One man slumped into a cross-legged position on the floor plates, as if duty had been the only thing that had kept him on his feet. Two others shuffled to their bunks to die with their eyes closed. One stocky man—Werner could no longer remember anyone’s name—chose to remain at the bridge.
“This day Germany expects every man to do his duty,” the admiral had said before Werner’s first voyage four infinite years before. He closed his eyes, trying to think of women, of birthdays, of his family. He wanted bright memories.
His fondest recollection was of the Hotel Beausejour after fifty days of patrol, and the ecstasy of shaving, of standing long under the pounding spray of a hot shower, breathing deep of the steamy, clean air, and then sprawling out on the shamelessly spacious bed with its crisp white sheets. He would miss that.
Blinking, he stumbled his way toward the rear of the boat, his boat. The floor tilted from the submarine’s descent, and the effort of climbing uphill exhausted him. But Werner hauled himself through the last hatch to the engine room, where the three torpedoes waited.
The engine compartment reeked of fuel oil and grease and smoke, but now the electric engines hummed, sucking power from the batteries, turning the screw that drove the boat downward. Werner stopped, reeling as the black gulf of unconsciousness swelled around him. Intentionally, he smashed his knuckles against a bulkhead, and the stinging pain snapped him back to awareness. Nausea threatened to cripple him, but he managed to force it down.
The three aft torpedoes waited in their tubes, and it took all his strength to open their hatches. Steel-gray arrows, they looked small and familiar compared to the red-and-black rockets he had fired at New York City. These gray weapons had been his companions. They had helped him sink dozens and dozens of enemy ships. He called on them to perform one more service.
“We must all do our duty for Germany, gentlemen,” Werner whispered to the first torpedo casing. “I know you are hungry for the hull of a British ship. I’m sorry I must keep you here. It is a difficult thing to ask.”
He set the timer for the scuttling charges on all three torpedoes, then made his way downhill back to the control room.
Werner wanted someone to shout the alarm one last time, to spot an oncoming destroyer after U-415 had sunk another supply ship. They would make a crash dive and slip to safety under the waves. All his crew would be back alive and working together.
The U-boat always slid into the invisible depths while they could hear the whir of approaching ships above. They would brace themselves, knowing a spread of eight or sixteen depth charges would come floating down, racing the descent of the boat. Asdic pulses would ping on the hull like hammers trying to break in. The shock waves of exploding depth charges would send the men reeling along the floor plates, searching the hull seams for any fresh leaks. Werner would order drastic course changes, trying to fool the enemy above with a meandering course.
Sometimes it took hours or even a full day before the destroyer above gave up looking for the great raft of air bubbles gushing to the surface that would signify the destruction of a submarine. But they always gave up, and Captain Werner and his U-415 always survived.
Those had been years of glory.
The boat continued to descend, deeper than it had ever gone. At a depth of four hundred meters the hull groaned and squeaked as the underwater pressure worked to crumple the steel shell. The bottom of the Atlantic remained a long way below.
The creaking sounds made Werner think of all the good men who had died at sea. Their ghosts swam in the depths too dark for any sunlight. Did his own fallen companions wait for him even now? He thought of them swimming outside the U-boat, shadowy and formless, with tattered uniforms, accompanying his submarine, escorting it to its final resting place.
The hull plates shrieked from the strain. Somewhere in the aft compartment a rivet popped free with the force of a bullet, pinging and ricocheting three times before it clattered into the bilges.
Werner could hardly breathe. The sounds of the outside depths and the humming of the electric motors seemed to be the whispers of dead men.
He didn’t know how long it would take for the pressure to destroy the boat—five hundred meters deep now, he saw—or if the scuttling charges would detonate first.
He would know in a moment.
17
Los Alamos
July 1944
“Hitler had sometimes spoken to me about the possibility of an atom bomb, but the idea quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity. He was unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics.”
“It will not be a calamity if, when we get the answers to the uranium problem, they turn out negative from the military point of view, but if the answers are fantastically positive and we fail to get them first, the results for our country may well be tragic disaster. I feel strongly, therefore, that anyone who hesitates on a vigorous, all-out effort on uranium assumes a grave responsibility.”
Elizabeth rolled over and tried not to disturb Graham Fox. He made no sound as she moved away from him. She patted her clothes in a pile on the wooden floor beside the bed, searching for the clunky watch she had bought at the PX. Holding it up in the moonlight, she squinted to see the time.
Two a.m. Sleep had escaped her for the last three hours, but it seemed later than that. Then she noticed the second hand had stopped. She had forgotten to wind the damned thing again. Elizabeth really missed her LCD digital watch. No telling what time it really was. At this rate she’d be dragging by morning, and probably wouldn’t be able to slip back into the women’s dormitory in time to get past Mrs. Canapelli.
She had had the nightmare again, recalling the film General Groves had shown about the New York disaster. As she had expected, another twenty thousand people had died from radiation exposure in the following month and a half, but the Germans had failed to strike again, sending everyone into panicked speculation.
She still saw the low-altitude footage of deserted streets, the little girl crying beside her dead mother. It seemed so unreal. She couldn’t believe what the Nazis had done. It was inhumane, something that she had never confronted on such a scale. These people played with radioactivity, but had no fear of its dangers.
At times like this she could understand why she had told Feynman about the implosion scheme. She still had not been able to admit that to Graham Fox. She didn’t know what he would think of her hypocrisy. He grew more resistant toward the Project work day by day.
Elizabeth tried to convince herself. Would the method really have been overlooked if she hadn’t brought it up? Somehow she doubted it—the theoreticians kept dabbling with new and exotic ideas, and sooner or later they would have had the inspiration.
But would it have come in time?
It didn’t matter now. The point was that she had let the genie out of the bottle, and she couldn’t stuff the horror of nuclear warfare back inside. You can’t close Pandora’s box. If it hadn’t been Germany, then someone else would have abused the new knowledge of the atom. Before the war nuclear physics had been esoteric stuff, full of theory and empty of practical use, while geniuses strolled along under tree-lined lanes chatting about the possibilities. Nuclear Metaphysics?
If Germany did have the capability to dump radioactive dust on American cities, would they issue an ultimatum to President Roosevelt, force him to surrender? Even now Roosevelt was campaigning against Dewey for his fourth term, but the aftereffects of the New York disaster didn’t look good for him. The war continued to go badly for all sides, and Dewey’s rhetoric had grown ugly. The Los Alamos scientists muttered among themselves, but went back to work. Dewey knew nothing about the Manhattan Project. FDR’s own vice president, Henry Wallace, didn’t even know about it, unless secrecy had changed since the New York attack. If Roosevelt lost the election, the existence of Los Alamos might be in question.