Weapons of Peace

by Johnston, Peter D. ;

  Wolf looked away, his mood and energy changed, his brain searching for some sort of logic to guide him—the same logic that had led to his scientific breakthroughs. He gazed out the window at the passing trees. He didn’t speak for what seemed forever to Emma and Manfred, the sound of the clicking rails filling the silence.

  He turned back to them.

  “Get me indisputable evidence of these camps and these mass killings you speak of—nothing more and nothing less,” he said. “For both our sakes, I will say nothing of you or our discussion to anyone. But until you show me this proof, which would tell me that everything I’ve known to be true is a lie, I will continue to do my part in moving the führer’s grand vision forward with this bomb.”

  She pulled out a large envelope.

  “Again, I apologize for how we’ve gone about things today, Herr Wolf. I hope you can understand why and forgive us. We, too, want this war to end.”

  She handed him the envelope, a gift she couldn’t have managed without Peter’s camera work and trusting way with people.

  “This is for you,” she said softly. “You’ll find brief updates about each of your children on the back of their photos. These were taken by our colleague just last week. I assume you’ll see some changes, since you haven’t been together in so long.”

  “Thank you,” Wolf said, not wanting to appear too eager, too appreciative. He took the envelope. He considered waiting, but couldn’t, and ripped it open, flipping through the photos, smiling, laughing, turning each one over to read the notes, a tear falling on his ten-year-old, Gertrude.

  After several of the best minutes he’d ever experienced, he took a deep breath and forced himself to place the photos back in the envelope, pushing the package toward Emma.

  “If you do somehow find any of the information I’ve asked for, I will be on this train, same compartment, returning to Berlin on the morning of the eighteenth of October. I don’t know how you’ll manage it, or how you’ll even get off this train, given the tight security.”

  Emma simply smiled. She put her cloak back on, walked to the door, and, before exiting, offered him a small nod. “Godspeed, Herr Wolf.”

  The scientist nodded back.

  Emma left the room. Manfred prepared to leave as well. He stopped.

  “Herr Wolf, I’m happy we brought you closer to your children tonight. However, should you try to turn on us—tonight, next week, or in the months ahead—I will personally make sure you never see any of them again.”

  Wolf continued to say nothing. He watched as Manfred slid the door shut. Weiner was still fast asleep and wouldn’t be awake for another hour, at least. In the meantime, Wolf knew that he had a lot to think about.

  He turned toward the window. He noted that the weather had changed again, inexplicably warming as they moved northward. A light, misty rain had begun to fall, melting the frost.

  —

  Fifteen minutes from its destination, the steam engine bound for Rügen came to an unexpected and abrupt halt, throwing its staff and its passengers off balance, while giving SS guard Weiner the jolt he needed to break out of his drug-induced haze.

  One of the train’s engineers had seen a fallen tree lying across the tracks up ahead and had immediately alerted the brakeman. As a couple of young employees ran to haul the tree out of the way, two passengers quietly opened and closed a steel side exit, lowered themselves to the gravel railway bed undetected, and disappeared into the nearby forest.

  —

  Romersa looked through the raindrops on the car’s rear side window, his face inches from the glass, as his chauffeur whipped them through the slick, black streets of Berlin and into the northern outskirts of the city.

  Romersa’s mother had once told him that sometimes having good manners meant putting up with other people’s bad manners. So, instead of being rude and complaining when his Nazi driver showed up at the Hotel Adlon more than eight hours late, he thanked him for coming, saying the wait had actually proved fruitful, because it allowed him to file several overdue reports with his employer, Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. Besides, his timely arrival, which was critical, still depended on his chauffeur.

  Benito Mussolini was counting on Romersa to be his sole representative at the noontime event the following day. The fate of the weakened Italian leader, who’d lost the southern portion of his country to the Allied invasion in 1943, was now completely dependent on the Nazis and any last tricks they might have up their bloodied sleeves. Mussolini had asked Romersa, as a respected journalist, to gather information from this test so that he could begin to prepare for victory—or defeat.

  As the young man glanced at his reflection in the car window, including his still perfectly coiffed black hair, white collared shirt, and silk tie, he wondered whether any weapon could truly be so different and so devastating that it could change the course of history.

  Chapter 28

  Thursday, October 12, 1944

  11:00 a.m.—Rügen Island, Germany

  Emma had never seen anything quite so stunning.

  Rügen Island’s steep, chalky white cliffs, sandy beaches, and dark, dense forests sat perched like a jeweled crown at the top of the German Empire. Emma had heard stories about battles for this coveted piece of land, which was by far Germany’s largest island.

  It was no wonder, Emma reflected, that jealous monarchs from Denmark, Sweden, France, and Prussia had fought for fifteen centuries to gain control of it. She was a well-endowed beauty sunning herself in the brilliant green waters of the Baltic Sea. Adolf Hitler had apparently fallen so hard for her that, in tribute, the Nazis were building a three-mile-long vacation resort along her shores, capable of accommodating twenty thousand people. The project’s progress had been slowed only because of the war.

