1945 (26 page)

"Wait. What else?"

"What else. How about I go back to D.C.? Do you know how long it took me to get things going with Sarah? Then you come along and drag me off on this wild Nazi chase."

"C'mon, Wayne. You were born wild. This way Sarah will get a chance to know what she's buying into when she buys into Wayne Mason. Besides, now that you 'have things going' the days of the relationship are numbered anyway. Am I right?" Jim really couldn't decide whether to feel guilty or amused at what he had arranged to have happen to his friend. He setded on both. "Besides, I thought you'd enjoy getting out of the Pentagon."

"Well, first off, it's different with Sarah."

"Yeah. It's always different."

"This time it is—"

"Oh, stow your guff. You know you wanted to—"

"Damn, it's that weasel Harriman," Wayne announced softly, as he pointed at a figure approaching them.

Jim turned. It was indeed the OSS spook from the Berlin embassy walking briskly toward them.

Harriman came up to the two and gave a little nod. "Gendemen, our friend said I should pick you up. My car is out this way."

"How the hell did you wind up here?" Mason asked as they followed dutifully.

Harriman looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Didn't Martel fill you in?"

Jim smiled. "Wayne spent so much of the trip down bellyaching that there wasn't time."

Harriman laughed. "We all have one thing in common besides being stationed in Berlin. We've all met our quarry. Donovan felt that qualified us as much as anything else. And Major, you actually had dinner with him and several members of his team once, which is what got you dragged into this in the first place."

"And here I thought it was all your idea," Wayne said in an aside to Jim.

"Heh. So did I. I guess my boss thinks for himself sometimes. I wonder if he has any other surprises lined up for me."

"I hope so," Mason responded dryly.

"As for myself," Harriman continued, "I guess you could say
I
'm your boss here." He paused to look at them.
"I
expect neither one of you thinks he has any particular reason to like me, and that's fine, though Martel, you might want to know that my personal report to Donovan said I thought you were clean. The point is, just as long as you listen to what I have to say and follow through on it, we'll get along okay."

"Oh, Donovan set me straight on that. You did what you were supposed to do and even made the right call about me being a fall guy. I have no complaints. I did then, because you didn't seem to give a rat's ass one way or the other—but hey, that's baseball."

"Okay, Harriman, me too," Wayne added

"Call me Trevor."

"All right, Trevor, you're an okay guy. So now what?"

Harriman smiled. "I've booked us a room in town. Rooms are okay, restaurant is better than you might expect. We've got two appointments tomorrow: one with Groves and one with the head of FBI operations here. So our mission tonight is to book in, eat, and get a good night's sleep."

Harriman looked at Jim and spoke in the flat, affectless way that in some men denotes absolute sincerity. "I'm glad you got cleared. Now's your chance to dish some back, right to the source."

April 17

Abbeville, France

Adolf Galland walked down the line of Me-262 and Gotha 229 fighters. The pilots stood before their planes at rigid attention. That at least had stayed the same in this new jet age, he thought. Such changes in a mere—what? —six years? Even the smells were different. No more the warm, familiar scent of petrol and oil; now it was all jet fuel and hydraulic fluid. Still, though he missed what had
passed
or at least was passing, away, Galland had to admit that the sharklike silhouette of the 262 looked far more deadly than that of the old 109s, while the batwinged 229s embodied stealthy death. The pilots standing in front of their planes looked fit and eager. Though they had not been briefed yet as to the mission, all could sense that something was in the air, that the hunt was about to begin.

"If only we had these fighters back in '40," Colonel Kleiber, his intelligence officer and second-in-command who had been standing silendy at his side, said wistfully.

"We'd have crushed them in a week."

Galland was impatient with this particular brand of fantasizing. "You might as well wish that we'd had them in 1919. Keep in mind that we are not going up against Spitfires and Hurricanes this time. The British haven't been standing still. Their upgraded Meteor IV is said to be a match for the 262, and on top of that they'll still have the advantage of defense. If we lose a plane we also lose the pilot. If their pilot gets out, he's in the air again the next day."

"But our jets outnumber theirs almost four to one," Kleiber replied. Those are formidable odds."

"We outnumbered them in 1940 too," Galland replied. "And we were as sure of ourselves then as now." Galland turned and looked back down the line of fighters. He could sense the ghosts hovering about him. It was from this same airfield that he had led the attacks against the British back in August of 1940, when victory had seemed a foregone conclusion. Instead of the sleek new jets, he saw in his mind's eye the line of 109s. Instead of the whine of jets, he heard the coughing rumble of piston engines turning over, revving up, and pointing to the west for take-off. And then, like now, victory was supposedly in the bag before the fight began.

Well, this time maybe so. If the initial onslaught caught the RAF on the ground, certainty so. Even if it did not, the Luftwaffe could wear the RAF down; they had the numbers to do it this time, unless the Americans intervened. But what
about
the Americans? Would they not fight for their British cousins? If not out of sentiment then because England and only England allowed the Americans something like strategic parity with the Reich? And once the Americans arrived on the scene, the strategic situation changed drastically. The US Navy was an air force unto itself, and when it came to logistics, the Americans were demons.

Well, the answer to that was simple enough: batter the English into submission before the American carriers arrived, before they started ferrying fighters across the Atlantic. That meant that not only the assault against England must go like clockwork, but the operations against Iceland and Greenland as well. He wondered how close to zero were the odds of every single factor clicking together like that

He looked back over at Kleiber, who stood saddened and disturbed at his commander's sudden fit of doubt. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. He might be tired of war but he still had his duty. It was wrong to project such feelings, especially now. They needed to believe. Belief 
itself was a vital component of victory. He forced a smile. "When we return wreathed in glory from that first strike, chances are I'll say you were right after all."

