Echo of the Reich

38

26 July 2012

Finding a hotel in the nearby town of Nowa Ruda didn’t prove to be a problem, and they picked a small establishment tucked away in a side street, where Bronson hoped nobody would spot the stolen plates on the stolen BMW. The following morning they had a large breakfast in the hotel dining room to set them up for the day, then climbed back into the car and headed north, through the suburbs of Drogoslaw, and the completely unpronounceable Zdrojowisko.

Bronson stopped in a garage on the outskirts of Nowa Ruda and topped up the tank of the BMW. The garage’s kiosk was well stocked, and as well as fuel he bought enough packet food and drink to last for two or three days, plus half a dozen flashlights and plenty of spare batteries, and a couple of sets of disposable mechanic’s overalls. Lying on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage shop, he also found a guidebook for the area. It was written in Polish and German, and had been published about fifteen years earlier. He wasn’t sure exactly how much use it would be to them, but he decided to buy it anyway.

When he got back in the car, he passed the book to Angela, who began looking at the text and having a stab at translating some of the German with the aid of a small dictionary she took out of her handbag. After a few minutes she closed the book and leaned back in her seat.

“There’s a map in it but it isn’t a lot of use,” she said. “I don’t think it’s to scale, and there’s very little detail on it, but there is some information about the underground complex. Apparently some of the tunnels are now owned by private individuals, and one or two are even open to the public.”

“I doubt very much if those tunnels are what we’re looking for,” Bronson said.

“True enough. According to the documents I’ve looked at, the entrances to the area where the Bell had been installed were blown up by explosive charges when the complex was abandoned. But it’s a huge complex, covering almost thirty-five square kilometers, and I’ve no doubt that there are dozens or even hundreds of tunnels and chambers in it that are still completely unexplored.”

A few minutes later, Bronson flicked on the turn signal and turned the car off Ludwikowice’s long main street and onto the first of the concrete roads he’d spotted the previous afternoon.

“Here we go then,” he said.

The road was fairly narrow, perhaps eight or nine feet wide, and made up of a series of single concrete elements, each of them about six feet long. The car’s wheels made a rhythmic thumping sound as they crossed the joints between the blocks.

“The surface isn’t in bad condition,” Bronson remarked, “bearing in mind it’s probably been here for over sixty years.”

The road climbed slowly away from the village, the slope gradual as it wound its serpentine way into the hills, and Ludwikowice quickly disappeared from view behind the car. Bronson kept the speed right down, ever conscious of the possibility of hitting a broken block or fallen tree.

Part of the way up the slope, and about six hundred yards from the main road, he drew the car to a stop and pointed.

“I was right,” he said, pointing ahead through the windscreen. “This road was definitely built by the military. That looks to me like an ammunition bunker.”

On one side of the road a spur led to a massive round-topped concrete structure built into the tree-covered hillside. The entrance, obviously originally protected by a heavy steel door, was wide-open, the surrounding concrete discolored and heavily overgrown as nature slowly and inexorably reclaimed the land.

“It’s pretty creepy,” Angela said, staring into the black oblong of the open doorway. “I’m kind of half-expecting to see a Nazi soldier walking out of there any minute.”

They continued a little further up the hill, but it was soon clear to both of them that wherever the Henge they were looking for was located, they were nowhere near it. All they found were low-lying structures made of reinforced concrete and in good general condition, apparently further storage facilities, dug into the ground.

“In the photographs I’ve seen of it,” Angela pointed out, “it looks as if it’s built on a plateau, or at least on a patch of level ground.” She gazed out through the windscreen at the tree-covered slope in front of the car. “There’s no sign of anything like that here, unless the Nazis lopped off the top of the hill.”

Bronson nodded.

“I think you’re right. Let’s head back down to the village and try the other concrete road.”

Ten minutes later, with a distinct sense of deja vu, Bronson slipped the car into first gear and again began climbing up the concrete slope of the hill, this time on the opposite side to the road that had terminated near what he’d supposed were ammunition bunkers. Almost as soon as they left the main road, the trees crowded in, the green canopy almost meeting above the road, shutting out the daylight.

Angela had opened up the guidebook again, and was looking at one particular section of it, which dealt with the German occupation of the area.

“I don’t know if it’s relevant,” she said, “but there’s a passage here which refers to a building erected in this area during the Second World War-if I’m translating the German correctly, that is-but it’s obviously not the Henge. It’s described as the Fabrica, which I think means ‘factory.’ There’s a picture of it as well, and it just looks like that-like a factory, I mean-the walls still standing but the roof collapsed. Maybe it was bombed by the Allies.”

After about one kilometer, they quite suddenly drove out from the forested terrain they’d been following and into a wide valley.

“That’s better,” Bronson said, blinking in the sudden daylight.

Although there was nobody in sight, it was immediately obvious that this area was being worked. There were piles of tree trunks, presumably felled from the forest, and the tire marks of heavy vehicles were clearly visible on the fairly soft ground on one side of the road.

“There’s some logging going on,” Angela said, and then pointed over to one side. “I think we might be on the right track this time,” she added, “no pun intended. That’s a deserted railway line.”

Bronson looked where she was pointing, toward the northern end of the valley, where the railway track disappeared into the tall grass and undergrowth.

“You said there was railway access,” Bronson said. “If we just follow that track, we might find the place at the end of it.”

