London Stormbird

by Martin J Cobb

  “How big do you think that is?” Tom asked as they both stared hard at the anomaly.

  “I would think something like 10 or 12 feet across, can you fly the drone up the slope so we can see if there’s any obvious boundary we can see to give an idea of depth?”

  Tom did as requested and they could see that around 70 feet up the slope immediately above the vegetation seemed to increase in density along a distinct line. He flew the drone back and forth a few times to check and then bought it back down to just in front of him, caught it and shut its motors down. Having turned everything off he started walking back the way he’d come still holding the drone and transmitter.

  “Can you bring the case please?” he said over his shoulder to Claire who obediently picked up the backpack and followed Tom along the track.

  From close up it was much more difficult to spot the area where the vegetation dwindled and Tom ended up flying the drone again to a get a better perspective from above and at a distance. He left the drone hovering with its camera pointed at the right place and waited until they both appeared in the shot before recovering the drone again. Facing the wall of scrubby grass and alpine plants growing on the near vertical surface they both agreed that it all looked perfectly normal and natural from up close. Tom grabbed a handful of the grass and pulled and a large area detached itself from the stone behind. The roots of the grass and plants seemed to have entwined themselves together forming a blanket of vegetation with very little anchorage to the rocks behind. As the rocks were exposed they could see that, rather than the solid wall of rock they had expected, they were looking at a pile of rocks of all sizes.

  “If this is a rockfall,” Tom started, “and the slope here is around 45 degrees, if we assume that the boundary is some 45 feet up the slope that would suggest that this pile could go back as far as 30 feet or so if my maths is any good.”

  Claire considered Tom’s calculations and then got out her tablet computer, fired it up and opened up the 1930s map picture she’d downloaded showing the route of the Stelvio Pass Road at that time. She zoomed in to the area where they were now situated and could see that a small symbol was overlaid approximately at their current position on the old road. It was one of several along this road all spaced at fairly even distances. Scrolling round the map until she found the key she suddenly announced, “It’s a location where snow shovels and other tools were stored in case of emergencies. It’s some sort of niche cut out of the hillside and off the road.”

  Tom looked at the pile of rocks in front of them. “But why fill it in just because you’ve built a new road?”

  They both began pulling lumps of the blanketing vegetation off exposing more and more of the stones until they managed to find either side of the rockfall where the loose rocks became solid walls of granite.

  “I make it about 10 feet wide, that’s a pretty big pile of rocks to fill that hole.” Tom exclaimed.

  Claire spotted a stone with a particularly large gap around its bottom edge and put her hand around it and pulled. The rock came loose and just missed her foot as it fell to the ground. Several smaller stones followed its departure from the pile and a second larger rock slumped down partially filling the hole it had left.

  “Easy!” Tom said rather unnecessarily as Claire smartly stepped back to avoid any further rock attack. “I have a better idea.”

  With that he opened up the backpack again and extracted the endoscope he’d used back in the factory tunnel and which he’d managed to purloin when nobody was looking. He turned on the small monitor and plugged in the camera on its metre long springy wire. The tiny white LED at the tip lit up and Tom fed this through the gap Claire had just uncovered. By twisting and turning he managed to feed the whole metre cable into the hole but all they could see on the monitor was more rocks. He extracted the endoscope and tried a different gap about a metre away. This time he couldn’t feed in more than just over half a metre before meeting a large obstruction he couldn’t navigate around. Several more attempts at different places all met with the same, disappointing result.

  “Well, it seems to be a solid pile of rocks doesn’t it? I’m not sure what else we expected really although it could explain the heavier rockfall below.” Tom started disassembling the drone in preparation for their departure whilst Claire had a try at another spot slightly higher up and about halfway across the anomaly.

  “What do you make of this?” She suddenly asked as Tom closed up the backpack.

  Claire was holding the cable in one hand, unmoving, having managed to navigate the endoscope almost a metre into the pile. Tom looked over her shoulder at the monitor screen which appeared to be showing a very smooth, rounded rock somewhere in the midst of those jagged granite ones.

  “That’s odd, I haven’t seen any smooth, rounded rocks like that around here, they all tend to be very angular.” Tom said, “Can you wiggle it round a bit?”

  Claire tried moving the cable but only succeeded in losing the image of the round rock completely. She pulled and pushed the cable back and twisted it this way and that but all they could both see were the usual rough-edged rocks. Suddenly the camera flicked, presumably having just freed itself from some restraint.

  “Don’t move!” Tom shouted and gently touched the record button on the side of the monitor so as not to cause Claire to shift in any way. They both stared at the screen. What was presented to them on the screen was something obviously man-made looking like just over half of a circle with two radius lines which appeared to be about a third of the circumference apart.

  “I absolutely don’t believe it!” Tom whispered, “That oh love of my life, as if you didn’t know, is a Mercedes badge in the middle of that rock pile.”

