1945 Read online

  "Here come their new heavies," Mason yelled as he pointed back up the street. Martel swung his binoculars around. Below, the crowd broke into wild yet inaudible cheers as a flight of Me-264 heavy bombers thundered overhead at rooftop level. Wait. . . this was a variant on what he'd expected. Longer... and the wings—were they larger too? There had been rumors of a new "stretched" 264E. Clearly this was it.

  For the final two years of the war England had slowly increased the pressure of night bombing with their fleets of Lancasters. Though the destruction had never seriously hindered the German war effort, Hitler had not been amused—and Göring had sworn to his Führer that never again would Germany lack the means to retaliate in kind. Next time, Jim thought sourly, both sides could dedicate massive portions of their industrial capacity to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.

  This Me-264 variant was massive, even bigger than the American B-29s they rather resembled with their glassed-over forward canopies. Unlike the American plane, however, these were a curious mix of prop and jet: four BMW 901G radial engines and two Jumo 004 turbojets. Mason was again busy with his sixteen-millimeter camera. Like any hunter, he had focused in on a single member of the herd and was clicking away.

  Though fully briefed on the standard-version specs, Martel watched in silent awe as the fast and deadly behemoths passed overhead. Earlier wisdom had been that Germany would not build a bomber fleet capable of reaching New York. The Germans, analysts had argued, simply could not afford the fuel consumption: Five hundred bombers flying five missions a month would devour one sixth of all avgas produced in the Reich. In a classic example of the perils of depending on narrow-gauge experts for strategic decision-making, the capture of Russia's Baku oil fields had changed all that. Still, it could have been worse; Intel believed that only a few 264s had been built. So far they had been pretty competent at that sort of analysis, thanks to code breaking and in-country agents — and anyway, the conclusion seemed reasonable to Martel. German air doctrine remained focused on tactical support, not strategic bombing. Furthermore, they had enough Arados and older twin-engine stuff to keep England quietly in her place.

  As the last of the 264s passed, another even higher-pitched whine made itself heard in rapidly increasing intensity. Suddenly, gone almost in a blink, batlike forms shot across the avenue at right angles to the thoroughfare. A few oddly empty minutes in which the loudest noise was the chatter of the crowd followed. Then, "There they are!" Mason shouted excitedly.

  Martel looked up past the Brandenburg Gate where Mason was pointing. A few miles away the formation that had just passed overhead was swooping around in an impossibly tight turn to come racing up the boulevard in precise single file, literally below rooftop level. He had seen the early intelligence specs, and had been specifically instructed to photograph the Gothas if they appeared. Though he would have vasdy preferred to continue direct visual observation, Martel dutifully picked up his own camera and started to mimic Masons efforts, snapping off shots and trying to keep a single plane centered in the viewfinder as they passed.

  To Jim the Gothas looked utterly bizarre, and very, very threatening. Based on a flying-wing design, they had no fuselage, and in place of a tail showed only two tiny vertical stabilizers mounted on the outside trailing edges. Except for their exhaust oudets, the planes' twin engines were invisible.

  Their boomerang shape, Jim thought, would be entirely at home in a Flash Gordon serial. Scary as they looked though, he knew that the Germans had discovered some serious flaws inherent in the flying-wing concept; if the Luftwaffe had, as rumored, really achieved supersonic velocities, they hadn't done so with flying wings. But subsonic or not, the Gothas were fast, highly maneuverable, and presented a razor-thin target silhouette when approached from astern. Martel found the mere thought of going up against them in a Corsair or Bearcat chilling.

  Not that the US had entirely ceased weapons development since Martel had missed the deck of the Enterprise. The Navy's new FD-1 Phantoms could go head to head with any German jet yet in production—it was more than a match for the 262—but so far only a few were actually aboard the carriers. As for designs not in production, part of his job today was to write up a detailed analysis of any new German craft glimpsed during the parade. One thing he already knew would go in that report: any prop plane the Navy flew would be in for a rough time if it stumbled on one of these jet-propelled monsters; it was time and more than time to move on to the next generation of aircraft.

