His condescension rubbed her the wrong way. “Oh, really?” she replied. “I understand a great deal more than you realize, Herr Doctor. If you really want my help, I suggest you don’t start by insulting me. Remember, it was you who flagged me down.”
“I mean no insult, mademoiselle. Please believe me. But if you are so intent on knowing what we are doing here, a picture will be worth ten thousand words.”
“Fine,” she replied. “Show me.”
“But it is such a long walk up the mountain. The path is steep, and we may have little time.”
This could still be a trap, she thought. But less fearful voices in her head spoke with calming certainty, telling her she’d been around enough Boche military men to know that there was absolutely nothing military about Doctor Franz Offenberg.
“Forget walking, Herr Doctor,” she said. “We’re losing the light. We’ll ride. Climb on the back.”
“Is this motorcycle powerful enough to climb the mountain?”
She replied, “As long as we’re not looking to break any speed records, then yes, it is.”
As he mounted the motorcycle’s rear seat, Offenberg said, “Forgive my manners, mademoiselle, but I haven’t even asked your name.”
She thought of replying with Sylvie Bergerac, but instead she told him, “No apologies necessary, Herr Doctor. My name is Isabelle Truffaut of Affaires Civiles.”
At a quick glance, this place looked like a far more serious venture than what she’d uncovered at Engelhardt Farm. Clinging to the side of the mountain—yet obscured from view in every direction, even from planes flying overhead—Doctor Offenberg and his team of three scientists could carry out their work, whatever it was, in absolute secrecy.
There were three wooden buildings, single story, each the size of a roomy family home. She heard the hum of a petrol-powered generator and noticed the power wires strung overhead. There was a water tower—a sizeable metal tank propped on wooden stilts—with a rain-catching funnel on top. The tank was high enough so slim pipes could carry water to the compound’s various facilities under pressure.
Very Boche, she thought. All the comforts of home in the middle of nowhere. I’ll bet there are even working toilets.
“Who built this place?” she asked.
“Prisoners.”
“In other words, slave labor,” she said.
He merely shrugged.
Pointing to the farthest of the buildings, Offenberg told her, “That is our residence, where we scientists live.” He went on to explain, “The one in the middle, that is the quarters of the SS.”
“How many SS are here?” she asked.
“There were eight,” Offenberg replied, “but only two remain now, the sturmbannführer in charge and a rottenführer still loyal to him.”
She knew the ranks. An SS sturmbannführer was equivalent to an army major. The rottenführer was a junior NCO. She smiled as she imagined how the Yanks and Brits would pronounce ROTTEN-führer, the o sound of the German becoming an ah, complete with all the disrespect they could inflict.
“So what happened to the other six?” she asked.
“They all tried to flee, hoping to escape the Russians. Four of them apparently succeeded. The other two…”
He pointed to a compact mound of earth that was very likely an unmarked common grave.
“They were killed trying to escape?”
“Yes, Isabelle. The sturmbannführer caught and executed them.”
“These SS men, though…the live ones. Where are they now?”
“They’re seeking a vehicle large enough to transport all of us, as well as the results of our work, deeper into the mountains.”
“You mean they’re trying to steal one?” she asked.
“I suppose so.”
She frowned. None of this was making sense.
“But they’re not here, Herr Doctor. Nobody is watching you. And even SS men must sleep sometime. Why don’t you just leave?”
“The sturmbannführer has standing orders to kill us if we try to run away, just like how he tracked down and killed his disloyal subordinates. Besides, we don’t know where to go. He has told us the Russians are very near. We would prefer not to blunder into them. Besides, any escape attempt on our own would be folly. You must either travel the roads—in plain sight and clear jeopardy—or go over the mountains. And we are not mountaineers.”
“It’s amazing what you can do when your life depends on it,” she scoffed. “You said there are four of you and two SS. Why didn’t you just overpower them?”
“You don’t know Sturmbannführer Hoffman and Rottenführer Becker, Isabelle. Our attempting to overpower them would be folly, too. We scientists are unarmed, you see.”
“So you want someone to rescue you, but who exactly are you being rescued from? The SS…or these imaginary Russians?”
“Both.”
“And you really don’t know how to get out of here?” she asked.
“No, that’s not what I said. We just don’t know where it’s safe to go. Whether you listen to London or Berlin, the shortwave broadcasts about the war’s progress are nothing but lies.”
Sylvie—Isabelle—replied, “You do realize you’re only about twelve kilometers south of Immenstadt, don’t you?”
He seemed heartbroken to learn that. “Only twelve kilometers…” he said softly.
“Yes, and you’re now well behind the lines of French First Army.” She pulled the road map from her pocket and showed him.
That seemed to give Offenberg hope. His face brightened as he asked, “We are near the Americans, then?”
She smiled: All the Boche want to do now is surrender to the Americans. They’re betting their lives that the Yanks have the smallest historical ax to grind with them.
“Yes, Herr Doctor, the Americans are only twenty kilometers to the east at the moment.”
“Will you take us to them, Isabelle?”
“I can’t take you all anywhere on just one motorcycle,” she replied. “But I can have the French military police here in force just as soon as I get back to Immenstadt.”
