Groves looked around impatiently. “Yes. Look at this hotel! He knows how to live right, the catcher does.”
“Berg can afford this?”
“The Office of Strategic Services has a fat budget. They assigned him to me. Let’s see if he’s through with those damned newspapers.”
They went to the larger room, where Berg was standing in shirtsleeves, looking out the big window. Karl could see the broad, muscular shoulders and thick arms. He had paid no particular attention to this man when he was a catcher at the one game with Anton, and now, in the strange currents of war, their paths crossed. Moe’s blunt, sunbaked face seemed pensive. Karl introduced himself and stood studying the big man who said softly, “Nice view of the hanging tree.”
Had Moe heard them talking in the other room? But no— “I always take this room for its view of the tree and square. History!”
Groves said, “You two start talking.”
Moe turned and gracefully folded himself into his deep chair. “You got a law degree, I hear?” Karl began.
Moe grinned. “I’d rather be a ballplayer than a justice on the Supreme Court.”
“The general said I should walk you through nuclear physics.”
“Right. Details matter—technical terms, names, stuff that might slip in conversations. Espionage is more like archaeology, dogged digging and sifting. You gotta look for little things, clues.”
Groves had gone back into the office, perhaps understanding that some personal nose touching had to happen to get the two of them to work together. Groves wasn’t all bulldozer manners after all.
“You speak French and Italian?”
Moe lounged back, crossing long legs. “Having been acquainted for years with that beautiful creature known as Latin, I try to savor its ornate, loquacious offspring. Yet the French accent eludes me.”
Karl smiled. Somehow this big guy with an easy, sliding smile and precise diction made you like him. Presence, that’s it. “My wife can help you with that. Have dinner with us.”
Moe Berg
2.
Moe Berg appeared exactly on time at their new address at West 121st Street, seven p.m. He brought a bottle of good Burgundy, presenting it with a flourish. Karl wondered how Berg had gotten it but thought it better not to ask. Marthe had sent word she would prepare one of her fragrant goose cassoulets, whose aroma filled their apartment. Somehow she had bargained her butcher into getting her a big goose, despite all the rationing.
Karl had spent days teaching Moe the basics of uranium, fission, centrifuges, reactors. He was a quick study. Along the way he asked if the Japanese had a similar program, and even asked Groves about it. Apparently not. Groves had told Karl that Berg had been on the 1934 all-star team that toured Japan, even though his batting average was in the high 100s. The Department of War had pressured the baseball mavens to include Berg, and he had faked his way to the top of a tall hospital and taken movies of the Tokyo skyline without being observed. Jimmy Doolittle used those pictures to plan the raid of Tokyo. Karl had seen the movie about that raid and found it stirring, just what the country needed in the year after Pearl Harbor.
Marthe was impressed with Moe, murmuring to Karl that he was “graceful for his size.” She liked their new, rather more stylish, two-bedroom apartment, a clear step up in status, under the Columbia social umbrella that stretched for blocks around. This was their first dinner party, and she beamed.
Marthe started addressing Moe in French. Moe responded readily. He displayed an oddity, gotten from “one of my contacts,” he remarked casually. Karl and Marthe held the embossed card gingerly. It was Hitler’s 1941 Christmas card, a photo of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an ancient Greek statue the Wehrmacht had taken from the Louvre. His greeting was printed: Our Winged Victory. Beneath that was a scrawl with only the A and H legible. “He . . . touched this,” Marthe said. Her hands shook, nearly dropping the card.
“Somehow, this makes the war more personal,” Moe observed. “We have to get Winged Victory back.”
Martine danced around the visitor, breaking the mood, welcoming him in her sprightly French. Marthe brought wineglasses and they sat, Marthe holding their youngest, Elisabeth, who watched Berg with wide, wondering eyes, as though his size made him a member of another species. Martine spoke her excited girl’s French and Marthe joined in, exchanging small talk.
Berg studied Marthe’s face carefully to see how the slippery words should be shaped. In American-accented French, he said, “I learned French at Princeton. Not much speaking in class, though. Never joined a dining club—what they call a fraternity—so I had time to study.”
