Steel Reign (Kirov Series Book 23)

by John Schettler

  * * *

  Raeder was quite surprised to see the material Heinrich had in that brief, reports, charts, logbooks from an American ship, the USS Norton Sound. He would make a point of looking it up, and if it was not found in the index of known enemy warships, he would ask Naval Intelligence to look deeper. What was odd about the material were the dates.

  “These can’t be accurate,” he began, even as Detmers had initially dismissed the possibility that the information could be authentic. Heinrich did not argue the matter. Instead he merely placed more and more material on the table, like a man revealing one piece of some elaborate puzzle after another. As time passed, and Raeder continued to study the documents, he saw how completely consistent every page was, every report and chart.

  “1958?” he said with a wry grin. “Someone has a ripe sense of humor.”

  “That is what I first thought,” said Heinrich, “but the documents were all stored where one might expect them, Chart Room, Log Station, Captain’s Ready Room. If it was all theater, it was certainly an elaborate performance. There were no other documents but these on that ship. Nothing ‘normal’ to offset the sheer weight of all this material, which is entirely consistent in depicting the date and time of the events described as occurring in 1958.”

  “I could have a clerk type up more of the same in half an hour.” Raeder was not yet convinced, preferring to conclude this was some Allied special operations ruse. But there was more to the story Heinrich was telling him now. “You say you fired on this aircraft carrier.”

  “We did, and Schirmer could not miss at that range.”

  “Then you hit it?”

  “I saw the hit with my own eyes, and the fires we started. Then… something very strange happened. I thought it was Saint Elmo’s fire at first, all around the ship.” He could see it all so clearly in his mind’s eye. The strange lights in the heavens seemed to descend and surround the ship, finally collapsing inward to a scintillation of jade green phosphor, and then fleeing into the night. Yet his greatest surprise was in finding that the target of Schirmer’s guns had vanished. He could still hear the echo of the ship’s guns, a quavering, hollow sound that seemed as though it was being stretched thin.

  “Then it was gone,” he said. “The carrier was not there any longer.”

  “Blown up?” asked Raeder.

  “I hardly think that possible. The hit was good, but not enough to sink a ship of that size in one blow. Besides that, we would have heard any explosion powerful enough to sink it, and all I heard was the report of our own guns. Furthermore, there was nothing whatsoever on the water. Suddenly the seas were completely calm. It was… Most disturbing.”

  “Your first Officer corroborates this?”

  “He was standing right beside me. Then, seconds later, the watchmen spotted another ship.”

  “The ship you boarded—this USS Norton Sound?”

  “That is correct, Admiral. And what you see now before you was taken from that ship, along with the rocket we delivered, and all the other equipment, including the radar sets. There is a second missile on the Goeben, and Detmers has the ship itself, underway with a prize crew aboard. These are facts that simply cannot be dismissed.”

  Raeder shook his head, a perplexed expression on his face. “But why litter such a ship with these false documents? And what would a ship like this be doing out there without any crew aboard? This is a real mystery, Heinrich.”

  “Indeed it is, sir. Now kindly have a look at this… I hope your English is good enough to read it.” He reached in to produce the Life Magazine, again dated October 13, 1958, which he pointed out to Raeder immediately. Then he opened it to the article on Montgomery.

  “What’s this?” said Raeder. “Montgomery?” he leaned forward, studying the cover photograph closely. “I did not know he was quite so old.”

  “I know it will seem impossible,” said Heinrich, but that is supposed to be a photograph of the General as he appears in 1958. Look at the article, it all speaks to his great accomplishments in the desert war against Rommel.”

  “Our comedian at work again?”

  “Possibly, yet I will tell you that the longer you sit with that, the more disturbed you will become. It was one of several such magazines we recovered, and this next one is quite revealing. We found it in a sea locker below decks. Apparently someone kept it as a memento.”

