“Pleased to meet you, indeed.” Sir Winston Churchill smiled after Smith’s introduction. Beside him, stood Vice Admiral Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten◦– a name Sarah would never remember◦– British Chief of Combined Operations.
Lord Mountbatten introduced her to the next man in line. “And this fellow is Colonel Donovan, head of the American Office of Strategic Services.” Donovan wore civilian clothes despite his rank.
With introductions complete, everyone found a seat at a rectangular conference table. Sarah sat between Donovan and Eisenhower. Churchill and Mountbatten sat opposite them. A movie projector on the table between them blocked her view of the men on the other side. Smith switched off the lights and started the machine.
“This footage was captured four hours ago by a Westland Lysander of the Royal Air Force’s 138th Squadron,” Smith began. “The devastation extends over an area of about twenty square miles, 32 square kilometers. The city of Saarbrücken and its railroad complex have been decimated. Water continues to fill the impact crater as we speak. The devastation spread across the border into France. Damage from the blast has been documented as far away as ten miles, 16 kilometers, from the epicenter. You’ll note however, no evidence of the massive fires our own scientists predicted in an atomic explosion.”
Sarah searched for the Holocaust Train in the footage. She caught sight of a line of boxcars moving away from the blast area, possibly headed south, but there had been so many trains. She couldn’t be sure if it was the train.
Churchill said, “Casualty estimate?”
“Over a hundred thousand dead or injured, maybe more,” Smith said. “Mostly civilians.” Sarah’s heart rose up into her throat, followed by the contents of her stomach. She bolted from the room, searching for a bathroom. A guard stationed outside the door took one look at her and pointed across the hall. She shouldered through the door, hand over her mouth, and headed for the nearest toilet. She thought she’d never stop retching, but eventually her stomach calmed. She went to the sink and splashed her face with water. As she straightened up and caught the reflection of the room in the mirror, she noticed Lord Mountbatten standing in the open door.
Sarah dried her face on the towel. “We estimated a high number of civilian casualties, but not so many from a single attack. What have we done?”
“It needed to be done, my dear. Retaking Europe from the Nazis will be costly work. I fear many more lives will be lost. The Russian armed forces have suffered almost eight million casualties, plus a like number of civilian deaths. If what you told Ike about Hitler’s Final Solution is true, another twelve million are scheduled to die in the camps. And that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of British and French laid to rest so far. Every month we shorten this war will save a million lives. If your nuclear weapons accelerate the conclusion, we’ll endure the cost, whatever it might be.”
Sarah nodded. She had made similar arguments herself◦– all of them theoretical. Now, the visual evidence of the bomb’s power confronted her. It was real. “I understand. Just give me a few minutes.”
Mountbatten nodded, backed out of the doorway, and closed the door.
Sarah sat on the cot in the room. She bent her head, closed her eyes, and prayed. She prayed for the families that had been destroyed by Hiram’s nuclear weapon, for the friends she feared she might never see again. When she opened her eyes, they fell on a poster tacked to the back of the bathroom door. It depicted a young mother sitting at the base of a tree with two children. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose up from the city toward the barrage blimps floating above. A ghostly Adolf Hitler whispers in the woman’s ear “Take them back!” urging her to return her children to the city. Printed below the picture were the words “DON’T DO IT MOTHER◦– LEAVE THE CHILDREN WHERE THEY ARE◦– A Message from the Ministry of Health.”
Sarah made up her mind. She stood, straightened her clothes, attempted to fix her hair, and returned to the conference room. They had an invasion to plan.
28
1300 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, near Lutzelbourg, Moselle department, Occupied France
The heat rising from the decimated landscape around Saarbrücken had provided additional lift, which enabled him to drift all the way to the rendezvous point in Lutzelbourg in four jumps. Each landing sent screaming hot pain from his ankle up through his leg. Once the meadow north of town revealed itself in his night vision goggles during his final jump, he had taken a small chance and deployed his parachute rather than put himself through another hard landing. He settled down to rest the ankle and wait for Danette and Deborah.
Hiram grew frustrated as the day wore on with no sign or signal from the two women. He had taken a few more of the pain killers, but the pain in his left ankle only grew. Repairing the damage took a back seat as his body combatted Hagar’s Curse, a result of the hours spent inside the pod waiting for the initial contamination generated by the Mark XII explosion to dissipate.
He’d launched two drones earlier in the day, a surveillance drone to search for Deborah and Danette, and an Icarus drone to establish communication with the rest of the team. Neither had accomplished the assigned task. That the latter wasn’t working did not come as a surprise. The Icarus drone’s manual stated that upper atmosphere ionization◦– a side effect of the bomb◦– temporarily disrupted communications. Hiram expected it to clear up soon.
His inability to locate the two women closest to him troubled him more. The farmhouse where they had planned to take refuge had been blown away, but they should have been able to survive in the cellar. Now, he couldn’t even tell if the place he sent them even had a cellar. Had they made it to the farmhouse? He found no sign of the railbike anywhere between Lutzelbourg and Spicheren. I can’t have lost them now, after all it took to get them out of the camp. Ozreini Adonai elohai. Help me Lord, my God.
29
1630 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, Lutzelbourg, Vichy France
Hiram climbed down into the pod to grab an HF radio. His ankle screamed in its cast as he climbed back out of the pod.
“Station Nineteen, this is Hawk, over.” The Marquis had an agent near Nancy, not far from Hiram’s current location. He tried several times before anyone answered his call.
“Hawk, this is Station Nineteen, over.” They kept the transmissions short to avoid triangulation of the source from anyone monitoring HF communications.
“Station Nineteen, have my packages been delivered? Over.”
“Hawk, affirmative. Primary package delivered along with sky jockey to an Anglo sewer pipe four days ago, over.” Sarah had boarded a sub, along with a pilot.
“Station Nineteen, status of the second package? Over.”
“Hawk, secondary package lost in transit. No additional information, over.”
“Roger, Station Nineteen.” What happened to Maria? Hiram provided the location where he’d hidden the last eight crates of 40mm grenades, and signed off.
He had a few hours to kill before travelling again, so he headed back into the pod to grab a snack and a few more pain killers. As he reached the bottom of the ladder, pain shot up his leg. It occurred to him that he might be doing more damage to his ankle hobbling down into the pod after each flight than landing in the wingsuit. His body had no time to recover from the injury and each minute he spent inside the pod ensured that any effort to heal his body was negated. At this rate, his ankle would never heal. Parachuting to the ground might provide less impact. He looked up at the ceiling-mounted portal, and then over at the aerial portal. I wonder…