“Get any invitations?” Karl asked. He had a certain amused curiosity about the stuffy clans of the Ivy League.
“One, the only Jew in my class to get one. I turned it down. I didn’t think I could put away that much booze.”
Marthe laughed and Martine looked puzzled. Karl whispered to her, “Drinking alcohol, like wine,” and tipped his glass.
“Between playing baseball and studies, that was it for me.” Berg shrugged. “I caught on that my fellow students just memorized some Latin abbreviations such as QED, e.g., and i.e. For most of them, these are all short for ‘I speak Latin, and you don’t.’ I hated those types.”
Karl helped Marthe set the food just as Anton arrived. He was well dressed and in wide-eyed awe of Moe Berg. Since that one game Karl took him to, he had become a rabid Dodgers fan—but any pro player was a god. Berg tolerated Anton’s fan talk through the salad, telling a few stories about split-second double plays and inside gossip about icons like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Anton said, “But why you retire? You had over a decade in the game.”
“Well, there’s this war thing,” Moe said, and left it at that.
Anton shrugged with a lopsided, knowing smile. He had learned that, as with Karl, there were questions you shouldn’t ask.
Moe told Anton how he had started in the minor leagues after Princeton. “You like university more than baseball?” Anton asked, incredulous.
“Of course. As I settled into the first Princeton semester, my heart was beating like that of a boy with a pocket of heavy change as he walks through the door of a candy shop. It was bliss, I thought, to fill in my ignorance of literature and language, poet by poet, guided by tenured wizards, in classrooms from the colonial era. I would look out at the drooping golden-leaved elm branches shivering in the sunlight, outside in the Yard—then go to baseball practice.”
This reverie impressed all the Cohens. Moe dug into the cassoulet with trencherman vigor. Marthe had made two, anticipating that a big athlete would need more. She was right. Moe regaled them with tales of his baseball life, travels, friends. He was smooth, funny, wry. Karl noticed he gave very little away about his personal life, probably a useful skill for a spy—talk much, reveal little. That he could do this in French, which Martine could follow now at age six, was even more impressive. Moe asked Marthe to correct his pronunciation and carefully repeated each word he got wrong. Karl learned a lot from this, though he had lived in France for many months.
“Tell me about how you learned physics, Karl,” Moe said over dessert—a luscious crème brûlée. Karl dutifully trotted out his career arc, the incredible bit of luck he’d had when Urey hired him and the Manhattan Project began. Anton got restless at this, since his French was weak and physics was not baseball.
Moe saw this and leaned back lazily, saying in English, “Y’know, Anton, mastering an academic discipline is an exponential domain—and so is baseball. You have to learn the basics over years, before you grasp the structures of the field. Then you can begin to play creatively with the concepts, with the moves—like, say, how to pick off a runner who takes a long lead from a base. Ice hockey is an exponential activity too—it takes years just to skate well enough. Karl did this with physics and chemistry. You can do it with—say, what do you do?”
Pleased with this attention, Anton looked around the table significantly. �
�I have changed jobs, or will soon. I volunteered for the navy.”
Stunned silence. Marthe bit her lip. Martine looked puzzled.
“I want to do something to defend this country,” Anton said with a jutting jaw. “They are killing my family in the Ukraine, murdering Jews everywhere. While I sell things in a store!”
Karl said, “You’re right. We have to do something.”
He glanced at Moe. Berg was the sort whose silence was more eloquent than his words. Anton didn’t know what Karl was doing, of course, just thought he was teaching classes at Columbia—which he wasn’t. Marthe joined in with a murmur of approval, but Karl could tell she was dismayed. She seldom heard from her parents hiding in the south of France, and nothing at all from her other French relatives. Karl felt a sudden lift, a strange joy. The urgency in Europe and across Asia needed the cheetah’s sprint, not this turtle’s plod. He had to do as much as he possibly could.
“Anton, you’re doing the right thing,” Moe said.
