1945 (45 page)

Skorzeny looked over at his anxious radio operator who had just overheard a contact between the American fighters and someone who was all too near to their own location. Whoever it was had the German take-off plans down pat, and so now the fighters did too. Indeed, as he was digesting this a fighter came streaking in, but it was flying by dead reckoning; its machine guns plowed a furrow parallel to the landing strip, and it disappeared into the night.

Had that furrow been on the other side of the strip—the two trucks and several commandeered autos had come to a halt and men started to scramble out of the vehicles when the Mustang interrupted the process. Now they were crawling out from under the trucks and from behind the cars. Several of them were moving slowly, walking with strange shuffling steps. One of them collapsed as Skorzeny watched. A familiar form began to slowly and painfully extract itself from the lead auto.

"Karl!" Skorzeny trotted toward him, but Radl held his hand up.

"Don't come near me."

Skorzeny slowed.

"We're dead men, Otto. The reactor blew with us right next to it. Maybe some of the men were far enough away, I don't know." He leaned forward, vomited a black gush of blood.

Gasping, Radl looked back up. "Get my boys who are still mobile out of here. Maybe some will live."

"Come on Karl, we're going home."

Radl weakly shook his head.

Probing fire, originating a hundred yards or so down the access road, burst out of the night. The security team answered it.

"We were trailed! Get out of here!" Radl paused to vomit again. His next words came out in a muttered gargle. "We'll hold them back. Let your men" — Karl waved toward the security team—"Fall back to the planes."

Skorzeny looked at his oldest friend, a man who had been with him from the very beginning, before war had made of him ... what he had become. For the first time in a decade he let emotion overcome reason, and stepped forward, arms outstretched.

But his friend staggered backward: "I'm covered with the stuff. Touch me and you'll get it too!"

Skorzeny felt restraining hands grabbing him from behind.

Radl looked up at him, smiling wanly. Then, as ever doing his job, he added a distraction. "Looks like you picked up a hell of a scar this trip, Otto."

Another burst from out of the darkness tore up the ground less than a meter away, but Skorzeny didn't move.

"Good-bye Karl," he whispered.

The medic, still holding Skorzeny, tugged gently at his elbow. Finally he. let himself be turned. Tears blinding his one eye, he followed the medic back toward the waiting planes. Walking backward, firing into the gloom, the security team fell back with him.

Skorzeny climbed into the plane waiting first in line, its engines howling at the delay. As the medic entered behind him and slammed the door, Skorzeny climbed up to the cockpit and sat in the jump seat behind the pilot.

"Go."

Instantly the pilot simultaneously released the brakes and hit the ignition button for the rocket-assisted-take-off packs. The plane leaped forward, twin tongues of fire jetting out from beneath the wings. Save for a single faint flare at the end, the runway was pitch black, the pilot steering by feel, while the copilot shouted off the rapidly building airspeed.

"One hundred and sixty!" the copilot roared, and both he and the pilot pulled back on their yokes. There was a jarring blow as the bottom of the plane struck something. Skorzeny 
waited for the impact, but they kept climbing. Then came the twin thunks as the spent rocket packs were jettisoned. Skorzeny signaled for the pilot to bank the plane hard to port so that he could study the inferno he had created.

In the middle of the turn the pilot shouted, "Plane Two is taking hits!" Skorzeny peered out the portside window. The second transport, its rocket packs still firing, was being laced by a stream of tracers coming in from its starboard side. Suddenly it fireballed. Seconds later the third plane burst through the
j
conflagration, still climbing. A moment later its rocket packs flamed out and it was shrouded in blessed darkness.

The fourth plane, the one carrying the survivors of Radl's team, never left the ground. The fire from a P-51 caught a wing during take-off, and the transport tilted over and pinwheeled down the runway, finally exploding in a smeared fireball that was answered in counterpoint by the timer-fused thermite grenades inside the planes abandoned for lack of passengers. Plane after plane exploded in flames, though not with the fully fueled enthusiasm of those with men aboard.

As the plane finished its turn and followed the Clinch
j
River north, Skorzeny looked down upon the visible evidences of his visit. Though few who followed him here were returning home, still he had won a famous victory. Next year on Victory Day they would sing of it, and him.

12:58 A.M.

Karl Radl watched as the plane carrying his men exploded in a blinding flash. Perhaps it was a mercy, he thought. Perhaps for all, certainly for many. There was a sporadic flurry of shots over by the trucks as the last of his doomed and dying rear guard collapsed, from weapons fire or nuclear poisons he wasn't sure. With a sigh of release he allowed himself to slide down the side of the car he had 
been leaning against, dropping his weapon as he did so. Strangely, the awful burning inside had become a warming glow, as if the invisible fire that had entered him had consumed all there was to consume, and was flickering down to a final charred ember.

"Here's another one!"

Radl looked up. Interesting. The stars were still out, the Moon—yes that was the Moon—was high overhead.

"He's still alive ... sort of."

Someone was blocking the light and he wanted to protest but the words somehow wouldn't come.

Words were being spoken. English. Yes, he could speak English ... or could he? Not just now, perhaps. How odd. He could understand it, but he couldn't remember how to speak it.

"Who are you?"

The other replied in German. Good. It was soothing to hear one's own language, here at the end. In gratitude he responded by looking up. The face before him flickered and glowed from the light of the funeral pyre of 264s on the runway.

"Radl—aren't you Karl Radl?"

'Yes . . . how do you know me?" Radl asked, using the intimate form, as if speaking to a friend.

"Jim Martel, American Navy. We met on Victory Day."

Radl smiled. "Victory Day . . . day of victory. Whose victory? Not mine. Not even Otto's, this time."

