The Proteus Operation Read online

  Anna had never talked about her experiences in Russia during the German and Japanese onslaught. As Ferracini watched her, he got the feeling that the visage of hardness and determination that he saw was a mask acquired in later years, with the contours beneath still carrying a memory of a face that had once been young and soft. She reminded him of another woman that he had seen somewhere . . . the former schoolteacher from Liverpool that they had brought back to Norfolk on a sub. It had been on his last European mission before Proteus. He couldn't remember her name.

  "So it's still happening, right now," he said in a strangely flat voice. "Across the ocean out there—there are still people on our side who don't want to see Hitler stopped. We really are right back where it all started." The realization had never registered quite so strongly before.

  "That's why Claud and the rest of King are over there," Anna said. "So let's hope that we'll soon start seeing changes to more than just speeches."

  Behind them, Cassidy placed the last stiffening bar over its slot in the completed former. "I still say we oughta nuke the hell out of all of 'em," he muttered, and hammered it home with relish.

  The phone from the front office rang, and Ferracini went to answer it. The voice of Major Warren greeted him, speaking quietly but urgently. "Get up here with Cassidy right away, but make it slow and casual. We've got uninvited guests. Have the others standing by on condition Fox in case there's trouble."

  Ferracini acknowledged, and the line went dead. "Major Warren," he announced as he replaced the receiver. "There might be trouble up front. It's a Fox alert. Cassidy, he wants us out there—but go easy."

  As Cassidy and Ryan put down their tools, Ferracini produced a Colt .45 automatic from a toolbox beside him and slipped it inside his coveralls. He went round the capacitor bank at the rear to where Floyd Lamson was working. Lamson lowered his torch and looked up enquiringly. "Fox alert," Ferracini told him, and went on past, heading for the front of the building. Meanwhile the others had picked up their own weapons and were following behind to take up their assigned positions. Ryan and Anna covered one of the two doors leading through the steel-reinforced facade of bales and crates screening the machine area; Lamson went to the other door to await the arrival of Gordon Selby, who had been resting in the back section with Captain Payne. Ferracini and Cassidy went on into the front area of the warehouse.

  Mortimer Greene, in vest and shirtsleeves as usual, was confronting four men out on the loading platform above the dock where two of the trucks were parked. The tall, blue chinned figure of Major Harvey Warren, erect and unmistakably military despite his brown corduroy pants, baggy green sweater, and leather cap, was standing a few feet back, outside the open door of the front office from where he had telephoned. Across the parking area below the dock, the small portal set into one of the main doors was open, and the front of what looked like a black Buick was partly visible outside.

  One man was doing the talking and seemed to be in charge among the four. He had flaccid, clammy-looking features with fleshy lips, a wide nose, and dark, sardonic, somehow fishlike eyes. He was dressed ostentatiously in a light gray hat with a glittery band, raccoon-skin overcoat, silk scarf, and crocodile-hide shoes. The other three, standing a few paces back, were all big, broad-shouldered, and more or less uniformly attired in variations of double-breasted suits and felt hats. One of them, who was chewing gum, moved his head a fraction to run his eyes over Ferracini and Cassidy as they appeared from the rear, then looked away again, still working his jaw indifferently. Greene was tight-lipped and angry. Warren was eyeing the visitors up and down with parade-ground scrutiny, weighing the potential opposition.

  "It's just a risky area around here—all the way along the waterfront," Fat-lips was saying, keeping one hand thrust in his overcoat pocket and gesturing with the cigar that he was holding in the other. He spoke in a bored, lazy voice, while his gaze wandered up and about, all over the visible interior of the premises. "Accidents happen all the time, especially fire accidents—bad ones. There's all kinds of stuff stashed away around these docks, know what I mean? Nasty, dangerous stuff—like oil, paint, gasoline . . ." He shook his head sadly and flicked an inch of ash onto the floor. "See what I mean, Pop? It can happen anywhere, any time at all. A place like this could be wiped out. And that'd be a real shame now, wouldn't it . . . all that nice stuff . . . them trucks down there . . . lotta money to lose."

