“I assume you don’t have a gold coin?” she said. She could always use another one, and she wanted to understand further who had received them—and who hadn’t.
“Gold coin?”
“Never mind.” She raised her gun.
“What kind of woman does these things?” he cried.
She fired a single bullet into his forehead.
A kind woman, she thought.
He dropped backward onto the platform.
In a few minutes, Janson, I’ll probably be jealous of how you just died.
—
Papp looked at his large walkie-talkie with concern, then at his junior colleague.
“Say that again, please,” Papp said.
“I have a security breach in our first station,” the soldier’s voice repeated on the radio. “Can you hear me?”
“Ja, we hear you,” Papp said. “What’s the nature of your emergency?”
The line crackled. “Our patrol found two men unconscious here,” the soldier said. “We’ve managed to revive one of them. He claims a blond woman in an SS uniform stormed their hut and did this to them. He says she’s armed with guns—and needles—and moving in your direction.”
Papp swore. Needles? That can’t be right, he thought.
He’d escorted her right into the heart of the mountain’s operations at exactly the wrong time.
A muffled gunshot sounded from above. Papp swore again. “Get up there! I’ll stay here to make sure she doesn’t escape. Shoot to kill. No warnings,” Papp emphasized.
The younger guard nodded and disappeared.
Chapter 45
Sunday, March 25, 1945
5:00 p.m.—Ore Mountains, Sicke’s Facility
As she ran back across the catwalk, Emma spotted Heinz Stark emerging from the control center. She shouted to him. “Meet me in the middle of the walkway—there’s no time for stairs! We have just a few minutes to escape!”
“I know! I saw the monitors!” he shouted back, running toward her.
“Don’t even think about getting to the control box to stop the missile,” she threatened as they came together.
“I wouldn’t,” he answered. “You’re doing what needs to be done. I didn’t, unfortunately.”
Emma put her gun inside her jacket. She began to mount the fenced railing. “Follow me. We have to jump as far out as we can to try and grab one of the overhead cables that run to the ground.”
The scientist hesitated, taking a step back. “I’d prefer to die up here rather than on my way down. And in truth,” he added, as she balanced herself on the top of the railing, “I’d prefer my family believed I died eighteen months ago. I was never one of the good guys, but I’ve become one of the worst under Sicke’s influence.”
“They forced you to do your work here, didn’t they?” Emma asked.
“We all make choices. I could have refused, or sabotaged Sicke’s work. I didn’t.”
Emma simply nodded.
He backed farther away. “Everyone out of the mountain! Sicke’s orders! Schnell, schnell!” he shouted down through the grate. The remaining employees and guards only now began to run for the exit.
Emma saw a solitary guard standing at the bottom of the cavern looking up as the others around him ran to save themselves. It was Papp, who’d brought her up to the control center. She shouted that the warhead was on its way toward them, making sure Papp had heard Stark. The guard looked unfazed.
A bullet whizzed by her head, missing by inches. Her head swiveled to the right. Papp’s partner was standing halfway up the stairs, firing at her.
As she looked down, her thoughts turned to Axel; she was so close to seeing him again.
She eyed her chosen cable some five yards away and threw herself forward through the golden mist, hurtling feetfirst toward the bottom of the cavern. She felt a second shot from the stairs fly by, just missing her chest. Distracted by the gunfire, she’d mistimed her jump.
My God.
Her hands missed the smooth metal cable by at least a foot.
She was in free fall. There was only one other cable she could reach for, and, after that, nothing but space and ground. The air rushed upward at her.
She extended her hand, trying to grab the second hanging line. She missed again. But this time she managed to catch the cable between her arm and her body, slowing her fall, at least briefly. She reached around to latch on with her left hand, quickly securing her hold with her right hand as well. Both arms stretched painfully upward as she fought against the pull of gravity, the thick wire burning the folds of her hands as she slid down it.
She was somewhat back in control now, the cable guiding her toward the ground and fast. But she knew that she had also just become a more predictable target.
The bullet hit her in her thigh. At first, she thought it was the cable boring into her, but this pain was different, sharper. She looked down and in a blur saw Papp, gun trained on her, getting ready to fire again.
He pulled the trigger—just as she balled her body up to make it smaller, a cannonball looking for a place to land. She hung on with her left hand and grabbed her gun with her right, returning his fire.
Twenty feet above the ground, she let go, in the direction of Papp. He’d underestimated her, not expecting this. She’d timed her release perfectly, driving both feet into his chest and landing on him upright. His head hit the cement floor, while his body cushioned her as she fell forward, rolling to the ground on her side.
She tested her unsteady feet, surprised that she could stand, and confirmed in a glance that her thigh injury was significant but manageable. Papp lay unconscious beside her.
She ran, limping, toward the large rounded opening through which the rail line passed and most of the mountain’s occupants had already fled. Another gunshot sounded, ricocheting off the stony interior just above her as she vaulted out of the chamber into the fresh air.
There was no time to retrieve her rucksack from the brush. One thing she knew for sure was that she didn’t want to be anywhere near the passageway into and out of the mountain when the explosion occurred; anything in that area would be blown up or vaporized along with the observation deck.
