James Becker - Echo of the Reich

Bronson replaced the Walther in his pocket, slung the submachine gun over his shoulder and looked around. There was no sign of anybody else in the area, and the single shot he’d fired would not have been audible for more than a few dozen yards, thanks to the efficiency of the suppressor.

The best place to put the body was undoubtedly inside the mine, but Bronson knew that that simply wouldn’t work. Trying to lift up the man’s literal deadweight to force it down the ventilation shaft and into the chamber would take too long, and might not be possible at all, even if Angela helped him. And he didn’t want her to be traumatized any more than she was already. After all, she’d just shot and killed a man inside the complex, and was still in shock. Disposing of another dead body was something he wasn’t prepared to even contemplate putting her through.

There was plenty of undergrowth around the rock face, long grass, bushes and shrubs, and even a narrow crevice not far away that he thought would be big enough to conceal the corpse. Bronson bent down beside the man and searched his pockets. He removed his wallet-to make identification a little more difficult when the police were finally summoned by somebody who’d noticed the smell of decomposition-a set of car keys, a box of nine-millimeter ammunition, and another Walther pistol in a belt holster. He was acquiring quite an armory.

Then he grabbed the man by his heels and dragged him across the level ground toward the crevice he’d noticed. He stopped beside it, laid the body parallel to the opening, and simply rolled it down into the crevice. He tossed a few broken branches and other debris over the corpse, completely concealing it from view. With any luck, it would be several days before anybody discovered the body.

Bronson walked back across the clearing to the end of the ventilation shaft, climbed up the rock until he could shine his flashlight down it, and called out to Angela.

“Can you climb on the chair and follow me out?” he asked.

Her face, pinched with concern, appeared at the end of the shaft.

“Are you okay?” she replied. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Now, we need to move. The clock’s running and we have to get back to London as quickly as we can.”

Thirty minutes later, they drove back down the track toward the main road and the village of Ludwikowice, but this time in a different car. The keys Bronson had taken from the pocket of the dead man had fitted another BMW, a big four-by-four, which he’d found parked about fifty yards away from the vehicle he and Angela had arrived in. Bronson wasn’t sure how long it would be before the owner of the BMW he’d stolen the registration plates from alerted the police, but it seemed prudent to change vehicles. The one thing he was certain about was that neither of the men who’d driven the four-by-four to the mine would be able to report its theft.

And there was another reason as well. When Bronson had opened the trunk to transfer their bags to the second vehicle, he’d discovered that the trunk lid of the new car had been modified, the plastic covering over the inside of the metal fitted with two concealed catches and a hinge. When it was opened, padded recesses were revealed, clearly designed to hold a pair of submachine guns, a couple of pistols, and half a dozen boxes of ammunition. The only reason he’d discovered the hiding place was that the cover had been opened by the two men to access their weapons when they arrived at the spot, and they hadn’t replaced it fully. One MP5 was still in place: obviously the men had decided to carry only those weapons appropriate for their task.

Bronson had tucked the pistols, the submachine gun and the ammunition into place and snapped the cover shut. Once in place, there was no external indication that the trunk lid was anything other than absolutely standard.

As he drove away, he reflected that he and Angela were almost certainly better armed than the occupants of any police car in any country in the world, with a total of two submachine guns and four pistols, including the Llama, which was now tucked away in Angela’s purse, and the second Walther pistol, the silencer still attached, hidden-but within reach-underneath the driver’s seat.

At the end of the road, Bronson swung the BMW to the right, heading west, back toward the German border. They had a long way to go to get to London, and he knew that time was running out.

What Marcus’s man had blurted out as he lay dying in the Wenceslas Mine meant that the attack on London was imminent. The one event of the Olympic Games that would be sure to attract publicity from around the world was the opening ceremony, scheduled for the evening of the following day. And that, Bronson guessed, was when the attack would take place. Not only would that mean Marcus’s vengeance attack on London would be witnessed by the whole world, but because of the popularity of the event, it would also result in enormous casualty figures.

Whatever Bronson and Angela did, they simply had to stop this catastrophic attack from taking place.

The only problem was, right then, Bronson had no idea how they were going to achieve that.

26 July 2012

“One thing that man said still puzzles me,” Angela said, giving a slight shiver as her mind replayed the events that had taken place a few hours ago in the darkness of the Wenceslas Mine.

They’d crossed back into Germany without any problems, and Bronson was simply following the instructions given by the satnav, which was taking them along the fastest possible route to Calais.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That remark he made about ‘our symbol for the Games.’ I presume he meant something German, but nothing about the Olympics has any link with Germany, surely? I mean, the tradition goes back to ancient Greece, doesn’t it?”

Bronson glanced at her and gave a smile. Then he shook his head.

“What?”

“It’s not often that I know more about something than you do,” he said teasingly. “And you know my dislike of all forms of organized sport. So it’s actually rather odd that I do know something about the Olympics. In fact, I know several things about the Games that most people don’t, but it’s all information I acquired by accident. A couple of months ago I was involved in a surveillance operation that went absolutely nowhere because we had the wrong information, and I spent a couple of nights sitting in the bedroom of a house on a small estate, waiting for a phone call that never came. The only books the owner of the place possessed were about sport, and the only one I found even halfway readable dealt with interesting facts about the Olympic Games.”

“And?”

“And the symbol of the Olympic Games-the famous Rings of Olympus-which most people seem to think was created by the nation that invented the concept, i.e., the ancient Greeks, wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Wasn’t anything to do with the Greeks, ancient or modern. The design came from the fertile brain of a French aristocrat named Pierre Fredy, better known as Baron de Coubertin, who’s usually considered to be the father of the modern Olympic Games. He created the symbol in nineteen twelve. The design of five interlocking rings, colored blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background, was intended for the World Congress of nineteen fourteen, but that was suspended because of the First World War. It was later adopted for the Olympic Games. And there’s no truth in the idea that each ring represents a continent. In fact, de Coubertin chose the colors because they appeared on all the national flags of the world.”

“Fascinating,” Angela muttered, but the tone of her voice caused Bronson to glance across at her. “And that has what, exactly, to do with Germany?”