Origins: The Reich (32 page)

Hastelloy recognized the blue, superimposed surroundings as the interior of the Nexus chamber.  In the center sat a virtual representation of Gallono seated at a workstation with a display screen showing a perfectly clear image of the explosion on Mars.  It was as if Hastelloy and the President were in the chamber with Gallono, only the objects they saw were blue-hued holograms.

“Is this a trick, Mr. President?” Hastelloy asked. 

President Truman looked at Hastelloy as if he had just walked across water.  His face showed both intrigue and terror as he asked, “Who are you people?”

“Friends,” Hastelloy responded, “and the beings who created that explosion on Mars are not.  In fact, they’re quite intent on our destruction.”

“How do you know all of this, and why are you telling me now?”

Hastelloy directed the President’s eyes toward Gallono’s display monitor.  “Show him.”

Over the next ten minutes, President Truman was treated to recordings of the massive space battle with the Alpha fleet and the Lazarus blasting its way free to escape.  The recordings continued with the Lazarus being cornered by a lone Alpha ship and engaging in combat, which led to their being stranded on Earth.

The man’s mind must have harbored a million questions, yet the first words out of his mouth after seeing it all was to repeat his prior question.  “Why are you showing and telling me this now?”

“Because we need your help to defeat them before they either conquer or destroy this planet,” Hastelloy answered.  “We have the rockets.  We can alter them to burn a solid fuel compound that will enable them to reach Mars.  We can also build hydrogen bombs like the one they detonated.  What we don’t have is the fissile materials needed to build such weapons.  Like I said, we need your help.  All of humanity needs your help.”

“You plan to launch one hundred of these thermonuclear devices at them?” President Truman asked.  “That is a massive expense that could bankrupt my country and leave us vulnerable to our enemy.  If I agree to help you, I will need something in return.”

“You mean something more than a planet free of alien overlords or them raining incomprehensibly destructive bombs on your heads?” Gallono asked with his sarcastic impulses on full display.

With the question posed to him, President Truman straightened his spine to stand his ground and fight for his nation’s future.  “You will turn over the designs for this hydrogen bomb so that we may use them as a deterrent against further Soviet aggression we all know is coming.  Promise me that, and you’ll have your materials.”

“Agreed,” Hastelloy found himself saying.  What choice did he have?  He would get what he needed now and work through the ramifications for the future later.

“Another thing,” President Truman continued.  “I’ll need to pacify Admiral Leahy and the generals with something.  You will need to turn over at least two of the rockets along with the research papers and a few of the scientists to their White Sands facility.”

“Agreed,” Hastelloy once again found himself uttering, and took ownership of the conversation before more demands could be made of him.  “Now that you know all of this, I need to see precautions taken to safeguard against any of this leaking out.”

“What do you have in mind?” the President asked.

Hastelloy pulled out a thick legislative document from his briefcase and handed it over to the President who began thumbing through the first few pages.  “You want to establish a covert agency charged with safeguarding this alien information?”

“Yes.  This will establish a National Security Agency with locked-in authority to do whatever is required to keep this and any other knowledge of alien activity hidden.  Sign this into law and we have an agreement.”

“This will subordinate even your FBI agency you know.”

“Yes it will,” Hastelloy said as he deactivated and returned his futuristic equipment to his briefcase locking it tight once more.  “It’s for the greater good.  Now with that settled, shall we talk some more with the others?”

The last time
Hastelloy led an FBI field operation on American soil it involved fifty men armed with Thompson machine guns storming a Communist party meeting.  It had been big and showy for the papers to let the public know the United States government was on top of the ‘Red Scare’.

This operation was far different.  Pistols tipped with sound suppressors replaced the bulky, disk fed machine guns.  Fifty men displaying badges were now replaced with five field agents in disguise as waiters, patrons, and busboys.  The setting now was not some dingy community center either.  This operation was taking place in none other than New York City’s famed Rainbow Room nestled on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Plaza.

Hastelloy looked around the lively room featuring a revolving dance floor with a big band orchestra dazzling the dinner guests in front of a long wall of windows overlooking the city’s impressive skyline.  A cursory glance of the club’s filled tables this evening revealed a typical star-studded patronage including Judy Garland, Bob Hope, and Joe DiMaggio.  Overall, it was an impressive sight that left little wonder why this was
the
place to be in New York City.

The Rainbow Room was also a hotbed of espionage activity, which is what drew Hastelloy and his men to the establishment this evening.  President Truman had made it clear that his cooperating with arming the V-2 rockets was contingent upon the FBI jealously guarding the Manhattan Project’s nuclear secrets.  To that end, several months back Hastelloy dropped dozens of lures in the espionage waters in the hopes of landing a covert agent of the Soviet Union.

Tonight it appeared Anatoli Yakovlev had taken the bait.  The thirty-two year old was in the country serving as the general counsel for the Soviet delegation in New York.  That was his official capacity, although it had long been suspected he was actually a KGB agent attempting to enlist spies to pass along scientific secrets.

