Amerika

by Paul Lally

  We had about eighteen hours before Fatt’s Yankee Clipper landed in

  Baltimore and the Gestapo realized they’d been had. Between now and then I had to get us to Couba Island. I got up and theatrically dusted off the left hand seat.

  ‘First officer Lewis, you have the aircraft. I’m making the rounds of the patients.’

  ‘Aye, aye, doctor.’ My co-pilot levered his wrestler-sized bulk out of his seat and took over mine. He and Orlando would make great dancing partners.

  ‘What’d you fly before?’ I said.

  ‘Multi-engine patrol boats.’

  ‘What do you think of the Boeing?’

  ‘Love it.’ He rolled his shoulders and stretched. ‘First plane I ever fit in.’

  When I arrived in her lounge the three of them huddled together like lost souls in a sea of empty seats. Frau Jäger minus her wig, but still wearing her dress, Ziggy staring tensely out the window while Ava casually leafed through a magazine.

  I said, ‘Sorry no steward service, Madam.’

  Ava didn’t even look up from her reading.

  Ziggy stirred himself and said, ‘That’s okay, cap, I know my way around a galley. Here, help yourself.’

  He gestured to a small tray on the table filled with neatly cut, crust-less sandwiches and a selection of relishes and freshly cut vegetables.

  ‘You did all this?’ I said.

  ‘Busy hands are happy hands.’

  ‘My compliments.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy. This plane may be pretty on the outside, but it sure isn’t on the inside. It’s like a flying basement.’ He turned back to the window.

  ‘Nothing but blue sky and pretty clouds out there.’

  ‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’

  Friedman said quickly. ‘Is there a chance we might be pursued?’

  ‘I was referring to the weather, not the Gestapo.’

  That seemed to calm him down, but no doubt about it, this was one troubled man. Maybe haunted is a better word for the way he was acting; as if he’d witnessed something horrible but had no words to express it. I sat down beside him and said, ‘Look, it’s over. You made it out. From now on you’ve got nothing to worry about, okay?’

  He looked at me like I was five years old. In a kind way, but definitely as my superior.

  ‘Someday that may be so. But not today, or tomorrow either. Not for a very long time.’

  I risked the question. ‘So tell me what it is you do, or did, that makes everybody and his brother want you, including the Gestapo.’

  ‘And the SS,’ he said and then fell silent.

  ‘Well?’

  He hesitated for a moment, looked at us one by one, and then said quickly, ‘I was involved with the atomic bomb project.’

  This was a man who helped kill my family. I waited for my anger to fade before I said slowly, ‘Just how involved?’

  He spread his hands and examined them instead of answering. ‘I should have left with Einstein, Bohr, and the others. They knew Hitler was mad. They begged me to join them in America but no, I had my project and what’s more, I was -’ he pinched his fingers closed - ‘this close to having it succeed. And besides, the SS had direct orders from Himmler to leave me alone.’ He blinked behind his thick glasses. ‘I’m Jewish, you see.’

  Ziggy smiled and said, ‘L’Chaim, professor.’

  ‘You as well?’

  ‘Born and bred.’

  He sighed. ‘Your American world is much different than our German one.’

  I said, ‘Unless you’re a nuclear physicist named Herr Doktor Friedman.’

  ‘That was true once, but no longer. Once the uranium was successfully weaponized into bomb material and others could replicate my work, they had no use for an old Jew who knew too much. Before you rescued me I was days away from being sent to the camps.’

  Ava said, ‘Why’d they let you go to Lisbon?’

  ‘Berlin keeps up appearances. If I hadn’t shown up for the conference, my colleagues would have started asking questions, and sooner or later the newspapers would have started asking them too. But my days were numbered. I haven’t been involved with the project for over a year. They cut me out long before they began dropping them on...on innocent people.

  ‘And when I saw the newsreels, heard them bragging about how many thousands of Americans they destroyed, about how the next thousand years belonged to the Third Reich, I decided that I knew too much, and that what I did know must be put to use to help defeat these monsters. I had secret communications with my friends in America and...’ he fingered the black material of his dress. ‘And here I am.’

  I said, ‘What kind of man would build a bomb like that?’

  ‘A man like me, and many others like me, although I assure you we never thought of it in those terms.’

  ‘You damn well knew what the end result would be.’

  He regarded me for a long while before answering. ‘Some scientists never see the forest for the trees. I was one of them. And I am sorry.’

  ‘Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  He leaned forward. ‘If it’s any consolation, there will be no more bombs, at least for a little while.’

  ‘Why?’

  He sat back and his eyes became hooded. ‘Let’s just say that for once in my life I saw the forest.’

  I pressed him for more details but, like Fatt, he turned into a sphinx. Still, if what he was saying was true, then maybe, just maybe, the nuclear threat hanging over Uncle Sam’s neck like a guillotine could be turned into a penknife – at least for now.

