The Hess Cross (7 page)

"Then Wavell received two incredible pieces of information. First, there was a gap between two of the Italian forts, Sofafi East and Sofafi Southwest, which was difficult to defend because of the topography. And second, for some reason, the Italians weren't even trying to defend the gap at all.

"Wavell assigned Major General R. N. O'Connor to take his thirty-one thousand men through the virtually undefended space. To make it short, O'Connor dashed five hundred miles across Cirenaica and destroyed the Italian army. It was a military feat unparalleled in the desert war."

"And the European Documentation Center's role?" Crown asked.

"A big one," Smithson volunteered uncertainly.

"Precisely," Sackville-West went on as he relit the pipe. "A week before O'Connor began his offensive, a Major Johann Wesel crossed to England. He was interrogated by the EDC, and they discovered that Wesel had been assigned to the German Army's Italian liaison office. Because of his position, Wesel knew in detail the strengths and weaknesses of the Italian army in Africa, including the gap between the forts. The EDC immediately gave Wesel's information
to the British High Command, which passed it on to Wavell.

"In other words, Wavell and O'Connor had the exact details of the Italian positions. As a result, the greater parts of five Italian divisions were destroyed. Thirty-eight thousand prisoners, four hundred heavy guns, and fifty tanks were taken. O'Connor's sprint turned into a major British campaign which drastically weakened the Italian hold on Africa."

"I hope the men at the EDC are being paid salaries commensurate with their work," Crown said at his boss's pause.

"That would be impossible. The Sofafi gap is only one example, albeit the most dramatic. There are several other instances where information gleaned from crossed Germans has saved British lives and has cost the Germans dearly." Sackville-West stood from his chair, his pipe gripped firmly in his teeth. He looked through the window curtains at the Chicago weather. New lines around the Priest's eyes were visible in the window light. Sackville-West had told Crown as early as 1938 that the United States would fight Hitler. The wrinkles were manifestations of the work and worry of the secret war that began years before most Americans had heard of the Nazi party.

"I tell you all this, John, so you'll realize the importance and effectiveness of the European Documentation Center. Now, let me mention several other classified items, and then I'll try to draw them together. The reason you are in Chicago will become clear as I do."

Crown noted the smirk that crossed Smithson's face, a reflection of the power the Chicago man felt because he possessed information Crown as yet did not. Sackville-West was lecturing Crown, not him. It equalized the conversation.

"Does the name Otto Hahn mean anything to you?" Sackville-West's questions interrupted Crown's thoughts.

"No, it doesn't."

"Professor Hahn is a German chemist presently involved in weapons experiments that we know extremely little about. In fact, what I'm told, I don't understand, but let me tell you anyway.

"You know that some atoms are radioactive—uranium, for example. Professor Hahn and his colleagues in Germany are experimenting with ways of splitting the atom, causing particles to break off and shoot away from the atom. Their hope is to start a chain reaction, one atom hitting another, and it hitting another, and on and on. This is nuclear fission."

"Where are you when you have nuclear fission?" Crown asked, sorry to see the conversation take a scientific turn.

"London and Washington speculate that the chain reaction could balloon violently, causing a massive explosion. The German research is designed to produce a bomb."

"That's just what the goddamn Germans need, another bomb."

"This one is different. Our scientists believe that, just like a conventional explosion, when an atom bomb is detonated, there will be an extremely rapid rise in temperature, which will result in the complete vaporization, or gasification, of the products of the explosion and also of the container. These very hot gases produced in the restricted space will start to move outward immediately following the detonation. But there are several ways an atom bomb will differ from TNT. First, the amount of energy released will be a thousand or more times that of our largest current weapons. The scientists figure that the wind velocity a quarter-mile from the explosion site will reach eight-hundred miles per hour, and that all structures within two miles will be flattened."

Sackville-West looked up from the ominous statistics, and a shadow of fear crossed his face, something Crown had never seen before.

