Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (8 page)

Heinkel’s face darkened. “You are probably right. And that is not good for us. Milch has never liked me. He
doesn’t like Willy Messerschmitt, either, but he dislikes him less than he dislikes me. We may be in for a very difficult time with the jet engine, Dr. von Ohain.”

The meeting ended in disarray, Eissenlohr continuing to follow Heinkel, helping him with his coat, opening the door, scuttling ahead to open the door of the big Mercedes. The others filed out, leaving von Ohain slumped at the table, his head in his hands.

Obermyer paused by his chair. “Dr. von Ohain, do not let this stop you. Things like this always happen in wartime. It may turn out for the best. Udet was not the right man for his job; perhaps Milch will be.”

Von Ohain looked up, surprised at the serious sentiments from the normally sardonic Obermyer, wondering if he was sincere or if he was baiting him. Uncertain, he simply nodded and said, “I hope you are correct.”

And, unable to resist, Obermyer added, “For the sake of Germany and the Führer.”

Von Ohain, clearly overwhelmed by the rapid pace of developments, knew he should say something but did not. As the two men parted, each knew that the other would require watching.

November 18, 1941, Friedrichschafen

Making money in Nazi Germany was difficult; hiding the fact that you made it was even more so, and Fritz Obermyer was grateful for the means provided by a small inheritance from his mother, Lottie, and the cover provided by a substantial working relationship with his uncle Otto Kaufmann. Otto was the black sheep of the Obermyer family. Fritz’s mother was the only one who understood Otto and stood up for him after he had avoided service in the Kaiser’s army by going to Switzerland in 1910. His father—for whom he was named—had immediately declared Otto an outcast. His brothers never spoke
of him again, but Lottie loved him and nurtured him with news and letters, including the doleful news of the loss of two of his three brothers in combat.

Otto was hardworking and smart and circled the postwar economic turmoil in Germany like a vulture, descending from his aerie in Switzerland to buy up good property cheaply even as he expanded his Swiss interests to include an optical firm, extensive real-estate holdings in Geneva and Zurich, and a small bank devoted primarily to international trade.

In 1925, just as the depression and the massive inflation were tearing Germany apart, Obermyer had visited his uncle in Geneva, bringing word of Lottie’s death. Otto was impressed by his nephew and offered to bring him into the family business. Obermyer appreciated the offer but refused graciously, suggesting instead that they might someday find a way to work together. Obermyer’s concept of work did not coincide with Otto’s view that sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, was about right.

Obermyer found a way in 1937, when his combined payments from Heinkel, Messerschmitt, Bloch, and Lockheed became too large to conceal in Germany. Uncle Otto maintained several accounts for him and was happy to send one of his trusted assistants to and from Friedrich-shafen to accommodate Obermyer’s growing financial situation. In turn, Obermyer looked after Otto’s interests in Germany as well as he could without making their relationship too obvious.

Obermyer had booked rooms for himself and Müller in the Bayerischer Hof, a small, comfortable hotel on the promenade bordering Lake Constance. The rooms were plain, clean, the furniture from Bismarck’s era, and the quiet employees sophisticated enough to know when to look the other way. Heinkel had booked Obermyer in at the Adlon in Berlin once; it was far more luxurious, but he preferred the simplicity of the Bayerischer
Hof, where he could afford to indulge himself in a small suite without exciting comment.

Obermyer liked to walk down to the water’s edge after an early breakfast, smoke a cigar, and contemplate his future. Convinced that Germany was going to lose the war, he wanted to make realistic plans. Some of his confidants talked about escaping to Spain or to Argentina when the time came, but that made no sense to Obermyer. Why go somewhere and find the same sort of corrupt Fascist government and the same stagnant economies? It didn’t make any sense. He wanted to go only to the United States. It would take an enormous amount of preparation to avoid being caught before he left—or after he arrived. He would need a complete change of papers, a new history, perhaps even some cosmetic surgery, but most of all, he would need plenty of money in the bank in the United States.

He was ready to write off his German holdings right now; they would be worthless after the war. The Swiss interests he could maintain, letting Uncle Otto’s firm handle them. In time, Obermyer would just sell everything out and move all his assets to California, which loomed in his mind as a golden land of plenty, filled with big cars, beautiful girls, and great opportunities for his particular brand of crime. It occurred to him that if he was able to save enough money, he might not have to “work” as he had done in the past and instead perhaps just invest in some legitimate business.

During the last war, both zeppelins and aircraft had been constructed in the huge hangars only a few miles from where Obermyer stood, gazing out over the water. The same designer who had created some of the giant seaplanes of the era, Claude Dornier, now operated one of his factories on the same site, turning out bombers and night fighters. The latter were not the object of Obermyer’s interest, however. He needed some apparently secret tidbits to keep both Ernst Heinkel and Willy Messerschmitt
happy. It was known generally in the industry that Dornier was working on a super-fast twin-engine fighter, a radical airplane with one engine in the nose and another, a pusher, in the tail. The Heinkel firm had been awarded a subcontract to develop new outer wing panels for the airplane, to improve its high-altitude performance, and this provided an adequate reason for Obermyer’s visit. Yet he had to come back with something from the Dornier factory floor on a new development, a big problem, a future project, or, even better, a personal scandal that would satisfy his patrons’ bottomless thirst for information.