  Greene's face, and even the bald crown of his head, had paled. His white mustache seemed to bristle of its own accord. "How much?" he demanded curtly. Ferracini caught Cassidy's eye for a moment. Cassidy, it was clear, was still all for nuking them. But military discipline prevailed.

  "Aw, for this place . . ." Fat-lips looked around again and gestured carelessly. "Say, two hundred a month—fire insurance, with the special protection plan against arson included. You're gonna need that, Pop—like I said, all kinds of nuts loose around this area."

  Greene drew a long, deep breath, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled sharply and nodded. "Very well. Now get out. You're wasting our time."

  Fat-lips turned his head momentarily to his three clockwork goons-in-attendance and indicated Greene with a nod of approval. "Thats what I like to see—someone being smart. Being smart and cooperating like that can even get a discount later, maybe."

  "Get out," Greene repeated. His face was beginning to color.

  Fat-lips's expression hardened and his pretentious air evaporated. "First of every month," he snapped. "One of the boys here will collect. And no funny stuff. Pop—accidents happen to people around here, not only to places." With that, he nodded to his entourage and led them across the loading platform and down the short flight of iron steps to the bay where the trucks were parked. They left through the small door and closed it behind them. Seconds later, the sounds of car doors being slammed came from outside, followed by an engine starting.

  Still breathing heavily, Greene turned back toward the others and stamped straight past them into the office, slamming the door behind him. They heard the car reverse outside the main doors, then stop, change into forward gear, and move away. Ferracini's tension relaxed. Cassidy was set to blow a gasket. "Are we supposed to just stand here and let bums come in and talk to the boss like that?" he seethed, throwing up his arms in protest at Warren. "We coulda blown 'em away. What are we, a kid's picnic outing or something?"

  "The professor was right," Warren told him. "It's only for a couple of months, and what does a few hundred dollars matter, anyhow? Trouble would only attract attention. We don't need that." Cassidy knew all that already. The outburst had been just his way of letting off steam. He nodded resignedly and turned away, punching a fist into the opposite palm.

  "Tell the others they can stand down," Warren told Ferracini. Then he went into the office to join Greene.

  "Come on, Cowboy," Ferracini said. "Time to stop being an asshole and get back to work." They walked back around a stack of bales toward one of the concealed doors. "Mort said earlier that if we get the Quadcomp finished we can take some time off tonight. Maybe we could introduce a couple of the guys to Max and his friends."

  "We've taken worse than those jerks apart with our bare hands," Cassidy grumbled.

  "Save it for the real war, if it happens," Ferracini advised.

  That evening, Greene would agree to only three leaves of absence among the military contingent, and Floyd Lamson went with Ferracini and Cassidy to the Rainbow's End. They took Gordon Selby along, too.

  For Ferracini this wasn't far from home. He had been born just a few miles to the north, in Queens, and grown up across the river in Hoboken. As they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab on their way into the city, he was struck again by how little the view that he remembered of the Manhattan skyline differed from the one he was seeing now. Most of New York's architectural character had come with the building boom of the thirties, and nobody had found the time or the motivation to change it very much in the years afterward as the conflagration ac
ross the seas grew into a world catastrophe.

  A branch of his family had established itself in America in successive waves of migration from Italy through the early decades of the century His own father, taking his boyhood sweetheart with him, had crossed the Atlantic in the thirties, over ten years before Harry was born. He had chosen to emigrate rather than to be conscripted and sent away to places no one had heard of, in order to slaughter defenseless natives for the greater glory of a strutting oaf like Mussolini. They married, and the family had already acquired two sons and a daughter when Harry arrived in 1947. By that time, his father had worked hard, set up as a partner in a successful hardware business in Queens, and become a proud, patriotic, naturalized American. He celebrated his new citizenship by giving his new son a good, solid, American name; he'd have none of the "Antonios" and "Romanos" that inhabited his relatives' families in legions.

