Alternative 3, p.3
Alternative 3, page 3
Nimitz sat forward in his chair. ‘That would explain some interesting comments from a Kraut navy admiral in ‘43. Apparently he and the rest of the submarine fleet took credit for having built something pretty special for the Führer. Called it a Shangri-la on land.’
‘Not one for exaggeration, was he,’ said Truman. He wasn’t smiling now.
The men sat silent, each lost in his own private nightmare — that the man they all thought dead might not only be alive, but was probably well resourced in some hidden, impregnable fortress in the middle of the world’s most isolated continent, plotting to continue the dream of the Third Reich.
Truman got up from his desk and returned to the window.
‘I want him found, and I want the base A-bombed.’
‘Mr President, if it were that easy, believe me . . .’ Stimson shook his head in frustration.
‘Of course it’s easy. We fly over it and bomb the hell out of anything we find down there.’
‘He’s right, Harry,’ said Acheson. He hardly ever called Truman by his first name, especially in front of others. But it made him listen when he did. ‘If we dropped an atom bomb down there on the ice cap, it’d melt a hundred thousand tons of fresh water into the sea. Maybe more. That would raise the oceans by at least three inches overnight. Apart from some low-lying flooding in Asia and northern Africa, that’s the good news. The bad news is that amount of fresh water would alter the salinity of the Southern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. That means it would heat faster, and that would permanently change the mid-Atlantic current, triggering a series of super-storms right across the globe to Kentucky. In terms of American loss of life, we could drop one in the middle of Times Square and still not even come close.’
Truman looked thoughtful. ‘So Antarctica’s not such a crazy place to build his base after all.’
‘There’s another reason, sir,’ said Forrestal. He paused, looking at Acheson. ‘Technology — or more specifically, Nazi flying-disc technology.’
Truman’s eyes narrowed, his brow creasing above his glasses. ‘I had a feeling we’d be back with the flying discs soon enough.’ He sighed. ‘All right, James, take us through it.’
‘We have good reason to believe the Krauts were more advanced in the area of military technology than we thought. Especially flight technology.’ He pulled a thin file from a satchel at his feet and sat it on his lap. ‘After the unconditional, we found that most of their experimental research bases were either blown up, or destroyed in the fighting. But over the next few months we discovered scientific papers hidden all over Germany — in tunnels, dry wells, ploughed fields, riverbeds, even in cesspits. We found evidence of things like heat-guided ground-to-air missiles, sonic-guidance torpedoes, highly advanced electrical submarines — over a hundred of which have apparently just disappeared into thin air I might add. But there were also plans of rocket planes that could fly even faster than the ME–262s and other vertical-rising jet aircraft, and even the beginnings of an atom-bomb project, and a manufacturing process for a metallic material that could withstand temperatures of about a thousand degrees. That’s centigrade, Mr President.’
Truman nodded thoughtfully. ‘How much did the Russians get?’
Forrestal pursed his lips. ‘Probably as much as we have, possibly more.’
‘How much more?’
‘We think they got a wealth of documentation from German bases out east — including buzz bombs and V2s, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, a whole heap of technical equipment they found stranded on the docks at Lubeck and Magdeburg, and around 6000 technical specialists.’
‘Six thousand!’ Truman was astounded.
‘But we think they have as little as we do on the flying-disc technology — perhaps even less,’ Forrestal added helpfully.
‘What’s so special about the discs? Hell, the Russkies could start World War III with that lot!’ No one laughed.
‘Flying-disc technology, and its components — design, engines, principles of lift, materials — is about as far ahead of what we currently have as you can get. Imagine a flying fortress over Waterloo, and you’re in the ballpark. This stuff is radical, even revolutionary, and probably constitutes the single biggest threat to American security ever. Period.’
‘That’s some claim, James,’ said Truman. ‘Care to elaborate for a simple infantryman?’
Forrestal pulled a thin sheaf of papers from the pile. The insignias looked unfamiliar to Truman, but he recognised the typing. It was German.
