Echo of the Reich

31

24 July 2012

Bronson covered the dozen or so feet to the other man in a few swift and silent strides, then stopped right behind him. He reached forward over the man’s left shoulder and wrapped his hand around his mouth. At the same moment, he hit out with his right fist with all the power he could muster. The blow connected with the other man’s back beside his right kidney, exactly where Bronson had been aiming. It was an incapacitating, not a killing, blow. The man loosed a sudden muffled grunt of surprise and pain as he arched backward.

Bronson was already pulling him in the same direction, and the man tumbled helplessly to the ground, cracking the back of his head on the hard-packed soil as he did so. But Bronson hadn’t quite finished with him, and swung his right fist again, this time aiming for the solar plexus, driving every vestige of breath from the man’s body. And he followed that with a sharp uppercut to the jaw to complete the process. The man’s head snapped backward as unconsciousness claimed him.

It was a rapid and brutal demolition job, and had offered the man no possible chance of responding, which was precisely what Bronson had intended. For about half a minute he stood where he was, staring down the track into the darkness and listening intently. He doubted if the noise of the assault could have been heard more than a few yards away, but he needed to be certain nobody was approaching him. But he heard nothing, no sound of movement.

Then he bent down and quickly searched the unconscious man. He found a Walther pistol-this one a PPQ model, very similar in appearance to the smaller Glocks-in a shoulder holster and with two spare magazines in a belt pouch. A metal tube in one of his pockets turned out to be a suppressor for the weapon.

Bronson shrugged, pulled off the man’s jacket, and took the lot. He took off his own jacket, donned the shoulder holster and the belt pouch, and screwed the suppressor onto the threaded barrel of the Walther. He pressed the magazine release and hefted it in his hand. It felt full, but he had no time to check it. Bronson replaced the magazine in the pistol and eased the slide back just far enough to confirm that there was already a round in the chamber.

That was the first part of his plan completed. Now all he had to do was get past whoever was waiting for him in the clearing further down the track.

Bronson still needed a car, and had realized that it might make sense to “borrow” the BMW, rather than even try to retrieve the Hyundai. BMWs, after all, were as common on the roads of Germany as Fords were in Britain, and he would stand out less driving that than the British-plated vehicle.

There was nothing in the Hyundai he needed to recover, and it couldn’t be traced to him because he didn’t own it. And despite the addition to his armory, Bronson still wasn’t happy about tackling the men in the clearing. He knew there were at least two of them, and even they would be a handful. If there were three or four waiting there, he’d almost certainly come off worst. In all respects, taking the BMW and getting the hell out of Dodge made sense.

He walked round to the driver’s door, slid into the seat and closed the door. The keys were in the ignition, and he immediately started the engine and switched on the lights, selecting main beam. There was no point in trying to be sneaky, because not even Harry Houdini could have managed to spirit a four-door saloon car past the men waiting in the clearing.

He lowered the door window and placed the Walther on the seat beside him, where he could easily reach it. Then he engaged first gear and began driving slowly down the track.

He was watching where he was heading, making sure he kept the saloon on the track, but most of his concentration was directed toward the wood on his left, waiting to see what would happen when he reached the entrance to the clearing. Would one of the men step out to stop him and ask where he was going, or would they just assume he’d been recalled to the house by Marcus?

A squawk from the dashboard made him look down, and he spotted a small two-way radio on the front of the transmission tunnel. The noise was followed by a short burst of German, so he guessed that somebody, presumably one of the men in the clearing, wasn’t waiting for him to reach them, but was asking him what he was doing.

Clearly he couldn’t reply to the question, so he just kept on driving, but picked up the Walther in his right hand and rested it on his lap, just in case they tried to stop him. Then he saw the two large trees on his left, and knew he’d almost reached the clearing.

The radio barked another string of words at him, which he again ignored.

Then a figure wearing camouflage clothing emerged from beside one of the trees, a pistol held in his right hand, but pointing at the ground, and his left hand raised.

