Echo of the Reich (44 page)

He’d found the weapon, but Bronson had not the slightest idea how to disarm it, or even how to get inside the locked inner compartment.

He pulled out his mobile phone, dialed 999 and told the operator who and where he was and that he needed a bomb-disposal expert there, fast.

In the background he could hear the scream of sirens, and a few moments later distorted and amplified voices as officials apparently tried to initiate an orderly evacuation
of the area. That was far too quick to be in response to his call, and he guessed it was because of the shooting a few minutes earlier.

Bronson ignored the noises outside as he struggled to make sense of the control panel, trying to work out what the various cables did, but his efforts were hampered by his lack of knowledge about the type of weapon he was dealing with. And, of course, by the fact that he knew almost nothing about bomb-disposal tactics.

The only thing he could tell for sure was that there was some kind of timing circuit incorporated into the control panel, because right in the center of the instrumentation was a digital counter, which was ticking off the seconds. At that moment, the number stood at one hundred and ninety-one—just over three minutes. He pressed buttons, but nothing happened. Then he spotted a keyhole on one corner of the panel, which presumably locked the controls.

As he stood there, staring down, he felt a sudden waft of air, and a narrow beam of light illuminated the interior of the truck.

“It’s too late now, you know,” an unpleasantly familiar voice said, from behind him.

Bronson whirled round, his hand dropping to his Walther, but he was too late.

Marcus stood at the back of the truck, having presumably released the padlock that secured the rear doors and climbed in that way. His own pistol was pointing straight at Bronson.

Bronson knew that if he tried to draw his Walther, or reach for his MP5, he’d be dead in less than a second. At that range, Marcus couldn’t possibly miss.

“The timer’s just passed three minutes, Marcus,” he said. “I would have thought you’d be miles away by now. Or are you planning on waiting around for the bang?”

The German shook his head, then laughed shortly.

“You really don’t have the slightest idea what you’re dealing with, do you? This isn’t a bomb, you bumbling idiot. It’s something far, far worse. But luckily it’ll have no effect on me. Or on any of my men.”

That wasn’t what Bronson had expected at all.

“So what is it? And how come you’re immune?”

Marcus shook his head.

“You’ll find out. And don’t bother trying to do anything about the timer, because you can’t. Everything’s armored and protected, so unless you’ve got something like a thermic lance to cut through the cables, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And even then, it only needs the power supply for a couple of minutes after it’s triggered, because then the reaction becomes self-sustaining. So there really is nothing you can do.”

Bronson stared at him. What the German had said made a horrible kind of sense. It looked as if the
Laternenträger
was indeed a kind of lineal descendant of the Nazi’s
Die Glocke
, miniaturized, improved and refined. That probably meant it was the worst possible kind of dirty bomb, or rather something like a rogue nuclear reactor that would spew out lethal radiation for as long as it was working, turning northeast London into a desolate wasteland that would make the area around Chernobyl seem like a paradise.

And if Marcus and his men were immune, that could mean only that they knew the type of radiation the device
would produce, and had taken drugs to neutralize its effects. Bronson had a vague recollection of antiradiation drugs from his time in the army, and he recalled that iodine could be an effective treatment in some circumstances.

“I could kill you right now, I suppose,” Marcus said, “but that would just deny you a lot of suffering, so I won’t. You shot my man outside in the stomach, and he’s dying slowly and in agony, so I think it’s only fair that you should enjoy the same kind of death.”

Marcus lifted the pistol and took careful aim.

27 July 2012

Bronson tensed, knowing that now he had to reach for his pistol, because he had nothing left to lose.

But before he could move a muscle, two shots rang out and the German seemed to crumple to the floor of the truck.

Bronson swung round to see Weeks framed in the side door, the Heckler & Koch MP5 held steady in his hands.

“I thought you were dead,” Bronson said.

“I deal in illegal weapons, Chris. Wearing a Kevlar jacket under my clothes is second nature to me. The bullet just knocked the wind out of me, and my chest’ll be bruised for weeks. Is he the last of them, do you think?”

“I bloody hope so.”

Bronson turned back to the control panel as Weeks hauled himself up inside the truck.

