Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

29.

East Coast, 1945

William Donovan, head of the Office for Strategic Services and a Brigadier General, knew he was in trouble.

He’d seen it coming for a long time, and it was a freight train along whose front bumper were written the words “J. Edgar Hoover.” Hoover, the little bulldog who decades earlier had taken command of an obscure police agency of the Justice Department, the Bureau of Investigation or B.I., had made himself a leading Washington power broker. Upon the death of FDR, whom Hoover had loathed, Hoover’s first action had been to call his office (now the Federal B.I. and soon, he hoped, the World B.I. or something equally grandiose—he had already staked his claim on the entire South American intelligence territory) and request the full dossier on Harry S. Truman. For Hoover had learned over the years that the way he could exert power over people was to gather as much information on them and keep secret files. Everyone had some nasty little secret—and Hoover made it his business to know.

Donovan, trained as a lawyer but more recently evolved into a fairly flamboyant, innovative spy master and war hero, had managed to overcome naive America’s slavish cultural devotion to the parent country, Great Britain, and had launched his own version of Britain’s MI5, MI6, and Special Air Services all rolled into one: O.S.S., the Office for Strategic Services.

Hoover had been on the crime beat since World War I, and he’d cleaned up a corrupt bureaucracy to create a first-class law enforcement agency. During World War II and after, the interests of law enforcement had been directed not only at crime—most notably alcohol related, as a result of Prohibition (1919-1934) but also drugs, gambling, racketeering, and the like. Some of Hoover’s most winnable forays, however, had been against both the German and the Red menaces, which more recently had become the Nazi and the Soviet threats. Perhaps the single most visible case for Hoover was the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1933, during which he managed to elbow aside the Treasury Department and other law enforcement agencies and claim part of the credit for bringing Bruno Hauptmann to justice.

William J. Donovan, Hoover’s second in command for a time, was the man Hoover most feared as threatening his position. Hoover kept bouncing Donovan from section to section (Criminal Investigation Division,

Wild Bill Donovan was one of the the most decorated soldiers in American history, if not the most decorated. A hero of World War I in Europe, he held all three of the nation’s top decorations: the Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was one of the founders of the American Legion and his credentials were impeccable. Upon his return to civilian life, he made an unsuccessful run as the Republican lieutenant governor of New York State. One of the factors in his loss was the fact that he was Catholic, in a country still dominated by Anglophiles. He served as a District Attorney in western New York, and confided in his friends that he had ambitions far outstripping his origins—he dreamed of one day becoming the nation’s first Catholic president.

During this time, Hoover’s lifelong hatred of Donovan was born, and thus began a war of machinations that now, in mid-1945, at the peak of his accomplishments, had brought Wild Bill Donovan to an abrupt precipice that looked as though it would end an illustrious career.

J. Edgar Hoover had what one aide called “a terrible patience,” and he could wait for decades, patiently biding his time until he found the moment to destroy an enemy. Hoover never forgot or forgave, even imagined slights. A very insecure individual, he compiled huge dossiers on the private lives of every politician and public figure. There was nobody in Washington, whether friend or foe of Hoover, on whom there did not rest a complete file—be it FDR, Donovan, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt (slandered by Hoover for alleged lesbian dalliances and other infidelities), or the most flagrant Communist. Donovan, meanwhile, thought he had freed himself of Hoover’s clutches in striking out to create the first real U.S. international intelligence agency. The exploits of O.S.S. around the world throughout World War II were legendary.

Then the earth suddenly shifted: Donovan’s patron, FDR, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, and within a short time Donovan began to realize that his dreams were coming to an end. Hoover had quietly and methodically built up a power base that included Supreme Court Justices as well as officials of the State Department, including the naïve Edward Stettinius. More importantly, Hoover had let Donovan know through back channels that he had a dossier on Donovan. The most serious accusation Hoover could, and did, bring to newly inaugurated President Harry S. Truman—who knew next to nothing of Donovan, but had been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe every word put in his head by Hoover—was that Donovan’s organization was hopelessly infiltrated by Communists.

Donovan, hearing this charge, had to reflect that a good intelligence chief did indeed seek whatever bed partners he could in executing his mission—and the primary mission as yet was still defeating fascism by any means possible. Too late, Donovan realized how far ahead the “terribly patient” Hoover had been thinking. Donovan saw it was too late to salvage the brilliant organization he had cobbled together.

