London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “If you look at the diagram, there’s not meant to be anything there except, presumably, hillside.”

  The others all looked at the diagram, Heinrich shrugged and then pointed to an area of the diagram close to the pencil marks and said. “If there’s nothing there why would there be a standby generator located right here with some dotted lines signifying, I have to assume, a power feed straight into the hillside?”

  They all stared at the diagram and the generator location Heinrich had pointed to.

  “Not only that but if you trace the main power lines from the factory they also appear to just stop in the same place. Why would they lay power lines all across the factory just to terminate them at a wall?”

  They all had followed Heinrich’s finger as he traced the route of the power lines drawn from the main generators all the way to the hangar wall.

  Tom stood up straight and, looking directly at the captain, “We need to have a look at the main control panel just inside the hangar outer doors to see if there are any labels or markings signifying what all the switches are for or if we can trace where the cables are routed”

  “You must wait until the engineers who should be here shortly to give us the all-clear.” The captain replied.

  “If they close the whole place down, we’ll never know what could be behind there. Just let me go into the hangar, I promise I won’t go any further than the panel and I’ll take the radiation monitor with me. Any twitch in the readings and I’ll run out.”

  The captain looked thoughtful “If you don’t do exactly as you’ve said or anything goes wrong I’ll probably be court-martialled.”

  Tom grabbed the Radionuclide Monitor, turned it on and almost sprinted out of the command truck lest the captain had second thoughts. Claire handed him the video camera, and the captain followed shouting instructions to the men guarding the entrance who opened the cordon to let Tom through. Tom walked through the gaping doorway and turned left towards where the control panel was marked on the diagram, nothing there. Picking his way carefully over the piles of twisted metal which were still littering the floor from the door destruction he made his way further left towards a doorway.

  “The panel must be in a separate room” he shouted at the assembled group outside the doors.

  Heinrich turned to the captain “That would make sense, they wouldn’t have wanted high voltage switchgear near volatile aircraft fuels.” The captain nodded, slightly appeased.

  Tom had to put his shoulder to the door to persuade it to open. Squeezing through the small gap he’d opened he found himself inside a sizeable room devoid of any furniture apart from a small wall-mounted cupboard but with the opposite wall completely covered in switchgear and control panels. He turned on the video and scanned back and forth across the whole array a couple of times before turning it off. He put his head back through the door and shouted “I’ve found the switch room, there’s a mass of stuff here. Can you tell me exactly what German wording I should look for on the switch labels?”

  The captain made a decision and marched briskly forward stepping over the door debris to join Tom in the switch room.

  “I was an electrical engineer before joining the military, let me have a look.” And with that he studied the various switches and levers and then scanned the mass of cabling tied together near the ceiling and supported by wire mesh and brackets. Tom looked to the far left where there was a wooden box mounted away from the main panels with a hinged front. Opening it he found it contained two huge brown bakelite fuse holders with hand grips on the front. Without thought Tom grabbed the left one and pulled. It came loose from its bronze clamps and Tom staggered back involuntarily as the resistance to his pull disappeared. The captain looked sharply across at him “What are you doing?”

  “Look this one has burnt out.” Tom pulled the other one out and checked it “and the same here.”

  The captain moved over and studied the fuses then pulled out his radio and spoke to the command truck. A few sentences of German later he proclaimed “It’s quite possible that this panel could still have power going to it. When they re-opened the factory for visitors, they connected up some of the old cabling to the grid to provide lighting and power to the old parts of the factory whilst work was going on. We don’t think it’s actually been disconnected.”

  Tom rooted through the cupboard and triumphantly held up a reel of very thick fuse wire.

  “How do you know this is the correct rating?” the captain asked, astonished that they were both apparently contemplating the same lunatic act.

  “I don’t but you only live once!” came Tom’s reply.

  The captain was obviously in a personal conflict between obeying his orders and listening to Tom, Tom finally won out. “Move every switch and lever to the Off or Aus position. If power is re-established, we must be careful what we turn back on.”

  Tom systematically moved back and forth across the whole wall turning everything off as the captain threaded new wire into the two fuse holders.

  “Stand back!” He stood at arm’s length from the fuse carrier and pushed the holder back into its clamps. Nothing happened. He took the second fuse and pushed it home. Nothing.

  “Hang on, what’s that?” Tom said pointing at a dim red light emanating from a particularly large metal casing with a single handle on the front. Without waiting for an answer Tom grabbed the handle and rotated it 90 degrees. The switch room was suddenly lit as the ceiling light came on. The captain read the switch labels one by one and jotted notes into a small notebook he’d extracted from his uniform breast pocket.

  “We must compare the switches here with the diagram in the command truck to see what matches and what doesn’t. We will leave now.” The captain left no opportunity for debate and ushered Tom out of the switch room and back out of the hangar.

  Ensconced once more in the command truck they studied Tom’s video and the captain’s notes and matched these to the services diagram on the table.

  “This will take some time and we cannot go back in until the area is checked and secured. The engineers should be here soon and will probably work through the night.”

