“Explain.” Von Falkenstein looked at him, eyes narrowed.
Peter gestured to the upper catwalk. “With today’s failure, we still must confirm the gate’s operation. Perhaps…” He paused, knowing that if there indeed was a Hell, a true spiritual Hell, he was about to engrave his own admittance on its fiery guest list, but it was the only chance Mina might have. “Perhaps it would be a more fitting punishment to send her through the gate to ensure all is in order before anyone else goes through. Kleist can then do whatever he pleases with her.”
Baumann cocked his head. “Killing two birds with one stone, eh, Peter?” His voice was distorted from the bandage one of his men had given him to staunch the bleeding from his nose.
“Yes, sir, after a fashion.”
“I like the way you think, young man,” von Falkenstein said after a moment. “But she doesn’t deserve to see the face of immortality, even trapped in a jar. Once she comes back through and Kleist has had a chance to study her, I’ll cut off her head and burn her body.” He sighed. “Now, of course, we will have to repair this latest mess. Peter, please assist Herr Hoth however you can. We must have the gate operational as quickly as possible. The Führer grows ever more impatient for reports of our success, even as the Allies draw nearer.”
“As you say, sir.” Peter was numb inside, his heart a cold stone in his chest.
Von Falkenstein clapped him on the back and headed toward the elevator. With a nod to Peter, Baumann followed him.
Peter watched them until the elevator door whispered shut. Then he looked down at the cage where Kleist and his minions were gathering up what was left of the poor soul who’d been sheared in half when the gate failed.
“Oh, God,” he whispered, “what have I done?”
SOS
“It will take at least three, maybe four days to repair,” Hoth told a furious von Falkenstein after conducting a full inspection of the capacitors that had taken nearly six hours. Peter, who had accompanied the portly man, put his hand to his mouth and coughed so hard he nearly gagged. The air in the chamber was still thick with smoke. A team of technicians had set up ventilation fans at the railway tunnel entrance, but the smoke seemed reluctant to leave the chamber. “Three of the capacitors are completely destroyed, and another four are questionable and must be replaced.”
“Four days?” Von Falkenstein was gritting his teeth, his fists clenched at his side.
“Ja, Herr Professor. There is nothing for it. We have enough spares in the warehouse, of course, but we must remove the old units and bring in the new through the rail tunnel entrance.” The devices were over six feet in diameter and twice as tall, with massive insulators protruding from the tops to which the main grid power cables were connected. Two rows of seven capacitors each were clustered on the power platform. “It will be back breaking work for which there are no shortcuts.”
“We have plenty of backs to break,” von Falkenstein told him savagely. “Break as many as you need to get this done. Quickly.”
Peter and Hoth watched as the Herr Professor stormed off to the elevator. “May I be of further assistance?” Peter asked.
Much to his relief, Hoth shook his head. “Thank you, Hauptsturmführer, but the bulk of the work before us is simple and most indelicate, well beneath your skills.” He smiled. “I hope you have other pursuits to occupy your time for the next few days. Perhaps some rest might be in order.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Peter told him as he nodded and turned toward the elevators.
He breathed out as the elevator doors closed. “Level Three,” he told the soldier who acted as the elevator operator. Peter thought it odd that it always seemed to be the same man, no matter what time of day or night Peter used the conveyance. The ride down seemed to take far longer than normal. An eternity.
After making his way to the lab, he fought to keep his eyes fixed directly in front of him so as not to see the specimen jars and their macabre contents. He shuddered at the thought that Mina might soon be in one herself, and he, too, could all too easily wind up in his own if things went awry.
“Ah, Hauptsturmführer!” Kleist called from a glass-walled examination room where he had been poking through what was left of the most recent traveler through the gate. “Come in, you should see this.” The man gave no hint of being at all tired from the crushing schedule von Falkenstein imposed. In fact, he was always bursting with energy.
“Where is she?” Peter asked, trying to ignore Kleist’s invitation. “Fräulein Hass?”
