“How did it fly?” I called up to him.
“That’s your problem.”
“No, I want to know what you saw. Or were told by those ‘boffins’ you spoke with. It doesn’t have any propellers, or even engine cowlings. Heck, the darned thing doesn’t even have a cockpit windscreen.” Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic without one, but I wouldn’t care to fly in combat that way. Did the pilot use periscopes?
“Ever heard of a Schwalbe?”
Schwalbe. I vaguely remembered vocabulary lists from college. “German for ‘swallow,’ I think.”
“Right. It was this Nazi secret weapon. The Jerries called it Turbo.”
“Oh, the Messerschmitt 262.” I knew what jets were. We’d seen some of the classified research at the plant, mostly on the know-your-enemy line, because the Japs had been rumored to be building an Me-262 knockoff, the Nakajima Kikka, or “Orange Blossom.” Not that I’d ever seen a jet airplane, or even so much as a jet engine.
And Floyd was right — this had to be a jet — no air screws, no place for them, and the smooth, curved lines that I had seen discussed in literature and had hashed over in late night engineering bull sessions. But this couldn’t be an Me-262. I had no idea how the Germans had manufactured this thing, but it didn’t come off any normal aircraft assembly line.
Even more than the fabrication techniques, the metal itself bothered me. The thing had obviously taken damage, because there were fairly crude aluminum patches on the bottom. Also, some of the tubing in the landing skids looked freshly milled and much less carefully finished than the fuselage work. But the rest of the ship was as smooth as a peach, and almost warm to the touch.
Climbing carefully down off the Mack flatbed, I went over to the f-panzer and stepped up into the cramped control box. I wanted to look around, to see if there were any more clues to the strange nature of my aircraft.
The f-panzer was just as crowded as I had thought, looking inside it past Floyd the previous day. There were no vertical surfaces, and the only horizontal area was the floor — everything else sloped like a pup tent. And it was all Nazi gray, hard-edged and sharp. The inside smelled of old metal and sweaty socks. Floyd’s Battle of the Bulge tank story was on my mind, though it didn’t look like anyone had died in there.
I’m not especially tall, but even I had to hunch to get into one of the operator’s seats. The sloped rear armor above them had embedded glass vision blocks that yielded a blurry, dark view of the inside of the barn.
Passing over the control panel for a moment, I swiveled one of the chairs to look over the glass screen console. It looked just like the few American-built cathode ray tubes I’d seen — slightly bulbous with rounded corners, set in a grounded metal frame. There weren’t a lot of uses for such a thing, which confirmed my suspicion that this was a part of a German radar rig. The rack-mounted equipment on the other side was more confusing. It had obviously been hastily installed, apparently as an afterthought to the radar screens.
I studied the racks carefully. Most of the gear was electronic test equipment — a heterodyne tone generator, test probes, similar things I didn’t recognize in detail. Next to the electronics kit there was a set of shockproof braces holding a small metal box. I unlatched the braces and opened the box.
Inside the box was a twisted piece of metal that looked for all the world like flowing quicksilver frozen in place. I knew perfectly well mercury didn’t have a solid state under room-temperature conditions, but the glossy, gritty sheen of the thing was hard to classify. It was about six inches long by half an inch wide, with three prominent buttons. It fit snugly in the palm of my hand, the eye-bending shape as comfortable as if it had been made from a cast of me.
I stepped to the open hatch to get better light and studied the metal piece more carefully with my magnifying glass. It was made of a similar material as the aircraft — another smooth, unclassifiable metal. And the workmanship obviously didn’t match anything else inside the radar truck. I decided to try again to get some history on the aircraft from Floyd. He’d been unhelpful before, but I couldn’t tell if he was being stupid on purpose, catty or just not paying attention.
Then maybe I could know whether it was a good idea to do some laboratory testing.
“Floyd,” I called, climbing with care out of the halftrack. I set the twisted metal piece on the deck just inside the open door. Floyd was still in the rafters, checking bolts. I was prepared to buy the new block-and-tackle we needed with some of my meager savings as I didn’t want to trust our prize to Mr. Bellamy’s aging hardware. It made me nervous enough to have to rely on the beams of the old barn’s roof to support the weight of the aircraft.
“Yeah?”
“We need to discuss this aircraft.”
He looked down at me for a moment, then carefully set down his measuring tape and tools before crawling back to the hayloft. A minute later he was standing in front of me, picking straw out of his hair. “We’ve already been over all this. What’s so important now that I had to climb all the way down here?”
“Where exactly did this thing come from? Germany?”
Floyd scuffed his shoes. “Belgium.”
“No, Floyd.” He was being stupid on purpose, I decided. “You may have found this in Belgium, but this was not built by Belgians. Belgians make French fries and wine and wool, but they do not make precision aircraft. Certainly not during a Nazi occupation.”
“Well, it is German.” Floyd looked at me, almost pleading.
That was the nub of the problem. I couldn’t see the angle yet, but this was the finest piece of technology ever produced by the hand of man. Who but the Germans could do it? Besides the United States of America, of course, but it wouldn’t have been sitting around in a Nazi convoy in Belgium if we’d built it. “How do you know that?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “I found it on a German truck behind German lines.”
“Where was it made, Floyd? Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know. Why does that matter so much?” Floyd was starting to whine, which with him meant he was about to get belligerent. “We want to use it ourselves, not return to sender.”
“Look, I don’t want to know where or how you swiped the thing. We’re past that — I’ve bought into your deal. It’s just that the metalwork in that aircraft is the most unusual stuff I’ve ever seen. I should be able to recognize it. Aircraft materials are my profession.”
“Well…” said Floyd. “There’s a big pouch of documents on the back of the f-panzer’s hatch. If you can read German, they might tell you something.”
This was more like it. “Why didn’t you show me those in the first place?”
Floyd shrugged. “Slipped my mind.”
“Fine, fine. Let me have a look.”
I pulled myself up onto the edge of the truck bed, in the shadow of our mysterious airplane. I really needed to drag a normal chair into the barn, before I hurt my leg even more. Floyd jumped up past me, stepped into the f-panzer for a moment, then brought me a fat manila envelope from inside. I opened it to have a look at my new toy’s pedigree.
The envelope had a cover letter and a large bound report. The whole thing was typed on SS stationery — original ribbon, not carbon, which was interesting. That meant the Nazi officers in charge had intended for very few, if any, copies to be distributed. There were also all kinds of attachments and appendices, charts, graphs and photos, along with a folder full of flimsy carbon copies of what had to be operational orders. All in all, it looked like manuals and field orders for the aircraft. The fact that I even held these documents in my hand at all confirmed that Floyd had pulled an enormous con on the Army — no military intelligence officer who could still draw breath would have left a trove like this loose inside captured enemy equipment.