Echo of the Reich

33

25 July 2012

Bronson woke, stiff and cold and aching, just after six in the morning. Dawn had already broken, the first pale streamers of the rising sun spearing slim shafts of light through the trees, and birds were greeting the new day with a medley of songs.

He opened the door and stepped out of the car, stretching and straightening his aching back, and for a few moments just looked around him and listened. He appeared to be entirely alone. He could see neither houses nor other cars, and no signs of walkers either.

He walked the few yards to the shore of the lake, bent down and splashed water onto his face. It was so cold it almost seemed to sting him, but it very effectively completed the process of waking him up. He had nothing to eat or drink in the car, and he badly needed both a cup of coffee and some food; he was ravenously hungry.

He also needed to decide what to do next. Getting back into the house near Spreenhagen would be impossible now. Marcus and his men knew that he hadn’t trotted back to London as he’d been instructed, and they would be even more alert than before to the presence of any intruder. He had no idea what would eventually happen about the undercover policeman he’d killed and the unarguable forensic evidence he’d been forced to leave in the house and, because he could do nothing about that situation, he tried to dismiss it from his mind.

He also didn’t know if he’d killed the man who had tried to stop his car near the clearing the previous night, but he certainly wasn’t going to lose any sleep over him-if he hadn’t shot him with the silenced Walther, he knew beyond any doubt that the man would certainly have shot him. In that situation, it was kill or be killed.

But the bigger question, the one that really worried him, was what Marcus and his men had planned for London. Exactly what was the “lantern bearer” that he’d mentioned? What could it do? And why was a group of reborn Nazis trying to mount a terrorist attack on Britain’s capital city?

Bronson glanced at his watch. It was too early to ring Angela, but he turned the phone on anyway and deselected the “silent” option, just in case she decided to call him. Then he fished out the map book, opened it at the page that showed the area to the east of Berlin, and for a few minutes just stared at it. He knew exactly where he was, but he had absolutely no idea where he should go next, or what he should do.

His mobile phone suddenly burst into life, the speaker playing the opening bars of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” and he made an immediate note to change this for something less offensive-or at least something more modern-as soon as he could. Bronson’s musical taste had stalled somewhere in the mid-seventies, and his CD collection was almost exclusively rock ’n’ roll.

Without even looking at the screen, he knew it had to be Angela, simply because nobody else knew his number.

“Chris? Thank God. I’ve been trying to call you for hours, but your bloody phone has been switched off all night.”

“I know,” Bronson replied. “I had no option. It was-”

“Tell me later,” Angela interrupted. “Listen. Thanks to Steven, I think I know what Laternentrager refers to, and it’s not good.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. That’s what I was really ringing you up for. I’m in a taxi heading for Heathrow; I’m booked on the morning Lufthansa flight to the new Brandenburg Airport in Berlin. The flight gets in at about ten, and I expect you to be in the arrivals hall no later than quarter past, and pleased to see me.”

“I’m always pleased to see you, Angela. You know that. But I don’t think you coming out here is a good idea. I’m involved with some really dangerous people.”

“I always thought you were quite dangerous, Chris, and I’m sure you can take care of yourself, and take care of me as well. Anyway, I’m coming, because you’re going to need my help to sort this out. I’ll see you at the airport.”

And with that, she rang off.

Bronson stared at the phone in his hand, then shrugged and put it on the seat beside him. In truth, he was pleased that Angela was flying to Germany. He was sure that whatever information she’d discovered would help point him in the right direction, and it would be really good to have her around. He just had to make sure that he kept her well away from the clutches of Marcus and his gang of homicidal thugs.

He looked at his watch again. He had hours before she landed, plenty of time to find somewhere, some quiet cafe, where he could buy breakfast, and then make his way to the airport, which he located quickly when he looked again at the map. It was in the Schonefeld district, just a few miles almost due south of the center of Berlin.

A thought struck him, and he realized that there might be something else he could do at the Brandenburg Airport while he was waiting for Angela to arrive. He smiled to himself, then started the BMW, bounced over the uneven ground where he’d parked for the night and got back on the road.

