"If only we had these fighters back in '40," Colonel Kleiber, his intelligence officer and second-in-command who had been standing silendy at his side, said wistfully.
"We'd have crushed them in a week."
Galland was impatient with this particular brand of fantasizing. "You might as well wish that we'd had them in 1919. Keep in mind that we are not going up against Spitfires and Hurricanes this time. The British haven't been standing still. Their upgraded Meteor IV is said to be a match for the 262, and on top of that they'll still have the advantage of defense. If we lose a plane we also lose the pilot. If their pilot gets out, he's in the air again the next day."
"But our jets outnumber theirs almost four to one," Kleiber replied. Those are formidable odds."
"We outnumbered them in 1940 too," Galland replied. "And we were as sure of ourselves then as now." Galland turned and looked back down the line of fighters. He could sense the ghosts hovering about him. It was from this same airfield that he had led the attacks against the British back in August of 1940, when victory had seemed a foregone conclusion. Instead of the sleek new jets, he saw in his mind's eye the line of 109s. Instead of the whine of jets, he heard the coughing rumble of piston engines turning over, revving up, and pointing to the west for take-off. And then, like now, victory was supposedly in the bag before the fight began.
Well, this time maybe so. If the initial onslaught caught the RAF on the ground, certainty so. Even if it did not, the Luftwaffe could wear the RAF down; they had the numbers to do it this time, unless the Americans intervened. But what about the Americans? Would they not fight for their British cousins? If not out of sentiment then because England and only England allowed the Americans something like strategic parity with the Reich? And once the Americans arrived on the scene, the strategic situation changed drastically. The US Navy was an air force unto itself, and when it came to logistics, the Americans were demons.
Well, the answer to that was simple enough: batter the English into submission before the American carriers arrived, before they started ferrying fighters across the Atlantic. That meant that not only the assault against England must go like clockwork, but the operations against Iceland and Greenland as well. He wondered how close to zero were the odds of every single factor clicking together like that
He looked back over at Kleiber, who stood saddened and disturbed at his commander's sudden fit of doubt. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself. He might be tired of war but he still had his duty. It was wrong to project such feelings, especially now. They needed to believe. Belief itself was a vital component of victory. He forced a smile. "When we return wreathed in glory from that first strike, chances are I'll say you were right after all."
April 17
Near Oak Ridge
Otto Skorzeny lifted the camera out of its carrying case and locked it into the brace mounted over the instrument panel of the Piper Cub.
"Just keep it steady."
"I'll only be able to hold this path for a couple of minutes. We are right on the edge of the restricted air space." The pilot, Friedrich Bachman, owned and operated a small private airport that had become their base of operations; he was their ultimate contact. From the moment Louis had delivered them to him, he hadn't seemed entirely happy with his new and more active role.
"That's all it will take," Skorzeny lied as he leaned over the camera and played with the focus. Oak Ridge, ten miles ahead, stood out with crystal clarity in the early morning light, and a beautiful sight it was.
The trees below were showing their spring colors. The apple orchards in the hollows were a happy riot of pink and white. The leaves on the early-blooming maples and beeches on the southern slopes of the hills stood out in pale lacy green against brown. Below them, the valley of the Clinch River, which formed a sweeping bow around three sides of the base, was blanketed with a soft morning fog. A few puffy clouds completed the picture.
Skorzeny aimed the lens straight at the town of Oak Ridge, swung it slighdy to the south until he picked out the airstrip, and started to snap off shots. Several C-47s were parked along the airport apron, a perfect measuring reference for the length of the strip, which as reported ran on an exact east-west axis. Finishing a roll of film, he popped it out and quickly loaded another.
"Take it in a bit closer."
"We are getting warned off."
"Do it. Now." Bachman would probably have leapt from the plane had Skorzeny told him to do so in that tone while wearing that expression.
"Sir! P-51s!" Bachman need hardly have spoken, because at that moment the wash of two Mustangs, one after the other, buffeted the little Piper.
"Scheisse! They must have been loitering in the neighborhood—what better place to practice patrolling? — and were vectored in using the cumulus to give the Piper a surprise. Well, they hadn't shot him down, which the technical rules would have permitted. They were probably taking this as a chance to teach local student pilots a serious lesson about how the neighborhood of Oak Ridge wasn't a good place to lose track of location. Plus maybe have a little fun.
As Skorzeny contemplated the possibilities, the P-51s began to execute what had to be Immelmans. They were a ways off now, but they would be looping over and diving back soon, probably with the intention of closing in and forcibly escorting the Piper to their own field.
Skorzeny grinned. Well, every mission has some bad luck. . . . and now he'd have some fun of his own. "Get down!" he shouted to Bachman. "I'm taking control!"
"What?"
"Maybe they didn't see you! Get down now!" Looking like he would have preferred to be ordered to bail out, Bachman did as bid.
Taking the stick, Skorzeny yanked it back and over, slamming in left rudder as he did so. The Piper Cub rolled up, flipped over and was suddenly pointing straight down. He pulled the throtde back to idle as the Cub went to meet Mother Earth. The P-51s passed straight over and high. After a few moments they both went into split-Ss as well, but physics dictated that their speed carry them well past the little plane they were pursuing.
