Amerika (35 page)

He sat back and his eyes became hooded. ‘Let’s just say that for once in my life I saw the forest.’

I pressed him for more details but, like Fatt, he turned into a sphinx. Still, if what he was saying was true, then maybe, just maybe, the nuclear threat hanging over Uncle Sam’s neck like a guillotine could be turned into a penknife – at least for now.

Orlando entered the lounge, his eyes bright with excitement. Only two things got him going; the Lord and technology. I guessed the latter and said,

‘Some setup, huh?’

‘Have you seen what they did in the back?’

‘I was too busy getting us the hell out of Horta.’

‘C’mon, I’ll show you around.’

Ziggy held up the tray. ‘Have one for the road.’

I took one of the sandwiches and examined. ‘Cucumber. Nice.’

‘Don’t knock it until you try it. Fresh, crisp, perfect for a summer getaway, and I do mean getaway.’

Going aft was like going from one world to another. When I first had seen the
Dixie Clipper
on Couba Island, the crew was stripping out her staterooms. That work was done. Where upholstered chairs and thick carpeting once comforted well-heeled passengers, anti-corrosion painted lime-green walls and bulkheads were all that remained. A narrow, perforated metal walkway allowed Orlando and me to move, single file, past what looked like oxygen canisters lined up like tin soldiers.

‘They’ve finished the waist guns, too.’

Located  over  the  ‘step’  of  the  hull,  the  fifty-caliber  machine  gun stations had been installed where Stateroom D use to be, including ammunition-feed chutes that looked like flattened metal snakes as they curved from the gun breeches to olive drab ammunition cans. The stateroom’s original Plexiglas windows were still in place on the port and starboard sides, but were now part of a larger aluminum panel that slid back on rails to allow a waist gunner to swing out the barrel and shoot.

I followed Orlando into the next compartment. As I stepped through the bulkhead door, the outside noise grew louder. Long gone was the soundproofing that once sheltered passengers’ ears from the output of four twelve-hundred horsepower engines. But the noise was even more pronounced  because  the  work  crews  had  knocked  out  the  bulkhead between the ‘special compartment’ and the ‘honeymoon suite,’ creating one long, tapering compartment.

Orlando stood by the tail and shouted over the wind noise, ‘Grab onto that stanchion. Want to show you something.’

I did so and he stabbed the intercom. ‘Tail section to pilot. Permission to test release device.’

Lewis’s voice rasped back, ‘Make it quick.’

I looked up for the first time at an I-beam extending the length of the compartment. Claw-like clamps dotted its surface, sprung open, waiting to grasp an object.

And then I knew.

‘Hanging on?’ Orlando said.

‘Affirmative.’

His face lit up and he hit a switch and shouted, ‘Bomb’s away!’

The fuselage floor split open along the centerline and swung down with a WHOOSH. The snakelike hiss of pneumatic pistons momentarily overpowered the combined roar of wind and engines. The whitecaps on the ocean’s surface six thousand feet below moved serenely onward, unaware that our silver, luxurious flying boat had become an engine of war.

The moonlit waters of Lake Salvador tilted to the left as I began our final approach, the green luminescence of the underwater buoy lights marking the landing zone with perfect precision. A secret night arrival was essential. The less folks saw of this beautiful silver bird the better. The headwinds I had earlier feared never developed, and other than a brief scare over Atlanta with a compliance airspace air controller, our long flight had been uneventful.

The first thing I wanted to do after we landed was call Abby and my mother. It felt like old times, my being away on a trip, that is, but then a sudden sadness stabbed me like a knife.

‘Watch your altitude, captain,’ Lewis said quickly.

The twin green line of lights was widening too quickly and I made a quick throttle adjustment to slow our descent.

General Patton’s voice crackled in my headphones, ‘Carter, I want the professor’s cargo offloaded right away, you copy?’

‘Do you mind if I land first?’ I snapped. ‘Or do you want us to toss it out from up here?’

A brief pause. ‘Negative.’

‘By the way, general, mission accomplished.’

‘That’s what you think.’

We had been gone from Couba Island only a few days, but in that short time it seemed the base had doubled in size. Sons of Liberty soldiers marched across the open field in complete silence and with absolute precision. A convoy of covered trucks roared past Ava and Ziggy and me, kicking up clouds of red dust.

Ziggy said, ‘What’s with these guys’ uniforms?’

‘What about them?’ Ava said.

‘Regular army is olive drab. Theirs are grey.’

‘Uncle Georgie’s idea,’ Ava said. ‘His granddaddy served with the twenty-second Virginia during the war for Southern Independence.’

‘You mean the civil war,’ Ziggy said.

‘We southerners prefer ‘independence.’ Uncle George thought it would be nice to resurrect the past to help America gain its future.’

Ziggy said, ‘Let me get this straight, you’re raising an army of Confederate soldiers?’

‘Beats sitting on your hands and doing nothing, which is what you Yankees are doing.’

A squad passed, Ava waved gaily at them but they sternly refused to recognize her.

