Echo of the Reich (34 page)

There wasn’t anything Bronson thought he could say in reply to that, so he just shook his head, switched on his flashlight and shone the beam down the tunnel.

Then the two of them began making their way, slowly and cautiously, along the horizontal shaft that had been cut through the rock and into the side of the mountain.

26 July 2012

The shaft was fairly easy to negotiate, being wide and unobstructed apart from a few stones and bits of rock that had fallen from the roof over the years, and it wasn’t even particularly long. Bronson estimated they’d covered only about twenty yards when the beam of his flashlight suddenly no longer showed the sides of the shaft, but a heavy-looking lump of rusty machinery.

“Stop where you are,” he murmured to Angela. “There’s something blocking the duct.”

He crawled forward a few more feet until he could clearly see what it was.

“It’s a fan,” he said. “I’ll need to shift it before we can go any further.”

He reached out and gave the rusted lump of machinery a push. It moved very slightly, but he knew he didn’t have either the strength in his arms or a fulcrum that he could use to shift it. He’d have to use his feet.

“Can you take this torch?”

Bronson passed it back to Angela, then awkwardly turned completely around in the tunnel. He braced himself with his arms against the side of the duct, then drew up his legs and kicked out, his feet hitting the fan squarely near its center. There was a sudden squeal of tearing metal, but the obstruction stayed in place. Bronson moved slightly, then kicked out again.

This time, whatever was holding the fan gave way, and it tumbled out of sight, landing with an echoing crash somewhere beyond.

Angela shone the flashlight over Bronson’s body. The worked stone sides of the ventilation duct stopped a couple of feet ahead, and beyond that was an inky blackness, part of a stone wall visible some distance away.

Bronson repeated the maneuver, turning himself round so that he was facing the open space ahead of them. Then he slid forward the last few feet until his head and shoulders projected beyond the end of the duct. He shone the flashlight downward, the beam revealing a level floor of hard-packed earth on stone and the crumpled remains of the fan.

“The floor’s about six feet down,” he said, his voice echoing in the confined space. “I’ll go first.”

“No bears or wolves, I hope?”

“Not that I can see, no.”

Bronson maneuvered himself awkwardly for the third time, turning round so that his legs dangled over the edge, then lowered himself with his hands, dropping the last couple of feet.

“Just come straight out,” he told Angela. “I’ll take your weight.”

Angela crawled forward, glancing with interest around the chamber, then stretched out her arms toward Bronson, who grabbed her shoulders and eased her body forward out of the shaft, then lowered her to the ground to stand beside him.

“What is this place?” she asked, unconsciously lowering her voice to a whisper.

“I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it, so maybe it was just a storage room, something like that.” He aimed the beam of the flashlight toward the center of the ceiling, where a rusty electrical fixture dangled. “It had a light once,” he added, “as well as that fan, so I’m pretty sure we’re in the right place. It must be a part of the Nazi underground complex.”

He switched the beam to the wall directly under the opening of the vent and noticed that there was a power socket attached to the stone, and a cable ran from it to the fan he’d kicked out of the duct.

Bronson led the way toward the doorway on the opposite side of the room and shone the flashlight into the space outside. A corridor, hacked through the rock, extended in both directions.

“Left or right?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll probably need to go in both directions. For now, go left. That’ll probably take us back toward the dynamited entrance, and we can get our bearings from that.”

As they walked down the corridor, Bronson stopped suddenly and shone the beam of his flashlight down at the floor.

“Tire marks,” he said. “Not a modern tread pattern,
obviously, so they clearly brought the odd vehicle in here. Maybe to take away the Bell just before they blew the entrance, or maybe just to deliver supplies.”

He shone the flashlight at the walls. “It’s not very wide, but I guess a small truck could get down here. The tunnel’s pretty straight, as far as I can see.”