A meeting was arranged for tonight between Anatoli and an FBI field agent posing as a machinist working on the Manhattan Project.  Hastelloy looked on with Alvina, his secretary, posing as his dining companion while they waited for the meeting to take place.  Their table was next to the ever opening and closing door leading to the kitchen area.  It was almost certainly the maître d’s subtle way of giving Hastelloy the rigid finger salute for using his FBI credentials to steal the use of three tables away from patrons who waited months on a reservation list.  It served its purpose though.

Ten minutes after Anatoli took his seat across the table from Hastelloy’s man, the agent used the napkin in his left hand to wipe his mouth.  That was the signal that triggered a series of events.  The ‘waiter’ arrived with a pistol concealed under a set of menus.  ‘Patrons’ at the adjacent table got up and escorted Anatoli from the dining area with pistols under their coats. 

While this took place, Hastelloy left his wallet with Alvina to cover their meal, made his way to the stairwell, and descended one flight to enter the establishment’s banquet area.  He opened the first door on the left and found Anatoli handcuffed to a chair with five agents waiting for Hastelloy’s arrival.

“Anatoli Yakovlev, you are under arrest for intent to commit espionage against the United States,” Hastelloy announced.

Anatoli just cocked his head to the side and laughed.  “Even if that lie were true, you can’t arrest me.  I have diplomatic immunity.”

“Give us the room,” Hastelloy ordered.  “Mr. Yakovlev and I are going to have a little conversation about what his diplomatic immunity is worth.”

Hastelloy watched the man’s smug smirk melt away as the agents vacated the room.  It vanished altogether when the double doors clapped shut.

**********

Amid the grease and grime of a roadside diner outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, Hastelloy endured the clanks and clatters of a busy lunch rush.  He sat alone in his four-person booth with torn seats held together with sticky strips of grey duct tape.  It was somewhat of a step down from his previous dining experience in New York City.

An overworked waitress took his order and shouted it across the room to the fat fellow working the grill station who obviously consumed a lot of the grease-fried products he made.  A short while later a skinny, middle-aged man strolled up to him.  “It is a little crowded in here today, mind if I join you?”

Hastelloy looked up to see the smiling face of Tonwen staring down at him with a broad grin.  He had not seen his science officer since the successful detonation of the atom bomb he was instrumental in bringing into existence.  Despite the cheeky grin, Tonwen looked very uneasy, tortured even.

“I don’t know, my mother always warned me about talking to strangers,” Hastelloy teased in an effort to keep the mood light.

“Fortunately, there are no strangers here,” Tonwen replied while sliding across the bench seat until his shoulder nearly touched the outside window.  “Besides, after ten thousand years I think you are old enough now to make your own decisions.”

“You’re never too old for good advice,” Hastelloy parried, allowing time for Tonwen to open a tiny gold case and pull out a cigarette.  “Speaking of which, you shouldn’t smoke.  It’ll kill you some day.”

Tonwen nodded his head as he struck a match and lit the thin white tube of tobacco.  “Picking up this habit was pretty much a job requirement.  Smoking breaks are where the real research progress gets made.  Everyone, and I do mean everyone, in the lab smokes.  Besides, I do not see any warning labels on them; that must mean they are safe.  Right?”

“Of course,” Hastelloy said with his soft smile hardening to address the business at hand.  “It’s good to see you again, old friend.  Tell me, how is the research for phase two of your project coming along?”

“We already have a proof of concept on the design.  It involves a fission bomb in the primary chamber to be set off.  The radiation from the nuclear explosion then compresses a secondary chamber of hydrogen and uranium fuel to induce a far more energetic fusion explosion,” Tonwen said in a quiet voice.

“What about alterations to the rockets: propellants, guidance?”

“The liquid fuel mixture the V-2s relied on was barely enough to reach lower earth orbit.  To escape orbit with enough velocity to reach Mars in a timely manner, I had to reveal the chemical composition to a much more powerful solid fuel mixture.   It is ahead of its time, but not by too much,” Tonwen reported.  “Guidance is another matter, however.”

Tonwen looked as if he would rather gnaw off his own hand than admit what he had done, but pressed on with the debriefing.  “The Germans used a system of two gyroscopes to guide the rockets.  That worked fine to hit stationary targets a few hundred miles away.  I am afraid being able to strike a moving, rotating target nearly forty million miles away required a more sophisticated solution.”

“Go on,” Hastelloy prodded as his science officer looked ready to gag.

“I devised a guidance system we call Atlas which relies upon an onboard autonomous system as well as a ground-based tracking and command component.”

“Autonomous, tracking, and command?” Hastelloy repeated.  “That sounds an awful lot like modern computer radio communication to me.”

“Exactly,” Tonwen confirmed with a cringe.  “On the bright side, they already have rudimentary computers, so it is not completely revolutionary to them, but…”

“But the smallest computer right now is the size of an office building and it can barely manage to add two plus two,” Hastelloy said, finishing the thought which caused Tonwen to nod in agreement.

