The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Donovan was now a humorless man who scowled at nearly everything, and he detailed names and movements. Karl avoided Donovan’s merciless, flinty glare and classic, aggressive harrumph. He had heard that many in-between people—the intelligence people whom Dyson said seldom displayed that virtue—carefully buffered “Wild Bill,” as they called him, kept him from going too far.

  “This is beyond my competence,” Karl said.

  “You want to end this war or not?” Donovan said, eyebrows raised.

  “Uh, I—” He thought of Marthe and all the years he had been away from home, when he wanted to be with his family. “Yes. Soon.”

  “Heisenberg will be within reach, so you two can figure out if he is head of a real bomb project. Glad to have you, Karl.”

  With that, the issue went away. Donovan gave more of the carefully measured smile, and their beef arrived.

  He and Moe were taking their leave when Donovan came back to the point. “Heisenberg goes to Switzerland regularly to discuss physics, a kind of vacation. He’s going soon, this summer. If he talks like he knows enough nuclear physics, drops some technical comments, pointing plausibly to a bomb project, you’re to render him hors de combat.”

  Moe seemed puzzled, but Karl knew this meant “outside the fight.” Donovan said flatly, “Moe, go in with a pistol in your pocket.”

  Karl was startled when a Military Police major appeared with a slim suitcase. “Here’s your background reading,” Donovan said to Moe. There were German agents around, he said, and somehow they might go after the case. The major handcuffed Moe to the attaché case with a nickel-plated bracelet.

  Walking to the train station, Karl said, “I don’t follow this cloak-and-swagger world of yours.”

  “It’s a lot like the blind men and the elephant. Donovan figures it means you just get a lot more men and fill in the elephant. Sometimes you lose one or two.”

  “How comforting. Any German agents could just kill you and cut off your arm.”

  Moe laughed. “ ‘An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.’ ”

  • • •

  Until they got word on Heisenberg, Karl continued working with the Los Alamos guys, who were in close contact with others back in New Mexico. The better they compacted and trimmed down the U-235 needed for the next bomb, the sooner they could go after a good target.

  But what target could that be? There was no obvious, essential asset, after Berlin’s center was gone. They didn’t know where Hitler was, or even the German bomb project—if there even was a central place for the bomb assembly. So Karl stayed in London and at the airfield, through July.

  At times he allowed himself to think of what he should be doing in a rational world, in summer’s warm miasma. Back in New York, Martine was four and Elisabeth just one, and he could see them in his mind’s eye, scampering around amid wood smoke and ravenous, buzzing bugs. They would be filthy and delighted, trying to catch perch in a tinkling stream, using little lines baited with canned corn nibs. Marthe’s aroma would carry hints of calamine lotion and simmering skin beneath a spotlight sun. At twilight the girls would madly chase the Morse code of fireflies amid the sizzle of hamburgers, their laughter ringing like tiny bells.

  He sighed, opened her most recent letter beside a dim lamp, and made out the words with relish. Their favorite names for the girls, Mots for Elisabeth and La Fou for Martine, jumped out at him.

  June 29, 1944

  My Dear Karl,

  I read your telegram eagerly. I hope the difficulties of the trip, the crowding, and the rations have not yet overwhelmed your zeal for this mission. Yesterday I saw the first newsreels of the Normandy invasion—pretty grim. Everyone in France must be huddled around radios and holding their collective breath and praying it will succeed. The pictures from Berlin are terrifying. Indescribable damage. Thousands of casualties. The newspapers here said a single uranium bomb did it all! I’m saving the newspapers for you, with details about de Gaulle, too. Also an important series of articles by Willkie, who looks like a candidate to run against Roosevelt, in the Herald-Tribune.

  I took La Fou to the Automat on Broadway for lunch. She was overjoyed, as you can imagine, especially now that her intestinal problem has subsided. She is now in the five-year-old group at school, though she is still four. Mots is always the same inimitable Mots. She is beginning to walk (without knowing it) by pushing a chair from one side of the kitchen to the other. Also, she says, “Hi ho . . . bang-bang.” Only “Silver” is missing.