  A carrier fleet depended for its life on its ability to knock out enemy ship killers before they got in range. With Gothas to protect them even the older bombers became a major threat. As for the Arados, if the German admiralty could arrange for Gothas to arrive in the neighborhood simultaneously with that winged annihilation . . . with Gothas flying in support, Arados might as well have been custom-made carrier killers.

  As the last of the bat-shapes swept past, Martel swung his camera around to the main reviewing stand and snapped off a final human-interest shot of the fat man waving at the planes and laughing With childlike delight as he pointed out his latest toy to his Führer.

  Hitler himself grinned hugely as the last of the planes whisked past, then gave a final salute to the adoring multitude lining the streets. A sea of upraised arms answered his, and the avenue echoed with chanted Sieg heils! as the most successful mass murderer in the history of the human race turned and disappeared down a covered exit way, his entourage scrambling for position to follow.

  "Quite a spectacle," Mason reiterated, as he put away his equipment.

  "Nothing succeeds like success," Jim replied while packing his own camera bag. "If the ghouls up on that stand had lost, that mob would be spitting on their memory. Perhaps one day they will anyway." Martel knew in his half-German bones that along with the sort of thoughtless jingoists so well represented out in the street this day, there were scores of millions of Germans who were secredy repulsed by all that the Nazis represented.

  Mason raised his eyebrows. "Lose? The Russians were finished the day it started. It just took a little longer than expected, that's all."

  Martel shrugged and started down the steps of the reviewing stand to join the crowd swarming into the middle of the boulevard, delighting in the beautifully clear autumn afternoon, when the SS security guards finally released their arm locks.

  "Hey, I want you to meet this guy," Mason whispered as he grabbed Jim's arm and guided him over to a knot of SS officers he had apparently just noticed. One of them, the tallest, nodded toward the descending Americans, and the rest of the group slowed and looked up. The one who had nodded was nearly six and a half feet tall, and had a build from a football fullbacks nightmare. His pale blond hair was close-cropped, almost shaved, and his face was slashed with several dueling scars.

  The scarified giant smiled at Masons approach and, unlike his compatriots, saluted in the traditional military way rather than like a Nazi. Jim returned the gesture. "Good afternoon, Major! " Though he spoke to Mason, his cold snakelike eyes had fixed on Martel, who stared straight back.

  "Colonel Otto Skorzeny, I'd like to introduce Lieutenant Commander Jim Martel." Skorzeny extended his hand. Taking it, Jim was startled and annoyed by the viselike grip that was meant to embarrass and almost did, before Jim, thankful for the free-weight training that was part of his therapy, bore down in turn.

  As Skorzeny released with a faint look of disappointment, Jim briefly examined his companions. All three wore SS uniforms with paratroop insignia, and looked nearly as hard, competent, and well trained as their boss. The one standing just behind Skorzeny had a face marked by dueling scars as well. Another, with ghostly white hair, was scarless but had the mashed-in nose and puffy features of a battered prizefighter. The four of them might have been taken for professional athletes in the peak of training were it not for their indefinable aura of deadliness. Jim had killed more than a few in the Pacific War, and sometimes spent ghost-ridden nights because of it, but these were killers i
n a far different league.

  "So what did you think of our display today?" Skorzeny asked the Americans, as he flexed his fingers just a little.

  Mason let Jim respond. "A lot of new designs, hugely expensive ones, I should think. I thought by now you'd be easing off a bit on the armaments."

  "Peace through strength," Skorzeny replied. "If we stay strong, there will be no future problems. Remember, Russia is still waiting on the other side of the Volga."

  Peace through murder and conquest, more likely, Jim thought to himself. "I doubt they'll be a problem," he finally said aloud. "Stalin's too busy fighting resistance groups out in Siberia to want a return match."