“I am afraid even with the new propellant, those rockets would barely get off the ground carrying one of those computers,” Tonwen said.  “In order to solve the problem, it was necessary to repurpose some microprocessors from storage inside the Nexus chamber.  I did everything I could to keep them and my programming code hidden, but they saw.  They may not have specific designs, but they know what is possible now.”

“Bottom line, will it work?”

“Yes.  Those V-2 rockets can now reach Mars and strike within a few inches of a designated target.”

“Excellent, then that leaves the matter of getting enough uranium to arm the rockets.  Are they keeping their end of the bargain?” Hastelloy asked.

“Yes,” Tonwen replied with a solemn nod.  “Every week I take delivery of new materials and make payment with copies of my notes and research papers.  Not only that, your deal with the devil has a team of scientists following and recording my every move and thought.”

Tonwen looked lost as he continued.  “They are getting everything, sir.  When this is all over, the Americans will control thermonuclear weapons guided by intercontinental missiles.  They will be poised to do whatever they want with those terrible weapons.”

“I can personally attest to the top military leadership’s eagerness to employ such weapons to either extort what they want, or to actually use them to set an example or eliminate an obstacle,” Hastelloy added.  “That’s why we’re meeting here today.  I need the names of any scientists on your team who might have, shall we say, more liberal ideals.”

“You mean men who think technology should belong to mankind as a whole, not just a single nation?” Tonwen asked for clarification.  “Men who feel guilty about their involvement in building weapons that killed over a hundred thousand people?  Christ, that’s everybody.”

“None of them thought for one second the American military would actually drop a nuclear bomb on a Japanese city.  Most expected some demonstration of the bomb’s power as a threat to make Japan surrender.  They anticipated some uninhabited island disappearing, or maybe a military facility with numerous weapons and few people.  That might have been justified in their eyes, but the reality was horrifying to all of them; every last man.”

“Yes.  I’m looking for exactly those kinds of men,” Hastelloy confirmed.  “Men who fear the United States will misuse its newfound power.”

“Again, that is nearly all of them,” Tonwen answered in a matter of fact tone.  “By nature, scientists are seekers of truth and feel obligated to share that truth.  Plus, you know as well as I do that many of them had ties to the American Communist Party before joining the program.  Had we only used nationalistic, conservative-minded scientists there would be no atom bomb right now.”

Tonwen paused a moment to look around the small diner.  “I could pick out five men in this room right now who would be the sort for which you are searching.” 

“In fact,” Tonwen said while turning to look behind his back, “two seats down I see David Glass.  He is a machinist on my team who still secretly attends communist party meetings on a somewhat regular basis.”

Hastelloy cracked a knowing smile when Tonwen turned back around.  “You mean the young man having lunch with his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, a man my agency has already proven but not yet prosecuted for turning over top secret information to Soviet spies?”

Hastelloy motioned for the gentlemen seated two booths down to join them.  “I believe the three of you are already acquainted so I will skip the usual pleasantries and get right down to the matter at hand.  Everyone at this table fears America has too much power now, being the sole owner of nuclear weapons.  We all fear our leaders will shirk their responsibility to humanity and misuse their power unless there is another nation with equal capabilities to keep them in check.”

“There are no precautions that can be taken; no barriers against the nuclear bomb can be built.  The only protection would be for the Soviet Union to have their own bomb,” Rosenberg said.

“Nuclear bombs are not a defense,” Tonwen insisted.

“They’re a deterrent,” Hastelloy countered.  “The only sure way to stop our leaders from flattening Moscow the way they flattened Hiroshima is for the Soviet Union to have a bomb of its own so they can threaten retaliation.  That is how we maintain balance in a world your group recently threw out of balance.”

With that declaration made and every man at the table nodding in agreement, Hastelloy gestured for another individual seated at the counter to join them by pulling up a chair.  “Gentlemen, I would like you to meet Anatoli Yakovlev.  From this day forward he’ll serve as your one and only point of contact with the Soviet Union.”

He paused to look at David Glass, “No more attending communist party meetings you think are secret.”

Antatoli ignored the barb and nodded toward Tonwen since he had already met the other two occupants on several occasions.  He took his seat and began laying out the plan, “Mr. Rosenberg will coordinate information, recruiting, and communication with me.  All messages will bear the code name Liberal.  You other two will help him recruit others to our cause.  We need men with specific knowledge of the bomb’s physical specifications, technical specs, and most important of all, how to make weapons grade isotopes.”

“Theo Hall, Morris Cohen, and Klaus Fuchs come to mind right away,” David Glass offered.

“Those would be my first picks as well,” Tonwen confirmed while looking at Hastelloy with frightened eyes.  This was an exceptionally dangerous scheme Hastelloy was hatching with humanity’s four pans of the Neo Scale wobbling wildly about.  The science officer did not have a better plan, thus he continued the conspiratorial conversation.

With his delicate espionage operation set into motion, Hastelloy extricated himself from the conversation and left the diner without looking back.  He had made his play and there was no going back on it now.