Two hours later, having breakfasted cheaply and copiously at a small cafe on the outskirts of Hoppegarten, and still well before Angela’s flight was due to touch down, he drove into the long-term parking area at Brandenburg. He knew he was only going to be there for a short time, but he was looking for something very specific, and he thought that that parking area represented the best chance he had of finding it.

On the way to the airport he’d stopped at an out-of-town shopping center, where he’d found a large hardware store. He’d bought a pop rivet gun with a selection of rivets and washers; a hand drill and half a dozen drill bits, including a countersunk bit; a plastic vehicle cover; and finally a basic toolkit.

All he needed now was to find the right car.

The long-term car park was the usual multi-story structure, each level covered by a single surveillance camera, which meant Bronson would need to be careful where he parked and what he did, to avoid attracting attention. He drove slowly up to the third level, then slowed down even more as he started looking for another black BMW 3-series. He had plenty of choices. He counted over twenty such vehicles as he drove through the car park, but he needed one that looked clean, which would suggest that it had been parked recently and implied that the owner wouldn’t be back to collect it for at least a few days.

He found what he was looking for on the fourth floor. A black BMW parked next to a Mercedes van, which shielded the car from the unblinking eye of the surveillance camera at the other end of that level, and with a vacant parking space nearby.

Bronson reversed the car into the vacant slot and waited for a few moments until the Mercedes saloon that had been behind him as he drove up the ramp passed him and continued up to the next level. Then he climbed out, checked that he was unobserved, and opened the trunk of his BMW. He walked across to the back of the other parked car and looked down at the number plate. As he’d expected, it was secured in place by two rivets, one at either side.

He walked back to his car, removed the hand drill from the trunk, inserted the countersunk bit in the chuck and tightened it firmly. He returned to the other vehicle, watchful that nobody had spotted him, then bent down, placed the point of the drill bit against the first rivet and started turning the handle. The bit was brand-new and made short work of the aluminum rivet, and in less than thirty seconds he was able to repeat the treatment on the second rivet. The moment the number plate came free, Bronson stood up, walked back to his own car and put the plate into the trunk.

Then he walked over to the front of the other BMW and repeated the process. In less than two minutes, he had both number plates stored in the trunk of his own car, and a minute after that he’d covered the other vehicle with the plastic weatherproof sheet, which would hide it from view and prevent anyone spotting the missing number plates.

He locked his car, leaving the weapons hidden under the seat, and set off for the lifts and walkways that gave access to the terminal buildings.

Thirty minutes later, he was sitting by himself at a table in one of the cafes in the arrivals hall, a cup of coffee in front of him, and a one-day-old copy of the Daily Mail in his hand. Beside him was a plastic sports bag containing a designer-label washing kit-the only one he’d been able to find-a couple of shirts and a selection of underwear, all of which he’d bought at the shops in the terminal building, because he’d needed to replace the bag and clothes he’d had to abandon in the Hyundai. He’d also found a twelve-volt universal phone charger for use in a car, and that was in the bag as well.

Angela’s flight arrived on time, and Bronson stood up, grabbed his new bag and walked over to greet her as soon as he recognized her in the stream of passengers entering the hall.

Bronson moved quickly through the melee of people, reaching her side before Angela even saw him. The moment she did, she lowered her bag to the floor and hugged him tight.

“I’ve been so worried about you,” she whispered. “I’ve had the police round twice, looking for you, and I swear that at least once somebody followed me to work.”

Bronson nodded. “I’m not surprised. I left Britain under something of a cloud, and a warrant’s been issued for my arrest.”

“Then you really are in trouble, aren’t you?”

“More than you can possibly imagine, for a whole bunch of different reasons. I’m really pleased to see you, but I’d still rather you were safely back in London.”

“It’s too late for that. I’m out here now, because I decided I couldn’t stay away any longer. Besides, I think you need my help.”

