The Proteus Operation

by James P. Hogan

  "That's a point," Cassidy agreed.

  "The saddest part's the big toy stores," Selby said. "They're all trying to keep up a business-as-usual face with lonely Santas sitting around among mountains of train sets and dolls, but there aren't any kids. They were all evacuated out of the cities at the beginning."

  "But they are starting to trickle back in again, especially with the time of year," Warren added.

  One lump of sugar for the coffee was allowed per cup. Each person received one pat of butter and one of margarine for the rolls, and the waiter pointed out which was which.

  Ferracini turned his head to scan the room after the waiter had left. "Is this place safe to talk?" he asked.

  Warren, nodded. "It's okay. We checked it before you guys arrived."

  "Then about the mission—what happens next?" Ferracini asked. At last—this, of course, was what had been burning in all their minds.

  "We're gonna go in and take out Ay-dolf's return-gate," Cassidy said before Warren or Selby could reply. "Why act like you don't know, Harry? None of us thinks we came along just for the ride."

  Nevertheless, all eyes remained fixed on Major Warren. He seemed unsurprised. Nobody had expected him to be. He nodded.

  "Where is it?" Payne asked.

  Warren frowned in the act of raising his fork to his mouth, and hesitated. "You've all come a long way, and the subject isn't really appropriate to this evening," he said. "Leave it until tomorrow, okay? It's going to be a busy day. First thing in the morning, we'll be coming back here to pick you up for breakfast with Claud, Anna, and Arthur. After that, you're all going to meet Churchill and Professor Lindemann for a preliminary briefing."

  "Is that when we get to meet the British half of the act?" Ryan inquired.

  Warren shook his head. "Forget it." The others exchanged puzzled glances.

  "There isn't going to be any British half," Selby explained.

  "Just us—everyone here except Gordon," Warren said. "He has to stick around to help get a bomb program moving if we don't make it."

  Ryan frowned. "So what happened to this idea of getting British replacements for the backups we were supposed to have gotten from JFK back in July?"

  "That's out," Warren said. "The politics between the British and the French stinks. The generals are all playing ostrich with their heads stuck in the last war. The staff in London doesn't get along with their commander in France. He doesn't get along with the French, and none of them gets along with the war minister. Some of them have even started bitching behind each other's backs direct to the King. Warren shook his head. "It's all a mess. I've talked about it with Claud, and we've agreed we'd be better off staying out and running our own firm in our own way."

  Six men were going to pit themselves against what was probably the most secret and heavily protected place in Europe—or, very likely, anywhere. Ferracini slumped back as the enormity of what Warren was saying hit him. He caught Cassidy's eye for a second, and for once even Cassidy seemed dazed. Selby, watching, attributed their expressions to fatigue. "Anyhow, you guys have come a long way. Let's save it all for tomorrow and try to get some sleep tonight, eh?" It was all right for Selby. Selby wouldn't be going.

  Cassidy leaned back in his chair. "Just us, period, or will we be using local contacts?" he asked.

  Warren waved his hand decisively in front of his face. "Not another word about it until tomorrow morning," he ordered. "Gordon, tell us again what you were saying earlier about that crazy horse and cart."

  "There's a famous old firm of hatters in London, called Scott's," Selby told the table. "They've always used a horse-drawn delivery van—a kind of tradition now. It's very distinguished, with nice woodwork all painted and varnished, and liveried coachman and footman in cockaded top hats."

  "Well, I saw it this morning trotting down Bond Street with everything just the same as usual, except that the guys have traded their hats for steel helmets—I guess until the war's over." He shook his head. "These people . . . I don't know . . . I'm not sure it's so inevitable that Hitler will walk all over them. Sometimes I still think it could go either way."

  "We all know what happened last time," Lamson drawled laconically.

  "True, but they were under the wrong management," Selby said. Then he added, "If only something could be done about that. . . ."

  Payne caught the curious note in his voice. "What are you trying to say?" he asked.

