Heroes Page 17

  There was only one step remaining for them—that of testing the bomb in the desert south of Albuquerque. He was going to have to find out how close they were to that stage. Once that happened—once the Americans successfully tested their first bomb—the war would be over within a matter of weeks, perhaps days, unless the Germans could beat them to it.

  Schey dismounted and secured the horse’s reins to the branch of a low pine, then scrambled back up to the edge of the rim with his camera.

  Starting at the far end of the installation, he took a series of photographs, each overlapping the other, that when put together would provide a panoramic view of the entire valley.

  Back in Oak Ridge he had received several sets of instructions for the time when he would come here. First on his list of priorities was to secure photographs of the entire installation, and then to shoot close-ups of its individual components. Its buildings; its machinery, if possible; its electrical generating facilities; its personnel—anything, in short, that might help the Reich’s scientists to duplicate the effort would be useful.

  The main road was just below him, and he could see the front gate from where he lay on the rock outcropping.

  Several cars and two large trucks were stopped at the gate.

  Armed guards were checking them, searching each vehicle before it came in.

  As he watched, a car approached from the inside. The driver and passenger were made to get out, and they, as well as their car, were searched before they were allowed to proceed.

  Schey lowered his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. Security was very tight. He suspected there would be high density perimeter patrols, probably outside the fence as well as inside. There might be other security measures, too. He would have to use a great deal of caution in his approach.

  He eased down from the ridge to his horse, where he took another drink from his canteen. He ate one of the sandwiches that Eva had packed for him.

  There was no question about him returning before dark. This was a marvelous opportunity that he simply could not afford to ignore. He would remain until after sunset, and then he would make his way down and, if possible, into the installation so that he could take the close-up photographs his people wanted.

  While he waited for darkness, he fed and watered his horse, finished the sandwiches, and loaded a roll of high speed night film into his 16 mm camera.

  The moon had not come up yet, but the bright stars directly overhead would provide plenty of light. Below, the installation was well lit, which would work to his advantage, he figured.

  Those inside or anywhere near the lights would have no night vision. They would not be able to see much of anything out in the darkness.

  Schey made his way down the hill, being extremely careful not to dislodge any stones that might give him away.

  He angled toward the north, away from the main gate, and when he came to within fifteen yards of the tall, barbed wire topped steel mesh fence, he stopped and lay flat on his stomach.

  There would be guards coming along. He had to know when and in what fashion they would pass.

  Within minutes of the time he had settled down, a jeep slowly ground its way up the hill, along the outside of the fence, two guards plus the driver. All armed.

  They stopped just down the fence line from where Schey lay.

  He held his breath as a spotlight came on and flashed across the hillside just above him.

  He looked over his shoulder, but there was nothing to be seen up there other than the rocks and brush. His horse was still concealed behind the ridge. The jeep would not be able to make it up that far, and he did not think the guards would walk up. It was their duty to guard the laboratory, not to explore the countryside.

  The spotlight was doused, and the jeep continued along the fence, passing below where Schey lay, and then disappeared into the distance.

  Inside the compound there was a lot of activity around what he took to be a dining hall. The trucks that he had watched come through the gate earlier were parked in what appeared to be a supply depot. Several men in uniform were busy unloading big crates.

  Electrical wires seemed to run everywhere. From somewhere [ across the installation Schey could hear the sounds of large diesel [ generators turning over. Whatever they were doing in their laboratories, they were using a lot of electricity.

  To the far southwest of where he lay was the housing section, lights in nearly every window.

  | It made him think about Dresden and Berlin and other German cities being bombed day and night by the Allies. Those cities , were not lit, save for the fires that, he read, raged almost | continuously.

  Here, there was no fear of a bombing raid. Here, they were secure. Perhaps smug in their relative safety?

  In one respect Schey had the terrible urge to enter the compound and wreak havoc. Blow up the generators. Locate and identify the laboratories and destroy them. Find the key scientists and kill them.

  Yet another part of him, a saner, more rational part of him that surfaced these days whenever he begun to think about Katy and about his son, urged him to turn around and leave. He should take Eva’s suggestion and get down to Mexico City, only a hundred miles or so from here—not so far, actually—and sit out the remainder of this terrible war that could only end in victory for the Americans.

  Twenty minutes after the jeep had passed, two soldiers on foot marched down a path on the inside of the fence. They were talking. Schey could hear their voices, but he could not make out what they were saying. Gradually they disappeared into the darkness.

  He made his way down to the tall fence, scrambled to the top, threw his jacket over the three strands of barbed wire, and crossed over, disentangling his jacket, then dropped down to the path.

  For a moment or two he remained there, listening for any signs of an alarm, but all was quiet except for someone who beeped a car horn somewhere within the installation.

  He scrambled away from the fence, off the path, down into a ditch and along it for several hundred yards until he came to the electrical distribution center.