  I hope you like this elegant (sic!) paper—the latest gross product from our fantastic industry. Shortages and rationing get tiring, not to mention time-consuming standing in line. The cheap, pulpy paper just reminds one of them.

  So far, funds are not lacking. But if you have to stay away until, say, the fall of Vitebsk*, it will be necessary for you to send me a check (but not a Czech, because what would I do with him?).

  I dearly hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses from the whole family.

  Marthe

  *can find on map?

  He looked up Vitebsk, which seemed like a misspelling but was a city under Nazi Germany occupation, just liberated. Much of the old city had been destroyed in the battles between the Germans and the Red Army, and most of the local Jews perished in a ghetto massacre.

  The military types all around him thought of war as about strategy and tactics, but to Karl it was about death. Thinking of his home, he recalled how Martine had asked him not long before he left them, “What happens when we die?” All he could think to say was, “We go back to where we were before we were born,” which was at least in a way true. “Oh, okay,” and she had skipped away

  In childhood we all live in the bright light of immortality, he thought.

  He had hoped she didn’t note the glistening in his eye, the burr in his throat as he spoke. A diffuse longing rose in him in a smooth wave, a longing like nostalgia for the child present right now, and who would soon be gone down the well of time, when he returned—to be replaced by another lovely child, larger and more sunk into the wondrous, deadly world.

  • • •

  Time waxed on into August. Karl got restless. He played poker with British and American fliers. They were savvy about bluffs and little unconscious signs, so they did pretty well. He studied them and picked up a few tricks himself. Mostly he found a book on poker probabilities in London and studied it. He memorized the cards shown and kept a running calculation. Betting the odds on each hand, never going big unless the calculations said he had a huge chance, his winnings gradually grew. He cultivated a reputation as a cautious, polite player. As his opponents drank more through the long evenings, his “luck” improved. He sent a weekly check to Marthe. The girls appreciated the gifts she bought for them. He even got photographs of them holding the dolls and toys. At nighttime the photos made him weep.

  Then Donovan sent a telex through Groves’s office marked TOP SECRET. Heisenberg would be in Lucerne somewhere around the second half of August. Groves frowned at this and said, “I told them I needed you here, Karl.”

  “You don’t really. When a second bomb gets here, Luis can—”

  “You’ve already done the following-plane job. Luis and the others—except for that Feynman, who’s always off calculating something he says will be useful, someday, somehow—have better diagnostics worked out. Faster cameras—”

  “Then let him fly the following mission.”

  Groves opened his mouth, closed it. “I like to keep my team together.”

  “Goudsmit thinks Heisenberg’s crucial. Moe’s uncertain he can follow Heisenberg’s talk in German, about physics he only understands superficially. He—”

  “Okay, I’ve approved your going.” He sighed, and Karl saw the man was both frustrated and tired. Berlin had been a big event, but the war had passed him by, into territory no one understood. “I couldn’t block the brass upstairs, anyway.”

  “General, to me you are the brass upstairs
.”

  Groves sat back and laughed. “Good to hear it. Get going.”

  PART XI

  * * *

  GROUND TRUTH

  It was at Waterloo that General Cambronne, when called on to surrender, was supposed to have said, “The Old Guard dies but never surrenders!” What Cambronne actually said was, “Merde!” which the French, when they do not wish to pronounce it, still refer to as, “the word of Cambronne.” It corresponds to our four-letter word for manure. All the difference between the noble and the earthy accounts of war is contained in the variance between these two quotations.

  —Ernest Hemingway, Men at War

  1.

  August 17, 1944

  Karl and Moe sat in the wardroom of a tubby landing craft, rocking with the sway as the engine throbbed a few feet away. The diesel coughed an acrid tang into the salty air. Their craft was bobbing on the waves of a dishwater sea with a lead-colored sky above. In the acronym-rich army, this was an LCIL, for Landing Craft Infantry Large. The wardroom was seven feet square and had bunks and a table with four places. Earlier they had managed to wedge eight men in there for a poker game, a nickel to ante—a high price for them, some of whom might not see tomorrow.

