“The flaw in the plan is the parachutists. I had nasty words with their oberfeldwebel over the issue of the execution of Von Bink.”
“They will do their duty, I will see to that. I will have Muntz call and explain things to them very clearly. They will obey or they will be dead. That is the only option they have. And if they hinder you, then it will mean nothing to me or to the Reich if you execute them. I am not ordering you to do so; I am telling you that is your prerogative if circumstances warrant. You have wide latitude.”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you take the Yaremche road through the mountain to the airbase at Uzhgorod, where that FW 200 awaits you and the White Witch. Then you go straight to Berlin.”
“Sir, I’ll hold the plane for you if the Soviets have started their offensive.”
“No, no. You must leave with her instantly. The woman is everything. She is everything.”
There was one last thing to do, and Groedl did it the next day. He spoke at length to Muntz, Brigadeführer of SS 12th Panzer and now, upon the death of Von Bink, commander as well of 14th Panzer and all the units under its umbrella. Muntz, later that afternoon, went to his communications unit and had the men reach Oskar, as the Green Devil position was code-named, and ordered the signals NCO to reset to a different, much less used channel. Once that was accomplished, he ordered Oskar Signals to locate Oskar Leader, Von Drehle himself. It took a few minutes, but then Von Drehle took up the microphone.
The general explained that he had great faith in Von Drehle, even if he believed several of his men were subversive. He mentioned a particularly impertinent NCO under Von Drehle’s command. He would hate to order executions and would be far less inclined to do so if Von Drehle’s men performed their duty at Natasha’s Womb, especially in the matter of the woman sniper called the White Witch.
He went on: “If you are successful, once she is turned over to Police Battalion, I will forget all about Bober’s intransigence. Moreover, I will personally intercede with the general staff and see you and your men given two weeks of leave, then a transfer to the Western Front, where you can rejoin Second Fallschirmjäger. Then, Von Drehle, find a nice American patrol to surrender to, tell them how you loathe the hated SS, and survive the war. Are you reading this, Major?”
“I am, sir.”
“Excellent. Do we have an understanding? You help me, I help you, we both help the Reich, and everything turns out for the better. The bandit woman is to be taken alive.”
Interlude in Jerusalem V
Certain things worked, certain things didn’t. It turned out that platinum as a catalyst was so widely used in the world that its name alone implied thousands of possibilities, some of them potentially lethal or at least weaponizable, some of them not so much. To plow through them and test them against a potential act-of-terror template would be a colossal waste of time. You needed two points to draw a line, establish a direction, a destination. One point indicated nothing except the universe around it.
Routine low-level exchanges with other friendly intelligence agencies — and even some not so friendly ones, surprisingly cooperative with the institute — yielded nothing, either. That meant Nordyne GmbH was either harmless or so far below the radar that it had been expertly buried by the best pros in the business, but there was no other indication of professional involvement. The mere presence of armed guards, even if some were Islamic extremists who’d been to war against Russia, meant nothing. Whoever owned Nordyne GmbH may have been manufacturing lawn-mower engines with catalytic converters for the American market and wanted to protect his investment.
All right, smart guy, Gershon argued with himself, why would he go to such lengths to camouflage his operation? Why would he locate it in a spot conspicuously close to Israel’s greatest enemy, an enemy that hungered for destruction and death, and yet at the same time, why would he seem to have — no independent penetration had yielded it — no connection with Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah, Hamas, or any of the world’s too many professional Jew-haters?
On top of that, the report from Lausanne was that the “address” for Nordyne GmbH was a fraud, just a post office box of a franchise operation in a mall. There was no headquarters per se, yet somehow, from a certain Swiss bank, payments were regularly sent by wire to receiving entities.
And — new element in the puzzle of the plant itself — why was there no outflow? If something were being manufactured, why was it not being shipped? Why was it linked to no distribution system, why was it unrepresented by a marketing department, why was it not publicizing its product at trade shows, whatever its trade might be? Why was it completely disconnected, as far as Gershon could tell, and that was pretty damn far, from any government sponsorship or even linkage? Its civic connections consisted of local property taxes paid promptly, water and electricity bills paid promptly, safety inspections passed, probably in the sense that someone “passed” someone else a couple of thousand rubles and the inspector went away happy, never having gotten past the cyclone fence and the gun muzzles of the Chechen thugs.
It just sat there, doing whatever it did, going nowhere, seemingly producing no salable product. It seemed operational only at night, because an American satellite, otherwise picking up zero activity, managed to confirm an operating temperature at a certain sector of the plant of about 1400 degrees centigrade. Why did they need all that heat, or, since he knew nothing much about chemistry, maybe the question should be “Why did they need so little heat?”
“Sorry,” said a professor at the university, “fourteen hundred centigrade is nowhere near the limit of industrial possibility in chemical manufacture. It’s not so hot, it’s not so cool. It’s just sort of in the middle.”
“Which means it tells me—”
“Nothing, except that somebody’s cooking something to make something else.”
“I think that’s what we already knew.”
“Now you know it even more so.”
And that was the most satisfactory conversation he had.
It didn’t help that Israel had no assets on the ground in South Russia. Moscow, St. Petersburg, yes, Volgograd, even beyond the Urals and in towns of special strategic value, yes. But way down south in the ass-end of Russia, near the Caspian, no way. And since the assets they did have at closest proximity — Odessa, Kiev, Lviv — were so well watched, it made no sense to send someone over from, say, the Odessa consul to check out the plant as a casual tourist. That would be sending SVR a telegram that the institute had something going on, was watching somebody, and who knew how SVR would react and how that reaction would mess things up.
“We know they’re making something; we don’t know what. We know they haven’t shipped it anywhere. We know they’re close to Iran, a night’s voyage by freighter. We know they have deep pockets and are highly paranoid about security. We don’t know who’s paying.”