Now, as he awaited a business visit by Ivor Crane, a colonel he’d recruited in London from U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Corps, he reflected that the handwriting was on the wall, and there was little he could do to save himself—but he still had a mission to fulfill, and he’d continue fighting to the last, like a good soldier. When Crane knocked at Donovan’s apartment in Manhattan, Donovan rose in stocking feet to open the door. It was evening on a drizzly spring day in May, one of those days when it was still cool, but there was hint of the coming summer humidity in the air. Donovan held a coffee cup in his free hand as he pulled the door open. There stood Crane in a business suit with his tie loose and a newspaper casually hanging from under one elbow. The two men exchanged delighted greetings in the foyer as Donovan closed the door.

“Come on in, Ivor,” Donovan said. “Coffee?”

“I just had dinner,” Crane said shaking his head. “I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion by coming earlier.”

“Oh?” Donovan’s interest was piqued. He went around closing drapes and straightening furniture. Unlike the lavish Paris digs he’d just given up at the Ritz, this Government-service apartment was austere. It was simple, but secure, located in a row of brownstones along the edge of Chinatown in mid-Manhattan. It had a secure entrance below, and another secure entrance halfway up, before a visitor could even knock on the deadlocked door. Not that Donovan spent that much time here—his agents had set the place up as a safe house, but now with the severe budget cuts Truman had visited on his agency, he was just letting the lease run out and was using it as a crash pad during his visits to New York City.

Crane, favoring his prosthetic arm, threw his coat over a chair and poured himself a short, neat whiskey from a bottle Donovan kept for visitors. With this, Crane walked over to a window in the living room and looked out over the glimmering Manhattan skyline. “You know that Hoover is smearing you.”

“I understand that.”

“Those of us who know it are outraged.”

Donovan chuckled quietly. “I’ve had 16,000 people under my command and we helped save the world. I lost fewer than 200 agents, far better than my Infantry days in France during the Great War. Now this vile little boxer dog is trying to impugn my reputation. And he is doing a damned good job of it.” Donovan sat his long, rangy frame down, set the coffee aside, and mussed his graying hair. “Time for me to get out, Ivor. I got through the first war alive, and I tossed all kinds of manure in this one, but I can't stomach the crap the giant bureaucracy in Washington shovels around.”

Crane sat down hard in the couch opposite as night fell outside. “General, it’s not over. You can fight. You can win.”

Donovan shook his head.

“What’s the matter with you, Sir? Give them hell.”

“Too honest,” Donovan said ironically. “I want to spend some time with my family. I just don’t have the stomach to exchange hairballs with Hoover for the rest of my life.”

“Listen,” Crane said, looking around. He suddenly said, “I assume Hoover doesn’t have any bugs on us here.”

Donovan chuckled again. “Wouldn’t that be—no, I’ve had the technical people go through the walls. It’s clean.”

“I have some interesting news,” Crane said. “I picked up a top secret wire that the Navy picked up a Nazi sub in the Atlantic and they brought her in to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This sub had on board a shipment of weapons-grade uranium headed for Japan, along with jet airplanes so the Japs could bomb a few of our cities. They’ve flown the Krauts to a secret facility near Washington for interrogation, including a Luftwaffe general.”

“So?” Donovan said with a shrug. “Sounds like ONI is handling it. Hoover will get his fat little pug face into it somehow, nothing we can do about it.”

“No, but listen,” Crane said. “As I see it, right now you stand at the crossroads. We have a new super intelligence agency, the Central Bureau of Intelligence. The two most qualified people to run it are you or Hoover. As I see it, it’s fifty-fifty, but you’ve gotta go fight for it, General. You can’t sit back and let this little pervert take you to the cleaners. It’s downright un-American the way this creep operates. Don’t take it lying down.”

Donovan shook his head and put his feet up. “You’re an optimist, Ivor. I think the game is over. I agree, Hoover is a sleazy man. You’d think that the powers that be would see it and dump him. It’s been tried, to no avail.”

Crane grew agitated. “That’s because you have naïve people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Ed Stettinius trying to run the show.”

“Stettinius!” Donovan said with a roar. He liked Eleanor, but he had little use for the man who had said “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail,” in regard to a spy coup OSS had managed to pull on the Soviets. Stettinius, as Secretary of State, had forced Donovan to give back to the NKVD a top secret code book that had been found on a Finnish battlefield, with which OSS could have followed Stalin’s constant treachery—but naïve people like Stettinius kept sabotaging the espionage efforts of the United States.

