Echo of the Reich

by James Becker

  Bronson shook his head.

  “That’s not what he said, and I’m certain that’s not what he meant. There’s something we’re missing here, some loophole Marcus has obviously identified and is going to exploit. I was even wondering if he had some plan to get the device onto an underground train or into a sewer somehow, but I just don’t see either of those options working, for a host of basic logistical reasons.”

  Angela nodded, then leaned forward as another thought struck her.

  “There’s another factor. If he’s been planning this for years, he can’t have worked out a way to beat the security system London’s put in place to safeguard the Olympics all that time ago, because it probably wasn’t even finalized until quite recently. So it must be something else, something fundamental, that we’re just not seeing.”

  The door opened and Weeks appeared, wearing blue jeans and a white open-necked shirt, both garments fitting him reasonably well. He had a light jacket slung over his shoulder.

  “Bathroom’s free,” he announced, then sat down and picked up his mug of coffee.

  Twenty minutes later, Bronson emerged similarly dressed, his growth of stubble removed, his hair combed.

  “Right,” he said, “we need to go. We’ll have a bag each, because we need somewhere to store the hardware, and a couple of sets of vests and caps I borrowed a while ago.”

  “Vests?” Weeks asked.

  “Yes. If we find something, we’re going to need to be able to move fast. I’ve got two sets of police baseball caps and overvests in my bag. Undercover officers use them when they need to identify themselves to the public. You just pull them on over your shirt. They aren’t Kevlar, just nylon, but those, and the caps, might help us pass for real coppers if we have to.”

  “You are a real copper,” Angela pointed out.

  “I was when I started this caper,” Bronson replied, “but I have no idea what I am right now. I don’t even know if they’re still paying me.”

  He picked up the keys for the car Angela had hired, a nicely anonymous means of transport that wouldn’t ring the alarm bells in any police car they passed, and turned to leave.

  “If you have any brain waves, give me a call on the mobile,” Bronson said. “Otherwise, I’ll see you later.”

  51

  27 July 2012

  Bronson and Weeks gave up looking just after four that afternoon, having achieved absolutely nothing.

  They’d driven around all the Olympic sites in Angela’s hired Ford, and seen all of the security precautions at first hand. Whole streets had been cordoned off by linked steel barriers, effectively turning the various sites into islands within the suburban environment. Police officers, many of them armed, were manning the barricades, their numbers supplemented by vast hordes of civilian staff. Troops were on the streets as well, providing an impressive extra level of security, and Bronson knew that Typhoon fighter jets had been stationed at nearby airfields, Royal Navy ships were moored in the Thames, and surface-to-air missile batteries were positioned and on alert around the city. London was protected by an impressive ring of steel, but he knew that these defenses would be completely and utterly useless if the weapon was already inside the city. And that, he thought, was the appalling reality of the situation.

  Pedestrian access was rigidly controlled, and neither he nor Weeks could see any possible way that anybody without the correct ticket was going to get anywhere near the stadium. And certainly no unidentified vehicle carrying a weapon, disguised or not, would have been allowed access to the area.

  They’d concentrated on the main stadium, the site of the opening ceremony, which was also where the most restrictive security precautions were in force, for obvious reasons. They’d driven around it twice, following a tortuous route through the side streets, but keeping as close to the stadium as they could. Then they’d parked the car and walked pretty much the same route. But there were no gaps in the security cordon, no places where even an agile man would be able to get through the barriers and into the stadium, and certainly no points where a vehicle could be driven through.

  The only other possibility was that the Germans were planning a kind of suicide attack, driving a heavy truck through the barriers and then detonating the device once the vehicle had finally been brought to a stop. But that didn’t seem likely—suicide attacks just weren’t a part of the German national psyche.

  But Georg’s words still echoed in Bronson’s memory. The German had been so certain, so sure, that Marcus’s foul plan would reach fruition. And in the circumstances of their confrontation that morning—when Georg had obviously believed that Bronson was going to be dead in seconds—there had been no reason for him to be anything other than truthful.

  * * *

  The streets were already packed, throngs of people streaming toward the venue, the cafés doing a brisk trade, and a tremendous buzz of excitement in the air. Even getting near the stadium was difficult because of the crowds, and it soon became clear that seeing any unusual activity would be virtually impossible. Above them, helicopters buzzed around, some police aircraft, but several emblazoned with the logos of television channels.

  “I think we’ve blown it,” Weeks said, as he and Bronson stood on a street corner watching a long line of people queuing to gain entrance to the stadium. “Wherever the device is, either it’s in position already or it’s not going to make it.”

  “I’m sure it’s here,” Bronson replied, finality in his voice, as he gestured at the continuous activity in front of them. “Marcus would have known it was going to be like this. He must have anticipated it, and somehow worked out a way to get around it. Or through it.”

