’s Den outside the town of Oberammergau. Said someone had hired him to find it and financed the whole excursion quite generously. I was off to Germany the next day, and it wasn’t too hard to find the spot, since I knew what I was looking for. But there was a nice shiny new security fence around the whole site. Whoever had bought it didn’t want anyone like me nosing around.”

“Can you lead us there?” said Patton.

“Oh, I can lead you there,” said Alex. “But then what will you do? Even if you could make it through the modern security the new owners have installed, you’d still have to contend with an underground complex with a single long tunnel as its entrance. They could pick us off one by one before we were fifty feet into the mountain.”

“So there’s no way we can get in?” said Bob.

“Not that I can see,” said Alex.

“Well,” said Patton, “we’ll just have to get them to come out.”

“And the gold?” said Nemo.

“If what I have in mind works,” said Patton, “they’ll bring it with them. What do you know about Operation Fortitude?”

“I know it won World War II,” said Franklin.

“What’s Operation Fortitude?” said Nemo.

“It was the great Allied fake out,” said Franklin. “Fake armies, false intelligence, even General Patton traveling to eastern England to rally troops that weren’t there. All to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion of the mainland was coming at Calais instead of Normandy.”

“Exactly,” said Patton. “And it worked. Even a month after D-Day the Germans were still bracing for an invasion at Calais, keeping divisions away from the Allied advances.”