Groves smiled. “Where do we find this Dobson?”
4.
September 26, 1944
The Lancasters took off in regular, teeth-rattling rumbles. Karl watched them beside Groves, who was nervous. From an anxious orderly the general took coffee by the fresh cup every few minutes in the foggy, predawn chill.
“Great airplanes,” Groves said. “Not as good as our B-29s, but good.”
Karl ventured, “I never thought you’d want to see me again, after that meeting with Eisenhower.”
Groves turned to him and gave a rueful, high-eyebrow frown. “Gotta admit, I felt that way for a while. But then one of Ike’s staff said to me that they liked how I let my people say their piece. You and Moe, they meant.”
“We were just reporting—”
“That’s the point. You guys met with Canaris. You got the real deal, stuff that’s not in the documents—plus Moe’s a genius at remembering details.”
“A lot better than I am. Heisenberg’s hard to convey—”
“Point is, Heisenberg was a lure. A stalking horse. Canaris at Abwehr must’ve gotten the scoop from the Gestapo goons, maybe with intercepts. So they knew the Gestapo smelled something, which was you. They let all that happen, you got in and out of Zurich—pretty damn good, that, after Moe killed those two thugs in the car. So I guess, then Abwehr came in at the last minute. Pretty sharp, knowing you’d go for the train, then back off, go for air. Made the Gestapo look like fools.”
“We had no idea.”
“That’s the point. The bait never knows.”
“All to get the word to Churchill.”
“Yep! Moe’s memory is so good, the Brit MI5—that’s intelligence—was able to track down who blocked the signals Canaris sent. Churchill’s guys sniffed around, found evidence of smothered messages, pointing to someone in British intelligence. Laid a trap, don’t know the details. They found a guy named Kim Philby, a Cambridge guy no less. Soviet agent, turns out. He took some persuading. Might have gotten a bruise or two. These guys are softies. He gave up some others in MI5. Churchill said to work him over a little more, he’d crack like an egg. Philby did, pretty quick, too. So now they’ve got a whole viper’s nest of them locked up. Call ’em the Cambridge Five.”
All Karl could think to say was, “Wow.” A smidgen of information goes a long way. . . .
Groves said, “Moe knows a lot too—a Princeton man and baseball player! He said to me after his debriefing that Napoléon believed one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field.”
Karl ventured, “We were lucky. I do think this attempt is the best. It’s just conspicuously easier to take out the Lair with a conventional daylight bomb raid. Save the second bomb.”
“Right. But this has to work, or else—well, I dunno. Hard to see what’s the right target for the second.” Groves bit his lip, thinking.
“The bomb’s done been assembled, just yesterday. I saw Luis and Feynman paint a name on the side of it. Here’s Hopin’.”
Groves chuckled and fetched a Hershey bar from his breast pocket. “Aren’t we all?”
The Lancasters’ roar was now routine, one heavily loaded bird lifting off behind another, laboring into the dawn air. The British were going after the Führer. Karl could see smiles and grim determination both, brimming in faces, in whole ranks of air ground crews gathered by the hundreds along the airstrips. Everybody knew this was different. Maybe more important than the Berlin raid, even.
Groves said with a twist of his mouth, “There they go. The next act is ours.”
• • •
It was beyond dawn when the B-29s took off. The crews had a bangers-and-mash breakfast while the English had leftovers from last night, termed “bubble and squeak,” which smelled like day-old chili. Again Groves stood with the covey of USAF and army officers, with Karl and Moe toward the back. The great silvery beasts took off like roaring, pregnant birds.
Karl asked Moe, “Think they’ll get him?”
“Everybody’s taking odds in betting pools. I put a hundred on us.”
Karl blinked. A pool on death? He took a few breaths to process this. “Y’know, all this comes from a scrap of paper Heisenberg gave me. He didn’t know anything about Hitler’s schedule.”