Kleist shook his head, making a tsk-tsk sound. “It is such a shame about her, is it not? But in a way it is good. She is of pure Aryan descent. I have sometimes had reason to doubt the validity of the trajectory coordinates after being forced to use Slavs and other sub-human subjects in our tests, but she is perfect. Perfect!”
Peter paused before he said anything else, fighting to keep his loathing for Kleist from his face. “I wanted to see the traitor.”
Ignoring him, Kleist prattled on. “You know, the Herr Professor told me you could read Elder Futhark.” Kleist clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re an amazing fellow, Hauptsturmführer. Truly, we are blessed to have you!” He waved several sheets of thin paper at Peter. On them were inscribed the circular coordinate patterns in Elder Futhark, the same as those used by Hoth to program the gate coordinates. Peter tried to feign interest as Kleist ran on about his theories, again comparing his own genius to that of von Falkenstein.
At last, Peter could take no more. “Where is she?” He demanded.
Behind his thick glasses, Kleist blinked. “She, who?”
“Fräulein Hass,” Peter said through gritted teeth.
Laughing, Kleist said, “Ah, of course! She is in cell Three Twenty-One.” He chuckled. “I already finished her preliminary examination…” He leaned closer to Peter. “I was very thorough, then sent her back to her cell. I believe the guard commander mentioned something about teaching her a lesson about treason.” He leaned closer, leering through his thick glasses. “If you hurry, you might be able to join in on the lesson.”
Peter whirled around and dashed — if the hop-hobble he made could be considered such — down the corridor that would take him to her cell.
It wasn’t long before he could hear Mina’s screams above the grunts and howls from the other cells. Ivan, whose voice normally dominated the bedlam, was uncharacteristically silent.
Peter burst through the open door of her cell to find three of the four men of the guard detail pinning her to the floor, while the senior soldier was busy undoing his trousers. Two of the men had blood running from their noses, a third had a split lip, and the guard commander had a bruise welling up around his right eye. Mina had not gone down without a fight.
“As you were!” Peter roared.
In an instant, the four men shot to their feet and assumed a position of attention, a momentary look of confusion on their faces.
Peter took a deep breath and tried to regain control. He kept his gaze away from Mina, who dragged herself away and curled up in the corner, trying to cover her bruised and naked body with her hands. If he looked at her, nothing could stop him from drawing his weapon and shooting these men. “What exactly is going on here?”
“We were…” The guard commander stammered. “Sir, we were, ah, just going to teach her a lesson and have a bit of fun.”
“Oberscharführer,” Peter said sternly, putting his hands on his hips, “you men were chosen for this assignment because of your racial and ideological purity. Don’t you realize that by fornicating with a traitor such as her you would tarnish that purity?” Looking at each of them in turn, noting with satisfaction the glint of fear in their eyes, he went on, “It is your duty to remain pure for the sake of the Reich. If you want to rape and pillage, if you want to act like savages, I will happily have you reassigned to the Eastern Front. We have no place for such behavior here. Do I make myself clear?”
“Jawohl, Hauptsturmführer!” The four
of them echoed as one.
“Good. Now return to your posts and let us have no more of this nonsense.”
With a textbook perfect Hitler salute, marred only by the still open fly of the Oberscharführer, the four men filed out, closing, but not locking, the cell door behind them.
As their footsteps retreated down the corridor outside, Peter bent down and scooped up the coverall that lay in a crumpled heap before kneeling beside Mina. “I’m so very sorry,” he whispered as he draped it over her.
“Kill me,” she whispered as she clutched the fabric to herself. “Peter, you must kill me.”
“Mina…” He tried to imagine himself putting the Luger to her head and pulling the trigger, or perhaps strangling her. Recoiling from the thought, he said quietly, “I can’t. I just can’t. I’ll find a way to get you out. Somehow.”
She shook her head. “I will never escape, Peter. Even if I could, where would I go? The Gestapo would find me soon enough, or both of us, if you came with me. And you would not last long out there on your own.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Neither of us will make it out of here. Our fate is tied to this horrible place.”
