Amerika (36 page)

‘They fell for that?’ I said.

‘They had all the correct flight identifications. Why wouldn’t they?’

I bit my tongue but said nothing.

Patton continued. ‘We estimate bomb release occurred at ten thousand feet.’

The  bright  red  animated  bomb  tracks  lit  up  on  cue  and  glided inexorably toward their assigned targets. When they arrived, each city exploded into a brilliant star to signify a strike.

‘The planes returned to their mother ship and beat it for Berlin. Case closed. Deal done. Lights, please.’

The lights came up. Friedman stared at his motionless hands curled on the table. He slowly flexed them into fists.

Patton said, ‘Professor, you have the floor.’

He hesitated, looked at Archie who nudged him and said in a British accent, ‘There’s a good chap, Ernst. Time’s wasting, remember?’

In a barely audible voice, Friedman spent the next ten minutes bringing everybody up to speed about Uranium-235, and how its atoms gave off incredible amounts of explosive energy when they split. Then he described how the Nazis had used fission bombs on our American cities as well as Moscow and London. But all of this was old hat to me. In the past six months I’d read hundreds of news stories that touted the Nazis so-called ‘Super Weapon’ and how the master race was going to rule the word.

I reached my limit and said, ‘With all due respect, professor, just why the hell did we bring you here?’

He looked at me carefully, and then Patton, who nodded slowly for him to continue. Friedman cleared his throat and said softly, ‘I am here to destroy the Genie’s bottle.’

The room buzzed with everybody’s puzzled reaction.

Archie Campbell slapped the table and took over.

‘Gentlemen,  for  the  past  five years,  in  the  greatest of  secrecy,  the United States of America, along with her staunch ally, Great Britain, have been racing to develop an atomic weapon as well. Unfortunately,
Herr
Hitler won and we lost - due in large part to
Herr
Professor Friedman’s significant contributions, I might add. We, of course, tried to get him to cross over to us years ago, but...’ Campbell patted Friedman’s shoulder. ‘At the time, my friend here believed he was doing the right thing for the right reason. But then again, we all go a bit mad now and then, don’t we? And this time it was Ernst’s turn, wasn’t it?’

Friedman nodded curtly. ‘I should have listened to you.’

Campbell brightened. ‘Why don’t you take up the baton and finish the race?’ He promptly sat down, which was a signal for Friedman to struggle to his feet. He looked to Patton. ‘General? The target please.’

The lights dimmed again.  An aerial view of an industrial complex nestled in the wilderness alongside a winding river. Friedman’s voice grew stronger, more authoritative. ‘This is a United States government facility located in Hanford, Washington, situated along the Columbia River. Its sole purpose for being is to use a nuclear pile reactor to manufacture weapons- grade plutonium for atomic bombs. Next slide please.’

A complex diagram that took me a moment to recognize it as cross- section of a bomb. All the notations were in German.

‘This is the design of the Nazi’s current weapon. Note how the uranium core contains a tritium trigger that helps initiate the chain reaction. After long deliberation and great secrecy, I modified the triggers in their  remaining  weapons  so  that  they  would  no  longer  cause  a  chain reaction. When detonated, the bombs - what is the word, Archie?’

‘Fizzle.’

‘Ja, danke.
And so it was in this way that Hitler’s last two remaining bombs did not explode, they fizzled. As a result, the Third Reich is out of weaponized  uranium  to  create  further  weapons  for  at  least  a  year  to eighteen months.’

Archie piped up. ‘Out of material in the Fatherland, you mean.’

‘Next slide, please.’

A blockhouse-shaped building surrounded by concertina wire and guardhouses.

‘The only existing fissile material in the world is located at the Hanford facility. Berlin plans to seize it by force sometime in the next few days.’

An angry reaction rumbled up from the ranks, but a quick slap of Patton’s riding crop on the table quieted them down. Friedman continued, his voice growing stronger.

