The Haigerloch Project

How? Dirk thought…. It had been in Holland. He'd been on a mission against the V-2 launching sites on the Dutch coast north of Amsterdam near Bergen aan Zee. The RAF had blasted most of them, but they couldn't get to the rest without specific information Someone had to get it. London was being clobbered. He and his Dutch underground contact, Jan, had entered a bombed-out assembly plant, destroyed in a prior raid. Cautiously, ever wary of booby traps, they had entered an office in their search for a vantage point from which to observe a launching pad nearby…. He could see the scene. He would always be able to see it. The cracked walls and ceiling and the shattered windows; the debris-strewn floor, the broken furniture and the big desk — all covered with the fine white dust of crumbled plaster which coated every surface. And the single sheet of paper that looked like a folded blueprint lying on top of the desk with the word GEHEIM — Secret — showing through the dust! They had stopped. They had looked around carefully…. He saw the tiny patch of fresh yellow sawdust under the desk — in the same instant Jan reached for the document. He screamed his warning — which was drowned out by the blinding roar of the explosion. Jan had literally disintegrated. His own left side had been peppered with shrapnel and splinters from the massive desk. Had he not instinctively turned away, he would have been blinded. As it was, he was unable to hear and could barely see. The blood was running into his eyes. But he'd managed to crawl from the building and hide He'd been found by a Dutch girl with a round red face, a huge bosom — and the gentlest hands in the world. She had nursed him back to a semblance of health — and the underground had managed to evacuate him to England in the bilge of a fishing boat…. It had been a booby trap. The most ingenious he'd ever run across. And so simple. A small hole bored through the desk top and lined with a metal ring; a wire taped to the underside of the document lying over the hole, running down through the middle of the ring — without touching; the batteries of the electrical firing device hidden in the drawer below and wired to a couple of grenades. When the document was moved — and contact was made—boom!

The damned mission had been a bust. He'd brought nothing back — except a piece of shrapnel in his ass….

He looked at Sig.

“How did it happen?” He shrugged. “I goofed.”

“Was Captain Everett — eh — Corny your control officer before?”

“No,” Dirk said. “He's supposed to be tops — however hard that is to believe….”

His mind was suddenly filled with thoughts of the mission ahead of them. Foreboding chilled him.

The Nazi atomic bomb…

Three things, they'd told him and Sig, three elements were absolutely necessary in order to make this bomb. The basic fuel — probably uranium or plutonium; the laboratory and industrial set-up to develop and build a prototype; the know-how in the persons of a sufficient number of top scientists and technicians to mastermind it…

The Germans had all three.

The big question was — How far had they progressed? How close were they??

The answer to that was the mission.

He glanced at Sig. He wondered if his teammate realized how inextricably close their relationship would have to be. How completely they would have to depend on one another.

Their mission had been given a code name.

Operation Gemini.

We make a hell of a pair of twins, he thought caustically. A battered spook and a professional civilian!

He yawned and glanced at his watch. 2200 hours.

“Almost ten,” he said. “Come on, Siggy, let's haul our asses out of here. Time to grab some bunk fatigue….”

12

General McKinley could feel the pressure he was under as a dull ache building up behind his eyes, hard thumbs of pain pushing into his temples.

He was already deep in one crisis with no immediate solution in sight. And now another had been dumped in his lap.

He deliberately tensed every muscle to the point of trembling — then consciously relaxed. He felt better.

He looked at the clock on his desk, the one Helene had given him on their twenty-fifth anniversary. 1917 they had been married. War was ripping the world apart then. He sighed. The world had done a lot of running just to stay in the same damn spot…. The clock showed close to 1600 hours. He flipped the switch on the intercom.

“Barnes,” he said, “it's about 2200 hours in London.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get me that OSS captain — the control officer on Gemini — eh—”

“Captain Everett, sir.”

“Yes, Everett. Priority communication. He'll probably be at Milton Hall.”

“Yes, sir.”

McKinley sat back in his chair. He'd have to deal with this new crisis immediately. Push the other out of his mind.

And how the hell did you do that?

Congressional trouble was always a sizable pain in the balls.

When it threatened to involve the security of the Manhattan Project, it was a monumental one.