Echo of the Reich

45

26 July 2012

“One thing that man said still puzzles me,” Angela said, giving a slight shiver as her mind replayed the events that had taken place a few hours ago in the darkness of the Wenceslas Mine.

They’d crossed back into Germany without any problems, and Bronson was simply following the instructions given by the satnav, which was taking them along the fastest possible route to Calais.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That remark he made about ‘our symbol for the Games.’ I presume he meant something German, but nothing about the Olympics has any link with Germany, surely? I mean, the tradition goes back to ancient Greece, doesn’t it?”

Bronson glanced at her and gave a smile. Then he shook his head.

“What?”

“It’s not often that I know more about something than you do,” he said teasingly. “And you know my dislike of all forms of organized sport. So it’s actually rather odd that I do know something about the Olympics. In fact, I know several things about the Games that most people don’t, but it’s all information I acquired by accident. A couple of months ago I was involved in a surveillance operation that went absolutely nowhere because we had the wrong information, and I spent a couple of nights sitting in the bedroom of a house on a small estate, waiting for a phone call that never came. The only books the owner of the place possessed were about sport, and the only one I found even halfway readable dealt with interesting facts about the Olympic Games.”

“And?”

“And the symbol of the Olympic Games-the famous Rings of Olympus-which most people seem to think was created by the nation that invented the concept, i.e., the ancient Greeks, wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Wasn’t anything to do with the Greeks, ancient or modern. The design came from the fertile brain of a French aristocrat named Pierre Fredy, better known as Baron de Coubertin, who’s usually considered to be the father of the modern Olympic Games. He created the symbol in nineteen twelve. The design of five interlocking rings, colored blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background, was intended for the World Congress of nineteen fourteen, but that was suspended because of the First World War. It was later adopted for the Olympic Games. And there’s no truth in the idea that each ring represents a continent. In fact, de Coubertin chose the colors because they appeared on all the national flags of the world.”

“Fascinating,” Angela muttered, but the tone of her voice caused Bronson to glance across at her. “And that has what, exactly, to do with Germany?”

“Nothing, directly,” Bronson admitted, “but the German propaganda machine virtually took over the symbol and used it to glorify the Third Reich in the run-up to the ’thirty-six Games, and afterward. I think that’s why that German used the expression “our symbol”-it was so closely linked with the Nazi party. The Berlin Games were hugely important to Hitler, and he and a man named Carl Diem were largely responsible for creating two Olympic myths that endure to this day.

“The first relates to the Olympic Rings. Hitler was determined that the Games should put Germany, and especially the Nazi party, in the center of the world’s stage, and also establish a kind of link with ancient Greece, with the nation that had founded the Olympics, because Hitler apparently believed that the Greek civilization was a kind of ancient version of the German Reich.”

“That man brought a whole new breadth of meaning to the word ‘deluded,’” Angela said.

“Exactly. So Carl Diem traveled to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, where the oracle was supposed to have lived, and which was also the site of the Pythian Games, the forerunners of the Olympics. He ordered a stone altar to be constructed there-it included the interlocking rings symbol and was to be used as part of a torchbearers’ ceremony for the Berlin Olympics to be held in Greece. Once the ceremony was over, the altar was left at Delphi and more or less forgotten about. Then a couple of British academics visited the site in the late fifties, found the stone and assumed it dated from the earliest days of the Games, and claimed it established a link between the ancient Greek contests and the modern Olympics. Some history books even today quote this ‘evidence’ as proof that the symbol originated about three thousand years ago. In fact, of course, Carl Diem’s Stone, as it has become known, was just an inspired piece of Nazi propaganda.”

“I didn’t know that,” Angela said.