  Karl studied the faces around them. Few spoke, and not all the sweating was from the weather.

  He was a long way from partial differential equations, diapers and kindergarten, dental bills, gas ration cards, whirring centrifuges. There had been times—quite a few, after leaving New York—when Karl wondered what the hell he was doing in such unlikely events. Neither of the career choices he had faced just a bit over a decade ago—chemistry versus concert piano—had ever seemed remotely likely to lead to . . . this.

  Moe, as usual, was reading three newspapers he had somehow found back in Corsica, plus a Stars and Stripes. In the two days’ voyage here, he had also consumed three armed-services editions of novels, shutting out the jammed quarters and seldom even looking up. Plus, he had total memory. Especially, he knew plenty of details about the rising tide of casualties around the world—a huge cost, but some victories. Karl mostly tried to forget such numbers.

  Nearby, the French cruiser Montcalm was banging out salvos. Each boom rocked their craft in a side-wash. She was firing at a German pocket of resistance miles from the shoreline. Their engine rumbled as they sped past. The watch officer turned on the small speakers around the craft, and here came the suave voice of a BBC announcer. “The Allies are now in a position to say the joint American-French landings came off with surprising ease. The air force and the big guns of the navy smashed coastal defenses, and the army occupied them.”

  A lieutenant and the engineering officer both began to laugh. The lieutenant said in a plummy English accent, close to the BBC one, “There is nothing like a broadcasting studio in London to give a chap perspective, y’know.”

  Karl was nervous and not afraid to show it. But it was hard to just sit. He and Moe had done a lot of that on the flight to Corsica. He went up on the observing deck to watch the French shoreline drawing nearer. Their craft had a rectangular superstructure and a narrow strip of open deck on each side. “These things move pretty fast, and they make a fairly small target, bows-on,” Moe had explained before they got aboard on Corsica. Painted on one side of the superstructure Karl noted a neat Italian flag, with the legend ITALY underneath so that there would be no mistake, and beside the flag a blue shield with white vertical stripes and the word SICILY.

  There was also a swastika and the outline of an airplane, which could only mean that the ship had shot down a German plane in a landing either in Sicily or Italy. How? They must have carried at least machine guns. He noticed a metal stand that must have been used to hold a high-caliber weapon. Apparently this time the military expected less opposition, so they didn’t arm the ship as heavily. The constant buzzing of fighters overhead supported this theory. Karl watched a Mustang come zooming along the rocky beach, on a patrol of some sort. Somehow he did not find the sight reassuring.

  The armada on view was called Operation Dragoon, a second invasion of France, with Allied ships and troops on hundreds of gray vessels flying various flags. Reports said the Italians who had been defending this coast had gone home, leaving thin, stripped-down German divisions. Their briefing said the German troops were only second and third grade, even Volksdeutsch leftovers from Poland and Czechoslovakia. But there were plenty of targets, to judge from the naval guns’ relentless barrage. British and South African troops had just taken Florence, backed by US heavy weaponry. The navy had taken Guam and Tinian, an island Karl had to look up to see its importance; it was within striking range of Japan, using the new huge B-29 bombers. That could come in handy when there were more A-bombs, he realized. Which should be just a week or two.

  But the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, valiant at first, had come on hard and finally failed. The approaching Soviet Union armies just stood off and let the slaughter go on. The Germans proclaimed they had wiped out all the Jews Warsaw held. They might be right, given the savagery of the war in the east. Every day brought more brutality.

  The unsuccessful bomb conspirators against Hitler in July were shot immediately or hanged with piano wire, and then their bodies hung on meat hooks. Reprisals against their families continued, proudly announced by German radio. Karl wondered if this rising against Hitler, after the Berlin bomb didn’t get him, was in some distant way his fault. Berlin as a target had seemed obvious. Now nothing was.

