The Black Gate (15 page)

With a grin on his face, he reached over and turned on the wire recorder. Everything he and the agent said would be recorded and played back by OSS analysts when the plane returned to its base at Harrington, England.

“Garbo, this is Doghouse,” he replied, also in German. While the transmissions were in the clear, the Joan-Eleanor system operated on a frequency beyond the capability of the Germans to monitor. “Go ahead, over.”

As the woman nearly six miles below him spoke, his smile disappeared and the hair on the back of his neck began to stand on end. By the time she had finished, with him asking only two questions for clarification, the skin on his arms had broken out into goose flesh, and it wasn’t from the cold.
 

After signing off, he pressed the intercom switch and spoke to the pilot. “Get us back to the barn, sir, as fast as you can.”
The brass is going to flip out over this one
, he thought.

***

“Jesus Christ.” Aaron Connelly more collapsed than sat into the chair at his desk. His body still felt numb after the emergency meeting General Donovan had called that morning after the latest report from Garbo had come in. The OSS detachment at RAF Harrington had forwarded a verbatim transcript of Garbo’s report, but some overzealous staffer in the communications center here at headquarters had hand carried it directly to Donovan instead of sending it through the Intelligence Services Directorate. Connelly and his boss had been summoned to the meeting along with the other department heads, only to be blindsided by the disaster unfolding at Arnsberg. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, smoothing it out against the blotter on his desk. “Goddammit, Peter,” he whispered as he read the carbon copy again, “what have you done?”

The agent you sent here has refused to destroy the Arnsberg V-Weapon project. He has become obsessed with documenting the technology and is putting the Allies in great peril. This project has far more destructive potential than thousands of von Braun’s rocket weapons, and cannot be allowed to achieve operational status for so much as a single day or the Allies could very well lose the war. You must act immediately or all may be lost…

“Is it true?”

He looked up to see his secretary, Iris, standing in the door, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. In her mid-fifties, she was twenty years older than most of the rest of the secretarial staff, but could run rings around all of them. Along with every possible skill a man could wish for in an assistant, she had an uncanny knack for knowing just what Connelly needed right when he needed it. She also seemed to know everything that happened in the headquarters building, whether she was cleared for it or not. This was the first time that even she hadn’t had a clue that an anvil was dropping on top of them.

Pursing his lips, Connelly nodded.
 

Iris came in and closed the door, then set the coffee down on his desk. He noticed it was only two-thirds full.

Without a word, Iris went to one of the five drawer safes and quickly spun the combination lock. Kneeling down, she yanked open the bottom drawer and reached toward the back to retrieve a bottle of whiskey. Gracefully returning to her full height, she strode over to the desk as she unscrewed the cap and filled up the cup the rest of the way.

“This won’t help, but it certainly can’t hurt,” she said as she resealed the bottle and returned it to the safe drawer.
 

Connelly took a sip of the powerful brew, forcing himself not to simply gulp it down. “It’s true that the agent reporting is saying that Peter’s not carrying out his mission, but who knows if that’s really the case? I don’t want to believe it, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “Whatever he’s doing, he must have his reasons.”

“There are already rumors going around that he’s a traitor,” she told him.

“That I don’t believe, not for a damn minute!” He put his head in his hands. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to lash out at you.”

“I don’t believe it, either, but that’s the story that’s making the rounds.” The OSS was built on secrets that were never to go beyond its walls. But sometimes, still confined within its walls, secrets that should have only been known to a few became known to many.
 

“Anyone who thinks that can go straight to Hell. Peter’s not a traitor.”
I hope
, he didn’t add.

“So what’s going to happen now?”

He looked up into her bright green eyes. “I don’t know. God help me, I just don’t know.”

