Echo of the Reich

29

24 July 2012

A metallic clattering noise woke him, and for a few seconds Bronson had no idea where he was or what he was doing. He’d fallen asleep with his head lying across his folded arms, and his neck ached abominably. Then realization returned. Moving slowly and carefully, because the human eye is particularly well adapted to detect movement, he lifted his head to face the house.

The air was noticeably cooler, and the sun had almost set. The front of the house was now illuminated by the last of its rays, giving the wood a golden glow, and infusing the building with an appearance of benign and rustic comfort that Bronson knew was entirely illusory.

He raised the binoculars to his eyes, although he had already guessed the cause of the sound that had awakened him: the garage door was wide-open. The garage’s interior lights were still switched off but he could just make out the shapes of two men standing together on the left-hand side of the open door. The odd word of German floated into the quiet of the evening, but even if Bronson had been able to speak the language, he doubted if he could have followed their conversation, because he was simply too far away.

It looked to Bronson as if they were waiting for something, or someone-perhaps for Marcus or one of the other men to arrive, which wasn’t good news. He could have tackled one man, perhaps even two using the threat of his pistol, but it was clear that that window of opportunity had now passed. To implement his very sketchy plan, he would have needed to be standing somewhere near the garage door when it opened. Now, it would be impossible to cross the seventy or so yards of open ground between his present position and the garage without being seen.

And then he heard the sound of a car approaching, and guessed that this might be the vehicle the men were expecting. He glanced to his left and saw through the trees the irregular flickering of a set of headlights, the note of the engine changing as the car slowed down. Moments later, a vehicle turned off the road and drove down the track toward the property, its lights shining into the interior of the garage and revealing the presence of four other cars already inside.

That changed the odds considerably. Even if each car had been driven there by a single individual, that still meant there were at least four people in the house, and possibly as many as sixteen. Adding to that number the occupants of the vehicle that had just arrived, Bronson knew he could be facing up to twenty men, many of them armed if his past experience was any guide. To approach the building now would be suicidal. The best he could hope to do was wait until at least some of the men had left. Assuming, of course, that they would be leaving. He would just have to wait, and watch, and see what happened.

He’d been expecting the car to drive into the garage, and had assumed that was the reason why the two men were waiting by the open door, but then he realized that the number of cars already inside would have made maneuvering somewhat difficult. Instead, the car swung around to the left and parked on the gravel drive. Its lights were extinguished, the sound of the engine died away, and then the car doors opened.

Four men climbed out and walked around to the vehicle’s trunk. Each man reached inside and took out a bulky bag, about the size of the weekend bag that Bronson had locked in the trunk of his car; then they strode across to the door of the garage. As they did so, the interior lights flickered into life.

Two things struck him immediately, both unexpected. The first was the way that the two men waiting there were dressed. Despite the warmth of the evening, both were wearing long and heavy overcoats that came well below their knees, and apparently had on some kind of boots, because Bronson could see the glint of black-presumably leather-below their coats. The second was what they did as the four new arrivals approached. They stood rigidly to attention and nodded deferentially as the other men stepped inside the building. Whoever the guests were, they appeared to be people of some importance.

But it was the overcoats that puzzled him. Now that the sun had gone down, the evening was getting cooler, but the air was still warm, and presumably the house had a central heating system, so why were the two men dressed in that fashion? It couldn’t be because they were cold; that didn’t make sense. In fact, Bronson could only think of one possible reason for what they were wearing, and he didn’t like the idea at all.

He switched his attention back to the events unfolding in front of him. One of the men was still standing by the open door of the garage, while the other was escorting the four guests to the door at the rear of the garage, and in a few moments all five men had disappeared from view.

Bronson toyed with the idea of trying to get across to the house and into the garage while there was only one man on duty, but he guessed there was only one logical reason for the second man to remain by the open door, and that was because additional visitors were expected. Moments later, he was proved right when a second car turned into the driveway and parked near the first. Again, four men emerged from the car, collected bags and then disappeared into the garage. The only difference this time was that as soon as all four men were inside, the garage door closed behind them and the thin sliver of light visible under the door was extinguished.

Bronson lay still, the binoculars still clamped to his face, studying the building, but no lights went on anywhere in the property, and in any case, every set of shutters that was visible to him was now firmly closed.

He tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. The only reason he could think of for the two men to be clad in heavy overcoats on such a mild evening was because of what they were wearing underneath. That, together with the gleaming black leather boots they both had on, suggested a uniform of some sort, and presumably a uniform that they did not want any casual passerby to see. And that thought generated a host of different, and distinctly unpleasant, possibilities.

From the first, Bronson had assumed that Marcus and his band of men had formed a terrorist organization, and terrorist groups did not tend to wear uniforms or anything else that would enable them to be easily identified. That, in fact, was the point. Terrorists lurked in the shadows, forming their plans, delivering their weapons, and then making their escape, if at all possible, completely undetected. Wearing a uniform would never be a part of their agenda.

He still had no doubt that Marcus had planned some kind of terrorist-style atrocity against London, but now Bronson wondered if the German had formed a sort of private army. Could this gathering at the house be a meeting of the principal officers of that army, a meeting that required the attendees to wear full uniforms? That would explain not only what the two men in the garage had been wearing, but also the bags that the eight visitors had carried into the house.

And there was yet another, even darker, possibility, suggested to Bronson by those gleaming black boots. What if Marcus hadn’t created a private army? What if he had simply re-created an older one? Maybe what was happening inside the property at that very moment was a neo-Nazi revival, a re-creation of a part of one of the most evil and ruthless regimes the modern world had ever seen. The thought sent a shiver down Bronson’s spine.

