Echo of the Reich Read online

  “Go inside and finish them,” he ordered crisply, then strode away toward the main entrance of the Komplex Milkow.

  Wolf waited outside the entrance to the Wenceslas Mine until the last of his men emerged, then gave orders for the explosives to be blown. Seconds later, there was a dull rumble from inside the mine as the dynamite completed its work. He waited a couple of minutes to ensure that all the charges had detonated, then crossed to the entrance to check that the inner passageways were no longer accessible.

  He glanced at the narrow-gauge railway that linked the Wenceslas Mine with the airfield at Bystzyca Klodzka and for a moment wondered if that would have been a better way to transport Die Glocke, but then shook his head. It would have meant transferring the device from the truck onto one of the railway carriages, and then repeating the process in reverse at the other end of the journey, and all of that would have taken time. Time which he really didn’t have.

  Only when he was completely satisfied did Wolf climb into his staff car and lead the small convoy of three trucks containing his men, the device they had extracted from the testing chamber, and those three scientists whose work, knowledge and ability was of the highest caliber and who were vital for the eventual success of the project.

  At Bystzyca Klodzka airfield, which lay in a valley within the Eulenbirge Mountains, to the west of Opole, the flight crew had already removed the tarpaulins that had concealed the huge six-engined Junkers Ju-390. They’d carried out the necessary preflight checks on the aircraft and the rear cargo door was wide-open, waiting for loading to begin.

  The device was heavy, bulky, and awkward to handle because of its shape, and maneuvering it inside the relatively confined space of the fuselage was difficult. But eventually they got it secured in place, and Wolf then ordered the three scientists to climb on board the aircraft. The expressions on their faces reflected their conflicting emotions. They’d expected to be evacuated from the area, simply because of the importance of their work to the Reich and the vital knowledge they possessed, but what had happened at the mine clearly showed that there was more than one way for their masters to ensure that they kept their mouths shut.

  When they had taken their seats in the cabin, Kurt Debus—the only one of the three with any military training—leaned across to Elizabeth Adler, who was visibly shaking.

  “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “If they were going to kill us, they’d have done it back at the mine. We’re safe, because we’re too important to Hitler.”

  “Where are they taking us?” Herman Obeth asked. “Not Berlin, surely?”

  “I’ve no idea, but somewhere out of the Fatherland, I think we can be sure of that. What we’ve achieved can still change the course of the war. We just need a little more time to perfect it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Adler replied, her voice quivering with emotion. “I really hope you’re right.”

  Hauptsturmführer Wolf was the last to take his seat, and only did so after carrying out a final check that nothing had been left in any of the vehicles that might compromise the project.

  One of the engines on the port wing of the Junkers spluttered into life, then settled down to a steady reassuring roar. Then the second engine started, and the third, and in less than a minute the flight deck crew had all six running. The Junkers, which had been painted light blue and illegally wore the markings of the Swedish Air Force—a rudimentary disguise that might make an enemy pilot pause before opening fire with his cannon—began to move, and the massive aircraft started to taxi across the short distance to the end of the runway.

  Moments later, the pilot pushed the throttles fully forward and the huge aircraft began gathering speed. It lifted into the darkening sky and swung around toward the west.

  It’s reasonable to assume that the paint job was a success, because no units of either the Russian forces or the Western Allies reported seeing a Swedish aircraft at any time that day or evening. They were too busy watching out for enemy aircraft, and it seems likely that the Junkers managed simply to slip through the front lines, perhaps seen but certainly not noticed.

  The Junkers’ ultimate destination was never recorded in any of the surviving documentation, and it’s quite possible that the flight was so highly classified by the Nazis that no details of it were ever committed to paper.

  After the war, various places were suggested as the location of the aircraft’s final landing. One of the most cogent and believable reports states that a multi-engined German aircraft was seen touching down at an airfield in the Entre Rios Province of northern Argentina in May 1945.

