“Take her down,” Erich said to the helmsman, and almost instantly felt the big boat respond to his command. The thought of returning to that strange and terrible landscape was anathema to him, went against the silent vow he had made when he had closed the hatch on it not twenty-four hours ago. But he believed he had little choice in this.
Manny stayed at the viewing port relaying visual information as the boat re-entered the under-ice passage. Slowly, they retraced their initial path until they surfaced on the dead calm of the nameless sea. As they floated near their entry point, Erich stood in the nest of the conning tower, peered through his Zeiss field glasses, looking for the location to suit his purpose. Although destruction of the city would be ideal, he would be happy with merely sealing it off, collapsing the cavern and the underwater entrance.
His problem was that he had no real appreciation for the power in the device they carried. Without witnessing the hellish display, no man could understand. High Command had tried to convey a sense of it to him, but it was only theoretical. Conjecture was never the same as reality.
“We are ready when you are,” said Manny, who had appeared in the hatch.
Erich nodded. “Open the hangar.”
Manny nodded, scurried down the hatch. Erich turned to watch the blister-doors of the hangar deck. There was a clanging sound, the whir of an electric winch and the sealed panels cracked open, swinging wide to reveal the seaplane with its wings tucked under itself like a sleeping raptor. Yawning wider, the doors uncovered three men standing on the deck — Manny, Kress, and Massenburg. While Kress eased himself under the belly of the seaplane to gaze up into the open bomb bay, the other two men carefully swung a wooden motor-launch, a powered lifeboat, over the side and hand-cranked it down to the water. The boat was to have been used by the launch crew as they readied the seaplane for take-off, but Erich had other plans for it now.
Erich watched all three of his men, waiting patiently until they had finished their preliminary preparations. Manny and Helmut had pulled themselves back up to the deck as Kress levered himself out from under the plane.
Standing up he looked up at Erich. “I am ready, Captain.”
“Can you do it?”
Kress held some folded paper in hand. “Ja. We have the means.”
“Very well. Get it into the boat.”
Kress snapped off a salute and enlisted the other two men to help him. Their first task was to lower the bomb from the Messerschmitt’s bomb rack with the set of dual hydraulic jacks used to originally load it. The jacks had been designed to raise and lower the device as needed during the arming process. The trick, Erich knew, was the re-engineering of the crane and winch. If successful, the assembly could easily get the bomb into the launch, rather than swing the seaplane out off the deck and lower it into the water.
The process proved time-consuming although not as difficult as he imagined. The bomb was more than 3 meters in length, and less than a half-meter in diameter. But its size was not as challenging as its weight of more than two thousand kilograms. Which is why they needed to employ the crane to lower it into the launch, and why it demanded time and care, as well as leverage.
Several hours later, Erich joined them in the motor-launch and directed them toward a small cove along the nearest shoreline. They towed a rubber dinghy behind them as they paired up and flanked their terrible cargo supported by the hydraulic jacks.
“Tell me one more time, Herr Kress,” said Erich.
Nodding slowly, Kress kept one hand on the bomb’s outer shell, as if to stabilize it. “The detonation design is called the ‘gun method’,” he said. “It uses a standard 105mm shell casing to fire what the orders describe as ‘sub-critical material’ into the bomb’s target rings which are made of the uranium isotopes.”
“And you can make this work without killing us?” Manny looked at him cautiously.
“I think so, yes.”
“Then you are not certain?”
“The orders and instructions are fairly straightforward. I have modified a timer and shaped charges from one of our scuttle packages,” said the engineer. “I will give us up to an hour to be quite far away.”
Erich nodded. “And the charge will be enough to detonate the 105 shell?”
Kress grinned in the spirit of all young boys who like to blow things up. “Oh. yes, Captain. It should be more than adequate.”
Erich looked ahead as Massenburg maneuvered the launch into the cove. The beacon tower and the nameless city lay on the opposite shore shrouded in mist. They were almost invisible, but Erich could sense their presence like a weight hanging over his head.
“Well, then,” said Erich. “My only concern is an answer we cannot obtain — how far away do we need to be to be safe from this thing?”
Kress shrugged. “I think we will know soon enough, Captain.”
Ten minutes later, the motor launch, with its massive deadly cargo, lay beached in the small cove. Erich, Manny, and his Chief Warrant Officer all hunkered down in the rubber dinghy watching Kress, who turned a spring loaded dial, depressed the timer, and sloshed through the water to join them as fast as he could.
“Now we must be quick,” he said.
More than fifteen minutes elapsed before they had sealed the hatches and slipped beneath the surface. As Manny guided the 5001 through the under-ice maze, Erich kept watching the sweep-tick of his watch, which seemed to moving faster than he had ever seen it.
How far would they get? How far would they need be?
Erich and his three accomplices sweated out the diminishing minutes as their boat cleared the ice shelf and broke into the open sea. The rest of the crew went about their tasks with not an inkling of the terrible force they now fled.
When they finally surfaced several kilometers south of their exit-point, Erich left the control deck with Manny and Helmut, joined Kress in the engine room. All of them held their timepieces in front of them. Now the notching of the tiny hands slowed. The final minutes fell away with stubborn resolve. Minutes finally reduced to scant seconds.
They studied them and each other’s faces, and…
Nothing.
The allotted time had slipped past them and they felt nothing, heard nothing.
“Could it be possible to be… so insulated?” said Manny.
“No, not at all,” said Kress. “We would hear a torpedo at this distance.”
“What happened?” said Massenburg. “A dud?”
“Perhaps only for the moment,” said Erich.
But it had proved to be wishful thinking.
If he would make rendezvous, Erich could not remain in the vicinity to acknowledge any delayed activity. He had no choice but to accept failure — either in his own plans or those of the men of Project Norway. The bomb remained silent, impotent as the rest of the Nazi war effort. It was beyond his control now, and so would it remain.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
He had been driving in silence, cursing their inability to draw in the net closer. Driving toward Lancaster on a calculated hunch was all they had for the moment, and he had no guarantees things would improve. Sinclair was gambling right now, and he hated being pushed to that final tactic. It was not how he’d survived all these years. Throwing dice up against a wall was no substitute for shrewd analysis.
As he headed east on US 30, Entwhistle began downloading some responses to his last set of queries to thin out the data he’d requested. “Hel-lo!” he said slyly. “I think we have something here.”