Bronson smiled at her. “You know,” he replied, “I think I probably do. I realized this morning that I had no idea where to go or what to do next, so I hope you really have got some information about this ‘lantern bearer’ thing.”

“I have,” Angela said, “and I’ll tell you all about it in the car on the way to Ludwikowice. You’ve got a car, I hope?”

Bronson looked puzzled. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ve got a car. But what-or where-is this Ludwig-whatever place?”

“It’s in Poland,” Angela replied, “and it’s where I hope we might find the answers to a lot of questions. It’s certainly the place where the story of the ‘lantern bearer’ began.”

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting side by side in the BMW, and Bronson had just finished programming the built-in satnav with Ludwikowice as a destination.

“It’s over two hundred miles from here,” he said, as the satnav finished its computations, “so it’ll take us most of the day to get there.”

He started the car and a couple of minutes later the barrier in front of them lifted and they drove out onto the exit road from the airport.

“We’ll get a few miles under our belt before we stop for something to eat,” Bronson went on. “So you’ve got plenty of time to tell me exactly what you’re talking about, and why this Ludwig place is so important.”

Angela leaned back in her seat and relaxed. “You’ll notice,” she began, “that I haven’t asked you how come you’re driving around in a BMW-a make of car I know you detest-on Berlin plates, or why there’s the butt of what looks to me like an automatic pistol poking out from underneath your seat.”

“It’s a long story,” Bronson replied, “and thank you for reminding me about the plates. I need to fix those as soon as I can. And it’s not so much BMWs I dislike-it’s the particular collection of arrogant and incompetent idiots who always seem to end up driving them.”

“What do you mean by ‘fix’?”

“You’ll see.”

Once they’d cleared the airfield, and had passed the intersection between the E36 and the Berliner Ring, Bronson turned off on the L40 toward Ragow and pulled into the first deserted turnout he saw. There, while Angela stood beside him, looking and listening for cars or pedestrians, Bronson quickly and efficiently swapped the registration plates on the BMW, tossing the originals over a hedge and into the adjacent field.

“Because of what you’ve just done,” Angela said, “may I assume that you’ve borrowed the car we’re traveling in, using the term ‘borrowed’ in its loosest possible sense? That we are, in fact, driving around in a stolen vehicle?”

“You assume correctly,” Bronson replied, getting back in the car and restarting the engine. He didn’t know what contacts Marcus might have with the Berlin police-if he had any contacts at all-but he knew that changing the plates would make it a lot more difficult for anybody to track him as they drove across Germany. Unless somebody checked the chassis number of the BMW, it would appear to be entirely legitimate, at least until the owner of the car in the long-term parking at Brandenburg Airport returned from wherever he’d flown to and blew the whistle.

“I’ve been very patient,” Bronson said, as he swung the car around in a U-turn to head back the way they’d come, “and you’ve been very mysterious. So why don’t you tell me exactly what you’ve found out about the ‘lantern bearer.’”

“Right,” Angela replied. “Since you called me, apart from running around most of London trying to find different places to call you from-calls you never actually answered, I’d like to point out-about all I’ve done is research, following on from everything that Steven told me. It has been,” she added, opening her handbag and taking out a small notebook with a dark blue cover, “grimly fascinating. First of all, have you ever heard the German terms Wunderwaffen or Vergeltungswaffen?”

Bronson shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. What do they mean?”

“The word ‘ waffen ’ translates as ‘weapon,’ so ‘ Wunderwaffen ’ means ‘wonder weapon’ and ‘ Vergeltungswaffen ’ translates as ‘vengeance weapon.’ Originally the Wunderwaffen were supposed to be various types of tactical battlefield weapons, while the Vergeltungswaffen were much more powerful strategic theater devices, but these days the term Wunderwaffen is often applied to both types of weapon. You probably know that toward the end of the Second World War the Nazis were desperately trying to find some kind of weapon or tactic that would turn the tide and force back the Allied advance, and keep the Russians off their backs.”

