The Saboteurs

by W. E. B Griffin

  Cremer was convinced that taking this sleek, bright red train, with its routing from Dallas–Fort Worth to Oklahoma City to Kansas City, was the best way to put some distance between them and the blasts…and the crowds of cops who no doubt were swarming the area…and position them well for more sabotage opportunities.

  During their week in Dallas, after having walked down to Union Station and collected pamphlets with each rail line’s schedule, he had gone over them and determined that from Kansas City they could get anywhere they needed to be in the middle and western U.S. The Rocky Mountain Rocket, train number 107-7, ran from Kansas to Denver; train number 43, the Californian, went from Kansas City to Chicago to Los Angeles; the Mid-Continent Special, train number 17, had sleepers to Minneapolis and Des Moines.

  And so he had bought them tickets on the Red Rocket and secured for the duration of the trip a Pullman “master room” compartment.

  He looked around the master room and was reminded of the railway brochure that had said it offered “the ultimate in refined comfort.” So far, he could not dispute that.

  This one—on the left side of the train—had a big main room, about seven by ten, with four comfortable, cloth-upholstered, chrome-frame armchairs that could be put wherever a passenger pleased. (The smaller accommodations came with fixed bench seating.) When the chairs were slid to the side, there was room to fold down the two twin-sized beds from the walls. The compartment also had a large wardrobe, plus full-length dressing mirrors. And, off the main room, an attached private bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower.

  Cremer had an armchair pulled up to one of the two large windows and was looking out to the west. He noticed that the Oklahoma countryside was changing. For the last hour or so, since at least the Texas border, it had been fairly flat, barren land, with occasional clumps of trees. Now it was turning dramatically hilly, with exposed uplifts of rock—what looked like the foothills of some small mountains.

  Grossman was quickly adjusting the tuning knob of the radio, anxious to hear more of the news bulletins on the Dallas explosions. After a moment, some cowboy music came in clearly. It was the tail end of a tune by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Cremer had heard quite a bit of them on the radio while in Dallas and actually was beginning to like this Texas swing music.

  Grossman, however, would have none of it, and after hearing a bartender in the Adolphus Hotel alternately refer to it as “Western” or “shitkicker” music had used only the latter description whenever he heard it.

  Cremer was surprised that he did not call it that now but decided it was probably because the radio announcer was promising that the news was coming up next, with updates on the terror in Dallas, and Grossman would rather suffer the music than miss a report.

  Grossman went back to the table and continued working with the explosives as the Red Rocket swayed and clack-clack-clacked its way north toward Oklahoma City.

  Considering all the time and attention he gives those, Cremer thought with mild disgust, one would think he could have properly set the goddamned fuses in Dallas.

  A half hour later, Cremer felt the train begin to slow. He looked out the window and saw that the countryside was becoming more developed. Houses dotted the land, and there were more roads that were improved—ones paved with blacktop as opposed to all the bare dirt ones he’d seen.

  He wondered if they already were approaching Oklahoma City.

  The train slowed even further as it came closer to town. First there were nice wooden houses in tidy neighborhoods, then the two-and three-story brick buildings of downtown proper.

  Cremer strained to peer forward, and, following the tracks, could just see the train depot to the left side of the tracks. It was a small one, about half a block long, of dark red brick with a black tile roof and a narrow wooden boarding platform—all clearly too small to be that of Oklahoma City.

  Then, just as he noticed the standardized signage reading NORMAN on the station’s southern wall, he heard the porter passing outside the compartment door.

  “Norman!” the deep, black voice announced, “Norman, Oklahoma! No stops, no disembarking! No stops, no disembarking!”

  The porter’s voice grew fainter as he moved up the car repeating the station information.

  Cremer and Grossman exchanged glances.

  “I don’t like this,” Grossman said and quickly put the last of the explosives back in the suitcase. The only thing remaining on the table was one of the small black leather pouches.

  “Don’t overreact,” Cremer said. “We may just be taking on mail or something.”

  The train’s brakes began to squeal and Cremer again looked out the window. He could see a few men standing on the platform, two in dark gray suits and black fedoras, one in the blue uniform and cap of a railway employee.

  The train, with the locomotive coming even with the station, was now barely rolling along. There were no more brake squeals.

  As the first of the passenger cars reached the station, the two men in dark suits began running alongside. In no time, they were outside Cremer’s window—Grossman now saw them, too—and he pulled the curtains closed for a moment. The car rolled past them, and when he cracked open the curtains again and looked back he saw that the men had matched the speed of the train and were now, one at a time and with some difficulty, jumping onto the metal platform where the last two cars were connected.

  Cremer’s stomach knotted.

  Those aren’t postal clerks, he thought.

  “They just jumped on the train,” he said.

  Grossman got to his feet, picked up the leather pouch from the table, slipped it into his suit coat pocket, and went to the door. He put his ear to the door but heard nothing unusual.

  The train began to pick up speed, and when Cremer looked out the window this time he could see that they were leaving downtown.