"Second," the Priest continued, "the explosion will be accompanied by a highly penetrating and deadly invisible ray. The scientists are only beginning to guess the effects of this ray, but they suspect it will have the effect of a massive overdose of X ray, that is, sickness and deterioration of the body parts. And third, radioactive particles will remain in the air and on the ground after an explosion. The particles will sicken or kill people coming in contact with them."

Sackville-West raised his hand to prevent an expression of disbelief, and said, "We know the Germans are spending millions on atom research right now. We also know that the Reich Ministry of Economics has forbidden the exportation of radioactive materials. The location of German stockpiles of uranium has become a German state secret of the highest priority. Even more frightening is that the Germans first produced heavy water in 1937 and split a uranium atom in 1938."

Sackville-West anticipated the question and went on, "Heavy water is water that has been made fractionally more dense by passing electricity through it. It's used to slow down the neutrons and divert them back into the reaction, thus allowing the reaction to build. The fact the Germans first produced it five years ago indicates they are far ahead of us in nuclear-bomb research."

The Priest was warming to his subject. His usually conservative gestures were now more animated, and his voice lost its hard, articulated edge. He was the United States government's premier operative. His agency was given information and told to act. Act secretly, swiftly, and surely. It was inconceivable that his data had not been analyzed and sifted by the best minds in the country, who had been trained to look for weak spots, inconsistencies, and planted information. That Sackville-West had been ordered to act made it clear that the United States was deeply concerned about this German research. Crown's doubt of the
unbelievable tale of a city-destroying bomb the size of a basketball disappeared.

"Now, to Hess's role in this affair. Rudolf Hess has always been viewed by us as Hitler's faithful, do-anything dog. Our studies on him done before his flight to Scotland showed him to be of medium intelligence with a rather shallow personality. We believed he rose to his powerful position in the Third Reich simply because of his unquestioned, blind obedience to Hitler. Hitler spoke, Hess jumped. Take a look at excerpts from some of Hess's speeches made before his crossing." Sackville-West produced another manila folder and passed it to Crown.

The thin sheets in the folder had only one green stripe. The first page was entitled, "
EXCERPTS FROM SPEECHES BY RUDOLF HESS SHOWING HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD ADOLF HITLER."
Crown glanced down the sheet. Each quotation was preceded by a date, a place, the name of the audience, and the purpose of the speech. The quotations were thickly obsequious:

      
Hitler is simply reason incarnate.

      
One must want the Führer.

      
With pride we see that one man remains beyond criticism, that is the Führer. This is because everyone feels and knows: he is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in the surrender to the Führer that does not ask for the why in individual cases, in the silent execution of his orders. We believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German history. There can be no criticism of this belief.

"This is sickening," Crown said as he handed the folder back. "Hess can fawn like no one I've ever heard of before."

"My thoughts, too. So the psychiatrists in England began their studies of Hess almost with their tongues in their
cheeks. They had Hess figured out before he landed. He was a slobbering puppet.

"His mind seemed to deteriorate in his cell. As I mentioned earlier, he would at times completely withdraw from human contact, refusing to talk or to listen to the doctors. He suffered hallucinations and short spells of complete amnesia. He would spend hours staring at a blank wall."

Everette Smithson raised his hand slightly, as if he were asking a teacher for permission to speak. "It sounds like he may have been crazy all along. What's more crazy—saying idiot things about Hitler or staring at a wall?"

"Few of the top Nazi leaders were ever sane," Sackville-West said as he smiled at Smithson, who beamed, grateful for the recognition.

Sackville-West returned to the folder. "A few months after the amnesia and hallucinations began, Hess started dropping phrases like 'fission,' 'heavy water,' and 'uranium.' At first the doctors thought nothing of it, thinking it was the wandering of a deranged man. But the more Hess's mind seemed to deteriorate, the more these scientific words cropped up. The doctors soon realized they were not qualified to question Hess further, because they had no idea what he was talking about."

"So the European Documentation Center was called in?"

"Yes. Normally, Hess would have been referred to them immediately after his arrival. But he was clearly having mental troubles, and it was thought that psychiatrists would be more efficient gaining whatever information Hess could offer.