“Get this,” Crane said. “They’ve taken the Krauts down to Washington to turn them upside down and empty their pockets. Meanwhile, my people have been able to track some interesting movement on the part of some of the Useful Dupes around New England. It seems that this shipment of uranium oxide is going to be sent west somewhere, top secret, way beyond my range of visibility. What’s interesting, though, is that we might be able to pull off a little trick or two of our own by tracking it and seeing who takes the bait. We already have a suspected CP on the move.”

“Who?”

“Goldman, a physicist from M.I.T., who has been working at Berkeley since last year on some top secret project.”

Donovan’s professional interest briefly overcame the cynicism and depression that he’d been fighting off for the past few weeks as he realized that Hoover was about to get his head.

His one real hope now was that, if he himself couldn’t get the prize position as the head of the new Central Intelligence Agency, then Hoover shouldn’t either. As it was, the rumors reaching Donovan were that it as already a done deal. Truman was going to create a vast new espionage bureaucracy, but he was going to name someone completely new and unknown to head it. The really bad news was that Donovan already knew OSS was about to be disbanded or absorbed into this new CBI or CIA. The good news was that Truman believed in a division of powers to keep everyone honest and prevent anyone like Hoover from ever acquiring the kind of power Hoover had, and so Truman was going to take away from Hoover the jurisdiction for all activities, intelligence, counter-intelligence, and otherwise—outside the United States and limit Hoover’s range of operations to the domestic front. That would mean Hoover would lose the entire South American espionage empire he’d set up. The worst possible news was the rumor as to whom Truman was planning to install as the first head of the CIA: a civilian with zero military background, and with almost no intelligence background, whose current job in life was as chief executive officer of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain. Maybe, Donovan groused, Truman was rumored to be doing that just as a joke of some kind.

Now, as Crane set forth to propose a desperate new counter-intelligence gambit, Donovan sat forward with his hands folded between his bony knees, and listened intently.

By the time Johann-Heinrich (John Henry) Fehler was on a U.S. Navy DC-3 headed toward Washington, D.C. along with General Kessler and the rest of the technical officers and civilians from the U-234, Fehler’s entire appreciation of the world had already changed.

For one thing, he was amazed at the wealth possessed by everyday citizens in the United States. He was just as amazed at the strange division of classes based on race. Blacks appeared more prosperous, certainly, than the bombed out master race in Germany, to use Hitler’s now obviously ridiculous term. At the same time, coming from a racially homogenous nation, Fehler could not get used to this idea that an entire class of human beings could float around unseen like ghostly, dark-skinned shadows—their existence unrecognized in motion pictures, novels, newspaper articles (unless it was about jazz musicians using heroin). They did not officially exist, these blacks, but they were cooks, train porters, airline skycaps, maids, anything menial that the whites did not want to do. One of Fehler’s first experiences with race in the United States had been at a restaurant. Taken on a bus with several other German and Italian POWs from the naval base to the navy-run municipal airport near Portsmouth, there had been a stop for lunch. The Shore Patrol guards, loyal U.S. military men, Negroes, had not been allowed into the restaurant but were forced to eat C-rations sitting outside in a park, wearing their ponchos, in fog and drizzle. And there was plenty of room for them in the warmth inside the restaurant! These class divisions made the U.S. seem truly alien to Fehler. He’d been to places like South Africa, where the blacks lived in squalor under white overlords, but somehow these blacks in the U.S. were supposedly full citizens. Fehler didn’t see how that was possible. The pretense and the reality were two different things. He was no longer a warrior, and he now had time to ponder such things.

There were many such shocks and contradictions—a wealthy nation, without national health care for its citizens (“Communism!” he was told when asking about it, bemused). Most of all, what impressed him and weighed on him as he traveled toward Washington, D.C. was his growing realization of the sheer vastness of this nation. How could the delusional and stupid Hitler and his crew of narcotic-ridden misfits have imagined that little Germany, with its 65 million inhabitants in a land area half that of France, could ever hope to conquer such a world? A U.S. that had, at the height of the war, rolled two bombers an hour, two warships a day, off each of its many assembly lines, without straining itself? It seemed that the Americans, be they little people in little towns, or important officials, uniformly seemed not to understand they were giants on the world stage.

