London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “I’m going to head straight for the aircraft, what’s the radiation monitor showing?”

  “Very slightly elevated but nothing to worry about so far.”

  Tom walked slowly through the bodies strewn across the floor heading indirectly towards the lift and the aircraft contained within.

  “These poor guys, what actually killed them do you think?”

  “It could well have been radiation or maybe lack of oxygen, who knows. If we can isolate whatever is in there, we can get a proper autopsy done on some of them and find out. Can you turn slowly around so that the cameras can get a good look at the whole hangar?”

  Tom turned a full 360 degrees as requested and then carried on advancing towards the Arado on the lift.

  “I can see the bomb underneath the fuselage now, it’s huge and looks rather comical with the huge fins on the back.”

  Claire was staring hard at the numbers overlaid on the video in the corner of her computer monitor.

  “Stay where you are for the moment, the radiation levels seem to be increasing.”

  Tom paused mid-stride. “How much?”

  “Not too bad, keep moving forward slowly and I’ll keep you updated as you move. Don’t worry though, the suit will keep you safe as long as you stay within its limits and don’t stay in there too long.”

  Tom put his best foot forward and continued towards the lift.

  “OK, I’m at the edge of the lift, I can touch the nose of the Arado. Amazing, I can see inside the cockpit, it’s just perfect, a complete time warp. There’s even a map case with a marked up map sitting on the pilot’s seat, it could have been abandoned yesterday.”

  “The radiation levels have risen but you’re still just within limits. Can you spin the camera around the lift area and then do a slow walk-around the aircraft panning the camera all the time?”

  Tom took a step backwards and panned the camera around as instructed.

  “Hold it there! What’s that on the lift’s corner strut to the rear of the nose?”

  Tom walked around the front of the Arado and crossed the lift platform to the designated corner frame where he could see a large control panel mounted at an angle roughly at waist height with a large, chromed handle mounted on the top with both extents of its travel movement marked `AUF’ and `AB’.

  “Looks like the lift control.” And Tom aimed the camera at the panel. Claire, watching the video feed from the command truck turned to the captain who was watching over her shoulder.

  “See that, the handle is in the `AUF’ or `UP’ position but the lift is blatantly `AB’ or `DOWN’. There was obviously a failure in the systems somewhere stranding the aircraft down here.”

  Claire paused as her attention was suddenly dragged away by a flashing set of numbers in the bottom right of the screen which had just turned red.

  “Tom, move back off the lift platform right now, the radiation monitor is in the red.”

  Tom turned around and, as rapidly as he could hampered as he was by the hazmat suit, walked back the way he’d come around the nose of the Arado. As he edged around the nose he saw something hanging from the nosewheel. Pausing only briefly he bent down and unhooked the small leather satchel someone had hooked on the corner of the undercarriage door.

  “The radiation level has dropped back down again, try walking towards the tail end of the aircraft - slowly.”

  Tom did as instructed and shuffled very warily towards the rear of the Arado, torn between his desire to investigate every inch of this rare aircraft and his even greater desire not to do himself permanent radiation damage.

  “Stop!. The levels are increasing again, it’s no use, the area will have to be properly de-contaminated.”

  Tom reluctantly retraced his steps back to the gap in the wall and turned around to give the hangar a last rueful look before stepping through the wall. He wasn’t prepared for what awaited him. Two hands firmly grabbed him around the upper arms and steered him into a translucent plastic tent that had obviously been erected while he was in the hangar. Once inside, an array of water jets sprayed him, and his two similarly suited assistants, from every conceivable angle and at high pressure. After at least a minute of this he was lead into an adjoining tent where all three men stripped off their suits and deposited them into a large chest with an obviously airtight lid which one of the men closed and clamped down.

  Having exited the decontamination tents Tom walked off towards the command truck to rejoin Claire.

  “Over here!”

  Tom turned around to see Claire waving her arms from the car park where she was packing up their gear and loading it into the boot of a black Mercedes. Tom walked over, kissed Claire briefly and helped with the loading. Suddenly they were both startled by a loud screeching noise emanating from the interior of the boot. Tom lunged towards the radiation monitor unit and hit the `off’ button to stop the noise.

  “What on Earth set that off? I hope that’s not you. There’s something in there it doesn’t like.”

  Tom took the radiation monitor out of the boot and set it on the ground and switched it back on. It was silent, but the screen showed a higher than normal reading. Claire picked up the remote probe and waved it around Tom from head to toe. The levels remained constant, albeit still slightly too high. Tom took the probe from Claire and waved it around the boot, the screeching started again and the monitor screen showed flashing red digits. He handed the probe back to Claire and started roughly pulling items from the boot which Claire scanned once they were on the ground. The screeching restarted again as soon as Claire scanned the small satchel Tom had recently acquired.

  “Where did that come from?” Claire asked as she shut the monitor down again.

  “It was hanging from the undercarriage of the Arado, I thought it might be interesting.”

  “For God’s sake, what were you thinking of?”

  Tom didn’t answer Claire’s rhetorical question, he picked up the satchel and opened the buckle.

