The Haigerloch Project

Now once again there was an invisible line to be crossed. But this time there was no magic of innocence. Only the promise of danger — perhaps death.

They walked on; two ordinary townspeople to be lost among the thousands of workers crowding the town. No one would pay them special attention….

It was dusk. 1817 hours, Saturday, March 24, 1945, when Dirk and Sig entered Hechingen.

In his office at Gestapo Headquarters, Standartenführer Werner Harbicht sat staring angrily at a report brought to him earlier. He tapped his pencil on his desk in exasperation.

He was dealing with imbeciles!

18

The descriptions were of no earthly use.

Harbicht slapped the papers on his desk an angry, backhanded blow. Zum Teufel damit! — the devil take it! The investigating officer in the field must have been a first-class Erdkloss, he thought in disgust — one of those country clods, so dumb he couldn't find a turd in a cow pasture. The information the man had managed to obtain from his interrogation of the suspect was utterly inadequate: An Unteroffizier was under arrest, accused of stealing food from the local farmers while on duty. Routine. He had been discovered at his post on a roadblock near the town of Lahr eating a large, homemade sausage. The matter had been referred to the Hechingen Gestapo at once simply because the orders to establish the roadblocks had come from that headquarters. Harbicht scowled at the report. His first impulse had been to pick up the phone and thoroughly ream the ass of the unit CO responsible for bothering the Gestapo with such stupid trivia. But he had read on. The Unteroffizier had insisted that he had been given the sausage by two men passing through the roadblock. Two bicyclists carrying rucksacks. Time — Saturday, March 24, about 0600. About! Harbicht could taste his irritation. The inexactness was not to be tolerated. Their papers had been in order, according to the sergeant. Soldbuch. Work permit. The men were from Hechingen. Hechingen? But the descriptions of them given by the non-com were utterly useless. One of them was a discharged soldier. Wounded. But it was not known what kind of wound. The other was a foreign worker. Austrian? Czech? Italian? The Unteroffizier could not remember. The men were medium height. Medium build. Medium-color hair. Medium age. Medium—damn and double damn! The observations of an idiot — most certainly below medium intelligence!

Nevertheless, one statement in the report had caught Harbicht's interest. The men had mentioned to the Unteroffizier that they had been visiting in a village called Langenwinkel. With the family of the local Ortsbauernführer. And Langenwinkel was hard on the restricted zone, only a few kilometers from the front-line sector hit by the enemy combat-patrol assault that night….

Who were the two anonymous bicyclists? What were they? Holiday travelers? Black-marketeers? Or — infiltrating saboteurs? If—if, in fact, they did exist at all except in the self- defensive imagination of the Unteroffizier…

He frowned. He would have that Ortsbauernführer brought to Hechingen. But it would have to wait. He was due at the Haigerloch plant in less than an hour. Berlin had requested that he attend an urgent, high-level conference. It was the kind of request not to be ignored.

He would get to the Langenwinkel matter as soon as he returned.

* * *

In addition to himself there were seven men seated around the conference table. Nearly all of them were smoking, Harbicht noted. The denseness of the smoke and the tension in the air were about equal, he thought. He knew all the men by name — and, of course, dossier — but he had met only one of them personally. Professor Reichardt. Dieter Reichardt, chief of the Haigerloch Project. The other men were top project scientists and an SS Obergruppenführer — SS General — from Berlin. A special representative of the Führer himself, flown down only hours before.

Harbicht looked at each of the sober men in turn. “The Uranium Club,” they called themselves in private. He frowned at the frivolous breach of security — however “private” it might be. The code name for the group was actually the Speleological Research Unit. Aptly chosen, he thought. From the rear window in the Swan Inn, where the conference was taking place, he could see the heavily guarded entrance to the complex of caves that had been carved and blasted into the granite bowels of the mountain itself. Those caves housed the most sensitive phase of the Haigerloch Project. The atomic pile…

The SS general stood up, ramrod stiff, waiting until he had the full attention of all.