The timer now stood at fifty-seven seconds.

“We need bolt-croppers or something like that, to cut the cables that power the device,” Bronson said.

His voice radiated the tension and resignation he was feeling. Because at that moment he believed Marcus was right, that there really was nothing they could do to stop the Bell.

“There are police cars and a fire engine heading this way,” Weeks said, peering out of the open rear door.

“Yes,” Bronson said, because now he could hear the sound of the sirens getting closer. “But will they get here in time?”

“Can you shut it down from here?” Weeks asked, stepping over to the control panel.

“Not without the key that unlocks the controls, and probably not even then. The key,” he repeated.

He ran over to Marcus’s body and swiftly searched it. He pulled out a bunch of keys, but as soon as he looked at them he knew they were house keys or similar, and he slipped them into his own pocket. But around the German’s neck he found a chain with a single key attached.

Bronson ripped off the chain, ran back to the control panel, stuck the key in the lock and turned it. Immediately, the various controls lit up, but Bronson could see nothing that looked like an abort switch.

The timer reached seventeen seconds.

He pressed a couple of buttons experimentally, just to do something, but to no avail.

At fourteen seconds to go, a figure in army uniform climbed into the truck through the rear door.

Weeks covered him with his MP5, but the man ignored him and strode forward.

“Russell. Bomb disposal,” he announced. “What have you got?”

“Do you speak German?” Bronson demanded.

“A little, yes.”

“Good. There’s twelve seconds to go and the control panel’s unlocked.”

The army officer stepped over to the control panel and looked down at it, his lips moving silently as he rapidly scanned the illuminated labels.

“Right,” he said, and pressed two buttons simultaneously. “That should be the abort,” he said.

Then he frowned, because the counter was still unwinding and a message had popped up in an alphanumeric display.

“It’s asking for the abort code,” Russell said. “Do you have it?”

Bronson and Weeks just stared at him.

“I said: do you have the code?” Russell repeated.

“No,” Bronson replied.

Russell’s face seemed to age five years in an instant.

“Then we’re buggered,” he said.

27 July 2012

The three of them stared at the timer in horrified fascination as it counted down to zero.

Then a new message appeared in the display.

“That says that the actuating sequence has begun,” Russell said, in a small voice.

Bronson strode across to the viewing pane in the steel partition and looked into the other compartment.

The Bell was in motion, the outer shell beginning to rotate slowly, a faint whine just audible through the steel wall.

“It’s started,” Bronson said.

“Did Marcus tell you what it did?” Weeks asked.

Bronson nodded, but then, as a pale violet light suddenly became visible in the viewing port, the color deepening with each passing moment, a sudden thought struck him.

“Lateral thinking,” he exclaimed. “After two minutes,
that thing becomes self-sustaining. We’ve got to cut the power to it right now.”

“But we haven’t got any bolt-croppers,” Weeks pointed out, “and the cables are under the floor.”

“I know,” Bronson said, seizing his MP5, “so we have to hit the generators. Blow their fuel tanks. Stop them operating.”

“That’s bloody brilliant.”

Russell ran for the door as Bronson and Weeks aimed their Heckler & Koch submachine guns at the fuel tanks of two of the petrol-driven generators.

The interior of the truck echoed to the sound of machine-gun fire as the two men, standing side by side, opened up with their weapons, firing short bursts. The bullets ripped through the two fuel tanks, sending petrol flying through the air, the fuel splashing down onto the hot engines below. In moments, the petrol ignited with a heavy “whump” and that end of the truck turned into hell on earth, blazing fuel igniting everything flammable.

The heat was intense, and the oxygen was being sucked out of the air Bronson and Weeks were breathing. They needed to get out. But the third generator was still running, still supplying power to the nightmare device inside the locked compartment, and both men turned their weapons on it.

As they did so, both the other generators died, the fuel in their carburettors exhausted. Again, fuel spewed everywhere as the third fuel tank ruptured, but the blaze ensured that it was ignited immediately. Maybe that tank held more than the others, or there were other supplies of fuel there they hadn’t spotted, but for whatever reason
the third petrol explosion was both louder and more powerful than the other two, blowing Bronson and Weeks off their feet.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bronson said, helping Weeks stand up again.