  Another report describes various witness sightings of a six-engined aircraft, provisionally identified as a Junkers Ju-390, being dismantled on a German-owned farm in Paysundu Province in Uruguay at about the same date. Some of the local residents also reported that the parts of the aircraft were then taken to the River Uruguay, which is over a kilometer wide at this point, and thrown into the water.

  A third report suggested that the aircraft had a very much shorter flight, and landed near Bodø in Norway, though this might of course have simply been an interim or refueling stop as part of a much longer flight, and it seems probable that if the aircraft had remained in Norway it would have been seen and reported by somebody, and most probably seized by Allied forces.

  What is certain is that at the end of the Second World War nobody knew where either the aircraft or its unusual cargo had been taken, or exactly what the secret device constructed in the Wenceslas Mine was intended to do. Current researchers believe the project designation implied that it was a weapon of some description, probably a very early type of weapon of mass destruction, but since 1945 no definite information has been recovered about Die Glocke and nobody had any real idea of its function or its purpose.

  Until now, that is.

  1

  17 July 2012

  “Can I just say something?” Chris Bronson asked. “I dislike sport to the extent that if you gave me a Cup Final ticket, I would rather pay you money than have to go and watch the match.”

  “Is that right?” The Met inspector looked distinctly unimpressed. He was sitting in a battered swivel chair behind a large but extremely cluttered desk—files stacked in piles on both sides of it—in a glass cubicle at one end of a squad room in a police station in east London’s Forest Gate. Bronson was standing in front of him. He had no option—there was no other chair, not even enough space for one, in the tiny office.

  The walls behind the desk were plastered with the usual selection of notices and leaflets, everything from Health and Safety directives—which looked noticeably clean and unread—to part of a faded page of newsprint apparently cut from the Evening Standard, the print too tiny for Bronson to make out the story. Other notices were attached to the glass walls of the office, but Bronson guessed that their principal purpose was less to convey information than to provide the inspector’s tiny sanctum with some slight measure of privacy.

  In marked contrast to the cluttered and untidy office, the inspector was impeccably dressed in a light gray suit, the material of which shimmered slightly every time he moved his tall, slim frame. Bronson didn’t have to glance down at the floor to know that his black shoes would have a mirror-polished sheen; the man exuded an almost palpable aura of elegance. His features were even and regular, with a neat and slightly aggressive mustache that conveyed a military bearing.

  Bronson was supremely conscious that he cut a rather less than impressive figure by comparison in his crumpled suit, slightly grubby shirt and black loafers. Nor could he blame the state of his attire on the train and tube journey up to Newham; he hadn’t, he realized, looked all that smart when he had left Tunbridge Wells that morning.

  “Well, let me tell you something, Detective Sergeant Bronson. I don’t give a damn about your views on football or any other sport. You’ve been sent here by that bunch of yokels who laughably call themselves the Kent Police Force to help us out. Not that we can’t manage by ourse
lves, but we do need a few extra bodies on the ground while the Olympics are on, and you’ve been selected as one of them.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Don’t interrupt when I’m talking. I couldn’t give a toss whether you like sport or not. I’ve got any number of coppers queuing up to be on duty in a stadium when some of the events are being held. But we need other bodies.”

  The Metropolitan Police inspector—the name on his door was S. R. Davidson—paused for a moment and glanced down at a note on his desk. Then he looked back at Bronson and smiled. “To be specific, I need somebody with certain talents and abilities, and I’m told you’re the ideal man for the job.”

  “What talents?” Bronson asked suspiciously.

  “You’re big and bolshie and nobody here knows you. Now open the door.”

  “What?”

  “You deaf or something? Open the bloody door.”

  Bronson turned round and pulled open the glass door he’d closed behind him three minutes earlier.

  As it swung wide, Davidson bellowed: “Curtis! Get in here.”

  “Jesus,” Bronson muttered, temporarily deafened by the inspector’s impressive vocal capability. “Can’t you use an intercom or something?”