  He stood up, too, and when he instinctively reached in his pants pocket, making sure the Walther pistol was still there—it was—he noticed that his palms were starting to sweat.

  Grossman opened the door a crack and looked out. Then he pulled it open more, looked toward the car behind them, then to the one ahead, and then stepped out into the hall. He glanced at Cremer before walking to the back of the car.

  Cremer watched as Grossman positioned himself to the left of the rear door’s window, out of sight of anyone in the other cars, and peered back into them.

  Grossman saw that the two men—one taller and clean-shaven, the other with a mustache—were going through the farthest car, systematically knocking on the door of every compartment.

  Each time, the man with the mustache would stand outside the door, covering the taller man as he went in. After about a minute, the taller man would then come out and they would move to the next compartment and repeat the process.

  At the fourth compartment, one of the passengers, a slender male of about thirty, came out into the hallway. He gave his wallet to the man with the mustache, who then appeared to ask a few questions as he inspected what looked like identification papers.

  The man with the mustache gave back the wallet, nodded curtly, then went with his partner to the next compartment.

  Grossman had seen enough. He carefully and quickly made his way back to the compartment.

  Cremer closed the door once Grossman was inside. “What did you see?”

  “Two men, maybe local police but probably state or FBI, clearing the train compartment by compartment. They’re checking passengers’ papers.”

  “Well, our papers are not a problem,” Cremer said evenly. “My driver’s license is the same as I had when I lived in New Jersey.”

  “Mine also.” Grossman’s eyes darted around the compartment. “But I do not like how this is happening. This is no routine investigation. There probably are more police waiting in Oklahoma City.”

  He went to the suitcase and pulled out the other black pouch.

  “What the hell do you intend to do with that?” Cremer said.


  “How far from Oklahoma City are we?”

  Cremer looked at him, made the mental calculations, then said, “Fifteen minutes…maybe less.”

  Grossman held up the pouch he had taken from the suitcase.

  “This is the one with the ten-minute fuse. I am going to place it in the passenger car behind us. It will take them no more than ten minutes to work their way up to it. Meanwhile, we will go forward, and when it blows, and the train stops, we will get out. By that time, the train will be in the city and we can slip away in the chaos.”

  Cremer, thinking, stared at him.

  I don’t want to believe it, but he may be right.

  Hell, he is right.

  Why else would a couple of cops suddenly jump on a train, if they weren’t looking for us? The damned radio has been nothing but nonstop reports about Dallas.

  And lucky Grossman—now he gets to blow up something else.

  He went to the door, opened it, and looked down the car and through the door windows. He could see the two men in gray suits and black fedoras, not in detail but clearly enough to tell that they were now about halfway through the first car. He closed the door.

  “I don’t like the idea…but, frankly, I do not have a better one.”

  “Okay, then,” Grossman said and unzipped the pouch. “I’ll start the acid fuse.”

  He pulled out the pen, looked at it, then quickly looked at it more closely, and whispered, “Scheist.”

  Cremer saw Grossman’s face lose all color.

  “What?”

  “The fuse…”

  The initial explosion of the half-kilo bomb blew out the side of the train seconds later. Grossman and Cremer had only a heartbeat to begin to comprehend what the absolutely brilliant flash and vicious concussion meant.

  Within a split second, secondary explosions were triggered when the twenty or so kilograms of plastic explosive that had been packed in the suitcases—and the half kilo in Grossman’s coat pocket—suddenly cooked off.

  The massive blasts rocked the whole train and tore the last three Pullman passenger cars from the track, scattering the Red Rocket and its contents across the peaceful Oklahoma countryside.

  [ TWO ]

  Office of Strategic Services

  The National Institutes of Health Building

  Washington, D.C.

  0630 7 March 1943

  When President Roosevelt had informed Wild Bill Donovan in August of 1941 that he had made a few calls and found, in a town where office and living accommodations were impossibly tight, space from which Donovan could execute the duties associated with his new position as director of the Office of Coordinator of Information, Donovan at first was somewhat under-whelmed.

  The National Institutes of Health? he had wondered.

  In no time, however, it became clear that housing—or, more to the point, hiding—the supersecret OCOI (and then its successor, the Office of Strategic Services) in the nondescript NIH building with its innocuous name came as close to perfect as the parameters of wartime allowed.

  The office of the director of the OSS was nicely furnished with a large, glistening desk, a red leather couch, and two red leather chairs. The director himself was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet up and crossed on a low glass-top table, and reading from a fat folder in his lap.

  “From the looks of it, Professor Dyer has already earned his keep,” Donovan said to his deputy director.

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Peter Stuart Douglass Sr., USN, said. “The list of scientists he thinks will follow him is impressive.”

  Douglass was slender and fit, a pleasant-looking forty-four-year-old with sandy hair and a freckled face. His career in the Navy had been spent aboard deepwater vessels—most recently as the commanding officer of a destroyer squadron—and in intelligence. When FDR had given Donovan the OCOI, he said it was only just that he start his staffing, too, and—with Donovan’s blessing—asked the secretary of the Navy to put Douglass on indefinite duty as Donovan’s number two.

