The Black Gate (4 page)

She scrutinized him for a moment, then slowly nodded. “Passable. Now get out of those American rags before you’re shot as a spy.”

After she’d disappeared behind the curtain, he stripped naked. Bob had made it clear to him that he could take nothing with him, not even his underwear, if it didn’t come from Germany. He even had to leave his leg brace behind. Instead, the OSS had provided him with one crafted in Germany that didn’t have the awkward metal struts that ran down to his shoe. It felt strange after he strapped it on and gingerly put his weight on his right leg, but seemed to serve its purpose.
 

As he shed his American clothing and donned the SS uniform, he couldn’t help but sense a deeper process of transformation. Looking in the mirror after he’d dressed, he found that what Connelly had told him, that Peter would have looked right at home on an SS recruiting poster, was true. Adorned in black, with close cropped blond hair and sparkling blue eyes set in a ruggedly handsome face, he was the spitting image of one of Hitler’s Aryan supermen. He was at once thrilled, because the uniform gave him a sense of
élan
, a veneer of callous superiority, and at the same time appalled that it appealed to his ego.
You have to play the role
, he told himself.
Otherwise, you’re going to wind up as dead as Mannie
. Shying away from the memory of his brother, he strapped a Wittnauer watch on his right wrist and looked at the time for the first time in four days. It was two-thirty in the morning.

The last element of his disguise was a single medal, the
Ritterkreuz
, or Iron Cross. Made in the shape of the
cross pattée
, it was black and trimmed in silver, with a swastika in the center and the year 1939 on the bottom stem of the cross. It hung from a ribbon that was red in the center, bounded by white and black on both top and bottom. He felt unworthy when he put it around his neck, the cross at his throat. Even though it was an award held in great esteem by the enemy, he felt as if he hadn’t earned it, that he had no right to wear it, even as part of his disguise.

With one last look in the mirror, he grabbed the heavy overcoat draped over the back of the chair and stepped around the cloth curtain. Throwing out his right arm in the
Hitlergruß
, the Nazi salute, he snapped his heels together. “
Heil
Hitler!”

“I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Bob breathed. “Hitler himself would be proud, sir.”

Even the woman looked impressed for a brief moment. “Appearance is the least part of your disguise,
Herr
Müller,” she said in German, pricking Peter’s ego. “Given the unusual nature of this mission, we decided to keep things as simple as possible for you. You were given only the most rudimentary training, and under normal circumstances we would never send someone so unqualified into the field, but in this case we have no choice. Remember: stupid mistakes are the easiest ones to make and the ones that are most likely to get you killed. So you’ll keep your name, except for changing your surname from Miller back to Müller.” She handed him a packet. “These are your identification papers. You can lose anything but these. Without them, you won’t last more than a day before the Gestapo tracks you down, so keep them on your person at all times. I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you’re captured.”

Feeling a bead of cold sweat run down his spine, Peter took the black leather document holder. He quickly flipped through the contents before slipping it into the breast pocket inside his tunic. “Speaking of documents,” he asked, “how is it that I’m not going to be found out? All they’ll need to do is ring up SS Headquarters to ask about me and the game will be up.”

“A personnel file with your information has been inserted into their records, with a telegram sent to Arnsberg about your arrival,” the woman told him. “If anyone asks questions, having an oft-used name and what passes for a nondescript appearance among the SS should help cover you. Your leg could be a giveaway, but you aren’t the first or only serviceman to be retained after an otherwise debilitating injury.” She came closer, staring into his eyes. “Your best defense is to blend in and be useful, Peter. You have to hide in plain sight.”

“What if…what if I have to kill someone?”
 

“Then you kill them, sir,” Bob answered softly. “You shoot him or slit his throat, and you think no more of it than if you were shooting or bleeding out a deer. You left any halfway measures on the far side of the Atlantic.”

Peter stared at Bob and nodded slowly.
 

“You’re not going there as a hired gun, you’re going as an engineer,” the woman reminded him. “Now focus on what will happen, and stop worrying about what might. Here,” she handed him a small folded paper, “this is a pass for the train.”

