Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Over a cup of espresso at a café nearby, Nicolaus watched a woman, hunched over, wearing a babushka, sweeping the sidewalk as babushkas do, and stealthily pluck the note from under the dead-drop rock, pushing it into a pocket of her apron, and finish her sweeping. She was a Mossad agent, of course, and Nicolaus finished his expresso satisfied that the message had been received.

  Weight Loss Program

  The same day Zerrissen’s name dropped into the card sorting bin by the American computation machine, Zerrissen had passed out at the drafting table again after working until early hours on NIX and finalizing some computations of his own. He was awakened by a scraping sound, like a straight razor being sharpened against a leather strop, within centimeters of his face. He cracked his eyes open to see Buttercup staring back, drawing its beak slowly, menacingly, across a flange on the scrap steel straight edge of the drafting table. Zerrissen pulled his head back slowly, trying to remember the proper way not to provoke a bear, and not knowing whether the rule applied to psychotic birds.

  The bird flew back to its perch when it saw Nicolaus entering from the back door and pretended to go to sleep, as if knowing that Nicolaus would not believe Zerrissen should he choose to complain about the animal.

  Taking in the scene, Nicolaus was, for the first time since losing Pyotr at Die Kuppel, visibly mortified with what he saw on the floor surrounding NIX as she hung in the balancing mechanism Zerrissen had fashioned on the ceiling block and tackle system. Several pieces from the interior had been removed, including one of the passenger seats.

  “Raynor, we’re committed. May 1st. Tomorrow. She’s got to be ready. The time to experiment is over.”

  Zerrissen, still rubbing sleep from his eye, searched for the words to explain. “She was too heavy, and the available oxygen was too low. Three of us would never make it to Tiergarten with enough air should we need to execute the Return function. What’s more, she cannot displace enough water with a third person on board without increasing her velocity to stay at the 1-meter limit, and she doesn’t have the battery life for that. The solution is two passengers. She’s ready now.”

  Nicolaus tried to imagine how so much planning could be thrown out now. “You just figured this out last night?”

  “No. I’ve known for weeks. I didn’t see the point of telling you.”

  “Can we try….”

  “No. The math doesn’t lie. Trust me. I’ve tried everything.”

  “Remove the interior items I put in there, that will save…”

  “Mere grams that do nothing in reduce oxygen consumption. No. The fault isn’t your interior design, it’s my hydrodynamic design.”

  “So, you pilot Halina to safety, pull the Return lever and come get me.”

  “The Return is automatic. No pilot will be necessary. NIX can return on her own. I think. But it makes more sense for you to take the first journey with Halina. You’ve got Todtenhausen to hunt down. I’ve got all the vodka I want here.”

  Nicolaus felt himself being persuaded but realized a rarely felt sensation amid his usual over confidence. Fear. “I don’t know how to pilot NIX.”

  “I know. But that’s what the sequencer is for.”

  He handed Nicolaus two microcassettes, one blue and labeled TIERGARTEN, the other red and labeled SCUTTLE.

  “Put the blue on in the sequencer, push the START button, and NIX will do the rest.”

  “And the red one?”

  “Worst case scenario. We ditch NIX should we the wrong people walk through that door. SCUTTLE will send NIX all the way down the Spree to the mouth of the Elbe River, then to the North Sea where it will eventually sink.”

  Zerrissen studied Nicolaus’ eyes to determine if he was buying the story, because he had not mentioned a critical detail. What he had not told Nicolaus was that the SCUTTLE sequence could carry a single passenger all the way to the North Sea where, instead of sinking, would in fact turn to port and beach itself on the Netherlands coast, where Zerrissen could emerge to relative safety and a warmer welcome than he would get from the Mossad agents at the Tiergarten who regard him as a War criminal.

  Without Halina and Nicolaus to server as character witnesses and plea for his release, he would spend the rest of his life in an Israeli prison, trading one interrogation cell for another.

  The time for decisions was over; the luxury of making choices was gone.

