He stared into Decker's face. The man's warm red life was spilling out over his hand.
He looked at Decker's bloodless lips, slightly parted as if in a sardonic grin. Their last words had made his own blood freeze.
Kernphysik…
Hitler's ultimate weapon?
Kernphysik—atomic research…!
5
Major General James Edward McKinley stared frowning at the Intelligence Summary dated 3 Mar 45 that was lying on the desk before him. His fingers curled and uncurled one corner of the paper. Two items in it raised his hackles and he couldn't shake the feeling of foreboding they evoked.
Item… A German scientist supposedly working on atomic research claiming near-success before being killed by friendly fire during an attempt to defect…
Item… The German-ordered evacuation of several small settlements in the barren region around Norway's northern-most seaport of Hammerfest, sealing off the area…
Unrelated bits of intelligence — and yet…
If the Nazis were close to perfecting an atomic bomb, they would need a place to test it.
Was that what they were preparing on the remote. Norwegian ice fields?
Until about a month before, the Intelligence Summaries had contained regular reports on the progress of German atomic research. They had given no cause for alarm. It had been generally assumed that the Nazis were far behind what had been achieved by the Manhattan Project. But since then such reports had virtually ceased coming through.
Intensified security because of an expected breakthrough?
McKinley was acutely aware of the super-strict security imposed on the US effort to perfect an atomic weapon. Ever since the project had been code-named the Manhattan Engineering District and General Groves had been placed in command, McKinley had kept his boss, the Secretary of War, fully informed on its progress.
The sprawling plant at Oak Ridge in Tennessee was finally turning out significant quantities of U-235, the fully enriched uranium necessary for the construction of an atomic bomb, and shipments of U-235, the fruits of three long years, were ready for delivery to Project Y, the bomb design and development phase at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
He had visited the place. He had found it ideal for its purpose.
Atop a lonely mesa along the Los Alamos Canyon at 7200 feet above sea level a small town of green-painted buildings had sprung up, surrounded by a double row of heavy barbed-wire fencing. Cradled in an arc of hump-backed green hills to the west, the mesa overlooked a vast desert wasteland of sand and cacti to the east, stretching away below as far as the eye could see, marked only by a thin, verdant strip of fertile ground along the winding path of the Rio Grande. It was a town that was not indicated on any map. The Hill, they called it. To the rest of the world it did not exist. It had been the site of a boys’ boarding school before being taken over by MED, but the studies being pursued at Los Alamos today were very different. Different — and deadly. How deadly would be learned at Alamogordo, 190 miles to the south as the crow flies, the site selected for Trinity — the test explosion of the first atomic bomb Los Alamos would produce Preparations for Trinity were going into high gear. They expected the blast to be equivalent to five thousand tons of TNT, but they could be wrong. Either way…
Was that barren Norway site the Nazi Alamogordo?
He stood up, walked to the window and stood for a moment staring into space. His Pentagon office windows opened on the landscaped, five-acre, pentagonal court in the center of the mammoth building. It was restful and pleasant. Yet he could never escape the feeling of being imprisoned.
McKinley had a photographic memory. Anything he'd seen, he remembered. He still recalled the poop sheet they'd handed him two years ago when the Pentagon had been completed. Trivia on an incredible scale. The world's largest office building… 4200 clocks… 685 drinking fountains… 280 restrooms — he wondered briefly if an architectural study had been made on the correlation of drinking fountains to toilets — and corridors, seventeen and one half miles of corridors. He must have walked every goddamned mile of them.
They could all disappear in the flash of absolute annihilation an atomic bomb might unleash.
An American bomb. Or a German…
He returned to his desk, stared at the Intelligence Summary. Should he alert Groves? As soon as the thought occurred to him, he knew he would not.
Groves had stopped a top OSS agent, that baseball player… Bates. Burns. Berg — that was it — Moe Berg… from going into Germany to check on the Nazi atomic project. Into the same damned area — Hechingen — mentioned in the report.
McKinley sighed.
Groves felt — and he had been right — that if Berg was captured, the Nazis might sweat more information out of him about our project than he could have learned about theirs.
McKinley flipped the switch on his intercom.
“Barnes,” he said, “the MED offices are still in the War Department Building?”
“Yes, sir,” his aide's answer came over the speaker.
“Get hold of their head of security. Colonel — eh—”
“Reed, sir. John Reed.”
“—Reed. I want him here in my office in two hours.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Also that major from Donovan's outfit—”
“Major Rosenfeld, sir. David Rosenfeld.”
“Right. The one we've dealt with on OSS matters.”
“Yes, sir. Anyone else?”
“That's all.”
“Yes, sir. Colonel Reed and Major Rosenfeld. Your office at 1330 hours, sir.”
There was a click from the intercom.
McKinley sat back in his chair. He knew both Reed and Rosenfeld. He respected them. They were men like himself who believed in getting a necessary job done — even if it meant not going through channels but taking direct action.
And action had to be taken.
He'd damned well better get some hard facts about the Nazi bomb.
A few months before, Groves had been wise in choosing to stop direct penetration of the suspected project area.
This time there was no choice. They had to go in….
He stared at the Intelligence Summary. Slowly he reread the first item:
1 Mar 45. Sector of 11th Inf vic Bitburg, Germany (Q 822 877). German scientist, Johann Decker, believed active with Degussa, Frankfurt, killed during exfiltration attempt. Decker states that individual named Himmelmann in Haigerloch ten miles west of the town of Hechingen (P 654 667) may have information re: German progress in atomic research. States further that German physicists are close to success….
McKinley sighed again. Decker. Johann Decker…
Who the hell was Johann Decker?
6
The slim file folder on the desk before Standartenführer Werner Harbicht bore the legend printed in black block letters:
GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI
Amt IV E-1
Stuttgart, Wkr V
A handwritten case number, 3-72P, had been entered in the appropriate box in the upper right corner — and beneath it a name in bold lettering: DECKER, JOHANN.
Colonel Harbicht, Chief of Amt IV E-1—Counterespionage — Regional Gestapo Headquarters, Stuttgart, contemplated the file. He knew every word it contained. It had been lying on his desk in a stack of new cases to be brought to his attention when he had returned to his office early that afternoon. It was now close to 1800 hours and Harbicht had just made up his mind. He knew exactly what he had to do.