“I’ll be on a train?”

“You won’t be riding it, but you might need some sort of proof that you rode one from Berlin. Keep it with your other papers.”

As he put the pass in his tunic pocket, Peter asked, “So just how am I going to get there? Assuming I survive my parachute landing, of course.”

“You’ll be met by an agent when you land, and you’ll be taken to
schloss
Arnsberg, using the cover story that they picked you up from the train.”

“Who is it?”

“I can’t tell you,” the woman said. “But the agent who contacts you will use a code word embedded in a sentence,” the woman said. “That codeword is
Charlemagne
. You are to answer with
Bismarck
. Don’t forget. If you use the wrong code word, the agent will kill you.”

“And if whoever meets you doesn’t use their correct code word, kill him, sir,” Bob added. “Without hesitation.”

“All right,” Peter breathed. “What else?”

“A leather suitcase with your personal effects is waiting for you on the plane,” the woman said. “You wouldn’t be traveling to a new posting with nothing but the uniform on your back. The suitcase has spare uniforms and clothing, shaving kit, and toiletries.”

“There’s also this, sir.” Bob reached into his coat and pulled out a Luger pistol and handed it to Peter, who looked it over, then slipped it into the leather holster on his waist belt. “Trust me. It works.”

The woman gave him a last look. “That’s it, then.”

The woman turned Peter over to the dressers, who helped him don a bulky padded jump suit after he slipped on the SS overcoat.
 

“Here, sir,” one of them said. “Let me have that.” He took Peter’s cap and tucked it carefully into the suit next to Peter’s chest before zipping it up. “Watch that doesn’t get mashed up, sir.”

The last part of the jump ensemble was a rubber helmet, which the other dresser strapped on Peter’s head.

Then, to Peter’s amazement, they began to help Bob into a similar suit.

“You’re jumping in with me?” Peter asked in a hopeful voice.

“Oh, no, sir! Not me.” He grinned. “Not this time, at least. General Donovan tasked me with getting you as far as I could, under my own direct supervision, he said. So I’ll be in the plane with you and kick you out the door, if you don’t mind the turn of phrase. This suit business is just to keep my ass from freezing off. It’s cold in those damn planes.”

Once Bob was dressed, the dressers escorted the two men to the door.
 

“Good luck,” the woman said, reaching out to shake Peter’s hand, then Bob’s.
 

“Thanks,” Peter told her, surprised at the look of compassion in her eyes.

Then they were back out in the cold February air for the handful of paces it took them to reach the waiting car. Both men got into the back seat, and the driver headed across the darkened airfield, guided only by the meager bit of light coming through the slitted covers over the headlights.

Peter heard the sound of aircraft engines growing louder, and by the time the driver pulled to a stop, the car was vibrating under the force of the rumbling.

“Here we are, sir,” Bob shouted. He got out on his side, while the driver opened the door for Peter.

They had stopped next to the slab-sided fuselage of a B-24 Liberator bomber, whose four engines were idling at a deafening roar. The prop wash from the four enormous propeller blades blew frigid air across the exposed skin of Peter’s face like a winter gale.

Looking up at the plane, he could see little more than a shadow that blotted out some of the stars in the partly cloudy sky above. The light from a quarter moon that hung halfway up from the eastern horizon glinted on the clear Perspex of the dorsal gun turret.

He felt a tug on his sleeve, and turned to find Bob gesturing for him to come. Following Bob’s lead, Peter duck walked under the bomber’s belly, then clambered up the ladder through the hatch aft of the waist gun positions.

“Welcome aboard,” the crew chief said as he helped Peter up. Making sure the hatchway was clear, the crew chief hauled up the steps before closing and securing the hatch.
 

“Sit yourself down there, sir,” Bob said, and Peter sat down on a distinctly uncomfortable looking rig of metal tubing and canvas that could only loosely be called a seat. The crew chief buckled him in.

“The skipper would have my head if you went bouncing around back here, sir,” the man said with a smile, his face bathed in the red glow from the flashlight he carried, the bulb covered with a red lens. Eyeing Peter one more time to make sure he was in place, he flicked off the light.