  With the saddest look on his face Zerrissen had not seen since their escape for Die Kuppel, Nicolaus expressed out loud what was on his mind.

  “Events are now driving our actions, Raynor, we’re no longer in charge of our decisions. That’s not good.”

  True, Zerrissen thought, but something else was on Nicolaus’ mind.

  “Oh? Is there something I should know?”

  “Yes. Another card popped out of the American machine’s sorting algorithm this morning. Yours.”

  “Nicolaus, I’ll be honest. We don’t care so much about each other, I don’t care so much about you, but I’ve become a bit fond of Halina. I can’t entomb her in that windowless torpedo tube for her and her child to die a slow death by claustrophobic panic and asphyxiation. I don’t want them drowning, screaming like kittens in a burlap bag thrown into the ocean. This is not what I agreed to do for you.”

  “This is a hell of a time to back out.”

  “I’m not backing out. I’m insisting on a test.”

  “Decisions are being made for us, Raynor. That one, for example. There’s not time. We’re leaving before dawn tomorrow. We can flip a coin to see who accompanies Halina.”

  “No. As you said, events make the decisions now. I’ll go on my own. You go with Halina.”

  “Either way, we need to be gone from here by May 2nd. They’ll be here by then.”

  “Who will be here?”

  “KGB and Stasi. Black sedans will pull up to your old workshop and search their way here. Anyone they find will be arrested. You most of all. You’re the one remaining architect of Wermut. The Soviets are very keen on understanding what you did. It will not go well for you, no matter what you tell them.”

  For the second time in as many decades, Zerrissen was being forced to break out of a Soviet siege.

  A squawk and flurry of feathers announced Halina’s appearance. The conversation changed to lighter subject, though she looked quizzically at Nicolaus sensing otherwise.

  “We were just discussing christening NIX before we leave tomorrow. Early. Before dawn. Do you want to break a bottle of champagne over the bow before we launch her?”

  Zerrissen forced a smile and confronted them with a reality. “There won’t be an available bottle of champagne in all Europe the way Russians celebrate May Day.”

  “Good. No one from the State gets up before sunrise on May Day.”

  As they disbanded for the final time, Zerrissen, pulled Nicolaus aside curious about an issue that this chance could be the last to address. “You don’t have to tell me, but whatever happened to Ulf? Did you decide to let him go?”

  Nicolaus smiled, confirmed that Halina was out of hearing, and answered cryptically. “Oh, he’s taken care of. In fact, he helped us clear the duct. Saugglocke needed ballast, didn’t it?”

  Zerrissen caught his breath, realizing that Nicolaus worked alone when filling saugglocke and sealing the ends. In fact, Nicolaus never touched the welder again. Was Nicolaus capable of stuffing Ulf in among the other trash and ballast?

  “I thought you promised Halina you would not kill Ulf…”

  With a sly smile, Nicolaus quickly corrected Zerrissen. “What are you on about, Raynor? Ulf was alive the last time I saw him.”

  Loch Ness Schlange31

  Nicolaus and Halina left to make final arrangements. Buttercup was placed on its perch in the old shop to entertain the authorities when they showed up tomorrow while they gathered supplies for the journey which would last only one hour if successful or the rest of their lives if not. High carbohydrate snacks from the West for the stress, and som
e fresh water to wash them down.

  After procuring a small bag of these sundries, Nicolaus tucked Halina away in a safehouse in the gay ghetto of Kreuzberg where Halina would be safer than anywhere in the world of heterosexuals who had raped her in the first place. There, she would also avoid accidentally informing the State of her condition, as they would not be inclined to let her birth a new citizen in the Free World after it had paid for her medical attention.

  He made a final visit to his own flat, ensuring first that the Stasi or the KGB agents were not there already, and set some distractions to amuse and otherwise distract their inevitable visit. He left train tickets to Moscow to throw them off the trail, and some illegal porn that they would most certainly add to their own collections. He then added his final touches: human feces in plastic containers and some beer bottles filled with urine in the refrigerator as little amusements for his former colleagues.

