Collision of Evil (31 page)

Waldbaer had ordered that three copies of the diary be made: one for the official file, one for his use, and one for Hirter’s review. He and the American sat in the detective’s office, Waldbaer in his desk chair and Hirter occupying a faded couch.

“Start at the entry for November ninth, nineteen forty-four. Read it aloud, Hirter, I find it a good method to give a text complete attention.”

Hirter flipped through the sheets of paper until he arrived at the desired date. Kaltenberg had written in disciplined block letters, making it a simple task to read the text. Hirter cleared his throat and read the entry.

9 November, War Year 1944

Today began directed assignment to the high-security facility at Dyernfurth-am-Oder. I had stated my preference for a
frontline assignment but was overruled by the Office of the
Reichsfuehrer-SS
. Nothing to be done.The ride from Berlin was depressing. It rained the entire way, and I expect sleet tonight once the temperature drops. The officer quarters here are adequate, but there is little coal for the stove in my room due to a general shortage. After depositing my kit in my quarters, I was escorted to the facility and found it unscathed by bombs. In fact, I was told by a lieutenant that this place has never been hit by Allied bombers.They must be unaware of what work goes on here; otherwise we would surely merit their attention.

Hirter looked up questioningly at his counterpart.

Waldbaer nodded. “Keep reading.”

Hirter found his place in the text and resumed the narrative.

The production facility is now to come under direct SS control, as there have been too many accidents under the Army Weapons Office and a sense that the technicians are being sloppy. I don’t know if this is the case, but we’ll see. The equipment located in Building 144 is impressive, much of it lined with silver as an anti-corrosive. Production is dangerous work. When the production step is reached where the chemical agent is reacted with alcohol and degassed, there have been safety problems. As an alternative solution, we have experimented with a reaction using sulfur, which has advantages, but it’s complicated and adds further production steps. Air handling and filtering is a critical element, and this is where the facility has suffered fatalities. There have been ten deaths so far. The last was a month ago, when a tear in a technician’s protective clothing proved deadly. The poor fellow began experiencing breathing difficulty and he knew what that meant. His comrades tried to assist, but in his panic he fought them off, wide-eyed and screaming into his mask. The convulsions started shortly thereafter and there was nothing to be done, save the burying.These things have to stop; it is affecting morale. The present production design can be summed up graphically in the following way.

Hirter turned the page and saw a complicated sketch. He dropped the papers into his lap. “Kommissar, we should get Chalmers. The content will make a lot more sense to him than to me.”

“Chalmers gets a copy,” the detective replied. “But the point here, Hirter, is that Kaltenberg was involved in chemical weapons production, no doubt about it. And we know from Chalmers’s tests that the agent involved is Sarin. Fact: Al-Assad and his friends have been using German equipment and technical knowledge from the facility at Dyernfurth.”

Hirter considered. “We have the equipment now. Al-Assad can’t produce any more of it, and he’s probably more concerned about hiding from the police than anything else. We have them off balance.”

“For the moment. But they produced the Sarin and doubtless have it with them.”

Hirter frowned slightly. “I guess that’s true. Do we have any clue as to the Sarin dispersion mechanism?”

Waldbaer repositioned himself in his oversized chair. “Keep reading.” Hirter returned to the text, skipping past the illustration.

The production of Sarin is not the sole reason that I was sent here. My superiors have made it clear that the Reich requires a means of chemical agent delivery other than artillery shells, the manner in which mustard gas was employed at the front in the first war.We are devising a delivery mechanism portable enough to be carried by a single soldier.

The tactical requirement is for the gas to be used against Allied troops in enclosed spaces. Barracks, for example. Or a staff meeting of enemy officers in a house. A dispenser solution seems the most attractive for this purpose. I presume that we will need to marry the delivery device to a timing mechanism to activate distribution. To be militarily useful, our end product needs to be a Sarin container that can be infiltrated behind enemy lines by action groups and covertly deposited in enclosed spaces where troops are gathered. A timer is engaged and the
device activates at the assigned hour and minute, giving the German soldiers time to leave the area before the Sarin is spread.

The idea is to create panic behind the lines, bringing the Allied advance to a halt.This will require mass use of the devices, presumably hundreds of them. I find the idea compelling. Sarin in its gas form is odorless and invisible. Its presence is extremely hard to detect. Enemy forces will start dying and not know why. Employment of this weapon will not only cause significant casualties, the psychological impact should be tremendous, spreading horror through enemy ranks. Chaos could ensue.

Employing Sarin tactically can change Germany’s strategic fortunes. If the relentless enemy advance can be halted, we will have time to get other weapons into the fight in quantity – jet aircraft and more accurate versions of von Braun’s rockets.The fact that so much hinges on this Sarin weapon places enormous responsibilities on my shoulders. I get stomach cramps just thinking about it. I must not fail, whatever the difficulties.

Hirter lowered the pages to his lap and raised his eyes to the detective. “What a horror show. This Kaltenberg was a choice son of a bitch.”

“Yes,” Waldbaer replied, the single word unadorned.

Hirter drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment and raised his eyebrows. “Wait a minute. As chilling as it is to read this diary, there’s something we shouldn’t forget. Sarin was never used. As far as I’m aware there wasn’t one instance of chemical weapons being employed in the Second World War, at least not in Europe. Am I right, Kommissar?”