Obediently, Bronson slowed down the BMW slightly and dipped the lights. He lifted the Walther off his lap and rested the end of the suppressor on the door, aiming the weapon at the man as the car approached him.

The figure stepped forward a couple of paces, then seemed almost to recoil as a spark of recognition crossed his face. Immediately he began to raise his pistol, but Bronson was a whole lifetime faster.

He adjusted his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger of the Walther. The pistol coughed in his hand, the suppressor doing its job, and the man beside the car fell backward, the front of his camouflage jacket suddenly turned crimson.

Bronson didn’t wait around. He flicked the lights back to high beam and floored the accelerator pedal. The BMW leaped forward, tires scrabbling for grip on the loose and rutted surface of the track. There was no point in him watching his mirrors, because the night behind him was impenetrably black, and the first warning he’d have if he was being shot at would be the arrival of the bullet.

Instead, he just concentrated on covering the ground as quickly as he could, trying to increase the distance between him and the other man-or other men-in the clearing.

A sudden flash of light from the track behind him caught his eye. Then he heard the bang of a gunshot, the noise echoing all around him. It sounded like a pistol, in which case, unless the man firing it was an Olympic-standard shot, Bronson had nothing to worry about. Few people can hit even a large stationary target with a pistol at much more than twenty yards, and he reckoned he’d already covered well over fifty. Another shot rang out, then a third, but all missed the BMW.

Now he was almost at the end of the track, trying to work out whether to turn left, which would take him past the front of the house, or right, to follow the Rothen road, which he knew curved around in a large loop to join the road he’d driven down to get to Spreenhagen earlier that day.

Then the choice was made for him.

As the BMW bounced over the last of the rough ground where the track intersected with the tarmac road, Bronson glanced to his left and saw headlights coming down the drive from the house. It looked as if the man with the radio hadn’t just been trying to contact the driver of the BMW, but had raised the alarm in the house as well.

It took only a second or two for Bronson to figure the angles. If he went left, the other car would be out of the drive and blocking the road long before he could drive past the house. Going right was the only viable option.

As soon as the front wheels of the car reached the tarmac, he swung the steering wheel around to the right and accelerated as hard as he could.

Then he heard the unmistakable hammer of an automatic weapon from somewhere behind him, and realized that the men in the clearing hadn’t just been carrying Walthers or Glocks; at least one of them had a submachine gun or an assault rifle. Through the open window of the car, he heard the sound of bullets ripping through the undergrowth and thudding into the trunks of trees that he was driving past, and which now provided a sort of natural bulletproof shield on his right-hand side.

At short range, pistols worried him, but automatic weapons were in a different category and added another layer of danger to the situation. And it also concerned Bronson that the men from the house were apparently happy to fire such weapons despite the certainty that other residents in the area would hear the noise, and most likely immediately call the police.

But that was the least of his worries.

The Rothen road was narrow and, as Bronson already knew, full of twists and turns as it made its way back toward the main road down to the southwest, but that was the way he was going to have to go because of the car that, he could now see in his rearview mirrors, had left the driveway to the house, and was swinging around to the right to follow him.

He was driving a strange car, with the steering wheel on the wrong side, along a road he didn’t know, pursued by men who he guessed knew both the area and their vehicles intimately. The one single advantage he had was that he’d been trained as a Class 1 police driver, and that meant that he knew how to handle a car at almost any speed.

The first part of the road was virtually straight, with just a very gentle left-hand curve in it, and he kept the power on as he steered the BMW through it. The lights of the pursuing car were visible in his mirror, but he had been able to swing right as soon as he left the track, whereas the other vehicle had possibly stopped to block the road before beginning to chase him, so he had a very slim lead over it.

In a matter of seconds, Bronson saw the first of the bends, where the road swung left almost in a right angle around another property, looming up in front of him. He hit the brakes hard, hauling the speed down as he shifted the gear lever from fourth directly to second. Slow in, fast out-a basic rule of high-performance driving.

