Foo Fighters

by Daniel Wyatt

  Two more ferocious attacks came and went. Six fighters, in pairs, diving out of the sun, each with spurts of flames flashing off their wing guns. Then nothing. Where’d they go? Tooney relaxed and watched the formation breaking up the puffy clouds. Then he saw something... a strange object coming up swiftly, then remaining at a distance of two-hundred yards, weaving in and out of the clouds. It was shiny. Small, wide wings. Lump of a cockpit. What the blazes! He couldn’t recall any enemy flashcard image like this.

  “BALL GUNNER TO PILOT. WE HAVE COMPANY. FIVE O’CLOCK LOW.”

  “BE SPECIFIC.”

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL IT IS.” He cocked his guns, trying to bear down on the incoming... whatever it was. Remember, short bursts. Forget it. Too fast. “LOOK AT IT GO! SHE’S COMING UNDER. THERE IT GOES!”

  “TAIL GUNNER TO PILOT. I SAW IT TOO, SIR.”

  “WHAT WAS IT?”

  “HELL IF I KNOW, SIR.”

  “WHAT’S WITH YOU GUYS? DID IT SHOOT?”

  “NO.”

  “THEN MAYBE SHE’S ONE OF OURS. PILOT TO ALL GUNNERS. KEEP A LOOKOUT FOR ANY MORE.”

  Tooney pressed his intercom button. “I WILL, SIR.”

  What the hell was it?

  Northern Coast of the Antarctic Peninsula

  Inside the small cabin of U-344, the scientist held up his right hand in a Nazi salute, his left hand clutching a copy of Adolf Hitler’s bestselling book, Mein Kampf. He took a breath of the musty air, mixed with an acid smell of diesel fuel. It had been a long, boring sub trip since leaving Hamburg, except for the stopover in Argentina to refuel. Those two days in Rio was something, even for a married man like him.

  “With your left hand on the divine word, you will read the oath from the sheet, please,” the sub skipper explained, holding up a typed piece of paper for the scientist to read.

  It seemed odd to the scientist to be initiated by such a young man. The sub skipper — Manfred Stoeller — was, maybe, thirty. If that. Twenty-five or twenty-six was more like it.

  The scientist cleared his throat and began. “I, Otto Bauer, of my own free will and accord, and under the threat of my own death, solemnly and sincerely swear that I will always secretly hail and henceforth never reveal the cherished mysteries of the Order of the Knights of National Socialism and our ruler, the Commander Fuehrer, to the profane, those who are not chosen to stand by us in our global struggle. I furthermore promise and swear that I will protect any and every fellow blood brother of the Order of the Knights of National Socialism from the profane who seek to pervert or destroy our hallowed Order so help me the most excellent and worshipful lord of this world. Hail Commander Fuehrer and his divine wisdom.”

  Stoeller snatched the sheet from the scientist as they exchanged glances. “Otto Bauer, you are now a brother to the first degree of the Order of the Knights of National Socialism. Welcome to the elite fraternity.”

  “Thank you.”

  The two whiskered men bowed to each other, clicking their heels. The sub skipper reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a shiny medallion, the size of a large coin, and gave it to Bauer. The scientist fingered it. It was heavy, made of gold. Engraved on it was an ancient Roman soldier on horseback, with sword in hand, holding a Swastika flag, above it the letters KNS.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Stoeller.”

  “And, of course, this.” Stoeller carefully handed over a bright red sash. Embroidered on it was a black swastika on a white circle. “Wear them on your person when you meet secretly with other brothers of the Order.”

  “I will be delighted, Lieutenant Stoeller.”

  “Remember, I shall return in three months. At that time I will take you on an extraordinary journey.”

  “Where, may I dare ask?”

  “Under the Antarctic icecap.”

  “Under the icecap? Are you serious?”

  “Quite serious. Keep that to yourself. It’s your first closely-guarded secret of the Order. So is Neuschwabenland.”

  “What is that?”

  “The Fatherland’s territory already staked out here. Now, you must go. Your party on the surface awaits you. Heil Hitler.”