Waldbaer pulled himself from his chair and strolled the office, hands thrust into his trouser pockets. “You’re right, Hirter. The Nazis didn’t use gas. Hitler never gave the order to use it. Hitler had been gassed on the Western Front in 1918. Maybe he retained an aversion to the weapon. Or maybe the Germans knew that if they employed gas, the allies would eventually do the same, wiping out any strategic
advantage. Who knows? Based on the diary entries though, Kaltenberg seemed convinced that if he could solve the problem of a viable delivery system, Sarin would be employed. Desperate times produce desperate decisions, and things were not looking good for German fortunes in late 1944.”

“Maybe Kaltenberg was overly optimistic about his ability to weaponize Sarin. What was it Clausewitz said? In wartime even the simplest task becomes difficult?” Hirter said.

“Let’s read on,” Waldbaer instructed.

The diary was not an uninterrupted chronology of nerve agent production. Waldbaer and Hirter flipped through pages dealing with Kaltenberg’s comments on food shortages and the poor quality of wartime sausage. He noted the passage above Dyernfurth of allied bomber fleets on their way to pulverize German cities, and he wrote of the carnage wrought in Berlin, Chemnitz, and Frankfurt.

Some entries were more memorable.

Two Wehrmacht deserters were discovered Tuesday as they passed through Dyernfurth.The field police asked me what to do with them. I had them hanged in the town square. We let their corpses swing for two days before burial. I had placards strung around their necks reading “I betrayed the Fatherland,” in the hope that it will be a salutary message for other weak hearts contemplating desertion.

Eventually, the account of events at the chemical production site resumed. Hirter read aloud to Walbaer.

Today a breakthrough.We have fabricated a nickel container and filled it with Sarin. A corrosion-resistant spray mechanism my team developed has been fitted to the top of the container, wired to a compact timing device manufactured in Essen. Although heavy for its size, the container can be carried by an infantryman. We set the timer for an hour delay and conducted a field test. It worked perfectly! When the timer engaged, the
sprayer activated and distributed the Sarin gas, propelling it several feet in all directions, a result of the rotating head that we used. The dispenser heads are pointed upward, to counter the effect of the particles descending to the ground too rapidly. I am extremely pleased with these results. I had the test filmed and have ordered the film dispatched to the Reichsfuehrer-SS for viewing.With developments at the front being so grim, this breakthrough came not a moment too soon.

“So, he did it after all,” Waldbaer interrupted. “He worked around the problems and found a functional delivery system for the Sarin. The troubling thing for us, Hirter, is that more than likely, al-Assad not only has Sarin gas, he has his smutty little hands on the dispersal containers as well.”

“And according to your instincts, al-Assad and his band are in an urban area. Which means, if they have functioning nerve agent devices, all they have to do is set them off.”

Waldbaer rubbed his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose. “We have to find them soon. Even if we locate the group, can we incapacitate them before they set the devices off?”

“In my view, Kommissar, this is a case where you can forget trying to take them alive. If we find them, kill them, just like that. Come in guns blazing. The consequences of permitting them a few seconds to react could prove disastrous.”

The detective half-snorted a derisive laugh and shook his head sideways. “My dear Hirter, Germany operates differently from the States, I’m afraid. The police require special orders to kill without warning. And that’s something beyond my personal jurisdiction. Something else—now that we’ve established not just the likelihood but the
probability
of a mass-casualty plot, I have to notify higher authority, the political level. You can imagine if we have some sort of Sarin incident and the politicians find out they weren’t informed of developments beforehand.”

Hirter nodded in agreement. “You’re right. Remember, though,
I’m here unofficially, and my people want to keep it that way.”

“We’ll find a way to handle that,” the detective replied. “I’ll brief my supervisor in Munich, and he can inform the minister-president of Bavaria, as a start. I guess we should go get Chalmers’s view on the diary and what it tells us about the threat. He might see something that we don’t.”

“Shave,” Mohammed al-Assad said to his companions, some of them still chewing the last remnants of their meal. They looked at him quizzically, not comprehending his words. They were gathered in Sayyid’s hotel room, and cardboard carryout trays, crumpled napkins, and plastic forks from a nearby Turkish restaurant littered the floor.

Al-Assad was seated on the narrow bed and he tugged at his full beard. “We need to shave off our beards. The time for the mission draws close, and we must alter our appearance. If the police know who we are, if they have driver’s license photos, they envision us with beards. So, no facial hair. We need to blend in with the population. Do your work delicately, brothers, I don’t want to see any nasty razor scars.”

One of the men leaning against the stained wall wheezed a low laugh. “Mohammed, I think that you want us to look like the infidels.”

Al-Assad fixed the man with an icy grin and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “That is exactly what I want, brother. When we leave this building for the last time, not long from now, I want us to look like the people who will be our victims. We will blend into them, however distasteful that might be for us. We will dress like them, comb our hair like them, and smile at them. And then we will kill them, these arrogant
kaffir
. Continue your prayers, friends, our time rapidly approaches.”

Chalmers, Hirter, and Waldbaer sat at an oval table on the back terrace of the Alpenhof. Chalmers was reading the copied pages of the diary and writing in a spiral notebook. Hirter and Waldbaer said little, sipping cappuccino from bright red mugs emblazoned with the hotel name. The table was situated directly in the late, deep yellow morning sunlight.

“Gentlemen, this is fascinating,” Chalmers said. “It tells us a lot about the industrial production of chemical agents in Germany in the 1940s. The illustrations make it clear that they were also experimenting in Dyernfurth with Tabun, another nerve agent. They settled on Sarin as more transportable. I’ve heard of Dyernfurth-am-Oder previously, by the way. The Russians captured chemical equipment there at the end of the war, and shipped it to the Soviet Union on Stalin’s orders. It became the genesis of the Russian chemical weapons program, which produced tons of stuff during the Cold War.”