Behind him Bachman was cursing wildly, fighting with the stick, trying to pull it back, but Skorzeny kept control. The Cub continued its straight-downward trajectory. As the airspeed indicator redlined, Skorzeny at last began to pull back, pushing in a little left aileron as he did so, turning the plane just enough to enable him by looking back over his shoulder to view the P-51s. They were out of their diving turns, lining up on him—but from well astern.
As the hills to either side came level with his wing tips, the Cub at last stopped shedding altitude and began skimming down a narrow valley just south of the Clinch at treetop level. The P-51s were still on him.
When they had closed to less than half a mile, he pulled the stick back and turned, racing up the side of the valley, barely clearing the trees along the crest line. The fog-shrouded Clinch was below and just ahead. The P-51s streaked past behind him and started to pull back up.
He dived down toward the river and seconds later was into the fog.
"You're going to kill us!" Bachman screamed.
Not bothering to respond, Skorzeny dropped the plane down lower, hoping that the man behind him had set the altimeter as carefully as a good German should. There was a break in the fog, and less than twenty feet below he saw the river. He gave the plane a touch of right aileron, watching carefully. He couldn't quite see the bank that he felt looming up to his right; it was more of a pale green glow.
Skorzeny slammed in left aileron and rudder, banking the plane over sharply.
He had to concede that the little plane handled very nearly as well as a Storch, as the Cub executed a full 180-degree turn within the width of the river. Heading east now, he edged back over to the north bank of the river. What fun, he thought, it would be to pop back up and run north for a kilometer or two and pull a treetop run over the atomic reactor. The fighter pilots would go out of their minds! Now that his blood was up he was almost crazy enough to do it. . . . But no, the odds of survivi
ng such a stunt were little better than fifty-fifty. The mission had to come first.
With wheels nearly skimming the water he continued eastward, weaving along the almost-visible shadow of the riverbank, following it as the river turned north.
"Bridge!" his companion shrieked.
What the pursuing fighter pilots had seen could possibly be attributed to a combination of panic and beginners luck. Negotiating the damned bridge was a job for an expert. Absolutely no possibility of popping over ... for a moment he contemplated simply slamming into it, but concluded the mission's chances would be harmed more by his absence than by news of an acrobat pilot nosing around the outskirts of Oak Ridge. He pushed the nose down slighdy, brought the wings to about fifteen degrees from horizontal so the plane could slide underneath the span like a key fitting into a lock. One wing tcked against a slanted support strut, the other had at least a centimeter of clearance. As he emerged from the other side, Skorzeny faked a stall, let one wingtip drift almost to the water, "recovered," and continued up the river for a while with wings now aligned about twenty degrees from horizontal, then "overcompensated" and wound up ten degrees off in the opposite direction. That would at least give some credence to the idea of a lucky beginner who wanted nothing but to get the hell out of town.
"They've lost us. They're calling in a probable crash," Bachman announced in a shaky voice. "A very understandable error, in my opinion."
"Well, let's just follow the river a little farther, then weave our way home."
"You are a madman."
"This was a lark," Skorzeny replied. "You don't know what madness is." As he spoke he unmounted the camera from its brace and stashed it in its case. There had never been a second in which to do that until now. He hoped no one had noticed it.
April 17 Oak Ridge
Major General Leslie Groves, overall commander of the Manhattan Project throughout the United States, tossed the photographs of Skorzeny back across the conference table toward Harriman.
"You're sure?"
"I'd give it ninety percent at a minimum, sir. Martel here identified the body of one of his closest henchmen." Harriman pulled another photo out of a folder and slid it over to Groves.
"Little the worse for wear, isn't he?" Groves quipped to Colonel Charles Soratkin, head of security for Oak Ridge, as he slid that photo over to him as well.
"This man, Hans Freiter," Harriman said, "washed up in Charleston Harbor four days ago. He was Skorzenys personal bodyguard and batman. If he was bobbing around in Charleston Harbor, that means that Skorzeny was with him, and is therefore now in the United States."
"Why?"
"Sir, aside from the fact that Freiter was his personal aide, Skorzeny tends to keep operational control firmly in his own hands. While operating behind Russian lines he once walked right through the middle of Baku, dressed as a Soviet officer, for no other reason than to thumb his nose at Russian security and prove he could do it,"
Soratkin stirred angrily. "If that bastard shows his face within ten miles of this facility, he's a dead man. Every one of my people has his photograph as of this morning. They'll nail him."
"Sir," Martel said quietly, "I think he's already been in here. Our guess is that he made Knoxville by the morning of April 16th. He most likely assumed that we were starting to get a tail on him and, given the way he operates, we think he would have decided to do a personal recon."
Harriman looked over at Mason and nodded.
"General, I did a profile study on this man just after the war with Russia ended. He's courageous to the point of being suicidal. He leads from the front, always. He never sends his men into something; they follow him in. Nor is he the type to sit back and just wear his medals. He's con-standy seeking an ever-bigger challenge. If you examine his missions, you'll see that every single one was more spectacular and risky than the one before. He's compelled to push beyond the edge of what is thought possible. In other words, he's a lunatic, but a very functional lunatic."
