Less than two weeks! That was all they had to stop the Haigerloch Project from being successfully completed. Twelve days. He raged against it. But he knew there was only one thing they could do. It never occurred to him not to try. They were there. They must stay. However impossible it might seem, it was now up to them to take action. Destroy the pile….
He looked around at the people standing silent in the dingy little room. He was grimly aware that he was looking at the entire strike force he could muster to stop the deadly project at Haigerloch. A frightened girl. A big, well-meaning yard worker, in over his head. Sig — who still believed the world ought to be a decent place to live. And a renegade Nazi scientist…
Himmelmann…
He would have to be a key factor in any action to be taken. He'd better remember that.
He turned to Sig.
“Siggy baby,” he said. “We start from scratch — against slightly bigger odds this time. That's the rule of the game. Return to GO. Do not collect two hundred bucks!”
Even he felt his foxhole humor fall flat. The hell with it. They still had to go for broke.
PART II
The Week of
2—8 Apr 1945
1
They could not be going more than eight to ten miles an hour, Dirk estimated. He sat at the edge of the open door of the boxcar as it lumbered down the branch track. Sig stood nearby, leaning against the side, idly watching the countryside go by. They had not spoken to one another since boarding the railroad car in the yard along with the half-dozen other foreign workers.
Dirk used the time to take stock….
Four days had passed since Himmelmann had dropped his little bombshell; four days of hiding in the stuffy basement room at the Storp house and racking their brains for an idea as to how to destroy the Haigerloch reactor They had nothing to work with No arms No explosives. No way of communicating. They had gotten nowhere.
Himmelmann had curtly told them that he would in no way be able to obtain passes for them to enter the sealed-off security area around the entrance to the reactor cave The area was ringed with a high barbed-wire fence, heavily guarded. And even if they did manage to penetrate the security area, it would be absolutely impossible for them to get into the caves themselves, let alone close to the reactor.
Everyone, without exception, was thoroughly investigated before being allowed inside. No foreign worker could enter. Himmelmann had pulled his cynical little smile. The pile had once been contaminated, he'd told them. Valuable time had been lost. Obviously, none of the Nazi scientists could take the blame — so it was laid to one of the few foreign laborers working in the caves. Security regulations had at once been sharpened. Non-Germans, with scarcely any exceptions, were banished from the inner sanctum of the reactor caves. Only a handful of foreigners, a few trusted technicians, still carried the “Red Pass,” the ID card with the broad red stripe running diagonally across it.
They had listened to him glumly. They had to get close to the damned cave entrance. They had to have some firsthand idea of what they were up against. They had to “case the joint,” as Sig had uncharacteristically observed.
It was Oskar who had come up with the solution. Occasionally he had been inside the restricted area. Supply trains arriving at the Hechingen railroad yard sometimes included shipments headed for Haigerloch. The freight cars were shuttled to the area and shunted onto special spurs that dead-ended inside at a series of off-loading platforms. He, Oskar, had at times taken work crews on those cars to do the labor. They entered the area under guard. They unloaded the cars under guard. They left under guard But no guards could prevent them from using their eyes….
The first opportunity had come today, April 2. With only eight days to go. Four boxcars had to be taken to Haigerloch for unloading. Oskar had taken on the job. He had selected twenty-four men — among them Sig and Dirk, indistinguishable from the other foreign workers. When you want to hide a tree, Oskar had said with a grin, plant a forest….
Dirk watched as the heavily laden boxcars rumbled over the tracks. The countryside as they approached Haigerloch was beautiful and serene. Fields, woods and orchards, their trees in bud, passed in review. He carefully mapped the terrain in his mind as he had been trained to do.
Slowing to a crawl, the train was entering the restricted area, pushed onto a spur by the old locomotive. As it clattered through the barbed-wire barricade, armed SS guards jumped onto each car, scowling indifferently at the silent laborers.
The cars came to a grinding halt. The guards jumped to the ground. A non-com shouted.
“Raus! Raus! Schnell machen!” he commanded “Out! Out! Make it fast! Get those cars unloaded!”
The workers hurried to obey.
Dirk and Sig found themselves scurrying back and forth, carrying heavy crates between the boxcar and a growing stack on the off-loading platform.
Dirk's arm protested with twinges of pain, but he did not acknowledge them.
As he worked, he listened with his eyes, using them like roaming cameras, committing everything he saw to memory as though recording it on film….
Haigerloch itself, a small Swabian village, romantic and picturesque, was perched astride two precipitous heights above the Eyach River at the edge of the Black Forest. It was a perfect choice for the Project. The narrow, cramped valley was virtually inaccessible to Allied bombers.
Out of the medieval village a sheer cliff reared, towering above the village and the security area immediately below. It was like a gigantic rough wall, almost perpendicular. Dirk estimated it to be between eighty and a hundred feet high. It was topped by a fringe of green shrubbery — and crowned by an original anti-aircraft installation, the most effective protection against enemy air raids: a church. A large whitewashed structure with a cupola-topped bell tower and long, narrow stained-glass windows, their saints and angels solemnly gazing down on the ungodly endeavors below….
He spotted it. The single entrance to the cave itself. Around it a boxlike concrete bunker had been built. Massive. Square. A short, chimneylike shaft sticking up in one corner. Air vent? Close to the cliff wall, double doors of heavy steel, set in the cement, stood open, guarded by two armed SS guards.
To the right of the entrance stood a wooden shed, a lean-to built against the cliff wall. Nearby a maze of wires and cables converged on a small house. That would be the communications center. The public-address system. Telephone and radio control rooms. Oskar had mentioned it.
Flanking the cave entrance at some distance from the cliff were two large buildings. The nearer one whitewashed, four stories high, two stories in the steep-peaked roof along with an attic, judging by the windows. That would be the former Gasthof Schwan — the Swan Inn. Conference rooms Billets for the top scientists on the project Professor Dieter Reichardt Security staff. A pile of lumber was stacked in front of it.
Opposite, a half-timbered building set on a massive stone foundation six to eight feet high, its crooked, unevenly set timbers giving it a patchwork look. In front of it stood several pieces of construction equipment. A cement-mixer. A brick-saw. A pile of wheelbarrows…
On a siding two spurs removed from where the men were working, Dirk could see a lone boxcar. It was obviously sealed. Two SS guards could be seen on the near side. He assumed there would be two others on the far side. What the hell was in that car? Hitler's family jewels? Unobtrusively he squinted to make out the routing chalked on the side of the car. He could read one word. It seemed to be the place of origin. STADTILM. It meant nothing to him.