  * * * *

  For centuries, men only suspected that Antarctica existed. The Romans and early Greeks wrote of it. The Romans called it Terra incognita australis, meaning unknown southern land. New Zealand tribes spoke of the great white land to the south. In the early nineteenth century, whalers of many countries combed the nearby waters, but kept their hunting grounds secret. Then in 1838, United States Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes saw enough of the region to confirm that the Antarctic did exist, and in fact was a massive continent of ice, snow, and murderous weather. In 1911, Norwegian explorers reached the centre of the great landmass, and hence were the first to stand on the South Pole. Then, after thirty years of expeditions conducted by various countries, rumours leaked out in 1940 that the unknown continent contained important minerals. The Germans were there to see if the rumours were true.

  It was a sharp change for Otto Bauer, going from the depths of the chugging, diesel-powered submarine to the startling outside. Why here? he thought, as he and the sailor left the sub behind and began to row the rubber raft to the nearby shore under a grey overcast.

  Outfitted in fur-lined parkas, pants, boots, and mittens, they were dressed for the conditions. It was a few degrees below zero. The water was calm, not a breath of wind. The shore was shrouded in a ground mist. Couldn’t they find a warmer place to dig? Like Africa? Lots of minerals in Africa. Tons of them. He didn’t want to come here. But one part of him welcomed the challenge. Better than the rubble and ashes of beleaguered Germany. After a short time, the scientist flipped down his hood and looked out upon the glacial waters of the Antarctic Ocean, intermingled with a few large chunks of flat ice. Bauer shot a glance back to the open water where U-344 was fast disappearing in the fog, his last link to the Fatherland severed.

  Fifty yards from shore, the scientist could make out patches of bare rock shimmering through the mist. The stark wasteland gripped him, leaving him empty. This was awful country. For a moment his mind flashed to home, then von Braun at Peenemunde, and finally his two Arab horses boarded away in Switzerland, in a safe haven. He jerked his head at the sound of a shout that drifted across the water. A figure appeared, waving. To the far right, up from the water, was a jeep. The sailor waved back. They continued rowing, closer and closer to land, their breath steaming in the frigid air. Now in clear, shallow water, Bauer saw rocks below the surface. They pulled onto thick gravel. Bauer looked about. To his surprise, he managed to identify some lichens and mosses a few feet away. Life! There was plant life here.

  “Thank you,” the scientist said to his rower, steering onto shore.

  “Good luck.” The sailor handed the two pieces of heavy gear to Bauer, then took to the icy waters once again with a splash.

  “Heil Hitler.”

  “Heil Hitler!” the sailor replied, enthusiastically.

  Bauer turned to the figure he had seen earlier. He was a stout man, full-bearded face, with hardened, wind-burned skin. A man his age. This was more like it, thought the scientist. Someone past forty. At last, someone who remembered vividly Germany before Hitler, not like the wet-behind-the-ears kids on the sub. “Herr Raeder? Wilhelm Raeder?”

  “Yes. Otto Bauer?”

  “At your service, Herr Raeder.”

  “How is my friend, Wernher?” The man was well-spoken, his voice as clean and sharp as the Antarctic air.

  “Excellent. He sends his regards with a bottle of French wine — 1934.”

  “Ah, the best. Good old Wernher.”

  They shook hands first, then broke into abbreviated Nazi salutes.

  Raeder smiled. “Welcome to summer in the Antarctic.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It is twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit. One of our warmer days this week. Two weeks ago, the thermometer reached forty.”

  Bauer grinned. “In that case, Herr Raeder,
I should have brought my swimsuit.”

  “Don’t worry,” Raeder had to laugh. “We’ve got extras, should you require one. Hand me your bags. By the way, Otto, we use only first names here. And we don’t salute.”

  In the jeep, during the six-kilometre jaunt to camp, Raeder, the chief geologist of the German mineral expedition to Antarctica, filled Bauer in, as he drove slowly over the tracks he had made fifteen minutes before. “This time of year — the summer — is more conducive to mining, and we’ve been taking advantage of it. We’ve uncovered a huge deposit of coal, and traces of oil, copper, lead, zinc. However, many of the deposits are low-grade. Another drawback is drilling through the ice, snow, and rock. We’ve had heavy-duty equipment sent to us by cargo ship a week ago. We’re already using it. We’re progressing much faster now.”

  “What about light metals? Magnesium? Aluminium?”

