Echo of the Reich Read Free Page A

aircraft’s final landing. One of the most cogent and believable reports states that a multi-engined German aircraft was seen touching down at an airfield in the Entre Rios Province of northern Argentina in May 1945.
    Another report describes various witness sightings of a six-engined aircraft, provisionally identified as a Junkers Ju-390, being dismantled on a German-owned farm in Paysundu Province in Uruguay at about the same date. Some of the local residents also reported that the parts of the aircraft were then taken to the River Uruguay, which is over a kilometer wide at this point, and thrown into the water.
    A third report suggested that the aircraft had a very much shorter flight, and landed near Bodø in Norway, though this might of course have simply been an interim or refueling stop as part of a much longer flight, and it seems probable that if the aircraft had remained in Norway it would have been seen and reported by somebody, and most probably seized by Allied forces.
    What is certain is that at the end of the Second World War nobody knew where either the aircraft or its unusual cargo had been taken, or exactly what the secret device constructed in the Wenceslas Mine was intended to do.Current researchers believe the project designation implied that it was a weapon of some description, probably a very early type of weapon of mass destruction, but since 1945 no definite information has been recovered about
Die Glocke
and nobody had any real idea of its function or its purpose.
    Until now, that is.

1
    17 July 2012
    “Can I just say something?” Chris Bronson asked. “I dislike sport to the extent that if you gave me a Cup Final ticket, I would rather pay you money than have to go and watch the match.”
    “Is that right?” The Met inspector looked distinctly unimpressed. He was sitting in a battered swivel chair behind a large but extremely cluttered desk—files stacked in piles on both sides of it—in a glass cubicle at one end of a squad room in a police station in east London’s Forest Gate. Bronson was standing in front of him. He had no option—there was no other chair, not even enough space for one, in the tiny office.
    The walls behind the desk were plastered with the usual selection of notices and leaflets, everything from Health and Safety directives—which looked noticeably clean and unread—to part of a faded page of newsprint apparently cut from the
Evening Standard
, the print tootiny for Bronson to make out the story. Other notices were attached to the glass walls of the office, but Bronson guessed that their principal purpose was less to convey information than to provide the inspector’s tiny sanctum with some slight measure of privacy.
    In marked contrast to the cluttered and untidy office, the inspector was impeccably dressed in a light gray suit, the material of which shimmered slightly every time he moved his tall, slim frame. Bronson didn’t have to glance down at the floor to know that his black shoes would have a mirror-polished sheen; the man exuded an almost palpable aura of elegance. His features were even and regular, with a neat and slightly aggressive mustache that conveyed a military bearing.
    Bronson was supremely conscious that he cut a rather less than impressive figure by comparison in his crumpled suit, slightly grubby shirt and black loafers. Nor could he blame the state of his attire on the train and tube journey up to Newham; he hadn’t, he realized, looked all that smart when he had left Tunbridge Wells that morning.
    “Well, let me tell you something, Detective Sergeant Bronson. I don’t give a damn about your views on football or any other sport. You’ve been sent here by that bunch of yokels who laughably call themselves the Kent Police Force to help us out. Not that we can’t manage by ourselves, but we do need a few extra bodies on the ground while the Olympics are on, and you’ve been selected as one of them.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “Don’t