In his first meeting of the morning, Obermyer would talk to Uncle Otto’s representative and transfer both cash and documents for deposit in Switzerland, along with instructions for their further transfer to his accounts in the Bank of America in the United States. He smiled at the thought that the only worthwhile thing Italy had done for the Axis was have an emigrant found an American bank for him to use.

Then at eleven, Ernst Staiger, his local contact in the Nazi hierarchy in the Dornier factory, would drop by, expecting to get a sumptuous lunch and his usual payoff. It always surprised Obermyer how cheaply information could be purchased, if the transaction was couched in old comrade terms over a heavy lunch, well lubricated by alcohol, even from men whose lifework was denouncing traitors. Extracting information would be painless this time, given the contractual connection with Heinkel and Staiger’s partiality for cognac. Obermyer had brought two bottles, one to drink and one to give him. It would be a very inexpensive exchange.

Exactly at ten there was a knock on the door. Obermyer opened it to find a stunning brunette tipping the uniformed attendant who had escorted her to his room.

Uncharacteristically speechless and mindlessly worrying that Müller, just a door away, would somehow intrude, Obermyer waved her in. She moved easily, walking
to the table to deposit a large leather briefcase, then turned to shatter him with a smile. Even in her hat and loden overcoat, she radiated beauty.

“My name is Gertrude, and Uncle Otto told me to wish you a very happy forty-first birthday!” With her right hand she removed her hat, slinging it to the table; with her left, she dropped her overcoat, standing before him stark naked except for her high heels, stockings, and extraordinarily fancy garters. She was breathtaking, holding herself so that her breasts were lifted, smiling as innocently as a choir girl.

Obermyer was stunned; Otto was right, it was his birthday, but what was he thinking of? Their relations had always been perfectly correct; there had never ever before been any suggestion of this sort of earthy good humor. But Gertrude was beautiful and time was precious. He swept her up and carried her to the bed, wishing that he had never made an appointment with Staiger and hoping against hope that Müller would sleep in.

• THE PASSING SCENE •

German advance stalls in Russian winter after 750,000 casualties; the United States loans $1 billion to the Soviet Union; National Academy of Sciences recommends immediate construction of an atom bomb; Allied shipping losses continue to rise; German raider
Atlantis
sunk; Leningrad under siege.

CHAPTER FOUR

December 8, 1941, La Jolla, California

Vance Shannon sat alone in his library, the radio on, the newspapers discarded on the floor. His usual loneliness and sense of Margaret’s passing was gone, submerged in his anger over the news from Pearl Harbor, the anger visible in the reddening of the scar across his forehead, a souvenir of an early crash. Talking to himself, he asked, “How could they have sucker punched us like this? Didn’t we have any reconnaissance aircraft? How could they get that close to Pearl Harbor and not be seen?”

As usual, he was thinking about Tom, on his way to the Pacific with his Marine squadron.
He’ll be in the thick of it, soon,
he thought. Vance was very familiar with the Grumman Wildcat Tom was flying, and he went to his files to see what he had on the Mitsubishi Zero that had been a major force in the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor.

He pulled out a folder, knowing there would not be much. In an adjacent file, he had six full file folders on
the Messerschmitt Bf 109; the Zero’s folder had only half a dozen items in it, mostly culled from popular sources. A former Air Corps officer whom he had met on one or two occasions, Claire Chennault, had issued a warning about the capabilities of the Zero, but these had been discounted. Vance himself had not taken them seriously at the time—it was impossible that a carrier-based fighter could outperform land-based fighters, just in the nature of things. Carrier fighters had to be stronger to take the shock of landings, and that meant weight that detracted from performance. Now it looked like he and everyone else were wrong.

Well, some isolationist congressman, a corn-belt isolationist who had voted against Lend-Lease, had said it best; “Now we have to lick the hell out of them.” And that was true. Japan would have to be defeated and Germany, too; there was no way out now.

One item in Vance’s folder shocked him. It was an American air attaché’s report on Japanese selection and training of pilots. If what he said was true—and Vance believed it was; it was written in very thoughtful terms—the Japanese were far more selective about their pilots and far more demanding in their training. Listening to Tom talk about Pensacola or Harry about Randolph Field, Vance would never have believed it. But now the Japanese pilots, and their planes, seemed incredibly formidable.

Still speaking aloud, though there was no one in the house, he said, “We have lots of catching up to do. Let’s just hope we do it before something happens to Tom or Harry.”

As his anger built over the surprise attack, he was awash in emotions. He thought about calling Hap Arnold and asking for a commission and a combat assignment. For a moment his imagination ran away with him and he was in France again, flying his SPAD XIII in his last dogfight, remembering how he had stitched the fabric
with bullet holes, working from the tail right up through the cockpit and into the fuel tank. The enemy Fokker D VII had lurched forward, the pilot dead, the spin intensifying as flames ate away the fabric on the left wings. Then Vance considered the reality: a desk at Wright Field or in the Pentagon, no flying, no combat, no engineering, just endless paperwork. He could do more good by staying out.

July 18, 1942, Leipheim, Germany

A cata log of Messerschmitt products carpeted the undulating, hill-bounded flying field outside the plant, with the preposterous Me 321 gliders looming over everything, their enormous 180-foot wings dwarfing their towplanes, the twin-engine Me 110s. More than one hundred had been built in anticipation of invading Great Britain; now they were assigned the more mundane task of supplying the hard-pressed German Army in Russia. A few of the newer Me 323s were also on the line, really just strengthened Me 321 gliders, each equipped with six captured French Gnome-Rhone engines to help it lumber through the air.