  “Nothing... yet. But we’re still looking.”

  Bauer nodded, disappointed at the lacklustre news. Precious light metals in Antarctica still sounded too far-fetched to him.

  Raeder drove through the mountain pass, into a flat lowland of white, nestled below a sharp ridge. “There she is. Camp Berlin.”

  Bauer put his binoculars to his eyes. His throat tightened, taking it all in. “Mein Gott!” The scientist was amazed. Clustered together like a small town were tents and clapboard structures of various sizes. Two tents supported Swastika flags. Then his eyes fell on what appeared to be... telephone poles!

  “We have our own power station. The big hut in the middle. Shortwave radio, electricity, oil heating, all the conveniences of home. Up there, in the hills to the right, is one part of our drilling operation.”

  Bauer observed the ridge, returning his view to Camp Berlin itself. “Quite the place,” was all he could say until they drove the last two kilometres to the site.

  Reader slammed on the brakes in the centre of the huts, below a large sign on a four-by-four post that read SOUTH POLE 2,565 KILOMETRES. “Are you hungry, Otto?”

  “Yes, I do believe I am.”

  “Out we go. I’ll get someone to settle you in. Then I’ll join you for a meal before we set off to our first drilling site.”

  “Mein Gott!” Bauer said for the second time, looking around, as a welcoming entourage of bearded men appeared from a hut, dressed in shirtsleeves, breath steaming in the polar air.

  THREE

  Berlin — January 18

  It was a massive underground complex below the Chancellery, bursting with eight hundred people — typists, cooks, chauffeurs, secretaries, orderlies, aides, and advisors. Constructed to last centuries, it contained toilets, running water, small apartments, offices, dining rooms, and conference halls, all protected by six-foot-thick concrete walls. With pride, Adolf Hitler named it the Fuehrerbunker. Here, Hitler would make his stand with his faithful, living like a party of bats.

  Martin Bormann entered his fifteen-square-foot office of cold, grey concrete. Today was his third day in the Fuehrerbunker. He had come off a comfortable night’s rest, and had been sleeping soundly since his week-long trip to see his wife Gerda. Beneath a large framed picture of Hitler staring down at him, Bormann began his day by ripping the previous sheet off the day calendar on his desk. He looked around. Things were finally getting organized. Files put away. Boxes unpacked. He hated confusion.

  Bormann was content with the layout of the department. He had organized it his way, down to the last detail. He had three doors built in which to come and go. One of the doors opened into Josef Goebbels’s office, now empty, but soon to be occupied. That was perfect for Bormann. He’d keep an eye on the propaganda minister, the little mole, so he couldn’t get too close to Hitler. The second door opened onto the telephone exchange and communications centre, where Bormann could carefully screen all the messages to and from the bunker. The third door led to the conference room where all of Hitler’s meetings — arranged by none other than Bormann — took place. Hitler’s nearby private bunker contained eighteen rooms, complete with his own telephone exchange, powerhouse, washrooms, and a separate room for his dog, Blondi, and her pup, Wolf. Here, underground, Hitler once again was content to let Bormann deal with the people.

  Bormann leafed through the paperwork on his desk. Next door the powerhouse diesel engine, which supplied the ventilation and electrical systems for the entire bunker, banged away, a constant clatter that Bormann forced himself to get used to. Too bad nothing could be done about the stale air.

  Bormann looked up. His secretary, a member of his staff for three years, stood at the door. He smiled. “Good morning, Fraulein Krueger.”

  “Good morning, Herr Reichsleiter.” The pretty, thirty-year-old Else Krueger was a professional, all utterly business with her superior. “I have a message for you from Reichmarshall Goering. He will be arriving at the Fuehrerbunker at two this afternoon to see the Fuehrer.”

  “Thank you, Fraulein Krueger.” Bormann smiled. Ah, Herr Meier.

  “You are welcome.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, Herr Reichsleiter. That is all.”

  She turned to leave. Bormann watched her. She was the one woman on his staff whom he hadn’t fondled at work or slept with at night, because he knew she was one who wouldn’t put up with such advances. For that he actually respected his secretary. She was one of only three women he regarded graciously. The other two were Gerda and his mistress, the actress Manja Behrens, whom he had spent a night with on his way back to Berlin after the week with Gerda.