  Selby glanced uncertainly at Warren. Warren gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and Selby steered the conversation to other things.

  Later in the evening, after the dinner party had broken up and the others had turned in for the night, Ferracini, Cassidy, and Ed Payne caught Selby on his own in a quiet corner of the lobby. "What did you mean earlier, Gordon, when you said something about changing the management?" Payne asked as they sat down around him at a table.

  "Oh, nothing really . . ."

  "Who do you think you're kidding?" Cassidy said. "Come on, give. We're curious."

  Selby hesitated, then emitted a long sigh and nodded. "Anna's convinced that Claud and Arthur are up to something that they're not letting on about," he said, lowering his voice. "Claud has taken more key people into his confidence over the gate and what's going on in the U.S. He says it's to stiffen the country's morale, but Anna doesn't think that's the main reason."

  "What does she think, then?" Ferracini asked.

  "That Claud's meddling again," Selby said. "It gives him direct access to more of the nation's policy shapers. He's having dinner tonight with Lord Salisbury and Leopold Amery, which is why he wasn't here. They're both among the people who have been saying some pretty tough things about the way the government's been handling the war so far. You see, it broadens Claud's base for pulling political strings. Chamberlain might be a sincere guy and all that, but he's just not a war leader. Churchill's the only one with any fighting spirit in the whole War Cabinet. Anna called him "a cuckoo put in a nest of baby hedge-sparrows." Now she thinks Claud is carrying out preparatory maneuvers to capitalize on having gotten Churchill in there."

  "You mean some of the sparrows might be kicked out before much longer?" Payne said.

  "That," Selby agreed. He paused for a moment. "Unless the idea is to bring down the entire British government, which might explain why Claud and Arthur are being so secretive."

  The others stared at him incredulously. "Surely not?" Payne protested. "Not even Claud would try to pull off anything as audacious as that."

  Selby smiled in a strange, humorless kind of way. That's exactly what I told Anna," he said.

  "And what did she say?" Payne asked.

  "She agreed," Selby replied. "She said her imagination must, have been running away with her. Why, it would be almost as audacious as trying to go back in time to change history!"

  CHAPTER 29

  LONDON IN DAYLIGHT STRUCK Ferracini as a caricature of a city at war. The superficial trappings of wartime were in evidence everywhere, to be sure: shop windows boarded up or crisscrossed with adhesive tape; balloons overhead; signs over sandbagged entrances indicating public airraid shelters; lots of uniforms on the sidewalks; but the people seemed like the mildly embarrassed hosts of a lavish masquerade party trying to act as if nothing had happened when none of the guests had shown up. Many of them were no longer bothering to carry their gas masks, he noticed, which the American newspapers had made a big thing of back in September.

  All the superficiality reinforced the impression he had formed before leaving the U.S. that England still didn't fully realize that it was at war, or if it did, nobody comprehended what war with modern totalitarianism meant. In September, the country had been grimly resigned to a mood of "let's get it over with." But since then the officially promulgated horror stories had been proven wrong, and the people had concluded that they'd have been better off trusting in their own instincts all along. Now all authority was suspect, if not openly ridiculed. Foreigners—Germans, Italians, French, Russians;
they were all pretty much the same—were too excitable and not very bright. They just needed to be left alone for a while to sort out their squabbles and calm down. Then everyone would be able to forget the fancy dress and other nonsense, and get back to being decent and civilized.

  Yet at the same time it was a pleasantly different England from the one Ferracini had known previously. The grimness and the crushing despair that had come after years of universal impoverishment, material and spiritual, were absent. And there wasn't a swastika to be seen anywhere. In the tradition that had remained unbroken through centuries, it was free.

  That was the whole problem with the English, Ferracini was beginning to see: They were simply incapable of conceiving how things could be otherwise.

