London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “I’m sorry Sturmbannführer, it won’t work.” He finally said. “The generator can only supply a few amps of power and we need much more to work the lift mechanism. We cannot move the lift.”

  Lehmann heard the subdued babble of conversation that had broken out all around him and saw the pilot emerge from the Arado in some confusion. This was a very secure facility, and they had designed it in such a way to prevent any possible incursion by undesirables. It had a huge lift that travelled the height of five floors to the surface at one end of the hangar and a pair of normal double doors at the other. These doors led to the tunnel complex that joined it to the rest of the underground facility. The tunnels were now obviously blocked beyond any potential for them to reopen them without heavy equipment and a great deal of time. The lift was apparently unusable as well so their fate was, quite literally, sealed. Sturmbannführer Lehmann took the photograph of his now dead family from his breast pocket and smiled knowing that his imminent departure from life would be here in this hangar rather than some fiery conflagration over London. He wasn’t sorry about that. They could hear sobbing from somewhere in the shadows as the enormity of their situation dawned on everybody there. From above the faint sound of the four jet engines on the fighters started to fade until they couldn’t be heard any more. The Messerschmitt fighters had departed alone.

  “Would I be right in concluding then that we have absolutely no prospect of getting out of here?” Lehmann asked the engineer whose countenance supplied the answer without need of a verbal confirmation.

  SS-Sturmbannführer Lehman, whilst still holding the photograph of his departed family, calmly removed his pistol from its holster, bought it up to his temple, and fired.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Yanks are coming - April 1945

  Gunnery Sergeant Willis had followed the Sherman tanks up the dead straight concrete road along the top of the hillside for at least a mile, or so he estimated. Why on Earth would you build a major highway here in the middle of nowhere which didn’t seem to go anywhere? The tanks ahead had come to a stop at the end of this road on a large concrete square and were now turning right down the gentle hillside towards the town and the prison camp below. He had been dreading this part of their current operation. The lieutenant had told them all at this morning’s briefing that they would overrun and liberate a major concentration camp facility today at Mauthausen and to expect some serious resistance. They believed that a crack, fanatical Waffen-SS regiment was billeted here and would probably fight to the death. Willis had already been involved in liberating a concentration camp further North a few days ago and the sights he had seen there he was sure would live with him for the rest of his life. Although a part of him wanted to get those poor souls freed as soon as possible another part really didn’t want to see, hear and smell the horrors he knew he was likely to encounter today.

  He drew up alongside the last two tanks still sitting on the concrete square at the top of the hill who were awaiting their turn to join the procession downwards. Suddenly the whole ground around him shook and trembled. He’d experienced a mild earthquake in his native California many years ago which had rattled the windows of his home, this however was much stronger but lasted only a few seconds and with no further after-shocks. The tank commander gestured wildly towards Willis who got out of the jeep and walked across to hear what he was saying over the din of the engines and continuing explosions all around. He noticed that he’d had to step down a few inches onto the concrete area where the tanks were sitting. The whole platform appeared to have slightly sunk during the latest explosions. He surmised, correctly as it would later turn out, that the Germans were rapidly destroying as much of their factory as they could before Willis and his team of specialist engineers got there. They had briefed Willis that this was most likely an experimental aircraft factory, and he had been tasked with getting as much equipment, drawings and components as he could ship out of there before the Russians arrived. The tank commander shouted across to Willis, “they have ordered us to cover the exit West, the Russians are not far away. They want you down at the factory.” With that he bent down putting his whole head and shoulders inside the tank to talk to the driver who turned the vehicle towards the hillside and rumbled off diagonally towards the river. The other tank turned half round and rumbled off down the hillside towards the factory. In the relative calm that had suddenly descended, Willis got back in the jeep and disappeared off down the hillside towards the factory entrance following the tank. As he reached the bottom of the hill, he heard a demonic screaming sound from the top of the hill, then another and then two more joined in. He was deliberating whether to turn the jeep around and go to investigate when the sound built into a crescendo and then rapidly decreased in volume. Within seconds it was barely audible above the racket of the clattering tanks and Willis suddenly saw, away towards the nearby village, four plumes of smoke behind glowing red fireballs climbing away and turning to the South.

