by Stuart Slade
Lang shook his head dumbly, still shaken by the immensity of the explosions that had destroyed the base. He’d never thought of railway guns, had no idea of their terrifying power and accuracy. It was a lesson he knew he would never forget.
There was a lot Marcks wanted to say but Lang was on first-name terms with more important people than he could easily count. For the moment, Lang was untouchable. Sarcasm would have to substitute for the more direct action he longed to take. “Well, if I may be permitted to make a suggestion. Have you considered serving the Fatherland by transferring to the Russian Army?”
Washington International Airport, Washington D.C. USA.
“How was the flight?” The question meant more than it sounded. ‘The flight’ was a long trip for the Pan American Constellation. It was a civilian airliner in name only. It had military-style seating and equipment; its Pan American paint job was a gesture towards the countries on its route. The first leg on the outward journey, Washington to Lajes in the Azores, was trouble-free enough, both were American territory, although the ever-cynical Achillea had her doubts about Washington. The second leg, Lajes to Casablanca, was where the fun kicked in.
Casablanca was technically Vichy French but it was actually run by the Free French. To be more precise, the faction of the Free French lead by Admiral Darlan. So, there was a constant underground war going on between the various groups and the resulting level of intrigue and conspiracy was surpassed only by Cairo. The third leg, Casablanca to Rome was even more interesting. There that the civilian cover of the Constellation was essential. Italy was a neutral in the war. Its economy was booming as a result and Mussolini had every intention of keeping it that way. So, the airliner had to be civilian. The final leg of the journey was the train trip from Rome to Geneva where Igrat, Achillea and Henry McCarty would meet up with Loki and pick up the monthly economic intelligence data. It was a regular trip and the question had actually been ‘did you get the data?’
“Pretty good. We got the stuff. Had a little trouble in Casablanca on the way out though.”
“Germans?”
“Nah, OSS.” McCarty leaned back in the limousine seat. Let me tell you about it.”
Gusoyn grinned to himself. McCarty was an excellent storyteller and this promised to be good.
Cafe Sahara, Casablanca, 36 hours earlier
“Special operations are for skilled professionals, not amateurs.” The local OSS man leaned back in his seat, radiating scorn for his company. Behind him, Igrat looked around the Cafe, it was empty, even the staff had made themselves scarce. In Casablanca, everybody knew when shady stuff was going down and those not involved took off in any convenient direction. It wasn’t that they were afraid of the authorities. It was well known that the Vichy police only arrested the innocent as a last resort. It was just smarter not to be involved.
Frank Barnes was emboldened by the lack of response to his comment. “And look at you. You’re supposed to be couriers for some important documents. An old man and two women. Weak, undisciplined civilians. You need to be in peak condition and have specialized training for this sort of thing. I’ve a good mind to make a report to Washington on this. What would happen if Nazi agents attacked you? Huh? Suppose a Nazi came at you with a knife?” Barnes pointed at Achillea. “What would you do? Huh?”
“I’d take it out of his hand.”
“This isn’t funny. A Nazi could take that case away from you right now. Look, let me teach you what to do.” Barnes reached into a pocket and pushed a pencil across the table. “Pretend that’s a knife and come at me with it and I’ll show you the tricks.”
Achillea looked down at the pencil. “No need to pretend. Uhhh, wait a minute.” She got up and walked across to the counter where a selection of chef s knives hung on the wall. She inspected them for a minute before selecting one, not quite the longest but one with a broad, strong blade. Then she touched the edge with her thumb and pushed her lower lip out in disgust. Blunt as a spoon. She disappeared through the service hatch and a few seconds later the sound of a knife being drawn across a sharpening steel rang through the empty cafe.
Frank Barnes started sweating slightly. “I’m only trying to help you know. This is a dangerous business, too dangerous for amateurs. You should leave it to us.” Igrat smiled at him; in the other corner, Henry just stared
“Madam, you can’t come in here. Staff only.” The cafe manager’s voice was smooth and cultured, although muffled by the closed service door.