She forced herself forward, up through the forest, away from where she’d hidden earlier and where the tracks disappeared into the main chamber. As she moved through the trees, some hundred yards from where she’d exited, she looked back over her right shoulder, catching flashes of the runaway green missile as it steadily gained speed down the long incline toward the tunnel.
By the time she’d doubled her distance from the base of the mountain, the missile had disappeared from her line of sight.
—
Max Sicke lowered himself to his knees, his arms above his head, his unblinking eyes staring at the monitor above him.
The position of his body, the sacrifice he’d undertaken for the betterment of all, and the pain and anguish he felt were all too familiar, a reminder of everything that he and Christ had in common, both of them terribly misunderstood before dying.
Everything in him told him to look away, but he couldn’t. He watched as his creation accelerated over the final stretch of track.
Resistant to his fate at first, he’d lost his composure, crying out, cursing his maid, closing his eyes, and praying to God to defy the laws of gravity and stop the missile right where it was.
But when he reopened his eyes, fully expecting the missile’s movement to have been thwarted by an invisible hand, he saw the rocket going even faster. He knew now that God had chosen another fate for him. He tried fervently to embrace that fate. He even forgave the maid who had done this to him and prayed for her soul.
Sicke smiled, choosing simply to enjoy a moment in time that was like no other, a celebration of his unparalleled accomplishments, when atoms would divide billions at a t
ime, returning everything to dust.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .
He tried to stay strong, tears pouring from his eyes as he watched his missile enter the main chamber directly below him, out of control, crashing off the rails, hitting the central pillar of his cathedral.
—
The ground trembled.
Anticipating what would inevitably come next, Emma drove her body upward, diving for cover behind a jagged outcropping of rock.
She hit the loose, wet earth, which filled her nostrils.
Everything underneath her shook, the huge, tree-covered mountain behind her emitting a deep roar from its very core. She arched her head up and back just in time to see smoke and fire blow out of all its orifices, high into the air beyond the eyes’ reach, making the mountain look and sound like an angry dragon.
She hid her face, covering her head with her arms, as dirt, pebbles, and parts of trees rained down around her. Stretched out on the mossy floor, Emma imagined the inside of the dragon at that moment: its innards imploding, pulverizing its tunneled intestines, its metal, its glass, its golden gems, and its remaining humans—including Sicke, Stark, Papp, and Janson—into nothingness, triggering the explosion of other materials and fuels.
The smoke continued to rise into the atmosphere.
Emma’s skin stung and her scalp burned.
As she moved farther away from the mountain, she realized that the dragon had been so loud that it had caused her to lose the hearing in her left ear.
She began to run through the trees, away from the destruction.
—
Dazed and still recovering, Emma found her way to Sicke’s jeep long after nightfall.
She counted herself extremely lucky that Papp’s bullet had passed through her thigh without claiming any bone or her femoral artery. She knew that either outcome would have led to her death, given the circumstances.
She’d been surprised to find herself feeling nauseated during the trek back, twice throwing up. At first, she thought that exhaustion was the culprit, since she hadn’t slept the night before. Then she recalled what Magnus von Braun had said about the impact of radiation, and that its victims needed to wash immediately. Panicked, she’d raced through the woods to a stream, where she stripped off all her clothes and threw herself into the frigid water yelping, scrubbing her skin and hair, cleaning her wounds, shivering, crying in relief and horror at what she’d just experienced—and done.
Once at the jeep, she grabbed her medical kit and tended to her various injuries—her thigh, forehead, cheek, back, and hands. Her hearing had finally returned.
As she drove away from the mountain, avoiding the main roads wherever she could, she thought back to her drive there, when she’d doubted herself for acting on her own and assumed that she was going to have to accomplish this critical part of her mission without relying on anyone but herself.
Only now did she grasp how wrong she’d been: in fact, she’d never been alone.
When she counted up the people who had helped her on her path into and out of the mountain, whether they’d wanted to or not, and whether they were nearby or had informed her from afar, she arrived at a number that far exceeded Nash’s reference to sixteen—a chess player’s full complement of pieces.
Her pieces included the guards at the hut, who gave her everything she needed to reach the mountain safely; the two guards who agreed to let her into the fortress; a brilliant fighter named Morton, who’d trained her in hand-to-hand combat; all the doctors and nurses who’d taught her anatomy and, specifically, the vulnerability of the occiput at the back of the head; Gottfried, with his unlikely smoke bombs; as well as Lady Baillie, Stark, Janson, Wolf, the von Brauns, Peter, Maria, Ursula, Eva Braun, Ania, Axel—and Everett Nash.
Without the support of each and every one of these helpers, she knew that she would have failed—and that she’d be dead now, along with hundreds of thousands of Parisians.
Nash, of course, had been right all along.
Chapter 46
Monday, March 26, 1945
7:00 a.m.—Berlin
Dr. Hans Kammler strode past the second security checkpoint in his building, again saluting and snarling “Heil Hitler,” his mood foul and well justified, he believed, and not helped by the dull ache in his temples.