  Willis couldn’t remember when he, or his team, had worked so hard and for so long without a break, they were utterly exhausted. Whilst the American forces had been liberating the concentration camp, rounding up stray Germans and gathering and making safe all the weapons they’d found, Willis’s team had been labouring furiously. They had dismantled and crated up all the part-built Messerschmitt Me262 aircraft they could find plus the tooling and components. They’d found the drawing office booby trapped with incendiary devices which luckily had failed to go off when one of his team had triggered the trip wire accidentally. Because of this a bomb disposal platoon had now joined them and were opening up rooms one by one and carefully dismantling any other devices they found. This process had seriously slowed their progress through the complex.

  “Clear!” came the shout from another corridor ahead. Willis was about to move on to the next corridor when he heard his name shouted from behind.

  “You need to pack up now, we’re moving out.” This delivered by the Lieutenant commanding his section.

  “We’re not done yet, we can see a whole store of Jumo jet engines in racks in the next corridor. The bomb disposal guys will be finished soon and we can get them crated.”

  “No time for that, the Russians are coming and they have ordered us to leave and destroy whatever we have to leave behind so that they don’t get it.”

  As he said that another team of engineers rushed past, called to the bomb disposal team to stop, and commenced laying new charges of their own in a bizarre turn of events.

  Less that thirty minutes later as Willis was overseeing the loading of the final truck a series of massive explosions rocked the complex and plumes of dust and smoke spewed from the entrance doors and, rather strangely so Willis thought, also a couple of locations far away on the hillside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sussex - Today, Saturday

  Tom Stroud sat on a low wooden antique milking stool with his head inside the port wheel well of a partly-restored Focke Wulf Fw190 aircraft trying to manoeuvre a cable harness through the wing when he heard his phone ring from its location on the workbench at the opposite side of the workshop.

  “Sod it!” He exclaimed to nobody in particular although Rodney, Tom’s border collie, sat up from where he’d been lying along the bottom tread of the staircase leading up to the office. Manoeuvring himself from under the wing he almost fell across the workshop making a grab for the phone before it stopped ringing. As he hit the answer button malicious thoughts crossed his mind about what he’d like to do to whoever was on the other end of the call if it turned out they were trying to sell him advertising space, offering to get him thousands back through PPI reclaim, or a host of the other unwanted dodgy services or products that seemed to plague him recently.

  “Tom Stroud.” He almost spat into the phone, having now convinced himself that the caller was indeed a total time-waster who would get a piece of his mind.

  “Hi Tom, long time no talk, how are you?” Tom paused in his wind up to the
verbal explosion he was looking forward to delivering.

  “Heinrich?” He asked slightly taken aback. “Is that you?” As he said that he considered the ludicrous question he’d just posed. Nobody was ever likely to respond 'No' would they.

  “It’s been a while hasn’t it.” Came the reply. “I might have something to interest you, assuming you are still in the same line of business and have some spare time. To be honest, I could do with some help and your expertise.”

  Tom almost laughed at the mention of spare time as he hadn’t had a proper paying job for a couple of months and the bank account was one again lurching inexorably towards the ‘red’. Only this morning he’d received a call from his credit card company advising him he’d reached his spending limit and not to use his card until he made a substantial repayment. If he couldn’t find gainful employment soon, he’d have no option but to sell the Focke Wulf to that American collector for a knock-down price to relieve the financial pressure. He suspected that Claire would help if he asked her, he just didn’t want to risk tarnishing their relationship at such an early stage, especially as she’d only just moved in with him.