‘A flying disc was test-flown sometime in February of this year near the underground complex at Kahla. It reached a height of 40 000 feet at a speed of approximately 1250 miles per hour. It was piloted, and seemed to have some form of radio that made it disappear off a radarscope, basically rendering it invisible. It could also have had electromagnetically or electroacoustically controlled weapons.’
‘Twelve hundred miles an hour.’ Truman winced. He knew the rough flight specifications of the new P–51 fighter. If what he’d just heard was true, the entire US airforce had just been rendered obsolete. ‘Can we believe the documents? They’re not some elaborate hoax?’
Forrestal shook his head. ‘I don’t think they are, Mr President.’
‘So why don’t you give me something I can get my head around. If Adolf Hitler is sitting down in some ice grotto on the South Pole, I need to know what sort of threat he presents to us. Your report doesn’t explain why we’re making such a fuss of this flying-disc business. Hell, he could probably hit us sitting here right now with a long range V2 carrying a mini A-bomb!’
None of the men thought this in the slightest bit funny. Or far-fetched.
‘Ever heard of Foo-fighters, Mr President?’ It was Stimson’s turn.
‘Well I’m sure I’m about to,’ said Truman drily.
‘In the closing stages of the war, our night-bomber boys started reporting strange flying objects — they called them Foo-fighters. Name kinda stuck. Anyway, we suspected they might be some type of new secret weapon. But the strange thing was, they didn’t shoot our boys down — they just flew right alongside them. Soon we discovered a whole bunch of aircrews had seen them, but didn’t include them in their flight reports in case the squadron commanders thought they’d been drinking.’
‘Foo-fighters, huh?’ said Truman. ‘A radar-interference device?’
Stimson nodded. ‘Seems they were not only invisible to radar, they could screw up the radar in our night bombers. Soon we had dozens of reports of the Foo-fighters being spotted just before malfunctions in the planes’ radar systems forced them to return to base.’
‘The Krauts called it the Feuerball — the Fireball. But it was actually circular and flat, kind of like two tortoise shells put together like this.’ He clasped his fingers together into a clam-like position.
‘I don’t understand why our boys didn’t just shoot the damn things out of the sky.’
‘The pilots we talked to said the halo gave the impression of enormous size. It seemed to unnerve them long enough for the radar-jamming to occur. They were also worried that if the things exploded they’d take the plane down with it.’
Truman sat thinking to himself for a full minute, as though considering what he would have done if he’d been faced with a Foo-fighter. The men sat tight-lipped and serious. Finally he said, ‘And now we know it didn’t stop there, did it?’
‘Goering had put together Luftwaffe engineers, rocket engineers, physicists and materials experts, and together they built an even larger, piloted version of the disc, complete with a domed pilot’s cabin.’
‘How big is larger?’ asked Truman.
‘They said it had a diameter of 138 feet, and a height of about 30 feet.’
Truman whistled. ‘Was it destroyed as well, or do you think they took it to Shangri-la with them?’
Stimson drew a long sigh. ‘No, Mr President. We believe it was seized by the Russians and taken to Siberia along with the technicians who developed it.’
Truman exploded. ‘Goddammit, Henry!’ he said, slamming his hands down hard on the thick file on his desk. ‘You mean to tell me the Communists have got a factory going, turning these things out on a goddamn production line? Kind of shifts the balance of power, don’t you think? We know they’re already testing their own A-bombs up there. This is making my bowels move just thinking about it.’ He could be real eloquent when he was annoyed. He stood and turned back to the window. ‘What risk do these flying discs represent to us?’
There was a tight pause as the men collected their thoughts. Secretary of State Acheson was the first to respond.
‘Mr President, I believe we are facing a very real national security threat. Not just from the Russkies once they’ve worked out the technology in the discs, but from the Nazis themselves.’
Truman nodded once. ‘Go on.’
