James Becker - Echo of the Reich

“Where?” he asked.

Angela pointed.

“This section looks a lot more tumbledown than the rest of the slope,” she said, “with more vegetation growing all over the rocks. And there’s a concave area just above it, see?”

Once she’d pointed out the visual clues, Bronson could absolutely see what she was driving at. He nodded slowly.

“You could be right,” he said. “If this was once a tunnel, a natural or man-made entrance, and it was blown up, this is pretty much what you’d expect it to look like, over half a century after the event.”

For a few moments they just stood there, staring at the rock face.

“You told me that the Nazis had destroyed the entrance,” Bronson said.

Angela nodded. “That’s in all the contemporary reports that I’ve managed to track down. When the special SS Evacuation Kommando arrived here, they removed Die Glocke and the documentation, killed everybody who wasn’t vital to the project, then blew down the entrance tunnel. And that,” she added, “is what I think we’re looking at.”

“I presume they were in a hurry,” Bronson said. “They must have known that the Russian advance was only a matter of days, maybe even hours, away.”

“Probably, yes. What’s your point?”

“I don’t know too much about mining or underground facilities, but I do know that a supply of fresh air would have been essential. And I think that it would be normal practice to have more than just one source.”

“You mean they might have destroyed the entrance used by people and vehicles, but they wouldn’t have had time to blow up all the ventilation ducts?”

“Exactly.” Bronson nodded. “This was a huge complex-you said it covered over thirty-five square kilometers-and to keep that kind of area livable in, they would have needed plenty of sources of fresh air.”

“So all we have to do is find one, I suppose. But at least we now know we’re looking in more or less the right place.”

They separated again, and this time they started looking higher up the rock face, because logically the air vents would have been placed high enough to avoid animals taking refuge in them, and where undergrowth would not interfere with the flow of air. And the Nazis had repeatedly demonstrated to the world that they were logical. Implacably evil in their intentions, but supremely logical and efficient in the implementation of their intentions.

Once again, it was Angela who spotted what they were looking for. About fifty yards from the dynamited entrance to the cave, under a natural overhang about ten feet off the ground and almost invisible in the shadow cast by that overhang, she saw a dark shape, not a perfect circle but too regular to be a natural opening in the rock.

Bronson pulled on a pair of overalls, handed a second pair to Angela, and checked that his flashlight was working.

“Do you really think you’ll need that in the cave?” she asked, pointing at the butt of the Walther that he’d tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

“Not really,” Bronson replied, “but you never know. I think they have wolves in this part of the world, and maybe bears as well. I’d hate to get inside the tunnels and find that I’d arrived in a wolf den just in time for lunch.”

“Good point. What about me? I have shot the odd pistol in my time, you know.”

Bronson fished the Llama. 22 out of his trouser pocket and handed it to her.

“It’s loaded, with one round in the chamber, and the safety catch is on, so just click it off, point and then shoot. But only if you have to. I doubt if one of those bullets would stop a wolf, and all it would do to a bear is just piss it off, really badly, so let me do the shooting if we meet anything like that.”

“Fine with me.”

Bronson again checked the flashlight he was carrying, confirmed he had spare batteries for it and for the second, smaller flashlight in his pocket, then scrambled up the rock face to the opening. The hole itself was about three feet wide, and appeared to have been chiseled out of the rock, because he could see the unmistakable marks of picks or chisels on the stone.

He crawled a few feet into the narrow tunnel, then turned round and waited for Angela to follow him, extending his hand to help her as she neared the entrance.

“This is definitely man-made,” Bronson said, pointing at the tool marks.

Angela shivered slightly. “It gives me a funny feeling, seeing something like this, knowing how it was constructed, and knowing that the men who were forced to dig this out of the rock were probably dead just days later.”

There wasn’t anything Bronson thought he could say in reply to that, so he just shook his head, switched on his flashlight and shone the beam down the tunnel.

Then the two of them began making their way, slowly and cautiously, along the horizontal shaft that had been cut through the rock and into the side of the mountain.

26 July 2012

The shaft was fairly easy to negotiate, being wide and unobstructed apart from a few stones and bits of rock that had fallen from the roof over the years, and it wasn’t even particularly long. Bronson estimated they’d covered only about twenty yards when the beam of his flashlight suddenly no longer showed the sides of the shaft, but a heavy-looking lump of rusty machinery.

“Stop where you are,” he murmured to Angela. “There’s something blocking the duct.”

He crawled forward a few more feet until he could clearly see what it was.

“It’s a fan,” he said. “I’ll need to shift it before we can go any further.”

He reached out and gave the rusted lump of machinery a push. It moved very slightly, but he knew he didn’t have either the strength in his arms or a fulcrum that he could use to shift it. He’d have to use his feet.

“Can you take this torch?”

Bronson passed it back to Angela, then awkwardly turned completely around in the tunnel. He braced himself with his arms against the side of the duct, then drew up his legs and kicked out, his feet hitting the fan squarely near its center. There was a sudden squeal of tearing metal, but the obstruction stayed in place. Bronson moved slightly, then kicked out again.

This time, whatever was holding the fan gave way, and it tumbled out of sight, landing with an echoing crash somewhere beyond.

Angela shone the flashlight over Bronson’s body. The worked stone sides of the ventilation duct stopped a couple of feet ahead, and beyond that was an inky blackness, part of a stone wall visible some distance away.

Bronson repeated the maneuver, turning himself round so that he was facing the open space ahead of them. Then he slid forward the last few feet until his head and shoulders projected beyond the end of the duct. He shone the flashlight downward, the beam revealing a level floor of hard-packed earth on stone and the crumpled remains of the fan.

“The floor’s about six feet down,” he said, his voice echoing in the confined space. “I’ll go first.”

“No bears or wolves, I hope?”

“Not that I can see, no.”

Bronson maneuvered himself awkwardly for the third time, turning round so that his legs dangled over the edge, then lowered himself with his hands, dropping the last couple of feet.

“Just come straight out,” he told Angela. “I’ll take your weight.”

Angela crawled forward, glancing with interest around the chamber, then stretched out her arms toward Bronson, who grabbed her shoulders and eased her body forward out of the shaft, then lowered her to the ground to stand beside him.

“What is this place?” she asked, unconsciously lowering her voice to a whisper.

“I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it, so maybe it was just a storage room, something like that.” He aimed the beam of the flashlight toward the center of the ceiling, where a rusty electrical fixture dangled. “It had a light once,” he added, “as well as that fan, so I’m pretty sure we’re in the right place. It must be a part of the Nazi underground complex.”