  Skorzeny laughed. "Not immediately, in any event. But in ten years? You Americans have no idea of the service we have done the world. Without us, it would be you squandering your lives and wealth fighting the Red Menace. Without us, your forces in China right now would be facing a Communist tidal wave, rather than helping the Nationalists mop up the remnant of the Maoists. The suppression of Marxism is an accomplishment for all of civilized humanity, one for which Germany deserves the highest recognition."

  He looked back at his comrades, who nodded their approval, and went on. "Poland had to go before we could come to grips with the real foe. If Churchill had only understood that, our differences with England never would have occurred. Be very sure that if the Russians try again, we will be ready."

  When Jim still did not seem to feel the need for any reply beyond a slight shrug the officer with the battered face interjected coldly, "The Russians are not like the Japanese you so easily squashed. You Americans think that when a war is over your Johnnies can just come marching home to glory. Yours is a fool's paradise!"

  Another chimed in: "You had a romp in the Pacific. We know war."

  "Lieutenant Commander Martel made twenty-three kills," Mason interjected, "and Japanese pilots were every bit as good as those in your Luftwaffe."

  "No air force is or was equal to ours," the battered officer replied heatedly. "And I would like to see your Martel's performance against the RAF. There was an enemy to be proud of."

  "Hans, Hans, let us not bandy insults with our guests,"

  Skorzeny said with an ironic grin. "Besides, some of the American pilots are quite good." The way he said it made the unspoken "but not good enough" almost audible.

  Having made his point Skorzeny reverted to host mode. Casually gesturing at the wings and Navy Cross ribbon on Martel's uniform, he said, "I am a pilot too, you know. In that at least we can understand each other."

  "Perhaps," Jim replied with a smile of his own.

  "Yes, 'perhaps,'" Skorzeny replied softly.

  There was a tense moment of silence, and then Skorzeny smiled again. "Well, we had best be going. I look forward to a time when we can meet again, perhaps under less ... constrained circumstances."

  Martel devoutly hoped that any such unconstrained meeting between him and this human attack dog took place at about 20,000 feet. He was ashamed to realize that under those circumstances he would go out of his way to give the German his wish. An old and painful image rose in his mind, only this time it was this tall SS officer rather than a Japanese naval pilot batting at himself as he tumbled out of his aircraft and began the long, long fall, drenched with burning gasoline. Skorzeny, it seemed, brought out the killer instinct in others as well....

  Almost as if reading Jim's mind, the SS colonel nodded drolly as he and his companions turned and merged with the crowd.

  As they departed, Mason snatched his camera out of its case and snapped off a quick shot. "That is one scary son of a bitch," he said quietly. "He's head of the SS's number-one commando team."

  Feeling himself begin to unwind, Martel realized he'd been in an adrenal state appropriate for combat. "The guys who snatched Koniev out of Leningrad?"

  "The same. Runs his operations exacdy the way he sees fit, answers directly to Hitler. Even field marshals have to step aside if Skorzeny wants something." Mason paused for a second. "That wasn't his only eoup, either. He pulled half a dozen other ops in Russia in the last months of the war. As a matter of fact I saw a report that he was planning to 'drop in' on Stalin if the armistice talks fell through." Mason smiled and shook his head. "What glory, if he'd succeeded. I think he was disappointed that he didn't get the chance."

  Skorzeny was nearly out of sight when he turned back to cast that same ironic smile—and was gone. The Cheshire Commando,' Jim thought, without the least bit of amusement.

  As Wayne Mason continued to rattle off his information, Jim found that the professional in him grudgingly admired Skorzeny. He was the ultimate soldier, but lost without the scent of battle to follow; to men like him, the cause for which one was fighting became nothing compared to the pure flaming joy of combat. Skorzeny was most likely in his own private hell right now. Too long without a war and he might well go mad. Jim thought about that as he said good-bye to Mason and turned to drift with the crowds, on his way to his real task of the day.

  There had been a taunting challenge in Skorzeny, the self-confident arrogance of a player on a winning team who had just verbally scrimmaged with someone he would meet and surely defeat come next Saturday afternoon. It was an interesting datum, something that he would note in the contact report. Strange that it had felt so personal....

