The Proteus Operation Read online

  "What'd you do last?"

  "Trucking between here and New Mex."

  "Ever work muscle? I can use help. It's good dough—fifty a week, and could get better.

  "Sid says he's ex-Army," Max threw in. "Sid can tell. That right, Harry?" Ferracini shrugged.

  "It wasn't the Army," Pearl said in a throaty voice. "They used to be with some secret spy operation that the State Department runs out of the embassy in Paris. Cowboy's been telling us about it over by the bar. They smuggled a real princess out of Austria or someplace. Say, Max, why can't we get interesting guys like these in here more often?"

  Ferracini groaned beneath his breath and went back to drinking his coffee. Before Pearl could take the subject further, Janet, who had finished her number, came over to the table. "How do you think it went?" she asked, looking at Max.

  "You're gonna work it into the routine tomorrow?"

  "Sure, if you like it. Why not?"

  "And you're gonna use the blue dress, okay? The one with the frills and stuff, that's got the cutaway top that shows plenty of . . . you know. . . ." Max cupped his hands in front of his chest.

  Janet nodded with a sigh and a resigned smile. "I'll wear the blue dress," she agreed.

  Max nodded his head rapidly and waved a hand. "Yeah, yeah, and sing the song. The song's fine."

  "I guess I'm through for today, then," Janet said. She looked down at Ferracini. "If you and Cassidy can stand a subway ride uptown, I'll fix you both a late breakfast. You'll be able to clean up a little, too, and say hi to Jeff. Interested?" Jeff was Janet's younger brother. She had taken a singing job partly to help him through Columbia, where he was studying on a state scholarship grant to be a chemist. The two of them shared an apartment somewhere near Morningside Park.

  "I'm interested," Ferracini said. He raised his head and called across to the bar, "Hey, Cassidy, Janet's inviting us to eat breakfast and meet her kid brother. Are we interested?"

  "What's that—breakfast?"

  "That's what I said. At Janet's place—say hi to Jeff, remember?

  "Oh, Jeff, sure—the chemist." Cassidy hauled himself carefully off the barstool. "Gotta say hi to Jeff . . . eat breakfast," he mumbled to the people he had been talking with.

  "Get a load of this," Pearl muttered, lighting a cigarette. "It takes me all my time to find one guy I wanna take home. She walks out with two of them."

  Ferracini stood up and helped Janet with her coat. "You've got a deal," he told her. "But no subway. With us you go by cab, okay?"

  Pearl looked appealingly at the ceiling. "What, no Cadillac? Gee, I feel bad for you, Jan. Things must be getting really tough."

  "Our chauffeur took it for his night off," Cassidy said as he joined them.

  Max sat back in his chair and looked up. "So don't forget what I told ya, Harry. You guys come back and see us again, okay? And make it often."

  "We'll see what we can do, Ferracini promised.

  "Here, give me a call if you wanna talk some more about the job," Johnny said, giving Ferracini a calling card. It read J- J- J- J- J- J- Harrington Enterprises, with a phone number.

  Ferracini nodded. "Thanks, Johnny. I'll keep it in mind."

  The three of them left the club through its double doors and walked along a short corridor to a flight of steps leading up to the street. "What's that?" Cassidy asked from Janet's other side as Ferracini was about to put the calling card in his pocket. Ferracini passed it to him.

  "He's the New York agent for all the Austrian princesses who want smuggling out of Europe," Ferracini said. "The two of you ought to get to know each other."

  Janet was somewhere in her latter twenties, with the petite, rounded kind of face that a button chin, high cheeks, and a girlishly turned-up nose made pretty rather than glamorous. She had large, green-blue eyes with long lashes, a puckish mouth that dimpled at the corners when she grinned—which was often, even after a night like the one before—and dark auburn hair that bounced around her face in loose wisps and waves in a way that seemed appropriate to the times—unlike the joyless, tight-bound styles typical of the seventies. She was refreshed after having enjoyed a little sleep the night before, and Ferracini and Cassidy were content to let her do most of the talking as the cab took them north along Broadway and onto Central Park West.