  But Harry never knew his parents. His mother died when giving birth to him, and his father was killed in an electrical accident less than a year later. The children were found homes among the various relatives, and Harry was raised by an uncle and an aunt who lived in Hoboken.

  His Uncle Frank worked as a spiderman on construction sites. In the evenings, he boxed in the local gymnasium; from time to time, he won trophies and some extra cash at clubs in the area. He taught Harry that people had to be prepared to defend themselves and the things they valued "because there's always people out there ready to take what they can't earn, if you let 'em." The same went for countries, too, Frank used to say. If America, England, and even Russia, maybe had only had the guts to stick together and fight Hitler while there was still time, then things mightn't have gone the way they did. Harry's father had always felt the same way, too. "He'd have been real proud of you, Harry," Frank had said when Harry announced, upon leaving school, that he was volunteering for the Army.

  As a boy, Harry remembered looking at the photographs of his parents in Frank's house, wishing he could have known them. He tried to picture the kind of life they had led in a free Europe, and then the coming of the tyranny that had driven them to flee. He was saddened to think that, after such effort and sacrifice to find freedom to live without interference and raise their children the way they wanted, they should have lived to enjoy so little of what they deserved. He had blamed the Fascists, the Nazis, and everything connected with them. Perhaps that was why he had joined the Army.

  The incident that he had witnessed earlier in the day bothered him. It bothered him because, enraging though the spectacle had been, there was nothing else, realistically, that Mortimer Greene could have done. Did that mean, then, that there was nothing the democracies could do against Hitler's blackmail, either? If so, the mission was already doomed to failure.

  Ferracini had never known Winslade's boundless confidence to be misplaced. He hoped more than ever that it would turn out to be solidly based this time. But he still couldn't see it.

  CHAPTER 10

  MAX'S PLACE WAS BUSY, and Janet was due to sing that night. Jeff had decided to take some time off from his books and his university friends and had come into town, too. He had even put on a jacket and necktie for the occasion, and despite his owlish face, his heavy glasses, and his mop of rebellious hair, he managed to look not too much out of place. In fact, to his freely admitted surprise, he was having a good time. A friend of his from the same department at Columbia—somebody named Isaac Asimov, who entertained hopeful notions of becoming a famous science-fiction writer one day—had declined an invitation to come along, claiming that he wanted to work on a new story idea. So Jeff had expected to spend a bored evening watching exhibitions of noisy mindlessness with nobody stimulating to talk to. Instead, he had met Gordon Selby.

  "Walter Zinn has been running a lot of the experiments, and somebody called Szilard—Leo Szilard, I think—is involved, too," Jeff told Selby. They were sitting at a corner table near the bar with Ferracini and Pearl. Cassidy and Floyd Lamson had learned to jive and were bobbing and yelling with a couple of other girls somewhere out on the crowded floor. "Szilard's another Hungarian who got out and went to England, but he moved here sometime last year. Anyhow, they use a mixture of radium and beryllium as a neutron source, and bombard uranium oxide with the neutrons."

  "And they've found fission neutrons?" Selby queried again.

  Jeff nodded. "I'm pretty sure they have. I heard something about Szilard making phone calls to Teller and Merle Tuve down in Washington that sounded as if they had. Apparently, they have to use paraffin to slow down what they call 'photoneutrons' into 'thermal' neutrons.''

  Selby pursed his lips. He was lean and swarthy, in his late thirties. The dense, black hair that normally adorned his head in rich waves was now cut shorter, thirties-style, and he had a heavy but neatly trimmed beard. He tended to keep his business to himself and spent a lot of his free time roaming around the New York bookstores and art shows. Ferracini guessed that Selby had thoughts of investing early in the works of new names that were destined to command better prices in years to come. Such smuggling from the past was against the rules, but Ferracini couldn't see any reason to worry unduly about it.