  Claire jerked around to look at Tom and in the process obviously moved her arm and the camera view changed once again to barren rock. She turned off the record function and played back the video just to satisfy herself that what they’d seen wasn’t a figment of their imagination. There was silence between them for a good minute as they both reflected on what they’d found. Tom was the first to speak.

  “Why would somebody bury a Mercedes in a pile of rocks, assuming it is actually Mercedes vehicle and not just a random badge discarded which somehow ended up here?”

  Tom’s voice shifted slightly higher as he continued.

  “Why would somebody bury a Mercedes in a pile of rocks on the Stelvio pass Road? There must be much better places to rid yourself of a vehicle you don’t want with far less effort?”

  His voice rose another notch.

  “Do you think there could be any possibility that there’s actually a Mercedes inside that rockpile which could be the very same Mercedes the Bolzano prisoners stole from their Nazi Commandant? And if so do you think there’s any possibility that this buried Mercedes could still contain gold?”

  Tom finished the rhetoric questions with his voice having achieved an almost shrill note and volume and sat down on the path exhausted by the massive implications of the questions he’d just posed.

  It was if the act of sitting would enable greater intellectual capacity for thought.

  “No idea; No idea; Yes and Yes in that order.” Claire replied instantly sitting down on the path alongside Tom and now deep in thought.

  “You’d better call Heinrich.”

  Tom nodded and pulled the phone from his pocket.

  Heinrich had agreed to meet them later at the hotel despite Tom’s refusal to tell him exactly why he wanted him to stay over rather than return to Linz as he’d planned. They’d returned to the car and driven the short distance to Trefoi again, this time in search of some equipment. Having found a general store in the village they managed to purchase a small pick, shovel and a long crowbar and fended off the questions asked by the storekeeper who seemed, quite naturally I guess, curious as to their intentions. Returning to the site they set about the rock pile with barely contained enthusiasm.

  Several minutes of hacking, levering, clawing and swearing an
d Tom paused and surveyed their handiwork.

  “This is ridiculous. All we’re doing is littering the track with rocks without really achieving anything useful. As fast as we remove rocks another lot cascades down. I’m going to climb the pile and try to remove some from the top. I’ll toss them down to you and you can pile them up down the track.”

  In a somewhat more organised fashion they set about their respective tasks and, after some 20 minutes of heavy toil, were rewarded with a substantial pile of rocks blocking one exit of the track and a distinctly depleted outer wall of the rock pile.

  “I seemed to have found a bit of a gap here between two large rocks, can you pass me the endoscope and I’ll see if I can feed it down?”

  Claire passed the endoscope up and Tom dropped the camera into the hole he’d created at the top of the rock pile. After some wiggling he finally exclaimed “Got it!” and started the recording. He gently moved the camera cable back and forth with further wiggling and Claire watched a smile creep across his face.

  “This you have to see.” He finally declared, switching off the recorder and scrambling down the rockpile. Eagerly he played the video just taken and pointed the monitor towards Claire. As the dim and very narrow beam of the LED light wiggled back and forth the unmistakable three-pointed star of the Mercedes badge came into view and rapidly disappeared again as the camera traversed what appeared to be a very battered panel, which once must have been streamlined in a series of swooping compound curves. Another wiggle and a rough round hole with edges bent back in a ragged tear appeared centre screen, obviously a bullet hole. As Tom had wiggled the camera around further parts of the panel’s outline appeared. Then, just as he was about to shut down the recorder to extract the camera, there was a fleeting glimpse of a long chromed piece of trim. Tom pushed and pulled the endoscope cable to the left and found another similar trim piece some distance away from the first as far as he could tell.

  With renewed energy Tom scaled the rock pile again and started removing more rocks. After almost half an hour of continuous work he declared himself totally knackered, to the relief of Claire who sat down immediately panting with the exertion of lugging the rocks around by hand. She passed him up the endoscope again which he fed into another hole he’d created further up the slope and to the left where the rocks seemed larger. This time he found that, by removing a last rock, he could get his whole arm down into the hole he’d made plus the metre long camera cable almost vertically straight down without much wiggling. He reckoned the camera head was probably now only around 2 metres from the bottom. Once again it was a picture of grey rocks roughly piled on top of one another that displayed on the monitor. He turned the camera cable around in his fingers to swivel the viewpoint and suddenly, out of the darkness there was a flash of light. He turned the camera back and forth a few times and got the same flash of light every time he passed a certain point. He pulled the camera cable up an inch and tried again. This time there wasn’t a flash of light, what he could see was a silvery round item with what looked like a conical shape one end where it disappeared out of shot. The flash of light was obviously a reflection of the LED off whatever this was. Having recorded a short video, Tom withdrew the endoscope and clambered down to an exhausted Claire.

  “I need a drink.” He stated to which Claire replied, “I need a bath and a drink.”

  Tom downloaded the video files to Claire’s tablet and emailed them to a friend of his in England who worked for a major auction house specialising in vintage and investment cars.