  Alone for the first time since inception of this project, Zerrissen was alone amid the collections of motors, casings, and barrels of fluids and the workshop now seemed cavernous. He contemplated the events of the next few hours, as well as the two microcassettes in his hand, one red for the worst-case scenario, the other blue, for the actual escape.

  Telling himself he was making mere scientific inquires, the used his weight and balance mechanism with bags of sand in NIX to simulate a single passenger journey to the Netherlands.

  Satisfied that the pipe would once again be neutrally buoyant one meter beneath the surface, deep enough to pass unseen (even by expecting eyes) in the murky, polluted waters of the Spree, Zerrissen lowered NIX into the duct opening, climbed into the pilot’s seat, pulled the hatch closed, and toggled the main power breaker that brought NIX to life. Needles swung into position, lamps indicated seaworthy status, levels and air pressure were good, and the magnetic clamps were holding.

  Two gyroscopes used for navigation and attitude control began their slow climb to rotational velocity with a dual whine of increasing frequency. When they settled in at the operating speed of ten thousand cycles per second, he asked himself one final time,

  “Do I really want to do this?”

  His mind had no answer, but the vodka said “yes.”

  Zerrissen climbed through the hatch, and strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, telling himself this would only be a test. He pushed the red microcassette into the sequencer. Never being one to give himself over to panic, he would not do so now.

  He popped the power breaker to the magnetic clamps holding NIX in place, allowing the craft to slide down backwards inside the inclined duct on its wheeled cart accompanied by a grinding sound of grit against concrete. The cylinder resonated as a kettle drum as its hull scraped and bumped against the sides of the duct, Halina’s catfish whiskers feeling the sides of the duct, and feeding minute adjustments to the tail flip motion so the craft could find the duct’s center once again.

  The sound of metal on concrete stopped with a bang. Zerrissen felt NIX drop, indicating that NIX was free and clear of the duct. It was in the Spree, its propulsion now entirely by Halina’s ingenious tail rather than by gravity. The inertia of falling off the duct floor sent NIX two meters deep in the river, a meter lower than its design depth, yet one it could survive momentary.

  Zerrissen had steeled himself for this drop, his stomach gave up all the unmetabolized vodka just the same. The large depth meter on one of the center dials of the dashboard confirmed he was two meters too deep. The laws of buoyancy commanded the craft to rise slowly to its set buoyancy level in the fresh, slowly moving water of the Spree. NIX would begin to float higher as it reached the denser, saltier water near the North Sea.

  Under guidance of the sequencer, and Zerrissen’s supervisory gaze, NIX headed downstream. The tail was calmly and silently flipping its way on a path that would terminate in the Netherlands. As it was a moonless night with slack tidal conditions in the North Atlantic nearby, the journey would take 10 hours.

  Water gurgled along the hull outside, which was fine as long as it stayed outside. The only other sounds were whines of the gyroscopes as the craft moved through the still water, it was a feat that made him feel some pride. His sequencer, his other pride, issued the occasional correction to the tail flip centroid, and adjusted the arrival time clock on the dashboard accordingly.

  Zerrissen’s mood improved as he looked for signs of failure and finding none. Only small amounts of water accumulated in what would have been the bilge (had this been a real submarine). His breathing was sending into the ambient air, but the scrubbers were keeping it under control. Current from the two batteries was consumed as planned, the voltage was holding at twelve volts. In a half an hour, the sequencer would command the tail to flip a path change to the Elbe River.

  First, however, NIX had to pass two GDU border guard stations before reaching its turn at the junction with the Elbe. The guards were armed, bored, and known to be as drunk as they were trigger happy, with no penalties for shooting first and asking questions never.