‘It seems an incident over LA we put down to war jitters back in ‘42 now appears to have been a flyover of Nazi flying discs.’
Truman turned, his expression incredulous as Acheson elaborated.
‘It happened in February ‘42. Only three months after Pearl, and the fear of a Japanese invasion was pretty real, so you can understand our scepticism at the time. But knowing what we know now . . .’ He trailed off for an instant. He too was having trouble coming to grips with the enormity of events unfolding in the quiet office.
The President seemed to have stopped listening. Perhaps he was back in ‘42. Before the death of F.D.R., before the bomb, and before this. The men sat patiently — this was how Truman made his decisions. He didn’t hurry, and he liked to have his advisors’ advice and opinions fresh in his mind.
When the President turned back from the window and leaned over his desk, they were in no doubt that the time for talking was over. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said softly, ‘I don’t have to remind you that we are on the verge of a war that could end up being more costly than the one we’ve just won. It’s going to be a war without frontlines, but a war nonetheless. And that war is going to be fought by scientists and technicians, and physicists and mathematicians. It’s going to be a technological war. And right now I feel like we’re losing. We have the A-bomb and we’re still losing. If I know Stalin he’ll be working those Krauts around the clock.’
He turned back to the window. ‘I don’t care if that Kraut son-of-a-bitch is licking his wounds in some ice castle on the South Pole, this is a matter of national security. He’s got what we need, and he’s got one hell of a fight on his hands because we’re going down there to get it.’
The men could sense the fire in the President’s belly. This was fighting talk. They just needed to convince themselves he was right.
Bay of Whales, Antarctica, January 1947
Captain Charles ‘Tommy’ Thomson figured this must be what it was like to be seasick. He’d never been seasick in his entire life, which was all the more remarkable for the fact that he’d spent most of his life not just at sea, but in some of the roughest and most remote seas on the planet. In the process he’d probably broken more ice than any seagoing icebreaker skipper in the polar seas. But the uneasiness in his stomach just wouldn’t settle.
He stood in the warmth of the bridge lighting a long puff on his home-made pipe as he surveyed the strange scene before him, and tried to pinpoint what it was that was wrong. Hell, if he was honest, there was plenty wrong about this whole operation. From the moment he’d received his orders from Navy Command back in late ‘46 about an expedition being led to Antarctica of all places, and by none other than Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the uneasiness had begun incubating in his gut. He’d been told that the expedition objective, code named Highjump by Nimitz, was to ‘construct and establish a temporary base on the Ross Ice Shelf in order to extend the explored area of the continent and to test material under frigid conditions’.
Baloney, thought Thomson. Good old-fashioned navy baloney. But baloney for what? He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what he was doing down here at the South Pole when the Soviet threat was at the other one. One thing was for sure though — someone was in a big hurry to get this circus up and running.
His own ship, the Navy Coast Guard Icebreaker Northwind, had been the first to leave its home port of Boston some two months ago, but preparations for the rest of the fleet hadn’t gone smoothly, and his seadog’s warning bell had started ringing loudly before he’d even lost sight of land.
Nevertheless, here he was. Moored in the Bay of Whales surveying the creation of Little America IV, just north of what had been Little America III — the west base of the 1939 US Antarctic Service Expedition.
It was a bizarre sight. A multitude of tents had sprung up in the middle of the white nothingness — enough to house the nearly 300 people stationed at the base — along with three compacted snow runways and a short airstrip of steel matting. Also moored in the bay were the rest of the vessels in his group, two cargo ships, the Yancey and Merrick, the submarine Sennet, and the expedition’s flagship, Mount Olympus. This group, imaginatively called Central, was to maintain the flight base for the aerial photography missions. The Eastern group was to head towards zero degrees longitude while the Western group was to circle the continent in a westerly direction until they met up with the Eastern group.
Even so, the sight of the 15 navy ships and an aircraft carrier of the full expeditionary force in the middle of the blue and white Antarctic landscape had cut a strange sight, even for someone of Thomson’s polar experience.