Ziggy twisted his hands. ‘I’m afraid to ask what you’re raising them for.’

She grinned wickedly. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

‘Soon enough’ came the following morning when I reported to General Patton, who had commandeered Mrs. Longstreet’s massive greenhouse, removed the plants, and whitewashed the glass to make a bright and airy command post. He sat at the head of a long wooden table, flanked on both sides by subordinate officers, including a confident-looking Captain Fatt and his crew, just in from Baltimore.

I sent him a silent question as to how it went. He answered with wink and a breezy ‘OK’ sign, as if outwitting the Gestapo was an everyday kind of thing.

Professor Friedman and a civilian I didn’t recognize sat next to the crew.

But I soon learned he was Professor Archibald – ‘call me Archie’ - Campbell.  A permanent grin occupied the man’s florid face and his bright, darting eyes constantly swept the place like a searchlight looking for something to land on. Five years ago, the British Government had detached him to America to work on a secret project that General Patton now proceeded to make public.

‘Kill the lights,’ he ordered.

Total darkness shifted to grainy black-and-white footage of Washington D.C. in ruins; capitol dome collapsed upon itself, Washington Monument broken in two, and somewhere in the dust and ash and devastation, what was left and tens of thousands of unsuspecting people who had breathed their last on the night of December 8, 1941, including my family.

Patton’s high-pitched voice chattered like a machine gun. ‘The war began and ended for America when the Nazis dropped their god-damned atomic bombs.’

Footage of an aerial view of what was left of Manhattan: the immense bomb crater carved a half-circle out of Battery Park as though bitten off by a monster. A cluster of deserted skyscrapers stood just outside ground zero, its inhabitants long gone, either dead from the blast or radiation sickness. Empty, rubble-filled streets, streetlamps tilted at impossible angles, automobiles tossed like crumpled bits of paper, and in the distance the occasional person standing perfectly still, as if contemplating Armageddon.

‘We know what this weapon can do,’ Patton continued. ‘And thanks to

Professor Friedman, here’s what it looks like when it goes off – where exactly did you say this is?’

Friedman cleared his throat a few times before he found his voice.

‘Moscow.’

Footage of a featureless plain at night. Moscow’s lights twinkling in the distance. The darkness shifts to pure white as the bomb detonates. The flash  recedes,  and  in  its  place  a  tumescent,  glowing  fireball  blossoms outward and upward into massive proportions.  And then, as the displaced air rushes back, a rising column of ash blooms into a mushroom-shaped cloud, climbing thirty-thousand feet into the still night air, carrying with it the remains of whoever and whatever once was alive.

The devastation footage afterwards was no different than Washington or New York. Broken gas lines burning out of control, featureless rubble where once buildings stood. Charred and shriveled lumps on the ground that once were human beings who had looked up at a bright light that exploded like the sun in the midnight sky.

Patton said, ‘Berlin claimed these were rocket-delivered weapons and we believed them. And why not, with proof like this?’

Now came the familiar
Movietone
newsreel footage I’d seen along with millions of other Americans of the German’s two-stage A9-A10 rocket rising majestically from its launch pad, balanced upon a column of fiery liquid oxygen and alcohol. Its first stage fell away a few minutes later, leaving only the winged second stage to arc across the thousands of miles separating Berlin from Washington to deliver the atomic bomb.

‘Surprise number one,’ Patton said. ‘This rocket delivery method of theirs is pure Berlin bullshit.’

The room stirred like someone had slapped everyone.

‘The footage is total fake. No way could that missile have carried that kind of payload that far. Thanks to the good professor, we’ve learned how the Heinie bastards really did it, and have film to prove it.’

I almost laughed when I saw the familiar profile of the Lufthansa ‘catapult ship’
Friesenland
steaming at full speed in mid-ocean, with a
Blohm and Voss
four-engine seaplane perched on its stern-mounted catapult like an anxious bird. The very ship that Bauer claimed he sailed on back and forth to America? Not just Bauer could it carry, apparently.

The top-secret German navy footage showed destroyers escorting the
Friesenland
with guns bristling. Then an on-board view as a plume of steam billowed out from the catapult and the seaplane jerked forward and up into the air. Sailors pumped their fists, leaped and danced in celebration.

‘They used their mail planes to drop the bombs?’ I said.

‘They damn well did, and we never knew.’

Lufthansa had beaten Pan Am to the punch with trans-Atlantic mail service back in 1937, long before Trippe’s clippers arrived. The airline had fitted out ships with catapults to launch float-equipped mail planes that would take off for America while still in mid-Atlantic. I remembered newspapers and magazines touting their achievement, because it truly was. But that didn’t compare with what those same planes had secretly done to America on December 8.

Animation replaced the newsreel footage. Maps of the eastern seaboard appeared. I stared numbly while Patton’s voice pressed on relentlessly.

‘The Friesenland launched both her aircraft about a thousand miles out. Two hundred miles off the coast they diverged to their respective targets. They identified themselves to Coastal Air Defense Command as inbound Pan American flights.’