  Tom and Claire left the command truck and ambled over to the gaping hole in the hill's side, now cordoned off and guarded once again by soldiers.

  “This looks like it could all turn into a bit of nightmare doesn’t it?” Claire said

  Tom looked longingly in to the now open hangar area where he could just see the nose of the Messerschmitt 262, `his’ aircraft. “So near and yet so far. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do for the time being, let’s go back to the hotel and have a look through the stuff I picked up in the office in there.”

  “What stuff?” Claire asked.

  “I forgot to say in all the excitement. I liberated a locked document case stuffed full of who-knows-what from an office I raided along with a few drawings for the Jumo engines on the Messerschmitt and a Nazi dagger.”

  Claire looked at him quizzically “So where did you put this `liberated’ stuff?”

  Tom unslung the bag from his back, “right here!”

  Together they walked back to the command truck where they persuaded Heinrich to give them a lift back to their hotel.

  “I’ll join you later for a drink if that’s OK.” Heinrich said as he dropped them at the foyer entrance. “I have to go back and brief the engineers who should be here soon, I just hope they don’t have to seal everything up again.”

  Tom watched his obviously miserable friend drive away from the hotel and back to the factory site.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Ratline

  “I’m not waiting until later, let’s have a beer in the bar and look at this stuff.”

  Tom steered Claire by the elbow towards the hotel bar and ordered a beer for himself and Claire’s customary gin and tonic, then they both settled into a couple of lounge chairs by the window. Tom took a sip of his beer and studied the lock on the document case which he now saw was embellished
with a German eagle and swastika emblem embossed just above the lock. The lock itself looked a fairly simple affair albeit slightly corroded. Tom could boast a variety of skills, some quite unorthodox, but unfortunately lock picking wasn’t amongst them. Using a knife purloined from the barman, he set about levering the lock hasp open. He needed little effort for the catch to disengage and spring up. Tom peered inside. There was a large bunch of papers, some typewritten some covered with spidery handwriting. THe removed a folded map which looked like it had been lacquered, similar to the Chinagraph maps the RAF used during World War 2 on which navigators could write route information then clean it off after the mission to reuse the maps. There was another map, this one looking more like a standard road map, and bizarrely a 1930s train timetable for the Cork to Galway line in Southern Ireland. He turned the case upside down and emptied the entire contents onto the table in front of them. Claire leaned forward and sorted the papers out.

  “This looks like some kind of reconciliation with a list of items and a price for each with a total at the bottom. What was a German Mark worth in 1945?”

  “I think there was about 2.5 to the US Dollar for years. What does the total say?”

  “Well, it’s a bit confusing as they've headed the column `M tnd’ but the total at the bottom is 1453.5.”

  “Probably a shopping list. Look at this though, it’s an aircraft navigator’s map with a route drawn in crayon. It shows a route from Linz to London with a couple of slight deviations around Brussels and Lille and what looks like fuel calculations at various points along the route.”

  Claire peered over his shoulder at the map laid out on the table. “What’s the other map?”

  Tom unfolded the other map which showed the Northern part of Yugoslavia and Northern Italy, as it then was, from the Austrian border down to the Mediterranean coast. A snaking line had been roughly drawn on the map from Mauthausen going roughly South West following the main road towards Salzburg but then leaving the road to travel onwards to Innsbruck. The line then headed slightly South to a place called Landeck and then twisted through the mountain ranges, obviously avoiding the peaks, all the way South ending up eventually just outside Genoa. There was a figure of 660 marked at the Genoa end of the line along with a small table of numbers: Rauchergeraet = 560, Düsentreibstoff = 2200 = 1500, Besatzung = 400, Fracht = 1850 max.

  “What do you make of that?” He said turning the map round slightly so that Claire could more readily read the small handwriting. Claire tapped away on her phone for a few seconds, looked up and declared:

  “According to YouTube, Rauchergeraet is some sort of fish smoker!” There was a pause whilst further finger tapping occurred, “Hang on a minute, it could also mean a JATO unit whatever that is.”

  “Jet Assisted Take Off.” Tom immediately responded with, “what do the other words mean?”

  Claire searched online for each of the other words, writing down her findings on a paper napkin as she went. Tom looked over her shoulder and repeated the translated words.

  “Düsentreibstoff is jet fuel and I’m guessing 2200 is litres and 1500 is kilograms. Besatzung is the crew and Fracht is freight, both of which must be weights. Guessing again I’d say this was a rough calculation to work out how much freight they could carry in an aircraft with a maximum take off weight something like 4300kgs more than it’s empty weight. That certainly rules out the Me262 and pretty much everything else the Germans would have had in the area of Mauthausen during the war. The only large aircraft I can think of which employed RATO units was the Arado 234 jet bomber, and that had only just entered service by the end of the war. I wonder what the freight was they were planning on flying out and why take it to Genoa?”

  “According to Wikipedia the major Nazi ratline, or the escape route, was through Austria to Italy and then by boat from Genoa to Argentina. Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann and many others used this route.”