Fehler, a good-natured, bright man with an optimistic view toward the future, could only grin to himself and enjoy the good food (of which there seemed to be limitless supplies), the fun music (to which even the top Nazis had secretly tapped their jackbooted feet), the attractive women, the whole crazy culture with its contradictions and its ups and downs—and a clearly patriotic population that believed just as fanatically in their national mission, but successfully so! As he sat in a plush seat on the DC-3, enjoying civilian life, he sipped on a container of chocolate milk and looked out at the brightly lit cities, patchworks of yellow and amber light, slowly revolving below. More than ever, he realized the futility of the sacrifices he and the other Germans had made for a decade in the service of one man’s insanity and one party’s evil, or both. But, dammit, here he was, comfortable, no longer at risk for his life! He was delightfully and wonderfully and deliciously free of all responsibility for life and death. He no longer had to sink Allied ships and try to save their passengers or let them die. He no longer had to write letters home to bereaved mothers whose sons he had held in his arms while they died, crying, from terrible burns. A million things—the whole weight lifted off his shoulders! Yes! He could indeed smile.

Fort Hunter, so Fehler learned, was a secret installation outside Washington D.C. The fort, whose origins dated back to the time of George Washington, had been one of the defensive sea artillery forts surrounding the capital. The British in the War of 1812 had burned Washington. This had demonstrated the need for such defenses. It had been made a battery (Sheridan Point) around Civil War times, and only taken out of warlike service by 1917. Now it served as an all-purpose Government facility, and contained a special interrogation camp for German U-boat officers. There, Fehler was housed with several of his former colleagues, among them Werner Henke. Kessler was taken to a different wing, and Fehler saw very little of him anymore. Kessler had big fish to talk to, and Fehler could only relate his tiny part of the story the Americans were after. Like Kessler, the civilian and military technical passengers of U-234 were taken away to other processing points.

Judiciously, as much as he bantered with his comrades, Fehler kept his mouth shut about the secret mission of the U-234. In any case, they all had lots of bittersweet and poignant memories to talk about—comrades lost in battle, wives and children lost in bombing raids while the men were at sea, parents who had died during the war, in general a world that would never come back again. Some of these comrades were still unreconstituted Nazis who saw no error in their ways. Others had long ago gotten wise to Hitler’s folly but soldiered on because it was the German way of doing things. All felt the crushing blanket of defeat on their backs. All suffered the shame and taunting, even the light-hearted humor of the invisible blacks in uniform who seemed to make the fabric of laundry, cooking, escorting prisoners, the whole glue of it hang together. It was a strange world, as Fehler quietly observed it without any particular personal rancor. The white Americans here were the upper class, very technical, the elite, who wanted to know all the secrets of Nazi Germany. The blacks resented their white overlords, who apparently could lynch them at will (or so some of the POWs said), and resented the Germans who were white and in some ways had it better than they who were lifelong citizens and serving in the uniform of their country. The Germans, for their part, were like prisoners anywhere—wily, looking for ways to beat the system, steal food, violate curfew, smuggle in brandy, maybe a carload of whores—and together with the blacks they managed to make some of this happen under the noses of their jailers. Interesting too, Fehler found, was the fact that many of the technical types appeared to be Jewish, and he was a bit surprised that they too were the objects of vehement scorn from the white Protestant establishment. In a sense, the place reminded Fehler of Hitler’s promise of a paradise run by a master race—and here it was, fleshed out, Hitler’s dream. Then, through the haze of his bemusement, shock, resentment, sarcasm, all the negative emotions, he began to re-examine the Germany he himself had left behind like millions of other Germans: the Weimar Republic. A democracy that might have worked if people had given it a chance and not rushed to vote Hitler into power in 1933 over Hindenburg’s recommendations. He laughed to himself. The Germans could have had it all. Weimar, racism, wealth, power—all without losing a man!

Oddly, as his world view went through these wrenching changes, Fehler found himself developing some tentative friendships with a few Jews and a few blacks, and he began to form his own opinion—that these fellows were all just fine in their own right!

Not everyone among the German prisoners felt this way. Fehler coughed up his share of secrets and was transferred back to Portsmouth, where he was put on light duty, administrative tasks, helping out the Americans as they prepared their vast hordes of German prisoners for expeditious return to a shattered fatherland. The more difficult U-boat prisoners were sent to a special camp at Papagalo, Arizona, to be maintained under heavy security.