The engines roared louder and the plane began to move forward. Peter wanted to unbuckle and go stand at the Perspex covering the waist gun positions so he could see out, even though there was little to see over the darkened landscape. He was amazed that he could feel so claustrophobic in such a large aircraft.

The B-24 taxied for several minutes before slowing to a stop. The pilots ran up the engines, making the plane rattle and shake, then throttled back. After a brief pause, the plane moved forward again, pivoting around onto the main runway.

“Hang on to your hat, sir,” Bob said with a grin. “These Carpetbagger boys are always good for a fun ride.”

“Carpetbaggers?”

“That’s us, sir,” the crew chief shouted over the din of the four Pratt and Whitney engines. “The 492
^nd
Bomb Group. We do the agent insertions for the OSS. You’re our one and only bomb to drop tonight.”

“Oh,” Peter managed.
 

Bob and the crew chief laughed.
 

The pilots pushed the throttles to the stops, and the Liberator began to accelerate down the runway, the engines howling as the plane rolled faster and faster.
 

Peter found himself clutching the frame of the seat as the bomber rattled and bounced, and he wondered if the thing would simply fall apart before it left the ground.
 

In the time it took him to gulp down his fear after one last jolt, they were airborne. As the pilot lifted the nose, Peter was pushed down in his seat, growing unnaturally heavy as the bomber climbed into the night sky.

For better or worse, he was on his way to Germany.

LEAP INTO DARKNESS

Peter had seen newsreels of the “round the clock” Allied bombing raids against Germany that were carried out by the Americans during the day and the British during the night. Some of the raids boasted over a thousand aircraft, and he had sat in the theater, transfixed, his skin prickling into gooseflesh as the screen showed the sky filled with four engine bombers and their escort fighters, a thousand and more aircraft leaving long white condensation trails behind them. It was an awe-inspiring sight, and it was hard to imagine that anything could survive in the wake of such an attack. Of course, he had a professional appreciation for the devastation the massive raids inflicted, having analyzed thousands of post-strike aerial photos to assess the damage against Germany’s power infrastructure. Many of Germany’s cities and larger towns had been reduced, literally, to rubble, and yet still the Germans fought on.

While he knew that Allied aircrews (not to mention the Germans) had suffered terrible casualties in the strategic bombing campaign, the men who flew the missions took off each time knowing that they were not alone, that hundreds or thousands of their countrymen were with them, facing the danger together.

The “Carpetbaggers,” on the other hand, the Army Air Corps unit dedicated to supporting OSS operations in Europe, typically flew alone. Peter stood at one of the Perspex-covered waist gun positions in the side of the B-24, looking out into the night. Other than the moonlight and stars reflecting from the wakes of Allied ships in the English Channel, the world was dark and empty, as if the plane had slipped beyond the Schwarzschild radius of one of von Falkenstein’s wormholes to a universe where only darkness reigned. Peter had never felt so alone or vulnerable in his life.

The nose of the plane suddenly dipped, taking them even closer to the water,
 

“We’re coming up on the Dutch coast, sir,” Bob said from beside him. “We’re taking a bit of a dogleg to the north of Amsterdam, or we’d be blowing the knickers off clotheslines.”

“How high…or low…are we?”

“About fifteen hundred feet.”

Peter stared at him. “The Germans could hit us with rocks.”

“Sure, if they could see a plane painted black at night and we weren’t moving at over two hundred miles per hour.” He put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, sir. We’ll get you there in one piece. Don’t you doubt it.”

The flight seemed to go on forever. Peter stayed at the waist gun position the entire time, watching the darkness roll by.
 

He was startled when the crew chief tapped him on the arm. “Okay, sir, it’s about that time.”

Peter checked his watch to find that only a little more than an hour and a half had gone by.

After the crew chief snapped on a light that filled the fuselage with dim red light, he and Bob began to strap on Peter’s parachute. Peter’s hands began to shake as a series of gory vignettes began to play out in his mind, each one ending with him splatting into the ground and bursting like a melon. His stomach began to churn, and he bit down on the urge to vomit.