London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “So where do I come into this?” Tom asked hardly daring to put the question.

  “Luckily the Colonel in charge of the drilling operation is an aircraft enthusiast and friend of the museum. He has persuaded the powers to be that they should give the museum every opportunity to salvage this aircraft as a national treasure. They are currently drilling a much larger access hole near the machine room doors as this looks like a stable part of the complex. They will line it with steel casings and send men down to recover the body of the child. They will also send in a bomb disposal team to make the place as safe as possible, I will then be granted access with a small team to evaluate the condition of the Messerschmitt. I have asked for you to join this team as an expert in aircraft salvage techniques, I’m afraid I can only pay you expenses and possibly a small commission.”

  “Heinrich, I’m blown away as our American cousins would say. I don’t want payment from you as such but how about I get to take home some souvenirs once we get your aircraft sorted one way or the other?”

  “What sort of souvenirs did you have in mind?” Heinrich asked, all too aware that they would ask him the same question when he sought his boss’s agreement to the proposal.

  “How do I know, I don’t know what’s down there? If it was an aircraft assembly plant, there might be some odd parts down there, maybe an engine or two or possibly just some tools or uniforms, something like that.”

  “I don’t think that would be an issue, I’ll draw up some sort of contract as we must make this official and you’ll have to sign a disclaimer.”

  “So when do you think they’ll get the large hole finished?”

  “You should get here as soon as you can, they could break through any time tomorrow or the next day. Fly to either Salzburg or Vienna just let me know which flight and I’ll make sure somebody picks you up from the airport.”

  Tom immediately fired up his laptop and accessed his cloud storage account where he set the machine to download the sub-directory labelled 'Me262' from the main directory labelled `Aircraft Drawings’. Tom had, over many years, accumulated a vast collection of historic aircraft drawings from a multitude of sources which he used to keep in a row of plan drawings in the workshop. The advent of cheap and secure remote digital storage had persuaded him to have the whole collection professionally scanned and digitised with the originals now in document storage elsewhere. The cost of this had finally been repaid many years later as he could offer anybody copies of these, often unique, drawings for a small fee. His customers were restorers, museums, collectors or just enthusiasts and operating this small business had given Tom some invaluable contacts.

  “Who was that on the phone?” Claire was standing in the entrance doorway with a bath towel loosely and revealingly wrapped around her slim body, with her hair still dripping from the shower she’d just vacated. Detective Inspector Claire Owens was the operational head of a small department, answerable only to the British Monarch and her Government’s Prime Minister, tasked with maintaining the integrity and property of the Monarchy itself. She and Tom had shared a few dramas recently whilst trying to recover some medieval documents. They were now sharing rather more, just as an experiment Claire had said at the time. Tom had initially found that sharing a house, his life and his bed again after so long on his own was a difficult adjustment but recently it had all felt extremely comfortable. Rodney, his rather fickle Collie, had taken to Claire at their first meeting and now was hugely reluctant to leave her side. He’d even taken to coming upstairs occasionally, which he’d never done before, presumably to check on Claire’s well-being. Who said a dog was man’s best friend?

  “It was an old friend in Austria who has a job for me, I need to leave ASAP, probably going to be away for three or four days. Can you look after Rodney or shall I drop him off next door?”

  “I can work from here for a couple of days, I’ll get dressed as I presume you’d like a lift to the airport.”

  Tom booked a flight to Salzburg leaving that afternoon and packed up his tools, locked the workshop and went indoors to pack. Having grabbed his bag from the cupboard in the hall, he went up to his bedroom where he found Claire sitting on the bed now minus the towel and smiling.

  “If you’re going to abandon me here for a few days, you need to make it up to me - right now!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Gusen, Austria - Sunday

  “Heinrich, great to see you.” Tom greeted his old friend as he escaped the clutches of immigration at Salzburg Airport and they fought their way through the throngs of brightly attired groups clutching skis, boot bags and wearing crazy headgear. Once ensconced in Heinrich’s Mercedes and travelling East, and having completed the obligatory small-talk and general life catch up, Heinrich pointed his thumb to the back seat.

  “There’s a file in the back with some papers you need to sign. There’s a non-disclosure agreement and another which essentially absolves everybody here of any responsibility for your continued good health. What’s probably more important to you is also a contract for your services at our standard daily sub-contract rate plus expenses and another one, signed by our Minister of the Department of National Antiquities, which grants you first refusal on any artifact that I deem unwanted by the museum or the government, free of any charge.”

  Tom reached into the back seat, signed the relevant documents and returned them to the folder extracting his copies and putting them in his laptop bag.

  “Thanks, I guess I’m just going to need to persuade you that whatever I find is unwanted by you. What’s the latest on the drilling?”

