Authors: John Drake
‘See?’ he said. ‘It’s quite safe. Everything’s been checked by this comrade.’ Ulitzky laughed again as Zharkov indicated the Red Army man, who saluted me.
‘Lyev Valentin Goraya,’ he said, ‘Captain of Engineers, gas warfare section, 6
th
Guards Motorized Rifles.’ He was a tall, thin, spidery-looking man with glasses.
‘David Landau,’ I said, ‘Wing Commander, 696 Squadron, Bomber Command, Royal Air Force.’ Goraya saluted again then spoke. He spoke very carefully, with eyes flicking constantly to Zharkov and Ulitzky.
‘May I respectfully ask the Comrade Wing Commander what his specialty might be in the British service?’
‘Heavy bombers,’ I said, and, feeling that more was expected, I added, ‘precision bombing. Daylight precision bombing.’ That brought a brief silence because this topic had not yet been discussed, and I saw Ulitzky and Zharkov exchange puzzled glances.
‘But, with respect, Comrade Wing Commander,’ said Goraya, ‘are you not expert in gas warfare, or biological warfare or …’ his voice faded away in profound unease, ‘or some other form of warfare that, perhaps, may be secret?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but let me have a look at this German gear and see if I can’t work something out.’ Goraya saluted again, and got out of my way as did everyone else. They very much got out of my way, especially Zharkov, who’d been on the edge of his courage even to go near the mysterious equipment, and I looked at them all and realized that something wasn’t right. Zharkov, Goraya, and the guards looked as if they’d have run for it if they dared, and only Ulitzky stood fast, with his thumbs in his belt, looking at me with a grin on his face.
‘What is it?’ I said to him. ‘What’s going on?’
Ulitzky pointed at the German gear. ‘It kills about one in six,’ he said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing a gas mask, or protective gear. The men who touched this stuff – my men – were dropping every so often as they tried to handle it.’ He looked at Zharkov. ‘But, fortunately, the Comrade Colonel came to help us in this work.’ He grinned. ‘The Comrade Colonel came with
his
men, and promising to shoot
my
men if they didn’t do the job.’
‘It was necessary,’ said Zharkov. ‘It had to be done.’
‘Yes, comrade,’ said Ulitzky, ‘It did. But what made the men do it was an officer who went first and picked up his share of the load. And he made them sing the good old songs as they marched. And he told them that it was for the Motherland. And he blessed those who fell in the name of the Almighty. And he led the others in here where they put everything on these benches.’
‘Who was he?’ I said, and Ulitzky just laughed.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and is that why nothing’s going on in here?’
‘Yes,’ said Ulitzky, and pointed to the German gear. ‘For every man who touches this stuff, about one in six get killed.’
‘Like Russian roulette,’ I said, attempting a grin, attempting humour in the face of death. But Ulitzky didn’t understand.
‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘What’s Russian roulette?’
‘The game of spinning the revolver cylinder.’
‘Is that what you call it, you English?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded. ‘So now it’s your turn, Moscow boy. With the Russian roulette.’
I looked at the piles of equipment. It consisted of three flying suits of odd design, and a pilot’s chair in a glazed-in aluminium cage. That and some personal items. But there was something hidden in the folds and cracks, and it struck dead one in six of those who handled it. And now it was, indeed, my turn.
Bletchley
Park
,
Milton
Keynes
,
Buckinghamshire
,
England.
Sunday
21 May
,
01
.
30
hours
.
Brigadier Sanders tried to explain. ‘Do you know any chemistry?’ he said, and Lady Margaret shook her head.
‘Not much,’ she said, and remembered the shy, damaged, young veteran of the Somme who’d tried to teach sixth form chemistry at Cheltenham Ladies College, and how she’d led the other girls into staring at him with big round eyes, while sucking forefingers with rosebud lips as if in thought, and slowly pushing the fingers in and out.
‘Then I’ll show you,’ said Sanders, and drew a diagram on a blank sheet of paper. It was the formula of a chemical compound.
Cl-CH=CH-As-Cl
2
‘That’s Lewisite,’ he said, ‘the latest mustard gas. It was developed by the Americans towards the end of the Great War. The chemical name is
dichloro
,
two
-
chlorovinyl
,
arsine
. Each of those letters represents an atom, right?