  Weeks shook his head. “I don’t see how. And you said Georg claimed the device would be arriving today, maybe even while we were here on the streets. That seems a hell of a lot more unlikely. I mean, they weren’t letting anything through, as far as I can remember, apart from what you’d expect—police cars and so on.” He paused. “They couldn’t have got it into a cop car, could they? Or a police van?”

  “I doubt it. Even a police Transit might be a bit small to cope with the Bell, unless Marcus and his cronies have devised some way of really miniaturizing it. And even if they did manage to do that, it would probably still need a large power supply unit, so that might mean several generators in the vehicle as well as the device itself. It would have to be a small truck at the very least. There just has to be a loophole, something that we’re missing.”

  Weeks looked at him.

  “Is there any point in you surrendering yourself to the plods?” he asked. “If you were in custody you could explain what you and Angela discovered in Germany and Poland. That would at least identify the threat and they could blanket the area, looking for the device.”

  Bronson shook his head.

  “I’d do that in a heartbeat if I thought it would help,” he said, “but I know police procedures. I’d be arrested, charged, and then stuck in the cell somewhere while they decided who was going to interview me. By the time I could get to speak to anyone in authority who had a bit of brain, the Olympic opening ceremony would already have started, and it would be far too late to do anything. In any case,” he added, waving his arm at the police and troops who were in position further down the street, “the area is already stuffed full of armed men who’ve been briefed to watch out for trouble. What good would another five hundred coppers do?”

  Weeks nodded, the cold reality of Bronson’s logic making perfect sense.

  “Then we really are screwed,” he said. “The best thing we can do is get the hell out of here, before Marcus lights the blue touch paper.”

  “I can’t do that. If that Nazi bastard could devise a way of breaching this security, then we have to be able to work out how he’s done it. How could he get a truck through this lot without it being stopped and searched?”

  Bronson broke off as his phone rang.

  “It’s Angela,” he said, recognizing the number.


  “Chris, I’m watching stuff on the TV,” she said. “All the preparations for the opening ceremony. They’re switching between shots from the helicopters and the cameras on the ground, around the stadium and inside it. And I’ve been thinking about what you told me. When that man in the mine said ‘when the eyes of the world are staring at our symbol for the Games’ we got sidetracked by thinking about the Olympic Rings, but what if he accidentally let another clue slip? What if the ‘eyes of the world’ meant a TV camera?

  “They’re showing an aerial view now,” Angela went on. “The stadium is enormous, and it’s already full of people, and there are huge crowds outside. I don’t know how you can hope to see anything with that mob blocking the area. There are buildings all around it as well, and I suppose that the weapon could be in any of them. And all the trucks are there, too.”

  Bronson stiffened as Angela finished speaking.

  “Trucks? What trucks?”

  “They’re all lined up outside a massive building near the stadium. Hang on a minute. The cameras on the helicopter are just covering that area now. They’ve all got logos on their sides.”

  For a second or two, Bronson just stood there, the mobile phone pressed to his ear as his brain processed what Angela had just said. And in that instant, everything fell into place. It was the only scenario that made sense, the only answer that worked for all the questions.

  “Angela, you’re a genius. That has to be it. Call the police. Call Curtis, tell him who you are and tell him there’s a bomb in one of the television outside-broadcast lorries at the Media Center. If he won’t listen, dial triple nine and give them the same message. And I think I might know which van it will be in, too.”

  Bronson told her his idea and gave her Curtis’s direct line and mobile numbers, then rang off.

  “The TV trucks?” Weeks asked.

  “It must be. They’re big enough to hold the device, and because they’re designed to operate out in the field, either they can be plugged in to external power supplies or they carry their own generators.”

  “But they can’t just have mocked one up. They must have documentation that authorizes them to be here. Do you mean Marcus and his men faked all that?”

  Bronson smiled grimly. “I doubt it,” he said. “More likely he identified a small television company that was sending just one lorry and stopped it on the road somewhere. He’d have pulled out the crew, killed them and dumped their bodies, and then he and his men would have loaded the device into the back of the truck and taken their places. They’d have arrived here in London with the right documentation, and been directed to a prebooked location. That has to be what Georg meant when he said they had a ‘reserved spot.’

  “And,” he added, “it also adds another dimension to his remark about them not being blamed for the attack. I didn’t understand it at the time, but he said ‘when it is all over people will see that we were right all along.’ I’d bet anything that the truck we’re looking for will belong to an Israeli television company.”

  Bronson glanced at his watch.

  “And we’ve got less than half an hour to find it and defuse the Bell and stop the greatest carnage London has ever seen.”

  52

  27 July 2012

  Weeks shook his head.

  “I thought all the media coverage was being handled from inside the Media Center, or whatever it’s called,” he said, “not from outside-broadcast lorries.”

  “As far as I know it is,” Bronson replied, already heading down the road. “But the building just provides the transmission facilities—studios and so on. All the broadcasters—and I’m sure I read somewhere that they were expecting about twenty thousand people all together—would have brought their own equipment, cameras, microphones, recording gear and so on. That’s what would be in the lorries.”

