Echo of the Reich

16

22 July 2012

They’d followed the dark blue articulated truck ever since it had pulled out of the industrial park on the southern outskirts of Prague. Three cars, two men in each, swapping places at irregular intervals. It hadn’t been a difficult task. The truck was simply too big, and too slow, to miss.

The complicated bit came after it had crossed the Czech Republic border near Waidhaus and headed west into Germany. The Germans knew they had two options: either they had somehow to divert the truck off the autobahn onto the quieter country roads or they had to wait until the crew stopped for fuel, or a break, or whatever. In the end, it proved to be easier than they’d expected.

A few kilometers to the west of the Schonschleif interchange, the truck had pulled into a service area. The three cars had followed, the drivers getting out and topping up their tanks just in case the truck pulled out again immediately. But it hadn’t. After filling the tank with diesel, the driver of the truck had pulled away from the pumps and driven the vehicle over to the truck parking area, where he’d stopped and switched off the engine. Then he and his companion had climbed down from the cab, locked the vehicle and walked over to the cafeteria for a meal.

If the men in the cars had scripted the events themselves, it could hardly have worked out better for them. Forty minutes after the truck had pulled off the autobahn, it was on the move again, this time with two different men in the cab. The stiffening bodies of the original crew were locked in the cargo section behind, each wrapped in heavy-duty plastic sheeting sealed with tape, because it was important that the smell of decomposition shouldn’t be detected for some time.

As they drove away from the service area, the passenger in the cab of the truck made a thirty-second phone call to a Berlin number to arrange the rendezvous for the next phase of the operation.

Six hours later, in a busy industrial park near Erfurt, where dozens of trucks arrived and departed every hour throughout the day and night, they made the switch, uncoupling the trailer from the Czech Republic truck and leaving it in a line of other unhitched trailers. Two hours after that, the sides of the trailer had a fresh coat of paint to conceal the original markings, and new heavy-duty padlocks had been fitted to all the external doors. It would be days, probably weeks, they hoped, before anybody took any interest in the vehicle.

One of the men attached the tractor unit to an entirely different trailer, which had been positioned in the park over two weeks earlier, the sides of which had already been painted with the appropriate logos, but which contained equipment of an entirely different nature to that loaded into the other trailer. It was now fitted with the registration plates from the Czech Republic trailer to complete the deception. The articulated truck drove out of the park as soon as all the phases of the operation had been finished, its route and destination preplanned and fully understood by all those involved.

It would actually take only a couple of days to make the journey, but the drivers knew they’d have to spend quite long periods parked en route because the arrival time had already been determined, and for several reasons it was very important that the vehicle didn’t arrive too early or-far worse-too late.