Cl
means chlorine,
C
means carbon,
H
means hydrogen, and
As
means arsenic. So, each of those letters is an atom, and the atoms link together to make a molecule. A molecule is the smallest amount of a substance that can exist. Anything smaller is just lots of individual atoms, and anything bigger is a collection of molecules, right?’
‘Yes,’ she said, remembering vaguely what the unfortunate young man had tried to teach.
‘And it’s very nasty stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s not actually a gas, but a greasy liquid. You have to spray it, or burst a bomb load of it, to spread it out so it falls as a mist. Are you following?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And it’s not so much a killer as an incapacitant. It burns the lungs, and the eyes, and certain other parts of a highly personal nature. And the skin of course, it burns that too. But it doesn’t kill you dead like a bullet. So if you wanted to kill a man with it, you’d have to get him to inhale or swallow several grams of it. Say an ounce. There’s about twenty-eight grams to the ounce, and that would well and truly do it, and very unpleasantly too. OK?’ She nodded. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘have you heard of a gram-molecule?’
‘No.’
‘Avogadro’s hypothesis?’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it hardly matters. The point is that to work out the number of molecules of a substance there are in a gram, you have to multiply by a number that’s so big it’s followed by twenty-three noughts.’ She frowned, struggling to grasp the number. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, and smiled for the first time that night. ‘It means that the number of molecules in a gram is millions, times millions, times millions.’ Lady Margaret nodded. ‘So,’ said Sanders, ‘what I’m saying is that to kill someone with mustard gas you have to give him several grams of it, and mustard gas is very nasty, but this stuff – Mem Tav – is more deadly not only than mustard gas, but more deadly than any other known substance. It is more deadly than anything anyone has ever dreamed of or imagined. It makes cyanide look like mother’s milk, and trapdoor-spiders look like pussy cats, because,’ he said, and picked up the translated intercept that the Colossus had cracked, ‘because according to this, the lethal dose of Mem Tav, either inhaled or by skin contact is …
one
molecule
!’
She frowned, not grasping the consequences of such appalling toxicity.
‘But what about gas masks?’ she said. ‘Anti-gas suits and so on. We’ve got plenty of those haven’t we? And everyone’s still got their gas masks. I’ve got mine somewhere.’
‘Not good enough,’ he said, and picked up the transcript, frowned, made the effort, and translated from the German, which he could do so perfectly well when he wanted to. He just didn’t like German. He thought it an ugly language.
‘“Eagle Unit SS Munsterlager to MemTav Operational Unit SSA one …”’ he looked up. ‘Then it gives a code and the date to show it’s genuine, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘this is the latest information from their research centre to the chaps in the field who are using the stuff. The research centre is at Munsterlager on Luneberg Heath. They’ve got a monster, enormous site there. Tens of thousands of acres. They used it in the Great War too. So this is their latest gen, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this is what they’re saying,’ he looked down and read aloud.
‘“Munsterlager confirms the following: One – effective dose against unprotected persons is one molecule inhaled or by skin contact; two – persistence is indefinite in cold or temperate conditions; three – flame-thrower decontamination of soil or equipment is effective; four – fully self-contained weld-sealed protective suits are effective; five – steam decontamination of protective suits is …”
‘And the rest is corrupted. They shift at random to new codes throughout the message and we couldn’t crack any more. Not yet anyway.’
He put down the paper and looked at her.
‘So you’re partly right. If you’re in an airtight suit with its own oxygen supply, you’re safe. The problem comes when you try to take it off because the stuff’s so deadly that if even one molecule of it is left intact on the outside of the suit, it’d kill you. So it sounds like you’d have to spray live steam on the wearer – that’s the chap who’s just dropped the stuff on someone.’
‘Well we could do that, couldn’t we?’ she said. ‘Something like a frogman’s rubber suit? And spray it with steam?’
‘Yes. If you can avoid cooking the blighter in his suit. And if you can make enough suits and steamer units for the entire population, and if you can burn the entire city or countryside with petrol after an attack to get rid of the contamination.’
‘Well, can’t we put everyone in gas-proof shelters?’