Anton smiled and looked around the table, basking in the praise. It was as if a beam from heaven lit his face.
Karl tried to look happy.
3.
Theory could only go so far. As director of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project at Columbia, Karl found it hard to keep a grip on the many multiplying threads of the effort.
To find out what was needed in what the security people insisted they call the “Tube Alloy” project, he decided he should show up to help with the next essential job. Fermi had built a small reactor in Teaneck, New Jersey, and the sprawling sheds around it were now an impromptu experimental group, trying to design the eventual bomb. Otto Frisch, the leader of this Critical Assemblies group, was trying to accurately determine the exact amount of enriched uranium required to create the critical mass, to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.
Otto was a stately Austrian with great skills as an experimenter. He had left Austria shortly after Hitler rose to power, and taught in London. He had met with his aunt, Lise Meitner, while on vacation, just after she got word of the Berlin results. Together they figured out that fission explained those 1938 Berlin experiments. Otto had quickly isolated the fragments produced by fission reactions, and urged the British to start a bomb program. Now he was leading the bomb builders.
“A job I never thought I would do,” he told Karl. “In fact, we are in the middle of a trial right now.”
Otto led Karl into a big room full of experiment gear, all centered on an array. Above them hung half spheres of enriched uranium hydride centered on a steel rod arrangement, with motors to move them. “We bring those uranium hemispheres together, to measure rising neutron activity, as we approach critical mass, see?” Otto thumbed the motor control and worked the assembly farther apart by a centimeter or two. “The metal bars scatter some neutrons away—and so increase the time that the reaction requires to accelerate. Nothing to reflect neutrons back into the uranium.”
Godiva
Karl was nonplussed. “While you’re . . .”
“Over here, behind this steel shield.”
“Ah, good.” Otto’s team was already behind the shield, working before a board of dials and levers.
“There are no reflecting surfaces nearby.” Otto gave him a thin smile. “So we call it the Lady Godiva assembly.”
“Cute.”
A low gong sounded. They clustered behind the shield. “One day,” Otto said, “I almost caused a runaway reaction. I was adjusting a coupling while leaning over the stack. I’m mostly water, plenty of hydrogen—so my body reflected neutrons back into the stack. Out of the corner of my eye I saw those little red lamps”—he pointed—“flickering. They do that when neutrons are being emitted. They were glowing continuously!”
“My God.” A sliver of fear arced through Karl.
“So I quickly scattered the bars with my hand, whoosh!”
“What was your dose?”
“Later I calculated it.” A shrug. “Quite harmless, a full day’s permissible dose of neutrons. But if I had hesitated for another two seconds—the dose would have been fatal. Tickling the dragon’s tail,” he said, and laughed. Karl did not.
“Starting!” a crew member shouted. The gong rang hollow in the big room. Even in the spare, high room smelling of dust and warm electronics, a silent tension layered the air. On the dials Karl could see the neutron count grow as the engineers carefully brought the uranium hydride closer together. Otto calculated as the experiment ran, until—“Halt! Close enough.”
The team broke for lunch, but before Karl and Otto joined them, Otto finished a calculation. “Confirms our previous data, gut.”
“Have you used this in the shotgun bomb design?” Karl peered at the pages of calculations, not following Otto’s handwriting well.
“I think about seventy kilograms, using that new gun design. That’s two critical masses, a safety factor to be sure.”
Karl nodded; he had done a similar calculation and got about two hundred kilograms. Otto’s data was better. “Good news. We can get bombs faster, then.”
“The centrifuges, they are running well?”
“Pretty well. Ernest Lawrence’s calutron helps—he can improve the purity of the centrifuge U-235. It’s still a while, months probably, before we can get the first bomb.”
“Sehr gut.”
They ambled away, discussing how the uranium gun-type weapon was straightforward, almost trivial to design. “You think the Nazis cannot develop a plutonium bomb?” Otto asked.
“Out at Hanford they’re trying to make enough in those big reactors, but it’s slow work. Plus, this new isotope they found turning up, Pu-240, is a fast neutron emitter. It’s too fast to use in a gun—the whole thing will explode from thermal heating before we slam together critical mass.”
