Then, he was sure, they would think about how split-second sure the firing fuses had to be in the gun at the center of the bomb. Those had never been checked in free fall.
He put aside such nervous anxiety. Nothing to worry about now. It works or it doesn’t. At least with a ground-pounder hit, there was no altitude trigger running on a radar. Little Boy would blow on impact, to get the maximum shock wave into the soil, to collapse the maze of tunnels and bunkers they knew lay below central Berlin. The one that the intelligence guys thought housed Hitler was at ground zero, near the Reichstag.
Doubts lingered. After all, they’d never tested a real fission reaction in anything bigger than a speck of U-235. If somehow the uranium wasn’t pure enough, or a hundred other things went wrong, Little Boy would be about as dangerous as dropping a boulder out of the sky.
“Armed and ready,” the comm said with a bright British air of bonhomie.
They were about to obliterate a city. To build Little Boy, whole cities had been created, especially Oak Ridge. One city for another, then.
Their vector changed, a maneuver to take them away from the lead bomber. That gave the cameras, started already by the navigator, an angle to watch the drop. Their engines hammered hard.
The pilot said, “There will be a short intermission while we kill a monster.”
Carlos smiled. “And no flak,” he added.
The pilot reminded everyone to don their goggles. Karl shook away the order. He wanted to see it all.
A chant came over the comm, radar course corrections. Now the bombardier would be flying the plane through his bombsight. Karl envisioned him turning the knobs beside the framing view, telling the automatic pilot about minor adjustments.
A loud blip on the radio told them all the drop was within two minutes.
They were very high. Clouds parted below as he checked the four pressure gauges yet again. A towering stack of cumulus clouds stood to their left, gray in the dim city lights. Above, a sky shot with stars. He could suddenly see scattered light in a pattern he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel. Their target was the Reichstag building, a single block away from the historic gate.
The keening tone signal sounded in his ears. Time to let them go. He gripped the controls tight and released the gauges.
Karl looked out the small window. A searchlight poked up feebly from the antiaircraft batteries below. No signs of flak bursts, which would be far below them. He peered carefully, hands tense. His chest was tight and he made himself breathe. The air seemed hot now.
In the dim searchlight beam he could see the Northampton jerk upward as the bomb fell. “Away!” came on his headphones. The radio tone stopped.
The Lancaster ahead dove away in a two-g turn. So did they.
Now the bomb was nosing down, inscribed with messages the Brits and Americans had enjoyed painting on it, most of them obscene. Headed for the Nazi lair, Karl thought with a sudden jolt of joy.
He held on hard as he saw the gauge parachutes open. Then he and Carlos slammed the bomb bay closed and turned, against the thrust of the plane’s momentum, to the scopes. On the oscilloscopes the calibration signal popped up bright and clear. The gauges were reporting and would send their data.
“Our detector gear is working!” he called over the comm.
He held on as the seconds ticked in his mind. Forty-five seconds to fall the thirty thousand feet. They would be less than six miles away when it hit. If they had underestimated . . .
The Lancaster shook from the turn. Nothing came over the intercom. Rattles, pops, a slow, low groan of the airframe.
He flipped the switches on all the auto-cameras. They had different filters to step down the fireball flash. He suddenly wondered if the films would survive the burning flare, or burst into flames themselves. There had been no time to test that.
Below them, a basketball sphere like the core of the sun was being born.
His pulse thumped. Karl wondered how many were about to die.
A bright flash lit the compartment. Searing, brighter than the midday sun. From the angle of the beams coming through the narrow windows, he saw they were light reflected from the clouds in front of them and back through the tunnel connecting to the pilot compartment.
Karl triggered the movie cameras to capture the wave forms. On the oscilloscopes a pressure pulse registered an N-shaped wave. The parachutes were reporting in.
A second N came, a reflection of the shock wave from the hills framing the Berlin center. As expected, but—
The sharp shock slammed the plane. It wrenched Carlos out of his seat. He landed on his parachute and struggled up.
The entire airplane popped and cracked. Nobody said anything.
Karl got up carefully. He and Carlos stumbled to the small window and saw a cloud rising straight into the gray vastness. They gaped as the dirty finger pointing up began to mushroom. Must be it hit the inversion layer below, Karl thought. It was a sullen, angry cloud, roiling, rising, swelling. Lightning forked yellow around its flanks. Despite their engine throb, he could hear a strong, sustained roar.
He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what— Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen.
“A rust bomb,” he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before.
Karl had never imagined what kind of cloud the blast would make. The pilot circled the mushroom cloud once as the cameras amidships rolled.
“Lookit that! Lookit that! Goddamn beautiful!” The voices piled on top of one another in his comm.
The white light had been, Karl thought, like the end of the world. Or the beginning of a new one.
They turned more and dived and the pilot angled them so they could see the dark cloud behind. It was a column of purple and gray now. Fires flickered along it. Some strange glow like moonlight glimmered on its flanks. Berlin was invisible beneath the spreading carpet of gloom below them. Carlos snapped pictures with his camera, as the manifest commanded. Karl had nothing to do but look at a world of somber clouds roiling beneath them like troubled lava, shot through with sullen red flaming tongues.