‘With air, food, water, and sanitation for weeks? Or maybe months or years? This stuff’s persistent indefinitely remember. And who’d be running the war effort in the meantime? Or even keeping the electric lights on?’ He shook his head. ‘In fact it’d be so damned deadly that I don’t know how they can even manage to make it.’ He frowned. ‘After the last war there was a nasty rumour that more people – most of them girls – were killed in the factories
making
mustard gas than Huns were killed by it in action! I doubt that’s true, but it shows you what the people thought, who had the job of making it, because there are always some leaks and spillages in any industrial process. So you don’t want that even with mustard gas, while with Mem Tav, which is millions and millions of times worse, you just couldn’t handle it. It’d kill the workers trying to make it and fill bombs with it. And above all, for God’s sake, how can it work at such a low dose? It makes no sense! Nothing could do that.’
Finally, at the limit of his ability to reason, he looked to her for advice. He did so reluctantly, because he didn’t like her. She was cunning, ruthless, and unprincipled. But in this case her defects were virtues. So he asked her advice.
‘What do you think, Lady Margaret?’ he said. ‘Is this real or are we being deceived? Are the Huns working some sort of bluff to make us back off when we’re winning? Can anyone really be killed by a single molecule?’
The
Führerboat,
At
30
Metres
Depth
in
the
North
Sea
,
Tuesday
16 May
,
02
.
10
hours.
‘It’s not the single molecule that does it,’ said Gavriel Landau. ‘Abimilech Svart explained it to us when he came to Munsterlager for the live testing.’ Landau fell silent. He stopped working on the navigator board and sat on the deck surrounded by tools, wires, and valves, in the quiet control room. The boat was running deep, and running on electric motors, so there was little sound in the control room except that of the air conditioning fans, some orders passed and repeated by the Kriegsmarine men at their controls, and other slave workers talking as they attended to splayed out equipment.
Landau thought of the live testing, and looked at Feldman with a sadness beyond hope; Feldman understood because there was so much in his own memory that was beyond bearing and beyond understanding. So he reached out and placed one hand on Landau’s.
‘You don’t have to tell me everything,’ he said. ‘Just say how it works.’
‘No,’ said Landau, ‘we must not forget.’ So he spoke. ‘Svart would come to Munsterlager on testing days. He would supervise the choosing of the subjects. We were kept in a concrete room. He would come with his SSA guards, and a box of dominoes. They were his own, from his childhood. He showed them to us, and told us this, and smiled and joked about being a happy little boy with his papa. Then he would make us each choose a domino, and then hold it up. And sometimes it was the highest numbers that were chosen, sometimes the lowest. He would laugh and make a joke of this. The guards all laughed with him, and, if you can believe it, we laughed too. Of course we were afraid not to, but he does have a tremendous gift for humour.’
‘And what happened to the chosen ones?’ said Feldman. But that was too much, and Landau was quiet for some minutes. Then he spoke again.
‘He used his dominoes to explain to the doctors. I saw it. They had doctors to supervise the testing.’ He stressed the point to make sure that Feldman understood. ‘I mean actual medical doctors – educated men from good universities!’ Landau shook his head. ‘They used us as laboratory technicians as well as for testing. They spoke in front of us, as if we weren’t there. After all, they knew we would never leave. So once, to explain how Mem Tav worked, Svart lined up his dominoes on a bench. He stacked them ready so that one would knock over the next, which knocks over the next, and so on until they’re all knocked over.’
‘Yes,’ said Feldman.
‘He showed that just one push of the finger starts the cascade.’
‘Yes,’ said Feldman.
‘He said … he said
that’s
what a molecule of Mem Tav does. It gets into the blood, it’s carried round the body and it reaches the heart.’
‘Then what happens?’ said Feldman.
‘The molecule reacts with an enzyme specific to heart muscle cells. Each heart muscle cell has these enzymes. They are responsible for initiating contraction. They cause the heart to beat.’ Landau paused. ‘This is all Svart’s own discovery. He is brilliantly clever. This is all new to science.’
‘Yes?’
‘He said that the Mem Tav molecule binds to the first enzyme that by chance it encounters. It causes the enzyme to fail, and to release an electro-chemical signal that has the same effect as Mem Tav. Thus each enzyme kills others, which kill others, which kill others, until the heart stops beating and the victim falls. He collapses like an empty sack. The whole process from skin contact to collapse takes four minutes on average. Svart would stand with a stopwatch and make his little bets with the others, and he would laugh as the victim fell.’ Landau sighed. ‘Svart estimates that skin penetration is instantaneous, the journey to the heart takes a few seconds, the heart stops a few seconds later, and unconsciousness follows within minutes as the brain is denied oxygen. Svart said that final death of the brain may take anything up to ten minutes more, but the subject falls within about four minutes.’