Otto blinked, frowned. “So the gun-type design must work with enriched uranium only? Can we fit that into our bombers?”
“The engineers think so. Say, I saw no light come from the experiment—neutrons can’t light up air?” Karl knew the answer, but something made him fill the silence with words.
“No. But when the bomb goes off, the X-rays will heat a fireball.”
Good old E=mc2. Mass wants to become light, Karl thought. Einstein had first said that, and now would see it done.
4.
Groves paced behind his desk like a bear in a cage. He had a sizable office in a new building at Columbia University, amid undergraduates. He and his staff stood out like toads on a birthday cake.
He grumbled and growled to himself and then abruptly turned and said to Moe Berg and Karl, “Look, I just got a briefing. Our secret war research is now under the Office of Scientific Research and Development, OSRD, headed by Vannevar Bush. It divides work among divisions on radar, rockets, nuclear, and so on. You guys should know something they figured out. Near as we can tell, the Germans have no such overall organization, because the Nazis are antiscience. Our agents and intelligence guys say they don’t believe in a clear connection between science and military power.”
Karl sat and waited, knowing by now not to interrupt Groves when he was venting. “They’ve been sure they can win it, so no need to do research. They draft their scientists, too. There’s a Führer’s List that exempts men from the arts, movies, even an astrologer—but no scientists.”
Karl put in, “Sounds like good news.” Moe just nodded.
“Well, I don’t buy it!” Groves smacked his hand on his desk, making a pen roll off and clatter on the floor. “I think they’ve kept the atomic work secret.” He picked up a folder with CLASSIFIED across its cover in red. “Uranverein—Uranium Club. Uranmaschine, U machine, reactor, German Army Ordnance Office. These terms keep turning up in intelligence reports, but with no detail.”
“They started that work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin,” Moe said mildly.
“I know,” Groves said. “I had it bombed. Photos showed we got a lot of it. So they’ve probably moved their Uranmasch
ine.”
“If they have big buildings full of centrifuges, like Oak Ridge, we might spot them,” Karl said. “They’ll need plenty of electrical power, so maybe near one of their dams.”
Groves brightened. “I’ll get the air boys on that. There’s something more, though.” He flipped open the file, scanned it. “Intelligence operations in Denmark have spotted bigger rockets than the ‘flame-tailed airplanes’ they had seen earlier, now called buzz bombs. Some of these fell into the North Sea, big bullet-shaped things. These seemed large enough to carry a nuclear warhead of the shotgun type, I’m told. So, Karl, is that why they’re developing this?”
Silence. Karl wondered how anybody knew the tonnage of a bomb they hadn’t designed yet.
“There’s more.” Groves flipped to other pages. “There’s something called ‘Vergeltungswaffe 2,’ meaning Vengeance Weapon 2—V-2 for short. It’s real, nonpropaganda name is the A-4, or Aggregat 4. Meaning an aggregated weapon, many parts. We broke a coded message that says, ‘Lessee . . . A-4—die Typenbezeichnung der ersten funktionsfähigen großen Rakete in der Welt mit Flüssigkeitstriebwerk.’ ”
Karl mustered his spotty German. “It says, the A-4 is the type designation of the world’s first functional large rocket with a liquid engine.”
“The buzz bombs were gasoline fueled, lit by a fast spark plug, right?” Groves stood, fidgeted in his pockets, took out some chocolates in paper wrap, and popped them into his mouth. It was a seemingly automatic gesture, and he munched them down, eyes distant. Karl had noticed that Groves’s girth grew under the pressures of his task. “So they’re building this damn rocket, and fast. If they can put a nuclear warhead in it, that’s considerable ‘vengeance,’ all right.”
Moe said mildly, eyebrows raised a bit, “So you consider the lack of leads to their uranium project a clue, General?”
“I don’t want to be snookered by that, yes. Point is—could they use an A-bomb against the French coast landing everybody knows we’re planning?”
The Berlin Project Page 16