As he relit his pipe and watched the little black fur-wrapped spots moving about on the ice, he pondered the reasons for his uneasiness. Throughout October and November ‘46, preparations had been quick, almost recklessly so. The expedition force had been drawn from both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and so both coasts had been busy ordering parkas, goggles, boots and thermal underwear, and the special tents and matting for Little America’s new runway. Special dogsled trainers had been sent into the New Hampshire woods to work with the dogs. Caterpillar tractors, forklift trucks, powered sleds and other heavy machinery had been urgently manufactured and loaded onto railroad cars and shipped to docksides in California and Virginia. And yet, in all the haste, actual details of the operation were completely unknown.
The hasty preparation had been a concern, but that was minor compared with some of Thomson’s other worries about the expedition. For a start, every vessel was steel-hulled. Sure, steel is stronger than wood, but in Thomson’s experience, a wooden-hulled vessel caught in the vice-like grip of the pack ice tends to splinter slowly, whereas steel just rips apart. He knew that all but a handful of men — of which he was one — of the nearly 5000 military personnel involved, were totally lacking in adequate training for polar conditions.
Even the maps and charts had proven so unreliable they’d had to ask the British Admiralty to use theirs. Limey charts, for crying out loud. But they’d proven their usefulness as he’d relied on them almost exclusively to guide the ships of the Central group through the pack ice and into the Ross Sea. Not bad considering. In all it had taken him 15 days to negotiate the pack ice after which Northwind had broken a harbour out of the bay ice for the rest of the group.
But despite everyone’s reservations, and Thomson’s own uneasiness, things had gone reasonably well. The PBM flying boats had begun their long, hazardous photographic missions, which gave him plenty of time to chew on his pipe and mull over the real reasons for the expedition. Could be uranium, he thought. Apparently you need it for the bomb. But aerial photographs wouldn’t show up mineral deposits, so he’d ruled that out some time ago. Anyways, he figured, without any reference points in the thousands upon thousands of square miles of ice, most photos of the interior would look exactly the same — white. Just didn’t seem to make any sense. If he knew any better, he’d say the navy was looking for something. But what? And down here of all places . . .
‘Cap’n?’ It was Thomson’s XO.
‘Yuh?’ he said, breaking his train of thought, no closer to the answer.
‘We’re getting some interesting radio traffic from one of the PBMs. Thought you might want to listen in,’ said the XO helpfully.
‘Might as well,’ said Thomson. ‘Not as if I gotta helluva lot else to do anyways.’
Thomson followed his XO down to Ops, the room that handled all the sensors, such as radar, and the ship’s communications.
‘Not in trouble, are they?’ asked Thomson as he swung through the bulkhead door and down an almost vertical ladder.
‘Don’t think so,’ said the XO. ‘Sounds like they’ve discovered something.’
Thomson gave another snort. ‘Fly-boys probably discovered their second ass.’
The XO was grinning from ear to ear as they entered the communications nerve centre of the ship. The several navy personnel quietly and efficiently monitoring the equipment did not look up as their captain entered.
The XO passed Thomson a set of headphones and nodded to the radio operator as he pulled on another pair himself.
It took Thomson a few seconds to adjust to the thin static squawk of the radio channel. He leaned in front of the radio operator, tapped his headphones, and pointed to the sky. Instantly the static grew louder and he heard the radio officer on the USS Mount Olympus, the expedition’s flagship just across the icy bay, coming in loud and clear.
‘Say again George One, over?’
‘We have a visual anomaly on the eastern horizon. Current position sector 0-2-1-2. Request permission to change course to investigate, over.’
Thomson shot a questioning look at his XO, who simply shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows in response.
‘Please describe the anomaly, George One, over,’ came the response after a short pause.
‘I can’t believe this, Olympus . . .’ Thomson pressed his headphones closer to his ears. ‘We’ve got some land up ahead with no ice . . . repeat, no ice.’