They staggered to the rear doors of the truck and jumped down to the ground, both blackened and barely recognizable as human beings. And at that moment something else—perhaps another can of petrol—blew up in the truck behind them with a deep booming sound.

All around the vehicle, police officers and firemen were assembling, the latter preparing their firefighting equipment, though it was already clear that little inside the truck would survive the blaze.

Then there was a scream from inside the truck, and Marcus, his clothes sodden with blood, flames licking around his limbs, stood framed in the rear doorway, silhouetted against the blaze like some devilish creature from the pit, his pistol in his hand as he looked for a target.

Bronson and Weeks acted as one, swinging round and aiming their MP5s at him. The four shots sounded like two as they simultaneously each fired two rounds.

Marcus tumbled backward into the flames, the pistol falling from his hand to land on the ground outside the truck. And he didn’t move at all as the raging fire began to consume his body.

“Christ, I thought he was dead,” Weeks said.

“Well, he is now,” Bronson replied.

“Do you think we stopped it in time?”

“I have no idea, but I suppose we’ll soon find out.”

Bronson glanced around him at the circle of faces that surrounded them.

“I think it’s time we made ourselves scarce,” he said. “At least I’ve got an excuse for wandering about carrying a submachine gun, but you should definitely get the hell away from here.”

Weeks nodded, then walked over to Bronson and pulled a couple of clear plastic evidence bags from one of the pockets on the other man’s utility belt. He strode over to the blazing truck, picked up the pistol Marcus had dropped and slipped it into one of the bags. Then he made his way back to Bronson, a somewhat bemused smile on his face.

“Give me the other pistol,” Weeks said. “Might as well try to pick up some stock while I’m here. And carrying these two weapons will give me an excuse to get out of here.”

Bronson grinned at him, pulled the Walther he’d taken off the German out of his belt and handed it over. Then he felt inside his trouser pocket, took out the keys for the hire car and gave them to Weeks as well.

“You’ve got a bloody cheek, Dickie, but actually that might work. Whatever happens, give me a call and I’ll do what I can.”

Weeks walked briskly away from the truck, a police officer on a mission, and the circle of people parted silently to let him through.

Bronson smiled at his retreating figure, then turned back to stare again at the burning truck. Then he was conscious of a couple of people approaching him, and swung round to meet them. Neither Bob Curtis nor Detective Inspector Davidson looked particularly pleased to see him.

9 August 2012

“Sit down, Chris.”

Bronson took a seat in front of the superintendent’s desk and waited.

“You’re fully recovered, I hope. Smoke inhalation can be dangerous, and I can see that your hair and eyebrows suffered a bit.”

Bronson nodded.

“I’m fine, sir, really. And the checks for radiation sickness came back negative as well.”

“Good. Now, there’s good news and bad news, like there usually is. The good news is that the boffins have finally finished picking over what was left of that burned-out lorry in the Olympic Park. Your instinct was right. Because you managed to stop the generators delivering a current to the Bell only a few seconds after it was activated, the two contrarotating cylinders never reached a sufficiently high speed to start a sustained reaction.”

The superintendent paused and glanced down at the notes on his desk.

“Now, I don’t pretend to understand the science behind it, but it seems that when it was originally constructed—when the Nazis built
Die Glocke
, I mean—it was intended to act as a kind of nuclear reactor, to transmute thorium into uranium or possibly uranium into plutonium, as part of the German atom bomb project. And we now know a bit more about what’s happened since then. The Met police arrested half a dozen other Germans who were clearly involved with this plot and a couple of them have been quite forthcoming. According to them, at the end of the last war, the Nazis managed to fly the original Bell, and the most important scientists involved in the project, out to South America. It looks as if Marcus Wolf’s grandfather was the officer in charge of that evacuation, and he and a bunch of other renegade Nazis, who were certain that Hitler had been right all along, decided they’d use the Bell to take revenge on the rest of Europe. The problem they had was that it took them a lot longer, decades longer in fact, to produce a fully functioning and miniaturized version of the weapon.