  He produced yet another copy of that same magazine, only this edition was much earlier, but still impossibly dated, October 29, 1945, and this time priced at 10 Cents. Its cover showed a black and white photograph of a man out hunting with his dog and shotgun in the woods, with the subtext “AUTUMN.” Heinrich quickly flipped to the relevant article, a two page spread with many photos, and the headline struck Raeder like a cold slap in the face: “Allies Indict 24 Top Nazis For War Crimes – Hitler’s aides are mugged like common criminals before trial by Allied Military Tribunal of Big Four.”

  There, spread out over the whole two pages, were pictures worth thousands of words, faces, shown dead on and in profile, of all 24 men. They were faces Raeder knew well, names that were now riveted in the highest echelons of the Nazi power structure. There was Reichmarschall Hermann Goring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, General Albert Kesselring, only this time without the smile on his face that was his trademark. Every face seemed harried, lost, deflated, the eyes vacantly staring at the inevitable fate that had befallen them. It was astounding, photos of Franz von Pappen, Generals Wilhelm Keitel, and Alfred Jodl, and there, last of all in the lower right hand corner of page 39, was a man he had spoken to only two days ago, Admiral Karl Döenitz.

  “Commander in Chief of the German Navy? Why, they’ve given Döenitz my title! And this is accusing him of crimes against persons and property on the high seas. Well that is certainly true, if they also want to convict themselves of that same offense.”

  “May I, Admiral?” Heinrich took up the magazine and began reading… ‘Less than six months after the end of the war against Germany, the victorious Allies made the first move to punish the leaders of the defeated Axis. In the white-walled chamber of Berlin’s People’s Court, an indictment against 24 top members of the Nazi hierarchy was presented before the International Military Tribunal. All 24 were charged with participating in a common conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace by using the German State as an instrument of war….’ Look at them sir, accused of crimes against humanity; lined up like common criminals.”

  Raeder smiled. “That is not too far from the truth.” The Admirals disdain for the Nazi mentality was well known. Heinrich handed the magazine back to him, and Raeder continued reading further. “We must make it clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.” He turned the page. “Yes, we certainly did. Where could they have possibly obtained all these photographs? My God, look at the expression on that face.” He pointed to Döenitz. “I wonder why they left me out of this little club?”

  “Who can say, sir?”

  “Why would they concoct something like this?”

  “Is it a concoction Admiral? A Fabrication? That is certainly the question. Turn the page—there’s much more.”

  Now Raeder stared at a large full page photo of men on cots, spread out, as the article caption claimed, on the hanger deck of the carrier Enterprise. The title was: “The Long Voyage Home—Having won its war in the Pacific, the Navy returns to have its day.” There followed photos of US Navy sailors arriving in Panama, and a dancing girl entertaining a group of enthusiastic seamen in their dress whites. The following page showed an eerily authentic looking photo captioned: “The U.S.S. Enterprise, sunk six times according to Jap claims, enters New York Harbor by the dawn’s early light.”

  Kapitan Heinrich could see just the hint of discomfiture in the Admiral’s eyes now. “Every page of this magazine is consistent in its depiction of the time as 1945—just like this other magazine dated to 1958. The message the
y both convey is quite obvious: from the perspective of those years, this war has ended, and Germany was utterly defeated, our leaders trotted into a courtroom and tried for war crimes. I first entertained the thought that this was all propaganda, but here we find a ship that I believe you will not locate in the registry of American vessels, and with rockets pulled from its hold like teeth from a shark, and all the other equipment—advanced radars, radios, other equipment that we do not yet understand. I suspect, Admiral, that upon closer inspection, we will find this equipment is much advanced. We even noticed serial numbers dated to 1952 or later. Certainly we have nothing to match these rockets now. Yes, as preposterous as all that seems, read further. It leaves you with a terrible yawning doubt, page after page…”

  Raeder flipped through the pages. Even the silly advertisements all conspired to speak the same message. One for the New York Central Train Line spoke of how ‘wartime travelers made post-war travel news.’ Another from a baby food company was showing an infant born in ‘The Year of Victory.’ Swift & Company proclaimed: ‘Final, complete victory has, of course, hastened the day when there will be plenty of meat for everyone.’