He steered the car over toward the railway track, which ran more or less down the center of the valley. It obviously hadn’t been used for years, because the rails were caked with rust and had grass and stunted bushes growing between them. Over to their left, a few of the outlying houses of Ludwikowice were visible, standing above a reinforced concrete wall some forty or fifty feet high, which marked that edge of the valley. That supporting wall clearly dated from about the same period as the ammunition bunkers, from the looks of the concrete. The wall also bore signs of additional structures, mainly small rusted patches and protuberances that might originally have been the anchor points for hooks or the like, their purpose unknown.

The valley floor was still fairly open and level, the BMW bouncing over the uneven ground but having no trouble moving forward through the long grass and around the occasional clumps of small bushes that grew near the railway track. In the distance, over on the left-hand side of the valley, Bronson could see a group of small trees, and it looked to him as if the railway line passed fairly close beside them, while the slopes on both sides were quite heavily wooded.

A few minutes later, the car bounced past the group of trees Bronson had spotted. Just beyond them, the valley opened up even more. On the left they could see a few more of the houses at the edge of Ludwikowice, but their attention was drawn immediately to a huge building, deserted and derelict, standing right in the middle of the clearing.

“That’s the Fabrica,” Angela said, as Bronson stopped the car a few yards away. “I recognize it from the picture in the guidebook.”

It was big. A two-story structure, the upper floor apparently with a much higher ceiling height than the ground floor. The roof had obviously collapsed long ago, and the outer walls showed signs of damage by either a fire or perhaps even an explosion, pieces of old blackened wood visible among the heaps of bricks and masonry that surrounded the structure. The grass and vegetation growing over and around the building suggested old, rather than recent, damage.

“Maybe we should follow the railway track,” Bronson suggested, pointing over to the east of the clearing.

He steered the car in that direction, and within a few seconds found an unpaved path that had clearly been used by vehicles at some time, because it was wide enough for even a tractor to pass along it and drive through the clumps of bushes and trees. Then the path Bronson was following vanished, and he drove the car onto a large reinforced-concrete open space, maybe originally used as a parking area, and there, at the end, stood the Henge.

The structure was huge, and bizarre. More than anything else, it resembled a concrete cage, vertical pillars arranged in a circle and topped with equally massive horizontal bars, like some modern but marginally more delicate version of Stonehenge.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Bronson muttered.

“People claim that it’s unique,” Angela said. “It’s known as either the Flytrap or the Henge, and nobody knows for certain exactly what it was used for. There’s the suggestion that the Nazis had designed some sort of circular aircraft, and that the structure was used as a kind of containment area to support the vehicle during testing. There are huge ducts under the Henge, which were probably used to run power cables up to whatever was inside it.”

She paused. “That’s one explanation.”

The way she spoke made Bronson look at her.

“And the other?” he demanded.

“All you have to do is look at it from the other direction,” she said. “Because, actually, you have seen something like this before.”

Bronson shook his head. “I haven’t,” he insisted. “I’d remember if I had.”

He looked back at the structure. There were eleven columns in all, evenly spaced, and it was about thirty yards across, he estimated, which meant a circumference of roughly ninety yards.

“The clue is those bolts you can see on the top of the circle of concrete above the pillars,” Angela said.

Bronson looked where she was indicating, and could clearly see a heavy-duty bolt sticking upward directly above each of the vertical columns.

“Some people have theorized that they were used to support something being tested inside the Henge, but that doesn’t really make sense. If that were the case, surely the bolts would have been positioned on the inside of the structure, not on the top. Because the Germans stuck the bolts there, I think it’s reasonable to assume that they intended to attach something to the top of the Henge, or actually did so.”

“Like what?” Bronson asked.

“Like a sheet-metal cylinder.”

“What?”

“I think the simplest and most logical explanation for the Henge is that it was the base of a power station cooling tower, the same sort of structure you’ll see at any power station today. Think about it: the Fabrica is only a few dozen yards away, and was obviously manufacturing something-nobody knows what-but it would definitely have needed a source of power. And some parts of the Wenceslas Mine produced coal, so there was a fuel source nearby.”

Angela paused and pointed at some concrete blocks that lay on the flat land below the slight rise where the Henge was positioned.

“I believe that if you’d visited this plant during the Second World War, you’d have seen a coal-fired power station running down there, on those foundations, with the cooling tower right here. Cables would have been run in underground conduits from the power station over to the Fabrica building, and that would be the obvious explanation for something that is otherwise almost inexplicable.”

Bronson nodded. What she’d said made sense-certainly much more sense than any suggestion that the Nazis had developed and been test-flying some kind of saucer-shaped craft. That, he believed, could not have been kept secret during, and certainly not after, the war. Somebody, somewhere, would have seen something or even taken a picture of it.

“So do you mean we’re just wasting our time here?” he asked.

“Definitely not. I’m reasonably certain I know the exact purpose of the Henge, but the Bell is something else. And, actually, if I’m right and the Henge was a power station cooling tower, that reinforces the story of Die Glocke, because every account of its operation stresses the fact that it needed huge quantities of power.”

Bronson nodded.

“So where do we go now?” he asked.

Angela pointed downward.

“According to the few surviving records, the Henge was built on the hillside almost directly above the chamber where Die Glocke was positioned. That’s also the reason for the ducts various people reported. They just had things the wrong way round. The ducts did carry power cables, but the power wasn’t being sent from the Wenceslas Mine up to some futuristic craft being tested inside the Henge, but from the power station up here down into the cave to power the Bell.”

“So somewhere around here there has to be a way into the caves in the ground we’re standing on?” Bronson suggested.

“Exactly. So let’s go and find it.”