“Hand please.” Achillea’s voice was abrupt. A split second later there was an outraged squeal followed by an irritated “still blunt.” The sounds of a knife being sharpened grew in energy.
“Uh, I just hope my old war wound won’t interfere with this.” Barnes was sweating heavily now and glancing around. The cafe was still empty. Then the service door swung open and Achillea stepped through. Her eyes fixed on Barnes and she dropped into her habitual crouch, knife in her right hand, down low, point aimed unerringly at Barnes’ groin.
“Err, good Lord, is that the time? I have to make my scheduled call to headquarters.” Barnes tried to rise, but his foot got caught in something and he half-tripped. Igrat steadied him and helped him to his feet. “Perhaps we can schedule this another day.” He was backing towards the door now, colliding with it, trying to open it the wrong way before finally getting out. He climbed into a passing taxi and was swept away.
“I wonder where he’s going.” McCarty sounded vaguely amused. Achillea sighed with disappointment and put the knife back in its rack.
“I don’t know, but he’s in for an interesting time when he gets there.” Igrat sounded smug as she reached inside her blouse. “I’ve got his wallet.”
Washington International Airport, Washington D.C USA.
Gusoyn’s snort of laughter almost caused him to crash the car as he backed out of the parking spot. “When did you give it back to him?”
“Give it back? Moi?” Igrat’s eyebrows arched. “It’s going to his boss as soon as we’re in the office. That fool could have messed up the delivery with his grandstanding.”
McCarty nodded, for all the incident’s funny side, it could have been a serious breach that endangered the information pipeline and they were all aware that the information they carried was literally priceless. Then he frowned. “Iggie? Wasn’t there some money in there?”
“There was.” Igrat confirmed. One of McCarty’s eyebrows lifted. “New hat. And the cutest little switchblade for Achillea. It was mine by right of conquest after all. To the victor the spoils and all that.”
United States Strategic Bombardment Commission, Blair House, Washington D.C. USA.
The eerie wailing of the sirens sounded the all-clear and the room relaxed. A few seconds later the telephone rang and Phillip Stuyvesant picked it up. He listened, absent-mindedly nodding as if the person on the other end could see him them acknowledged the message briefly.
“Three missiles Sir. One shot down, the other two hit south of here, down around Alexandria. Both exploded in open country, no casualties this time. My guess is they were trying for the torpedo factory.”
“Not a damned chance, not with those things. If they were aiming for anything specific it was for the East Coast and they did well to hit that.” President Thomas E. Dewey sounded relieved. The wild inaccuracy of the Fi-103 ‘Doodlebug’ didn’t mean that they couldn’t do a lot of damage.
“Coastal have backtracked the missiles and we’ve got a good fix on the sub that launched them. Navy PBJs and a hunter-killer group are prosecuting it now. They won’t get away.”
That was a bit hopeful, Stuyvesant thought. The casualty rate for submarines launching missile attacks on the East Coast is around 50 percent. A bit safer for them than attacking convoys but not that much more. Outside, Washington was shrouded in darkness. Anybody breaking the blackout would be on the receiving end of a shouted “Put out that light!” and a stiff fine. That was the lucky outcome. It was not unknown for people care
less with their lights to be accused of signaling to submarines off shore. Their neighbors took a dim view of that supposed act. As a matter of fact, the FBI had been unable to substantiate a single accusation of signaling to German submarines, but the very fact the accusations were being made was a symptom of a deeper problem.
“So, Seer, progress on Downfall?”