“Then we have to make sure the gate is destroyed. But it’s going to take more than anything I can do from inside. I might be able to slow them down some more, but it would only be a matter of time before I’m caught. And I suspect that Baumann is watching everyone now even more closely than he might have been before.” He frowned. “I need to get word back to the Allies that today’s attack failed.”
She snorted. “We can’t exactly use my radio now.”
“No, I suppose not…” He stopped, his mouth hanging open as a thought struck him. “My God. I think I know how. If I…”
She put a finger to his lips. “Do not tell me. If…when…they torture me, I cannot tell them something I do not know.”
He knelt a moment longer, wishing there was something he could say or do.
“Peter,” she whispered.
“Yes?”
“Promise me that if I become a thing like what they have in that jar in Kleist’s laboratory, you will give me mercy. I can’t bear the thought. Swear to me, on the soul of your brother.”
With a slow nod, Peter whispered, “I swear.”
“Now go.”
With one final look back at Mina, he stepped outside and swung the door shut, then reluctantly locked it.
He had intended to head straight back to the elevator, but instead found himself standing before Ivan’s cell. Peering through the view slit in the massive door, he found the monstrosity staring back at him with eyes that seemed almost human. Peter whispered in English, “I wish you could understand me.”
Much to his surprise, the creature slowly nodded.
“You do? You understand English?”
Again, Ivan nodded.
“I’m sorry about what they did to you. I’m here…I’m here to try and stop this insanity. If I can, I’ll help you. And perhaps you could help me when the time comes.”
For a third time, Ivan nodded. His massive hands clenched into fists the size of boulders.
Hearing footsteps down the corridor, Peter knew it was time to go. “Be ready.”
He turned and left the behemoth behind. As he rounded the corner, heading toward Kleist’s shop of horrors and the elevator, Ivan let out a deafening roar.
***
Peter’s destination lay on the first level, down the corridor opposite the dining room. Halfway to where the enlisted men’s quarters were located was the wireless room. Pausing for a moment to straighten his uniform, he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Yes, sir?”
A young Untersturmführer, a lieutenant, shot out of his chair to stand at stiff attention. He looked like a younger twin of Peter’s dead brother, and Peter found himself staring at him for a long moment.
“Are you all right, sir?”
Peter shook himself. “My apologies. I’ve worked straight through the last two watches and I must be getting a bit addled.” He smiled, and the Untersturmführer nodded slightly, a sympathetic expression on his face. “I must send a priority message to SS Headquarters. I’ll need you to step outside.”
“But, sir, the order book says that a communications officer must always be…”
“I know what it says, but this is a special eyes-only message for Reichsführer Himmler himself,” Peter lied. “The cipher machine is set for the current codes, I take it?”
The man licked his lips. “Of course, sir.”
“Then I’ll take it from here. I’m familiar with the function of the encoding machine. Once I’ve prepared the message, you are to send it out immediately over the wireless. Clear?”
“Clear, sir.”
Peter nodded toward the door, and the Untersturmführer stepped outside. Taking a seat at the cipher station, Peter studied the Enigma machine. It resembled a typewriter and had similar letter keys, but also had a set of lamps on the top of the case that matched the letters on the keyboard, along with three rotors. Just in front of the keys was a plug board, which added an additional mathematical jumble atop that provided by the rotors. Once the rotors and plugs were set to the current codes, operating the device was quite simple: as the operator typed in the message to be encoded, each press of a letter key caused one of the letters on the lamp board to illuminate, transforming the original message letter by letter into unreadable gobbledygook. The operator copied down each of the enciphered letters into a message for transmission over the wireless. Decrypting a message was a similar process: after setting the machine to decrypt, the encrypted message were typed in, and the resulting decrypted letters lit up on the lamp board.