April 17

Near Oak Ridge

Otto Skorzeny lifted the camera out of its carrying case and locked it into the brace mounted over the instrument panel of the Piper Cub.

"Just keep it steady."

"I'll only be able to hold this path for a couple of minutes. We are right on the edge of the restricted air space." The pilot, Friedrich Bachman, owned and operated a small private airport that had become their base of operations; he was their ultimate contact. From the moment Louis had delivered them to him, he hadn't seemed entirely happy with his new and more active role.

"That's all it will take," Skorzeny lied as he leaned over the camera and played with the focus. Oak Ridge, ten miles ahead, stood out with crystal clarity in the early morning light, and a beautiful sight it was.

The trees below were showing their spring colors. The apple orchards in the hollows were a happy riot of pink and white. The leaves on the early-blooming maples and beeches on the southern slopes of the hills stood out in pale lacy green against brown. Below them, the valley of the Clinch River, which formed a sweeping bow around three sides of the base, was blanketed with a soft morning fog. A few puffy clouds completed the picture.

Skorzeny aimed the lens straight at the town of Oak Ridge, swung it slighdy to the south until he picked out the airstrip, and started to snap off shots. Several C-47s were parked along the airport apron, a perfect measuring reference for the length of the strip, which as reported ran on an exact east-west axis. Finishing a roll of film, he popped it out and quickly loaded another.

"Take it in a bit closer."

"We are getting warned off."

"Do it. Now." Bachman would probably have leapt from the plane had Skorzeny told him to do so in that tone while wearing that expression.

"Sir! P-51s!" Bachman need hardly have spoken, because at that moment the wash of two Mustangs, one after the other, buffeted the little Piper.

"Scheisse!
They must have been loitering in the neighborhood—what better place to practice patrolling? — and were vectored in using the cumulus to give the Piper a surprise. Well, they hadn't shot him down, which the technical rules would have permitted. They were probably taking this as a chance to teach local student pilots a serious lesson about how the neighborhood of Oak Ridge wasn't a good place to lose track of location. Plus maybe have a little fun.

As Skorzeny contemplated the possibilities, the P-51s began to execute what had to be Immelmans. They were a ways off now, but they would be looping over and diving back soon, probably with the intention of closing in and forcibly escorting the Piper to their own field.

Skorzeny grinned. Well, every mission has some bad luck. . . . and now he'd have some fun of his own. "Get down!" he shouted to Bachman. "I'm taking control!"

"What?"

"Maybe they didn't see you! Get down now!" Looking like he would have preferred to be ordered to bail out, Bachman did as bid.

Taking the stick, Skorzeny yanked it back and over, slamming in left rudder as he did so. The Piper Cub rolled up, flipped over and was suddenly pointing straight down. He pulled the throtde back to idle as the Cub went to meet Mother Earth. The P-51s passed straight over and high. After a few moments they both went into split-Ss as well, but physics dictated that their speed carry them well past the little plane they were pursuing.

Behind him Bachman was cursing wildly, fighting with the stick, trying to pull it back, but Skorzeny kept control. The Cub continued its straight-downward trajectory. As the airspeed indicator redlined, Skorzeny at last began to pull back, pushing in a little left aileron as he did so, turning the plane just enough to enable him by looking back over his shoulder to view the P-51s. They were out of their diving turns, lining up on him—but from well astern.

As the hills to either side came level with his wing tips, the Cub at last stopped shedding altitude and began skimming down a narrow valley just south of the Clinch at treetop level. The P-51s were still on him.

When they had closed to less than half a mile, he pulled the stick back and turned, racing up the side of the valley, barely clearing the trees along the crest line. The fog-shrouded Clinch was below and just ahead. The P-51s streaked past behind him and started to pull back up.

He dived down toward the river and seconds later was into the fog.

"You're going to kill us!" Bachman screamed.

Not bothering to respond, Skorzeny dropped the plane down lower, hoping that the man behind him had set the altimeter as carefully as a good German should. There was a break in the fog, and less than twenty feet below he saw the river. He gave the plane a touch of right aileron, watching carefully. He couldn't quite see the bank that he felt looming up to his right; it was more of a pale green glow.

Skorzeny slammed in left aileron and rudder, banking the plane over sharply.

He had to concede that the little plane handled very nearly as well as a Storch, as the Cub executed a full 180-degree turn within the width of the river. Heading east now, he edged back over to the north bank of the river. What fun, he thought, it would be to pop back up and run north for a kilometer or two and pull a treetop run over the atomic reactor. The fighter pilots would go out of their minds! Now that his blood was up he was almost crazy enough to do it. . . . But no, the odds of surviving such a stunt were little better than fifty-fifty. The mission had to come first.

With wheels nearly skimming the water he continued eastward, weaving along the almost-visible shadow of the riverbank, following it as the river turned north.

"Bridge!"
his companion shrieked.

What the pursuing fighter pilots had seen could possibly be attributed to a combination of panic and beginners luck. Negotiating the damned bridge was a job for an expert. Absolutely no possibility of popping over ... for a moment he contemplated simply slamming into it, but concluded the mission's chances would be harmed more by his absence than by news of an acrobat pilot nosing around the outskirts of Oak Ridge. He pushed the nose down slighdy, brought the wings to about fifteen degrees from horizontal so the plane could slide underneath the span like a key fitting into a lock. One wing
tcked
against a slanted support strut, the other had at least a centimeter of clearance. As he emerged from the other side, Skorzeny faked a stall, let one wingtip drift almost to the water, "recovered," and continued up the river for a while with wings now aligned about twenty degrees from horizontal, then "overcompensated" and wound up ten degrees off in the opposite direction. That would at least give some credence to the idea of a lucky beginner who wanted nothing but to get the hell out of town.