“Where’s he going to go now? The Soviets are his biggest problem, coming into Poland. He’s got us stalled in France, so a guy like that, he wants to be close to the action. Not stuck on a mountain peak in Bavaria. It’s a good bet. Want to join?”
Karl felt a sudden elation, as if his body was lighter, the world brighter beneath the fresh sun. “I’ll do a hundred, sure.”
• • •
Everybody in the mess hall was grouped around radios. No word from the German radio stations. The day had waxed on, the Lancasters back first, looking battered from years of use. The raid had to use bombers rather than short-range fighters because the target was all the way over, deep into East Prussia. Not all made it back.
Karl watched the bomber command pilots and crews lining up after their return from the Wolf’s Lair mission. The British called a squadron formation and sounded off during roll call. Some names went unanswered. Now the dead were the Not Present, voices stilled. The only witnesses they had, eventually, would be those who remembered their deeds, the yellowed newspaper reports, the fading echo of their funeral epitaphs. They were now the Absent, Forever.
Then the B-29s returned, sleek and glinting in the slanting autumn sunlight. They roared like lions on takeoff, a challenge to the sky itself. Miraculously, they all made it back. Apparently the German defenses were out of gasoline or ammo.
The Americans, always more noisy and boisterous, took over the mess hall. Karl worked his way to a table lined with airmen and spotted a lanky guy with DOBSON on his left breast. “Congratulations. Good run?”
Dobson gave a lopsided grin in a face that had a parabolic chin. “The best. Only been flying those birds a few weeks, but they’re beauties. Better navigation, handling, the works. We got in low, no Kraut flak, no fighters, either. I saw some trucks and staff cars, went after them. We swarmed around that place. The woods were blasted pretty good already. Went after anything that moved in among the trees.”
The whole table listened to this, then clinked glasses. Karl realized that the water glasses were a suspicious tan color—they were toasting one another with beer. “Great,” was all he could manage.
English fliers were chummy with the Americans, and Karl learned that “dog’s bollocks” was a synonym for “awesome,” and B-29s were “the bee’s knees.”
Suddenly a rumble of noise came from one of the groups around a radio. Cheers. Shouts.
A Royal Air Force officer sprang to his feet. “The Jerries say the Führer is dead—killed in action on the eastern front.”
The cheering was bedlam for minutes. Karl struggled through the mob, nearly fell, and reached the Brit officer. “When?”
The man gave him a puzzled look, then understood. “Late morning. Looks like you Yanks got the bugger.”
5.
September 26, 1944
Karl found that beer was a perfectly reasonable substitute for wine, after all. Though the headache was fearsomely worse.
He woke the next morning to a world without Hitler, ever again. That thought alone struck him. The Beast was gone.
Not that the war was over, no. Not until that afternoon, in an oddly mellow, flowing announcement from the BBC. In Oxbridge tones the formal Foreign Office notice was, “The German Provisional Government, headed by General Rommel, has announced a cease-fire on their western front. The Allied High Command immediately issued an order for a cease-fire of all troops, land and naval and air, on all European fronts. The Soviet Union has not spoken as yet.”
“Churchill and Eisenhower move fast,” Moe said.
Karl considered how the world had shifted. “Roosevelt, too.”
• • •
The BBC announcement had been strangely ca
lm. Yet it caused celebrations that made Karl and Moe and Freeman retreat to the fields beyond. There seemed an endless supply of apparently hoarded beer and whiskey. Speculations ran rife in the autumn air. Wars were the best rumor factories of all. There were suddenly plenty of what the US Army called “beer hall Bradleys” after Omar Bradley, said to be the most popular general of them all in this war. The loudmouths knew better. Unfortunately, so did many others, which did not bode well in a beer hall.
“The Germans don’t want a peace, per se,” Karl said. “Just a cease-fire, Canaris said. For the new government, after Hitler, to form and unify and make a proposal to all sides of the Allies.”
“How long?” Freeman mused.