One thing was now perfectly clear to him: there was no way he could get inside the property that evening. There were simply too many people in there for him even to attempt it. And if his theory about a neo-Nazi group was correct, if he was apprehended on or near the property, he had absolutely no doubt what the outcome would be. If he was lucky, they’d simply shoot him. If he was unlucky, he’d be strapped to that hideous chair in the concrete room and worked over for a day or two by some of Marcus’s men to extract whatever information they wanted, and then they’d kill him.

The one thing he wasn’t going to do, he decided, was get any closer to the house. He considered returning to his car and simply driving away, but he was loath to do that for the moment. In any case, he had no idea where he’d go or what he should do. He couldn’t simply walk away from what he’d been forced to do inside that house. He had to try somehow to retrieve both the pistol he’d used to kill the man in the chair and the film Marcus had taken of the event. For the moment, that must be his goal. The bigger, and ultimately far more important, problem of the threat to London had receded somewhat in his mind, taking second place in his list of priorities.

The best thing he could do, he decided, was wait. And watch. When the garage door finally opened again, he might see something that would help him decide his course of action, and perhaps he could even memorize some of the faces of the people as they emerged to return to their cars. A decent camera with a telephoto lens would have been extremely useful at that point, but Bronson hadn’t gotten one, and he had no way of obtaining one at that time in the evening.

For the next two hours, the house remained still and silent: no lights showing in any of the windows, no sign of any activity. The winking, telltale light on the burglar alarm box had been extinguished, because the system had been disarmed, and the property looked completely deserted. The moon was the faintest of crescents high in the sky above him, but it cast sufficient light for Bronson to see the shape of the house, even if he could no longer make out any of the details.

The noises of the wood had changed after nightfall. The birdsong had ceased, the buzzing of insects was no longer audible, and a silence seemed to have fallen across the land, disturbed only by the sounds of the creatures of the night. Somewhere over to his right a vixen screamed, the howl of a tortured soul, and some distance behind him a snuffling and grunting sound suggested that he’d been right about the possibility of wild boar being found in the area. He heard plenty of noises, but actually saw very little. A fox wandered across the clearing in front of him, between him and the house, and paused briefly to stare in his direction before moving on, following its usual patrol route. Several times he heard bats, their high-pitched squeaking unmistakable, and once a large owl, uncannily silent on its massive wings, flew slowly over the house, heading north on its nightly search for prey.

Just before midnight, the light in the garage snapped on again, dimly outlining the closed door, and moments after that, with a faint click and the whirr of an electric motor, the door began to open and light flooded out across the gravel drive.

Bronson focused the binoculars on the garage. As the door clicked up into the fully open position, one man appeared, striding across to the wall on the left-hand side of the door, then disappeared from view. Moments later, three floodlights mounted on the garage wall were switched on, illuminating the two parked cars outside the building. Then the man reappeared, stepped outside the garage and looked round, then walked back inside and across to the internal door, which was standing open.

Before he reached it, another figure appeared, quickly followed by about seven or eight others, most of them carrying bags-Bronson guessed they were the men he had seen arriving earlier. As far as he could tell, they were dressed in the same clothes they’d been wearing before, but as he stared through the binoculars at the group, now standing and talking more or less in the center of the garage, one figure immediately stood out.

Bronson knew that he would never forget Marcus’s face. It wasn’t simply that he recognized the man who’d forced him to kill a helpless human being, it was what the German was wearing that gripped his attention.

The black jackboots, black breeches and tunic were chillingly familiar, as was the peaked cap bearing the eagle insignia with the skull symbol, the Totenkopf — Bronson knew that much German-mounted below it. On the left-hand side of the uniform hung a chained black ceremonial dagger, and the lapel bore a rank badge bearing four square pips above two parallel bars. Bronson remembered military ranks from his days in the army, and that, he was sure, was the German rank Obersturmbannfuhrer, equivalent to a British lieutenant colonel. The only splash of color was the blood-red armband displaying the all too familiar black swastika in a white circle.

Then Marcus turned slightly to his left, and for the first time Bronson could see his right lapel. There, gleaming in the overhead lighting, he could clearly see what he’d been expecting ever since the German had stepped into the garage: the twin lightning-bolt runes of the SS.

Two of the men then raised their right arms toward Marcus in rigid salutes, salutes which he returned. Then the two men turned on their heels and walked out to the cars.

He’d been right. The German hadn’t created his own private army. Instead, he’d revived the most feared and detested military unit of all time, the SS or Schutzstaffel, the black-uniformed thugs responsible for running the concentration camps and perpetrating the vast majority of the atrocities recorded during the Second World War. The SS had fielded almost one million men, and had managed to enslave, torture, experiment on and eventually kill some twelve million people, most of them Jews. But they’d also directed their lethal attentions toward other “undesirables” who might in some way contaminate the purity of Hitler’s ideal of an Aryan race, such as Poles and Slavs, the mentally and physically handicapped, political dissidents, clergymen and homosexuals. Of all the forces, of all the nations, involved in the global conflicts of the twentieth century, the SS had been by far the most chillingly efficient as a killing unit, and by far the most reviled.

Bronson knew that what he was staring at wasn’t some toothless neo-Nazi revival, a bunch of deluded socialists wearing shirts with silly badges. From what he’d already found out about Marcus, he guessed that he was as close as possible to the real thing.

Not neo-Nazi. Just Nazi.

And that worried him more than anything else.