  Raeder would find a most interesting article a few pages on: ‘The Atomic Scientists Speak Up – Nuclear Physicists say there is no secrecy in Atomic Bomb and no defense against it.” He knew something of that, but said nothing. There was even an article with photographs near the end that featured the broken and bomb damaged statues of Berlin, which gave Raeder a shudder.

  “Heinrich… You are suggesting that these documents and magazines may be authentic? Why, they would have to have come from…”

  Heinrich did not finish the Admiral’s sentence, it simply wasn’t necessary. The photographs spoke their silent truth. Raeder took up the issue dated October of 1958. There, in the table of contents, was Montgomery’s portrait, led by a haunting quote from the English poet T.S. Eliot: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…”

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Chapter 5

  He joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, a society for space travel, at the ripe age of 17, to begin his first foray into rocket design in 1927. There he met Max Valier, who saw applications for rocketry in driving cars, trains, gliders and even snow sleds. By 1930, select members of the society had co-opted an abandoned ammo dump near Reinickendorf and saw it the perfect place to begin testing their designs. They called it the Raketenflugplatz, or Rocket Airfield, and their first major test model was called the Mirak-1, which used a mix of a liquid oxygen and gasoline. After one successful test, the second model exploded, sending the team back to the drawing board to consider a less volatile method of fuel.

  Early variants designed by the group produced modest results, achieving altitudes of 200 feet and ranging no more than a kilometer. Eventually the altitude reached one mile, which was when the Army stepped in when the group approached it looking for funding and support. With an Army proving ground site available at Kummersdorf, the young Wernher Von Braun soon found himself working for the Army. There he met the famous Major von Richthofen and Ernst Heinkel, who wanted him to work on designs for rocket assisted aircraft.

  Von Braun also helped developed the A-Series rockets, (A-1 and A-2) which he nicknamed Max and Moritz. It wasn’t until 1937 that a dedicated testing site was set up at a top secret underground location called Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. It started with the A-3 design improving on earlier models, but had little real support until a strange ship appeared and began flinging lethal rocket weapons at German Navy ships. Suddenly Hitler was all ears. He wanted to know everything possible about these rockets, how they worked, how they were guided to their targets, how far they could fly and what payload they might carry.

  Soon von Braun found himself leading a team of very talented scientists, among them designer Walter Reidel, Rudolph Hermann conducting wind tunnel testing, Dr. Mader in materials, Dr. Ernst Steinhoff working on guidance and telemetry, Arthur Rudolph in the fabrication lab, Klaus Riedel conducting testing, and Hermann Steuding handling aeroballistics. Their designs were many: the Wasserfall and Schmetterling, The Waterfall and Butterfly, remote controlled AA rockets, Germany’s first attempts at building a functional SAM. The Taifun followed, conceived as a weapon that could be fired in massive waves against high flying Allied bombers.

  These and other designs got support from Goring, who was also looking for an anti-aircraft rocket for the Luftwaffe, but Germany never really saw a development path leading to much success with them… until two mysterious rolling chassis were delivered to Peenemünde on the night of May 5, 1942. Von Braun was among the first to get a look at them, his eyes widened with delight and awe when he saw them.

  “We’ll name them Max and Moritz,” he said with a grin, hearkening back to those early days of testing. They would become schoolmasters for the well educated minds who were now there to study them, and one day they would be twin terrors for the Allied cause. There, sitting on those horizontal carriages, were solutions to all the problems they had been muddling through. They had samples of materials, and engine design, for the X-17A was using three different engines made by Morton-Thiokol. They had the solid fuel propellant used in each engine, something that was not achieved in Fedorov’s history until 1948, and most of all, they had the design, noting the presence of two small rockets on the first stage that had been added to impart a desired spin on launch.

