Echo of the Reich (33 page)

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.”

26 July 2012

It had sounded easy enough when Bronson said it, but finding their way into the cave complex of the Wenceslas Mine proved to be far more difficult than either of them had expected.

One of the first and biggest problems was simply finding any trace of the mine entrance because of the considerable growth of trees, bushes and undergrowth that had occurred over the decades. The shape of the ground had been softened and altered by weathering and the passage of time, and although they were able to use the railway line as a guide—because Angela had discovered that during the war a spur had linked the mine entrance to the main line—it still took them over half an hour to find anything that even resembled a mine entrance.

And when they did find it, it wasn’t much help.

“There’s an entrance over here,” Angela called out. “At least, I think it’s an entrance.”

Bronson trotted over to where she was standing.

At first sight, what she was looking at didn’t appear much different to the rest of the rock face. They had been searching in the area between the remains of the railway track and the plateau upon which the Henge stood, studying a fairly steep slope about thirty feet high. It was mainly rock, except where rough grass and the occasional stunted bush grew in the cracks where there was just enough soil for the roots to gain purchase. At the foot of the slope, large boulders and smaller rocks lay scattered on the ground, where they’d fallen over the centuries.

“Where?” he asked.

Angela pointed.

“This section looks a lot more tumbledown than the rest of the slope,” she said, “with more vegetation growing all over the rocks. And there’s a concave area just above it, see?”

Once she’d pointed out the visual clues, Bronson could absolutely see what she was driving at. He nodded slowly.

“You could be right,” he said. “If this was once a tunnel, a natural or man-made entrance, and it was blown up, this is pretty much what you’d expect it to look like, over half a century after the event.”

For a few moments they just stood there, staring at the rock face.

“You told me that the Nazis had destroyed the entrance,” Bronson said.

Angela nodded. “That’s in all the contemporary reports that I’ve managed to track down. When the special
SS Evacuation Kommando
arrived here, they removed
Die Glocke
and the documentation, killed everybody who wasn’t vital to the project, then blew down the entrance tunnel. And that,” she added, “is what I think we’re looking at.”

“I presume they were in a hurry,” Bronson said. “They must have known that the Russian advance was only a matter of days, maybe even hours, away.”

“Probably, yes. What’s your point?”

“I don’t know too much about mining or underground facilities, but I do know that a supply of fresh air would have been essential. And I think that it would be normal practice to have more than just one source.”

“You mean they might have destroyed the entrance used by people and vehicles, but they wouldn’t have had time to blow up all the ventilation ducts?”

“Exactly.” Bronson nodded. “This was a huge complex—you said it covered over thirty-five square kilometers—and to keep that kind of area livable in, they would have needed plenty of sources of fresh air.”

“So all we have to do is find one, I suppose. But at least we now know we’re looking in more or less the right place.”

They separated again, and this time they started looking higher up the rock face, because logically the air vents would have been placed high enough to avoid animals taking refuge in them, and where undergrowth would not interfere with the flow of air. And the Nazis had repeatedly demonstrated to the world that they were logical. Implacably evil in their intentions, but supremely logical and efficient in the implementation of their intentions.

Once again, it was Angela who spotted what they were looking for. About fifty yards from the dynamited entrance to the cave, under a natural overhang about ten feet off the ground and almost invisible in the shadow cast by that overhang, she saw a dark shape, not a perfect circle but too regular to be a natural opening in the rock.

Bronson pulled on a pair of overalls, handed a second pair to Angela, and checked that his flashlight was working.

“Do you really think you’ll need that in the cave?” she asked, pointing at the butt of the Walther that he’d tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

“Not really,” Bronson replied, “but you never know. I think they have wolves in this part of the world, and maybe bears as well. I’d hate to get inside the tunnels and find that I’d arrived in a wolf den just in time for lunch.”

“Good point. What about me? I have shot the odd pistol in my time, you know.”

Bronson fished the Llama .22 out of his trouser pocket and handed it to her.

“It’s loaded, with one round in the chamber, and the safety catch is on, so just click it off, point and then shoot. But only if you have to. I doubt if one of those bullets would stop a wolf, and all it would do to a bear is just piss it off, really badly, so let me do the shooting if we meet anything like that.”

“Fine with me.”

Bronson again checked the flashlight he was carrying, confirmed he had spare batteries for it and for the second, smaller flashlight in his pocket, then scrambled up the rock face to the opening. The hole itself was about three
feet wide, and appeared to have been chiseled out of the rock, because he could see the unmistakable marks of picks or chisels on the stone.

He crawled a few feet into the narrow tunnel, then turned round and waited for Angela to follow him, extending his hand to help her as she neared the entrance.

“This is definitely man-made,” Bronson said, pointing at the tool marks.

Angela shivered slightly. “It gives me a funny feeling, seeing something like this, knowing how it was constructed, and knowing that the men who were forced to dig this out of the rock were probably dead just days later.”