  “Barry is a bit of an expert on vintage cars, Mercedes in particular. I’m hoping he’ll have some idea of exactly what we might have here. I’m pretty certain it’s not a truck or van as that badge is nearly horizontal and from what I remember Mercedes commercial vehicles tend to be near vertical at the front and have much larger logos on them.”

  Claire looked at Tom quizzically, “What difference does it make what sort of Mercedes it is, surely we’re interested in what might be in it?”

  “Do you have any idea what some of these cars are worth? Some pre-war Mercedes have fetched seven figure sums at auction?”

  “I bet they weren’t rusty and crushed by a mountain of rocks though.” grumbled Claire in reply.

  They packed up their gear and drove back to the hotel. After checking back in yet again and unpacking their bags Tom presented Claire, who was in the bath by now clutching a large gin and tonic Tom had acquired from the bar for her. Leaving her to soak, he went back to the bar to find Heinrich sitting on a stool at one end with two beers in front of him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Not so Secret

  “Well?” Heinrich asked without preamble as Tom perched himself on the bar stool alongside and grabbed one of the beers. He took a long swallow and replaced the glass on the counter.

  “I think there’s a good possibility that we may have found the Mercedes that the Bolzano prisoners commandeered.” Tom responded. Heinrich rewarded Tom with a look of total astonishment.

  “Is there any more gold in it, where is it, have you got any pictures, when can I see it?” Heinrich blurted out in an excited babble.

  “It’s buried in a pile of rocks near the Stelvio Pass and we will need some proper gear and help to get it out. I have absolutely no idea whether there’s anything in it.It was all we could do just to get some poor video footage recorded using the endoscope. Claire’s having a bath but when she comes down we can go over what we found in detail and show you the videos. What’s new your end?”

  Heinrich gave Tom a rundown of the events surrounding the theft of the bomb. He described the decoy aircraft, the shoot up in Lviv and the recovery of the bomb. He also recounted the progress at the factory and the extraction and dis-assembly of the Arado. The visitor centre was being repaired and the recovered gold from the truck was now safely in a government vault somewhere. The one slight worry though was that they had discovered, by accident apparently, that the gold bars were slightly radioactive. One of the recovery crew was testing the radiation monitors, prior to packing them away, somewhere near the box with the 18 gold bars in and one suddenly registered.

  “The levels are not high enough to be a concern but point to the bars being irradiated by close proximity to a radioactive source of some kind.” Heinrich paused in his report having spotted Claire walking across the reception area towards the bar.

  “Now, show me the video.” He demanded as Tom called over the barman to order some refills.

  “Zdravstvujtye.” The swarthy man dressed in multi-coloured bright ski gear spoke into his phone. He had moved to the car park outside the hotel to make this call to his employer. Vassili Urosov, on the other end of the call responded with a demand for a report.

  “The targets are all in the hotel bar at the moment, I am recording their conversation. I left a digital voice recorder running inside a folded magazine I left on the bar counter. I will retrieve it later and upload the file onto the cloud storage facility.”

  “Let me know when it’s available for me to listen to.” Vassili cut the connection without further conversation.

  Returning to the bar, the swarthy man removed his ski jacket and sat on one of the bar stools recently vacated by Tom, Claire and Heinrich who, he could see, had moved on to the restaurant. Ordering up a vodka he surreptitiously clasped the magazine at the end of the bar counter and removed the small gadget from inside which he slid into his pocket.

  With a vodka refill he removed himself to a corner of the lounge away from the bar and the barman and plugged a cable into his phone and the other end into the audio recorder. After several minutes he satisfied himself the audio file had uploaded and disconnected the device. The text he sent to Vassili Urosov was a single word, ‘completed’.

  Some 800 miles away Vassili Urosov sat at his desk in the newly installed office on the second floor of his Bucharest mansion listening intently to the rather muffled audio recording made earlier that evening. When he reached the part wh
ere Tom described the find of the Mercedes he paused the playback and dialled a number on his phone.

  “Get to the Stelvio Pass area immediately, I want you to be close when Stroud and his team exhume and old car from under a pile of rocks somewhere on the Stelvio Pass Road. I believe that the car contains boxes of goods which I need you to take from them. Be prepared to meet forceful resistance although I would like you to take every precaution possible to avoid creating an incident. I will brief you fully when you arrive.” He hung up and then immediately called an International number.

  “Please inform His Highness that I fully anticipate delivery of his goods within days now. I have also authorised a small bonus as an apology for the slight delay and as a gesture of friendship and goodwill.”

  The monosyllabic Arab accented voice at the other end of the connection responded bluntly, “I shall pass on your message.” And promptly hung up. He then dialled another number and, when answered, spoke equally bluntly. “Do nothing yet but remain on site and keep the target under close surveillance until you receive further instructions.” Closing this connection he rushed away to request an immediate audience with His Highness the Prince.