The one satisfaction the colonel had was the relentless progress of the Jewish segregation program. His hatred of those people was complete, and where Hitler had failed, he would succeed. Hitler had been a maniac, a madman who despite his incompetence had very nearly succeeded. If men like Rommel had been allowed to run things, professionals who knew their work, it would have been different: Churchill would have danced at the end of a hangman’s rope, England would have been swept into Fortress Europe, and iron discipline would have broken the back of resistance.
Discipline! The lack of it had destroyed the United States, the command of it would very shortly raise Gregor Rostovitch to the peak of his country’s hierarchy, and after that… He dropped it because he had thought it out many times before to its conclusion and he knew what was to come. He knew his own strength, his relentless toughness, and the power of his intelligence. He knew accurately that he was vastly superior to the Austrian paperhanger and that he would not and could not be stopped. The military power behind him was absolute, and the man did not live who would dare to get in his way. Except for some subversives in the occupied United States, and they would be exterminated!
The woman who was delivered to him was in her early thirties, attractive enough to be interesting, and willing if she knew what was good for her. After five minutes in her company he sensed that she too knew her business and was ready to deliver the merchandise. That mollified him to a degree: his physical appetites were as strong and driving as his political thirsts and he had no compunctions about gratifying either.
He took the woman to his quarters and in a preliminary tryout found her as competent as he had expected. On the strength of that he had a good dinner sent up for both of them and after that plenty of side delicacies and top-quality liquors. He got very little actual sleep that night and he desired none; his animal instincts were at their peak and the woman gave him great satisfaction. When at last he ceased, because the alcohol he had taken into his system would no longer be denied, he sank into a kind of stupor and remained that way until early morning. Then he roused himself, shaved, dressed, and was ready to do battle.
He was in his office well before nine, going through the reports which had accumulated on his desk, searching every one of them for the vital piece of information he needed. He was two-thirds of the way finished with this task when he read again with incredulity the words before him and then slammed his clenched fist hard against the desk top. If he felt any pain he was unaware of it. “Fools!” he screamed aloud. “Fools!”
Disbelief racked him: somehow, in some manner, his people in charge of a West Coast shipyard where a fully armed, nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine was berthed had allowed more than eighty unidentified Americans to board the potent ship at one time and to occupy it throughout an entire night. The colonel was in a frenzy; his rage boiled like liquid oxygen as he grabbed for the telephone. All of *his persistent questions about what had been going on behind the fagade of nothingness were answered; the Americans were preying on the gross stupidity of his people.
He got on the line with blazing fury and demanded an instant connection to San Francisco.
At precisely minus six minutes the commander of the yard, who had caught a brief catnap in his office, arrived with his overseer in his vehicle and climbed out in the thinning darkness. He first read the meter to determine the radiation level and then called to a man who was patiently hosing down the deck. In response a message was passed to the supervisor on board the submarine, and moments later Morrison came across the brow. As the three men met, a slow-moving, flatbed truck appeared rumbling its way down the pier. It had aboard one of the massive dumpsters used in the yard, a steel open-topped container used to collect scrap and waste material. Laboriously the truck turned around and backed into position somewhere near to the submarine’s stern.
“We’ve got things under control now,” Morrison reported. “Another four hours and we’ll be able to shut down.”
The commander wiped his sleeve across his brow. “We’ll be safe, then?”
“That’s right; no problem. We’ve called the day workmen onto the job. Some of them have responded, the rest want to go home.”
“God damn them!” the commander exploded. “They’re working for me; let me handle this. Mind if I go on board?”
“Be my guest.”
In visibly mounting rage the commander strode rapidly across the brow and clambered down the front hatchway. The overseer started to follow, but Morrison held up his hand. “He’ll be right back,” he promised.
Less than a half minute after the commander had disappeared the first of the day crewmen began to come up. Stiff-jointed and still shaking off the effects of sleep, they came across the brow and waited on the pier for directions. They sat on convenient bollards, one or two of them yawning and rubbing the upper part of their legs, the others contenting themselves by staring across the water. They were men who had slept in their clothes and who had no desire to be up to witness the first light of the day.
Far above them the overhead crane came alive. The sling slowly descended from the end of the boom as the whole upper assembly began to rotate to the left. The maneuver was neatly done; the cables hung in almost perfect position to be hooked onto the pier dumpster. Since it was almost half the size of a boxcar the truck driver beckoned for help; two of the day workmen responded and gave a hand in fitting the hooks into the four corner shackles. When the brief job was done the driver stepped back and signaled to the operator far overhead.
In response the cable came tight and the dumpster with its load lifted off the concrete. Again the whole massive upper structure of the high crane began to turn to the left, the dumpster hanging at the end of a hundred feet of extended cable. The turning motion increased slightly, then stopped abruptly. Because of the long cable, the dumpster continued in motion, arcing forward lazily over the water off the north side of the pier.
Then the crane mechanism began to rotate in the opposite direction, and with gradually increasing speed. The dumpster resisted the change in direction, but as the angle of the cable increased, its inertia was overcome and it began to swing back. Its momentum built up rapidly; someone shouted, but the boom continued to turn and at the same time to come down a few degrees in angle.
The dumpster swept across the pier just above the concrete with inexorable power directly toward the heavy mobile field gun mounted at the end. Its speed was not too great, but its sheer mass was overpowering. The gun crew had less than five seconds of actual warning; one man jumped successfully flat onto his face — then a violent terrible crash of steel against steel tore the still air. Despite its tons of weight, the gun and its carriage were driven by the impact over the edge of the dock; there was a second’s pause, then a massive splash as it disappeared into the water.