London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “What’s ‘Strahlung’ mean?” Tom asked Heinrich who had turned quite pale and was fumbling in his jacket pocket for his phone.

  “Radiation.” He stated without hesitation. Tom didn’t know who Heinrich called but it appeared to have resulted in the Sergeant receiving a call within seconds which necessitated him saying ‘Ja’ quite a lot.

  “A specialist team will be here as soon as they can round up a helicopter, we have been told not to touch anything and to give the shelter a wide berth. The sergeant will post a guard and he’s suggested you leave the area now as there’s nothing useful you can do here.”

  From his viewpoint Valentin watched with interest the latest development at the excavation site. The other members of his team had now joined him and they were closely monitoring the background radiation levels being transmitted from the truck. There had been the tiniest spike when the gold had been loaded on the other truck parked beside the bugged one, and another even smaller spike when the old car was loaded onto the breakdown truck in the lay-by. Neither of these spikes though was apparently indicative of a quantity of fissionable material being transported away.

  What he could now see through his binoculars was a totally different matter altogether. He couldn’t read the large warning signs on the box as it was too dark inside the shelter but the body language of all the people down there told him something was seriously amiss. When his phone rang and Vassili Urosov relayed the content of the intercepted phone call Heinrich Schröder had just made, he didn’t need to read the warning on the boxes. He watched fascinated as Herr Schröder, Tom Stroud and Claire Owens walked down the track, got into their car and drove away.

  “And that leaves just 4.” He said to himself grinning.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Attack!

  The sergeant and the two squaddies were sitting in the back of the truck discussing which bar they intended drinking in that evening when they got back to the camp. They didn’t hear the arrival of the five armed men until their heads, and more importantly the barrels of their guns, appeared above the tailgate. None of the soldiers felt brave or stupid enough to make a dive for their guns which were propped up against the sides of the truck and effectively out of rapid reach. They all raised their hands in unison and put up absolutely no resistance when their hands were tied together behind them using cable tie wraps or when their ankles received similar treatment once they’d sat down as instructed. The apparent leader then removed phones and radios from each of them and, with the truck’s keys, placed the lot in a bin bag which he dragged out of the back of the truck and handed to a colleague who walked off down the road and slung them unceremoniously into the boot of their car parked in the next lay-by. The stunned soldiers sat in the back of the truck in silence, as they’d been instructed, until their bound feet were roped to the truck’s frame and they were gagged using duck tape. They heard the ambushers in quiet conversation outside and saw two of them exit the lay-by and walk hurriedly down the road. The other two stayed with the captives until one of them received a call on his phone which he immediately cancelled rather than answering. It was obviously a predetermined message as he beckoned to his colleagues. The three remaining men walked quietly up the track towards the excavation and, as they turned the last corner, were spotted by the two guards outside the shelter.

  “Halt!” One of them demanded pointing his rifle menacingly at the intruder.

  Valentin carried his Vityaz-FN machine gun slung loosely and casually at his side in a non-threatening way and replied in a slow, calm voice, “I’m afraid you are surrounded and outnumbered. Your colleagues are now restrained and will not assist you. Put down your guns and you will not come to any harm, resist and all of you will die.”

  There was a pause for no more than a few accelerated heartbeats until the guard nearest the shelter made an almost unconscious move to raise his rifle to his shoulder. Four rapid-fire shots rang out, and the guard fell forward face down on the track amidst a rapidly growing red stain in the dirt. His colleague looked on in horror and slowly started to raise his own weapon involuntarily.

  “If you don’t put the gun down immediately, you will be joining him.” Valentin calmly said.

  Shocked back to reality the guard made a conscious decision and lowered his gun rapidly to the ground as if it had just become boiling hot. One of the men who had joined them from the other direction down the track picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. With the surviving guard trussed up and leaned against the outside wall of the shelter the four men loaded the twelve boxes onto the discarded platform of the mini digger which they’d refitted and drove down to the lay-by. With a man dispatched to collect their car from the next lay-by where they’d left it, Valentin put a call through to Vassili Urosov.

  “Report!” Came the usual abrupt demand.

  “We have twelve wooden boxes, each probably weighing 20 kilograms, which contain what looks like a lead inner box. They are all marked with a radiation warning.”

  “Excellent, well done! Have there been any difficulties and will you need any form of rapid extraction?”

  “Not really. One guard was killed, the rest are tied up however I would imagine we don’t have a great deal of time before they are either or missed and others arrive.”

  “Take the cargo to the agreed rendezvous in Bormio where I will meet you as planned. We will travel from there to Switzerland where I have a plane waiting. You have done well, there will be a bonus for you and your team.”

  As Vassili hung up the phone, wearing the largest smile he’d cracked for many months, the rented car arrived in the lay-by. Within a minute the boxes had all been loaded into its boot and all five of them had clambered into the seriously overloaded vehicle and driven off up the Stelvio Pass road. Reaching Bormio they drove straight through open gates and into the garage of a private house they’d purloined and closed the wooden doors behind them. All they had to do now was wait for Vassili Urosov.