  Beyond that, they had something in the nose of each missile that was truly perplexing—two fully functioning low yield atomic warheads. It would be many months before they could even begin to grasp the full magnitude of what they had before them, but in that time, the examples would serve to guide and instruct the entire German rocket program. The only dilemma von Braun and his cohorts faced was the fact that they could not see the missile actually fire without losing it forever. They could only probe, measure, analyze and speculate, and so their first effort would be to try and reverse engineer what they had in front of them by building their own models. To adequately achieve the same scale, they would need to first understand how the powerful solid fuel propellant was made.

  Up until that time, most German rocket models had used volatile liquid fuel combinations of oxygen and alcohol, but this was something entirely different. By removing tiny samples for analysis, they determined that the oxidizer here was being embedded in a rubbery matrix that was cast right into the motor design as an integral part, much unlike a liquid fueled rocket that could be fueled on the launch pad. A solid propellant also produced a steady burn, which was much more difficult to throttle than a liquid fueled system, where the thrust could be determined by the amount of fuel being injected into the combustion chamber.

  The German scientists quickly realized that once this rocket was ignited, it could not be shut down, which even prohibited a test firing of the engine to determine its thrust and characteristics. Once it was fired, it was lost forever as a working model.

  ‘Yet solid fuel has many advantages,” said von Braun, “particularly from a military standpoint. It is very dense, allowing us to get a lot of thrust from a very low volume of material, and that saves weight. It ignites immediately, requiring no pre-fueling operation prior to launch, which would be completely impractical on a ship. And my experience tells me the reliability of such fuel will be much better than liquid fuel, and the shelf life is indefinite. From a logistical standpoint, it is much to be desired in a rocket weapon for military use—no fuel trucks and supporting crews, quick deployment and firing, easy transportability.”

  “But is this the weapon that struck our ships?” asked designer Walter Reidel. “Look, it clearly has three stages, the largest being that wider first stage. We have estimated the burn time on the volume of propellant there to be about two minutes. The other two stages, being much smaller and narrower in diameter, might burn for just a few seconds. From my perspective, I would say this design was intended to achieve very high altitudes, and very
quickly if the first stage burns so fast.”

  “Perhaps it is not the ship killer,” said Rudolph Hermann. “We are working on an exact model of the three stages for wind tunnel testing soon. This may be the anti-aircraft model—that is my suspicion.”

  “The key will be to first replicate the solid fuel propellant,” said von Braun.

  “We are only just beginning to understand its component chemistry,” said Dr. Mader. “We have identified acrylic acid, ammonium and potassium nitrates, perchlorates. The fuel is actually in granular form, embedded in a kind of rubber like asphalt, and these grains have a very specific shape to maximize burning characteristics.”

  On and on it went, until the actual warhead itself became a central focus of German interest. They did not know exactly what they were looking at in the beginning. Every preconception they had would lead them in the wrong direction. When they actually removed it to make a closer inspection, they were stunned to see there appeared to be no explosive material there at all, no amatol, TNT, or anything else. What good was a rocket with no explosive warhead?

  It was then that a man named Werner Heisenberg was brought in to take a closer look, who immediately sent a request for nuclear physicist Kurt Diebner, Paul Hartek, a nuclear chemist, an done Otto Hahn, who had pioneered the discovery of nuclear fission. When they finished their analysis and told the research team what they thought they had, there was hushed silence. Max and Moritz were no ordinary rockets, but highly advanced ballistic missiles that had been designed for high altitude flight paths, fast reentry, and they were delivering a lethal warhead that was based on the arcane principle of nuclear physics, and not simply chemical explosives. Germany had also been pursuing enrichment and nuclear physics at its Uranprojekt, with noted physicists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

  “Theoretically,” said Heisenberg, “The amount of fissile material in that warhead might be the equal of one or two kilotons of conventional explosives. But what is amazing here is that the mass of the fissile material is much smaller than I envisioned. I’ve been over calculating the critical mass required. This changes everything. Where in the world did you get these monsters? They certainly were not built here, of that I am certain.”