1945 (32 page)

And look at the current aftermath of that war: the fallen enemy was being
coddled,
and carefully converted to a civic philosophy designed to make future war between the two nations nearly impossible. What a difference if the Home Islands had fallen to the Reich. Radl pictured the endless convoys carrying all the wealth of Japan home to Germany.... No, the Americans would not use this bomb of theirs, not as long as its frightfulness was enough to stop others. To stop us. When it came to world conquest, Americans just didn't get it. How could one feel passionate hatred for a people like that? What point?

And finally, what did he
care for
anymore? Except for Otto, his friends were all buried in Russia on land that fat party members now scrambled for like medieval barons. Our blood, our sweat, he thought. Their profit.

Karl Radl suddenly realized that he was finished. Out of boredom as much as anything he had thrown himself into this mission and its intricate planning as if it were nothing more than an intellectual exercise to while away the long boring days of peace. But if peace was burdensome, war no longer held the promise it once had of honor and glory. He chuckled softly. As if it had ever actually contained those things, rather than a mere mirage of them that obscured war's single reality: death and misery in all their guises.

Perhaps after tomorrow the questions would be moot, he thought. The Party will have of me what it wants, and I shall have what it seems I want. Karl Radl sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. The flight turned southwest, chasing the night that receded before them.

April 19,10:00 P.M.

Harry's Crop Dusting Service & Flight School

"Bury him in the woods."

Skorzeny looked down at the body of Friedrich Bachman, whose head lolled obscenely to one side, victim of the trademark Skorzeny neck-break. A thin, dying stream of blood trickled from the nostrils.

Silently, two of his team picked up the corpse and disappeared into the darkness.

Skorzeny looked over at Gunther, who seemed a little bemused by the quickness of it all. "He was panicked. If someone from the government were to have returned he'd have started talking for certain. We can't take the risk, not now."

Gunther nodded in agreement. His surprise was strictly a matter of Otto's earlier words. Nothing had changed since then—except Otto's opinion, and that change had led to swift and violent action. Well, Skorzeny was like that.

"So, I guess you're Bachman's hired hand," Skorzeny announced. "If anyone shows up, say that he took off to visit some friends down in Georgia for the weekend."

Skorzeny patted Gunther on the shoulder. "Can you pull off this American southern accent?"

"Ah reck'n Ah kin, if Ah put mah mand to it," Gunther replied with a smile.

April 20,8:00 A.M. The Oval Office

Andrew Harrison looked up from his desk, where he had been sitting for the last sixty minutes. When it came to getting up in the morning, the American President remained a Nebraska farm boy. His mother would have approved.

"Mr. President." It was Mayhew, standing just inside the door. "Mr. Donovan is here to see you sir, as scheduled"

"Send him in, John."

"Thank you for seeing me at such short notice, sir," Donovan said as he walked toward the President.

That's all right, Bill. I'm sure it's important or you wouldn't have asked."

The head of the OSS started to take a seat before the President's desk, but Harrison rose and motioned to the overstuffed furniture and the fire.

"I have some updates, sir," Donovan said quietly, as they settled themselves.

"Go on."

"Though we still don't have a clue regarding the new German coding system, we can at least tell that they've taken to rescrambling every four hours. They haven't done that since the armistice with England. And then there's this Oak Ridge situation."

"What about it? Have they caught that damned superspy yet?"

"We might have a lead on him. I sent three people down there, including Martel. You remember him, the one who—"

"Yes, yes. The letter. Go on."

"They were checking out some possible leads and Martel believes they've found Skorzeny and his team. They're holed up at an airstrip about forty miles east of Oak Ridge."

"Does Hoover know about this?"

"My head of operations informed his FBI counterpart last night. They claim they already checked out the location and it came up cold. They're focusing on another airstrip."

"And you think Martel's pick is hot?'

"Martel's been right more often than anybody else, sir. His partner is staking out the airstrip right now. They'll keep an eye on it until they get some support."

"Well, I don't want to overrule Hoover, but. . . send some of your own people down as backup. If we have a war coming on, the last thing we need is damage at Oak Ridge."

"That is just what I was going to suggest, sir."

"And is that all, Bill?'

"Yes, sir, it is. I didn't realize you would anticipate and grant my request this way. I wanted to be sure I had a chance to make the case in favor of the ... irregularity."

Harrison nodded. "Oh, I'm with you on this one, Bill. There's just something too strange about what's going on down there, and the FBI has been consistendy wrong on everything to do with it." The President paused, shook his head in irritation. "I can sympathize with them though; it is confusing. What do the Germans have to gain from all this? I can't understand what it is they think they're doing."

"That troubles me too, sir. There's something not right about all of this. Skorzeny is their top man, and they're wasting him. Leading from the front the way he does, there is very little damn chance he gets out of this country alive once he initiates an op. And there's nothing they can do to Oak Ridge that's worth losing him over. Hell, there's nothing they can do to Oak Ridge that's worth making us mad!"

"And so?" the President prodded.

Donovan looked at him with angry frustration. "I don't
know,
sir. All I know is that we have to be missing something."

Harrison, who had leaned back in his chair and wearily closed his eyes, stirred and looked at Donovan. "Well, if all you have is a feeling, I can sympathize with the Bureau not taking the whole thing too seriously."

Donovan winced at the rebuke. "All I can tell you sir, and vague as it may sound this is a professional judgment, is that Skorzeny knows something we don't. Something important." Donovan winced again, as unhappy with the useless "advice" he offered as the recipient obviously was. This really wasn't the way he'd pictured this interview going.