Then there was Wenke, who could not tolerate what was happening to him and his fellow prisoners. One evening in June, he suddenly broke free from the exercise yard and sprinted through the dusk toward the barbed wire at the edge of the Fort Hunter preserve. As other POWs watched in shock, a volley of rifle fire rang out from the guard towers. Wenke just managed to reach the barbed wire in view of civilian houses not far away, when his body was riddled with rifle bullets and he hung bleeding to death in the wire for at least a quarter hour before Marine Corps troops pulled his tangled corpse out of the steel thorns.

That, in turn, caused all sorts of shadowy commotions. Like the man who came to visit Fehler a few days later, a tall graying intelligence officer who introduced himself as Colonel Ivor Crane of the United States Army. They sat opposite each other in a small visitation room, sharing cigarettes. Crane had smuggled in a six-pack of rather watery, lousy American beer, for which Fehler was nonetheless grateful. He was obviously a brave man, for he’d lost an arm, and he carried himself like a warrior. Crane seemed a sinister warrior, and that caught Fehler’s observant eye.

Crane seemed a rather odd duck, probably not the regular Army M.I. though he introduced himself as such. Crane kept looking strangely aside, as if he expected to be overheard (by what? A hidden microphone? A counter-spy?) At one point, Crane seemed to be sweating, and his fingers trembled as he folded them together on the desk. They were in a small room with night-black windows running with rain, and a banging steam radiator should have blanked out any spy pickups. “This radioactive material,” Crane said. “How many boxes were there?”

Fehler told him, while feeling a bubbling up of mirth. “What? Your Government has lost a box or two?” He had delivered it to these stupid Yanks, and there wasn’t much more he could have done for them. Or to save the world from an Axis atom bomb, much less a Communist one. As soon as he laughed, he regretted it. He imagined the Soviets atom-bombing Berlin. “Colonel, are you people complete fools or what?”

“Kapitän-Leutnant, let me phrase the questions. I have my reasons for doing this, and you will tell nobody of my visit today, do you understand?”

Fehler did, and he could only shake his head helplessly as it became apparent that the Americans seemed to have lost their minds, and their bomb. Then another possibility occurred to him, which was truly horrifying. Stultifying in its brazenness. What if Crane were a Soviet agent, and the Russians were trying to intercept the material somehow, take it to Moscow. The result would be a Soviet atom bomb. Too horrifying to contemplate. It was Fehler’s turn to sweat. He knew Crane had his back covered. If he, Fehler, made some wild accusation to his masters in this prisoner of war station, it might go badly for everyone involved. There was nothing he could do but keep his mouth shut.

He rose. “I think we have talked enough for today,” he told Crane.

“Hold on a minute,” Crane said angrily.

“Gehen Sie zum Teufel. Go to hell,” Fehler said, turned, and stalked out of the room. He left the beer on the table.

On a drizzly spring night, Ivor Crane left the brownstone in which he’d had a long conversation with Wild Bill Donovan.

Ivor did not see himself as a bad man or a traitor. He might be a Soviet agent, but he was determined to help his boss out before OSS went down the drain. Thousands of men and women working for Donovan felt this way, while thousands in the employ of Hoover were anxiously waiting to jump ship and go over to whatever new super-spy agency President Truman was about to sign into being.

Crane tossed his newspaper into a trashcan and strode purposefully along through Chinatown. His visit to Fehler at the submarine officers’ interrogation lab in D.C. proved largely fruitless. It seemed Fehler was onto him quickly. The loss of the uranium hinged on Fehler’s insubordinate, reckless decision to disobey orders when he handed the uranium over to the Americans. Rather than risk having blowing his cover, Crane decided to try other venues. One way or another, he vowed, he would get that uranium oxide into Soviet hands.

Not long after his visit to Fehler, Ivor Crane sat in an apartment on the Upper West Side owned by Dr. Glenn Foucault, a physicist who had worked on the early atomic project in Manhattan. Foucault, who was now retired at 77 years of age, partially blind, and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. His wife Mary, bowed over and looking brittle, brought them tea and cookies.

“We could be put in jail for talking about it,” Foucault said as he used a trembling hand to dip a cookie into a little chocolate sauce.