  * * * *

  The two superbly-uniformed men walked in the Chancellery garden, above the bunker, away from sentries patrolling the entrance.

  Reichmarshall Hermann Goering was a flag without a pole. Hitler’s official successor since 1940, Goering was a leader on paper only of an air force that barely existed except for a few airplanes and a handful of untrained pilots. Tired, shaky, considerably thinner in the last year or so, he was an old fifty-two, a heavy drinker, and a drug addict. He was in the Fuehrer’s doghouse since the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain in 1940. And it never got better after that. Following a poor showing on the Russian Front in 1942 and 1943, Hitler wanted to hang Goering along with his entire Luftwaffe of fliers.

  The Reichmarshall looked distraught during the walk with Bormann. Once the epitome of the socially prominent, once reckless, loud, egotistical, brutal, and extremely obese, Goering was only a crust of a man now with a bad hip that had bothered him since the Great War. “May God have mercy on our souls,” he had told Hitler when war broke out six years ago, when Germany was riding high. The war’s effects had carved yet more jagged lines in his placid face. He knew he never should have said what he did to the German press in 1939. “Not a single bomb will fall on the Ruhr. If an enemy plane reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Goering. You can call me Meier!” RAF bombers had not only reached and bombed the Ruhr repeatedly in the last three years, but they had razed Berlin too. Now, in early 1945, only one thing remained constant. Herr Meier still insisted on wearing his lavish, comical uniforms, as was the case today with his white battle dress full of shiny medals under his open greatcoat.

  Bormann listened impatiently to Goering’s complaints of his sore hip and sorry state of the Luftwaffe and the war before he finally spoke out of desperation to the Reichmarshall. “Our only hope is that crazy fighter-interceptor of yours, the V-4.”

  “The V-4?”

  “Yes. What the Allied papers call the Foo Fighter.”

  Goering came to an abrupt stop by the garden wall, scarred and damaged by the winter Allied bombing. “What are you talking about?” he blinked in disbelief, his breath steaming in the cool air.

  “The latest secret weapon. I know the codename. Projekt Equinox. The combined effort of Messerschmitt and the Peenemunde staff. Isn’t that what you came to speak to the Fuehrer about?”

  Goering swallowed, unable to speak. His hands, clutching his Reichmarshall baton, twitched slightly as he sto
od.

  “You can’t hide it from me,” Bormann continued. “I have pictures in my safe taken inside the underground factory in the Thuringia mountains.” Bormann did up another button on his coat to keep the cold out. “They show the radio-controlled models. Your operational tests, I’ve heard, have been quite successful. Your interceptors have shot down American and British bombers in the last two days. And what is this new pilot-controlled prototype at Peenemunde? I am also familiar with Camp Berlin. So there!”

  “Then you do—” Goering stood open-jawed, drawing back a step.

  “Close your damn mouth and listen to me, you fool.”

  “How dare you!”

  “We need each other, Goering. The war is as good as over. A blind man can see it.”

  “That can’t be any more apparent. A quick end to the war is inevitable,” Goering admitted. “It’s only months away. April or May, the latest.”

  “Then we agree.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “We have to get out of this mess. That’s why we created our fraternity in the first place. Certain people will want our technology. Americans. May I suggest a solution?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You and me, Goering, our safety in another country, in exchange for the blueprints to every Nazi secret weapon, except the V-4.”

  “Why not the V-4? I thought you just said it was our only hope.”

  “We hold it in reserve, to see if they negotiate without it. We give them the window dressing first. We spring the V-4 on them at the last minute, only if we have to. The less people see it, the better. Are you with me?”

  “You and me? An odd combination, wouldn’t you say, after all these years?”

  Bormann knew what Goering was driving at. They had never come remotely close to being friends. Without question, they had loathed each other. Bormann would now go to work on the Reich Marshall’s Achilles heel — his pride. “That was the past. Yes, Goering. You and me. No one else. Not Himmler. Not Goebbels. Not the Fuehrer. They are not members of the Order. Not anyone else. Too many cooks spoil the broth. I can’t trust anyone else. We — you and I — see things in a brighter light. We are the only two with a clear sense of self-preservation.”