"The EDC produced a report after interviewing Hess one week. Mind you, the doctors were also present during these interviews. The EDC people, as good as they are, do not have psychiatric training, and we didn't want to lose whatever strands of sanity Hess still possessed.

"The EDC report indicates that Hess, far from being a do-
nothing party speechmaker, had a very important role. For some reason unknown to us, he understood the potentials of what Professor Otto Hahn told the German leaders about an ultimate bomb long before other Nazi leaders did. He became interested in nuclear physics. Perhaps as a pacifier, Hitler assigned him to oversee the nuclear experiments and to act as liaison between the scientists and the Führer. Hess apparently kept a close watch on the experiments and became knowledgeable about them. For several years Hahn and the other German physicists told him immense amounts of scientific data in order to convince Hess to keep money coming to the experiments."

"How technical is Hess's information?" Crown asked.

"We don't know. The EDC men don't know anything about nuclear physics, so they can't ask intelligent questions. The best they can do is to scribble down what Hess mutters and pass it along."

"It wouldn't seem possible that a fanatic Nazi bootlicker never known for any intellectual prowess could have data that would help us."

"Perhaps not," Sackville-West replied, "but all information, no matter how general, must be extracted from Hess. The very least he knows is how much emphasis the Nazis are putting on the nuclear experiments, and that information alone is vital.

"There is only one man qualified to question Hess, and he is here at the University of Chicago. His name is Enrico Fermi. I'll be brief with his biography."

Sackville-West picked up a 3A sheet and summarized. "Fermi was born in 1901, the son of a railroad administrator. He quickly outgrew traditional education and began the study of physics as a hobby. He purchased and borrowed physics texts, and he decided to become a physicist before his high school ended. In 1918 Fermi went to Pisa to begin his higher education at the Reale Scuola Normale of Pisa.
In 1922 he received his doctorate in physics. Fermi then taught at various institutions and studied with the world's leading physicists. In 1924 he became a lecturer at the University of Florence, and two years later he went to the University of Rome as a professor of theoretical physics. He made important discoveries involving the behavior of electrons in solids, electrical conductivity, electron emission, and thermoelectric effects.

"In 1928 he was married to his present wife, Laura. This apparently didn't slow him down, because in 1934 he developed a theory of radioactive beta-ray disintegration. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938." Sackville-West lowered the 3A. "What I'm trying to impress you with is that Enrico Fermi is a heavyweight."

"You've succeeded admirably," Crown replied. The prospect of meeting a Nobel laureate intrigued him.

"Mussolini began cracking down on the Jews and intellectuals in the late thirties. Fermi is a Catholic, but he found he couldn't carry on his research and teaching in the repressive atmosphere of fascist Italy. He fled in 1939 and accepted a post at Columbia University in New York. A while ago he came to Hyde Park."

"Where he is working on research similar to the Germans', research on the ultimate bomb," Crown guessed. His assignment was beginning to take shape.

"Yes. His research is too important to take the time to fly him to London to interview Hess. So Hess is coming here. Fermi will interview him, and then Hess will return to England. European Documentation Center personnel will also come to Hyde Park to assist Fermi. In fact, Peter Kohler, the assistant chief of the EDC, has been in Hyde Park for over a week preparing a safe house. Your job is to transport Hess from England, to ensure his safety while he is in Chicago, and to get Hess back to England. This must be done with unprecedented security. The Germans, and
everyone else for that matter, must not even have slight suspicions of Hess's travels.

"As you know," Sackville-West went on, cutting off the opportunity for questions, "Smithson here is in charge of mid-States antisabotage. He has the resources you need, like automobiles and the like. He'll cooperate in every way, and you're to call him if you need anything. You have one week to work with Peter Kohler to make your preparations for Hess's confinement in Hyde Park. Next Monday, we have transportation for you to London to pick up Hess. I've prepared a packet of further instructions, which you can read downstairs. They are not to leave the building."