  After leaving Mason, Jim continued down the boulevard, passing several of the new temples to the Nazi Reich. The central section of Berlin had been hit hard by the RAF in the closing months of the war, but the rubble had long since been cleared, and now Hitler's neoclassical monstrosities were beginning to dominate the skyline. To his right just ahead, the new Party headquarters, with the beginning of what would one day be a thousand-foot dome, was just starting to rise up out of the ground. Supposedly it would take another fifteen years to bring the hideous thing to completion. Next, also on his right, the new museum for the Volkische Kunst — for "Aryan Peoples' Art" — had just opened. Nearly all its displays leaned heavily toward the new German heroic style, which in practice seemed to mean a superfluity of iron-jawed young Teutonic knights battling the hordes of darkness, alternating with saccharine scenes of buxom peasant girls tending hearth and farm.

  Craftwise enough to assume he was being tailed, Martel moved casually, taking in the sights. As he strolled down the middle of the boulevard a line of young boys dressed in the brown shirts and red neckerchiefs of the Hitler Youth marched past him. They were singing the latest popular hit about the heroes of the Eastern Front. It had been given great prominence on the airwaves in preparation for Victory Day. The main point of it was that the gods must love dead Slavs because they had helped the Reich make so many of them. Theirs was the kind of religion, Martel thought dryly, that gave atheism a good name. As they marched, the boys waved their Nazi flags in time to the song's catchy beat. It looked as if venomous red, white and black butterflies swarmed over their heads.

  As they marched by, several of the children looked up at him, wide eyed at the sight of an American uniform. He smiled at them until one flung a comment about American Jews. How his Jews were next on the list. Shocked and angered, he turned away lest he strike the little monster and create an international incident.

  "Jim! Good to see you!"

  A German army officer had come around the corner and bumped into him, as if by accident.

  "Willi! Good to see you!" Jim extended his hand, grabbing hold of the German major's in a grasp of genuine affection.

  Major Wilhelm von Metz, adjutant to Major General Hans von Oster of Admiral Canaris's Abwehr, the German center for military intelligence and counterintelligence, patted Jim on the shoulder.

  As it happened, Willi was Jim's cousin. Indeed the two of them might easily be taken for brothers, though Willi had the typical pale blue eyes, high cheekbones, and aquiline nose of the Mannheim family line, while Jim, whose nose was equally aquiline and cheekbones equally high and planed, had the dark hair and gray eyes of his father. During his high s
chool year in Germany he had lived as a fully accepted member of Wilhelm's family. Willis mother was Jim's aunt, and he had rather adored her.

  It was a relationship the Navy had known about and wanted Martel to cultivate; the Navy had reason to hope that both Wilhelm and his superior Canaris hated the Nazis and might be willing to do something about it. Jim was able to confirm this; while living with the von Metz family he had witnessed their horror at the rise of Nazism, and had often heard his aunt privately denounce the "Nazi thugs." The Mannheims were German patriots and Junkers of the old school, and the von Metz's too were fiercely patriotic, and just as proud of their military heritage, which they traced back to the army of Frederick the Great. To such as they the Nazis were gutter sweepings that in an obscene twist of fate had seized control of the Fatherland. In Willi's case, this hatred was compounded on a personal level by the loss of two older brothers who never returned from Russia.

  But huge as the stakes might be, and dark the backdrop against which their little drama was played, balancing against each other the intelligence jobs their respective countries had handed them was an amusing game in some ways. Willi had let Jim know early on that he had been given the task of playing upon Jim's German heritage and family relationships in order to turn him into an asset of German Intelligence.

  To string the other side along, Jim would occasionally be cleared to "let slip" a minor detail about naval equipment or designs, and very occasionally, to keep the contact hot, something major that Navy Intelligence knew was already compromised. But in von Metz's case the turning was genuine.

  "I was supposed to meet Lori here after the parade," von Metz said loudly enough that he could easily be overheard. "Have you seen her? I think we must have got our directions crossed."

  Directions crossed. They were definitely being followed.

  Jim looked around as if to help out.