They walked on, and within a few dozen yards they found the entrance. Or what was left of it. The damage on the inside of the complex mirrored what Angela had noticed outside. A massive pile of boulders, rocks and rubble completely blocked the tunnel. Whoever had blown the entrance had made a competent and comprehensive job of it.

“That seems clear enough,” Angela said. “This was what the reports described, so somewhere down there”—she pointed back the way they’d come—“is the chamber that was used as the test facility for
Die Glocke
. All we have to do now is find it and learn what we can from whatever’s left there.”

“Right,” Bronson said, and led the way down the corridor, the beam of his light playing over the walls as he walked.

There were numerous openings on both sides of the corridor, all either without doors at all or with doors that were standing wide-open. Some of the rooms had clearly been used as offices, equipped with desks and chairs, and each time they looked into a room and saw anything in it, they stepped inside to investigate.

In several rooms the chairs had toppled over, evidence of a hasty departure or possibly caused by the blast wave of the explosion that had sealed the tunnel entrance. In
some, dust-covered paper littered the floor and covered the desks, but Angela scarcely gave it more than a cursory glance.

“Isn’t it worth checking some of these documents?” Bronson asked.

Angela shook her head. “If I was a German-speaking historian specializing in the Second World War, it might be, but my guess is that most of this stuff will just be routine administration, orders for food or fuel or equipment, that kind of thing. Anything that was important to the project would have been taken away with the device itself.”

The papers were generally speaking in good condition, probably because the interior of the mine seemed very dry—certainly there was no smell of damp, and the walls were dry to the touch. The edges of some were chewed, evidence of rats or mice, or maybe even insect activity.

Bronson wasn’t sure that Angela was right about the papers. They knew that the Germans had left the place in a hurry, believing it would soon be overrun by Allied forces, and in those circumstances he thought it was possible, maybe even probable, that important papers might have inadvertently been left behind. But he also realized that as neither of them spoke German, they would be unlikely to recognize any significant documentation unless they spent hours doing translations.

And he knew that they didn’t have the time to spare.

“So what are we looking for, exactly?” he asked.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know,” Angela replied. “I wanted to find the chamber where the Bell was operated, because I thought if we could take a look at the
controls and instrumentation they used to operate it, we might get a better idea about what it was supposed to do.”

That made sense to Bronson.

Moments later, the beam of his flashlight fell on a door that was closed. In fact, it wasn’t just closed, it was bolted shut. Two large bolts, the steel almost an inch in diameter, had been driven home into sockets set into the rock around the door.

“That’s different,” he said, pointing.

“That could be it,” Angela said, and strode across to the door.

Bronson seized the top bolt and tugged at it, but it didn’t move.

“I think it’s pretty much rusted in place,” he said, handing his flashlight to Angela and changing his grip.

With both his hands tugging on the bolt, it did move. Not easily, and not far, but he knew it was only a matter of time. He wiggled it back and forth, each movement freeing it a little more, until after a minute or so, with a final defiant squeal, it slammed back as Bronson’s efforts at last pulled it free of the socket.

“One down,” he muttered, and grabbed the second bolt.

For some reason, that was easier to move, and in a few seconds Bronson was able to grab the edge of the door and swing it open.

Angela sniffed as the door swung open, and an unexpectedly familiar scent wafted out of the closed room.

“It smells almost like a church,” she said. “Old stones. Old stones and something else.”

The beam of Bronson’s flashlight, a circle of brilliant white light in the blackness of the room, played over the walls and then dropped down to the floor. At first, Angela couldn’t make out what she was seeing: the floor was covered with what looked like ragged, frayed and torn clothing interspersed by a confused tangle of white and brown shapes.

Then she caught her breath as she realized what she was staring at. The floor was carpeted with old corpses. A mass of rotten clothing from which skulls and bones, some showing white, others with brown and mummified skin and flesh still adhering to them, projected. She’d seen bones and bodies before, like everybody who trained as an archaeologist or in any of the related disciplines. But this was a sight she knew she would never forget.