The sound of that terrified Doctor Offenberg. “But if we’re still here then, Isabelle, and your military police try to storm the place, the first casualties will likely be me and my colleagues. The sturmbannführer will consider it his duty to kill us rather than allow us to fall into Allied hands.”
Sylvie knew the SS too well to dismiss Doctor Offenberg’s fears out of hand.
But one question still burned inside her. “Just what is it you’re doing here that makes you so indispensable to the Reich yet so easily disposable, Herr Doctor?”
Before he could begin an answer, they heard a voice, its source unseen, shouting an alarm: “They’re coming back!”
A lookout clambered down from his concealment in a tall tree on the edge of the compound. Once he hit the ground, he came running toward them, saying, “We must hurry and hide her!”
The lookout was, like Offenberg, a man of military age. But he, too, didn’t strike Sylvie as being military. Too boyish and bookish, he seemed more suited to the academic life than soldiering.
“How far out are they, Braun?” Offenberg asked him.
“Just turning off the road now.”
“We only have a few minutes then,” Offenberg said. As he and Braun began to push her motorcycle, he added, “Come this way, Isabelle. Hurry!”
Behind the third building—a workshop with no windows and large, barn-like doors at one end—lay a cave in the mountainside. A corduroy road made of split logs crisscrossed the compound and ended at the cave, which was large enough to accommodate a military truck. But there were no vehicles on the compound except Sylvie’s motorcycle, which they hurriedly rolled inside.
To get the cycle to the rear of that cavern, they had to walk around and through an enormous metal contraption comprised of vats, pipes, and a boxy unit that looked like an industrial furnace. Sylvie thought the assemblage resembled something she’d
once seen at a winery. The odor of the place, however, was nothing like the pungent sweetness of wine making. It smelled more like the foul stench of ozone after lightning had struck the surface of a lake or an ocean.
“What is this thing?” she asked.
“There’s no time to explain now,” Offenberg replied. “Hide yourself here and do not, under any circumstances, come out. The SS will not come in here unless they have good reason to. Don’t give them one. One of us will come back when it’s safe to do so.”
She opened her jacket to reveal the pistol. “I’ll be fine,” she said, giving the weapon a friendly pat. “Perhaps it would be better if your SS men did come in here.”
“No, please!” Offenberg replied, shaking his head in alarm. “No gunfire in this cave! It’s much too dangerous.”
They could hear a vehicle entering the compound.
“That’s a car’s engine,” she said. “You were expecting a truck, no?”
Offenberg didn’t know how to reply, as if he was overloaded with inconvenient details. As he and Braun turned to leave, he asked, “That pistol…have you ever killed anyone with it?”
“Not with this one,” Sylvie replied. “You’d better hurry along now and tend to your SS masters.”
As they walked away, she wished she hadn’t said it quite so nastily.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Doctor Offenberg had been right. The SS men never came near the cave. In fact, nobody came near the cave. The sun had dropped behind the western peaks, throwing the compound into deep shadow and the cave into darkness. There were electric lights strung along the roof of the cave, but for the Germans to turn them on now might seem suspicious, she surmised. Light or dark, however, she knew she dared not sleep.
But if she was careful with the flashlight in the motorcycle’s saddle bag, she should be able to at least take a good look around the cave.
She’d gotten used to the foul odor of the place. Food and drink were no concern, either, at least not for another day. There was still a full canteen of water in the saddle bag, along with some bread and cheese. Even an apple, which she’d planned to save for a late night snack back at her quarters in Immenstadt. But with each passing minute, it was becoming more likely that this cave would be her quarters tonight. Driving the winding mountain roads in the dark was dangerous. Assuming she could even get out of the compound without starting a gunfight with the SS and putting the scientists in jeopardy.
It was well past 2100 when Offenberg returned to the cave. He brought food and wine. “I’ve had something to eat already,” she told him. “But a little wine would be most appreciated, thank you.”
She took a few sips from the bottle only after she’d watched him do the same. “I wouldn’t try to poison you, Isabelle,” he said, quite serious. “You’re our only hope.”
“I think you need to tell me a great deal more about the situation here,” she replied. “I’ve been reading some of the papers lying around the cave, as well as the markings on the equipment. I must confess I don’t understand any of it. Tell me, what is uranium?”
For the next thirty minutes, Offenberg provided her a layman’s outline of how uranium, once it was enriched in a device such as the one they were sitting next to, could be used to create a weapon of extraordinary destructive power.
She remembered when Luc Vachon had told her of the rumors of a weapon that could kill tens of thousands at a single stroke.
This must be it, she thought.
Offenberg went on, professing a complete command of the science involved. He seemed less confident, however, on the success of their efforts to actually enrich the uranium to the all-important 235 isotope.
“It’s all been too slow,” he said. “Even at our laboratory in Berlin, we lacked some of the material we needed to expedite the process, like the heavy water from Scandinavia used to moderate the diffusing process. Once the bombing forced the Reich Ministry to move us to this place, we had even less access to what we need.”
“How long have you been here in the mountains?” Sylvie asked.