“It’s imperative that I understand what they will do with the material,” Crane said sitting o the edge of his seat. He still had his hat in his hands, spinning it impatiently. Realizing suddenly he was being rude, he laid the hat down on the oriental rug between his feet. “Help me, Dr. Foucault.”

Foucault ran a crippled hand over his liver-spotted temples. “Well, let’s see. They are doing this research in centers all across the country, keeping it decentralized, I suppose. No way of telling if they have central facilities somewhere. I suppose that uranium could go just about anywhere.” He thought for a moment. “Tell you what. Check out the background on a company right here in Manhattan called ChemCor. I seem to remember they were hot and eager to get radioactive fuels, and it seems to me the FBI came to me a year or two ago asking about them. Does that help?”

“Thanks!” Crane said, jumping up grabbing his hat. He hugged Mrs. Foucault on the way out. “Best cookies I’ve had in a long time.”

She beamed after him, closing the door.

Crane sprinted down the stairs, taking each landing in a few seconds, and rumbling out the front door onto the street. His coattails flapped as he sprinted for the nearest subway station. It was a beautiful plan. He could help himself, help the world-wide workers’ movement, help Donovan, hurt Hoover, and sow more dissent among the American amateurs who had no real idea about how to do world-class espionage. Too mired in their simplistic ra-ra idealism and their ridiculous contradictions.

Along the way, he stopped at a phone booth and called Donovan at the apartment. He had to be very careful what he said, for the line might be tapped by Hoover’s minions.

“Yeah,” Donovan said in a curt, dry voice.

Crane said cryptically: “ChemCor. Check them out. I’ll follow up with you.” He hung up after spelling the name as Foucault had done for him.

Within two days, working with OSS, Crane had established that the shipment of uranium had been offloaded at Portsmouth, put on a civilian charter plane flown by Army Air Corps pilots with top clearances, and taken somewhere out west.

Crane followed up at a feverish pace, for there was no telling how many bombs the Americans already had, or when they might start using them. A Russian émigré named Bernard Rossakoff, who had worked as a chemist for ChemCor before it went bankrupt after a Federal investigation in 1943, had revealed it was a front for the NKVD technical branches.

Crane hopped a Navy charter DC-4 out of Norfolk, Virginia and was on his way to San Francisco. From there it wasn’t hard to get hold of the itinerary of the German uranium from the U-234. The processed and fissionable product, Uranium 238, had gone into the abyss of the War Department’s black operations—with a strangely urgent priority attached, which made first use of an atomic bomb imminent. Crane became particularly alarmed when indications came in that the yellowcake was to be shipped through San Francisco, onto a ship bound for the western Pacific, where it was only inevitable it would wind up being dropped on Tokyo. Crane signaled his handler at the Rezidentura to warn them they could intercept the material in San Francisco, their only chance; and he hoped they had the brains to believe him about the urgency of this project. He was sure they had high-powered people working in San Francisco on turning the founding of the United Nations—which would affect the world for ages to come—in favor of the USSR, but the imminent detonation of an atomic device, and the availability of the high-quality yellowcake ore from the U-234, had to supersede all other opportunities. An old friend, formerly known as Jaguar and now using a new tradename, was following up on that leg of the adventure at that moment, tracing every step in the uranium oxide’s journey across America from a beginning at Portsmouth harbor.

The damp chill at night created a gray fog that drifted over the spooky masts and sails of the docked U-boats at the naval station dock in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Lying beside U-508 was U-234, recently arrived in the company of Coast Guard cutters and Navy destroyer escorts. Sailors with loaded shotguns stood guard at dockside squarely in the middle of the boarding ramp.

Sitting in the water, quietly, was a fifty-foot sailing vessel with her engine housing covered by canvas and her large sail furled. Her lights were off, and several men in watch caps and dark clothing waited eagerly. When a U.S. Navy patrol boat puttered by, manned by young sailors who were tired of war and only wanted to go home, they waited tensely with their American-made revolvers, but the Americans never quite caught on that there was a boarding party less than a mile offshore waiting to go in, do its work as quickly as possible, and then head out to sea where a submarine waited to pick up them and their precious cargo.

Somewhere, distantly, a dog barked. Traffic flowed past a mile away on the public roads in a town, a city, filled with civilians celebrating the recent fall of Berlin and the approaching climax of the war with Japan.