“We’re getting started Sir. For all its faults, JANSP-23 provides us with a base to start from. It’s given us the magnitude of the task we have to undertake even if it overstates the measures needed to execute the mission.” Stuyvesant, already better known in military planning circles as ‘The Seer’ after his USSBC code-name, paused for a second. The Joint Army-Navy Strategic Plan No.23 had enormously overstated the number of atomic devices needed to destroy German war-making potential. It wasn’t that they’d overstated the task; they had underestimated the sheer destructive power of the new weapons. It was easy to say ‘equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT’ but another thing entirely to appreciate the incredible destruction that implied. Only when one saw the mushroom cloud boiling upwards, felt the ground shuddering under one’s feet, heard that all-encompassing, crushing roar did the reality sink home. But then, nobody had, until Trinity back in August. Stuyvesant had been there and he had realized then that ‘destroying German war-making potential’ with these weapons actually meant totally destroying the country.
It quite surprised him that the realization was taking so long to sink in. Didn’t people realize that the moment the doctrine of strategic bombardment was accepted, it axiomatically meant the complete destruction of the target country? Because it was impossible to draw the line between where the war-making potential of a country ended and the purely civilian began? Years before, when Mitchell and his supporters had proposed Strategic Bombardment as a ‘humane’ alternative to the slaughter of the Western Front in World War Two, Stuyvesant had seen where it would lead. As the doctrine had gained strength and its supporters had seen it become an accepted doctrine worldwide, his worst fears had been confirmed. Technology was advancing so fast that it had outrun the ability of people to understand or control it.
“We’re convinced it has to be The Big One?”
“Yes indeed Sir. It has to be. What we have is a one-shot deal. We have two complementary military secrets of equal importance, nuclear weapons and the ability of the B-36 to overfly enemy defenses. If either is prematurely compromised, the whole thing falls apart. The first blow has to be cataclysmic, so appalling in its power that the enemy cannot continue the war. Anything less just doesn’t have the necessary impact. I think even General Groves is coming around to that opinion now.”
“He put up a good fight.” Dewey chuckled. The long duel between General Groves and General LeMay had been a spectacle to behold. “When can we go?”
Stuyvesant thought carefully. “Assuming that projected B-36 and nuclear weapon production stay on schedule, sometime during the first six months of 1947. We’re shifting device production to the Mark 3 now; they’ll be entering the depots early next year and we’ve got six Bomb Groups equipped with B-36Ds either operational or working up.”
Dewey was horrified and his voice showed it. “Seer, mid-1947? In eighteen months time? My God man, do you understand we are losing 800 men a day on the Russian Front? And you want us to wait another 18 months? Do you realize that means almost half a million men are going to die out there while we wait for the bombers to be completed?”
The Seer suddenly looked very old and very, very tired. “438,000 to be precise, Mister President and yes, we all do understand that. The Big One is the only chance of ending this war quickly. Say again, the only chance. If it goes off half-cocked, if we try half measures, it will fail and this war could go on for years, decades even. Our death toll then will make a half million seem very small.
“Mister President, when we throw The Big One, it’ll do two things, quite independent of the attack itself. One is that it will tell the world that nuclear weapons are possible and give pretty much everybody a few good clues on how to build them. The other is that it will tell everybody that high-flying bombers are very hard to intercept and give them clues on how to build them as well. How long after a failed Big One, Mister President, will it take Germany to build its own long-range, high-altitude bombers and the nuclear weapons to arm them? Months? A year? Won’t be much more than that. Or how long will it be before the doodlebugs coming over have nuclear tips? And what about Japan? We have to wait Mister President, we must. It’s the hardest thing of all, to have a deadly, war-winning weapon and to wait until the time to use it is right, but it is also the only thing we can do. Any other way lies disaster.”
Dewey nodded. In his head, he could see the inevitable, undeniable logic; his mind’s eye also saw the lines of graves, lines that lengthened inexorably with every day that passed. “Can we hang on? Can the Russians hang on?”