He clipped the apex of the corner and the moment he saw the clear road ahead he accelerated again, swinging the car into the following right-hand curve.

Another sharp left-hand bend appeared in front of him, Bronson trying to read the road as he concentrated on getting as much speed as he could out of the BMW. He was still in second gear, which was probably right, and again he hit the brakes hard before powering around the curve.

The main beams of the headlights showed him that the road was straight, at least for a couple of hundred yards, and he took full advantage of the fact. Another gentle curve to the left was followed by a sharp left-hand bend, and then another straight, this one much longer, and he managed to get the car traveling at well over seventy miles an hour before the next bend in the road. That bend swung through almost ninety degrees, and had a couple of junctions on it as well.

He’d been checking his rearview mirrors, and the lights of the pursuing car were still with him, but they didn’t seem to have gotten any closer. He estimated that it was still at least two hundred yards behind him, a slim enough margin. He accelerated around the bend and into another straight, and at the end of that he could see the signs indicating that it was a T-junction. This time, he knew he had no option about which way to go. He had to get away from the area of Spreenhagen as quickly as he could, and that meant a right turn, to head northwest.

He was hampered by the fact that he had neither a map nor a satnav in the car. Or, to be exact, he didn’t know if he had either, and he certainly didn’t have time right then to look. He was having to rely on his memory, what he recalled of the journey he’d done the previous day, and he just hoped that would be enough.

He knew that part of the Berliner Ring lay somewhere over to the west, and getting on that and simply driving as fast as he could was one option. A second choice would be to find a town or village somewhere on the road and lose the pursuing car in the streets, maybe by stopping in a car park or a side street and hoping that the pursuers drove on. The third option was the riskiest, and definitely the last resort: let them get close enough for Bronson to mount his own ambush on some quiet road.

He reached the T-junction, flicked off his headlights as he approached, so that he could detect the lights of any vehicles on the road he was about to join, saw nothing, turned the headlights back on, and braked hard again, changing down as he did so. Then he clicked the steering wheel to the right, simultaneously lifted his foot off the brake pedal and back onto the accelerator. The back end of the BMW slid out in a power slide with a squeal of tortured rubber, and the car fishtailed down the road as he straightened up.

Now he knew he had a good chance of losing the following car. The road was virtually straight and had curves rather than bends, the surface was better, and it was much wider than the Rothen road. He still had a good lead, at least three hundred yards now, he estimated, because of the speed he’d managed to achieve on the section before the T-junction. Then he realized he’d done better than expected, because the pursuing car’s headlights only appeared in his mirror as he reached the bridge across the river, and that meant a lead of over half a kilometer, more than five hundred yards.

There was a tiny village named Spreeau, little more than a hamlet, a short distance beyond the bridge, but he didn’t even attempt to slow down, just kept the BMW running as fast as he possibly could. He was doing an indicated one hundred and forty kilometers an hour-over eighty miles an hour-as he drove out of the northern end of the village, and knew immediately that he simply had to outrun the pursuit, because the road ahead was arrow straight as far as he could see, and that meant that if the men chasing him didn’t see his taillights, they would know that he’d stopped somewhere.

He simply had to rely on speed, and he just hoped that, whatever the pursuing car was, the BMW he’d stolen would be faster.

There was no other traffic on the road, in either direction, which was both a blessing and a curse. Other cars would have slowed him down, certainly, but at night, just as in the dark all cats look gray, all cars look alike, and he could have tried to lose himself in the traffic. He continued accelerating hard, the BMW easily traveling at well over one hundred miles an hour, his concentration absolute.

The headlights appeared behind him under a minute after he’d cleared the end of Spreeau, but it was immediately obvious that he’d managed to increase his lead even further. Either their car was slower than the BMW or he was simply outdriving them.

The sign for a roundabout appeared suddenly out of the dark, and Bronson started to slow down, looking out for the road sign that he knew would follow. He glanced quickly at it, saw that the Berliner Ring was indicated over to his left, and continued slowing down as the roundabout came into view. Again, he flicked off his headlights as he approached, checking for other traffic. No other lights were visible, and instead of going around the obstruction, Bronson simply eased the car over to the opposite side of the road and took the left-hand exit, saving a few precious seconds.

