Amerika

by Paul Lally

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.’

  I studied the spaghetti-like diagram of the gas diffusion system with its paper-thin membranes mysteriously able to allow certain atoms of certain electrons to pass through while keeping others out. ‘Ever think Mother Nature was telling you to stay the hell out of her back yard?’

  ‘Wished we had.’

  ‘Too late now.’

  Archie said, ‘But not too late for us to slow things down long enough to get America into the war and drive that madman out of Berlin.’

  Fatt snapped, ‘And into a pine box.’

  Friedman nodded. ‘Better him than the millions he’s already killed and plans to kill; Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally disturbed, anybody who doesn’t fit the Nazi idea of a superior race sees the inside of a gas chamber.’

  ‘I thought that was just propaganda.’

  Friedman’s face grew still, like when the wind stops on a pond and everything becomes mirror-clear. ‘Every day men, women and children are rounded up and put onto trains and sent to so-called labor camps. Except for the young, the old, and the feeble, there is no labor to do except to take off your clothing and go to the showers and never return. What kind of country would do this to its citizens?’

  None of us had an answer.

  Friedman continued, his voice quiet but relentless. ‘I’ll tell you what kind. One that has lost its way, one that believes in a nightmare named Adolf Hitler and is afraid to wake up for fear it will die along with the others he’s already exterminated.’ He leaned forward. ‘That is why America must grab Germany by the shoulders and shake it until it awakens and sees the world – not as Hitler sees it – but as it truly is. Only then can it re-join the human race.’

  The humid, August heat of the day had not dissipated with the sun going down. If anything it got worse. Professor Friedman and Mason assembled the bomb in the ordnance hut while Fatt, Orlando and I watched them work. Amazing how simple it is to create something so destructive:

  ‘Insert flange A into groove B; twist until hand tight, then torque-wrench to seventy-five pounds, while maintaining proper alignment, etc…’

  Drops of perspiration fell from Mason’s reddened face – now the same shade as his hair - onto the bomb casing as he worked, staining its smooth gray surface with dark dots.

  Orlando said softly, ‘For such a deadly thing, it’s beautiful to behold.’

  Friedman said, ‘Germans are elegant people. Unfortunately we practice it in the wrong places sometimes.’

  A long silence followed while Mason fitted the nose-cap to the front unit with surgical precision.

  Orlando whispered, ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’

  Fatt said, ‘Ours too.’

  Orlando touched the bomb. ‘Innocent people will die when this explodes.’

  Fatt soothed, ‘We’ve done our best to make sure that injuries will be minimized. Certain friends of our cause at the plant will scram the reactor about an hour before we arrive on target.’

  He saw the blank look on my face, so he explained, ‘They’ll let the reactor reach critical levels by adjusting the carbon control rods so that it’ll look like the core is going to melt down, even though it won’t. They’ll hit the alarm, the whole place will evacuate, and BOOM, we drop the bomb. It’s a hell of a sweet idea.’

  Orlando said, ‘Providing it works.’

  He shrugged. ‘If it doesn’t then too damn bad. You’ve got to break eggs to make omelets.’

  ‘Easy for you to say at ten thousand feet.’

  He gave him a long deadly look. ‘You got any other bright ideas, reverend? We’re dealing with the devil himself, not just one of his sinners.’

  Orlando started to say something, but then shook his head.

  Mason cleared his throat. ‘Do you gentleman mind taking your moral dilemmas outside? We’ve got us a bomb to build.’

  That silenced them.

  Mason then showed us the bomb trigger: a cleverly-designed miniature radio altimeter that worked in concert with the more conventional barometric one; each cross-checking the other to get a mutually agreeable answer as to the proper height above ground wherein the contacts would close, the high-explosive spherical shell surrounding the plutonium would detonate, crushing the fissile material and triggering an uncontrolled chain reaction that released a violent burst of energy outward, consuming everything it its white-hot, radioactive fist.

  Fatt said. ‘Wouldn’t mind having a warehouse full of these babies.’ Friedman said, ‘This
is the last one.’

  ‘For now.’

  He sighed. ‘For a very long time, I hope.’

  Fatt snorted. ‘If we manage to pull this off and American enters the war, don’t you think General Patton and his boys will want these weapons as fast as possible?’

  ‘Wanting is not the same thing as having. America has the fissile material but Germany has the technology to construct bombs with it.’

  ‘Then we’ll steal your scientists the same way we got you.’

  He smiled. ‘After this, I am out of the bomb business, permanently.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  He shrugged. ‘I cannot speak for them, but I am certain that they, like me, will pray that America will defeat Germany with conventional weapons long before enough plutonium is manufactured to construct more nuclear ones. If that happens, then we can put atomic energy to peaceful uses instead.’

  Fatt laughed. ‘You actually think you can tame this shit?’

  ‘We have developed plans for nuclear power plants. And other civilian uses as well.’

  Orlando said, ‘The lion shall lie down with the lamb?’ Friedman said, ‘That is my fondest dream.’

  Fatt pointed his cigar at the bomb. ‘Dream on professor. I’m betting on the lion.’

  The ordnance team transported the assembled bomb to the dock area, where the Dixie Clipper floated serenely beneath a canopy of camouflage netting hiding it from the prying eyes of compliance fighters droning overhead, heading east and west on their patrol missions in search of neutrality violators trying to slip through their tight little net along the Gulf Coast.

  While Fatt and I watched from the shore, the team carefully winched the bomb onto a small barge and floated it out to the clipper’s open bomb bay doors beneath its swooping tail.

  Fatt puffed contentedly on his cigar. ‘Who would have thought the day would come when that sweet bird would take off with an atomic bomb up her ass.’

  ‘Providing we adjust for center of gravity. Otherwise she’ll drag her tail until kingdom come and never get unstuck.’

  ‘Then I suggest you damn well make sure we perform correct weights and balances, captain. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life taxiing back and forth across Lake Salvador like a Mixmaster.’