Echo of the Reich (35 page)

Then Angela spotted another closed door—in fact, a pair of double doors—though these weren’t bolted, just pushed shut.

Bronson pulled them open, and they found themselves looking down a separate wide passageway that led off the corridor they’d been following. At the far end, facing them, was a further pair of double doors, standing slightly ajar. On the left-hand side of the passageway were two more doors, and another one was set into the right-hand wall.

“You said the Bell was pretty big,” Bronson remarked, “so maybe that’s the chamber it was positioned in, down at the end of this corridor.”

“Could be. Let’s take a look.”

Angela strode down the passage, Bronson right beside her. At the end, he pulled the doors open and they stepped into a chamber that was completely different from any that they’d seen before.

It had a significantly higher ceiling than all the others they’d explored, probably twelve or fifteen feet above
their heads, and was almost circular. But that wasn’t what made them stop in their tracks. Almost directly in front of them, a pair of skeletons lay against the wall, the bones in two untidy heaps below the numbers “3” and “4” that had been painted on the wall.

“What the hell happened here?” Angela asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Bronson replied, striding across the room to examine the grisly remains. He stared down at the skeletons. Some connective tissue and tendons had survived, along with a few patches of skin, and on one corpse part of the skull still bore skin and a few strands of fine wispy hair. Rusty chains dangled above them from rings secured to the wall.

“I don’t know who these two were,” he said, glancing back at Angela, “but they were chained up here.”

He pointed to one of the dangling chains, at the end of which was a handcuff, one skeletal wrist still secured by it. The corpse’s other arm had apparently dropped free of its steel support at some point after the victim’s death.

“And they were probably naked,” he added, “because I can’t see any evidence of clothing anywhere near them. Some of their skin has survived, so if they had been wearing clothes, I would have expected some scraps to still be visible. From the look of the pelvis region, I’d say they were both male. Other than that, I’ve got no idea what went on in this room.”

He shone his flashlight at the walls, which were different from those in the rest of the complex, and not just because they were circular.

“That’s odd. Why did they line this chamber with bricks? Weren’t the stone walls enough?”

“Obviously not.”

Angela walked over to a section of the wall well away from the two skeletons and examined the brickwork carefully. She tapped one of the bricks with her fist, then rubbed the surface with her fingertip.

“I’m not a bricklayer, obviously,” she said, “but I don’t think these are normal bricks, not like the ones we use today, anyway.”

Bronson had also been looking at the bricks, and nodded agreement.

“You’re right,” he said. “They’ve got a kind of glaze on them.”

He took out his multi-tool, opened the knife blade and scratched the surface of a brick.

“It’s not made of the usual material either. In fact, I think they’re probably some sort of ceramic.”

“Ceramic? Why would they need to line the chamber with ceramic bricks?”

“Against excessive heat, maybe. The underside of the American Space Shuttle has a layer of ceramic tiles on it, to protect it against the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.”

Bronson paused and shook his head.

“No, that doesn’t make sense. If the Bell was generating so much heat that it was damaging the walls of this chamber, it would also fry anybody in here.”

“According to the reports, several of the scientists on the project died.”

“Yes, but it can’t have been from heat. If that had been the case, those two skeletons”—he pointed at the opposite wall—“wouldn’t be here. To damage the walls would
mean it would have to get as hot in here as in the incineration chamber in a crematorium, and all that would leave would be a couple of piles of dust and ash. No, it wasn’t heat they were worried about. It was something else.”

“Radiation, maybe?” Angela suggested.

“That sounds a lot more likely to me, though I have no idea what kind of radiation would need ceramic bricks to absorb it. And maybe they didn’t know either.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever happened in this chamber was brand-new technology. As far as we know, nothing like the Bell had been constructed before, so they were treading completely new and unknown ground. Maybe they realized it was radiating something, and using ceramic bricks was their first attempt to contain it. If they’d been able to continue their research, they might have eventually switched over to lead sheets or to something entirely different.”

