Echo of the Reich

44

26 July 2012

“What is it?” Angela asked.

“Quiet,” Bronson muttered. “I just saw something. I’m certain there’s somebody outside, walking around near the ventilation shaft. I don’t think our deceased friend was working alone.”

“Oh my God. Is there another way out of here?”

“I doubt it very much, and even if there is, it could take us days to find it. We don’t have any choice: we have to leave this place the same way we entered it.”

“But if you’re right,” Angela said, her voice rising slightly with fear, “whoever’s out there will shoot us down the moment he sees us.”

“I know,” Bronson said. “That’s the problem. Either we have to take him out of the equation before we leave or we have to somehow convince him that we’re not who he thinks we are.”

For a few seconds he considered the problem from a tactical point of view. As long as they stayed inside the mine, they were invulnerable, because the only way the man outside could attack them would be by coming through the ventilation shaft himself, and a man-even a heavily armed man-stuck inside a stone tunnel was a sitting target. Unfortunately, precisely the same argument applied to Bronson if he tried to crawl along the ventilation shaft and then shoot down the man waiting outside. He couldn’t possibly cover the distance from the chamber to the end of the shaft in silence, and the man would be waiting and alert when he finally reached the outside opening. To do that would simply invite a bullet through his head.

Then he glanced down at the overalls he was wearing, and a slight grin appeared on his face.

“What?” Angela whispered.

“I think I know how I can make this work. You’ll have to stay here and wait for me. And don’t argue. There’ll be shooting, but if it goes according to plan, I’ll call you to come out as soon as I’ve taken care of the problem outside.”

Angela looked at him in the gloom of the chamber and shook her head.

“Just be careful,” she said.

Then she took a couple of paces forward, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed him full on the lips.

Bronson responded immediately, holding her tight and stroking her blond hair back from her forehead.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said it enough,” he said, his voice thick with emotion, “but I’ve always loved you.”

“I know you have. Now stop fannying about and get us out of here.”

Bronson smiled at her, nodded and turned away. He climbed up onto the chair and looked down the ventilation shaft. There was now no sign of movement, no subtle changes in the amount of light visible, but he knew what he’d seen. He took the Walther out of his pocket and screwed on the suppressor. He also checked that he had the Heckler amp; Koch submachine gun with him, but removed the magazine and tucked it into one of his pockets. That weapon would play a crucial part in his plan to ambush the man outside.

Bronson was gambling on the fact that he was dressed in a very similar fashion to the German who’d attacked them inside the mine, and that one man wearing a set of dark blue overalls and emerging feetfirst from a stone shaft should look very similar to any other man doing the same thing. The submachine gun should help to complete the deception.

He made no attempt to be quiet. In fact, he deliberately knocked the butt of the Heckler amp; Koch against the stone wall of the ventilation shaft a couple of times as he climbed up into it. He was sure that the noise of the shots would have been audible outside the mine, though the sound wouldn’t have traveled very far, so the waiting German-and Bronson was hoping that Marcus had sent only two men to the Wenceslas Mine-would be expecting his colleague to reappear at any moment.

As Bronson made his clumsy way backward along the ventilation shaft, the Walther pistol tucked into his pocket and the submachine gun clutched in his left hand, he heard the man outside call out to him in German. He just grunted in reply, feeling with his feet for the end of the shaft, because that was when his plan would succeed or fail.

Then his left shoe scraped over a rocky lip and he felt a faint breath of wind through the thin material of his sock. And then someone tapped his shoe twice. The second man was obviously waiting right beside the entrance to the ventilation shaft, and that was exactly where Bronson wanted him to be.

He maneuvered slightly in the confined space, and slid the unloaded Heckler amp; Koch down his body, butt first, until it projected out of the shaft, and then just held it there for a few moments, waiting for the other man to take it.

Seconds later, he did so, and that gave Bronson just the opportunity he needed. By handing over the weapon, he hoped he’d convinced the man waiting outside that it was his colleague emerging from the tunnel, which should mean that the second man was now holding the unloaded submachine gun-without the magazine just a useless lump of metal-instead of whatever weapon-possibly a pistol-that he was armed with.

Time was now of the essence. As quickly as he could, Bronson wriggled backward out of the shaft, keeping his face turned away from the other man.

Then he heard a disturbingly familiar sound-the series of metallic clicks made when the magazine is inserted into a submachine gun and the bolt is pulled back to cock the weapon-and he guessed that the second German had just converted the Heckler amp; Koch back into a lethal weapon by attaching a new magazine. At close quarters, his Walther pistol would be no match for that weapon.

He had seconds to react.

Bronson scrambled the last couple of feet out of the tunnel and down the rock face, keeping his head facing away from the other man the entire time. In one fluid movement, he dropped to the ground, drew the Walther pistol with its cumbersome suppressor from his pocket, slipped off the safety catch and whirled round to face his opponent.

The German-and Bronson was relieved to see only one man facing him in the small clearing-was looking straight at him, the submachine gun held in both hands, the barrel pointing directly toward him. Something must have alerted the man, perhaps the color of Bronson’s overalls, or simply his failure to reply to his questions as he’d emerged from the shaft. Whatever it was didn’t matter. But it left Bronson with absolutely no choice about what to do next.