  “What are you doing, that’s radioactive?”

  Tom ignored Claire’s increasing anxiety and peered inside the satchel at the small bundle of documents which he withdrew dropping the now empty satchel on the ground.

  “Scan the satchel again now and then scan these documents.”

  Claire did as instructed. The monitor screeched when the probe was waved near the satchel but remained silent when the document bundle was scanned.

  With obvious relief Claire left to find the captain and get the satchel properly disposed of while Tom flicked through the documents in his hand. As he read the handwritten notes his flicking became more frenetic, and he silently cursed his inadequate grasp of the German language. Claire returned with the captain and a couple of his soldiers who were carrying a small box regaled with `Danger - Radioactive’ warnings. They picked up the satchel with a mechanical grabber and deposited it in the box which they sealed and all three then departed.

  Claire looked at Tom with increasing concern at the face he was pulling.

  “Are you OK?”

  Tom didn’t answer but recommenced his frantic study of the notes. “Your German is better than mine, what does this say?” He thrust one sheet into Claire’s hand who read the obviously hastily written text.

  “This looks like a signal log. It appears to have been written by a radio operator communicating with an aircraft.”

  “I think this is a record of the radio communication between the other Arado 234 and this facility. Look this is obviously the pilot requesting information about the conditions en route. He mentions weather and possibility of enemy aircraft interception.”

  Tom turned another sheet, Claire moved round to look over his shoulder and pointed at the text.

  “That is a position co-ordinate and a speed, heading and altitude report.” Claire opened Google Maps on her phone and entered the co-ordinates.

  “It’s a position just South of Salzburg and the heading is almost directly towards Innsbruck.”

/>   Claire reached over and turned the page in Tom’s hand.

  “Look, another position report.” Claire entered the numbers into her ‘phone. “This one is just West of Innsbruck and the heading is now 220 degrees, basically South West, and at an altitude of 8200 metres.”

  Tom turned the page again and pointed to the transmission times in the left-hand margin.

  “Something obviously happened, the communications are now almost continuous rather than regular position reports.”

  Claire studied the last two pages, Tom impatiently watched as she struggled with the rough handwriting and some abbreviations that had been used in what had obviously become a very rapid exchange of signals.

  Claire handed the pages back to Tom and took a step back obviously gathering her thoughts.

  “From my understanding of all this the pilot reported that he was having to increase engine power beyond the maximum allowed to try to maintain height. He then says that he cannot maintain height and gives another position, which appears to be somewhere South of a place called Landek. At that point he reported his altitude as 6100 metres and decreasing. Some minutes later he reported a change of course South towards Nauders and an altitude of 5900 metres. There is then a flurry of signals which I can’t decipher but he mentions something to do with his engine and then a rapid descent down to 4200 metres. A further flurry of signals then follows and then another course change to 170 degrees to avoid mountain peaks, his altitude was then 3700 metres. There is then a discussion which I think is about where to land and mention of a place called Mals in a valley. That’s just about where the log finishes. I guess either the plane crashed or landed somewhere.”

  “It may well be that they descended below the level of the surrounding mountains and lost radio communication.” Tom suggested.

  “We need to find out if there were any reported civilian incidents or anything else unusual at that time and in that area as we’re pretty confident we have scoured the military records. At least we now have a much smaller area of interest to investigate. Let’s get back to the hotel, I need a beer.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Gold Rush

  Tom and Claire had turned a corner of the lounge bar at The Courtyard Hotel into their private office. The large coffee table now supported, alongside a half-empty beer glass and a barely touched gin and tonic, a pair of laptops with trailing chargers, various phones, a miscellany of old documents with yellow post-it notes attached and the open leather document case Tom had liberated from the underground office he’d found.

  “Heinrich is checking the museum archive which has extensive records of the Luftwaffe’s operations during World War 2. He doesn’t think he will find anything though as he’s pretty sure something as important as a crashed Arado 234 carrying VIPs and presumably a cargo of gold would be well known. He said though that records towards the end of the war were not kept as accurately as they would have been a few years earlier.”

  Claire looked up from her laptop and stopped her rapid tapping of the keys.

  “I’ve used my official status to get a curator at the Imperial War Museum to drop everything and scour their British Military records for any mention of a crash or a recovery of a German aircraft in the mountains of the South Tyrol. I’ve also made a similar request to that contact you gave me at the USAF Museum who has just sent me back an email saying their records mention no known aircraft crash. He copied in somebody at the Smithsonian who has also responded negatively.”

  Tom listened carefully to Claire’s update and then picked up his phone and called a number from its memory.

  “Hi Marty, how’s things?” Claire listened intently, trying unsuccessfully to hear both sides of the conversation. Tom closed the connection and put the phone down.

  “I’ve known Marty for years, he maintains the aviation archive for the Smithsonian in Washington DC. He was involved in the restoration of their Arado 234, up to very recently the only example left in existence. The definitive list of all the Arado 234s found at the end of World War 2 was compiled by him and includes those known to have been destroyed. He also holds the original factory build records. When I told him we’d just doubled the World’s population I thought he would wet himself! The bottom line though is that he has nothing suggesting one went down somewhere in Southern Austria, he didn’t even know that any had ever been stationed there.”