“Maybe.” Angela didn’t sound convinced. “Or perhaps they knew exactly what they were doing. Don’t forget that this project was the brainchild of one of Germany’s leading physicists, Walther Gerlach. He was a full professor, and his work on the behavior of atoms in a magnetic field was part of the founding science of quantum physics. He was a smart man and he surrounded himself with an equally smart team.”

Bronson grunted and glanced round the chamber again. In the center of the floor was a tangle of power cables. If their theory was correct, this would have run from the coal-fired power station they guessed had been
built above the complex, somewhere near the Henge. He settled the beam of his flashlight on a long horizontal glass window that was the dominant feature of one wall.

“I suppose the control room was probably behind that,” he suggested.

They walked out of the circular room and pushed open the door, which gave access to the chamber on the other side of the glass—glass that had a peculiar greenish glow in the light, and which was obviously at least a couple of inches thick.

Where the large chamber had been almost bare, this room was equipped with banks of instruments, dials and switches, clearly designed to control whatever experiments had been conducted on the other side of the glass viewing pane. Swivel chairs were ranged in front of the control panel, and there were other dials and switches on the back wall.

Angela shone her flashlight at the markings still visible on the various controls, then took a compact dictionary out of her pocket and began jotting down notes in a small book.

“Anything useful?” Bronson asked after a few minutes.

“Sort of, yes,” she replied.

She pointed at two dials set side by side and more or less in the center of the panel.

“The legend above these decodes as ‘centrifuge,’ and the dials seem to be intended to record the speed of rotation.
Die Glocke
apparently contained two counterrotating components—one inside the other, according to this schematic drawing—but the numbers don’t make much sense. The dials are labeled from zero to ten, and they’re
both red-lined at eight, and I suppose that could mean eighty, eight hundred or maybe eight thousand.”

“Actually,” Bronson said, “centrifuges generally have a very high rotation speed, so it could even be
eighty
thousand
. Anything else?”

“There are power meters and switches, that kind of thing, but nothing that seems to measure the output of the device, or give any hint about what it was supposed to do or generate. As far as I can see, all these instruments just controlled or measured the power input and what the device was doing.”

“Maybe what it did wasn’t something they could measure using instruments.”

Angela nodded.

“That would make sense, actually. The most persuasive suggestion I read was that this thing was supposed to turn thorium 232 into protactinium 233 or maybe even straight to uranium 233. This isn’t my field of expertise, obviously, but from what I read, protactinium is highly toxic and very radioactive. Nasty stuff, in short. There was another suggestion that the Nazis could use the same technology, and the same device, to convert uranium 238, another isotope of the element, into plutonium. And with enough plutonium, they would have been able to build a nuclear bomb.”

“That’s the nightmare scenario, isn’t it? But I wonder how close the Nazis really were to succeeding. After all, the Americans’ Manhattan Project cost tens of millions of dollars in the nineteen forties, which would be billions today, employed the best scientists and engineers they could find, and by the end of the war they’d only managed
to build two working weapons, of two different types. And both of those were incredibly inefficient in terms of yield. I read somewhere that the Hiroshima bomb only used a tiny percentage of the fissile material in the warhead, maybe as little as six hundred milligrams.”

“It did the job, though,” Angela said.

“Definitely. That was enough to give it a yield of about fifteen kilotons. Do you really think that the Bell could have produced uranium or plutonium?”

“We know it didn’t produce enough to let them construct a nuclear weapon, but that’s not what worries me. Whatever
Die Glocke
was capable of doing back in the nineteen forties, we do know that it was almost certainly producing copious amounts of radiation, and that was probably what killed the German scientists working on it, and of course also murdered any test subjects they had chained to the walls of the chamber when they switched it on.

“From what I’ve been able to find out, the device probably generated extremely powerful X-rays when it was running, as a part of the transmutation process when a plasma was created. That would be enough to kill anyone nearby, but not necessarily very quickly. But for thorium to transmute into uranium it has to absorb additional neutrons and protons, and the Nazis probably used beryllium oxide as the source of these particles. That means the device would also have generated beta radiation—the emission of protons.”