  “Broken,” Davidson replied shortly, as a heavily built man, whose appearance and dress sense seemed closer to Bronson’s casual scruffiness than the inspector’s sartorial elegance, got up from his desk and ambled over to the door of the cubicle.

  “Boss?”

  “Remember that SLJ we discussed the other day, Bob? Detective Sergeant Bronson here is going to take care of it for us.”

  A smile spread across Curtis’s face as he looked Bronson slowly up and down.

  “And what shitty little job is that, exactly?” Bronson asked.

  “Bob will explain everything,” Davidson replied, looking slightly miffed that Bronson had recognized the acronym he’d used. “Take him away, Bob, and fill him in.”

  “A pleasure.”

  Curtis led the way across the squad room to his desk.

  “Grab one of them,” he said, pointing to a stack of dark gray metal-framed chairs with plastic seats.

  “Popular man, your boss, is he?” Bronson asked, taking the top chair from the pile and sitting down in front of Curtis’s desk.

  Curtis grinned at him. “Not so’s you’d notice, no. He’s one of that new breed—fast-track coppers. Gets a degree in knitting or something and then joins the force, aiming for a chief constable slot before he’s fifty. Frightening thing is, he’ll probably make it. His initials stand for Steven Richard, by the way, but round here everybody calls him Shit Rises.” Curtis paused and glanced across at Bronson. “Been in long, have you?”

  Bronson nodded. “A few years, yes. But I was in the army on a short-service commission before I joined the force.”

  Curtis smiled again and looked to his left, toward the officer sitting at the adjacent desk. “That’s a tenner you owe me, Jack.” He swung back to face Bronson. “Had a small wager running,” he explained. “Jack figured you for another graduate fast-tracker like Davidson. But I reckoned he was wrong because you look like you’ve been around the block a few times.”

  Bronson thought that worked out as a compliment.

  “I hadn’t planned on making chief constable,” he replied. “For one thing, I’m not a Mason, and in any case I don’t think I could handle the bullshit that comes with the job. Talking of jobs, what’s this nasty surprise you’ve got planned for me?”

  “It’s not that nasty,” Curtis said. “In fact, you might even enjoy it. But it is really important, because we’re running out of ideas.” There were about half a dozen files sitting in an irregular pile on one corner of his desk, and he reached across and pulled out the bottom one, which was also the slimmest. He flicked through the first couple of pages before looking up at Bronson again.

  “Let me give you the background. Pretty much ever since London won the bid to hold the twenty twelve Olympics, there’ve been cases of sabotage and malicious damage at the various venues. At first, we thought it was the usual mindless vandalism that you get in every major city, but over the last three months or so it’s become clear that we are looking at a concerted plan. There seems to be a definite objective to the damage. It’s not just a case of breaking a few windows or daubing graffiti around the place, though there’s been a fair amount of that as well. But these guys, whoever they are, seem to be targeting the machinery on the building sites, doing their best to ensure that the work won’t be completed on time.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Bronson said. “The Games start in exactly ten days’ time. I thought that everything was pretty much finished—and all the construction work was completed ages ago.”

  “Dream on. The government and all the other talking heads are just saying what they think the public wants to hear. Most of the building work has been completed, that’s true, but there’s still a hell of a lot of finishing-off to do before the opening ceremony. I reckon that the paint inside some of the buildings will still be wet when the athletes arrive.”

  Bronson nodded. “I hadn’t realized that. But what do these vandals want? What’s their motive? I thought most people believed that the Olympics would be a good thing for London, not just because of the income that’ll be generated during the Games themselves, but also because of all the redevelopment of the East End. Surely everyone will benefit to some extent?”

  “Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But this bunch seems to have a different agenda.”

  Bronson glanced at the thin file in front of Curtis. “From the look of that,” he said, “you haven’t got very much to go on.”

  “You got that right. We know that they usually work at night, but so far we’ve made no arrests. In terms of evidence, about all we have got are the damage reports from the construction companies, and statements from our own people about how they broke into the sites.”