  Sitting in his parked car in the suburban outskirts of Bormio, the MI6 agent called up his controller to give a situation report. He was a block down, and on the opposite side of the road from the detached house Valentin and his team had just driven into. He had a clear view of the house from here and could see anybody arrive or leave. He ruefully reflected that, without backup, there was little he could have sensibly done to assist the Austrian soldiers and he doubted he could have prevented the murder of one of them. His instructions had been clear, under no circumstances was he to lose sight of the boxes the Russians had taken. The Austrian Anti-Terrorist agency working with the Italians were sending a large team to take over from him and recover the boxes he’d seen the Russians load up on the Stelvio. His job was to keep watch until they got there and then return to keeping a watching brief over D.I. Owens and her partner and to make sure they came to no harm.

  Less than 20 minutes later the agent’s boredom was broken by the sound, and then sight, of a black Audi A6 Avant which had appeared some hundred metres behind him on the same road. He followed its progress in his mirrors until it passed him still accelerating despite already exceeding the speed limit by a substantial margin. He watched as it passed the Russian’s house, braked very heavily to a complete halt and then conducted a rapid three-point turn extremely badly hitting the pavement both sides of the road in the process. His interest aroused he had already reached for his phone when it braked to a halt outside the Russian’s house and the sole occupant exited and almost ran up to the front door. By the time the door had opened, and the driver had been granted access the agent had already called up his controller.

  “Urosov has just arrived, where are the Austrians?”

  The calm voice on the other end immediately replied. “ETA no more than 6 minutes from our tracking. Assist them if required otherwise move to cover DI Owens if needed.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Street Fighting Men

  A brief flash of something dark, caught out of the corner of his ey
e in the car’s rearview mirror, alerted the MI6 agent to the arrival of the Anti-Terrorist Unit. He remained seated in his car as he saw several vans and cars quietly and discreetly block off both ends of the street some distance away. He watched, through the occasional gaps between houses, several men carrying weapons dressed in identical camouflage plus kevlar vests jogging down the street parallel to his in the general direction of the Russian’s house. The other houses in the road were being discreetly approached, one by one, and their occupants persuaded to leave temporarily. He watched as one particular family three doors away from the house in question marched out carrying a birdcage and a small dog still sitting in its bed and were led away to a safe point away from the target house. Taking his cue he started his car, executed a slow three-point turn and drove slowly towards the roadblock. One of the two uniformed men carrying machine pistols who now stood in front of him held their hand up in the recognised instruction to halt. Whilst both guns remained trained on him an officer approached the lowered driver’s window. Once the agent’s identity was confirmed he was allowed through the roadblock to park behind the trucks from where he could watch the impending conflagration.

  With the roadblocks in place, and men stationed all around the house, two of the trucks drove rapidly up to the house and braked to a halt immediately outside almost touching front and back of the Audi which was now blocked in and effectively disabled. The rear doors of both vans opened and a stream of armed men emerged from each and took up positions along the low front wall bordering the garden of the house whilst, simultaneously the men at the rear of the house did the same. An officer climbed out of one of the vans carrying a megaphone which he raised to his lips as he ducked down for cover behind the bonnet of the van.

  “You are surrounded and heavily outnumbered by armed and experienced anti-terrorist troops. Please place your weapons down and leave the house by the front door, one at a time, with your hands held high palms forward and unclenched. If you do as requested you will be treated fairly. If you do not, we will take you by force. You have two minutes to comply.”

  The officer made a great show of looking at his watch.

  “You have one minute left.”

  The time ticked down the last minute and the officer spoke rapidly to one of the soldiers squatting behind the front wall.

  “Your time has expired, this is your last chance. We would rather arrest you peaceably but my orders are that you are to be prevented from leaving at all costs.”

  The response from the house was rather unexpected.

  “We have hidden a large explosive device in the centre of the town which is surrounded by four of the boxes of material we took from the excavation site. If you do not allow us to leave immediately, we will set it off remotely. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you the consequences of having radioactive material blown all over the town.”

  The Russian accented voice continued shouting without the aid of a megaphone.

  “Remove your trucks, we will take the Audi and leave by the West road. Write your cellphone number on a piece of paper and leave it under the windshield wiper of the Audi. I will call with the bomb location once we are safely away.”

  The man from MI6 could not hear this shouted conversation from his position some 60 metres away. He did however catch some radio conversation that transpired between the officer on the scene and the sergeant manning the roadblock where he was standing.

  “What did he just say?” He asked the sergeant.

  “We are to be ready to remove the block on his orders. Apparently the targets have planted a bomb in the town with some material they took from the excavation site.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  The sergeant rather reluctantly handed over his radio to the man from MI6 after telling the officer he wanted to talk to him.

  “Listen, I followed them with all the boxes direct from the site to this address, they never left my sight. They absolutely did not stop anywhere in town and could not have planted any kind of bomb with the radioactive material. It’s a bluff.”