  “They’ve broken through with the large drilling rig and have lined the 1.5 metre hole with steel casings as they drilled. They have lowered more robotic devices down to test the atmosphere for anything nasty and are, as we speak, rigging up a sort of bosun’s chair to lower people down once they've completed the checks. If all goes well we should be able to go down tomorrow sometime. The bomb disposal people are going down first to check for any other booby traps but we can follow them down once the first room is clear. I’ve booked you into the Courtyard Hotel near the airport, it’s only about 10 km from the drilling site. It has a pretty good restaurant and isn’t too expensive.”

  “So we go down, find a Messerschmitt Me262 forgotten since the Americans cleaned the place out, then what? How on Earth do we get a 10.6 metre long aircraft out of a hole 1.5 metre diameter, and that’s after we take the wings off?”

  “The original design of the factory was such that the tunnels you can see in the video were used for the final assembly of the airframes. At the end of the tunnel was a large hangar door which opened out onto an apron at the base of the hillside. There was a massive funicular railway which carried the finished aircraft up the hillside to a runway they built on the top running towards the West. When the Americans departed in 1945, they blew up a whole section of the hillside and collapsed it over the hangar doors. The reports I’ve got from the US archives suggest that explosives had already partially collapsed the tunnels inside by the time they got there. They didn’t have time to explore too far inside as the Russians were not far behind them and they were, quite rightly as it turned out, concerned about potential booby traps. They took what they could and then blew up pretty much everything else to deprive the Russians.”

  “So how did the Me262 in the video escape all this destruction?”

  “We can only surmise that the tunnel where it's located was behind the line of collapsed tunnels. From its location we believe it’s very close to the exit doors which would make sense. To answer your question though we have an outline plan to expose the original hangar doors and take it out, intact, that way. The slight issue though is that the visitor centre is in the way!”

  “Please don’t tell me that your planning on knocking it down.” Tom looked at Heinrich with astonishment.

  “The visitor centre is a glass sided building built on a single-span steel frame and we’ve established that we could remove 13
metres of the glass wall front and back and run the aircraft right through the building. We’d have to remove the fin and rudder and possibly put it on a low wheeled trolley rather than using its undercarriage as we wouldn’t have too much height.”

  “You really believe that you will get yourself an intact aircraft don’t you?”

  “It’s just logistics. Our military have all of the necessary equipment and knowledge to do this, they’re treating it as something of a training exercise.”

  They pulled up outside the Courtyard Hotel, Tom grabbed his bags and got out “Will I see you later?”

  “I cannot have dinner with you tonight but I’ll pick you up at 9 tomorrow morning. We’ll have dinner together tomorrow, would you mind if my wife joined us as she would like to see you again?”

  “That would be lovely. I’ll see you in the morning, please say hello to Freida for me and tell her I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

  Tom watched Heinrich drive away and smiled wryly to himself. For a while, some years ago, Tom had thought that he and Freida were in serious danger of becoming a permanent item. He could not consider leaving England permanently, he had children at school there and a business to run. This coupled with her refusal to leave Austria was causing obvious difficulties and then he’d introduced her to Heinrich one evening. He hadn’t seen her since that fateful day and surprised himself that he actually felt slightly nervous about the prospect even though she apparently had no such similar issues.

  He checked in, unpacked his bag and took his laptop down to the bar where, with Weiss bier in hand, he checked his emails. The usual detritus was in abundance. There were emails offering him medication for ensuring various parts of his anatomy became larger, more prominent and thus irresistible Emails threatening to suspend various bank accounts he didn’t have or to fill the bank accounts he did possess with cash from the Nigerian National Lottery, which he had apparently won at least a dozen times a week plus a host of other similar scams. Amongst all this however, and almost deleted by accident, was an email from Claire strangely sent from her office email address rather than her private one. What it contained certainly made Tom sit up and take notice. It was an official warning from Claire and copied to an sis.gov.uk address that Tom knew was MI6. It suggested that there was strong intelligence, from several sources, that the underground aircraft factory at St. Georgen Gusen was also a facility utilised for the production of nuclear weapons at the end of World War 2. Several of the liberated prisoners had exhibited signs of radioactive poisoning when they had been examined by medical staff as had a couple of American servicemen who were involved in the tunnel clearance. The German and Austrian authorities had quietly checked the whole area after the war but had found no signs of excessive radiation. Similarly the American and British military had checked everything taken from the factory and also failed to find any traces. The conclusion was that the sealing of the tunnels behind the factory had effectively contained whatever had be there but any new investigation now should be preceded by extensive radiation testing first. Tom re-read the text again and wondered whether Heinrich and the Austrian military were aware of this. He had just closed the email and taken another swig of his beer when his phone rang.

  “Tom, it’s me.” The familiar and welcome sound of Claire’s voice emanating from the handset, “are you alone?”

