I am not such a bad sort, truly. And kindly do not assume I harbor
sadistic and depraved tendencies. Those are scurrilous rumors, and,
of course, totally baseless. While it is the case that I am a senior
Gestapo interrogator, and jawohl, as such that does indeed
grant me license to inflict carefully calibrated dosages of physical
discomfort under carefully controlled circumstances, it is all a part of
my duty. I do not enjoy it. Believe me, I most assuredly do not. Think
of me as if I were a physician who administers painful procedures for
the greater good. And in any case I am only following orders.
I joined the Party in 1930, but only because I saw it as an opportunity
to better myself. It is quite true that I am ambitious, and I need
not apologize for that. I did not ever believe all that tommyrot about
racial superiority, but it is quite useful for mobilizing the masses
and uniting the Fatherland, as our Propaganda Minister has so aptly
demonstrated. I will admit to harboring a grudge of sorts against the
Amerikaner and their mongrelized nation of of peddlers, jazz musicians,
and hooligans. I can tell you that a certain guttersnipe Amerikaner,
one R. S. Bowen, shot down my Gotha bomber in the waning days of the
Great War, and that is why my face is so scarred and disfigured. Should
fortune ever deliver him into my hands, I would most certainly dispose
of this fellow and I would likely roughly handle any of his infamous
underlings and associates. I understand he has scribbled quite a
number of foolish books, and our movement will ensure that each and
every one of these corrosively evil tomes will be piled in a heap and
burnt to cinders when the Thousand Year Reich subdues and occupies
decadent Amerika.
"While we are on the subject of military arcana, my good sir, kindly tell us all you know about a device referred to as a 'cavity magnetron.' And as we are in such a talkative frame of mind, perhaps we might also discuss a certain 'Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society' located in a park in Bletchley." Cheese and chess? What in the blazes did that have to do with the price of tea in China? It was an enigma. Wait. Enigma! Where had he heard that? Something to do with Ultra, a mysterious group working on a German ciphering machine, and this eccentric mathematician, somebody by the name of Boring or Toring or something similar. And then afterwards, what he had subsequently found out . . .
Freddy gritted his teeth. Must not give way to despair! Must not! The choice was stark. Endure what was euphemistically called "rigorous questioning" with an English stiff upper lip . . . or betray his country and very possibly hand the keys to world conquest to Herr Hitler. That could well spell doom, both for himself, his family, his homeland, and for all he held dear. Was there no way out?
My name is Freddy Farmer, and I'm a rather ordinary sort of chap, or so
they tell me. It seems that I was born in Liverpool on a dreary rainy
day in August of 1923, and that accounts for my sunny disposition. Keeps
the gloom away, you see. Family tradition has it that we Farmers at one
time actually made our living as tillers of the soil. We are allegedly
descended from the landed gentry, in fact, with ancestry reaching back
to Oliver Cromwell, and beyond that possibly even to Queen Boudica,
the crazed lady warrior who led the hopeless revolt against the Roman
invaders. Father was invalided on the Somme in the Great War, after
that working only sporadically. It's rather difficult finding work as a
pipefitter with only one functioning arm, you see. That left the family
in somewhat straitened circumstances, and Fanny and I would endeavor to
bring in a few pence to supplement the meager family income at whatever
dribs and drabs of employment there were to be had. Fortunately, I was
befriended by our neighbors, a certain Mrs. Dowling and her son Willy
Patrick. They were most kind and generous, especially the missus, who
would prepare meals for us when our cupboard was bare, as was all too
often the case in those difficult times. (In her arms I subsequently
found sustenance of a far different sort, but that's likely a story
best not told.) She constantly whinged about her absent husband, a
certain Alois, who had skedaddled back to the Fatherland before the
War and since then shared his affections at least one other woman,
wouldn't you know it, and who was allegedly making his fortune there
due to dubious family connections. It seems that his daft half-brother,
a housepainter by trade, and rather inept at it, had somehow gotten to
be put in charge of the entire madhouse. Odd, isn't it, how it came
about that in the end I was to be captured by the murderous minions
of the mad brother-in-law of the woman who taught me a thing or three
about the ways of the world. Somehow, I doubt that the bloke with the
toothbrush mustache would be greatly amused by the bizarre twists of
fate that have entangled our respective destinies.