  Tom picked up the paper with the shopping list again and studied it harder.

  “The German word for a thousand is tausend and it could be abbreviated `tnd’. If this total of 1453.5 is thousands, could the `M’ at the beginning mean German Marks, what do you think?”

  Claire frantically tapped away again on her phone. Her eyes widened, and she carefully placed the phone on the table as if it had suddenly become extremely precious.

  “1,453,500 German Marks would have had a value of just over 550,000 US Dollars in 1945. Just for fun I’ve just checked the value of gold bullion in 1945 which had a value of US$1057 per kilogram. If you then correlate this with its weight you would end up with a pile of gold bullion weighing almost exactly 520 kilograms. At today’s value this would be worth over 22 million US Dollars and is well within the quoted maximum permissable cargo weight for the Arado.”

  “There’s nothing on this to suggest that it was gold they intended to ship, it could have been anything. Maybe it was works of art or, come to that, could have been weapons and armaments. Maybe it could even have been something to do with nuclear material and the `M’ and `tnd’ mean something entirely different.”

  Claire picked up some other papers from the pile on the table and scanned them for anything she recognised or could translate. Tom did the same, and they both sank back into their respective chairs trying to make sense of these now quite ancient documents.

  Claire suddenly sat up straight, “Eureka, isn’t that the word?”

  “Only if your name is Archimedes.” Tom responded sullenly still staring at the paper in his hand.

  “Look at this. It looks like a manifest of some sort and is headed `AR234C - 140318’ and there’s another sheet headed `AR234C - 140320’.”

  Claire put the two pieces of paper side by side on the table and Tom leaned forward and spun them round so that he could read them.

  “They both seem to be check lists for loading a pair of Arado 234 jet bombers with sections for fuel, crew, armaments, bomb load, etc. There are tables showing take-off weights and distances and maximum range etc. Interestingly they are both very different to each other. This one has less than a full fuel load but doesn’t appear to carry any armament or bomb load but has five men in the crew. The load weight though is much more than five men could possibly weigh. The other has a full fuel load, just a single pilot with no other crew and no armaments but a full bomb load. They both appear to have the RATO units fitted although there is a note which, if I’m reading it correctly, demands that these are to be jettisoned immediately on take off. They both also seem to be seriously over the quoted maximum take off weight.”

  Claire slid the two maps on the table back towards them.

  “These lists, and their fuel numbers, are the same as on the maps, look.”

  “You’re right, and both maps show the routes starting at Mauthausen.”

  As they both stared hard at the maps and checklists Tom’s phone rang.

  “Tom, you need to get back here. They’ve isolated the area around the crack where you registered high radioactivity and enlarged the crack to put a probe into the space behind. They’ve also fed in a light source and put the endoscope back. You need to see this!” Tom thought that Heinrich sounded as excited as he’d ever heard him and was about to ask a question when he realised Heinrich had hung up. Tom turned to Claire who was looking at Tom quizzically and stuffed the maps and papers back into the document case.

  “We apparently have to go back to the factory now. Heinrich is very excited about something he wants to show us. Can you get the reception to organise a cab whilst I put this lot upstairs and get my stuff?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Entombment

  Tom and Claire arrived at the command truck less than 20 minutes later and, walking through the door, caught sight of four men hunched over a single computer screen totally oblivious to their arrival. He closed the door none too gently and Heinrich stood up and looked round.

  “Tom, quick, come and look at this and tell me what you see.”

  They wal
ked over to the monitor and two of the soldiers reluctantly stepped back to give them room. Tom stared at the screen as the operator restarted the video from the beginning. They watched as the camera probe flicked and turned in the gloom as it was fed through the wall until it broke out into a brightly lit space, the light swamping the sensor on the camera momentarily causing an uncomfortably bright flash across the screen until it stabilised at its new light level. Tom stared at the screen as the camera slowly spun around, his mouth slowly dropping open. The space behind the wall was obviously huge, the meagre light insufficient to completely illuminate the far end of the space. What he could see though was what looked like a large steel or iron cage arrangement near the far end but what caught his immediate attention was littering the floor nearer the camera. There were guns, helmets, tin cans, odd bits of uniform and equipment and various tools. Amidst all this he could see the unmistakable shape of fallen soldiers in various states of decomposition. Some were lying on the floor, some were propped against the walls two were even back to back propping each other up sitting on the floor. All were obviously German victims of World War 2 and dated from when the factory was evacuated in 1945. Tom watched until the short video had finished.

  “I guess they must have been sealed in, but why? Where is the proper entrance to this area?”

  Heinrich turned to the operator again and said, “now show him the enhanced version of the video.”

  Tom and Claire peered again at the screen as the same basic video file played but this version having benefited from the video enhancement system. They could now see the soldiers in more gruesome detail and, although all very decomposed, their uniforms were obviously keeping their skeletons intact to a great degree. Tom could see their insignia and could identify some of the equipment and the models of the guns littering the floor. The camera swept around to point again at the cage arrangement at the far end.