  There was a burst of static from the radio as the officer obviously released the transmit button and a pause of several seconds. His voice when it came back was hard, and he spoke slowly, “Is there the slightest possibility that you could be wrong or that somebody could have left the vehicle?”

  The man from MI6 immediately and emphatically replied, “None!”

  There was a shouted order from the officer immediately after he’d heard the word ‘None’ and two of the soldiers crouching behind the wall levelled their rifles at the ground-floor windows of the house and fired.

  The smoke grenades shattered both windows and burst inside the house. They were rapidly followed by another two grenades at which point automatic gunfire could be heard from inside the building and the lower leaves of a tree bordering the road were shredded. The two smoke grenade firers then fired a volley of stun grenades through the same windows and then into the windows above upstairs. The dull ‘whump’ sounds could be heard distinctly from the MI6 man’s position.

  The flurry of machine gun fire from inside, mostly wildly inaccurate, now ceased completely and the men crouching outside took this as their cue. The lead man sprinted up the path carrying a large battering ram which he swung at the front door in one fluid movement as he ran up the porch steps. The door crashed off its hinges and the man behind him immediately sprayed bullets into the hallway as he rushed past followed by the remainder of the men from the front of the house. The sounds of doors being kicked down and furniture broken emanated from the house along with two short bursts of automatic gunfire and then, suddenly, all was silent.

  The officer appeared standing in the demolished front doorway and radioed for the containment and clean-up teams declaring the house now secure. The man from MI6 watched the rest of the assault team file out of the house as another truck, this one with a grey containment on its flatbed, pull up outside. All twelve boxes containing the recovered Nazi horde of enriched Uranium were carried out of the house by two men in hazmat suits and loaded into the containment vessel. Once the truck had departed in convoy with all the troops and their vehicles as escort the clean-up team went in to recover the bodies and any weapons or explosives. The MI6 man watched as they carried out the body bags one at a time until he’d counted five. At this point he was surprised that they appeared to be packing up, obviously preparing to depart, their work complete. The MI6 man rushed over to the unmarked ambulance carrying the bodies and spoke to one of the crew in the process of removing the protective gear he was wearing.

  “You recovered five bodies, is that correct?” He received a positive answer to this question, and a shaken head to the next when he queried the fact there should have been six. Where was the last man, how had he escaped?

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Germany Calling.

  Tom slid out of bed quietly scooping his watch from the bedside table in the dark so as not to wake Claire and crept to the bathroom closing the door behind him. 5 am. and he was wide awake as he had been for the past hour, too keyed up for sleep. He put on yesterday’s clothes which he’d abandoned in a pile on the bathroom floor and exited the bathroom, quietly picking up the laptop as he slunk out of the room. Finding nobody around downstairs in the hotel he’d turned on the coffee machine in the restaurant and settled himself at a table waiting for the machine to warm up. Opening his email on the laptop he was astonished to find his inbox overflowing with unanswered emails, all arrived since yesterday morning when he’d last checked. He ran through the extensive list deleting the obvious rubbish which probably accounted for almost a third of the total. Starting at the earliest time he opened up one from his transport and shipping company requesting a mountain of details regarding the shipment of the Messerschmitt. Moving on the next email was from his friend `Biggles’ in Australia with the title ‘So you got yourself a Swallow’ referring to the nickname of the Messerschmitt. How did he find out so quickly, Tom tho
ught? The next few emails were from people Tom knew in the old aircraft market enquiring about the Me262 as well. He skimmed through all these until he came from one from his son who had copied a brief video taken from the TV news the previous evening which included pictures of the two Messerschmitts in the tunnel and another pic of one emerging from the factory. The 45 second news item covered the unearthing of the aircraft and mentioned Heinrich and Tom by name. So much for keeping this quiet, Tom thought rather angrily. What really caught his attention though was the following item which showed the Mercedes sitting in the sunshine outside the shelter it had been evacuated from with a title superimposed saying ‘Nazi Gold Found’. The newsreader described in some detail the operation to dig the car out and what had been found inside and then, alarmingly went on to say there had been some sort of shooting incident at the site. There had also been a shooting in the neighbouring town which was being described as terrorist however the authorities had not so far confirmed whether these two events were connected.

  Tom was horrified, what was going on? He had to get the Mercedes moved rapidly that was obvious. It would suddenly become of great interest to a great many people and it was hardly secure where it was. He poured himself a coffee from the machine and carried on reading his emails.

  His son had sent a second mail which made him smile, brief and to the point. ‘Now you’re rich any chance I could have a McLaren Speedtail Hyper-GT?’

  Tom wasn’t sure exactly what a Speedtail Hyper-GT was but if it came out of the McLaren factory in Woking, it was going to be a very special, and hugely expensive piece of automotive art.

  Tom speed-read more emails, most from friends and acquaintances either congratulating him for his ‘finds’ or asking to be involved somehow in their eventual marketing. The one from the Mercedes Museum required his proper attention though, and he read and reread it several times whilst holding his coffee cup poised mid-air, unable to either drink from it or put it down such was his focus.