Plenty of people felt it was going to be about the same kind of punch and go as Patton’s drive in Germany. Many expected MacArthur to do in the Pacific what Eisenhower, Patton, and others had done in Europe. Still, there were always those frightened and conspiracy minded individuals for whom the glass was never half full, but always half empty and loaded with poison. The sailors traded laughter, rumors, colorful jokes, little anecdotes about home and girlfriends, pictures of babies, worries about when it would all be over. Shifts came and went. Most of the Germans were either in POW camps by now, but a few had been kept in Portsmouth for interrogation, and some of the higher ranking ones including Nazi civilian stuffed shirts, had been flown away someplace for interrogation by high U.S. brass. Some rumors had it they’d been flown directly to Washington, and some of those were the kinds of rumors that seeped through the walls of secrecy and security by way of mouth—the guards on special Navy flights, the colored cooks, any of the thousands of little mice who weren’t noticed when the big boys were nibbling captured cheese.

There were also plenty of brass sniffing around, and there were at least two dozen or more intelligence agencies involved, some known quantities like Military Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, others new outfits nobody had ever heard of before. Many were small intelligence sections lost in the copious layers of middle management in regular civilian agencies.

When, therefore, a quiet, dark-eyed U.S. Army major began sniffing around, hardly anyone took much notice. The major was a man of about 40, with grayish-white cheeks stippled with broken capillaries. He had watery blue eyes, puffy jowls, and a large graying mustache whose points reached well beyond the never-smiling corners of his mouth.

Only a guard at a gate casually checked his I.D., and thought nothing of it. The major’s face and I.D. went out of the guard’s mind before the major had even stepped away from the guard shack and passed through the outer security perimeter to examine the stacks of boxes on the dock around the captured German submarines. The security guard was a young kid who couldn’t wait to get out, who often came to work half sloshed on cheap vodka, and who preferred to listen to radio music rather than diligently scan the harbor with his eyes as he’d been trained to do.

The army major had his collar up, his brim down, and his hands in his pockets. He had an ID badge clipped to the lapel of his raincoat, should any other guards question him. None did.

The guard at the gate was busy, bent over his radio to bring in the station more clearly to hear Al Trace And His Silly Symphonists play Mairzy Doats. He’d play it loudly until the sergeant of the guard came by to tell him to turn it down or turn it off, but that wouldn’t be for another hour at least.

Meanwhile, the man who had signed in as Major Robert Malone strode carefully around the dock, eyeballing the German subs before showing his badge to the boy with the shotgun, who then let the major inside to clamber into the submarines.

Which the major did, quietly, with a tool in his pocket to unlock the mine shafts and determine if General Leslie Groves had already removed the cargo to use in his top secret weapons program.

The splattering of leaking rainwater on metal inside the dead boat was the first thing the major heard as he clambered down the ladder.. He knew exactly where to go in the dim reddish maintenance lighting inside U-234 as she sat disabled at the dock.. It was cold and damp in the dead boat, where water dripped from broken fixtures, and shattered glass lay under extinct dial faces. Using a flashlight, he followed its wavering and stabbing beam deep into the bowels of the sub. After a few minutes, he had two of the shaft doors open and was staring at the empty metal floors, and the scratch marks where the heavy gold-lined boxes of yellow-cake uranium had been dragged out. Was there a shred of hope the stuff was still here? He had to be sure. No. He pointed the flashlight here and there. The stabbing beam found nothing. Gone.

No time to lose. He turned and hurried from the U-boat. Viktor Mutsev, the man known by a variety of handles including Jaguar, climbed hand over hand up the steel ladder leading from the ghostly interior of the submarine. They were too late to steal the material now. He must wave off the boarders and the submarine, then immediately turn to his chain of command in the rezidentura to learn where the shipment of uranium oxide might be headed next. His guess: the American atom bomb project, and he had recently learned that was being carried out in two centers: Hanford and Oak Ridge. His best information was that the material would be going to Oak Ridge, for technical reasons involving the type of bomb material. He understood the stakes perfectly, and was highly motivated. For Stalin, it would mean possessing an atomic bomb. For Communism, it would mean a step closer to world victory. For himself, it would mean a promotion and perhaps a nice villa outside Moscow in that hazy paradise of the future when the dictatorship of the proletariat was in full force. The thought of these things made him salivate, and he pressed on all the faster, his hands blurring on the cold, damp rails as he emerged into the night air like a drowning man gasping for oxygen.