Bronson nodded. “I know they developed jet engines for their fighters, and of course there were the V1 and V2 missiles that they fired at London. I suppose they were classed as ‘vengeance weapons,’ because of the ‘V’ designation?”

“Exactly. But the Nazis had far more interesting and exotic devices up their sleeve. Their problem was that by that time they’d lost air superiority in the skies over their own country, and the Allied bombing raids were doing enormous damage to their airfields and especially to the factories that were turning out military hardware. But one of the odd things about this period of the war was that despite all this bombing, Germany’s war production actually continued to increase.”

“I didn’t know that,” Bronson admitted. “How did they manage it?”

“It was all down to a man named Albert Speer.”

“I’ve heard of him. He was one of Hitler’s ministers, wasn’t he?”

“You’re right. In nineteen forty-two he was appointed Minister of Armaments and War Production, and as Allied bombs rained down on Germany night after night, he came up with a radical solution. Because the factories on the ground were no longer safe, he decided to move them. But instead of simply relocating them to other parts of Germany, he put them underground.”

“Underground? That must have been an enormous job. You mean the Germans dug tunnels?”

“It was a huge undertaking, without question, but it wasn’t the Germans who were doing the work. Because of the concentration camps, they had an enormous force of slave laborers-hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people, who could be quite literally worked to death in the most appalling conditions. And as soon as one man died, they simply dragged in another and forced him to take his place. They didn’t need to supply safety equipment or proper clothing or masks or anything. In many of the construction sites, the SS doctors estimated that a fresh concentration camp prisoner would have a working life of as little as six weeks, working twelve-hour shifts with the most basic possible rations of food and drink. In several cases, according to the testimonies of the handful of people who managed to survive, prisoners were marched into the tunnels and only left them when they died, their bodies hauled out and dumped in a mass grave.”

“Horrendous,” Bronson muttered, “simply horrendous.” He’d decided not to mention what he’d seen at the house-the chilling sight of Marcus in full SS regalia-for the moment.

“It was,” she agreed, her voice bitter, “but it was also very efficient, and the Nazis were nothing if not efficient. Working prisoners to death not only meant that their construction projects proceeded quickly, but it also saved them the price of a bullet or the cost of a canister of poison gas.”

“So how many of these tunnels are you talking about?” Bronson asked.

“It was one of the largest projects in the history of mankind,” Angela replied. “Nobody knows for sure exactly how many underground facilities were built, or even planned, but even before the end of the war the Allies knew of at least three hundred and forty underground sites and, according to the records recovered after the end of the conflict, over four hundred sites had been given code names. But in fact there were far more than that. Plans held in the German Ministry of Armaments referred to some eight hundred plants in all. Work on them started in the summer of nineteen forty-three, when Allied air raids began inflicting enormous damage on Germany, and Albert Speer gave the go-ahead for the project, with Hitler’s blessing.

“I suppose it’s also worth saying that the idea of having underground facilities wasn’t exactly novel. From as early as the mid-nineteen thirties, the Nazis began creating massive oil and fuel tanks underground. One of these-it’s near Bremen-is still in operation today. There are eighty tanks there, each made of high-quality shipbuilding steel surrounded by a concrete jacket about a meter thick. Each tank holds four thousand cubic meters of fuel. They’re absolutely massive.”

“Well, underground storage tanks are quite common, and have been for many years,” Bronson commented. “When you’re dealing with potentially explosive liquids, burying them is often quite a good plan.”

“I know. But actually the tanks were only a very small part-though an important part-of the project. The biggest and most significant plants were those used for manufacturing, rather than just for storage. The Nazis built an underground aircraft factory at Kahla in Thuringia, using foreign slave laborers who worked twelve-hour shifts and who were told when they arrived there that they would be worked until they dropped dead. That place was used to manufacture the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, and the plan was to build twelve hundred aircraft there every month, a huge output that absolutely could have turned the tide of the Second World War. That one factory, if it had reached full production, could have produced enough aircraft to drive the Allied bombers and fighters from the skies of Germany. The intention was to create almost twenty miles of tunnels inside the mountain, with four huge subterranean halls, covering around twenty-seven thousand square meters, where the actual manufacturing would take place. By the end of the war, almost half of the internal construction had been completed, and the first aircraft took off from Kahla in February nineteen forty-five. And it was, as I said before, very efficient. The aircraft were assembled in the halls, then they were taken out of the mountain through the tunnels, hauled up to the top in a sloping elevator, and would then take off from a runway the Nazis had constructed on the top of the mountain. Luckily for us, only a few of these Messerschmitts were completed and flown away, so they never became a major threat to Allied aircraft.”