  Douglass, who believed he had little hope of making admiral—and was not sure he in fact wanted such duty, especially if it meant sailing a desk in Washington—embraced the OCOI assignment because it promised to put him, as it now delivered, in the middle of some very exciting and important work.

  “Question is,” Donovan went on, “can we get them out before the Germans (a) find out we grabbed Dyer and that he’s not simply ‘missing,’ and (b) decide that the loyalty of these remaining scientists is not with Hitler but soon with Leslie Groves.”

  Until recently—as in two weeks before—Professor Frederick Dyer, a rumpled academic in patched tweed in his fifties, had been at the University of Marburg, working under duress on the molecular structure of metals in the pursuit of turbine engine technology for the propulsion of aircraft, among other projects critical to ensuring the Tausendjahriges Reich—the Nazis’ thousand-year empire.

  The OSS—with Eric Fulmar as the mission operative and Dick Canidy as his control—had smuggled Dyer and his daughter, twenty-nine-year-old Gisella, out via an OSS pipeline. The difficult escape through German-occupied Hungary very nearly cost all of them their lives.

  In the end—as in two days ago—the Dyers were escorted to the University of Chicago, where the professor joined the dozen or so scientists—including Enrico Fermi, Dyer’s friend and colleague from the University of Rome—working on a highly classified project led by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, Army of the United States.

  Code-named the Manhattan Project, it traced its roots to when the brilliant Fermi had fled Mussolini’s fascism for the United States.

  Once in the U.S., Fermi naturally had become involved with a number of other eminent scientists, many of them also Europeans who had sought freedom in America. There was the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the master German mathematician Albert Einstein, the Hungarians Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and others of remarkable scientific talent.

  And among them there was talk of the very real possibility of splitting the uranium atom in a chain reaction—“fission,” they called it—that would create energy on a scale bordering on the incomprehensible.

  They theorized that the energy released from such a chain reaction, or continuous disintegration, of one hundred pounds of the uranium 235 isotope was the equivalent of the energy from twenty thousand tons of the high explosive TNT (trinitrotoluene).

  The scale of effort to achieve this fission and then harness it in a usable manner—if, in fact, it was entirely possible, and the scientists had some disagreement over that—also bordered on the incomprehensible.

  What was not disputed among these great minds was the fact that others in the world’s scientific and political communities were aware of the possibilities of atomic fission and its military applications—and these others included Adolf Hitler.

  Thus, the scientists in America—particularly the Hungarians Szilard, Teller, and Wigner, who vividly knew the reach of Hitler’s cruel hand and the inconceivable atrocities that would follow were he to gain control of such a weapon—had to make this information known to the President of the United States.

  They did so by drafting a letter, under Einstein’s signature and dated August 2, 1939, that was then delivered to the White House by Alexander Sachs, an economist who enjoyed Roosevelt’s close friendship.

  The letter laid out everything the scientists knew about the big picture of turning uranium into an atomic bomb—what the potential uses were, where the rare usable uranium could be found, the limits of current academic funding, et cetera, et cetera. It ended by stating that it was understood that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from Czech mines it had taken control of, and that the uranium work being done in America was being repeated at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where physicist Carl von Weizsacker—son of Nazi under-secretary of state Ernst von Weizsacker—was attached.

  FDR instantly read between the lines. And he saw that this situation set up a pair of particula
rly difficult obstacles for the United States—not officially in the war—and the Allies:

  They had to beat the Germans in the actual development of such an atomic bomb while not letting the enemy know that they were in fact working on one; and

  They had to stop the Germans from accomplishing the same.

  To the first problem, FDR put into play the Manhattan Project, a secret so great that only a very small circle of people—the scientists and FDR, of course, Churchill, Donovan, Hoover, the chief of Naval intelligence, an Army general named Leslie Groves—knew about it. Vice President Henry Wallace was not in that circle.

  And to aid with the second problem, he established the Office of Coordinator of Information, which, as part of its agents’ secret work in intelligence, counterintelligence, sabotage, and other shadowy operations, would be deeply involved both in the snatching of scientists from the Axis and in the blowing up of their assets that could be used in the development of an atomic bomb.

  Donovan flipped through the Dyer file and came to a sheet that caught his interest. “‘Known alloy machining, milling, and extrusion shops in and near Frankfurt’?”

  “Another nice list from the professor,” Douglass said. “We were aware of a couple of the major ones, but not that many, and not the scope of their production. There has to be a lot of machinery that the Germans looted and shipped back to put on line.”

  “Maybe Doug can take out these facilities with the drones,” Donovan said with raised eyebrows.

  Captain Douglass smiled warmly at the thought of his son.

  While Peter Stuart “Doug” Douglass Jr. was Captain Douglass’s namesake, the twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate was quite something more. Starting with the fact that he was a triple ace and a newly minted lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces.