London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “Hi Hon, what are you doing?”

  “There’s only one Arado in that hangar isn’t there?” Claire asked rhetorically. Tom looked at her without bothering to confirm or deny.

  “There are very specific details here about the loading of two aircraft, so where is the other one?”

  “Good point, which one do you think is here?”

  “Look at it logically. We know there is a high probability that the one in the hangar is carrying radioactive material and has something lodged in its bomb bay, yes?”

  Tom continued to look at Claire without comment who continued without waiting for the answer that wasn’t coming.

  “One manifest showed a full fuel load, a single pilot and an overweight bomb load whilst the other listed nothing in the bomb bay, do you concur?”

  This time Tom nodded in agreement.

  “If you follow the logic, the Arado sitting in the hangar is the one designed to travel the furthest and presumably drop its cargo on London, would you agree?”

  Tom stared hard at Claire,

  “You realise what you’re suggesting don’t you? The conclusion has to be that they planned to drop an atomic bomb on London. If that’s the case what we have here is a Nazi atomic bomb sitting in that aircraft’s bomb bay hanging from an antique aircraft with a full load of probably very unstable jet fuel.”

  “That’s part of what I’m suggesting, yes. But the other conclusion has to be that its sister aircraft actually departed, presumably with its planned cargo and crew. We also have to assume its cargo was a substantial amount of gold bullion as I cannot think of anything else with values and weights to match the manifest figures we have. There is absolutely no sign of anything like that still being here and no record that I can find that a haul of gold was found when either the Americans or Russians ‘liberated’ the area. As far as I’ve ascertained in the past hour of searching the files on the Internet, no such Arado aircraft or such a horde of gold was ever documented arriving or transiting Genoa around that time either. If the Arado had landed somewhere, there would be some record of it being abandoned on an airfield but there isn’t anything in the files that I’ve managed to search online. Similarly I cannot find any report of a crashed aircraft around Mauthausen, Linz or anywhere close which wasn’t properly investigated and documented at the time. If you accept all that where is the second Arado?”

  Tom considered the indisputable logic of what Claire had just said and then shuffled through the papers on the table finally selecting the map showing Southern Austria and Italy. He unfolded the map over the top of the other papers and traced the Chinagraph drawn route with his finger from Mauthausen all the way to Genoa.

  “So using your logic, which I absolutely agree with by the way, the Arado must have landed somewhere on this route as it obviously didn’t make Genoa. The Arados had to drop the RATO units straight after take-off and without those I doubt it could have taken off again from wherever it landed with its cargo on board. We have to assume therefore that the landing was unscheduled and must have been because of a problem.”

  Claire stared at the map for almost a minute before responding,

  “OK, I agree. If we accept that, as the Arado was such an unusual aircraft at that time and its cargo was certainly high profile, if it had landed or crashed anywhere between Mauthausen and Landeck somebody would have spotted it and investigated. We need to check the records properly to see if there’s any mention of such a crash in Southern Austria. I think it’s safe to assume that had it made a successful landing somewhere we would know about it as it would have needed plenty of runway limiting it to using a major airport.”

  Tom picked up his phone and dialled a number from his contact list. A short conversation ensued ending with ‘I owe you one’ as Tom disconnected the call.

  “What was that all about?” Claire asked, not having overheard much of the conversation.

  “My friend Carson took retirement from the US Air Force prematurely and now occupies his time dredging through the Federal Records in the American National Archives doing World War 2 specific research for anybody prepared to pay him. The area between Linz and just South of Innsbruck was all occupied by American forces in 1945. If anybody can find a record of a crashed Arado in the American sector of Upper Austria, he can. On the assumption he doesn’t find our Arado the conclusion would have to be that it’s somewhere between here,” Tom placed his finger on the map on the place called Landeck and drew an imaginary line to Brescia near the Southern end of Lake Garda in Northern Italy, “to here.”

  “Why stop there, why couldn’t it be somewhere between there and Genoa?”

  “Once you clear the mountains the land is predominantly flat and in early 1945 was occupied by both the US and British army in force as they pushed the German army back North and West. If our aircraft had ended up in that mess once again it would have been well documented.”

  They both bent over the map again studying the route, Claire with a slight smile on her face at Tom’s use of the phrase ‘our aircraft’ and ‘our Arado’. It was obvious he was now fully committed to the new treasure hunt.

  “That’s over 200 kilometres of mountain ranges and passes, it could be anywhere.”

  Tom studied the map again,

  “That’s true however assuming they kept to the planned route they must have come down somewhere in one of the valleys or passes, and there aren’t any proper landing sites along the route. How come there isn’t any record of a crash or any wreckage or signs of a crash?”

  Claire pulled up Google Earth on Tom’s laptop and carefully copied the line drawn on the map into the program. This enabled them both to look at the terrain in greater detail and to zoom into areas of interest. Claire suddenly had a thought,

  “If you were the pilot flying an overweight aircraft though the mountains, and you had a problem which would necessitate landing and there wasn’t a suitable airfield or even an area of flat terrain to use, what would you look for?”

  Tom screwed up his face in concentration and was silent for at least a minute as he considered the problem.