Bronson took his eyes off the road for a second or two to glance across at Angela.

“That’s huge. Was that the biggest underground factory?”

Angela shook her head. “No, not by a long way, and some of them are still in use today. In Baden-Wurttemberg, down in the southwest of Germany, there’s a town named Neckarzimmern. There’s been a gypsum mine there since the early eighteen hundreds, over one hundred meters below the banks of the Neckart River. It was used as a dynamite factory in the First World War, and then after nineteen thirty-seven it became an ammunition dump. The various shafts inside it were expanded to accommodate its new role. Today, it’s a subterranean town. There’s a road network almost thirty-five kilometers long in there, and the various caverns occupy about one hundred and seventy thousand square meters of space. In nineteen fifty-seven, units of the German armed forces were first stationed there, and today over seven hundred people work underground, in the tunnel system, supplying parts and repairing equipment for the German army.”

“Okay,” Bronson said, “I understand that the Nazis turned into moles and burrowed into the hills and mountains, or rather their slave laborers did on their behalf, but you still haven’t told me why we’re heading for the Polish border, or what the ‘lantern bearer’ has to do with any of this.”

“Patience, Chris. To fully appreciate what I’m going to tell you about that, you need to understand a bit more about the Nazi secret weapon program, the Wunderwaffen. We talked about the so-called ‘vengeance’ weapons, the V1 and the V2. The V2 was developed by Werner von Braun at Peenemunde, though it wasn’t at first called that-it was designated the A4-and the first examples were ready for testing by early nineteen forty-three, and the weapon became operational in the summer of ’forty-four. The first V2 hit London on the seventh of September that year and after that the rockets became fairly regular and most unwelcome visitors to the capital. What’s not generally known is that this missile wasn’t built by the Germans, though it was undeniably designed by them.”

“What do you mean? They contracted the work out?” Bronson asked.

Angela shook her head. “No, nothing so civilized. When American troops reached a town named Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains in mid-April nineteen forty-five, they found a concentration camp there named Mittelbau-Dora. The few inmates who were still alive-the vast majority who hadn’t been executed by the Nazis before they left the area had simply starved to death-told the Americans about tunnels in the nearby mountain and a top secret missile factory deep underground where they’d worked as slave laborers of the SS. The American troops were shocked at what they found, but in fact the Allies already knew about it.

“In August nineteen forty-three, after the Royal Air Force bombed Peenemunde, the Nazis had transferred their missile production to Nordhausen. Some ten thousand slave laborers from the Mittelbau-Dora camp were forced to start digging tunnels into the mountain to accommodate the new production lines. For obvious reasons, we don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s been estimated that around three and a half thousand workers died in the first few months from pulmonary diseases, starvation, exhaustion and maltreatment by the SS. Some of them almost certainly simply froze to death.

“In all, the Nazis had allocated an area of about six hundred thousand square meters for the production of the V2 missile, and set a target of one thousand missiles per month, a theoretical output that they thankfully never achieved. We do know that in April nineteen forty-four the factory produced four hundred and fifty missiles, but that was one of their best months ever. Most of the time, production was badly delayed because the German scientists at Peenemunde kept altering the design and making changes. And as a result of that, more than half of the rockets that were assembled were not fully operational and either never reached their intended targets or simply blew up on the launch pads. But the missiles themselves were constructed by specially selected prisoners, who assembled them from some forty-five thousand different components. The sad reality is that most of the V2s that landed on London and caused such destruction to the city were actually built by people-Poles and Jews and others-who we would have considered to be our allies. Of course, they had absolutely no option. If they didn’t do exactly what they were told, they would be summarily executed by the Nazis.”

