The damned mission had been a bust. He'd brought nothing back — except a piece of shrapnel in his ass….
He looked at Sig.
“How did it happen?” He shrugged. “I goofed.”
“Was Captain Everett — eh — Corny your control officer before?”
“No,” Dirk said. “He's supposed to be tops — however hard that is to believe….”
His mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of the mission ahead of them. Foreboding chilled him.
The Nazi atomic bomb…
Three things, they'd told him and Sig, three elements were absolutely necessary in order to make this bomb. The basic fuel — probably uranium or plutonium; the laboratory and industrial set-up to develop and build a prototype; the know-how in the persons of a sufficient number of top scientists and technicians to mastermind it…
The Germans had all three.
The big question was — How far had they progressed? How close were they??
The answer to that was the mission.
He glanced at Sig. He wondered if his teammate realized how inextricably close their relationship would have to be. How completely they would have to depend on one another.
Their mission had been given a code name.
Operation Gemini.
We make a hell of a pair of twins, he thought caustically. A battered spook and a professional civilian!
He yawned and glanced at his watch. 2200 hours.
“Almost ten,” he said. “Come on, Siggy, let's haul our asses out of here. Time to grab some bunk fatigue….”
12
General McKinley could feel the pressure he was under as a dull ache building up behind his eyes, hard thumbs of pain pushing into his temples.
He was already deep in one crisis with no immediate solution in sight. And now another had been dumped in his lap.
He deliberately tensed every muscle to the point of trembling — then consciously relaxed. He felt better.
He looked at the clock on his desk, the one Helene had given him on their twenty-fifth anniversary. 1917 they had been married. War was ripping the world apart then. He sighed. The world had done a lot of running just to stay in the same damn spot…. The clock showed close to 1600 hours. He flipped the switch on the intercom.
“Barnes,” he said, “it's about 2200 hours in London.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me that OSS captain — the control officer on Gemini — eh—”
“Captain Everett, sir.”
“Yes, Everett. Priority communication. He'll probably be at Milton Hall.”
“Yes, sir.”
McKinley sat back in his chair. He'd have to deal with this new crisis immediately. Push the other out of his mind.
And how the hell did you do that?
Congressional trouble was always a sizable pain in the balls.
When it threatened to involve the security of the Manhattan Project, it was a monumental one.
The Trinity test at Los Alamos was obviously a project of topmost priority. Now it had become figuratively as well as literally explosive. The congressional bloodhounds had nosed a quarry. Pointed questions about the “squandering” of millions of taxpayer dollars were already rumbling from certain factions on the Hill. They might have to go through the same damned rigmarole they'd already suffered once, when questions in Congress had gotten the Special Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program into the act. Thank God Truman, then chairman, had realized the risk in an investigation of the Manhattan Project and had promptly agreed to postpone action until after the war.
The most vociferous Congressman then had been Representative Engel of Michigan. And now Engel was making noises again. He had to be placated again. It would require supremely delicate handling at the highest level. Groves? Stimson? Marshall?
He pushed that problem aside and fingered the cabled report brought to him a short while before. Top secret. From London. He began to read it once more, although he knew it by heart. He saw only one word.
OHIO.
The current code word meaning uranium.
A German encoded message had been intercepted and deciphered. It was an order to ship at once all available uranium mined at the Joachimthal mines in Czechoslovakia and processed at the Auer-Gesellschaft near Berlin to Haigerloch at Hechingen.
There it was. The first time Haigerloch and uranium—the core element of an atomic bomb — had been definitely linked!
He had no doubts about the authenticity of the intercepted message. He had come to rely implicitly on reports such as this one. It had originated with Ultra.
Ultra messages awed him. He knew he was one of a handful of senior US officers and officials who were privy to the awesome secret of this vitally important British operation. It was an appalling responsibility. Were the Germans to learn or even suspect that the British had cracked their supposedly unbreakable coding-machine system, the Enigma, and were literally reading every top-secret High Command document and order it encoded, they would immediately discontinue using it, and thus deprive the Allies of an invaluable intelligence source. The British called their decoding set-up the Ultra Operation. And it was. The vitally essential intelligence gathered by Ultra had to be jealously safeguarded — and backed up with conventional intelligence to allay any possible enemy suspicions.
With a cold lump in the pit of his stomach, he recalled a high-level rumor early in Ultra's existence.
Ultra had picked up the bombing orders for the Nazi Luftwaffe to blitz the cathedral city of Coventry supposedly well before the scheduled attack occurred. Evacuation might have been achieved — but such a move would certainly have alerted the enemy to the existence of Ultra. McKinley felt cold. The decision to do nothing and doom an entire town in order to safeguard Ultra must have been agonizing.