  "Our pa was an engineer of some kind. When I was fifteen, we moved down to Pennsylvania so that he could take a job with one of the steel companies," she told them. "Well, when everything crashed they had to cut back, and he was laid off. He couldn't get any other work—nobody could—and we all ended up in a light-housekeeping room."

  "Lighthouse?" Cassidy repeated. "You mean you were on the coast?"

  Janet looked at him strangely, uncertain of whether he meant it as a joke or not. "No . . . you know, that's what you called it. Two-burner stove, icebox in the closet that the guy delivered a fifty-pound cake for every two days, bathroom in the hallway that you shared with the whole floor, all for seven dollars a week in a brownstone walkup on the edge of the slums."

  "Sure, sure," Ferracini said, nodding knowingly. "So what happened to your folks? You said there was just you and Jeff now, right?"

  "Ma overworked herself outdoors in the winter and got TB," Janet said. "There wasn't any money to buy proper treatment, and she died in '33." Her voice was matter-of-fact, without bitterness or self-pity. "Pa sent Jeff and me back to New York to stay with his cousin, Stan, who was a lawyer, and his wife, and he headed out West. There was supposed to be jobs in Oregon and California. He said he'd send for us after he got himself fixed up, but all we ever got was a couple of letters with a few dollars inside." Janet shrugged and smiled. "Still, even that meant he didn't forget, I guess. Last we heard from him was over a year ago now, when he said he'd signed up on a freighter based out of San Francisco, going to Japan and places like that."

  "So what happened with this guy Stan and his wife?" Ferracini asked.

  "Oh, they're still around. They've got this huge house that they've lived in forever. When Stan's brother's business failed in Jersey and another cousin got laid off by Ford in Michigan, they all moved in with their families—twelve people to seven rooms and one bath. That lasted a couple of years. We ate lots of rabbit and relied mainly on somebody or other getting a WPA job, but usually that only lasted a few months. So when Jeff—he's a smart kid—won this scholarship to Columbia and I got the job at the Rainbow to help out—"

  "Rainbow?" Ferracini queried.

  "Max's place—the Rainbow's End. We've just come from there, remember?

  "Oh, yeah, sure . . ."

  "Anyhow, Max got us the flat through someone he knows. It's only a couple of blocks from Columbia, so ideal for Jeff. And it's easier for me to get downtown to work, too. I work in a store in the day as well as sing, but today I'm off."

  "Max got you the flat?" Cassidy sounded surprised.

  "Oh, he can get a bit fussy at times, but underneath he's okay," Janet said.

  The apartment was at the top of a tired-looking, stone-fronted, three-storey tenement situated in an alley somewhere between Seventh and St. Nicholas Avenues, south of 116th Street on the edge of Spanish Harlem. Laundry hung from lines strung to the buildings opposite, above small, walled-in yards. There were lots of children, dogs, and trash cans.

  The final flight of stairs was dark and rickety, but the apartment itself, even though cramped by monumental furniture intended for the roomier houses of an age when servants had been plentiful, was warm, clean, and reasonably lit. It consisted of two rooms and a tiny kitchen, and was brightened by cheerful curtains and draperies, plenty of ornaments and knickknacks, some framed family photographs, and a selection of chocolate-box-top pictures of mountains, flowers, and lakes pinned on the walls, all, no doubt, a result of Janet's feminine touch.

  The front room opened off the stairway landing. They found Jeff sitting at the table that took up the center of the room, contemplating a litter of tools around a partly dismantled toaster. The
radio was on, and just as they entered, Molly at 79 Wistful Vista was shrieking, "Don't open that door, McGee!" to the accompaniment of thunderous crashings, clangings, and clankings.