‘Whereas Germany has gained the ability to extract enriched uranium, American and British scientists have perfected the method by which plutonium is created and weaponized. While it is more difficult to fission, it is much more powerful. Berlin wants it, and whatever Berlin wants it takes.’

Fatt piped up. ‘My ass.’

A supportive growl from the troops.

‘Steady on, gentlemen,’ Patton said. ‘Let the professor finish.’

‘If we can destroy the plutonium at the Hanford facility, we will gain valuable time.’

I said, ‘To do what?’

Patton snapped, ‘To get America back into the war.’

Patton nodded to his aide who, in turn, nodded to another aide, who opened the double doors leading into the potting shed, and motioned to someone waiting there. Seconds later two soldiers appeared, grunting and heaving Friedman’s steamer trunks out of the room and then thumped them up onto the table. Patton held out a small key to the professor, who ceremoniously reached over, unlocked them and opened them in turn. Everyone at the table rose as one to see what was inside.

Inside the first steamer trunk, three grey, metallic, twelve-inch diameter cylinders, each about three feet long, lay side by side, tied down with strapping cords. In the second trunk, a series of thin collar-like objects with rivet  holes,  which  I  figured  must  be  the  mating  couplers.  Also  two shoebox-sized  instrument  packages  with  thick  bundles  of  wires  neatly coiled in readiness, sat nestled at either end.

‘Gentlemen,’ Friedman said quietly, ‘This is the only nuclear weapon left in the world.’

‘Not very big,’ I said.

Friedman said, ‘It is a Plutonium 239 proof-of-concept version we built long ago.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning it will only yield the equivalent of one hundred eighty-five thousand tons of TNT. But more than enough to destroy the plutonium and damage the reactor that makes it.’

‘Lot of punch in a small package.’

‘Nuclear energy is remarkable that way.’

Aided by a complicated-looking diagram, Friedman spent the next few minutes outlining how the bomb parts were assembled, how the fusing system worked - both proximity and barometric, how armed - manually by a weapons officer - and how aerodynamic fins and nose cap would give it enough stability to be dropped like an ordinary bomb.

‘Who’s the bombardier?’ I said.

Patton said, ‘Mr. Mason, here.’

To my surprise, our red-haired flight engineer grinned sheepishly at me and stood up.

‘Sir, I’ve reviewed the basics with Doctor Friedman. It looks fairly straightforward. The only difference being that it’s going to make a hell of a bigger bang than the ordnance I’m used to working with.’

The room chuckled at this, Fatt the loudest.

Patton singled him out, ‘Captain Fatt, you’ve got the floor.’

He shot me a wink and stood up. ‘While the Gestapo is still busy chasing its tail back in Baltimore trying to figure out what happened to the professor, the
Dixie Clipper
can be ready to go in forty-eight hours, if I can have the crew to myself.’

‘You’ve got the crew,’ Patton said. ‘But you’ve only got twenty-four hours. The compliance people could move at any moment, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.’

I said, ‘Why don’t we just hide the plutonium somewhere else?’

Patton shook his head. ‘The second we start, they’ll make their move. Besides, I want that shit gone.’ He slapped his riding crop into his palm. ‘I promised President Perkins a level playing ground for America to go head to head with the Nazis using conventional weapons, and by God that’s what we’re going to do.’

‘She approved the mission?’

He grinned. ‘Let’s just say she’s looking the other way at the moment. If we fail, she’ll blame it on those crazy Johnny Reb Sons of Liberty and leave it at that, but if we succeed, that’s a different story.’

I said, ‘A lot of governors are still running their states solo. What makes you think they’ll sign on?’

‘When our mission is accomplished, the president will blow the whistle on Berlin and call their bluff. Once the world finds out Hitler’s bark is worse than his bite, mark my words, America will unite like never before and chew his ass to bits.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

He frowned and leaned forward, both palms flat on the table like a poker player. ‘Let me ask you a question, captain. Would you go to war against these bastards if you knew you had a chance of winning?’