  Tom and Claire both picked up their respective drinks, sank back into their chairs and contemplated their findings. Claire was the first one to break the silence that had descended.

  “So, we have documents that suggest they prepared a second Arado to carry five people and an undisclosed additional load. Other documents we have from the same source look like manifests for a quantity of gold and a map describing an evacuation route for some VIPs to Italy and then to South America.”

  Claire reached across the table and rifled through one of the piles of papers extracting a folded map.

  “If you then correlate this map that came from the same document case with the radio log you found in the hangar look.”

  Tom traced the route with his finger on the map from Mauthausen Westwards whilst Claire read the positions off the radio log. When Claire got to the last position just before the transmissions stopped Tom drew a circle on the map around his finger position. Removing his finger they both bent closer to read the place names off the map. Tom rummaged through another pile of documents and extracted his battered European Atlas book which he opened at the relevant page.

  “OK, let’s assume the radio transmission is indeed the other Arado which was carrying senior Nazis, and was overloaded with their loot. The radio suggests it had suffered some sort of engine problem, which was not unusual with these early jets, which would undoubtedly have made it impossible to maintain height without jettisoning its cargo. The area is mountainous but if you take its last quoted position, height and heading it’s pretty obvious it was heading down a natural wide valley all the way down to Italy past a town called Mals which they mention on the radio. If we assume it had suffered a total engine failure when its rate of descent increased somewhere around Nauders and continued that rate down the valley I think it’s fair to assume he could not have got any further than here.”

  At this point Tom stabbed his finger on the old map at a place name for a small village called Graun. Claire had picked up the atlas and found the same village on the new map and, to Tom’s surprise, started laughing.

  “What’s so bloody funny?”

  Claire pushed the atlas towards Tom who stared hard at the village of Graun now apparently called Graun im Vinschgau which appeared to be located in the middle of a vast expanse of blue. Claire had tapped away on her laptop and turned the screen so that Tom could see the Wikipedia page displayed.

  “Well I guess that could explain why nobody has found it so far. Being underneath a four mile long artificial lake would certainly hamper its discovery. It says here that they finished the dam in 1950 but I wonder why it would have been undiscovered for five years?”

  “Who knows, but this would have been a sparsely populated area at the time with little passing traffic. If they managed a forced landing in a fairly orderly manner, I guess they could have destroyed the aircraft and continued onwards by land towards Italy which, after all, was only a few miles away. Maybe they found a truck to commandeer.”

  Tom drained his glass. “Well, I'm having another drink and then some dinner and an early night. It looks like we have a 240 mile drive tomorrow, assuming we’re off to Graun im Vinschgau.”

  Claire caught the barman’s eye and held up two fingers in a Churchillian salute to signify their requirement for refills. Whilst waiting for their drinks to arrive Claire trawled through a hotel booking site on her laptop and selected a picture postcard pretty Tyrolean wooden gasthaus, made the reservation and started packing away their stuff while Tom organised a hire car for the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Climb Ev'ry Moun
tain

  Tom steered the rented Volkswagen over the iron girder bridge across the Danube and headed for the A1 West towards Salzburg.

  “So, when we get to Graun what exactly are we going to do?” Claire asked, briefly raising her head away from the laptop computer which had engrossed her since leaving the hotel.

  “Well, I guess we ask around to see if anybody was there during the war who can remember an aircraft coming down. Assuming we get no joy with that we can check the local records to see if we can get a list of residents and their addresses at the time they created the lake. Maybe we can check with them if their new addresses are on file somewhere.”

  “I’m as optimistic as the next person but frankly that doesn’t sound much of a plan and pretty unlikely to produce any real answers.”

  Tom was silent for a few seconds as he negotiated rows of cones delineating major roadworks alongside a picturesque lake.

  “Well, if that all fails I guess I could always go for a dive in the lake.”

  Claire halted mid-email with her hands poised above the keyboard. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m a fairly experienced PADI divemaster although I have done no diving for a few years now. Can you get online and find out how deep the lake is and whether there’s anywhere we can hire some dive gear.”

  Claire resumed tapping away on the laptop without answering. Tom turned on the car’s radio and finally found the station playing the highest ratio of music to chatter. Negotiating the outskirts of Salzburg he found his way successfully onto the road to Innsbruck without benefit of the satnav which insisted on robotically issuing undecipherable directions in German. Claire shut the lid of the laptop and placed it on the floor in the back of the car.

  “OK, this is the deal. You need special permission to dive in the lake which I’ve asked George back at the office to arrange. You need to stop in Innsbruck at a private address they will email over in a minute. If you’d asked for a ski hire shop, I could have found you a hundred but there isn’t a lot of call for scuba gear in the mountains. The office have a contact who is an ex-Navy professional diver who lives just outside Innsbruck and they are hoping he’ll either have gear at his home or will know where to get it locally.”