  “According to my map, we’re at our best vantage point right here on this hill. There’s no way we can easily get onto the island today with so many soldiers posted around it,” Gottfried said, binoculars glued to his eyes. “And, besides, if it’s real, my sources tell me this kind of weapon could spread radiation, so we probably don’t want to be much closer, anyway.”

  Manfred looked down at his watch. “We still have almost an hour before the test.”

  “What shall we do while we wait?” Gottfried asked, pulling his binoculars down.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Emma said, getting to her feet and pulling her sweater over her head. She ran toward the water, kicking off her shoes. After reaching the narrow beach, she took off her shirt and slacks as well. Stripped down to just her undergarments, she didn’t hesitate, plunging into the sea with a headfirst dive.

  “She’s crazy,” Manfred said. “That water won’t be as warm as it looks.”

  Emma’s shrieks confirmed his assessment. Gottfried grinned, raising his binoculars again and returning his focus to the horizon several miles away.

  —

  He felt like a prisoner in the small room, whose walls were made of thick concrete, with tiny slits as windows slightly above ground level and a single bare lightbulb providing the only other light. The air felt thick and dank, the smell of new cement seeping into his nostrils.

  Luigi Romersa stood with three German army officials and a stern SS representative who towered over all of them. The tall one was responsible for hosting the event. The officials spoke in hushed but excited tones. As their words ricocheted off the walls, the Italian heard “überraschen die Welt”—no doubt expressing their belief that the Nazis were about to surprise the world with their new weapon.

  Their square-jawed host, who had to tilt his shaved head sideways to avoid scraping the low ceiling, asked for their attention. He informed them that the test would occur fifteen minutes earlier than planned, at 11:45 a.m.—just minutes away—because a senior official watching from another bunker had been urgently summoned back to Berlin.

  Thank
God! Romersa thought. Hopefully I can be out of this bloody cave by lunchtime. He hated confined spaces. No one had prepared him for these conditions.

  Four guards had accompanied the Italian journalist to this location. At 10:00 a.m., they’d left Stralsund, where Romersa had managed to grab some sleep in a hotel. He’d been ferried by boat to the island. Following a short drive, they had disembarked from a large jeep, passed through a security checkpoint, and made their way down a winding path into the forest. He had walked several paces ahead of the guards.

  As they moved through the thick woods, amid bright-green foliage and the sweet scent of colorful flowers, he had been charmed by leaping deer, chattering birds, and black-masked, yellow-limbed monkeys, their small white chests almost glowing as they leaped from tree to tree above him.

  One of the young monkeys had taken a liking to Romersa. She stayed within yards of him, and when they emerged from the woods, entering a large clearing, she kept moving with him through the deep grass, where sheep and goats grazed lazily as shouts volleyed above them; a contingent of soldiers was measuring the distance from one side of the clearing to the other.

  Looking to the west, Romersa saw imposing stone houses, a tower made of rock, as well as smoke rising from behind another wall of trees. His guards guided him in the opposite direction, eastward. Within minutes, another low-lying concrete tower came into view, this one embedded in the ground, with only its top two stories protruding. He was directed toward one of the structure’s side entrances. Before walking through it, he stopped, and looked up at the sky to say a silent prayer, before shuffling downward into the gray bunker.

  He had heard the tiny monkey’s screeches only at the last moment as the door was closing behind him. Through a pane of glass, he tried to shoo her away, back toward the forest, but she wouldn’t go. Romersa smiled at her persistence before turning and disappearing into the room in which he now stood.

  —

  Since his arrival in the bunker an hour earlier, there had been nothing to do but stand, sweat, and wait. While he enjoyed dressing fashionably, he realized that it had been a mistake to wear a fine gray Italian suit, though he noted that the other observers were in full uniform. In such a hot, tight space, the smell of male bodies began to mix with the dampness, forcing him to further tighten his nostrils.

  At precisely 11:42 a.m., their SS host began handing out dark sunglasses. “Gentlemen, I hope you are prepared to witness the first event of its kind in history. These glasses are to protect your eyes. Though we are more than half a mile from the weapon, we believe its explosive light and force could reach our bunker,” the officer explained in German. “Brace yourselves. This concrete tower, exposed above the ground to a height of exactly twenty feet, will be assessed to measure the bomb’s physical impact.”

  Once the men had placed their sunglasses firmly on their faces, they were instructed to move toward the mica-tinted glass in front of them. Each person had his own miniature window for viewing.

  An avid football fan, Romersa did a rough calculation: based on what he’d just been told, the bomb was almost ten full football fields in length away from them, separated by thousands of huge trees and half a dozen solid stone structures.

  He found it hard to believe that he and the people around him would see or feel anything from this distance, but so be it, he figured. This is where the Nazis had decided to put him as Mussolini’s man on the ground in Germany.

  He glanced at his watch: 11:44 a.m.

  —

  Emma was lying on the grass with her eyes closed when she felt the ground jolt underneath her.

  A loud roar came from the distance. Her head shot up.

  A flash of brilliant light filled part of the sky above Rügen Island.

  “They’re early!” Gottfried shouted.

  Manfred said nothing.