  Orlando entered the lounge, his eyes bright with excitement. Only two things got him going; the Lord and technology. I guessed the latter and said,

  ‘Some setup, huh?’

  ‘Have you seen what they did in the back?’

  ‘I was too busy getting us the hell out of Horta.’

  ‘C’mon, I’ll show you around.’

  Ziggy held up the tray. ‘Have one for the road.’

  I took one of the sandwiches and examined. ‘Cucumber. Nice.’

  ‘Don’t knock it until you try it. Fresh, crisp, perfect for a summer getaway, and I do mean getaway.’

  Going aft was like going from one world to another. When I first had seen the Dixie Clipper on Couba Island, the crew was stripping out her staterooms. That work was done. Where upholstered chairs and thick carpeting once comforted well-heeled passengers, anti-corrosion painted lime-green walls and bulkheads were all that remained. A narrow, perforated metal walkway allowed Orlando and me to move, single file, past what looked like oxygen canisters lined up like tin soldiers.

  ‘They’ve finished the waist guns, too.’

  Located over the ‘step’ of the hull, the fifty-caliber machine gun stations had been installed where Stateroom D use to be, including ammunition-feed chutes that looked like flattened metal snakes as they curved from the gun breeches to olive drab ammunition cans. The stateroom’s original Plexiglas windows were still in place on the port and starboard sides, but were now part of a larger aluminum panel that slid back on rails to allow a waist gunner to swing out the barrel and shoot.

  I followed Orlando into the next compartment. As I stepped through the bulkhead door, the outside noise grew louder. Long gone was the soundproofing that once sheltered passengers’ ears from the output of four twelve-hundred horsepower engines. But the noise was even more pronounced because the work crews had knocked out the bulkhead between the ‘special compartment’ and the ‘honeymoon suite,’ creating one long, tapering compartment.

  Orlando stood by the tail and shouted over the wind noise, ‘Grab onto that stanchion. Want to show you something.’

  I did so and he stabbed the intercom. ‘Tail section to pilot. Permission to test release device.’

  Lewis’s voice rasped back, ‘Make it quick.’

  I looked up for the first time at an I-beam extending the length of the co
mpartment. Claw-like clamps dotted its surface, sprung open, waiting to grasp an object.

  And then I knew.

  ‘Hanging on?’ Orlando said.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  His face lit up and he hit a switch and shouted, ‘Bomb’s away!’

  The fuselage floor split open along the centerline and swung down with a WHOOSH. The snakelike hiss of pneumatic pistons momentarily overpowered the combined roar of wind and engines. The whitecaps on the ocean’s surface six thousand feet below moved serenely onward, unaware that our silver, luxurious flying boat had become an engine of war.

  The moonlit waters of Lake Salvador tilted to the left as I began our final approach, the green luminescence of the underwater buoy lights marking the landing zone with perfect precision. A secret night arrival was essential. The less folks saw of this beautiful silver bird the better. The headwinds I had earlier feared never developed, and other than a brief scare over Atlanta with a compliance airspace air controller, our long flight had been uneventful.

  The first thing I wanted to do after we landed was call Abby and my mother. It felt like old times, my being away on a trip, that is, but then a sudden sadness stabbed me like a knife.

  ‘Watch your altitude, captain,’ Lewis said quickly.

  The twin green line of lights was widening too quickly and I made a quick throttle adjustment to slow our descent.

  General Patton’s voice crackled in my headphones, ‘Carter, I want the professor’s cargo offloaded right away, you copy?’

  ‘Do you mind if I land first?’ I snapped. ‘Or do you want us to toss it out from up here?’

  A brief pause. ‘Negative.’

  ‘By the way, general, mission accomplished.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’

  We had been gone from Couba Island only a few days, but in that short time it seemed the base had doubled in size. Sons of Liberty soldiers marched across the open field in complete silence and with absolute precision. A convoy of covered trucks roared past Ava and Ziggy and me, kicking up clouds of red dust.

  Ziggy said, ‘What’s with these guys’ uniforms?’

  ‘What about them?’ Ava said.

  ‘Regular army is olive drab. Theirs are grey.’

  ‘Uncle Georgie’s idea,’ Ava said. ‘His granddaddy served with the twenty-second Virginia during the war for Southern Independence.’

  ‘You mean the civil war,’ Ziggy said.

  ‘We southerners prefer ‘independence.’ Uncle George thought it would be nice to resurrect the past to help America gain its future.’

  Ziggy said, ‘Let me get this straight, you’re raising an army of Confederate soldiers?’

  ‘Beats sitting on your hands and doing nothing, which is what you Yankees are doing.’

  A squad passed, Ava waved gaily at them but they sternly refused to recognize her.

  Ziggy twisted his hands. ‘I’m afraid to ask what you’re raising them for.’