  “You’re a genius!” He finally exploded and bent his head close to the laptop screen.

  “Water, you’d try to find a lake to put down on. At least it’s flat, and you’d have a good chance of surviving the impact.”

  Claire put marker `pins’ onto the Google Earth map on every decent sized stretch of water along the route. When she’d finished she wrote out the names on a pad along with their approximate size and orientation.

  “Reschensee, Glorenza, Lago Gioveretto Zufrittsee, Lago di Santo Giustina, Lago di Molveno, Lago do Garda.”

  Tom traced the route with his finger on the paper map as Claire recited the names.

  “That all checks out apart from the first, I can’t find Reschensee on this map. Glorenza is no good as it’s much too small and Gioveretto is in a closed valley with mountains at each end, they would never have flown down there. I think if it had gone down in Lake Garda we would know about it which leaves Santo Giustina and Molveno only.”

  “I think you should keep Reschensee on the list as well.” Claire suggested as she studied a webpage on the history of the man-made reservoir. “There always were a series of lakes there but they flooded the valley, including a village, to join them all up into one large lake.”

  “So where do we go from here, how do we investigate?”

  Tom folded up the map and put the documents back into the case.

  “I’ll email Carson and ask him to check any reports around these lakes as well. He also has contacts at the National Archives at Kew, the RAF Museum and the Imperial War Museum archives. I’ll ask him to cast the net wide and see what he unearths. While he’s doing that we have an intact Arado and a dodgy bomb load that needs extricating and I have my Messerschmitt I need to arrange to get shipped back home. So let’s have another drink, some dinner and get focused on what we need to do tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEENr />
  Last Flight Out - 1945

  Flugkapitan Specht rechecked the strapping holding the cargo down for what must have been the tenth time. He looked at the small wooden boxes stacked on the two pallets with the wings and swastika emblem branded on each box. From the weight figures they had given him it was obvious that they did not contain the ammunition the manifest claimed. He glanced down again at his clipboard with the names of the passengers that would accompany the boxes, Specht grinned ruefully. It looked like the rats were deserting the sinking ship he thought. Mentally adding up the overall weight again with the fuel load he’d calculated he still couldn’t make the total add up to something less than the theoretical maximum takeoff weight for the aircraft, even with the additional rocket motors. He recalculated the fuel requirements again for the chosen route but couldn’t make that any less either even by altering the rates of climb, altitudes and speeds. The only way to reduce the load was to remove the customary reserve of 30 minutes to allow for contingencies. Even knocking this off the fuel load they would still be overweight by a considerable margin. Specht scratched his head and tried to establish which was the worse evil; the chance of flying to freedom and safety, albeit in a dangerously overweight aircraft with a history of engine failures or staying in Mauthausen to be captured by the Russians. A moment’s consideration was all he required. Satisfied with his conclusion he began yet another visual check of the aircraft in preparation for departure in the morning, now with a renewed energy.

  Flugkapitan Specht stood alongside his Arado which had been carefully positioned on the lift by the Kattengrat half-track motorcycle just moments before. He watched as the lift operator completed a final check to make sure the aircraft was fully contained within the lift footprint with nothing overhanging and then swung the handle on the control unit. A pair of huge electric motors started up above noisily winding chains onto a drum near the ceiling of the hangar. The lift floor shuddered and started slowly rising accompanied by a hideous screeching nose which almost drowned out the rattle of the tensioned chains. There was a hiss of pneumatics from somewhere above and then more grinding and screeching noises as the ceiling above the lift rose in sections and folded back to opposing sides. Specht watched the grey sky above slowly appear as the lift rose to ground level. Stretched out in front of him, beyond the concrete apron, the runway stretched away towards the horizon, descending slightly towards the village at the base of the hill. Would it be sufficiently long, would the rocket motors fire correctly, would the BMW jet engines deliver their full power? Well, I guess I’ll find out soon enough, Specht thought ruefully as he commenced his pre-flight checks. He was removing the intake covers on the port engines when a Mercedes staff car braked to a halt on the apron and disgorged a tall man with gold-framed glasses in a long leather coat and wide-brimmed hat. Two immaculately uniformed officers wearing the badges off the Schutzstaffel or SS and an array of medals and badges closely followed him. Specht recognised the Brigadefuhrer being the overall head of the more secret part of this facility and his adjutant but didn’t know who the civilian was. The adjutant walked over to him.

  “Are you ready for departure, is everything loaded?”

  “Yes Herr Haupsturmfuhrer, everything is prepared, I am just awaiting the arrival of our flight engineer.”

  “He will not be coming, you will not need him and the weight needs to be reduced. We will leave now.”

  With that the party climbed into the Arado through the cockpit entry and settled themselves in the small seats arranged directly behind the pilot’s where they had removed one of the fuel tanks to accommodate them.

