Echo of the Reich (25 page)

Bronson lay still, the binoculars still clamped to his face, studying the building, but no lights went on anywhere in the property, and in any case, every set of shutters that was visible to him was now firmly closed.

He tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. The only reason he could think of for the two men to be clad
in heavy overcoats on such a mild evening was because of what they were wearing underneath. That, together with the gleaming black leather boots they both had on, suggested a uniform of some sort, and presumably a uniform that they did not want any casual passerby to see. And that thought generated a host of different, and distinctly unpleasant, possibilities.

From the first, Bronson had assumed that Marcus and his band of men had formed a terrorist organization, and terrorist groups did not tend to wear uniforms or anything else that would enable them to be easily identified. That, in fact, was the point. Terrorists lurked in the shadows, forming their plans, delivering their weapons, and then making their escape, if at all possible, completely undetected. Wearing a uniform would never be a part of their agenda.

He still had no doubt that Marcus had planned some kind of terrorist-style atrocity against London, but now Bronson wondered if the German had formed a sort of private army. Could this gathering at the house be a meeting of the principal officers of that army, a meeting that required the attendees to wear full uniforms? That would explain not only what the two men in the garage had been wearing, but also the bags that the eight visitors had carried into the house.

And there was yet another, even darker, possibility, suggested to Bronson by those gleaming black boots. What if Marcus hadn’t created a private army? What if he had simply re-created an older one? Maybe what was happening inside the property at that very moment was a neo-Nazi revival, a re-creation of a part of one of the
most evil and ruthless regimes the modern world had ever seen. The thought sent a shiver down Bronson’s spine.

One thing was now perfectly clear to him: there was no way he could get inside the property that evening. There were simply too many people in there for him even to attempt it. And if his theory about a neo-Nazi group was correct, if he was apprehended on or near the property, he had absolutely no doubt what the outcome would be. If he was lucky, they’d simply shoot him. If he was unlucky, he’d be strapped to that hideous chair in the concrete room and worked over for a day or two by some of Marcus’s men to extract whatever information they wanted, and then they’d kill him.

The one thing he wasn’t going to do, he decided, was get any closer to the house. He considered returning to his car and simply driving away, but he was loath to do that for the moment. In any case, he had no idea where he’d go or what he should do. He couldn’t simply walk away from what he’d been forced to do inside that house. He had to try somehow to retrieve both the pistol he’d used to kill the man in the chair and the film Marcus had taken of the event. For the moment, that must be his goal. The bigger, and ultimately far more important, problem of the threat to London had receded somewhat in his mind, taking second place in his list of priorities.

The best thing he could do, he decided, was wait. And watch. When the garage door finally opened again, he might see something that would help him decide his course of action, and perhaps he could even memorize some of the faces of the people as they emerged to return
to their cars. A decent camera with a telephoto lens would have been extremely useful at that point, but Bronson hadn’t gotten one, and he had no way of obtaining one at that time in the evening.

For the next two hours, the house remained still and silent: no lights showing in any of the windows, no sign of any activity. The winking, telltale light on the burglar alarm box had been extinguished, because the system had been disarmed, and the property looked completely deserted. The moon was the faintest of crescents high in the sky above him, but it cast sufficient light for Bronson to see the shape of the house, even if he could no longer make out any of the details.

The noises of the wood had changed after nightfall. The birdsong had ceased, the buzzing of insects was no longer audible, and a silence seemed to have fallen across the land, disturbed only by the sounds of the creatures of the night. Somewhere over to his right a vixen screamed, the howl of a tortured soul, and some distance behind him a snuffling and grunting sound suggested that he’d been right about the possibility of wild boar being found in the area. He heard plenty of noises, but actually saw very little. A fox wandered across the clearing in front of him, between him and the house, and paused briefly to stare in his direction before moving on, following its usual patrol route. Several times he heard bats, their high-pitched squeaking unmistakable, and once a large owl, uncannily silent on its massive wings, flew slowly over the house, heading north on its nightly search for prey.

Just before midnight, the light in the garage snapped on again, dimly outlining the closed door, and moments
after that, with a faint click and the whirr of an electric motor, the door began to open and light flooded out across the gravel drive.

Bronson focused the binoculars on the garage. As the door clicked up into the fully open position, one man appeared, striding across to the wall on the left-hand side of the door, then disappeared from view. Moments later, three floodlights mounted on the garage wall were switched on, illuminating the two parked cars outside the building. Then the man reappeared, stepped outside the garage and looked round, then walked back inside and across to the internal door, which was standing open.

Before he reached it, another figure appeared, quickly followed by about seven or eight others, most of them carrying bags—Bronson guessed they were the men he had seen arriving earlier. As far as he could tell, they were dressed in the same clothes they’d been wearing before, but as he stared through the binoculars at the group, now standing and talking more or less in the center of the garage, one figure immediately stood out.

Bronson knew that he would never forget Marcus’s face. It wasn’t simply that he recognized the man who’d forced him to kill a helpless human being, it was what the German was wearing that gripped his attention.

The black jackboots, black breeches and tunic were chillingly familiar, as was the peaked cap bearing the eagle insignia with the skull symbol, the
Totenkopf
—Bronson knew that much German—mounted below it. On the left-hand side of the uniform hung a chained black ceremonial dagger, and the lapel bore a rank badge bearing four square pips above two parallel bars. Bronson remembered
military ranks from his days in the army, and that, he was sure, was the German rank
Obersturmbannführer
, equivalent to a British lieutenant colonel. The only splash of color was the blood-red armband displaying the all too familiar black swastika in a white circle.