He’d been in meetings the night before with the führer and had not been able to communicate with his young assistant Heinrich Janson, who’d attended the launch with Sicke. In the end, Kammler assumed the event had been delayed, otherwise someone surely would have apprised him of the extinction of the French capital.
Exhausted after a full day of meetings aimed at mounting a response to Allied incursions on three fronts, Kammler had decided to spend the night at the apartment of his mistress rather than go home to his uninspiring wife. He and his lover had finally fallen asleep after devouring red wine and each other well into the early hours of the morning. Then, at 6:30 a.m., the phone had rung, waking him and his young redheaded mistress from their deep slumber. The voice on the line was that of his long-serving secretary, Trudi.
What he heard next was possibly the worst news he’d ever received. Trudi informed him that the launch had gone horribly wrong, apparently leaving Sicke’s Ore Mountain facility decimated, everything in it completely destroyed. The scientist himself was presumed to be among the dead, along with Stark and Janson. No one knew yet exactly what had transpired, but several surviving guards reported that an unidentified blond female dressed as an SS officer had somehow breached the mountain’s defenses—though it was unclear if she’d survived.
As he mounted the concrete stairs toward his office, which afforded him a panoramic view of the Tiergarten, he paused suddenly, wondering if this was the end. He had run out of ideas for keeping his part of the SS war machine moving forward. Without Sicke’s new bomb and its supporting rocketry, there was simply nowhere else to turn. Starting over would be impossible with the Allies so close.
His life would be at risk now. If the Americans or the Russians didn’t get him, his boss would. He’d promised Heinrich Himmler, who ran the SS and much of the Nazis’ overall war effort, that he would, one way or another, turn the war back in Germany’s favor. If that was no longer possible, Himmler might expect him to pay with his life.
If cornered, he’d take his cyanide and be done with it, rather than give anyone else the satisfaction of killing him. He knew that satisfaction well. It had driven him to build concentration camps, extermination centers, crematoriums, and underground weapons facilities that worked slave laborers to death. To calm his mind when he couldn’t sleep, he counted Jews instead of sheep. Whatever happened going forward, no one could take away his legacy: overseeing the deaths of millions of undesirables who undermined or stole from his Aryan race, and from the Nazi Party.
As a proud forty-three-year-old engineer and a leader in the prime of his life, he realized that his Nazi dream might well be coming to a close, but felt that his own ascension was just beginning in so many ways. His mistress, Bella, constantly reminded him that he was handsome—thanks to his height, slight build, long, thin nose, and full head of jet-black hair—especially in uniform, she’d say, as she ripped it off his body.
Still standing in the stairwell of his building, he collected his thoughts. He had business to attend to. He would track down those who’d ruined his efforts to revolutionize Germany’s weapons. There had to be a group of formidable men behind an operation complex and systematic enough to take out a mountain facility. How clever of them to use a blond SS-uniformed woman as a distraction and a means of entry to Sicke’s fortress. He would start with her, his only lead. Despite a hangover from the fruity Bordeaux, he’d move to find her immediately, torturing her until he knew what she knew, including whom she was working with. Then he would kill her himself.
He started to climb the stairs again, punching in a
number on a keypad on the third floor, then passing through a dark, damp hallway to the entrance of his once well-appointed office. At least his own little fortress hadn’t been wiped out by the Allied bombs that had destroyed so many Nazi strongholds.
Trudi wasn’t at her desk, but he knew she couldn’t have gone far, because an untouched cup of steaming coffee sat waiting for her.
Kammler walked into his office, his head starting to pound from the wine.
For some reason, his black leather chair, whose seat always faced the door, had been turned away, so that he could see only the back of it. As he approached his large teak desk—an ornate, hand-painted gift from Japan’s ambassador—he realized that there was someone sitting where he normally sat.
“Trudi?”
The chair began to swivel toward him.
He relaxed.
Until he saw that it wasn’t Trudi.
—
“Dr. Kammler, I presume?”
Kammler jumped—out of surprise, not fear.
The woman sitting in his chair was young, blond, and wearing an SS uniform and cap. She appeared to be unarmed.
How convenient. Now I won’t have to track her down to kill her.
“Indeed, I’m Dr. Hans Kammler. And you are?” he said, pulling out his gun.
“Your guardian angel, Dr. Kammler. Now, please do have a seat so we can talk.”
“Why would I do that? Why shouldn’t I just shoot you or call for security?”
“Well,” she replied, “I suppose if your security guards were worth calling they wouldn’t have ushered me into your office in the first place.” He could see dried blood on her skirt; it appeared to have seeped through from her thigh.
A chink in her armor, he thought. She must be weak from her exploits.
“And what have you done with my dear Trudi?”
“Not to worry, your secretary is out running an errand for me.”
He was intrigued. This blonde was beautiful, albeit a little battered—in addition to the blood, her cheek and forehead looked bruised—but otherwise she appeared to be the perfect Aryan specimen for a female. If she’d truly arrived here unarmed and didn’t have something tremendously useful to discuss with him, she had to be mentally unstable. Her tone and poise gave no indication that this might be the case, however. He sat down.
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