  Schey lay upon the bank of the ditch and took two photographs of the electrical equipment, then continued along the ditch, which was used to control flash flooding during the infrequent but very heavy rainstorms.

  Three more times he stopped to take photographs of interesting looking buildings. One of them had all of its windows boarded over, yet he could hear the sounds of some kind of machinery running from within—a high-pitched sound, not like a generator, but more like a centrifuge, Schey thought.

  Another five hundred yards farther on, the ditch ended at a narrow culvert that he could not follow, forcing him to either return the way he had come or to climb up.

  He chose the latter, scrambling silently up on the bank, then across it between a row of long, low barrackslike buildings.

  Schey could hear music coming from one of the barracks, and soft yellow light spilled from the windows, although most had curtains covering them.

  He approached one window that was open a crack. The slight breeze ruffled the curtains, and he was able to catch a glimpse of the inside’.

  It was a barracks. It was filled with at least fifty men, some of them in bed, some of them lounging, drinking, or reading. Five men in skivvies were playing cards around a foot locker at one end of the barracks. At the other end, a tall, thin red-skinned man, a portable radio perched on his shoulder, the speaker directly against his ear, was doing some kind of loose-limbed shuffling dance.

  All the clothing he could see hanging on rods behind the bunks and lying around were civilian. These were not soldiers. They were civilians. Probably engineers and perhaps even scientists.

  Bachelors, or men whose wives had decided not to come along.

  Schey stepped away from the building and looked down the row of similar buildings, all the windows lit. If each was a bachelor barracks and the housing across the base, which he had seen earlier from above, was presumably for married couples, and if all
were filled, then there were at least five thousand people here. Perhaps more.

  The effort of the Americans to produce this bomb was at once staggering and frightening. Germany was under a siege at the moment, and that seriously hampered her war efforts. Even at peace, however, her factories and laboratories working at full capacity, her people as dedicated to this as they were to their Fiihrer, Schey did not think they could match the Americans.

  There were too many people in this country, too much industry, too vast a pool of natural resources for Germany to possibly match it.

  And yet the war was not over. Not yet. Not by a large measure.

  Schey continued taking photographs of the buildings across the wide dirt street that ran in front of the barracks. Many of them looked like laboratories. Some of the individual buildings were isolated within their own separate enclosures, with signs warning passersby that special permits were required for entry.

  He made his way back to the ditch that paralleled the fence, then back away from the well lit buildings toward the area of relative darkness where he had come over.

  Even before he got back to his starting position, he could hear a jeep’s engine, and he could hear someone talking.

  He crouched down and went the last dozen yards, finally flattening himself against the bank and peering over the side.

  The two foot soldiers who patrolled inside the fence were speaking with the soldiers in the jeep on the other side of the fence.

  At first Schey could not tell what they were talking about. Had they discovered that someone had breached the security of the base? Perhaps someone had found his horse up above the ridge.

  Or perhaps they had spotted his trail down the hill. Maybe he had ripped his jacket and a patch of material was stuck on the barbed wire.

  But then one of the men laughed. Another stepped away from the fence and urinated not ten feet from where Schey lay.

  A few minutes later, with a parting word or two, the jeep headed west and the foot soldiers went east. Soon they were out of sight, and Schey quickly made his way over the fence and up the hill, his horse whinnying softly in the suddenly very cool evening.

  Deland and Bernard Dannsiger walked together along Wilhelmstrasse, the Reich Chancellery and Foreign Office in the park across the broad avenue from them. They were both large men, Deland somewhat fairer of skin and more Nordic-looking, if anything, but Dannsiger much older and obviously wiser.

  The late afternoon was warm, and although there wasn’t much vehicular traffic, other than the occasional Army troop truck or open Mercedes staff car, there were a lot of pedestrians out and about.

  Allied raids had come every night and morning for seven days in a row. Last night there had been peace as there had been this morning because of a low, humid overcast that was supposed to last for several more days.

  “It’s a rare pleasure to be outside without having to maintain an awareness of just where the nearest air raid shelter is located,” Dannsiger was saying. He had been a lecturer in Latin and South American history at the University of Berlin until three years ago when his post was declared “superfluous.” He ran the underground now.

  “At least it’s not cold. We don’t have to worry about overcoats,” Deland said.

  Dannsiger, along with a dozen others in the underground, provided identification, clothing, and some limited transportation for downed Allied fliers. In some respects their job was much easier now that it was summer. At least they didn’t have to worry about a man freezing to death.

  But Deland was chafing at the bit.

  “This winter will probably be the last,” Dannsiger said firmly.

  “You think so?”

  “He can’t hold out much longer.”

  They both glanced instinctively over at the Reich Chancellery building. Dannsiger had learned that Hitler was spending a lot of time in his specially constructed bunker beneath the building. He had his staff with him. Practice, they all supposed, for when the siege came, although it was likely that when the end did come, the Fiihrer would head south into Salzburg where he could more easily be defended.

