From a distance, the five barges looked like any other tied up to the bank of the Danube near the Austrian city of Linz. But as Eight Ball rumbled closer, Sean could see the barbed wire fence forming a perimeter along the riverfront, preventing access to the vessels from land. There was some sort of barrier in the water around them, as well, designed to make an approach from the river difficult, if not impossible. Red signs hung on the wire, which read, ZUGANG VERBOTEN—access forbidden. Beneath those words was the skull and crossbones symbol for poison.
“We got about a dozen Krauts on them barges,” Sean radioed to his platoon. “I think they’re waving white flags. I’m gonna get closer and check it out. The rest of you spread wide, hang back, and stand by. No shooting unless they shoot first.” Then he radioed Captain Pollack and asked for the loudspeaker truck to be brought up.
As Eight Ball drew closer, there was no doubt the Germans were waving white flags. A soldier in an officer’s cap threaded his way through the wire toward the tank. Watching his approach, Fabiano said, “They got poison on them barges? You don’t suppose—”
Sean cut him off. “Don’t suppose what? You ain’t talking about wonder weapons again, are you?”
“Just sayin’, Sarge. Just sayin’.”
“Do me a fucking favor, Fab. Don’t say nothing, okay?”
The German officer was close enough now for Sean to see he wore the insignia of a major. He seemed to be welcoming them rather than surrendering. In fluent English, he said, “Thank God you Americans got here before the Bolshies.”
“What the fuck is a Bolshie?” Fabiano asked.
Sean replied, “Another name for a Russian, I think. Now shut up and let me talk with this Kraut.”
The talk was more interesting—and more unnerving—than Sean had imagined. The barges were loaded with some five thousand artillery shells filled with Sarin, a highly potent nerve gas. The major said, “I’ve been tasked with making sure that no one uses these rounds, not you, the Russians, or my own army. After not employing them the entire war, my general does not wish to inject chemical weapons into this lost cause now.”
Captain Pollack had joined them. He asked the major, “Make sure no one uses them? How did you propose to do that, exactly? It doesn’t look like there are very many of you.”
“You might have noticed how difficult it was for me to get through the wire,” he replied. “That’s because the area around the wire is mined. The water barrier is mined, as well.”
“You don’t have to worry about us,” Pollack replied. “We won’t go near anything with nerve gas in it. But my general is going to take control of this stuff, you realize?”
“Yes, of course,” the major replied.
“Good. You are all my prisoners as of right now. Have your men start clearing and marking paths through the minefields wide enough for heavy vehicles. I don’t need any of my men hurt or killed accidentally.”
“But Captain, we’re not sappers,” the major protested. “Mine clearing is not our specialty. We don’t want to get hurt or killed accidentally, either.”
“Tough shit, major,” Pollack replied. “If my grandmother knew where those mines were like you do, she could dig them up without hurting herself, but she’s old and slow. You’re not, so get busy.”
They all watched the major trudge back through the mine field. It was obvious when he told his soldiers about digging up the mines; the body language of men who’ve just been given a shit detail was universal.
“Look at those assholes,” Sean said, enjoying the spectacle. “Stomping around and waving their arms like that’s gonna do any good. No discipline at all. It’s disgusting, I tell you. This sure as hell ain’t the same Kraut Army we’ve been fighting the last three years.”
Then he noticed Fabiano was white as a sheet. The gunner asked, “The Kraut said Sarin gas, didn’t he?”
“Yep,” Sean replied, figuring that Fabiano was flashing back to the training films they’d seen where actors mimed the twitching, convulsions, and horrible death that quickly ensued from a nerve gas attack. He knew something else, too:
“Hey, Fab…I bet you wish you never threw that gas mask away now, right?”
“Everybody threw ’em away, Sarge,” he protested. “It wasn’t just me. Hell, you threw yours away, too! Said we’d never need the damn things.”
With a shrug, Sean said, “When you’re right, you’re right.”
“Damn right, I am, Sarge. One whiff of that shit can kill the whole fucking battalion. Or a whole fucking city.” Then Fabiano paused, creating a moment of tension like a prosecutor about to deliver the climactic statement of his closing argument.
“So, Sergeant Moon, do you or do you not agree that nerve gas is a super weapon?”
“All right, Fab, all right. To a bunch of joes with no gas masks, yeah, it sure is. Now shut the hell up.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
At Schwechat, the rain and overcast continued through the night and into the next day. With little to do, Sergeant McNulty suggested he and Tommy take a road trip. He asked, “You ever heard of this place on the other side of Vienna called Ass-burn, Captain?”
“You mean Aspern, that bombed-out airfield, Sarge?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. You ever been there?”
“No. Never had the time. I heard the place is nothing but rubble, anyway.”
Wagging a scolding finger, McNulty said, “Ah, but there can be treasures in that rubble. You ever heard of the Amerika Bomber?”
“Yeah, who hasn’t? Just another myth about Kraut super weapons, the way I hear it.”
“With all due respect, Captain, myth my sweet ass. It’s sitting there, big as life. Bigger, even. Wanna go?”
Tommy didn’t have to think about it very long. It was better than just sitting around doing nothing. “How are we going to get there, though? We can’t drive around the city. The Russians here may know who we are, but out there…”
“No problem, Captain. We’ll get Mischenko’s little girlfriend to drive us. Being real close to the general and all, she’s got the horsepower to go anywhere she damn pleases.”
Fifteen minutes later, Tommy, McNulty, and Mischenko had piled into a jeep driven by Sonia Alexiev. Crossing the Danube on a surprisingly intact bridge, they drove through the bombed-out city. Tommy thought it looked even more devastated from the ground than the air, and he told them so.
Sonia replied, “You realize, Captain, that only about twenty percent of the city has been severely damaged?”
“Really? Where’d you get those numbers, Sergeant?”
“From my general’s staff reports, of course, Captain.”
Tommy puzzled over the number for a moment. “Twenty percent, huh? I’ll tell you what…if this is twenty percent, I’d hate like hell to see what fifty percent looks like.”
“Then perhaps you should not visit Stalingrad, Captain,” she replied.
As they drove on, Tommy came to realize what McNulty meant concerning Sonia’s horsepower. They’d passed through any number of checkpoints, and at most of them, the jeep never even stopped. The guards merely saluted as she drove right through.
Must be something about the markings on this jeep, Tommy thought, like it’s got General Kozlovsky’s name all over it.
At the few checkpoints where she did have to stop, the barrier arm was lifted and they were quickly on their way once she flashed a document she was carrying.
Nice to have friends—or lovers—in high places, he figured.
McNulty leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Hey, Captain…you know the Krauts had a Heinkel aircraft factory at Schwechat?”
“Yeah, I heard. I even walked around those hangars once, but there was nothing in them but dust and bird crap. It looked like Sergeant Alexiev’s pals had already cleaned the place out pretty good.”
Sonia looked shocked. She said, “Captain Moon, please tell me you are not calling the brave Soviet fighters of the Great Patriotic War a bunc
h of looters.”
But she couldn’t keep up the scolding charade for more than a few seconds. The Americans breathed a sigh of relief when she started to laugh.
“Looters? Oh, perish the thought, Sergeant,” Tommy replied. “You know, we Yanks are pretty good at appropriating things, too.”
Still smiling, she asked, “Appropriating…you mean stealing, correct?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“We do not consider it stealing, Captain,” she said breezily. “We consider it due compensation.”
It was obvious Aspern was once an active airfield, but Allied bombing and the Soviet assault had put an end to all that. The paved, intersecting runways were pocked with bomb craters, rendering them useless. The hangars looked like the skeletal remains of their former selves, with roofs blown away, walls crumbled, and floors nearly impassible with rubble and fallen steel girders.
One hangar was much bigger than the others. Inside that hangar sat an enormous aircraft, its coating of dust and debris giving it a ghostly gray pallor. It was the biggest plane they’d ever seen, easily dwarfing any Allied heavy bomber in the skies over Europe in every dimension. It had six radial engines, each spinning a huge three-bladed propeller. There were four main landing gear—one protruding below each of the four inboard engine nacelles—with two enormous tires on each gear. The tires would have looked even more enormous—and the plane sitting even taller—had they not all been flat. Even the single tail wheel looked bigger than a main wheel on his P-47.
For all her grandeur, she was extensively damaged and nothing more than another piece of war refuse. Probably unable to fly when the Luftwaffe pulled out of Vienna, she’d been abandoned to this undignified fate.
McNulty stood beneath her nose, arms outstretched, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, behold the mighty Amerika Bomber. Even if she is in decrippled condition.”
Seeing the puzzled look on Sonia’s face, Mischenko beat Tommy to the translation, whispering, “The Sarge means decrepit, I’m pretty sure.”
A close inspection of the ship and her markings revealed she was a JU-390, the Junkers offering in the Reich’s quest for an aircraft that could bomb the eastern shores of America. They were so fascinated with her that they ignored the rain falling through the many holes in the hangar’s roof as they inspected every inch of her from ground level.
“I’d really like to get on board,” Tommy said.
“Gonna need some kind of ladder for that, Captain,” McNulty replied. “I’ve been trying to eyeball one ever since we got here. But it looks like someone ransacked the shit out of this place real good.”
That’s when they realized that Mischenko and Sonia were nowhere to be seen.
McNulty said, “Don’t tell me those two are off playing hide the salami while we’re being all technical and shit.”
Tommy saw them coming first. They were carrying a rickety-looking wooden ladder, with one of them at each end. He called out, “Where’d you find that? You must’ve read our minds.”
“We’d like to see inside that plane, too, sir,” Mischenko replied. “Sonia figured she knew a place where this thing might be hidden. Just watch that rung in the middle. It’s broken.”
They placed the high end of the ladder against the slab-sided fuselage next to an open hatch. “Must’ve been some kind of waist gun port or something,” McNulty said as he climbed through. Once inside, he added, “Yeah, looks like there’s a gun mount right here.”
It was dark and dusty inside the plane as they made the uphill climb to the taildragger’s cockpit. They were disappointed when they got there; most of the cockpit equipment—flight instruments, gauges, panels, even the control wheels—had been scavenged. One set of gauges hadn’t been removed: the fuel quantity indicators. Tommy added the full amount for each gauge in his head, hardly believing the number he’d come up with. “This thing says it’ll hold forty-two thousand liters of fuel. That’s eleven thousand gallons! Even with six engines sucking that gas, this thing could probably stay airborne for a solid day. Lumbering along at typical heavy bomber speed, I’ll bet this thing could make a circuit to New York and back. Maybe not from this far into Europe…but from Belgium or western France, for sure. Couldn’t carry much besides all that fuel, though.”
McNulty said, “Boy, could you picture this monstrosity cruising over the Statue of Liberty or something? I’ll bet that would make ol’ Mayor LaGuardia shit his pants. How many of these things the Krauts got, you think?”
Sonia Alexiev provided the answer: “There were only two. Neither has been serviceable for some time.”
Tommy said, “You read that in one of your general’s staff reports, too?”
She smiled and nodded.
“Ain’t that something,” McNulty said. “The Krauts got jet planes we don’t have, and now we find they had something like this, too. With all these super weapons of theirs, how come they ain’t gonna win?”
“Simple,” Tommy replied. “They don’t have enough of them. A case of too little, too late. Our stuff might not be as technologically advanced, but it works just fine. And we’ve got lots of it. Besides, this thing’s got to be a sitting duck on a long-range mission because no Kraut escort fighters can fly far enough to stay with it…unless they got some based in Greenland or something. And the ack-ack batteries would cut it to shreds. It’s such a big target that even a kid with a BB gun could hit it.”