  "I'm kind of surprised that you know so much about it," Selby said to Jeff. "I wouldn't have expected students to be involved."

  Jeff grinned. "Well, it's not exactly official—I'm just interested in the subject, I guess. And in a big university . . . well, there's always somebody who'll talk to you if you approach them the right way. Academics aren't big on censorship."

  "Have you talked much about this to anyone else?" Selby asked uneasily.

  "Not really. I can see why some people might consider it a sensitive subject right now, but Joliot's paper in Nature last month pretty much said the same things, anyway. And I've heard that Zinn and Szilard were working with Fermi and a couple of other guys to put out their own paper any time now."

  Selby was wondering how much of Overlord's decision to equip Hitler with atomic weapons for the 1942 Russian campaign might have been due to mistaken impressions of an intensive official program being launched in the U.S. He knew from the subsequent record, and Jeff didn't, that a lot of arguing was going on right at that time in the office of George Pegram, professor of physics and Dean of the Graduate Schools at Columbia, over suggestions for voluntarily withholding details of the uranium research being conducted there. Also, Szilard had convinced Pegram, Fermi, Teller, and Tuve that the implications were serious enough to justify government involvement. Accordingly, Pegram had written to the Chief of Naval Operations in March to advise of the possible imminence of a new explosive of revolutionary destructive potential. In a follow-up visit to Washington to elaborate further, however, Fermi and Tuve had been virtually thrown out as a pair of cranks. So much for an intensive official U.S. program.

  "The last thing I heard was that Fermi wants to build a pile big enough to support a chain reaction," Jeff said. "But he's not sure yet whether to go for carbon or heavy water as the moderator." He looked at Selby curiously for a few seconds. "You seem to know a lot more about this kind of thing than most people," he commented. "Where did you learn it?"

  "Oh, I worked out West in Berkeley," Selby lied. That seemed far enough away. "Cyclotrons."

  "With Lawrence?" Jeff sounded interested. "A pal of mine moved out there. He still writes—tells me all about what's going on there. It sounds like terrific stuff."

  "That was a couple of years back," Selby said hastily. "I came into an inheritance. Now I'm just living up in the hills on my own for a spell, reading, thinking, and figuring out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I don't know anything about what's going on anywhere."

  Pearl stopped talking to Ferracini while she lit a cigarette and looked across the table. "Hey, you two, we're still here, you know," she said, raising her husky but not unattractive voice. "How about trying English for a change? Do you know what they're talking about, Harry?"

  "Beats the hell out of me. I just leave 'em to it."


  "She's right, Jeff," Selby said, relieved. "We ought to quit."

  "Try getting to know some of the girls, Jeff," Pearl suggested. "There's some good-looking ones in here tonight. Go ask one of them to dance, why not?"

  Jeff wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "Not really— I'll pass."

  "Why, for chrissakes?"

  "Aw . . . it's too much like a sex-substitute. I'll take the real thing or nothing."

  "Gee, get a load of this! Is that a new line, Jeff?"

  "I dunno—maybe. Think it's got chances?"

  Pearl threw her head back and laughed delightedly. "It might have, but don't hold your breath." She looked at Ferracini. "Know something, Harry? This kid's gonna be okay. Hear that, Jeff? You're okay."

  "Well, that's nice to know," Jeff acknowledged.

  "I thought your sister was due out before now," Pearl said, looking around. "Where is she?

  The band slowed to a smoochy rendition of "When the Blue of the Night," and the crowd on the floor began thinning out. A few seconds later, Cassidy and Lamson appeared, heading toward the table with their women. Cassidy was steering a small, bright-eyed, bouncy-looking girl, his hand draped loosely on her waist. He introduced her as Molly, and her companion as Nell. Molly evidently knew Pearl already. "I didn't realize he was with you!" she squeaked excitedly. "You never told me you knew a real, live, bomber pilot, Pearl. Who else have you been hiding?"

  "Fancy that—I must have forgot." Pearl glanced at Ferracini and shrugged resignedly.