He was eleven years old. His parents had taken him to visit friends from the Old Country who'd settled in a small town on the Ohio-Indiana state line. In fact, the state line ran right through town, right smack through the house where their friends lived. His father had said that every day the lady cooked dinner for her family in Ohio and served it in Indiana! He had been awed, and he had been thrilled each time he walked across the invisible line. He had stood with one foot in each state. It has been magic….
Now once again there was an invisible line to be crossed. But this time there was no magic of innocence. Only the promise of danger — perhaps death.
They walked on; two ordinary townspeople to be lost among the thousands of workers crowding the town. No one would pay them special attention….
It was dusk. 1817 hours, Saturday, March 24, 1945, when Dirk and Sig entered Hechingen.
In his office at Gestapo Headquarters, Standartenführer Werner Harbicht sat staring angrily at a report brought to him earlier. He tapped his pencil on his desk in exasperation.
He was dealing with imbeciles!
18
The descriptions were of no earthly use.
Harbicht slapped the papers on his desk an angry, backhanded blow. Zum Teufel damit! — the devil take it! The investigating officer in the field must have been a first-class Erdkloss, he thought in disgust — one of those country clods, so dumb he couldn't find a turd in a cow pasture. The information the man had managed to obtain from his interrogation of the suspect was utterly inadequate: An Unteroffizier was under arrest, accused of stealing food from the local farmers while on duty. Routine. He had been discovered at his post on a roadblock near the town of Lahr eating a large, homemade sausage. The matter had been referred to the Hechingen Gestapo at once simply because the orders to establish the roadblocks had come from that headquarters. Harbicht scowled at the report. His first impulse had been to pick up the phone and thoroughly ream the ass of the unit CO responsible for bothering the Gestapo with such stupid trivia. But he had read on. The Unteroffizier had insisted that he had been given the sausage by two men passing through the roadblock. Two bicyclists carrying rucksacks. Time — Saturday, March 24, about 0600. About! Harbicht could taste his irritation. The inexactness was not to be tolerated. Their papers had been in order, according to the sergeant. Soldbuch. Work permit. The men were from Hechingen. Hechingen? But the descriptions of them given by the non-com were utterly useless. One of them was a discharged soldier. Wounded. But it was not known what kind of wound. The other was a foreign worker. Austrian? Czech? Italian? The Unteroffizier could not remember. The men were medium height. Medium build. Medium-color hair. Medium age. Medium—damn and double damn! The observations of an idiot — most certainly below medium intelligence!
Nevertheless, one statement in the report had caught Harbicht's interest. The men had mentioned to the Unteroffizier that they had been visiting in a village called Langenwinkel. With the family of the local Ortsbauernführer. And Langenwinkel was hard on the restricted zone, only a few kilometers from the front-line sector hit by the enemy combat-patrol assault that night….
Who were the two anonymous bicyclists? What were they? Holiday travelers? Black-marketeers? Or — infiltrating saboteurs? If—if, in fact, they did exist at all except in the self- defensive imagination of the Unteroffizier…
He frowned. He would have that Ortsbauernführer brought to Hechingen. But it would have to wait. He was due at the Haigerloch plant in less than an hour. Berlin had requested that he attend an urgent, high-level conference. It was the kind of request not to be ignored.
He would get to the Langenwinkel matter as soon as he returned.
In addition to himself there were seven men seated around the conference table. Nearly all of them were smoking, Harbicht noted. The denseness of the smoke and the tension in the air were about equal, he thought. He knew all the men by name — and, of course, dossier — but he had met only one of them personally. Professor Reichardt. Dieter Reichardt, chief of the Haigerloch Project. The other men were top project scientists and an SS Obergruppenführer — SS General — from Berlin. A special representative of the Führer himself, flown down only hours before.
Harbicht looked at each of the sober men in turn. “The Uranium Club,” they called themselves in private. He frowned at the frivolous breach of security — however “private” it might be. The code name for the group was actually the Speleological Research Unit. Aptly chosen, he thought. From the rear window in the Swan Inn, where the conference was taking place, he could see the heavily guarded entrance to the complex of caves that had been carved and blasted into the granite bowels of the mountain itself. Those caves housed the most sensitive phase of the Haigerloch Project. The atomic pile…
The SS general stood up, ramrod stiff, waiting until he had the full attention of all.
“Meine Herren,” he said crisply, “I shall make this brief. I am flying back to Berlin within the hour…. I bring you the Führer's personal congratulations on your successful achievement here earlier today!” He looked around the room. “As soon as word reached Berlin that the Haigerloch pile had worked and your theories and methods had been proven correct, the Führer himself was informed. He at once called an urgent meeting with Reichsleiter Bormann, Reichsführer Himmler, Reichsmarschall Goering and Dr. Goebbels. I attended that meeting. I am here to make a personal inspection of your progress and to get definite answers to specific questions.” He paused. “Meine Herren,” he said solemnly, “the Führer is assigning top priority to the Haigerloch Project. To the creation of an atomic bomb!”
Harbicht was wholly engrossed. He carefully considered the full ramifications of the general's statements. He was not surprised that Bormann, Himmler and Goering had at once thrown their support to the project. In the past they had all championed the cause of scientific research on behalf of the Reich. Their decrees had saved many a scientist from going to the front. Der Dicke—the Fat One — had been one of the first, setting up the War Research Pool in ’44 when the scientists were in danger of being drafted into the armed forces. Bormann had followed in September with his decree shielding scientists from any kind of duty except in their own fields. But — the Führer? Atomic research had never interested him. Judenphysik—Jew physics — he had called it. As had Helwig, whose Die Deutsche Physik maintained that such inquiries were the work of alien, Jewish minds, which the pure German Volk must shun as racially incompatible…. The importance of that morning's achievement at Haigerloch must be — enormous….
He felt a sudden chill of alarm. Why his presence now? Security, of course. But was there more? Had the Decker disappearance case come to the attention of Berlin? He still had no answers. And he vowed silently to double his efforts and to strengthen security still further in the Hechingen-Haigerloch area. But if nobody else brought the Decker case up now, he certainly would not.
He returned his attention to the general. The man's voice was getting on his nerves. It was thin and high-pitched, totally out of keeping with the importance of his rank.
The general brought out a small black notebook. He opened it.
“These are the questions I shall want answered,” he said crisply. “First. When do you plan to conduct the final test of the uranium machine? Cause the pile to go critical?”