Landau bowed his head and spoke in a whisper. ‘I have seen it,’ he said. ‘They’d strip the subject, put him in a sealed room with a glass panel, and spray him. Once used, the room could never be re-entered. So they had lines and lines of them at Munsterlager: hundreds of them, a fresh one for each spraying. There were many series of tests, to check different aspects of the Mem Tav. In one series they tried diluting the spray until it didn’t work. Thus they proved – which Svart had predicted – that one molecule was enough.’ He paused, and crushed down upon the guilt that afflicts survivors, because what use was it? What right did he have to suffer guilt when there was work to be done? Guilt was a selfish indulgence. So he raised his head, and looked at Feldman. ‘I would have been used for the testing, but then they discovered my knowledge of electronics and sent me to the Führerboat. I was …’
‘Shh!’ said Feldman, and the quiet Polish conversation ceased. Landau glanced round the control room. An officer was working his way round the clutter of slave workers and equipment and towards himself and Feldman. The officer was carrying rolls of thick white paper and a clipboard.
‘You, 416!’ said the officer, reading the number on Landau’s striped tunic. The German was Kuhnke, first officer of the boat, in his crumpled Kriegsmarine cap and British khaki.
‘Sir!’ said Landau, standing up and dropping his hands to his sides.
‘These are what you asked for,’ said Kuhnke. ‘The captain says you can have them, but you’ll sign for them and they’re not to go out of your sight.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Landau, and wrote his name and number with the pencil Kuhnke gave him on the chitty that Kuhnke held out on the clipboard.
‘So!’ said Kuhnke, frowning and handing over the rolls, and trying to think of something to get the job done faster. ‘And if this doesn’t help, you’re in big trouble. We’ve got the SSA on board and if you don’t get a move on they won’t like it!’ Then Kuhnke realized what sort of threat he was making, and beyond that he’d guessed what would happen to the slave workers when the job was done. So he was embarrassed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I mean … I mean … just get on with it!’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Landau, and Kuhnke walked off. Landau sat down by Feldman. He unrolled the first of the papers. It was an overall summary of the electric circuits for the entire vessel. Other rolls gave full circuit details for each individual tube and system: navigation, fire control, air conditioning, and so on.
‘So they believed us,’ said Feldman.
‘Yes,’ said Landau, ‘they believed that it’s a problem with the whole boat’s wiring, not just the navigator board.’
‘Look,’ said Feldman, ‘some of it’s blacked out. That will be the Mem Tav sections.’
‘Yes,’ said Landau, ‘so we don’t know what’s in there.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Feldman, ‘not if we can get at the torpedo warheads.’
‘Let’s look,’ said Landau, spreading out the big wiring diagram. ‘Everything’s novel and electrical on this boat, including torpedo loading.’
‘Yes,’ said Feldman, ‘we had to haul on chains and pulleys in my day, but look here.’ He pointed a crooked, black-nailed finger at one of the diagrams. ‘They’ve got hydraulic–electric trolleys on rails, with the second salvo ready on the trolleys, waiting to be run into the tubes.’
‘Second salvo? Where’s the first?’
‘Already in the tubes. That’s normal.’
‘I see. And the arming of the warheads is likewise electrical,’ said Landau, ‘as is the firing mechanism.’ He smiled. ‘Even the torpedo motors are electric. So, Herr Doctor Feldman, let’s see what we can do with all this engineering cleverness!’ And the two of them looked over the diagram in quiet concentration.
*
Von Bloch was impressed with the wardroom. It was the combined dining room and recreation area for the boat’s officers. It was spacious, cool, and quiet, with a long table down the middle, benches for eight officers, and a hatch at one end for a steward to serve food and drink. There were bookshelves, a gramophone, and a cine projector and screen, but there were neither books, nor records, nor film in this rushed-out boat.
Captain Sohler sat at the head of the table. Von Bloch and Weber – still on aspirin and paracetamol for the pain of his burns – sat next to him, then came Sohler’s second and third lieutenants, the first lieutenant being in the control room in command of the boat. Then there were two young SSA lieutenants, and finally Sergeant Major Zapp, who stood facing the table with his back to the hatchway and an MP 40 submachine gun slung across his chest. From time to time Sohler glared at this display of force. It was an arrogant, shameful insult to his own authority as captain. But he tried to ignore it because mainly his argument was with von Bloch.
