possible that the flight was so highly classified by the Nazis that no details of it were ever committed to paper.
After the war, various places were suggested as the location of the 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 Bodo 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 too tiny 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 interrupt when I’m talking. I couldn’t give a toss whether you like sport or not. I’ve got any number of coppers queuing up to be on duty in a stadium when some of the events are being held. But we need other bodies.”
The Metropolitan Police inspector-the name on his door was S. R. Davidson-paused for a moment and glanced down at a note on his desk. Then he looked back at Bronson and smiled. “To be specific, I need somebody with certain talents and abilities, and I’m told you’re the ideal man for the job.”
“What talents?” Bronson asked suspiciously.
“You’re big and bolshie and nobody here knows you. Now open the door.”
“What?”
“You deaf or something? Open the bloody door.”
Bronson turned round and pulled open the glass door he’d closed behind him three minutes earlier.
As it swung wide, Davidson bellowed: “Curtis! Get in here.”
“Jesus,” Bronson muttered, temporarily deafened by the inspector’s impressive vocal capability. “Can’t you use an intercom or something?”
“Broken,” Davidson replied shortly, as a heavily built man, whose appearance and dress sense seemed closer to Bronson’s casual scruffiness than the inspector’s sartorial elegance, got up from his desk and ambled over to the door of the cubicle.
“Boss?”
“Remember that SLJ we discussed the other day, Bob? Detective Sergeant Bronson here is going to take care of it for us.”
A smile spread across Curtis’s face as he looked Bronson slowly up and down.
“And what shitty little job is that, exactly?” Bronson asked.
“Bob will explain everything,” Davidson replied, looking slightly miffed that Bronson had recognized the acronym he’d used. “Take him away, Bob, and fill him in.”
“A pleasure.”
Curtis led the way across the squad room to his desk.
“Grab one of them,” he said, pointing to a stack of dark gray metal-framed chairs with plastic seats.
“Popular man, your boss, is he?” Bronson asked, taking the top chair from the pile and sitting down in front of Curtis’s desk.
Curtis grinned at him. “Not so’s you’d notice, no. He’s one of that new breed-fast-track coppers. Gets a degree in knitting or something and then joins the force, aiming for a chief constable slot before he’s fifty. Frightening thing is, he’ll probably make it. His initials stand for Steven Richard, by the way, but round here everybody calls him Shit Rises.” Curtis paused and glanced across at Bronson. “Been in long, have you?”
Bronson nodded. “A few years, yes. But I was in the army on a short-service commission before I joined the force.”
Curtis smiled again and looked to his left, toward the officer sitting at the adjacent desk. “That’s a tenner you owe me, Jack.” He swung back to face Bronson. “Had a small wager running,” he explained. “Jack figured you for another graduate fast-tracker like Davidson. But I reckoned he was wrong because you look like you’ve been around the block a few times.”
Bronson thought that worked out as a compliment.
“I hadn’t planned on making chief constable,” he replied. “For one thing, I’m not a Mason, and in any case I don’t think I could handle the bullshit that comes with the job. Talking of jobs, what’s this nasty surprise you’ve got planned for me?”
“It’s not that nasty,” Curtis said. “In fact, you might even enjoy it. But it is really important, because we’re running out of ideas.” There were about half a dozen files sitting in an irregular pile on one corner of his desk, and he reached across and pulled out the bottom one, which was also the slimmest. He flicked through the first couple of pages before looking up at Bronson again.
“Let me give you the background. Pretty much ever since London won the bid to hold the twenty twelve Olympics, there’ve been cases of sabotage and malicious damage at the various venues. At first, we thought it was the usual mindless vandalism that you get in every major city, but over the last three months or so it’s become