  She grinned wickedly. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Soon enough’ came the following morning when I reported to General Patton, who had commandeered Mrs. Longstreet’s massive greenhouse, removed the plants, and whitewashed the glass to make a bright and airy command post. He sat at the head of a long wooden table, flanked on both sides by subordinate officers, including a confident-looking Captain Fatt and his crew, just in from Baltimore.

  I sent him a silent question as to how it went. He answered with wink and a breezy ‘OK’ sign, as if outwitting the Gestapo was an everyday kind of thing.

  Professor Friedman and a civilian I didn’t recognize sat next to the crew.

  But I soon learned he was Professor Archibald – ‘call me Archie’ - Campbell. A permanent grin occupied the man’s florid face and his bright, darting eyes constantly swept the place like a searchlight looking for something to land on. Five years ago, the British Government had detached him to America to work on a secret project that General Patton now proceeded to make public.

  ‘Kill the lights,’ he ordered.

  Total darkness shifted to grainy black-and-white footage of Washington D.C. in ruins; capitol dome collapsed upon itself, Washington Monument broken in two, and somewhere in the dust and ash and devastation, what was left and tens of thousands of unsuspecting people who had breathed their last on the night of December 8, 1941, including my family.

  Patton’s high-pitched voice chattered like a machine gun. ‘The war began and ended for America when the Nazis dropped their god-damned atomic bombs.’

  Footage of an aerial view of what was left of Manhattan: the immense bomb crater carved a half-circle out of Battery Park as though bitten off by a monster. A cluster of deserted skyscrapers stood just outside ground zero, its inhabitants long gone, either dead from the blast or radiation sickness. Empty, rubble-filled streets, streetlamps tilted at impossible angles, automobiles tossed like crumpled bits of paper, and in the distance the occasional person standing perfectly still, as if contemplating Armageddon.

  ‘We know what this weapon can do,’ Patton continued. ‘And thanks to

  Professor Friedman, here’s what it looks like when it goes off – where exactly did you say this is?’

  Friedman cleared his throat a few times before he found his voice.

  ‘Moscow.’

  Footage of a featureless plain at night. Moscow’s lights twinkling in the distance. The darkness shifts to pure white as the bomb detonates. The flash recedes, and in its place a tumescent, glowing fireball blossoms outward and upward into massive proportions. And then, as the displaced air rushes back, a rising column of ash blooms into a mushroom-shaped cloud, climbing thirty-thousand feet into the still night air, carrying with it the remains of whoever and whatever once was alive.

  The devastation footage afterwards was no different than Washington or New York. Broken gas lines burning out of control, featureless rubble where once buildings stood. Charred and shriveled lumps on the ground that once were human beings who had looked up at a bright light that exploded like the sun in the midnight sky.

  Patton said, ‘Berlin claimed these were rocket-delivered weapons and we believed them. And why not, with proof like this?’

  Now came the familiar Movietone newsreel footage I’d seen along with millions of other Americans of the German’s two-stage A9-A10 rocket rising majestically from its launch pad, balanced upon a column of fiery liquid oxygen and alcohol. Its first stage fell away a few minutes later, leaving only the winged second stage to arc across the thousands of miles separating Berlin from Washington to deliver the atomic bomb.

  ‘Surprise number one,’ Patton said. ‘This rocket delivery method of theirs is pure Berlin bullshit.’

  The room stirred like someone had slapped everyone.

  ‘The footage is total fake. No way could that missile have carried that kind of payload that far. Thanks to the good professor, we’ve learned how the Heinie bastards really did it, and have film to prove it.’

  I almost laughed when I saw the familiar profile of the Lufthansa ‘catapult ship’ Friesenland steaming at full speed in mid-ocean, with a Blohm and Voss four-engine seaplane perched on its stern-mounted catapult like an anxious bird. The very ship that Bauer claimed he sailed on back and forth to America? Not just Bauer could it carry, apparently.

  The top-secret German navy footage showed destroyers escorting the Friesenland with guns bristling. Then an on-board view as a plume of steam billowed out from the catapult and the seaplane jerked forward and up into the air. Sailors pumped their fists, leaped and danced in celebration.

  ‘They used their mail planes to drop the bombs?’ I said.

  ‘They damn well did, and we never knew.’

  Lufthansa had beaten Pan Am to the punch with trans-Atlantic mail service back in 1937, long before Trippe’s clippers arrived. The airline had fitted out ships with catapults to launch float-equipped mail planes that would take off for America while still in mid-Atlantic. I remembered newspapers and m
agazines touting their achievement, because it truly was. But that didn’t compare with what those same planes had secretly done to America on December 8.

  Animation replaced the newsreel footage. Maps of the eastern seaboard appeared. I stared numbly while Patton’s voice pressed on relentlessly.

  ‘The Friesenland launched both her aircraft about a thousand miles out. Two hundred miles off the coast they diverged to their respective targets. They identified themselves to Coastal Air Defense Command as inbound Pan American flights.’

  ‘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.’