McNulty leaned back in the co-pilot’s seat and stared out the grimy windshield, still in awe of this massive machine. “I can’t get it out of my head, Captain…this thing flying over New York City, throwing its big shadow on the ground. I’d hate like hell to have my mother, my wife, or my kid look up and see this baby hanging over them.”
Her voice cold as ice, Sonia said, “Be thankful you were not in the Soviet Union. It was like that every day.”
Then she handed her camera and submachine gun to Mischenko, slid between Tommy and McNulty, and said, “Adam, take our picture. I want my mother to see that I met real Americans.”
“Hey,” Mischenko protested, “I’m American. You’ve got lots of pictures of me already.”
She shook her head. “You look Russian, Adam. She would never believe me.”
The drive back was just as gloomy as when they’d come. Vienna was still shattered, the rain unrelenting. Tommy said, “If this keeps up, we won’t be flying tomorrow, either.”
Once at Schwechat, they dropped McNulty and Mischenko off at the flight line. Then Sonia drove Tommy to the operations building. Seizing on this rare opportunity to be alone with him, she said, “Be very wary of Major Vukonikov, Captain Moon. He may be a hero to the Party, but he is a despicable man. He is very jealous of you.”
“Yeah, I figured that out already.”
“He seeks to humiliate you, Captain. Any way he can. Don’t turn your back on him.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. I appreciate the heads-up.”
With that same cold voice she’d used in the Amerika Bomber’s cockpit, she added, “I told you nothing, Captain Moon. Okay?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A secluded farm in the English countryside had become the focal point of Allied scientific research and intelligence in the European theater. Two days after being taken into custody, Doctor Offenberg, his team of three nuclear physicists, and all their papers were flown to the farm. There, they’d be accommodated—the polite Allied term for the detaining of high-value individuals—until the Allied governments could determine how to best put them to use.
Offenberg and his people didn’t know this, but their papers were being rapidly scrutinized by American and British officers, all scientists in their own right with direct communications links to a specialized group of physicists in the United States. On both sides of the ocean, the Allied scientists had all come to the same conclusion. They summarized this conclusion in a report to SHAEF:
The Germans are nowhere near creating atomic weapons. Had they tried to detonate a weapon
using the data that has come into our possession, it would have been a failure, as several of their assumptions and calculations are incorrect.
They were generally on the right track, however. Whether their falling short of the mark was due to lack of materials, lack of German industrial commitment, or loss of the many talented minds that fled Nazi Germany prior to hostilities remains to be seen at this time.
At SHAEF Headquarters, General Walter “Beetle” Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, read the Allied scientists’ message to his commander. When Smith was finished reading, Ike breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good news, Beetle,” he said. “Real good. They don’t have one…and I don’t ever want to use ours, anyway. Now we don’t have all that over our heads anymore.”
Smith replied, “There’s something else good about it, sir.”
“What’s that, Beetle?”
“This German data…right, wrong, or indifferent…at least the Russians don’t have it.”
“You can say that again,” Ike replied.
“I’ve got a question about the French, sir. General Tassigny is expecting some sort of high honor from SHAEF for his people stumbling into these scientists. What do you want me to do about that?”
“Not a damn thing, Beetle,” Ike replied, clearly frustrated. “These French generals from de Gaulle on down all think they’re God. I’m afraid only God himself can tell us what makes them think that.”
“So I should tell him to pound sand, sir?”
“Affirmative.”
Sean Moon braced himself for the bad news; he felt the men of 37th Tank were about to be tasked with clearing another slave labor camp that sounded just like Buchenwald. This new camp was located between the Austrian towns of Gusen and Mauthausen, less than twenty miles east of Linz. A recon platoon had found it much as Sean’s company had found Buchenwald, abandoned just days before by its SS staff and guards. Just like at Buchenwald, the starving, physically weak, but determined inmates were now in charge. Satellite camps were rumored to be in the area, too.
Our Ally, Our Enemy (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 3) Page 25