Bronson didn’t respond for a few moments, as he tried unsuccessfully to imagine what it must have been like to be forced to assemble weapons that you knew, without the slightest shadow of doubt, were going to be used to kill members of the only nation likely to rescue you from imprisonment.

“That’s horrendous,” he said again.

“You know, almost everyone who has read anything about the Second World War knows about the V1 and the V2, but hardly anybody has ever heard of the V3.”

“You’d better include me in that,” Bronson said, “because I’ve never heard of it. What was it? Another type of rocket?”

Angela shook her head. “No. It was something much simpler, but arguably even more dangerous than the other two ‘vengeance’ weapons. It was known to the Germans as the England Cannon or Busy Lizzie, and it consisted of five batteries, each containing twenty-five high-velocity cannons that were designed to fire shells up to one hundred and twenty miles.”

“Jesus,” Bronson muttered. “If they’d ever got that working, from the right location it could have flattened London.”

“It did work and they had the right location. It was a small French village near the English Channel coast named Mimoyecques. Luckily for all of us, the British government found out about it in nineteen forty-four. The Nazis had built an underground facility for the production, and also the operation, of the weapon. But this time, instead of relying on the natural defenses of an existing mountain, they had to build their own mountain, as it were, because the terrain around there is fairly flat. So they constructed a reinforced concrete roof that was five meters thick, and walls that were almost equally massive. On the sixth of July nineteen forty-four, aircraft from 617 Squadron-you’d know them better as the Dambusters-attacked the site with twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs. They were one of the first of what are now called ‘bunker-busters,’ and one bomb went straight through the concrete roof and exploded inside the facility.”

Bronson nodded. “And I suppose that was more or less that,” he said.

“Yes. It was obviously the right decision in the circumstances, and it was a fine piece of precision bombing. What worried the British government at the time, quite apart from the possibility of a constant stream of high-explosive shells landing in and around London, was that they suspected the Nazis might be prepared to fit the shells with chemical or biological payloads. After all, they were very experienced by this time in the use of lethal gases. Zyklon B gas had been supplied to the Buchenwald concentration camp early in nineteen forty, and to Auschwitz in September of the following year. Oddly enough, its principal use was for delousing in an attempt to control the spread of typhus, but fairly soon it started to be used as the principal agent to solve the Nazi’s Jewish problem. The gas had also been used as early as nineteen twenty-nine, but in America, not Germany, for disinfecting freight trains and sanitizing the clothing of Mexican immigrants.

“But Zyklon B wasn’t what the British were worried about, because it only works effectively in a confined and unventilated space, like the Nazi gas chambers. Toward the end of the war, the German chemical company IG Farben moved into another underground facility named Falkenhagen, about ten miles northwest of Frankfurt, near the Polish border. Believe it or not, some of the British records concerning this place are still classified, even today, but it’s fairly clear that the facility was intended to produce a brand-new and much more lethal type of weapon: a nerve gas. This new concoction was named sarin, which can’t be seen, smelled or tasted. The lethal dose is tiny: one droplet on the skin will cause death in about six minutes. Zyklon B was just as lethal, but took up to twenty minutes to do its job. Luckily, the war ended before large-scale production of sarin, or any other of what you might call the ‘new generation’ nerve agents, like tabun, could start.”

Angela looked up from her notes for a moment and stared ahead at the road that was unwinding steadily in front of them.

“Where are we now?” she asked.

Bronson glanced down at the satnav display.

“About halfway there, I suppose,” he replied. “As soon as we see somewhere we like the look of, we’ll stop and buy ourselves some lunch. Right, I think I understand the kind of things that the Nazis were working on toward the end of the Second World War, but I still have no idea about the significance of the ‘lantern bearer.’”

Angela smiled at him, but without any humor in her expression. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the Laternentrager. Now that was something completely different.”