  Flugkapitan Specht completed his walk round and settled into the cockpit. With all four engines successfully started and running properly he released the brakes and turned the Arado to face down the runway. Whispering a silent prayer to himself he held the brakes on and increased the throttles to full, rapidly scanning his instruments for any hint of an engine problem. As the aircraft crept forward under the power of the engines he released the brakes and there was a distinct lurch forward as the plane rapidly accelerated. As the speed increased to over 40 kph, he pushed the buttons for the two rocket motors which fired with a distinct bang to his great relief. The sudden increase in thrust pushed him back into his seat. He stared at the airspeed indicator willing the needle to reach the 220 kph mark. The needle started to rotate, Specht glanced up towards the runway end and then back to the dial now showing 70. Glancing back and forth the aircraft passed the point of no return, he could no longer stop it before the end of the runway, they were committed to the take off. He could now clearly see the low wall and the line of trees just beyond the runway’s end and the airspeed was only just passing 140, they weren’t going to make it. As the wall loomed larger and larger in the plexiglass Specht ignored the airspeed indicator still hovering just below 200 kph and hauled back the control column. The Arado’s nose lifted, and it lurched off the runway, its wheels almost immediately bumping back down again but then staggering reluctantly into the air. Specht pushed the undercarriage button as the belly of the aircraft skimmed the topmost branches of a tree, correcting the slight nose down effect of the impact as he did so. Slightly panicked by the near disaster he rapidly checked the instruments to ensure the rate-of-climb indicator was showing something positive. The ambient noise dramatically decreased and Specht realised the rocket motors had used up their fuel and spluttered out, he hit the release button and felt the lurch as they fell away. He re-trimmed the aircraft to counter the drop in weight and drag of the now absent rocket pods. With the airspeed now rapidly climbing towards 300 kph and the altitude slowly but steadily increasing, Specht put the aircraft into a gentle left turn and headed for Salzburg and Innsbruck and onwards to turn South through the mountain passes and eventually to the Italian Coast, Genoa and a release from the appalling mayhem they’d thankfully left behind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  That Bleeping Machine

  Having been almost the first people down at the buffet breakfast the following morning, Tom and Claire had then spent the entire morning in the hotel's lounge making phone calls, sending emails and scouring the internet for information. The rewards for their efforts had frustratingly amounted to very little. They had found no record of a crashed Arado anywhere in Southern Austria according to military records or even mention of wreckage that might have been an Arado bomber. They had found no suggestion of an Arado being found or captured by any of the Allied forces either. None of the reports at the time mentioned anybody finding a horde of gold bullion and there wasn’t any record of a group of escaping Nazi officers being captured anywhere along the planned route of the aircraft. All in all though, it hadn’t been a waste of time as all this negativity at least meant that maybe the gold could still be out there somewhere waiting to be found. Tom’s friend Carson had been almost jubilant when he’d called in to report that his exhaustive research of American records had uncovered precisely nothing.

  It was while Claire was negotiating with the barman for the purchase of some lunchtime sandwiches to go with the beers they’d already ordered that Tom’s phone rang.

  “Herr Stroud, we should be ready for you to make your inspection in about two hours, would that be convenient?”

  Tom thanked the captain for his call and promised to be there ready in a couple of hours. He meant to ask him whether Heinrich had removed the museum’s Messerschmitt yet as he hadn’t heard from him but the phone connection had already been closed.

  They ate their sandwiches, drank their beers and Tom reluctantly declined having another because the hazmat suit he would shortly have to wear did not come equipped with toilet facilities. The cab they’d ordered arrived exactly at the time they’d ordered it for and precisely 1 hour and 55 minutes later they presented themselves back at the complex ready to go.

  On arrival it surprised them to find absolutely no obvious activity. The door to the command truck was open, and the Captain stood at the top of the steps,
hand on hips.

  “Guten tag Herr Stroud, are you ready to put on the suit and make the inspection?”

  “Where is everybody, and what’s happened to the equipment?”

  “The second aircraft has been packed and Herr Schroder has accompanied the truck to the storage warehouse in Linz. He asked me to tell you that he will prepare your aircraft for truck transport to the UK but you need to organise its collection before the end of the month when he has to hand back the warehouse keys. He also requested that you call him after your inspection to update him on the situation in the hangar.”

  The captain watched Tom as he cast his eyes around the silent compound and factory hangar entrance.

  “So where is everybody else?”

  The captain answered with a slightly embarrassed expression,

  “We have kept everyone not immediately involved away this afternoon, there are just the minimum personnel here to oversee your inspection, I’m assuming you are still prepared to carry it out?”

  “Let’s get it done, I’ll go and get suited up.”

  Tom marched off away from the truck leaving Claire to follow the captain into the command truck where she sat down at one of the computer terminals.

  “Radio check.” Tom called in now fully enclosed in a self-contained hazmat suit doing a fair impersonation of a lunar astronaut.

  “Five by five.” Claire answered from her spot in front of a monitor screen in the command truck.

  “I’m getting a reading of fairly normal background levels of radiation and the chest and helmet cams are working fine. Be careful!”

  Tom struggled sideways through the gap in the wall and into the hangar, carefully manoeuvring the oxygen tanks mounted on his back through the ragged gap. He then leaned back to collect the handheld radiation monitor from the other side. Turning round he took a moment to steel himself for the task of negotiating the bundles of rotting uniforms enclosing the skeletons, and quite possibly worse.