  Meanwhile, the Allies had failed to close entirely the Falaise Pocket that led to eastern France. That left a gap that the Germans, fleeing east to escape the Allied pincer movement, filled quickly. The bomb had not turned out to be the war-ender they had all hoped it would be, and now the dust seemed to be equally useful.

  Between the hammering of the big naval guns, Karl could hear faint explosions from the western side of the shore. The landing craft’s hull was a lurching box for carrying men, no more. It pitched and rolled, and Karl was glad he had earned his sea legs on his Atlantic crossings in the 1930s. Some of the troops nearby were still vomiting over the side. This brought amused smiles to the officers, who sometimes referred to their calling as an “ambiguous farce.”

  Several groups on deck were rubbing “impregnating grease” into shoes to make them impervious to mustard gas. There had been a great last-minute furor about the possibility that the Germans might use gas against the invasion, and everybody had been fitted with impregnated gear and two kinds of protective ointment. The ship’s rails were topped with rows of crusty, drying boots.

  “This is the first time I ever tried to get a pair of boots pregnant,” a private called out sociably nearby.

  “You tried it on about everything else, I guess,” another yelled as he worked on his own boots.

  Nobody said anything about “death dust.” Karl supposed they were taking their dangers one at a time. Maybe combat training made you do that. Now that the dust was in play, why use mustard gas, a trickier weapon overall?

  Voices pealed in tones of rickety bravado. Seaweed flavored the air and gulls cawed. He felt utterly out of place as they came into shore. The craft had a stern anchor, which it dropped with a splash just before going aground. Two forward ramps whined and ran out as she touched bottom. Moe came up, and they waited as troops in drab-green field jackets walked quickly down the ramps and formed up into ranks on the pebbled beach. They carried mortar and machine gun parts on their backs, in addition to a full pack. Some carried carbines, and most had M-1 rifles packed in oilskin cases. Two had pickaxes and blocks of TNT, for pillboxes. “Me, I like a BAR,” one of them had said to Karl, explaining, “Means Browning automatic rifle. You can punch a lot of tickets with one of these babies.”

  The ship naturally lightened as men left and they stepped onto dry, crunching stones, within view of the Marseille dockyards. The troops marched away toward the rich green hills. Moe and Karl stood out in their street clothes.

  Moe gestured toward town.
The landing craft lieutenant had thought they could not set foot on the beach except in the company of a commissioned officer, but Moe had a letter that shut him up. Karl had read it, brisk and firm and signed by Eisenhower.

  Now they were on their own. “We can move faster that way,” Moe had said. “My preferred mode.”

  The warm, comfortable air and humming traffic made this not seem at all like the jumping-off place for an invasion. “No mines and underwater obstacles,” Moe said approvingly. “They’re already cleared. It was a different story when I went into Italy near Rome, to talk to the physicists there.”

  A corporal arrived with a Jeep for them, and they headed toward the city. “We’re going first class,” Moe said wryly.

  The general invasion plan had been for planes and big guns of the fleet to put on an intensive bombardment before the landing. That seemed to have worked. Shattered pillboxes and bunkers still smoked beside the road. At the Marseille dock, traffic murmured amid a chemical stink. The harbor surged, a lake of ripples with an oily sheen. Troops went ashore on a wooden plank, chuffing compressors and whining turbines adding their music. In the damp heat a cat lay on a tarp on the busy quay, asleep with four legs in the air. Khaki was everywhere, distant booms rolled in, and troops marched off big gray ships and into armored personnel carriers with .60 caliber machine guns on their decks.

  Ten minutes later they were purring along a beautiful broad avenue beside crisp, sandy beaches. Cannes was a bit east of them. A few burned German tanks dotted the sunny shore. They were the big Panzer IVs, Karl noted, already towed off the road where they’d met their end.

  Karl turned toward the light blue sea and watched the brown girls lying on towels only a few meters away. The exotic contrast of a luxuriant holiday spot and the sprawl of discarded military gear somehow made him think of Marthe. She was far away and he was here, in her homeland.