As brilliant as the mathematicians and analysts at Bletchley Park might be, not every rotor and plug combination was necessarily exploitable. Peter couldn’t take the risk that the current settings were among those that hadn’t yet been broken. Carefully noting the current positions of the three rotors and plugboard, Peter switched them to a setting he was familiar with from his time working on the ULTRA project, and that he knew could be decrypted by the analysts at Bletchley Park.
With a final glance at his watch, praying that no one — Baumann, in particular — wandered by to ask the communications officer why he was standing outside his post, Peter began to type his message, letter by letter, writing down the corresponding encrypted letters on a pad of paper.
URGENT FOR OSS CONNELLY XXX 15 MARCH AIR STRIKE AGAINST ARNSBERG FAILED XXX VITAL REPEAT VITAL FACILITY IS DESTROYED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE XXX FULL OPERATION TO COMMENCE ON OR ABOUT 19 MARCH XXX PM SENDS XXX
After resetting the Enigma machine to the current codes, Peter got up from the chair and limped to the door. Opening it, he was relieved to find the Untersturmführer still there, standing at parade rest.
“Get in here,” Peter ordered.
The young man came in, and Peter handed him the sheet of paper with the enciphered message. “Send this out right away to SS Headquarters, for the direct attention of the Reichsführer-SS.” That sort of message header would definitely get an Allied radio operator’s attention. He thought for a moment. “Send it twice, just to be sure it gets through any Allied jamming.” That would give the Allied listening posts a better chance of collecting it. “This is vitally important. Do you understand?”
“Of course, sir!”
“Then don’t let me keep you.” Peter left, closing the door behind him. Eventually, he knew, his treachery would be discovered. Every message was logged, and Baumann must surely review it on a regular basis. And if he didn’t find out, some communications officer at SS Headquarters with nothing better to do might happen upon the settings Peter used to encode the message and decrypt it. In either case, the game would be up.
***
Just as Peter had hoped, his message did indeed get someone’s attention. A wireless intercept operator at the so-called Y Station at RAF Chicksands in Bedfordshire, one of the collection sites that fed the signals
intelligence operation at Bletchley Park, was monitoring his assigned frequencies when the dits and dahs of a new message in Morse Code came through his headphones. His boredom was transformed into excitement as he copied down the letters of the header, indicating that the message was bound for SS Headquarters, which was highly unusual. The German operator sending it repeated the entire thing, which made it even more unusual.
He immediately passed it to his supervisor, who flagged it as priority and packaged it up with a number of other recently arrived messages and handed it off to a motorcycle dispatch rider. Normally the collected messages would be sent to Bletchley Park by the recently installed teleprinter link, but the newfangled contraption had been balky the last few days and the dispatch riders had been recalled to their former duty to fill in until the link could be fixed.
The rider immediately took off for the thirty odd kilometer ride to Bletchley Park. Not having gotten much rest the past few days, he wasn’t paying close enough attention to the side roads as he passed through the quiet village of Clophill. He never saw the Army lorry barreling south, a drunk soldier at the wheel, that slammed headlong into his motorcycle, killing the rider instantly. His dispatch case eventually found its way to Bletchley Park where the messages were decrypted, but by then it was far too late.
PROMOTION
When Peter reported to Baumann at breakfast the following morning, sweat was running down his spine and his stomach was twisted in knots. He fully expected Baumann to greet him with an oily grin and the muzzle of his Walther pistol. To his surprise, while the oily grin was certainly there, the gun was in Baumann’s holster and no guards were about. When Peter asked for his orders for the day, Baumann made a dismissive wave.
“Herr Hoth informed me that he doesn’t require your services until the repairs are made,” Baumann told him, “so consider yourself on restricted leave, shall we say, until you are summoned.” Then he went back to sipping his coffee and reading the latest copy of the Völkischer Beobachter. The headline, Peter saw, trumpeted the devastation the Red Army was suffering in Hungary at the hands of the German Sixth SS Panzer Army in a new offensive called Operation Spring Awakening. Peter hoped the German troops were receiving a similar thrashing from the Soviets as it had at the hands of the U.S. Army during the Battle of The Bulge only two months before.
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