“About a year. Since we put the diffuser into operation—that’s the device you see all around us—we’ve only produced about five kilos of uranium 235. Add that to the ten kilos left behind at the Berlin lab—if that hasn’t already been destroyed—and we’re still far short of what we need to make a weapon.”
“How much do you need?”
“About fifty kilos for one weapon,” Offenberg replied.
After a long silence, he added, “But that is not the fault of the scientists.”
“Why not, Herr Doctor?”
In the darkness of the cave, she could just make out the amused smile on his face as he thought how best to answer her question.
“Let’s just say there was a convenient lack of involvement at the highest levels. The German military was only interested in weapons that could be put to use quickly, and atomic weapons simply took too long to produce. They were quite happy with the weapons they already had, so there was no driving need for our research.”
“So why are you still doing this work?” she asked. “And at great risk to yourselves, apparently.”
“I’m not sure I should be telling you any more of this, Isabelle.”
“How much more damning could it be, Herr Doctor?”
“You’d be surprised, my dear,” he replied.
As he stared wordlessly into the darkness, she was sure he’d said all he was going to say.
But then he added, “I suppose I have no choice but to put my complete trust in you, Isabelle Truffaut. So I will tell you the rest.”
He then described what the life of a physicist was like in the Third Reich. Many of the scientists had been Jews and fled Germany before war had broken out. The others—faced with the prospect of induction into the Wehrmacht and the high probability of a posting to the slaughterhouse of the Russian front—concocted an elaborate deception:
“We were able to convince the Ministry of successes we were not really achieving. While they put no strategic stock in the weapons we may or may not have been producing, as long as there was some indication of progress with our research, they found no reason to shut us down, so our physicists were spared being forced into the military. It has been a very delicate tightrope walk, I can assure you.”
She believed him. But there was still one thing she couldn’t accept. “I still don’t understand how, in all this time, Herr Doctor, you didn’t just walk away from this place if you feared for your life so deeply.”
“I’ve explained that already, Isabelle.”
“Yes, I know you have, but I still have trouble with it.”
“I can tell you are a woman of action, Isabelle Truffaut. Even violence, perhaps. I suspect you are—or at least you might have once been—a member of the French Underground the SS men spoke of.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Herr Doctor.”
His smile made it clear he didn’t believe her lie. But she was not about to divulge one bit of her past. She didn’t need to negotiate anything away. She was not the one asking for favors here…
And I’m still not convinced Offenberg and his scientists wouldn’t run back into the arms of the Nazis if the wind blew that way. I either bring them in to the Allied authorities, complete with their research, or they can rot in hell.
“Very well, then,” he said. “But try to see it all through my eyes. This war will end, one way or the other—”
“Yes,” she interrupted, “it will end very soon, with Germany’s total defeat.”
He shrugged. “Even if that is so, my work—our work—will still go on. It must go on. It is of crucial importance to science that it does. We Germans know more than any other group of scientists in the world about harnessing the mysteries of atomic energy. We must live—we must survive this war—so we can continue our work.”
“Believe what you like, Herr Doctor,” she replied. “But at the moment, our most pressing need is getting
you off this mountain.”
Maybe the SS men really don’t sleep, Sylvie wondered. The lights in their quarters have been on all night. I can see their silhouettes walking past the windows at all hours, too.
But something would have to be done about them, and quickly. From what Offenberg had told her, they desperately needed a large truck if they were going to abandon this facility. Besides the six men, there were dozens of bulky boxes full of research papers, data that held the key to unlocking the power of the atom. If any of it was lost or left behind, it might take months—maybe years—to recreate it.
It was no wonder that escape in the SS men’s car had been out of the question. The vehicle was a BMW sedan with minimal space for cargo. Six men could have squeezed into its front and rear seats, along with the compact steel cylinder for transporting the uranium, but all the boxes of data wouldn’t fit inside, on top, or in the boot of the car. Offenberg told her that once there had been an Opel truck—a standard Wehrmacht cargo vehicle in nondescript paint—at the facility’s disposal. But that was the vehicle in which the SS men who successfully fled had made good their escape. The search for a replacement vehicle available for the stealing had to continue.
Going into the SS men’s quarters is too risky, Sylvie told herself. They’d better show themselves before sunrise, so I can make my move on them under cover of darkness.
Just before 0500, she got her wish. The scientists were awake now. Their house was lit up inside, and she could smell meat cooking. With light spilling into the compound from the windows of both quarters, she could see movement near the BMW: two men—tall and broad-shouldered—were putting satchels in the sedan’s back seat. Then the two hulking shapes of Sturmbannführer Hoffman and Rottenführer Becker walked to the scientists’ quarters.
Breakfast time, I suppose. But I wonder what’s in those bags. Tools? More weapons? Schmeisser machine pistols would fit easily.
From her hiding place behind a corner of the SS quarters, she could see they were wearing civilian clothes. Each had a fairly large handgun on his belt: Walther automatics, I’m guessing. She could see something else, too: They both have their pistols on their right side, so they’re both right-handed. Very good to know.
Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3) Page 21