‘Damn right.’

‘That’s exactly what the Sons of Liberty are going to do; give America and her people that chance.’

‘But I’m not in the Sons of Liberty.’

‘You are now.’

If you’re doing nothing, twenty-four hours can be an eternity. But when you’re planning a non-stop bombing mission that takes you over two thousand miles across the United States, those hours disappear faster than water drops in a hot skillet.

I spent the rest of the day dancing in that skillet, along with Fatt’s crew in a hot, airless room with maps on every wall and performance charts spread out on the table.  Our  mission  path  would  take  us  from  Lake Salvador  northwest  into  Texas,  Colorado,  west  through  Wyoming  and Utah, further west into Idaho, Oregon, and finally due north into Washington State.

They had picked the Boeing because of her extraordinary range. Only a plane like ours could lift off, fly the mission and return halfway before we would need to land and refuel. Landing a seaplane requires water, however, so the Sons of Liberty had established a secret base on Lake Mead, Nevada where we would gas up for the flight home.

About two hours into the briefing, Fatt had two enlisted men bring in a sheet-covered table. He whisked it off like a magician to reveal the Hanford Facility painstakingly reproduced in miniature. In the late thirties, the government had made the barren landscape even more deserted by buying up  the  nearby  small  town  of  Hanford  and  relocated  its  unsuspecting citizens. Then private contractors built a string of concrete buildings nose- to-tail alongside a densely-wooded, deserted stretch of the Columbia River.

Their nuclear reactor bombarded uranium rods to create U-238. They sent the irradiated rods over to a building called ‘PUREX,’ the Plutonium Extraction Plant that ground them up into a liquid plutonium nitrate solution. The Plutonium Finishing Plant was the next stop, converting the solution into solid, disc-shaped objects nicknamed ‘hockey pucks’ which were stored in a top-secret vault that was safe from everything.

‘Safe from everything except the
Dixie Clipper’s
bomb,’ Fatt added.

‘Delivered right about here.’ He touched his wooden pointer on the roof of the finishing plant.

I said, ‘How accurate does your aim have to be?’

Fatt nodded to Mason who said casually, ‘If this were a conventional pickle, I’d have to drop it right on the money. But from what they’re telling me, if I can lob the damn thing within a mile or so, we’re in good shape.’

I said, ‘That powerful?’

‘Let me put it this way.’ Mason made a wide circle with his arms that embraced almost the entire Hanford complex. ‘Boom, it’s gone.’

According to Archie, the ‘Manhattan Project’ had   proceeded excruciatingly slow for years. Apparently making this stuff was a lot easier on paper than in reality - not to mention the reactor ‘going critical’ and practically melting down before they could shove in the rods and shut it down.

But after two years of failure, they were finally achieving success. And while our scientists and technicians were working their butts off, FDR’s White House was working equally hard to find out how far Nazis had come in the nuclear race. One advantage Hitler had over America’s open society is that the he controlled information the way a greedy miser controls his money: nothing gets out unless he says so.

Was our security as good? Hard to say. But some claimed we had our share of spies happily sending - or selling - what we had learned about nuclear fission to the Berlin boys. But they hadn’t bought it all, apparently, because from what Friedman claimed when he joined our briefing in the late afternoon, the German scientists still hadn’t mastered the art of plutonium extraction beyond his small proof-of- concept weapon.

He and Archie tried explaining the gas diffusion process in detail, and how the Uranium 235 got converted to Plutonium 239, but they lost me and the crew early on. Sometimes too much information is too much, and I finally said so.

Friedman agreed with a faint smile. ‘It is a highly complicated and time- consuming process to get a very small amount of product. Not to mention expensive too. The Third Reich almost went bankrupt at one point. But Hitler got Krupp and the other industrialists to make unrestricted loans.’

‘What did he promise in return?’

‘Their heads attached to the rest of their bodies.’