“Oh, dear God,” she murmured, her voice choked with emotion. “So the reports were right. They couldn’t take all the scientists with them, so they massacred them to make sure they kept their mouths shut.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked again at the scene in front of her. “There must be at least twenty or thirty bodies here.”

“Old stones—and old bones,” Bronson agreed.

26 July 2012

The white light of the flashlight flickered again over the confused tangle of bones and flesh and clothing.

“Most of them look as if they were shot in the head,” Bronson suggested, “so maybe the SS just locked them in here and then sent in a couple of men with pistols to do the job. No—” he broke off. “I’m wrong. See that piece of wood over there?”

He pointed to a spot near the center of the room, and Angela nodded.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the handle of a German stick grenade, what our boys used to call a potato masher. They must have made them all wait in here, then lobbed in a hand grenade or two, waited for the bang and then gone back in to finish them off.”

“Callous bastards,” Angela muttered, as she recovered her composure. “These people were almost certainly Germans, German scientists, working for the Third Reich
and most of them probably even supporting Hitler. And this is the payoff they got for their loyalty and dedication. I can’t even begin to comprehend the mindset of the kind of people who would do this.”

“In the end,” Bronson said, “it might have just been a case of simple logistics. They might have only had enough space on the aircraft for a dozen or so people, plus the Bell. And they were probably desperate to prevent any documentation or—worse—any of the people involved in the project from being captured by the Russians or any of the other Allied forces. The fastest, easiest, cheapest, most efficient, and above all the most certain, way to ensure that that couldn’t possibly happen was to kill them all.”

He paused and ran the beam of his flashlight around the room.

“It’s difficult to tell how many bodies are in here,” he said, “but I think it’s more than twenty. My guess is that there are at least thirty, maybe forty of them. I suppose you could say that it’s just another example of Nazi efficiency. When you link that to their total disregard for human life, you get a pretty frightening combination. The only good thing is that we now definitely know that we’re in the right place.”

Bronson pushed the door closed on the silent room and its long-dead occupants and slid home one of the bolts to secure it.

“Can you imagine what those poor souls must have felt like,” Angela said, her voice quiet and subdued, “locked in that room and probably knowing that they had just minutes to live? Wondering if they would be shot
or bayoneted or simply left there to die of thirst and starvation.”

“At least it was quick,” Bronson muttered, “but they probably died screaming in terror. Those that survived the blast of that grenade would have been begging for death. The explosion in that confined space would have done terrible things to their bodies. So I hope their souls found some peace.”

Angela dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and glanced over at his dark shape as they walked down the corridor together, heading further into the mine.

“That’s very deep for you, almost religious,” she said. You feeling all right?”

“Yeah. It’s just that it’s one thing to read in a history book that the Nazis killed God knows how many millions of people, and you completely understand that on an intellectual level, but it’s just facts, you know, just numbers. But then, when you actually see the bodies—or rather the bones—it brings it home to you. I’ve never seen hard and unarguable evidence of a Nazi atrocity before. It just makes everything so much more real.”

“Yes. And those poor souls wouldn’t even have been listed among the dead. That was a secret atrocity, if you like, one nobody was ever supposed to know about. It makes you wonder how many other piles of bones are still out there somewhere, in some underground chamber or wherever, waiting patiently to be found so that another unfinished chapter about that war can finally be completed.”

Their lights danced ahead of them as they walked steadily down the corridor, the beams illuminating the
bare stone walls and the concrete floor. They passed numerous chambers, all of them, with the exception of the charnel house they’d investigated, with their doors standing wide-open. They looked in every one, but saw only a virtual repeat of the first few offices they’d checked: papers scattered everywhere, chairs and desks displaying signs of a hasty departure.

The only rooms that were different were a canteen or dining room, the chairs and tables thick with dust, a serving counter at one end, and a couple of washrooms—male and female—equipped with sinks and toilet stalls.