***

On the other side of the Atlantic, the operations officer of the RAF’s 617 Squadron, the famed Dambusters, sat ramrod straight at his desk in the squadron headquarters building at RAF Scampton, his telephone pressed to his ear so he could hear over the muted roar of a pair of four engine Lancaster bombers coming in for landing. “Yes, sir, today’s raid against the Bielefeld viaduct was a complete success, collapsing about sixty meters of the viaduct. It’s the first raid where we used the Grand Slam bomb. It shattered at least one of the pylons, and the Tallboy bombs finished off the target…yes, sir…” He looked up at his planning board, which listed all the targets the squadron had been ordered to attack over the next month. “Arnsberg is fourth on our list sir…Yes, sir, but we’d have to update our…That many, sir? Yes, sir, I understand. I’ll coordinate with 9 Squadron immediately. We’ll get it done, sir.”

As he hung up the phone, his assistant asked, “What the devil was that all about, sir?”

“That was Air Vice-Marshall Blucke.” Blucke was the Air Officer Commanding of No. 1 Group, of which 617 Squadron was a part. “We’ve been given orders from on high that the viaduct at Arnsberg has been moved up to the top of the list for the next Grand Slam raid.”

“On high, sir?”

“I distinctly heard mention of Downing Street.” 10 Downing Street was the official residence of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

“Oh, hell.”

The operations officer looked out the window as the planes returning from the Bielefeld raid taxied from the runway to parking positions along the apron. The squadron leader had already radioed in the news of the raid’s success. The operations officer hadn’t been surprised at the results: while the twelve thousand pound Tallboy bombs the squadron had been using to attack hard targets were enormous, the new twenty-two thousand pound Grand Slam bombs, the largest bombs ever dropped, were positively titanic. Released from high altitude to burrow deep into the earth, they created an underground shock wave, an earthquake effect, when they detonated, that literally shook the target to pieces. “I’ll brief the squadron leader as soon as he comes in. I want you to get the ground crews to work turning the planes around and have the weapons chaps get the bombs ready for tomorrow.” He turned back to face the younger man. “We’ve been ordered to send up everything we can get into the air.”

“When?”

The chalk in the operations officer’s hand screeched on the blackboard as he wrote
15 March - Arnsberg
. Turning back to his assistant, he said, “Tomorrow.”
 

TEUTONIC KNIGHTS

While Peter could have performed some subtle sabotage on the computer that wouldn’t have caused lasting harm, he had no doubt that Baumann would instantly have put him under a microscope. After resolving the machine’s performance problems, von Falkenstein and Hoth had made it clear to the rest of the staff that Peter was now in charge of the great computer’s operation and maintenance. A guard was now posted at the steps to the platform, which was the only way to reach the device, and only three technicians were authorized access, which greatly limited the pool of likely suspects.

The capacitor bank, however, was frequented by a dozen electrical technicians, along with Hoth and Peter, who had assisted the senior scientist with some of the system calibrations after Peter had proved his worth on the computer. As was customary before operating the gate, the capacitors were checked for any faults, and Peter’s assistance was welcomed.

While his heart had been beating like a drum and his body was soaked in the cold sweat of fear, he was able to carry out his act of sabotage all too easily. As the technicians had checked off one capacitor after another, Peter had simply slipped a small spool of solder wire into a particular gap in the housing of one of the capacitors. He hoped that, were it discovered prematurely, it might be written off as a foolish accident on someone’s part, as it certainly wouldn’t look like sabotage. Not until the capacitors were turned on and began to generate heat.

With the checks complete and his treachery undiscovered, Peter excused himself and returned to his room. He still had some time left before the next watch, when von Falkenstein planned to send the next test subject through.

After grabbing something to eat in the kitchen, Peter returned to his room and sat down at the desk where he had left
The Black Gate
and von Falkenstein’s copy of
The Mystic Will
. From his tunic pocket, he produced a pair of hand-sized journals he had purloined from one of the operator consoles on Level Two.
 

Taking a pen from the desk, he opened one of the journals and paused, the nib held a fraction of an inch from the waiting paper. Peter was an engineer by trade and had a keen eye and memory for detail, but he couldn’t trust his observations simply to his memory. He had to document as much as he could.