"Skorzeny. Where is he?"

Radl nodded to the airstrip.

"He got away, he always does. He always does."

He saw Martel leaning down, reaching toward him.

"Don't, and I speak as a friend. I'm dying from radiation, a very great deal of radiation. Don't, or you'll die too." Martel drew away.

Radl laid his head back, trying to see the stars just once more. But there was nothing there now, only darkness, and then, finally, a soft gentle light. He imagined himself moving toward it.

1:05 A.M.

Martel rose from Radl's side. As he stood, he realized that Marshall was standing at his side.

"What did he say?" Marshall asked.

"Skorzeny's alive. They got away."

"Well, that doesn't matter now," Marshall said. "It's what happens next, and what we do, that matters now."

Jim Martel turned and looked back at the fire that seemed now to spread from horizon to horizon, filling all the world, and all the future as well.

INTERLUDE

2:35 A.M.
Knoxville Airport

Lieutenant Commander James Mannheim Martel and General of the Army George Catlett Marshall were pressed gently back into their upholstered seats as the DC-3 that had been commandeered for their use lifted off from the Knoxville airport.

"Wondering why I dragged you along, Commander Martel?"

Jim hadn't really been wondering about much of anything. So much had happened to and around him in the last twenty-four hours that he was just observing without judgment. In his hypoadrenalized condition a surprise trip in an overloaded helicopter, followed by a quick transfer to an executive aircraft hardly counted as interesting.

"I figured you would tell me, sir."

"We'll be seeing the President this morning."

"Sir?"

"Do you recall the story of Saul of Tarsus?'

"Yes, sir, I do," Jim replied, puzzled. "I'll probably get this wrong, but as I recall, on the road to Damascus, Jesus appeared to Saul, saying, "Why do you persecute me so?" Saul was so impressed he changed his name to Paul. Changed his whole way of thinking, too ... Oh."

"Well, I'm not about to change my name, but my 'whole way of thinking' has just undergone a major shift. Listening to the dome-brains gathered in Oak Ridge was part of it, that and realizing just where we would be without them. Another part was watching you and Skorzeny—"

Jim snarled unconsciously at the name.

"—in action. Almost like mirror images of each other, but both so very good at what you do. Him as a super-commando, you as a superb improviser in an impossible situation, countering his every move, almost stopping him cold. But the clincher was realizing that we are in a de facto state of war with a power that makes the Japanese Empire at its height look like a Gilbert and Sullivan threat."

Jim, who would bear the scars of the Great Pacific War to his grave, was not pleased at this demeaning of a fierce and powerful enemy, but he took the General's meaning.

Marshall looked at Jim speculatively. "What chance do you think an unbiased oddsmaker would give us in the coming fight, Commander? One in three? Two in five?"

Jim shrugged. "We always start behind, sir. It's a national tradition by now."

"Not this far, Commander. Not this far." Marshall shifted in his seat, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He was silent for long enough that Jim began to wonder if he had gone to sleep, but apparently he was merely gathering his thoughts.

"When I spoke to the President, your name came up, probably because Donovan was with him. I recommended you for the Medal of Honor."

Jim's eyes flew open.

"But never mind that now."

"Uh..."

"It turns out you're not just a hotshot pilot and fast on your feet, but an acute technical military theoretician as well."

"Me, sir? I've thought about things a bit—"

"You're trying to tell me your father really wrote the piece in
Defense Review Quarterly
on 'Carrier Reaction Times and the Jet Threat'?"

"Er... he had a big hand in that one, sir."

"How about the one on airborne radar-vectoring?"

"That one was pretty much mine."

"The one on aircraft as 'weapons platforms'? 'Stand-off and Deliver' was the title, as I recall."

"Guilty as charged, sir, except for the tide."

"Right, I just wanted to be clear. Not that the job you did wouldn't qualify you for a spot on my team anyway. I can always use somebody fast and brave and smart, someone who isn't afraid to talk back but usually doesn't. But those articles that got you in so much trouble ... did you know I'm familiar with them? Irritating as the devil, a couple of them. But even the ones that I disagreed with at the time I now see to have been spang-on. I'm told that your analyses of German weapons while in Berlin also had that intriguing/irritating, spang-on quality. That makes me interested in you on a whole different level. In a Saul of Tarsus kind of way, if you see what I mean."

"No sir, I'm not sure I do."

"Hmph. Maybe I've left a few steps out. Look, I don't suppose the whole thing really came to me in a flash last night as I watched X-10 head for the stratosphere —the notion is too detailed and polished for that—but I do have a new model — a new paradigm — on how a modern democratic state should organize itself to make a surge-effort in war. This is radical stuff, Jim, and I'm going to need a cadre of thinkers, thinkers, who can take my ideas and run with them and build on them. And that's why I'm dragging you along to Washington."

"Sir, I'm all ears."

"In a nutshell, I want to, as it were, give them an unlimited charge account, and toss them into Macy's Department Store."

"Sir?" Then Jim recalled the joke about every woman's dream and nodded politely for the General to go on.

Marshall paused in thought. "By that I mean, give them the greatest possible freedom to shape the very goals they pursue ... or to put it yet another way, to
call
the shots, not just make them. Consider: We won the Great Pacific War as fast as we did by assembling first-rate teams without regard for the organizational provenance of the team members. Then we set them goals and arranged things so that they could charge forward full-bore, with no bottlenecks, or bureaucratic jerks, or surprise budgetary constraints allowed to get in the way. That was enough to whack Japan pretty good. It wasn't really a contest except in the very short run."

"Not after Midway," Jim agreed.