‘As commander of this vessel,’ said Sohler, ‘I have to know the purpose of this mission and the source of your orders. I want to know by what right you intend to use this Mem Tav weapon.’ The two Kriegsmarine lieutenants nodded in agreement with their captain. ‘From what you’ve been telling us,’ said Sohler, ‘I assume that you want us to use one of these things on a city to kill millions of people?’
Von Bloch said nothing, even though there was no part of him that delighted in the thought. He’d been a cavalry office in the Kaiser’s war: 5
th
West Prussian Cuirassiers, Duke Frederick’s regiment, and things were different then. But Weber spoke. He spoke with much anger.
‘And how many of our people did the Americans and Tommies kill with their bombing raids? They killed our women and children by the tens of thousands. They burned them and suffocated them in their shelters. So this is our chance to hit back, and hit hard!’
‘Yes!’ said the two SSA lieutenants.
‘Yes!’ said Zapp.
Sohler hesitated. It was in his mind to say that the war was already lost and that Mem Tav had come too late. But that would be outright defeatism. It would be too dangerous. So he kept quiet and went back to his earlier line of questioning.
‘Who knows about this?’ he said. ‘Kriegsmarine High Command? Grand Admiral Doenitz?’ Von Bloch stayed silent. Sohler persisted, ‘Then does the Führer know?’ he said. ‘Does even
he
know?’
Again Weber answered. ‘You’re acting under the direct orders of Abimilech Svart,’ he said, ‘Supreme Commander of the SSA, and that’s good enough for you.’ He looked at Zapp, and nodded, and Zapp levelled his MP 40 at Sohler. The two naval lieutenants gasped, and even the SSA lieutenants were shocked. But Captain Sohler wasn’t a fluffy duckling that paddled after its mummy. He’d faced depth charges, bombing, and destroyers trying to ram him at thirty knots. He done it for years. So his main problem wasn’t controlling his fear – he was used to that – it was controlling his anger at being threatened with a gun aboard a vessel under his command. So he raised his head, straightened his shoulders and stared right back at Zapp and his gun, and spoke with utter contempt.
‘You must have shit for brains,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know where you are?
You’re
inside
a
submarine
!’ Sohler pointed at one of the jungle of pipes that ran through the wardroom as they did through every part of the boat. ‘See that one?’ Zapp looked. ‘That’s compressed air at eight hundred kilograms per square centimetre.’ Sohler pointed at another. ‘And that’s the electric ring-main, and that one there,’ he said, pointing, and Zapp looked, ‘that’s high-pressure water to clear the heads. You wouldn’t want to break any of them, and even if you didn’t – assuming you really are stupid enough to let that thing off in here – then the bullets would ricochet off the steel walls until they killed everyone in here, including
you
!’
Zapp gaped. He looked round in alarm and Weber frowned. ‘Bah!’ said Weber. ‘Put it away.’ And the gun was lowered.
‘So!’ said Sohler. ‘Where’s Svart anyway? Why isn’t he here?’
‘Because he’s working on the warhead,’ said Weber. ‘It’s got to be small, and it ain’t quite right, and he’s a genius engineer. Ain’t nobody like him.’
Sohler sneered. ‘And how do you expect to use this device from a submarine?’
‘That’s our business,’ said Weber, ‘You bring us up and point the boat at the fucking target, and we’ll do the rest!’
‘And kill everyone in London?’
Weber sneered and was about to speak, but von Bloch interrupted. ‘You will leave all matters of targeting to Herr Svart and to my team,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Weber.
‘You will be told all that you need to know in due course,’ said von Bloch.
*
Later Sohler went to the control room, which was still full of slavies trying to fix the boat’s electronics. He glanced at them as he came through the hatchway, and wondered, as ever, if they were trying their best. Or were they just stupid? But no, it couldn’t be that. Some of them were clever men, cleverer than himself when it came to these brand new SSA devices. Then he saw Kuhnke salute, and he touched a hand to his own cap.
‘Captain,’ said Kuhnke. There was no more ceremony that that, by Sohler’s own orders. The men knew him and he knew them. So he stepped round the slave workers and their tools to get to the plotting table by the periscope standards, where Kuhnke was waiting. Sohler went close to him and made a show of examining the charts and listening as Kuhnke gave the boat’s location, heading, and condition.