  “It has indeed been a while, probably three or four years at a guess.” Tom responded “You’ll be interested to know that the Kommandergerat you supplied for the Focke Wulf has restored perfectly and is now fully working, shame I can’t say that about the rest of the aircraft yet.” Tom had acquired the critical `computer’ for his Focke-Wulf from the storage of a major German National Museum in a very complicated deal that had found the museum with a Messerschmitt Bf109E fighter project from Russia, a large collector in the USA gaining a Buffalo Brewster fighter and some Russians with enough cigarettes to make themselves very unwell plus a wad of US Dollars presumably to pay for the clinical aftercare they’d probably require. Heinrich Schröder was the museum’s curator in charge of acquisitions and had become a good friend through the turmoil of this transaction.

  The Focke Wulf represented the pinnacle of fighter aircraft development in the latter half of the second World War and had proved to be a formidable opponent against the Allies. Control of it’s hugely powerful radial piston engine was managed by one of the earliest computers made. It was a mix of electric, hydraulic and pneumatic valves, contacters, clockwork and pistons called the Kommandergerat. The purpose of this was to relieve the pilot of the complicated task of juggling numerous engine controls. He merely had to shove the throttle leaving him free to concentrate on shooting down his chosen target. The result of this was that the aircraft achieved victory on far too many occasions for the comfort of the Allied airmen ranged against him. Tom’s example was an absolutely original aircraft recovered by him from a forest many years ago where it had lain untouched since 1944 when its pilot had made a forced landing caused by engine failure after a bullet had partially destroyed the complicated computer.

  “Glad to hear things are progressing with the butcher bird, are you actually planning on flying it if you ever get it finished?”

  “Of course. I can’t get the hots for machinery that’s forever dormant, an aircraft’s place is in the sky.” Tom replied just avoiding snapping a sarcastic response to the suggestion that he might not complete it.

  “If everyone thought like you I’d be out of a job.”

  “How is the job, I see your museum had something of a recent coup with your acquisition of that new-build Me262 fighter, it looks great?”

  “It’s a beautiful copy, They have even allowed them to issue it with a serial number that followed on numerically from the last of the original manufacturing run in 1945, but it’s still a copy. I hanker to have an original. This is the main reason for calling you. Did you see a news report recently about that poor kid who fell down a ventilation shaft into the bunker complex near St Georgen in Austria and got blown up?”

  “I saw it on the TV news, don’t they reckon he set off a booby trap left by the Nazis when they abandoned the concentration camp there?”

  “That’s partly correct. He fell into a part of the underground complex untouched since World War 2. Where he ended up was, in fact, the machinery room for the Messerschmitt factory which was building the Me262. The Nazis forced the prisoners from the nearby concentration camp to work there on final assembly of the aircraft from component parts manufactured elsewhere in the complex which, once completed, they winched to the surface onto a very short runway along the top of the hill above from where they were flown to their combat squadrons. The huge explosion the poor child triggered not only destroyed the machinery room, and its contents, but also collapsed the ventilation shaft. Since the explosion the army have been on site with drilling equipment and they managed to break through into the complex this morning and put a camera down the shaft.”

  Tom was now sitting on the workshop floor hanging on Heinrich’s every word. “So, you’re going to tell me what they found aren’t you and why you’ve called me.”

  “I’ll send you a link by email to my cloud storage site, there are a few video files in it which you need to look at and then call me back, is that OK?”