“I don’t really need a lesson in nuclear physics, Angela,” Bronson said. “Just tell me if X-rays and beta radiation would have been enough to kill people near the device.”

“Almost certainly, and probably to kill them quickly and unpleasantly. Some reports refer to the flesh of the test subjects liquefying.”

“So forget the possibility of the Nazis manufacturing uranium or plutonium. Just running this thing would be enough to generate lethal radiation. What we’re looking at here is a kind of sophisticated dirty bomb, but instead of the particles of radioactive material being blown in all directions by explosive charge, in this case they would presumably be emitted in a continual stream for as long as the device was running.”

“Yes. And there’s something else we need to remember.”

“I know,” Bronson said, “and that was what it could do in the nineteen forties, when it had only just been developed. Wherever the Bell went, and whoever took it, they’ve had seventy years or so to refine it and get it right. And that’s really bad news.”

“I think we—” Angela began, then stopped abruptly as Bronson put his finger to his lips. From somewhere in the tunnel system he’d just heard a sudden thump or bang, as if a large object had fallen over.

Then they both heard a faint metallic clatter. Sounds echo in confined spaces, and it was impossible to work out exactly where the sound had come from. But there was no mistaking what it meant.

Someone else was in the mine with them.

26 July 2012

“One more thing, Klaus,” Wolf said.

The two men were sitting on opposite sides of the desk in the study, and had been going over the final sequence of events that would culminate in the completion of the operation. These particularly concerned the actions that were to take place in London when the device was first positioned and then activated using the built-in timer system. Marcus himself was going to supervise and initiate this final phase. It was his destiny. He would be fulfilling the wishes of his long-dead grandfather, and realizing the dreams of all the members of
Die Neue Dämmerung
, members both alive and dead, who had worked together over the decades to bring this triumph for the Fatherland to its climax.

“Yes?”

“I’m still worried about Bronson and what he’s doing. If he was still in the vicinity of Berlin, somebody—either
the police or our men—would have seen him, and there’s still been no word from Oskar, I suppose?”

“Nothing so far,” Klaus replied.

“Do you know where he is now?”

“He’d just crossed the border into Poland the last time he called; he hoped to reach the mine within two or three hours.”

Marcus Wolf nodded.

“I suppose Bronson might be there, but I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve read him wrong, and if he might be trying to get back to Britain. That doesn’t bother me, but I’m getting slightly concerned about making sure that the lorry crosses the English Channel as soon as possible. The ferry ports and the Channel Tunnel terminal are obvious choke points, and the last thing we want is for the truck carrying the weapon to be stuck on the wrong side of the Channel.”

“That makes sense,” Drescher replied. “What would you like me to do about it?”

“Contact the team driving the vehicle and tell them to get across the Channel as soon as they can, and then to find somewhere they can park, somewhere no more than an hour’s drive from London.”

“No problem.” Drescher took his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialed a number from memory.

26 July 2012

Bronson stepped soundlessly across to the partially open door. He eased it a fraction wider and for a second or two just listened.

Then he pushed it closed and looked back into the control room, the flashlight beam flitting around the room as he searched for a hiding place, for somewhere that Angela would be safe.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” Bronson replied, just as quietly, “but somehow I don’t think it’s some guy doing a guided tour of the mine. It’s most likely one of Marcus’s men, and it sounds as if he’s right down by the entrance, probably where we got in.”

“They followed us here?”

“I doubt it. I think it’s just Marcus covering all the bases. He and his men will have been looking for me ever since I shot my way past them at the house outside Berlin.
He’ll have the British gang watching out for me, and if I’d been him I would have sent somebody here, just in case. The only clue he let slip was the expression ‘lantern bearer,’ and he must have known that that would only make sense in the context of the Wenceslas Mine. If they’ve spotted the car outside, they’ll know I’m inside, somewhere. But what they can’t know is that you’re here as well, and I’m going to make sure that that doesn’t change. You have to get out of sight.”