He altered the aim of the Walther fractionally, pointing the barrel at the center of the man’s chest, and squeezed the trigger.

Only in films can somebody shoot a weapon out of another person’s hands, or bring someone down with a well-placed shot to a leg or arm. In a real-life firefight, soldiers, policemen and bodyguards aim for the center of mass, the middle of the torso, because that’s where a bullet wound is most likely to incapacitate and, given the inherent inaccuracy of pistols, that also increases the chances of the bullet hitting the target.

Good shots are born more often than they’re made, and Bronson had always been good with weapons.

The flat crack of the silenced pistol echoed off the rock face, and before the German could squeeze the trigger of the submachine gun, the nine-millimeter copper-jacketed bullet slammed into his chest. The shocked expression on his face told its own story, and without a sound he simply fell backward, the Heckler amp; Koch dropping to the ground beside him.

Bronson strode across to where he was lying, the aim of the Walther never varying for an instant, pointing directly at the fallen man. He stopped beside him and looked down, but it was immediately clear that he wouldn’t need a second shot. There was remarkably little blood from the wound because the bullet had clearly ripped apart the man’s heart, and he had effectively been dead even before his body fell.

Bronson replaced the Walther in his pocket, slung the submachine gun over his shoulder and looked around. There was no sign of anybody else in the area, and the single shot he’d fired would not have been audible for more than a few dozen yards, thanks to the efficiency of the suppressor.

The best place to put the body was undoubtedly inside the mine, but Bronson knew that that simply wouldn’t work. Trying to lift up the man’s literal deadweight to force it down the ventilation shaft and into the chamber would take too long, and might not be possible at all, even if Angela helped him. And he didn’t want her to be traumatized any more than she was already. After all, she’d just shot and killed a man inside the complex, and was still in shock. Disposing of another dead body was something he wasn’t prepared to even contemplate putting her through.

There was plenty of undergrowth around the rock face, long grass, bushes and shrubs, and even a narrow crevice not far away that he thought would be big enough to conceal the corpse. Bronson bent down beside the man and searched his pockets. He removed his wallet-to make identification a little more difficult when the police were finally summoned by somebody who’d noticed the smell of decomposition-a set of car keys, a box of nine-millimeter ammunition, and another Walther pistol in a belt holster. He was acquiring quite an armory.

Then he grabbed the man by his heels and dragged him across the level ground toward the crevice he’d noticed. He stopped beside it, laid the body parallel to the opening, and simply rolled it down into the crevice. He tossed a few broken branches and other debris over the corpse, completely concealing it from view. With any luck, it would be several days before anybody discovered the body.

Bronson walked back across the clearing to the end of the ventilation shaft, climbed up the rock until he could shine his flashlight down it, and called out to Angela.

“Can you climb on the chair and follow me out?” he asked.

Her face, pinched with concern, appeared at the end of the shaft.

“Are you okay?” she replied. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. Now, we need to move. The clock’s running and we have to get back to London as quickly as we can.”

Thirty minutes later, they drove back down the track toward the main road and the village of Ludwikowice, but this time in a different car. The keys Bronson had taken from the pocket of the dead man had fitted another BMW, a big four-by-four, which he’d found parked about fifty yards away from the vehicle he and Angela had arrived in. Bronson wasn’t sure how long it would be before the owner of the BMW he’d stolen the registration plates from alerted the police, but it seemed prudent to change vehicles. The one thing he was certain about was that neither of the men who’d driven the four-by-four to the mine would be able to report its theft.

And there was another reason as well. When Bronson had opened the trunk to transfer their bags to the second vehicle, he’d discovered that the trunk lid of the new car had been modified, the plastic covering over the inside of the metal fitted with two concealed catches and a hinge. When it was opened, padded recesses were revealed, clearly designed to hold a pair of submachine guns, a couple of pistols, and half a dozen boxes of ammunition. The only reason he’d discovered the hiding place was that the cover had been opened by the two men to access their weapons when they arrived at the spot, and they hadn’t replaced it fully. One MP5 was still in place: obviously the men had decided to carry only those weapons appropriate for their task.

Bronson had tucked the pistols, the submachine gun and the ammunition into place and snapped the cover shut. Once in place, there was no external indication that the trunk lid was anything other than absolutely standard.

As he drove away, he reflected that he and Angela were almost certainly better armed than the occupants of any police car in any country in the world, with a total of two submachine guns and four pistols, including the Llama, which was now tucked away in Angela’s purse, and the second Walther pistol, the silencer still attached, hidden-but within reach-underneath the driver’s seat.

At the end of the road, Bronson swung the BMW to the right, heading west, back toward the German border. They had a long way to go to get to London, and he knew that time was running out.

What Marcus’s man had blurted out as he lay dying in the Wenceslas Mine meant that the attack on London was imminent. The one event of the Olympic Games that would be sure to attract publicity from around the world was the opening ceremony, scheduled for the evening of the following day. And that, Bronson guessed, was when the attack would take place. Not only would that mean Marcus’s vengeance attack on London would be witnessed by the whole world, but because of the popularity of the event, it would also result in enormous casualty figures.

Whatever Bronson and Angela did, they simply had to stop this catastrophic attack from taking place.

The only problem was, right then, Bronson had no idea how they were going to achieve that.