“The people are getting tired, Mister President. Tired of the casualties, tired of the wartime shortages and rationing, tired of the blackout, tired of the deadlock. We need a victory, a big one. The German breakthrough last year was a bad shock for morale but this endless stalemate is worse. The Russians will fight on. Without us, their ability to do so effectively is questionable. The Russian military industry has lost most of its coal supplies and more than half its energy resources. Virtually every industrial complex they have, including the ones we’ve built, is short of fuel, power and metals. Now, there is some good news. Our oil industry people have been to their Siberian oil fields. The Russians had very poor extraction technology and those fields can produce, and are producing now, much more than they got out of them in the 1930s. Even better, our oil people say we haven’t even found the king and queen fields yet, let alone the emperor field.”
“King, queen, emperor? Doesn’t sound very egalitarian to me?” Dewey’s voice had its usual dry humor back.
“Sir, oil fields come in a hierarchy. From the smallest up, Squire, Duke, Queen, King, Emperor. The structure of an oil-producing area is an Emperor field, surrounded by two or more King and Queen fields and they’re surrounded by Duke and Squire fields. All existing Siberian production is coming from Duke and Squire fields. The undiscovered oil wealth that’s potentially there is enormous. Until recently, we were shipping Siberian crude to US refineries and then shipping products back but we’ve started building refineries in Russia itself. We have tuned up their metals mining facilities, coal recovery. Thank God the Russians have no objections to strip-mining, but they’re still short of everything, from people to fertilizer. Without us, their ability to hold is arguable at best. And we need a victory, a big, decisive one.”
“Is there hope of one? Or do we have to wait until 1947?”
“Sir, this morning I would have said no and yes respectively. That’s changed. We’ve just got the latest intelligence digests through. Triple source confirmed.” Dewey shook his head slightly; he didn’t want to know the sources. The Seer wished he didn’t know either sometimes. The data came from three separate routes. The Geneva spy ring called the Red Orchestra, run by Loki, a second spy net nobody could quite identify called Lucy and an ultra-secret code-cracking operation called Ultra. Between them, they gave a brilliant insight into German strategic plans.
“Mister President, shortly we will be running out big pre-winter convoys through to Murmansk and Archangel. A huge supply convoy, more than 250 ships, that will carry enough munitions, fuel etc. to keep the Kola Peninsula going until spring.”
“A convoy that big? There’s a saying about eggs and baskets.”
“I know, but in this case it doesn’t apply. A given submarine attack can only sink a given number of ships regardless of the number in the convoy. So, a big convoy has proportionally fewer losses than a small one. Also, a big convoy isn’t significantly easier to find than a small one so one big convoy is less likely to be found than the equivalent number of ships in a series of small groups. Mathematically, we’re much better off with big co
nvoys. We’ve got to get this convoy through before winter really sets in. That’s when the ice boundary moves south and pushes us too close to occupied Norway for comfort.
“Anyway, with the main convoy will be a smaller but an equally important one, a troop convoy carrying the Canadian Sixth Infantry Division to Murmansk. We know that the German fleet plans to overwhelm the escorts for those two convoys and destroy them. Simultaneously, they plan to launch a land offensive that will take advantage of the supply crisis caused by the destruction of the convoys to take the Kola Peninsula. With Murmansk gone, Archangel and Petrograd will fall, and the Canadian Army in Kola will be destroyed. That will free up a mass of German resources for the main front.
“Sir, we had planned to cover those convoys with a single carrier group, while the rest pounded northern Scotland. In view of this information, I suggest we use all of the groups to set up an ambush and sucker-punch the German fleet as it heads north. The Germans don’t really understand naval warfare.” Nor do I, thought Stuyvesant, but I know a lot of people who do. “The initiative is with us, we decide when to send the convoys out, we decide when and where the battle will be fought. We wait for good weather, give our carriers every edge we can, and then we turn them loose on the German battleships. We can wipe their fleet out. That’s a pretty valuable goal in its own right, but it’s also the victory I think people need.”
“And how long do we have to wait for the weather we need? Months?”
“The Gods are smiling on us, Sir. We had a rough fall up there, but the weather magicians tell us we’re in for a spell of fine weather. By North Atlantic standards anyway. We can go as soon as possible. Now if we wish.”