"You'll notice the facial scars," Harriman added.
"Prussian dueling scars?" Groves asked.
"Yes, sir. He later said that when he got the first one he was thrilled because it didn't hurt as much as he expected and, more importantly, he didn't flinch. No matter what we do, this man will not flinch. Die, yes; he's only human. But flinch? Never. Trying to scare him would be pointless."
"So what the hell are you suggesting?"
"Nothing, sir," Harriman replied calmly. "I'm just trying to give you the background, that's all. You and your people are the security experts here, not us."
"So who exacdy are you people?" Soratkin asked pointedly. "You said the White House sent you, but where are you from? OSS? And who exacdy sent you?"
"I never actually said who sent us," Harriman said. "But you know as well as I do that there is only one place that can issue our boss orders, and that's the White House."
"But you are OSS ?"
"Our boss is William Donovan. Let's just leave it at that."
"A little outside your territory, aren't you?"
"Look, we're all on the same team here," Martel
interjected, ignoring Soratkin and looking over at Groves.
Groves held his hand up. "Enough of that, for now. Let's get back to our Aryan superspy. You say this character has already been in and out of the project area."
"What we are trying to say is that he's penetrated behind Russian lines on a number of occasions—behind the lines of a police state engaged in war. By the very nature of their system they can secure themselves in ways that we wouldn't dream of, even if we were at war. He beat them consistently. Frankly, penetrating here, before his photograph was distributed, would have been child's play. Not the plants, maybe, but the city."
"We also think he might have been behind that flight early this morning," Mason added.
"We've had student pilots off course before," Soratkin said reasonably, "Why not this time?"
"The same pilot was so unskilled a navigator he couldn't keep on course—and so skilled an aerobat he could evade fighter planes with flying circus maneuvers and fly under bridges?" Mason asked dryly.
"We're checking on it," Soratkin replied. "If there's anything behind it, the FBI will get whoever did it. You don't work here day to day, I do. If I got worked up every time a plane went off course I'd have been dead years ago. I could show you a stack of reports five feet high regarding planes off course over this area and usually they're some damn stupid pilot who couldn't piss north after you show him Polaris. The FBI is checking every airfield within a hundred and fifty miles, and if they get a lead, they'll haul the idiot in.
"As for the fighter report on the acrobatics, well, they lost him, didn't they? Of course they'd say he was superman in a plane. Chances are he was some kid thinking he was a navy pilot." Soratkin stared straight at Martel and smiled. "And as for Skorzeny, he hasn't beat us yet. We've already been briefed by the FBI on this, and I should add that they've been working with us since this project started. We've yet to have a serious security breach and I intend to make sure that record stands.
"Now, answer my question: Just what the hell are you people doing here?"
"As I told General Groves, we've had dealings with Skorzeny before," Harriman said calmly. "Mason here has met Skorzeny and several men of his team. Martel's met him as well, though only briefly. We just wanted to put ourselves in a position to offer our assistance. We're the only people working for an American security agency with the experience of personal contact. After all, our job is intelligence and counterintelligence, and that falls under what must surely be part of Skorzenys mission."
"Until we hear otherwise directly from the President or General Marshall internal security remains the sole responsibility of the FBI and the Army as far as this project is concerned," Soratkin replied. "We can handle this Skorzeny from here. Maybe he was able to pull off his games on the damned Russians, but he's up against another team here, Mr. Harriman, and that bastard i
s in for a rude awakening."
At that moment an aide appeared at the door.
Groves glanced at the lieutenant and asked, "Yes, what is it?'
"Phone call for Mr. Harriman, sir. From a Mr. Donovan. He says it's urgent."
Groves turned to Harriman. "You can take it in my office."
Harriman nodded his thanks and followed the lieutenant.
Groves, lighting a cigar, looked at Soratkin, started to say something and checked himself, and instead turned to Martel. "Commander, it was you who first put two and two together on this. Maybe you got four, and maybe you came up with five. For argument's sake let's say it was four. So what do you think is the real game here? Just what is your super commando up to?"
Jim paused for a moment in thought. "Sir, I just don't know. It's like a mouse attacking an elephant. No matter how evil its intentions, it doesn't have the means. But just because I can't figure out what he's up to doesn't mean he isn't up to something. In my opinion the weight of evidence has become incontrovertible. I think, sir, that within a week the United States will be at war with Germany. I also think that the war will start right here at Oak Ridge, Tennessee."
Soratkin snorted derisively, but a sharp look from Groves silenced him.
"Go on, Commander. Why here, why now?"
"You're building an atomic bomb."
"Just what the hell makes you think that?" Soratkin shouted.
"It was felt essential that we should know," Harriman, who had just reappeared, interjected. "The clearance came straight from the White House, sir."
"The Germans know about this project," Jim continued, "and for Hitler that is reason enough. Hitler wants to fight us before we have an unbeatable weapon. To achieve that end he must cripple this project. He knows what he would do with such a weapon as you are building here, and assumes the same of us. I suspect the notion of having it and not using it isn't even within his mental universe."
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