  “But surely the Olympic sites are guarded? There must be cameras, nightwatchmen, patrols by security companies? And this close to the event, the work will be going on twenty-four hours a day, won’t it?”

  “All true, and when the work stops the nightwatchmen are posted, but these people have a knack of knowing the odd corner or length of fence where the surveillance cameras don’t have total coverage, that kind of thing, and there are so many sites involved that they’ve got plenty of choice about where they hit each time.”

  “Have you got any leads at all?” Bronson asked.

  “A few whispers on the street, but that’s about it. We think the gang is based somewhere in this area, because on the odd occasions when any of them has been spotted and chased, they’ve always managed to slip the net down alleyways, side streets and so on. That suggests detailed knowledge of the area.”

  “Or it could just mean that they’ve done a thorough reconnaissance of the target area beforehand,” Bronson said, “or even that they’ve invested in a bunch of really good quality GPS units.”

  Curtis nodded. “I can’t argue with any of that. We think they’re a local bunch, but we really don’t know. And we’ve no idea what their objective is.”

  Bronson shook his head. “I can see how frustrating this must be,” he said, “but surely it’s only an irritant? Why can’t you just double the number of nightwatchmen and CCTV cameras and increase the regular patrols around the sites? Surely that would be enough to neutralize this bunch of idiots.”

  Curtis smiled at him. “Until about a week ago, I’d have agreed with you. Then two things happened. First, we got a lead on the name of the man who seems to be the head of the group, and that does tie up with some of the graffiti we’ve found. At several of the sites they hit, we found fresh graffiti that looked a bit like a capital “M” with a lowercase “u” directly underneath it. In fact, we’d started referring to them as the “Mu Gang,” though we had no idea what the symbol was supposed to mean.

  “Anyway, one of our informers finally came up wi
th the name Wolf, spelling uncertain. He thought that was the man’s surname, and that his first name might be Mark or maybe Marcus, but he wasn’t sure. He also told us that the graffiti, the “Mu” symbol, was meant to represent a wolf’s head, the “M” being the ears and the “u” the snout, so that all seemed to hang together.”

  “Interesting, but not particularly helpful,” Bronson commented. “What was the second thing?”

  “The second thing changed everything. Five nights ago, what we believe to be the same gang launched an attack against one of the stadiums. They got in undetected by cutting through the boundary fence, and made their way over to where some construction equipment was still being stored. They did a fair amount of minor damage to some of the most expensive equipment they could find, cutting diesel fuel lines, putting sugar in petrol tanks, all that kind of thing, because there isn’t much else you can do to a bulldozer or a crane to stop it working. Unless you’ve got a wrecking ball or cutting equipment, that is.

  “Then it all went wrong. We think the nightwatchman on the site saw something on the CCTV cameras or maybe heard the gang. Whatever happened, he dialed triple nine and then headed out to try to stop them. He was by himself, and from the recordings we’ve looked at, there were at least six of them.”

  Bronson had a horrible feeling he knew what was coming.

  “He tried to tackle one of them, but he was set upon by the gang and beaten up. That was bad enough, but he wasn’t that young and his heart gave out during the attack. By the time the first patrol car arrived, he was already dead and the intruders were long gone. So what started out as just a bloody nuisance has now turned into a full-scale murder inquiry.”

  “I presume you don’t want me to help out with that?” Bronson asked.

  “No. We’ve already got a full Murder Room running, not that they’ve got very much to go on because of the lack of any useful forensic evidence. But Shit Rises has got a better—or at least a different—plan in mind, and that’s where you come in. He’s under a hell of a lot of pressure from the top to get this sorted. The clock’s ticking, and we absolutely have to find this bunch of thugs and get them off the streets before East London is flooded with athletes and spectators. He’s been looking for a volunteer for this for a few days, pretty much ever since the killing of the nightwatchman.”