  “And Marcus and his merry men would have wanted to delay their vehicle’s arrival until the last minute, just in case anybody spotted anything odd about it?”

  “That’s about the size of it. That’ll be why it was programmed to arrive today. Even if it had been scheduled for an earlier arrival time, I’m sure they would have faked a breakdown or something on the journey to delay its arrival. So if I’m right at least we know what we’re looking for.”

  The International Broadcast Center, a huge multi-story building three hundred yards long and over one hundred yards wide, was positioned in the Main Media Complex in the northwest corner of the Olympic Park. It had been designed from the outset to be a state-of-the-art media center, able to cope with the transmission requirements of journalists of every nation, beaming reports to a worldwide audience of up to four billion people.

  Just like the rest of the Olympic Park, access to the building was strictly controlled, but that wasn’t a problem because they didn’t need to get inside it. The one thing Bronson was certain about was that Marcus wouldn’t have risked trying to get the Bell inside that, or indeed any other, building, because there was simply no point. Leaving it in the truck was the ideal solution, as long as the device had adequate power supplies, and that could presumably be supplied by a plug-in mains feed, maybe supplemented by onboard generators.

  “Where is it?” Weeks asked, striding along beside him. “Where do we have to go?”

  Bronson pointed down the street.

  “We carry on down here and then take that road over there. That should take us in the right direction.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was already nearly seven in the evening. The start of the opening ceremony was imminent, and the German terrorist group would be triggering the weapon at any minute. They could clearly hear the sound made by the thousands of spectators in the main stadium, a dominating and undulating buzz, like the noise of a colossal beehive. The stands there would be full of people, including the Prime Minister and most of the country’s senior politicians, the upper echelons of the military, leading businessmen and a host of other dignitaries from Britain and around the world. For almost the first time, Bronson fully appreciated the magnitude of the catastrophe facing the country if the device was triggered.

  The death or incapacity of the people in the stadium would not simply be a humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions; it would cripple the country for decades to come. The government would fall, businesses would collapse, and the country could even be bankrupted by the financial cost of repairing the damage and the compensation that would have to be paid. The deaths of so many foreign dignitaries would produce international condemnation. Britain would become a pariah on the world’s stage, reviled by every nation for having permitted such an event to occur. The glory of the Olympics would in an instant be transformed into the greatest catastrophe of modern times.

  And it wasn’t just the rich and powerful who would suffer, Bronson knew. Countless thousands of ordinary people, from most of the nations of the world, would also perish. All around them, the streets were choked with people on their way to the stadium or perhaps just attracted by the sense of excitement that pervaded the area. Bronson looked at the sea of faces, at their eager expressions of hope and expectation, and knew that in minutes—if he and Weeks didn’t manage to do something about it—most of them could be dead or dying.

  “Down here,” he said, and led the way down another street, pushing through the crowds that clogged the pavement.

  Simply getting through the press of people was difficult enough, because they were moving against the flow, away from the stadium, and the two men had to rely on their bulk to shift people out of the way. But within minutes it was clear that they weren’t going to make it in time. They had to do something else.

  “Here,” Bronson instructed, and turned off the pavement into a gap between two buildings.

  “What?”

  Bronson didn’t reply, just opened the bag he was carrying and pulled out two black nylon vests with the word “police” printed on them, front and back. He had also brought along his utility belt, which he buckled around his waist. Both men
put on black baseball caps, again bearing the word “police,” on their heads. The final touch was the sunglasses, which rendered their eyes completely invisible.

  Weeks checked his MP5, then slung the weapon across his chest and stood waiting as Bronson looked him up and down. His own Walther was in a belt holster.

  “It should be a ballistic vest, obviously,” Bronson said, “and you should have a utility belt, but otherwise it looks quite convincing. I think the British public’s got used to the sight of Heckler & Koch submachine guns on the streets, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Now let’s get going.”

  Faced with the sight of two grim-faced and heavily armed police officers, who were clearly in a hurry, the crowds parted easily in front of them, and Weeks and Bronson were able to run along the pavements almost unobstructed. A couple of times they were forced to detour down less crowded streets simply because of the mass of people virtually blocking the more direct route.

  “That’s it, right ahead,” Bronson panted, as a huge building came into view.

  He and Weeks slowed down to a jog as they approached the structure, both men looking for the first sign of the trucks that Angela had seen on her television screen. “Over there,” Weeks said, pointing.

  To one side of the building was a large open area where rows of broadcast trucks had been parked, presumably after whatever equipment needed had been removed from them. Bronson and Weeks strode across to the high wire fence that enclosed the parking lot and walked steadily along beside it, looking carefully at the parked vehicles.

  Around them, crowds of people ebbed and flowed, and above everything else the noise of the thousands of spectators talking and laughing and arguing provided a constant soundtrack.