Then Marcus turned slightly to his left, and for the first time Bronson could see his right lapel. There, gleaming in the overhead lighting, he could clearly see what he’d been expecting ever since the German had stepped into the garage: the twin lightning-bolt runes of the SS.

Two of the men then raised their right arms toward Marcus in rigid salutes, salutes which he returned. Then the two men turned on their heels and walked out to the cars.

He’d been right. The German hadn’t created his own private army. Instead, he’d revived the most feared and detested military unit of all time, the SS or
Schutzstaffel
, the black-uniformed thugs responsible for running the concentration camps and perpetrating the vast majority of the atrocities recorded during the Second World War. The SS had fielded almost one million men, and had managed to enslave, torture, experiment on and eventually kill some twelve million people, most of them Jews. But they’d also directed their lethal attentions toward other “undesirables” who might in some way contaminate the purity of Hitler’s ideal of an Aryan race, such as Poles and Slavs, the mentally and physically handicapped, political dissidents, clergymen and homosexuals. Of all the forces, of all the nations, involved in the global conflicts of the twentieth century, the SS had been by far the most chillingly efficient as a killing unit, and by far the most reviled.

Bronson knew that what he was staring at wasn’t some toothless neo-Nazi revival, a bunch of deluded socialists wearing shirts with silly badges. From what he’d already found out about Marcus, he guessed that he was as close as possible to the real thing.

Not neo-Nazi. Just Nazi.

And that worried him more than anything else.

24 July 2012

Just under half an hour later, once the two cars had departed and the house was again still and silent, Bronson moved back from his observation position below and behind the bushes and stood up, his joints and muscles protesting.

He had two choices about getting back to his car. He could retrace his steps through the wood, but that meant passing close by the house again, and in the dark he wasn’t sure he could do that without tripping over something or making enough noise to be detected. Or he could work his way down through the wood, moving away from the house all the time, until he reached the road. Then he could simply walk along it, turn right up the rough track and get to his car that way.

It wasn’t a difficult decision.

He took a last look at the house and turned away, moving slowly and carefully and keeping inside the wood
itself. The further away he got from the property, the quicker he felt able to move, and in less than five minutes he stepped over a narrow ditch and onto the tarmac surface of the Röthen road.

When he reached the open area in front of the house, Bronson crossed to the opposite side of the road, just in case there were any watchers positioned. His rubber-soled shoes made almost no sound on the tarmac, but as a precaution he stepped onto the grass verge and walked along that, where his footsteps would be completely silent.

The house still looked empty in the faint moonlight, the only light the steadily blinking telltale on the external alarm box, which meant that somebody had armed the system again, presumably after the occupants—and he had counted at least four men plus Marcus still in the house—had retreated to their bedrooms.

Beyond the house, Bronson crossed back to the east side of the road. The beginning of the track was easy to find because the gap in the undergrowth was wide, though the track itself was barely visible in the moonlight. He checked the road, but saw no vehicles in either direction, then began making his way along the track. Bronson was fairly sure he was alone, but he still took his time and exercised caution as he headed toward the clearing where he’d parked his car, keenly alert for any noise that would indicate the presence of one of Marcus’s men, or anyone else, for that matter.

In the end, it was something he smelled that alerted him. The faint whiff of tobacco smoke was unexpected
but unmistakable. Somebody had smoked a cigarette on or near the track in the last few minutes.

It could have been one of the locals out walking his dog last thing in the evening and enjoying a cigarette. Or it could have been somebody a lot less innocent, and Bronson wasn’t about to take a chance.

The instant he detected the smell, he stopped moving. Then slowly and silently he moved over to his right, toward the trees and bushes that bordered that side of the track, removing the Llama pistol from his waistband as he did so and clicking off the safety catch. He knew that there was already a round in the chamber, so the weapon was ready to fire.

For several minutes he stood motionless by the trunk of a large tree, concentrating with every fiber of his being on looking and listening for any movement or noise from the wood in front of him, anything that would show him where the armed man—and Bronson was sure that the man who had smoked an incautious cigarette would be armed—was positioned. He heard no movement, but he did hear a low murmur as somebody spoke, the words indistinct. Then another voice, clearer and probably closer, replied with a single syllable:
“Ja.”

That changed the odds; there were at least two of them waiting for him in the darkness of the wood ahead.

Still Bronson didn’t move, his mind racing as he considered his options. He could walk away, abandon the car, but that really wasn’t much of a choice. He needed a form of transport, but hiring a car wouldn’t work because his passport didn’t match his driving license, and if he
stole a vehicle that would set the German police on his tail within hours. He needed the car, and that meant somehow getting into the clearing and incapacitating the men Marcus had positioned there.

For a moment he wondered how he’d been detected. He could only assume that before one of the clandestine meetings of the “new” SS in the house, Marcus probably ordered his men to do a quick search of the surrounding area. That would have been carried out while Bronson was asleep, and he guessed he was lucky that they’d only found the car, not him. And when they told Marcus it was on British registration plates, they’d know exactly who it belonged to.

Because he’d heard no movement, only the two brief snatches of conversation, Bronson still didn’t know exactly where the men were waiting for him, so he did the next best thing: he tried to work out where he would have positioned his men if he’d been told to set up an ambush in the clearing.

With two men, he’d probably station one in the undergrowth directly opposite the opening between the two large trees, and the second man over by the car. That way, both of them would see the intruder at about the same moment, as he stepped into the clearing and, if the intention was to eliminate him, they could cut him down in their crossfire.

And the other thing Bronson would have done was to position a car or other vehicle some distance further up the track so that, if by some miracle the target was able to incapacitate the men waiting in ambush in the clearing, the third man in the car would be able either to follow
him when he drove away or, more likely, to ram him and attempt to stop him as he headed down the lane.