Again, there was no traffic, and Bronson was able to extract every last scrap of speed from the BMW as he headed for the autobahn interchange. The pursuing car was now so far behind him that he knew the men in it would be completely unable to see which direction he turned at the junction. He was hoping that he’d find somewhere to tuck the car out of sight just before the junction so he could make sure that whatever direction they turned, he would go the opposite way.

And here the road helped him. Although it was wide and fast, there were numerous curves and the land on both sides was heavily wooded, which meant that once his car was around one of the curves, he would be lost to sight for anyone following him.

Another road sign told him that he was approaching the autobahn junction, the road at that point swinging to the left in a gentle curve, and a further sign warned of a left-hand junction. Bronson braked gently but firmly, ensuring that the car’s tires left no marks of rubber on the road that could alert the men in the following vehicle, and as soon as he saw the junction ahead, he swung left off the road and into the entrance of a small industrial estate. The road was comparatively wide, and he was able to swing the car around in a U-turn so that it faced back toward the main road.

He pulled the BMW to a stop at the edge of the road, switched off the lights, pulled on the handbrake and lowered the window on the driver’s door. There were trees over to his right-the whole area seemed heavily forested-which would prevent his car being spotted by any approaching vehicle on the main road, but the area to the west of him was comparatively clear, and he could actually see the autobahn junction about eight hundred yards away down a completely straight road. As long as his pursuers didn’t guess that he’d pulled off the road, he knew he’d be able to see which direction they turned.

And although the roads he had driven on so far had been devoid of traffic, he’d already spotted several vehicles on the Berliner Ring, which would further confuse the pursuit.

Moments later, he heard the sound of a powerful engine running at high revolutions, and a black Mercedes saloon swept past the junction where he was waiting and powered on toward the autobahn interchange.

The car’s brake lights flared into life as the vehicle reached the junction, and Bronson could imagine the conversation taking place inside. Reduced to its barest essentials, it was a simple choice: left or right?

The Mercedes came to a complete stop, engine idling, in the road a few yards short of the entrance to the northbound slip road. Then the motor roared again and the car lurched forward, past the slip road and on toward the southbound carriageway.

For about five minutes, Bronson just sat in the driver’s seat staring out at the autobahn junction over to his left. He had always been taught never to assume anything-he remembered an old adage that one of his sergeants had frequently trotted out during his time in the army: “assume makes an ass out of u and me”-and because he hadn’t actually been able to see the Mercedes heading south on the autobahn, he didn’t know that was where it had gone. It was possible that the car had stopped just out of sight, and that the occupants were looking back, in the direction they’d come, in case he’d managed to fool them.

He thought the possibility was remote, but still he sat there, just in case.

Then he turned on the ignition of the BMW and checked that all the instruments were giving correct readings. He climbed out of the car and made a quick visual check of the tires-what little he could see of them in the dark-because they would obviously have suffered from the treatment he’d given the car during the pursuit. But they were intact and, as far as he could see, they had plenty of tread left.

The glovebox of the vehicle produced nothing particularly helpful, apart from a map book and the car’s handbook written in German, but tucked under the driver’s seat Bronson found two full boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition. The other thing he found, which particularly pleased him, was a built-in satnav. He changed the language to English, which took him a couple of minutes, and then used the map book to pick a destination at random-a satellite town to the east of Berlin-and plotted a route to it. He needed somewhere quiet where he could park the car while he slept inside it, and he needed to talk to Angela.

Bronson drove back onto the main road and then took the slip road leading to the northbound Berliner Ring. The dashboard clock told him it was after two in the morning, but still there was quite a lot of traffic on the road, an almost equal mix of cars and trucks.

Twenty minutes later he pulled into a heavily wooded area beside a lake, switched off the engine and closed his eyes.