  Tom agreed to call straight back as soon as he’d watched the videos. He closed the phone connection and almost ran up to his office where his laptop was sitting on his desk. Calling up his email he found Heinrich’s message, clicked on the link and downloaded four video files which he copied onto his laptop. Whilst he was waiting for the files to copy over he reached into the fridge and extracted a beer, sat at his desk facing the laptop screen and took a deep swallow. Running the first video he had difficulty making out what he was looking at. It was very dark and had a faint circle of smudgy white dancing around in the middle of the screen. Suddenly the white bit grew larger until it was full screen. He’d been watching the camera and light travel down the bore hole to the remains of a room in the complex, or what was left of it. As the camera rotated around all he could see through the dirty lens was twisted, burnt rusty metal, dust and pieces of broken concrete all interspersed with fragments of paper and other detritus. This was obviously the machinery room. On one wall there was a heavy looking but twisted metal double door with one side hanging off its hinges. The video ended. Tom fired up the next one which showed the same room but now in much higher definition and with a clean lens. With shaking camera moved forwards towards the double doors, it was apparently mounted on some kind of tracked vehicle as the picture danced up and down as the vehicle climbed the piles of debris. The operator of the ROV had to stop and reverse course several times to negotiate obstructions. It continued moving slowly on for 2 or 3 minutes until it manoeuvred itself through the doorway and into a corridor outside. It spun around on its own axis 360 degrees showing the walls and a corridor disappearing in both directions beyond the range of the meagre light the camera vehicle was carrying. The ROV started apparently retracing its steps and then the video finished. They shot the next video from another robot camera but in a different place. This time they had increased the light somehow and the camera was in a cavern with a domed ceiling and deep, straight slots cut into the walls about halfway up the sides. Again the camera did a 360 degree rotation which showed that it wasn’t really a cavern but more of a tunnel. The roof was arched and disappeared into the distance with the strange wall slots also continuing down the tunnel. Tom started the final video which was taken using a different camera and mobile carriage as the resolution was better still and the low light capability much improved. At a considerable speed now the camera ran down the tunnel from which Tom assumed it was autonomous or radio controlled rather than tethered to its operator. The tunnel continued on for perhaps a full minute of travel until the camera stopped moving and the remote operator changed the camera settings. There was a slight flash as the brightness suddenly increased temporarily defeating the camera's automatic settings and then the lens slowly zoomed into the gloom of the tunnel ahead. Tom peered hard at the screen and could just about make out something partially blocking the tunnel ahead. At full zoom he could see that th
ere was a horizontal shape which seemed to occupy the whole width of the tunnel and into the wall slots both sides. The slots had obviously been cut to accommodate whatever was in the tunnel. Tom paused the video and stared at the screen.

  “That can’t be!” He suddenly exclaimed loudly to the empty office and then stared again at the video now paused. “It is!”

  He grabbed his phone and dialled Heinrich’s number who answered on the first ring. “I thought you’d call back quickly and yes, we think it is an Me262 sitting in that tunnel.” Heinrich laughed as he listened to the spluttering emanating from his phone from Tom on the other end of the line.

  “The military didn’t dare take the robotic camera any further as they were concerned about setting off more booby traps.”

  The Messerschmitt Me262 was the World’s first jet fighter aircraft developed towards the end of World War 2 by the Germans. It was incredibly fast and manoeuvrable and totally outperformed any aircraft the allies could pit against it. Unfortunately for the Germans it came too late in the war to save them and they could not make it in sufficient numbers. The allies repeatedly bombed their factories, and they were incredibly short of some raw materials necessary for the engine construction. They had to resort to building it in makeshift factories in abandoned mines or anywhere else underground to avoid the Allied bombers. Frequently they resorted to slave labour to build the components and the quality thus suffered. Despite all this, the pilots that flew it claimed it was wonderful to fly and could have won the war had it arrived earlier. After the war the British, Americans and Russians all evaluated several captured examples, what they found formed the basis of pretty much all aircraft development from then onwards. It was truly revolutionary, unfortunately nobody recognised that in 1945 and they scrapped most of the captured aircraft once they’d tested them and gleaned all the information they could There are a mere seven original survivors around the World in museums, none having flown since 1946 although a few replicas have been built in recent years which are gracing the skies. What Tom was looking at was an original, unrestored machine still apparently sitting on its wheels, an absolutely unique example. Tom wanted it, he wanted it very badly, but he’d settle for being on hand when they recovered it and especially if he could earn some cash in the process.