James Becker - Echo of the Reich

It was looking more and more as if the only way that he could do anything about Marcus’s nasty little plot was to somehow stop it by himself. Preferably with Angela’s help, if she decided to stick with him. But even as that thought crossed his mind, he knew he was being unfair. The two of them had had their differences in the past, but their ultimate loyalty to each other had never been in any doubt, at any time. The one thing he was quite certain about was that she would stick by him.

Bronson glanced across at his former wife and smiled grimly. “You know that I’m always pleased to see you, and I hope the feeling’s mutual,” he began. “And we’ve had some interesting times together, tramping around the world trying to unravel ancient mysteries. But I have a horrible suspicion that right here and right now, we’re both completely out of our depth.”

“Never say die, Chris. If we can find out as much as we can about this man Marcus and what he might have planned, surely we can just go to the authorities here in Germany, and probably in Britain at the same time, and hand over everything to them? Provide them with the information and let them sort out the problem?”

For a couple of moments, Bronson debated telling her exactly what had happened to him since his arrival in Berlin, but then decided not to.

He shook his head. “It’s not that easy, I’m afraid. I didn’t tell you before, but I left Britain under a real cloud. I ended up firing a pistol at a van-load of police officers, and that’s not a simple offense to walk away from. I’m not surprised you were being followed around London, because there’s a real live warrant out for my arrest, and if they do catch up with me-cliche or not-they’ll want to lock me up and throw away the key.”

For a few seconds, Angela just stared at him, her face clouded with disbelief. “You did what?” she demanded. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”

Bronson shrugged. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and it’s complicated. I believed there was a serious threat to London during the Olympic Games, and I simply couldn’t convince any of my superiors that there was any truth in it. They were going to pull me off the case, and just mop up a small and insignificant bunch of thugs who’d been breaking a few windows in northeast London, and I knew that if they did that we’d never find out about the bigger plot until it was much too late. So I did what I thought was right, not what I was told to do.”

“But shooting at your fellow officers? That’s really serious, Chris.”

Bronson nodded. “Tell me about it. Actually, I didn’t shoot at any of them, only at one of the tires on the van they were driving, but that’s probably splitting hairs. But I still believe I was right, and what I found out here has confirmed it.”

“You mean the stuff I’ve told you about Die Glocke?”

“That, obviously, but now I know a lot more about Marcus as well. I was watching his house last night, and I saw him in his full jet-black regalia, along with a group of other men who were clearly his subordinates. He was dressed as a Nazi Obersturmbannfuhrer, a lieutenant colonel, right down to the swastika on his left arm. I even saw the lightning bolt runes on his lapel.”

Angela was silent for a few moments, then she shook her head.

“That’s really nasty,” she said. “The SS probably killed more people-mainly innocent people who couldn’t fight back, in the concentration camps and elsewhere-than any other single unit of the Nazi armed forces. And they were heavily involved with Die Glocke as well. One thing I didn’t tell you was that when the Bell and the equipment were taken out of the Wenceslas Mine, it was a special SS Evacuation Kommando that handled the operation.”

“I’ve never heard of a unit like that.”

“You won’t have done,” Angela replied, “because as far as I’ve been able to find out, it was the only one ever created. These SS men went into the mine, removed Die Glocke itself and all the documentation, and selected which scientists should accompany the device on its journey out of Germany. The rest of the scientists and technicians were executed on the spot.”

Bronson nodded grimly. “I guess that’s what you’d expect of the SS-doing what they did best and keeping up their tradition of slaughtering the innocents.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So you’re sure that everything to do with Die Glocke was removed from the mine? In that case, why are we going there? What do you hope to find?”

“I don’t know, but that place is the only firm lead we have. Everything else I’ve told you has just been culled from recovered documents and the recollections of the very few survivors of that period of the war who were vaguely aware of what was going on. That mine was the last location where the device was known to be operating, and I suppose I’m hoping we might find something there that other people have missed.”

Bronson looked at her for a second or two, then turned his attention back to the road.

“According to the satnav,” he said, “we’ll reach the Polish border in a few minutes, and I suppose we’ll find out fairly soon. Did you discover anything else about this blasted Bell?”

“Only one thing, but it is quite significant,” Angela replied. “All Nazi projects and operations were given code names, as we’ve already discussed, but they were also allocated priorities that reflected their importance, and that priority determined what resources they could command, and how quickly requests for additional men or equipment would be processed. From the very start, both Projekt Thor and the later twin projects of Chronos and Laternentrager were allocated the priority classification Kriegsentscheidend. That meant ‘decisive for the outcome of the war.’ It was the highest possible classification in the entire Nazi system. Guess how many other German Wunderwaffen projects shared that same classification?”

Bronson shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue.”

“The short answer is ‘none.’ Die Glocke was the single most vital project of any sort embarked on by the Nazis at any time during or before the war. If they could have got it operational, they obviously believed it was so important a development that it could literally have won the war for them.”

“And that’s why we have to find out whatever we can about it, because if Marcus has found the device and managed to get it working, I really think it’s possible that he has a weapon that could be used to destroy a large part of London, perhaps rendering it uninhabitable for centuries to come.”

25 July 2012

The first thing Bronson noticed was that the road on the Polish side of the border was in a markedly worse condition than the same road in Germany. Whereas the German autobahn had been smooth and well-maintained, the Polish section resembled a construction site more than anything else. The surface was scarred by cracks, potholes and the uneven finish caused by numerous previous repairs, and in various places road gangs were working on sections of it.

The landscape had been generally flat, just grassy meadows interspersed by golden fields of corn and other crops, but as they approached Walbrzych the scenery began to change as hills, their flanks covered in trees, reared up in front of them.

“This whole area used to be part of Germany,” Angela said. “It was a section of the Reich before the Second World War, and most of the people who lived here then were German-speaking farmers. And it was important during the war as well, because there were lots of coal mines here, and the Wehrmacht used some of them as production facilities and storage bunkers. I believe they even built some of the Wunderwaffen here, or at least some of their components, like bits of the V2 rockets.”