Bronson nodded. “Not many people do,” he replied. “I think the majority still believe the symbol is as old as the Games. But that wasn’t all Carl Diem did. Hitler also wanted to emphasize the superiority and purity of the Aryan race, so athletes representing Germany were chosen as much for their appearance as for their abilities. He wanted every major event to be won by a German, and for every one of those Germans to fulfill the fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan ideal. The torch relay, carrying the Olympic flame from Greece to the host country, is now an important part of the Olympics, but again it was invented by Carl Diem. There was no such event at the original Games, though a flame was kept burning throughout the ancient events to symbolize the theft of fire by Prometheus from the god Zeus. The modern concept of the Olympic flame was introduced in nineteen twenty-eight at the Amsterdam Summer Olympics, but the torch ceremony was Carl Diem’s idea. To reinforce Hitler’s message, every one of the German runners who transported the flame almost two thousand miles from Greece to Berlin fitted the Aryan mold.”

“Again, news to me,” Angela said. “How come you remembered all this?”

“I’ve got a retentive memory, and all the misunderstandings fascinated me. And there’s something else,” Bronson went on. “Bearing in mind what we’ve managed to discover, there’s an odd link between the nineteen thirty-six Games and what’s happening now.”

“What?”

“There was a bell at the Berlin Olympics as well. It was another Nazi innovation, a bell that was supposed to sound to summon the youth of the world. It weighed over thirty thousand pounds, carried the usual mix of symbols, including the Olympic Rings and the German eagle, and was positioned in a bell tower at the western end of the Olympic stadium, a tower almost two hundred and fifty feet tall that could be seen from most of Berlin.”

“Is it still there?”

“Yes, but it’s pretty battered. The tower was set on fire after Berlin eventually fell, and a couple of years after the end of the war it was demolished by British engineers. The bell tumbled down from the top and hit the ground so hard that it cracked. A few years later it was used for target practice to assess the effectiveness of antitank ammunition, and today it’s down at ground level outside the stadium, slowly rusting away.”

Angela nodded. “And now we have to stop a different kind of Nazi bell from sounding,” she said.

“That’s a very good way of putting it,” Bronson replied.

Then he lapsed into silence as the enormity of the task facing them began to sink in.

The only thing they knew for sure was that the target was going to be the London Olympic Games, but they had no idea how Marcus and his men intended to deliver the weapon, how big it was or what was needed to trigger it. They now knew the approximate dimensions of the original Bell, the one that had been tested and developed in the Wenceslas Mine, but it was reasonable to assume that, if some group of renegade Nazi scientists had been working on the device since the end of the Second World War, the overall miniaturization of electronic components would have allowed them to greatly reduce its size, and instead of trying to find something the size of a small car, like the original Bell, a modern version of the device might fit inside a suitcase, and be considerably more difficult to locate.

The old cliche of trying to find a needle in a haystack barely began to hint at the degree of difficulty facing them, and a sudden wave of despair flooded through Bronson.

Moments later, he realized that Angela’s thoughts must have been running along a very similar track.

“Chris, we don’t have any option. There’s no time left. We have to involve the authorities, the London police or somebody,” she said. “There’s no way the two of us are going to be able to find this thing, and even if we did, I don’t know how we could possibly stop it. You’ve told me about Marcus, and it’s pretty obvious he’s a driven man, not to mention completely ruthless. The fact that he sent those two men to the Wenceslas Mine to kill us is proof enough of that.”

Bronson nodded, his hands involuntarily clenching the rim of the BMW’s steering wheel.

“I know. All we’ve managed to do so far is discover the bare outline of this plot, literally at the eleventh hour, and it’s obviously just the culmination of a long process that he’s been planning for years. He must have devised a way of getting this weapon into one of the Olympic venues, or very close beside it, and I’m still certain that he intends to trigger it tomorrow, during the opening ceremony. The problem is that I don’t think I’ll be able to convince anyone in the Met that I’m doing anything other than trying to avoid my own arrest.

“I mean, who in their right mind would believe that we’ve uncovered a plot by a group of reborn Nazis to take revenge on Britain for the destruction of the Third Reich by using a weapon that was developed in the Second World War and looks like a bell and might even be a small nuclear device?”

“I don’t know how we’re going to do it, Chris,” Angela said. “Just the two of us, against whatever organization Marcus has put in place, and with you being hunted by the British police at the same time. And all we know-all we think we know, to be exact-is the time of the attack and the target. And even that’s a pretty big place.”