The interrogator fastidiously removed the monocle from his eye and in a droning monotone repeated the question. "And what exactly do you know about this so-called Manhattan District?" Dave groaned inwardly. This was the secret he had sworn to keep at all costs, even to the point of killing himself rather than be taken prisoner. He couldn't help recalling that night at the wild party in San Diego when that drunken army engineer had begun babbling about some kind of super-explosive that was being worked on in a town in the New Mexico desert. Two shiny hemispheres of a blue-tinged heavy metal slapped together by a shaped charge of high explosive -- like someting out of a lurid scientifiction pulp. And this would supposedly trigger a runaway reaction of atoms exploding like popcorn in a hot skillet, a most horrific thought, that. And a certain chemical plant in Tennessee -- where was it? -- Pine Ridge, or something like that -- where they were working the kinks out of the process of refining a rare variety of a certain radioactive mineral. Why, oh why, had he listened? He must have been out of his head, maybe more than a bit drunk himself. And why hadn't he immediately reported the fool to Military Intelligence? Well, by golly, why should he have? He was Dave Dawson, adventurer, war hero, and son of the highly-decorated Colonel Dawson, and he was too blastedly busy dashing around the world foiling dastardly villains and doing daring death-defying deeds to dirty his hands dealing with the lunatic ravings of a besotted loose-lipped imbecile.
Growing up in a military family lays a heavy burden of expectations
on a boy. And when your father helped rescue the Lost Battalion in
the Meuse Argonne offensive, then folks just naturally assume that
you'll follow in his heroic footsteps, even if you have no particular
inclination to. My childhood dream was to become a dynamite real estate
speculator or dauntless stock market operator, and do nothing much more
exciting or dangerous with my life than accumulate vast piles of money
by defying the odds, and become a fabulously wealthy tycoon, in the
mold of, say, a Joe Kennedy or a Jesse Livermore. But, alas, it was
not meant to be. Colonel Dawson packed me off to a military academy
at the tender age of 6, and left me to the tender mercies of petty
tyrants and cruel martinets who made a fetish of enforcing what they
euphemistically called martial discipline. Not to mention that my fellow
inmates at that enlightened center of cultural enrichment compelled
me to earn my survival with flailing fists and animal cunning. But,
survive I did and I was shipped out of that marvelous institution of
higher education just a bit ahead of schedule, thanks to a fortuitous
expulsion for possession of unauthorized materials -- crossbows, black
powder explosives, incendiary devices, infernal machines, and the like
-- not to mention allegedly ruining the headmaster's daughter. (She
was, in fact, the enthusiastic initiator of certain events, with highly
unexpected consequences. As I was still hopelessly naive and fatally
ignorant in matters of the flesh, I foolishly decided to take the fall
out of misguided romantic illusions or perhaps some anachronistic notion
of chivalry.) Some months later, I managed to finagle my way back into
the good graces of Colonel Dawson by infiltrating and exposing a local
Nazi spy ring, but that's a story for another time.
"Silence will avail you nothing, my dear Kapitän Dawson. We have certain other sources of intelligence, the product of the most efficient espionage apparatus of all time. We therefore know about the secret installation in your American state of New Mexico. Our agents have penetrated deep into each and every nook and cranny of your military and industrial establishments, and all we require from you at this time is confirmation of what we have already found out. And, of course, since you were most unfortunately out of uniform when captured, it is permissible for you to be shot as a spy, as you are well aware. Come, come, Dawson. This is the real world of dirty war and murderous, cold-blooded violence and very final death, not some frivolous novel written for light-hearted schoolboys."
Cold sweat had soaked all the way through the coarse fabric of Dave's borrowed German military fatigue, both front and back. Shot as a spy? Would his long series of glorious adventures end ingloriously in front of a firing squad on the bloodstained cobblestones in the courtyard in a squalid Gestapo prison? Could he face death as courageously as the storybook hero people expected him to be? Was this the end of Dave Dawson?
COULD THIS REALLY BE THE END?
It doesn't have to be. Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer are clever fellows, and they've figured their way out of tight jams before. With a little help from the author, they might be able to do so once more. In fact, Mr. Bohlen has the crazy notion of possibly sending our two heroes back over Berlin on yet another secret bombing mission, this time to extinguish evil Herr Adolph while he's cowering in his underground bunker with his depraved minions. Assuming that Dave and Freddy manage to evade their captors and make their way back to freedom, of course. And assuming that there's enough of a popular outcry for the continuation of this yarn.
LICENSE
This book preview is released under a modified Free Documentation License.
It is free and freely distributable for non-commercial use. You
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This is what you are not permitted to do.
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certainly go a long way toward facilitating the completion of this book.
Writing is such bleak, lonely, ill-paying work . . .
Dave Dawson Over Berlin Page 3