  Zerrissen’s stopwatch dead reckoning told him he was near the first guard station, but on this moonless evening of celebration, a black painted NIX, one meter beneath the water, would surely be impossible to see. His hunch was confirmed when he heard guards laughing and talking loudly as drunks do, even above the gurgling of the water slipping past NIX’s hull. No doubt they were resentful of the short straws they had drawn to work that evening. His confidence subsided, however, when he thought he heard a guard shout, “Alarm!’ If he were seen, he would soon be perforated with test fire from their rifles. When no such rifle fire commenced, Zerrissen struggled to convince himself it was all in his mind, when he noticed the depth gauge. By pumping out the water collecting at the bottom of NIX, he had increased her buoyancy and allowed her to expose a few inches of her hull above water. Even a drunk guard could not ignore a black cylinder with a hatch and eddies of water forming around its swishing tail, even if only illuminated by starlight.

  At the second guard station, another guard leaned his rifle against the exterior of the shack, fumbled for his zipper and stomped his heavy waffle-pattern shoes towards the riverbank, looking for a strange object that was reported to him by phone from the guard station upstream. Urinating into the river in the freezing April night air, he watched for the black cylinder in the light reflecting from the western side of the riverbank, and upon sighting it, decided it was only an old oak tree that had fallen into the river, but nonetheless a decent target. It moved at two knots, which gave him just enough time to grab his rifle and pull off a round into the center of the exposed portion. The sound of the rifle awoke his comrade guard inside, but it was the sound of a ricochet that sobered them both up a bit. Bright search lights on top of the station threw light on the water, and both guards emptied their 9 mm magazines into the strange tree trunk of steel.

  As it moved out of range, the guards lit cigarettes and let it vanish as fly fishermen watched a targeted trout slip away. Neither concerned himself with the responsibility of letting it go, nor with the paperwork that interrogations about such things invited.

  “Loch Ness Schlange,” one guard remarked to the other, laughing. With the target gone, they lowered their rifles, lit each other’s cigarettes, and continued their patrol, the incident already forgotten.

  The episode did not pass so benignly inside NIX; the instruments (and a bit of flesh) had received the rifle fire. Zerrissen’s attention was spread across too many points of failure to be on top of any, or to even be aware of the sound of water passing beneath the hull. He could not see the swords of light from GDU guards probing the strange mass floating in the Spree, and he was thus stunned by a loud whipcrack reverberating through the tube. This was followed by a whine of high velocity, which sounded like the ricochets in American Western movies.

  Sacrificing precious battery power, he flipped on the internal lights to look for the source of what could have only been an explosion, even though nothing pyrotechnic was on boa
rd. The fact that there was no smoke and no water leakage intensified the mystery. Had NIX struck another ship? How could it? It was a meter beneath all other traffic. Then he heard another whipcrack, then a whine of a snapped piano wire striking a note of ricochet. A hole appeared inches behind his head in the soft aluminum tail section, admitting a stream of high-pressure water that doused the tail flip mechanism and the aft scrubber. A second stream, more powerful and diametrically opposed to the first, opened underneath him.

  The incoming water was solving his buoyancy error too slowly. NIX was still exposing a full half meter of her hull above the surface. He slammed the depth control forward to drop another meter only to find that the maneuver increased the flow of water through the two openings. Sounds of zippers being ripped open confirmed that NIX was a still a target, though the shooters, certainly GDU guards patrolling the east side of the river, were either terrible shots, or his depth adjustment had finally made the craft invisible.

  Though still navigable in this condition, NIX would never make it to the North Sea, much less the shores of the Netherlands. Zerrissen had a few minutes of buoyancy to consider his options. He could either sink with the craft and do what the Stasi or the KGB were going to do with a bullet anyway, or he could turn around, still within range of the duct and safety. With enough pumping, NIX could just make it back. Each second of his delay would reduce the options to the first one.

  “Scheisse!” He pounded the control panel with his hand as if to punish NIX itself.

  With a resigned sigh, he pulled the REVERSE lever by his right side, sending NIX into a preprogramed sequence. It began with a sudden flip and a change in direction, then fighting the current upstream, located and then attached itself to the magnetic grapples of the uphaul that would pull it back into the workshop. His survival, and that of Halina and Nicolaus, depended now on his ability to pump water overboard, and on the self-control and memory of the sequencer.