• • •
Their pilot throttled back their engines once they were clear of German airspace. He wanted to let the Northampton come in first; it had less fuel and deserved the honor.
Karl leaned back into the humming aluminum at his back and let the vibration soothe him. He thought of nothing at all. Events were now rolling over him and he let them. Done and done.
He could not stop envisioning the effect of that vast fireball. He thought of those working in underground bunkers near the impact—engulfed in collapsing ceilings, choked and crushed under concrete, the lucky ones dying instantly, the rest gasping for air in final darkness. And those civilians a mile or two away, mashed in their homes, burned in the tongues of flames, lungs full of rasping smoke. Or those in the open at night, suddenly fried to a crisp by a flash of X-ray or infrared that swelled like a blister from the ground, searing everything that saw the swelling raw dome in their last instants, before the shock wave blew them into pieces.
All of it in part due to him. He stared at the humming dim compartment, lit by the oscilloscope bulbs, not thinking, just feeling.
Their Cumberland lumbered on and Carlos went forward, eyes bright, to talk to the others. They were a seasoned aircrew and Karl was not. The adrenaline surge he had felt ever since they flew into Germany trickled away. He sat and wrote a letter to Marthe, his fountain pen wobbly.
This long, strange story of our mission will be known in its short version by the time you get this. But you and I know it started in 1938, when I got that lucky
job with Urey. No newlyweds know what the future holds, but I think ours takes some sort of prize. In less than six years it’s come to this!
As I write this, only our plane crews and the unlucky residents of Berlin know the story. We and the British have run raids with three thousand tons of explosives, in the entire raid of hundreds of bombers. Tonight our lead plane gave the Germans a taste of maybe fifteen thousand tons, all in a single second’s punch.
So the days of big raids are over—forever. A single plane disguised as a friendly transport can wipe out a city. That means to me that nations will have to get along together or suffer the consequences of sudden sneak attacks that can cripple them overnight.
And erase how many lives? We will know soon.
What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Germans—just going about their lives, asleep tonight—are tempered. I hope this terrible weapon we have created may bring the countries of the world together and prevent further wars. Alfred Nobel thought that his invention of high explosives would do that, by making wars too terrible. Unfortunately, it had just the opposite reaction. Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse. It may realize Nobel’s dream.
Love more than ever,
Karl
PART X
* * *
June 6, 1944
Success is going from failure to failure with enthusiasm.
—Winston Churchill
1.
It had been a rousing spectacle beyond anything he had ever known. Hundreds of shouting men streamed out onto the runway, where the Lancasters were turning into their parking position. Through the porthole he could see their shining faces, eyes wide. As he came down out of the airplane he was above their heads, so he could see a sea of cheering mouths.
The din drowned him. He got down onto the tarmac and somebody lifted him. In an instant four Brits in RAF blue were carrying him over an ever denser crowd. The dawn sky sent lances of yellow across cottony clouds, like an entry into paradise. He told them he wasn’t in the bomber that actually dropped the gadget, just a following plane, but that didn’t matter. That sent a thrill through him, and all the sweeter because he did not deserve it.
He supposed most men went through life feeling that they never got their due credit, but what delight it was to be cheered for something he had not done. Adulation swarmed all around him. This was what victory smelled like, with a sharp zinger of revenge.
The cheers still rolled on as he finally got his feet on the ground. A crowd filled the mess hall, and breakfast beer was everywhere. Karl took one and answered questions like “Whassat look like?” until Tibbets and his Northampton crew gathered with the Cumberland crew for photos.
Groves was in the mob, slapping everyone on the back, but Karl saw Moe Berg give a head nod to the side and followed him out, into a small room. Moe handed him a tulip glass and said, “The equation here is, pour one jigger absinthe into a champagne glass. Add iced champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milky look. Drink three to five of these slowly.”
Karl had two and wandered off to sleep.
• • •
Dimly he stirred in rough wool blankets and recalled the warm, muzzy comfort of his mother, Rae, when she would read to him her favorite story, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” It was from The Wind in the Willows, and she read it to him again and again when he was ill or just needed comfort. And always, toward the end, he heard the catch in her voice and the long pause to find her handkerchief and blow her nose. Then the last words and he always fell asleep.
He rolled over and nuzzled his pillow as though it were Marthe, then fell back into an anxious sleep.
When he awoke he felt his body stretching like a continent on the bed. He was a king, vast, immune to life’s abrasions, a survivor. Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, he had heard at an Episcopal funeral. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth, as it were a shadow. But not Karl, not today.
Karl studied the rough planking of the ceiling and thought.
Natural selection had spent over two hundred million years shaping mammalian tissues and nerves to the chemical swamp of Earth’s surface. Those reactions depended on only electrons swirling around distant atomic nuclei, not on the protons and neutrons inside those nuclei. But then, for the first time, the effort that began in 1939 had unlocked that energy at the center of Berlin. For an instant the expanding energy ball had enclosed Hitler, stretching his tissues in opposite directions as it annihilated them. His brain had vaporized long before any sensations could stimulate his nerves and reach the three-pound boneless mass of wet tissue through its two sets of twelve cranial nerves.