  The three sat watching from their knoll as a plume of dirty gray smoke rose into the air above where the explosion had occurred some five miles away. As the smoke rose, it cast a growing shadow on everything below it.

  No one spoke again—until Emma broke the silence.

  “God help us, they’re not bluffing,” she said breathlessly.

  To this point, the threat of a new weapon had seemed an exciting, unfathomable challenge to be tackled on behalf of the Allied forces and her mentor, Nash. Now, she felt sick to her stomach, more scared than she’d ever been in her life.

  Manfred was on his feet. Gottfried and Emma jumped up, following his lead.

  They started to run, as fast as they could, away from the spreading cloud.

  —

  Romersa initially refused to put on the white asbestos clothing, including long lightweight boots and a head covering that looked like a scuba helmet, not believing any of this was truly necessary. Then they told him about the invisible radiation.

  The two soldiers who had brought the specially designed clothing to their bunker, and who wore it themselves, insisted that the garments would protect the observers from severe burns and other potentially serious ailments. The soldiers had arrived four full hours after the weapon’s detonation. This additional wait had been excruciating for Romersa, his claustrophobia magnified by the trauma he’d just experienced.

  He had been shocked, as were the others, by the brute force of the explosion. It had felt as if a giant were playing with their concrete tower, shaking it violently from top to bottom, knocking him and the other observers off their feet as they watched a wall of fire blast toward them. In less than a minute, the heat had risen inside their bunker by at least twenty degrees. The robust elderly general beside him had fainted.

  Romersa was now starving, overheated, dehydrated—and stunned. The last thing he felt like doing was adding more layers to his clothing, which would generate more heat, but he did want to leave. He started pulling the outfit over his suit. He didn’t know much about radiation, only that it was a harmful side effect of an atomic bomb, which, according to their host, this weapon had been.

  “Achtung! Once we are outside, you may look around, but please do not stop or touch anything. Follow these soldiers. You will be taken back to the mainland. Herr Romersa,” the SS officer said to the Italian, “you will meet with Minister Goebbels in Berlin to debrief prior to your return to Italy. Danke, gentlemen. Heil Hitler!”

  The journalist was the first observer from the bunker to walk outside.

  A grayish white powder fell on Romersa’s slight frame from the sky, covering his jacket and his helmet. It appeared to be a snowy early-evening scene, when in reality it was just past 4:00 p.m. on a sunny afternoon. A dark cloud hung above everything he could see, along with a blanket of silence. Gone were all signs of life, including the energetic, chattering voices he’d heard outside before the test.

  The tiny slit he’d used to observe the explosion from the bunker had given him no sense of the breadth of the devastation in this part of the island. He could see clear across all ten football fields, with absolutely nothing to obstruct his view. Any random trees left standing had been stripped of their foliage and reduced to black sticks, leaving the smell of smoldering wood hovering among the falling ashes.

  Several hundred yards from where the weapon had exploded, the stone houses and the tower had been wiped out, their remnants blown across the clearing. The lush grass carpet he’d hiked across hours before had disintegrated, reduced to scorched earth.

  As he began to absorb the surreal surroundings, his mind turned to the obvious implications for the Germans, the Italians, and their enemies.

  Romersa shuddered and kept moving.

  His right foot hit something hard. He stumbled and fell awkwardly, the limited vision through his helmet’s clear panel making it difficult to see. His white suit was soon covered in soot as he rolled on the ground. He swore, panicking, knowing that contact with the contaminated soil could lead to severe illness.
<
br />   Romersa thought, at first, that he’d fallen over a charred black rock. But his second glance revealed more. He saw that the grizzled stone had limbs and a short stub where a tail should have been.

  A surge of disgust and guilt overtook him when he realized what he was staring at. It was the young female monkey that had followed him to the bunker. It looked to him as though she had curled herself into a ball to protect herself from the blast.

  Romersa brushed himself off with his gloved hands and hurried to catch up with the others, no longer interested in assessing the damage around him.

  He’d seen enough.

  Chapter 29

  Wednesday, October 18, 1944

  8:50 a.m.—Stralsund Train Station Platform

  Rolf Berg’s weighty frame seesawed as he strode across the busy platform toward his train, his weeklong commitment on the Baltic Sea successfully completed.

  The criminal director didn’t have all the details about the new weapon, but he knew that securing Rügen Island during and after the testing had been deemed critical by senior Nazi officials—and that, once again, he had come through.

  As he looked up at the coach numbers, trying to locate No. 15, where he would be traveling with his new criminal assistant, Berg made his way past a couple who caught his eye, noting that the middle-aged man of average height looked considerably older than the woman who held his arm. The attractive pair were headed in the opposite direction, and Berg turned to watch them briefly as they jostled through the crowd with their two small bags.

  He continued to forge toward his own coach, the smell of burning coal from the train’s engine permeating the air and sticking to his suit. Not long afterward, he settled into his comfortable second-class seat for the three-hour trip to Germany’s capital city. He was happy to see that the seats around him were unoccupied, because he and his new assistant could stretch out and speak without being overheard. His assistant was cutting it close but would probably arrive just in time based on what Berg had experienced over the previous couple of weeks.