  The preliminary briefing for Ampersand took place in a vault beneath the Admiralty buildings on Whitehall, which on Churchill's instructions had been permanently reserved for undisclosed, highly classified naval business. All ten of the Proteus team now in England, i.e., everyone except Mortimer Greene and Kurt Scholder, were present, along with Churchill, Lindemann, and a confidential secretary to record the proceedings.

  Ferracini had learned something about Churchill during Proteus training, as had all the team, and had gleaned more from further reading during the months at Gatehouse. He knew that Churchill had fallen from favor in the Great War, made enemies among British socialists and conservatives alike, and was alleged to be erratic and impetuous. But against that, Churchill had been one of the few who had consistently foreseen and warned of the dangers that others were only now beginning to wake up to, and he had died gun in hand behind a barricade, defending what he believed in. In Ferracini's book that said he couldn't be all bad.

  Besides that, Ferracini had never found reason to doubt Claud's judgment. As he stood in a corner sipping tea—he was learning already that the English couldn't do anything without having a cup of tea first—and watching the stocky, red-haired, bulldog-jawed figure standing by the shrouded table in the center of the room and grumbling to Winslade about bureaucratic pigheadedness and red tape, Ferracini could sense already that Churchill was an exception to the general picture he had begun to form of the British. Back in 1975, Claud had fought hard to get the mission planners to accept Churchill as the first contact. Ferracini was already responding to Churchill's personality, even though Churchill hadn't as yet really said anything. Whatever else might be going on between other English and French generals, politicians, or whomever, Claud had found the team a good general manager. It was a shame, Ferracini thought, that he couldn't do the same for the whole country.

  The session began with a few introductory words from Churchill, in which he welcomed the newly arrived Americans to Britain and expressed the hope that many more would be following before it was too late. Then Winslade picked up a pointer and took the floor, while Major Warren let down a set of successively larger-scale wall-maps showing Europe and parts of Germany.

  "I'm sure there's no need to tell you what the objective is," Winslade began breezily. He glanced around to confirm his guess, then raised the pointer to indicate a region just over a hundred miles southwest of Berlin. "From this moment on, the Nazi return-gate will be referred to as 'Hammerhead,' " he said. "It's located here, in the Leipzig area, deep underground at the chemicals and munitions plant near Weissenberg." He paused and looked around expectantly.

  "Leipzig? Cassidy repeated. He looked at Ferracini.

  "That was where we went on that other assignment back in '71 or '72 . . . to bring back those papers and stuff that somebody had copied from some local archives."

  "Purely a coincidence," Winslade said with obvious insincerity. He turned and unveiled the table in the center to reveal a detailed model of the Weissenberg plant. "The target, gentlemen," he said.

  The site was roughly square and, from familiar kinds of structures and the vehicles that had been included to indicate scale, looked about a mile or so along a side. The back lay along the bank of a river, probably the Elster, and consisted mostly of loading docks and moorings for barges. One side of the plant was flanked by trees cut back to leave a clear strip outside the boundary fence; on the other side, the land rose toward a bluff of open, rugged high-ground overlooking a bend in the river. The front faced an expanse of open ground that ended at a workers' residential suburb of Weissenberg, consisting mainly of brick rowhouses.

  A road and rail spur led in via a freight entrance, and a branch of the roadway ran outside the fence for some distance to the large main gate. The fence itself was unremarkable for an industrial installation, a high wire construction with floodlights at intervals and a number of small side gates.

  A cluster of what looked like office and laboratory buildings stood inside the main gate, and behind them stretched a confusion of factory buildings, processing towers, storage tanks, reaction vessels, smokestacks, and vats, all tied together in tangles of pipework, roadways, rail sidings, and canals, along with all the other paraphernalia of a large chemicals manufacturing complex. Whoever built the model had even added a few puffs of cotton-wool smoke to some of the smokestacks for realism.

  But there was also something odd, Ferracini realized as he looked more closely. And now that he had noticed it, it continued getting odder. In a remote corner of the site, on the uphill side toward the bluff, a much smaller zone projected out from the main site area like a later addition, but was fenced off from it. A separate road and rail link branched off the spin-outside the main plant and followed the perimeter to enter the fenced-off zone through its own, formidable-looking gate.