“I think the German General Staff will move quickly to get some veil of civilian rule,” Moe said. “We did them a big favor by eliminating most of the high Nazis in Berlin.”
Freeman had field binoculars and was watching birds flit among the trees. Without taking his eyes from them, he said, “The Germans can switch their death dust to the Soviets, who’re pouring toward Poland now on a few jammed roads.”
Karl was amused. “So the dust will be in Soviet territory. . . .”
“Precisely so, I would expect,” Freeman said mildly. “Now they can take all their super new weapons they’ve been using against us and throw them at the Soviets—the V-1s and V-2s, jets delivering dust, jets fighting off their bombers.”
“Plus, we won’t be bombing their factories or troops,” Moe added. “And the Ploesti oil fields are still in German hands, so they’ll have fuel.”
Karl said, “We’re sworn by treaty not to make a separate peace.”
Moe raised an eyebrow. “In my debriefing I recalled your remark on the Convent of the Nuns of the Passion of Our Blessed Lord, at 127 Rue de la Santé. The MI5 used that location to find where the report to MI5 had gone, and then led to Philby. Churchill had undoubtedly heard of it—the biggest breach of British intelligence in memory.”
“By the Soviets, no less,” Freeman said as Karl absorbed this.
He doubted he could now recall that address, after all that had happened—but Moe did, and had. “So . . . the whole alliance falls apart. . . .”
“And the war ends, yes,” Freeman said. “For us. A bargain, I would say.” He took a drink.
An English officer came striding across the field quite deliberately. He stopped, saluted with a ramrod spine, and said, “Arthur Clarke. I gather you’re the men who brought us those superbombs. I’d like to shake your hands.”
Karl found him an agreeable fellow, a bit younger and brimming with ideas. He and Freeman were soon trading technical estimates of the German rockets that had been falling on London, killing dozens daily. The cease-fire was taking hold only slowly, as hard-line Nazi units fought with the regular German army units, and chaos prevailed.
Clarke said with a broad grin, “Yet this V-2 is the best thing we’re getting out of this war.”
“What? Why?” Karl asked.
“We can go to the moon in a rocket like that!”
Karl snorted. “Next thing, you’ll tell us maybe we can use uranium to make a rocket go really fast.”
“But of course! All right, that’s two good things we’re getting.”
• • •
A cable envelope sat on his bunk when he managed to get back to his quarters. His heart thumped.
WIRE FROM NAVY SAYS ANTON KILLED IN PHILIPPINES. SO SAD.
MARTHE
Stunned, Karl peered around at the room, which now seemed Dickensian in its dinginess.
• • •
“Look, the European war’s over,” Karl said. “I’m no use here anymore. I want to go home.”
General Groves gave him a sour shrug across the new desk in his new office, close to central London. “These things take time.” He sat forward and laid the Stars and Stripes on his desk. Karl saw a big photo beneath the headline
JAP KAMIKAZE SINKS CARRIER ST. LO IN PHILIPPINES
Karl sat down heavily, feeling as if the wind was knocked out of him. “St. Lo . . .”
“Yeah, they named it after one of the spots where we had fierce fighting after the Normandy landing, since the carrier was being commissioned just then.”
Karl made himself put the tide of emotion aside and focus. He stood.
“Okay, look—the Soviets aren’t standing down, the Germans are pounding them from the air, using death dust, even—but that’s got nothing to do with us.” Karl hammered these words out, leaning over Groves’s desk. He peered at the man with a ferocity he had never shown the Big General before.
USS ST. LO
Groves leaned back, hands behind his neck, thinking as he propped his feet on his large desk. On the wall now was a photo taken of the Berlin blast, the crimson blister rising from the ground amid total darkness, the few city lights invisible in the glare. The exposure was good enough to show small puckers and dull spots in the cherry-red dome. No doubt the physicists, particularly the ever-curious Feynman, were studying those now.