He tried again. "Let's try to think it through. Why Skorzeny? He's not the spy type, not even the sabotage type. His forte is the sort of special ops for which large numbers of men are required. Maybe somehow he's gotten more people in here than we think."

"According to Groves, ten times as many as we think he has wouldn't be more than an annoyance," Harrison replied. "You don't think he could have salted away
hundreds
of agents, do you?"

"No sir, I don't. No way more than fifty, tops. Absolute tops."

"Then ... ?"

"This is where we came in, sir. Skorzeny knows something we don't."

Harrison apparently changed the subject. "I was speaking with Winston a little while ago."

"Sir?"

"He thought he had an answer."

Donovan said nothing, politely.

"In-air refueling. He says the Germans are much farther along than we thought. He tied it in to some sort of low-level bomber exercise his intel has dredged up."

"Nothing doing, sir," Donovan said instantly. "We are on top of that area, as well we might be. Obviously it's of much more interest to us than to the English, since when the Germans perfect it their Luftwaffe will have intercontinental range. We have operatives all over that particular project, good German-American operatives. Maybe twenty or thirty planes could be serviced as of now, no more. Enough for a demonstration, and a bloody obvious demonstration at that. Dead ducks before they got past Iceland, once we had picket ships out. Hell, the carriers could deal with them without leaving port."

Donovan smiled back. "Curtis is right. We'd clobber 'em good if they tried it. When they have in-air refueling for fighters, then we'll worry."

"Or when their bombers carry A-bombs?"

"Yes, there is that, of course," Donovan admitted. "But sufficient unto the day, sir, and that's not a problem we have to deal with right now."

Harrison nodded, eyes unfocused, as if looking into the future. "No, not today." After a lost moment, Harrison shook himself and looked at Donovan again. "I guess that's about it?"

"Yes sir, that's about it. Thank you, sir."

April 20,2:00 P.M. Martinique

Karl Radl half-stood behind the copilot to catch a glimpse of the still-exploding wreckage less than fifty feet below, though now blessedly farther than that behind them.

"What happened?" Radl shouted.

The pilot, intent on holding the plane aloft as they skimmed over the ground, said nothing. Suddenly the ground slid away and they were skimming over the dark blue waters of the Caribbean. The pilot was still struggling to gain altitude. A rogue wave combined with a sudden gust could still kill them all.

A little altitude gained, the plane started to bank and Radl could see, this time from the copilot's side window, a plane come bursting out of the dark oily smoke, cutting swirling eddies as it did so. And at just the worst possible moment the crashed bomber fireballed, and the plane overhead was caught in the blast, its portside wing shearing off and the plane instantly collapsing to that side. When the nose touched the ground the bomber proceeded to cartwheel across the beach, but before it reached the water it exploded, sending enormous sheets and gouts of flaming gasoline out over the ocean. Even for a fully fueled bomber it was an impressive exit. . . . Damn! It was one of the precious tanker planes.

Inevitably, fifteen seconds later yet another plane appeared out of the smoke, this one banking hard to starboard so as to avoid the conflagration. Its right wing looked as if it would tear into the ground. Then it straightened out to skim low over the ocean and slowly gain altitude.

Radl's pilot finally looked back at him. "The first one lost an engine, the tire blew, or—well, we'll never know. As for what happened to the second, that was the natural result of taking off overloaded at fifteen-second intervals."

Radl nodded, saying nothing. At least it hadn't broken up on the runway. The pilot had simply kept on going, right off the end of the concrete strip and into the row of palm trees that fringed the edge of the beach several hundred meters downrange.

He heard the tower calling for the stream of bombers to stop their take-off rolls but the pilots simply kept going, one after the other, every fifteen seconds.

Eight planes lost to the strike now, Radl thought. Six bombers, a precious gunship, and now the equally precious tanker. One had gone down over the Atlantic, three had aborted back in Germany, two more after landing in Martinique and now two more at take-off. They were still within mission parameters, but barely.

Radl wiped the sweat from his face. The plane had been an oven during their four-hour layover while waiting to be refueled. He tapped the copilot on the shoulder.

"All right to go back to my men?"

"Yes. But don't let anybody else move around yet. We're right at maximum."

Radl unbuckled and moved aft, climbed down the ladder into the lower deck area.

"What happened back there, major?" one of his men called. "It sounded like an explosion."

"We lost a couple of planes at take-off."

"Any transports?"

Radl shook his head. "We've still got everyone. How are you boys doing?"

The men grinned, though some of them looked a bit ashen from the hours of sitting in hundred-degree heat without any ventilation. Now, however, the cabin was rapidly cooling as blasts of fresh air washed in.

"Now that we can breathe again, just setde back and try to grab some sleep. In less than eight hours we'll be getting out to stretch our legs a bit."

April 20,8:00 P.M. The North Sea

Erwin Rommel stared hard at where the spotter was pointing. The Mosquito was impossible to pick out with the unaided eye, but unless the spotter had gone mad it was definitely there, circling at well over twenty thousand feet. On the horizon he could pick out two more Mosquitoes sweeping across the far end of the convoy, hovering near the
Tirpitz,
which had just reported two British destroyers trailing them as well.

They're onto us.

He turned and looked back to the west. The western horizon was drifting into a dark indigo. According to th plan, it was time for them to turn to the west and start th high-speed run across the North Sea. Churchill h declared before Parliament that movement of Germ forces in or over the Channel toward Great Britain would be construed as an act of war. Presumably, as soon as th made the turn the British would feel free to start throwing things at them.