  Everything about this appendage seemed out of place. The constructions inside it were squat, windowless, and solid-looking, with sloping walls, suggesting more a fortress or a system of blockhouses than anything connected with the rest of the plant. The surrounding enclosure consisted of three well-spaced fences with the strips between filled by tangles of barbed wire. And the watchtowers at the corners and halfway between looked as if they contained more than just floodlights.

  "Quite an asset to the German war economy," Winslade commented after a suitable pause. He moved forward and pointed out various details. "For the most part it conforms to standard layout. The area over here is devoted to bulk chemical processing. This inner fence—here, along here, and around to here—encloses the munitions manufacturing compound, which produces heavy artillery shells and Luftwaffe bombs. Filling and assembly of the shells takes place in this group of buildings . . . of bombs in this group . . . and the finished products move through to final storage here, by the railhead, before shipment out. There's also a 'specials' section, here, which handles things like on-off experimental devices and low-volume test hatches. Casings aren't manufactured on site, but come in by rail."

  Winslade moved around a corner to reach the rear of the model. "The power plant is at the back by the coal-yard and unloading wharves, and the place next to it is a central boilerhouse for raising process steam. The buildings inside the front gate are administrative offices, and the ones behind, quality assurance and research labs. Here, outside the front gate, is the works' cafeteria and social club. This is the medical center, and that, a training school for apprentices."

  There were no questions. By the time they left, everyone going on the mission would know the place as well as the streets they had grown up in. Winslade quickly scanned their faces and then went on, "But there is something unusual, as I suspect some of you have noticed already. His manner became less casual as he tapped the pointer on the casematelike buildings of the fenced-off corner annex. "Here, in 1935, the Ordnance Department of the German Army began constructing a research and testing facility for secret work on explosives and rocket propellants. Because of the nature of the work, and because those who mattered knew that war would be only a matter of time, it was built underground, and its surface buildings made bomb-proof. However, when the basic construction work was completed two years later, the Nazi high command ordered the site to be handed over to the Todt c
onstruction organization of the SS. Hammerhead was dismantled, moved there, and reassembled from a place it had occupied in the Bavarian Alps—not far from Berchtesgaden, as a matter of fact, which was why Hitler's mountain retreat was built there."

  Churchill interjected, "My first reaction was that only a lunatic would put a vital installation that close to a munitions plant. However, I am assured it would be unaffected even if everything on the surface blew up at once."

  "It's more than strong enough and deep enough," Lindemann confirmed.

  Winslade put the pointer down, slipped one hand into his jacket pocket—he was outfitted as a British naval officer that morning—and made a sweeping gesture over the model with the other. "On the other hand, this location offers many advantages. No one will question the need for security. Strange-looking objects going in and out will attract no undue attention. It has good road, rail, and water freight-handling facilities. And it lies within easy traveling distance of Berlin."

  He turned and gazed hack at the model. "The surface portion of the installation that houses Hammerhead is referred to by the people at the plant as the 'Citadel.' All that the average worker knows is that it's a place the SS owns—you stay away from it and don't ask what goes on inside. Hammerhead itself is situated several hundred feet below in an artificial rock cavern, behind concrete roof, walls, and floor all tens of feet thick."

  "There are two elevator shafts giving access, one at each end. The main one is under the large hexagonal blockhouse that the rails disappear into, there, and there's a smaller emergency shaft at the rear. Each shaft is protected by its own system of alarms, armored doors, and guard posts. A permanent garrison of three hundred fully equipped SS infantry is housed inside. Both shafts connect to the facility on two levels. The connecting corridors are covered by observation and gun ports and can be sealed off from the inside. As an additional precaution, the approach passageways are also protected by gas-injection and flame-throwing devices." As he finished, Winslade wheeled to face the Special Operations squad and beamed at them challengingly.