The immense heat and pressure had reduced Hitler to a gas. He became a spray of light atoms. Those light atoms had five billion years ago been part of the vastly greater swirling spray of light and heavier elements that coalesced under their own gravity. Those atoms had formed the sun and the planets and much later the first simple life-forms. It was a superb way to die. Too good for him, really.
Karl sat up suddenly, the night falling away. He glanced out the window and saw midday sunlight. Breakfast!
Showering, he found a bruise in his side the color of an eggplant, the diameter of an orange, from when the shock slammed him into a strut. The bombing memory was already acquiring in his mind a certain polish, a fake gleam of glory. But he knew he was not bold and brilliant in action. He had just nodded when Groves had given a little speech, booming out, “We have spent a billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won.”
Freeman joined him for eggs and ham. “We knew you had succeeded right away, at the Royal Society offices in London.”
“How?” Karl could get only the one word out, around a slice of salty ham.
“Their seismograph. It was a Richter five signal, just as expected.”
“Ingenious.”
Groves appeared then in full uniform and took them all to his office. Walking there on the cinder paths, Karl felt airy, as if he had lost half his weight.
Groves handed them teletype messages.
GEN C LE MAY
REPORT OF CONCENTRATION RISING TO 40,000 FT ARRIVING FOUR HOURS LATER.
REPORTS SMOKE COLUMN STILL THERE HAVE OBLIQUE PICTURES BUT
DENSE WHITE SMOKE RISING TO ABOUT 30,000 FEET. MUSHROOM OF WHITE SMOKE OVER THAT. CITY COMPLETELY COVERED WITH GREY DUST LIKE SMOKE. TARGET AREA SHOWS FIRES. IMPOSSIBLE FOR THEM TO GET ANY DAMAGE ESTIMATE THROUGH SMOKE. PICTURES SOON.
THEY WERE BRIEFED NOT TO FLY IN CLOUD AND SMOKE OVER THE TARGET.
REPORTED THE COLUMN STILL THERE UPON THEIR ARRIVAL FOUR
HOURS AFTER BOMBS AWAY.
IS THIS THE INFORMATION YOU WANT?
“Sure is the info,” Groves said. “You guys did it beautifully. Tibbets would be here, but he’s not awake yet.”
Karl let the conversation flow around him, still feeling a skating sense of unreality. Speculations ran on as others crowded into Groves’s office. How long till the German generals surrendered? What would they ask for? Would we just let them go back to status quo ante as in the last war? Once we used the bomb on the Japs, this would be over—and what to call it? The Greater War? No, that one was now World War I; this would be II.
Then a master sergeant came elbowing in. He shouted for attention and put a radio on Groves’s desk. After some static, the voice came in clearly, unmistakable now for years, the ranting harsh notes. They froze.
“Goddamn,” Moe said. “We didn’t get the bastard.”
• • •
Within an hour Groves’s teletype rattled out a translation.
My fellow Germans! I live! Yet another of the countless atrocities that have befallen our lands has stricken Berlin—but not me.
I am speaking to you so that you can hear my voice and know that I myself am not injured and well.
The vast crime in Berlin has destroyed the entire center. But it cannot destr
oy the inevitable victory of the National Socialist Reich! My survival is a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence—and that nothing is going to happen to me. The great cause which I serve will be brought through its present perils, and everything can be brought to a good end.
For I can solemnly state in the presence of the entire nation that since the day I moved into the Wilhelmstraße, my sole thought has been to carry out my duty to the best of my ability. And from the time when I realized that the war was unavoidable and could no longer be delayed, I have known nothing but worry and hard work; and for countless days and sleepless nights have lived only for my people!
This evil attempt to wipe out virtually the entire staff of the German High Command has failed. We do have losses, but I have moved to restore order.
In order to restore complete order, I have appointed Minister of the Reich Bormann to be Commander of the Home Forces. I have drafted General Guderian into the General Staff and have appointed a second proven leader from the eastern front to be his aide.
In all the other agencies of government within the Reich, everything remains unchanged. Few people can begin to imagine the fate which would have overtaken Germany had this attempt at assassination by bombing succeeded. I myself thank Providence and my Creator not for preserving me—my life consists only of worry and work for my people. I thank him only for allowing me to continue to bear this burden of worry, and to carry on my work to the best of my ability.
“Nice touch,” Moe said with a thin smile. “ ‘Assassination by bombing’—that’s right, and his including that phrase shows it.”
“I wonder where Hitler is?” Groves asked. “You, Moe, look into that.”
Karl recalled his dreamy fantasy just a short while before, of Hitler disintegrating in the crimson blister of the bomb. Wishful thinking. Vivid, but wrong. He thought but did not say, The whole world is looking for him now.
2.
At least there was some physics to do.
The Berlin Project Page 27