“Right. Y’know, Karl, I want a hand for us in the Pacific war.”
“What target?”
Groves chuckled. “You’re always thinking. I like that. You even get my jokes. Gonna miss my sense of humor if you ship Stateside?”
“Very much.” You have to lie sometimes. . . . Groves was always telling underlings jokes he had heard, not realizing they were shopworn by the time they reached the brass.
“Y’know, the propaganda guys are way ahead of us—look.”
Karl turned to see a new poster on a side wall.
“So we’ve got a bomb, Karl, with another in three months. Where can we use it to hammer the Japs? Make ’em stop?”
“I’ve heard of an island, Iwo Jima—”
“Not big enough. We have trouble reaching a Jap city, but with the B-29s, we could do it. Even Tokyo, maybe.”
“How about a military target?”
“They’ve got army headquarters in some of their cities, like Hiroshima in the south, easier to reach. But this latest Philippines battle, where that carrier went down—their navy is never bunched up enough to get a lot of them. That St. Lo was ten miles from the nearest Jap battleship, giving them a pounding, when the kamikaze got ’em.”
“Go for the homeland, then,” Karl said, mentally reviewing the maps he had seen. Maybe something closer to the mid-Pacific? “Or . . . there’s a big island, part of Imperial Japan, I think. Lots of army, I’d guess. Okinawa or some such name.”
“I think something closer too. We’ll see.” Groves stood and offered a hand. “I want to thank you for what you’ve done, Karl. That was a brilliant piece of luck you and Moe brought off.”
“An accident.” Sort of . . .
“What’s the saying? ‘Fortune favors the prepared.’ Well, you and all the other eggheads got us this bomb, and accident decided it was on our side. Thanks.”
They shook in silence.
With a grin he could not suppress, Groves reached into a pile of paperwork on his desk and pulled out an envelope. “I got orders to the Pacific last night, by the way. I’m headed out. In the same packet came some other orders—for you. New York.”
Karl let out a whoop that he was sure could be heard throughout the command staff building. “My . . . God.”
“Thought you didn’t believe in God.” Groves was still grinning. Karl tore open the envelope, saw his departure time. One hour!
“I don’t. Okay, maybe for this one time. Good-bye, General—and . . . think about Okinawa.”
He stepped outside, and the waterfall of events struck him there. He wobbled over to a bench and sat.
Here, now, was where some scrap of faith would be . . . useful. He had been at a few Jewish mournings, sitting shivah. He knew that shivah meant “seven,” signifying the seven days when mourners were supposed to sit low to the ground and say a Kaddish, a prayer. That was what an ancient uncle had called Menschlichkeit, what you did to be a man. Show solem
n respect, display your emotion. All Karl had ever done, at occasional Old World family events, was echo a “Shabbat shalom” as he came and went. He usually replayed a Bach piece in his head, or else puzzled over some chemistry, while adults droned on.
Now he was without the comforts of belief, of any faint faith. Anton had yearned to get into the fight, and now it had gotten into him. Just at the moment when the Beast was blown, as Huck Finn would put it, into pure scatteration.
He felt something on his face, and his finger told him it was a tear. The watery view before him jostled with movement. Men whooping and running in both celebration and contest. Englishmen playing soccer on a bright green field in warm, buttery sunlight. Anton never to be among them. The only game we played together . . .
He sat and watched with acrid bile in his mouth and knew he would never be able to see that game in the same way again.
PART XIV
* * *
LOOKING BACKWARD
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
—Father John Culkin, SJ, on Marshall McLuhan
1.
September 20, 1963
The telephone jangled him up from a pleasant dream. Something about the war again, but soft and warm and . . . he could remember no more.
He sat up. Marthe was already in the bathroom, and the telephone’s harsh clamor made him jerk it off the cradle. “Allo?”
“Dr. Cohen,” a thick German accent said, “I am from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper in—”
The Berlin Project Page 39