  “He’ll probably hold out a lot longer than I will,” Deland said. It was time to get out. Something at the back of his head had been telling him that for weeks now.

  Dannsiger stopped him at the corner. “Don’t you think I know ‘what you are going through?”

  “I want to go home. I’m tired, Bernard.”

  “We’re all tired, Helmut,” Dannsiger said reasonably. (Deland’s cover name here in Berlin was Helmut Schmidt. He posed as a voice teacher. At home he had been on the church choir and had a surprisingly good tenor voice.)

  “None of this matters to me anymore. I find I don’t give a damn.”

  Dannsiger smiled indulgently, like a father might with a son who was trying to find his way. “Don’t you think we know?”

  “About what?”

  “Katrina Mueller, of course. Up in Wolgast.”

  Deland could feel the blood rush to his ears. “How?” he managed.

  “Before anyone joins us, we must know their background.

  Everything about their past. But if that wasn’t enough, you talk in your sleep very often.”

  They went across the street, then started across the wide square in the middle of which stood the Brandenburg Gate, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rushing off the top of the arch.

  “I’ll come back when it’s over.”

  Dannsiger looked at him not unkindly. “I keep forgetting that you’re not a German. You are so very much like my …”

  “Don’t say that,” Deland snapped. Dannsiger’s son had been killed in France.

  They had to wait for half a dozen trucks to pass, then they went through the gate, and headed up Chausse Strasse. There was a lot of bomb damage just here. Many craters pockmarked the street; many buildings were down, rubble piled very high, some of it still smoking.

  Deland was perspiring. He didn’t feel well. “I could just go.”

  “The frontier is not particularly safe at this moment, so if that is what you really want to do, and intend doing it, please let me know.” “Yes?” Deland said hopefully.

  Dannsiger smiled and nodded. “Yes. I will see what I can do for you, although it will not be much.”

  “I’m not looking for a first-class ticket out.”

  “No. But what about Fraulein Mueller?”

  That really hurt. “I’m coming back for her as soon as hostilities cease.”

  “Do you think she will be there, waiting for you?”

  Deland stopped the older man. “Do you know something?

  Have you heard some news?” His heart was hammering.

  At length Dannsiger shook his head. “No, Helmut, I know nothing about the girl, except that she is there in Wolgast.

  Nothing more. There are other things more important at the moment. I just wondered if you were disgusted with all Germans, or just those of us here in Berlin.” Deland said nothing. He was visualizing Katrina the last time he had seen her in Maria Quelle’s apartment. Rudy and Maria were both lying dead on the floor, blood everywhere. That memory, that vision, had stayed with him day and night through five months. More than once he had almost gotten on a train and gone back up there. Daily he reached out for the telephone to call her where she worked. He’d pretend he was an official from Berlin.

  He needed information.

  Each time, of course, his own better sense stayed his hand.

  Something so reckless would endanger not only himself and the underground here in Berlin; it would place her in grave danger as well.

  But he did not know if she had survived the suspicion that must have fallen on her. Did she still hold her job? Was she still living in her own apartment or had she moved back with her parents?

  They got on a trolley and rode the rest of the way down to Berliner Strasse in the vicinity of the Forschungsamt building, where they got off and walked a half-dozen blocks north into a rundown, all but bo
mb-destroyed neighborhood of three-and four-story apartment buildings. The Spree River, stinking like the open sewer it had become, was directly behind the row of buildings that they approached by a circuitous route.

  They did not speak. Each was alert to their surroundings. Each building, each burned-out car or truck, each overturned handcart, each pile of rubble could possibly present a grave danger. Each could conceal a watcher. Someone who would turn them in to the Gestapo for nothing more than suspicious behavior, for a reward of food. Perhaps two eggs. Perhaps a quarter kilo of pork or a small chicken.

  They ducked through the gate of what once had been a girls’ finishing school, then in to the burned-out building. The top three floors were gone. But the first floor and the basement were more or less intact.

  This building had been selected because of its room—it was a very wide and long building—and because of the fact that a storm sewer emptying directly into the Spree ran beneath the building.

  A hole had been punched through the concrete floor in the basement, and through to the eight-foot-diameter sewer pipe. It provided an escape route for Allied fliers dressed in civilian clothing, with Polish worker identification, to relative safety outside the city.

  From there they were on their own, with sketch maps, counterfeit money, and ration coupons sufficient to last them until they reached the frontier where the fighting was going on. From there it was anyone’s guess how many got through. They were never officially informed, although some of the fliers they interviewed seemed to think the underground system in Berlin was very good.

  There were no guards or even lookouts on the entrances to the building. They would have been a useless waste of time and manpower. If the authorities came, there would be little any of them could do to save themselves. It would mean that they had been observed. Their faces and their methods of operation would be known.

  Besides, in Berlin these days, no one strayed into strange places. It simply was not healthy. So there was little risk that they would be discovered by accident.