  “I should make some facetious comment like ‘apart from this stunning blonde sitting opposite’ but having just read your email I’m not feeling too lighthearted.”

  “It’s worse than you think. I couldn’t put everything in the email as I needed to copy it to Big Brother. My guys here have also told me that they’ve intercepted communications from our Russian nemesis of recent acquaintance who is apparently also aware of the situation. Not only that but, presumably through his ability to intercept emails and phone calls using the FSB, he believes there might still be useful and valuable material in that factory. He has very significant dealings with one or two rogue states who, we’re sure, would be extremely grateful if he could deliver to them some fissionable material.”

  Tom took another swig of his beer to give himself thinking time. “I’m thinking that my friend over here is probably unaware of the potential for some unpleasantness.”

  “We think that’s probably correct and maybe it would be a good idea if it stayed that way for the moment. My colleagues on Albert Embankment are sending you a detection device linked to them for you to test the waters as it were. They will advise immediately if it picks up something unhealthy so you need to keep your phone with you.”

  “I may just love you, do you know that?”

  “Say that again to my face when you get home and we’ll have more than a conversation about it. For the record I think I feel the same way so tread carefully!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Monday

  On the dot of 9 Tom was standing in the hotel entrance when Heinrich drove up. Having passed the normal morning greetings they pulled away from the hotel and Tom broached the subject of Claire’s email with Heinrich.

  “How serious do you think they are about this material?” Heinrich asked, confirming his prior ignorance of the possible presence of radioactive material in the complex.

  “Claire is not prone to panic or unnecessary histrionics from my experience. That MI6 seem to be also taking an interest suggests to me that there may be something to it.” Tom had purposely omitted telling Heinrich about Vassili Urosov’s possible interest. The thought of a rather crooked and dangerous Russian oligarch somehow interfering might just persuade Heinrich to consider abandoning the project.

  Heinrich parked the car outside the visitor centre and they both walked over to the large command vehicle the military had parked up outside the entrance to the underground factory. Climbing up the rear steps they both entered to find three officers huddled over a plan on the central table.

  “Come in Gentlemen, we have had something of a breakthrough.”

  After they had completed the introductions, the Captain in charge of the operation continued,

  “We sent one robot down into the machinery room this morning to look for the boy. It had no success with the boy’s body however what it found was folded diagrams of the pipework, cabling and services for the complex which are proving to be very interesting. If we check this off against the current plan of the factory as we know it there are some glaring inconsistencies. The factory was originally much larger than it is now, which we knew. Both the Nazis and the Americans blew up some tunnels bringing down the roof which effectively reduced the size of the space. What is strange though is that there are a few emergency generators dotted about but it shows two of them with dotted lines connecting them to the main grid but it doesn't describe an actual location for them. There are also some huge cables from the main power grid it shows with similarly dotted lines but without anything apparently connected to them. It could well be that the dotted lines merely show planned services that were never actually installed but they could also suggest that there may be a part of this complex that our services plan doesn't show.”

  Tom looked across at Heinrich for some support, receiving a shrug he turned back to the Captain and the other assembled officers and told them about the contents of his email from Claire. The room became totally static and silent for a brief moment as the enormity of Tom’s announcement sunk in. This temporary pause eventually broken by the captain grabbing a phone and barking orders down it. The room suddenly came alive with a babble of excited conversation.

  “Well that stirred them up didn’t it? What are they saying?” Tom asked Heinrich who translated some of the numerous conversations that had broken out.

  “It seems they’re in the process of shutting down the site, creating a large exclusion perimeter, and have ordered up a containment unit and apparently a specialist team will be taking over the whole project when they get here later today.”

  “I’m really sorry, I thought they’d just send down a
robot with a Geiger counter or something to check the atmosphere.”

  “Apparently they’re not allowed to. The military here are specifically forbidden from placing themselves in any known nuclear contamination situation. The robots can’t seem to make any headway over the piles of smashed machinery and masonry down there so they can’t use them. They seem to have only one option and that is to bring in the government appointed contractors.”

  Tom suddenly had a thought, “Do they have containment suits amongst their equipment here?”

  Heinrich had a brief conversation with a lieutenant who was still poring over the services diagram and turned back to Tom, “They do but cannot use them now they know that there is a likelihood of radioactive contamination.”

  “I’m not bound by their regulations. Could I go down there in a suit with some detection equipment? I’m pretty sure I could clamber over the rubbish and make it to the corridor outside the machinery room?”

  There was a further heated exchange between Heinrich and the officers culminating in the captain turning to Tom,

  “You must understand we cannot officially sanction this. You would do this entirely of your own volition. What I can say though is that if you can do this, and the air is clear, we might avoid having to shut the site down.”