It would be natural for him to keep his own set of project notes here at the facility. But any information he might take with him, assuming he ever left this place alive, had to be protected, both from casual discovery and from those who might pose a threat to the United States after the Nazis had been vanquished (the Soviets came immediately to mind) in case he wasn’t able to deliver his journals to the right people. What he now knew was far more important than even the Allied exploitation of German and Japanese ciphers, which were among the most closely guarded secrets of the entire war.

That is what had driven him to borrow von Falkenstein’s copy of
The Mystic Will
. Flipping it open, he breathed a sigh of relief that it was the same printing as his father’s copy, which remained safe in Peter’s library at home. He had wanted the book not to read, but to use as a key for one of the world’s oldest methods of encryption, the book cipher. In concept, it was simple enough: using a particular book as the key, one could use the page number, line number, and position number of a word or letter to transform that word or letter into a numeric cipher. To decipher the information, the process was reversed. The only catch was that one had to use the exact same edition of the book. He silently thanked his father, for codes and ciphers had been another of his hobbies, and he, Mannie, and Peter had spent many fine hours enciphering and deciphering silly messages. While Peter hadn’t pursued it as a line of work, that aspect of his childhood had helped immensely when he had been sent to Bletchley Park.
 

His plan had two downsides, of course. The first was that he would be in a bit of hot water with von Falkenstein and Baumann if his illicit journals were discovered. Simple notes would not have been questioned, but numerical cipher would certainly raise some red flags. He might be able to talk his way out of it, but might not. The second problem was more concrete. If he died in this place, the journals, even if eventually discovered, would be useless because no one would know the key.

There is one person you can trust
, he thought.
 

Flipping open
The Mystic Will
to a random page, he composed his thoughts and began to write.

***

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Peter stood at the entrance to von Falkenstein’s library. After what could have been no more than an hour of sleep, slumped over his desk, pen still in hand, he had been awakened by a soldier bearing a summons to the
Herr Professor’s
quarters.

“Yes, Peter, yes.” Von Falkenstein looked up from where he’d been writing in one of his own journals. Peter would have loved to get his hands on it. “Please, come in and close the door.” Peering over the top of his reading glasses, he added, “You look dreadful, dear boy. Your zeal is commendable and appreciated, but you must find some time to rest. Come, sit down.”

Like a wooden marionette, Peter did as he was told, slumping into one of the leather armchairs facing von Falkenstein’s desk. “I’m sorry, sir. It was a very long night. I’m having some difficulties coming to grips with all that I’ve seen here.”

With a final flourish of his fountain pen, von Falkenstein closed the journal and took off his glasses, setting them on the desk. Getting up from his chair, he poured a glass of schnapps for Peter and himself. Handing Peter the glass, he said, “Here, drink this.”

Peter put the glass to his lips and took a sip, then tossed back the entire contents, swallowing it in one gulp. The schnapps blasted a welcome trail of fire down his throat and into his stomach.
 

Von Falkenstein poured him another. “I called you here for a very important reason,” he said quietly as he sat down in the chair opposite Peter. “There is no easy way to say it, so I’ll just get on with the matter.” Peter nodded, suddenly worried. “The more time has gone on, the more I regret Baumann’s choice as the leader of the first contingent of our new Teutonic Knights. He is quite the warrior, yes, but he is also a heartless, honorless baboon. He’s vile and sadistic, and I think in the end, once he transits the gate and is given the powers of our great ancestors, he will be found to be ill-disciplined, unwilling to carry out the
Führer’s
orders. Instead, I believe he will follow a course of action of his own design, which will lead to very unfortunate consequences for the Reich. We have put so much into this project, sacrificed a great deal to get to where we are today, and I feel like we may be about to pour our gold into the wrong mold, as it were.”
 

Peter felt queasy, and it had nothing to do with the schnapps. “Sir, if I may ask something?”

“Of course.”

“
Standartenführer
Baumann told me that you’ve sent a few hundred travelers, including children, through the gate. But why didn’t you just stop your experimentation with Ivan? What more perfect engine of destruction could you hope to find in a chimera than him? A thousand, even a hundred, of those things would put a stop to the Russians, to say nothing of the Anglo-Americans.”