  Jeff looked like a student. He had a lean, almost skinny build, an unruly mop of hair hanging over his forehead, and a pale, owlish face adorned by thick-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a sleeveless pullover on top of a checkered shirt, worn-looking corduroy pants, and canvas shoes. The shelves behind him were packed with books and untidy stacks of papers, and the walls were covered with scientific charts and tables, clips holding more wads of paper, a street map of New York, some pictures of airplanes torn out of magazines, and a cutaway view of a battleship. The blankets half-pulled over the couch by the window indicated where he slept; the other room, behind the door at the rear, was Janet's.

  "Jeff, this is Harry, and this is Cassidy," Janet said. "They're the two guys I told you about this morning—the ones I ran into with Amy last night. They were still at Max's when I got back, so I invited them home for something to eat. Guys, this is Jeff."

  "Hi," Jeff said in a neutral tone. His face registered no particular reaction. Janet took off her coat and disappeared through the door into the back room. There were a few seconds of silence. Cassidy looked down at the table and pulled a face. "Know anything about toasters?" Jeff asked.

  "Only that they work better in one piece," Cassidy replied. Jeff nodded distantly. "Anyhow, I thought you were supposed to be a chemist," Cassidy said.

  "Well, I'm not really anything yet. Why? Know anything about chemistry?"

  "Not really—except that you have to learn a foreign language to talk about sugar and salt."

  "Oh, that reminds me—" Jeff turned his head and called in the direction of the open doorway through which Janet had gone. "We were out of sugar, milk, and bread, so I took a half-dollar and got some from the corner store. The change is in the tin."

  Janet came back into the front room. "Thanks. That saves me a trip back downstairs. Now how about clearing that stuff out of the way, Jeff, while I make some coffee and start breakfast."

  During the meal, they talked about movies, song hits, and some of the people who frequented the Rainbow's End. Jeff had a low opinion of most of the ones he had met, dismissing them unapologetically as bums, which perhaps explained the coolness that he had shown Ferracini and Cassidy. Ferracini asked Jeff if he had plans for specializing in any particular kind of chemistry after he graduated. Jeff thought for a second, then asked, "Ever heard of atomic physics?"

  Ferracini made a you-know-how-it-is gesture with one hand. "A little."

  "There have been some pretty exciting developments in the last ten years," Jeff said. "Theoretically, anyhow, you ought to be able to get enough energy out of tiny amounts of some substances to supply the whole world easily—thousands of times more than from gasoline, for instance." He gave Ferracini a guarded look. "Does that sound crazy to you?"

  Ferracini did a good job of looking just a little incredulous. "Well, I guess nothing's impossible until someone proves it is . . . and then that's only until someone else goes and does it, anyway," he said. "Didn't a lot of smartasses who should have known better tell everyone that steam engines wouldn't work and airplanes wouldn't fly—all kinds of things like that?"

  Cassidy nodded from across the table. "Right. I guess if I had to, I'd put my money on guys like Jeff here making atomic gasoline work somehow in the end—or whatever you call it."

  Jeff seemed encouraged by the response. "You seem to be more open-minded than a lot of people," he said.

  Cassidy shrugged and made a gesture of magnanimity. "You don't only get bums and deadbeats hanging around the clubs, you know. You can bump into us intellectuals, too, kind of keeping up the standards, know what I mean?"

  Jeff grinned at Janet and seemed to loosen up suddenly. "Maybe these two are okay," he told her. "You know, your judgment's improving all the time, Sis. There might be hope for you yet."

  "Well, Jeff, I'm real glad to hear that," she said.

  Jeff looked back at Ferracini and Cassidy. "Recently, we had one of the real big names in atomic chemistry join Columbia," he informed them. "He had to get out of Italy because his wife's Jewish. Enrico Fermi. Maybe you've heard of him?"

  Ferracini frowned. He'd heard the name, he was sure. Hadn't Fermi been mixed up with the crash U.S. program to go all-out for an atomic bomb, back in the early forties before Ferracini was born? The American program had begun after the Germans astounded the world by suddenly producing the atomic bomb in 1942, the second year of their attack on Russia, and had succeeded just in time to give the U.S. twenty years of grace.

  The Axis powers had taken until the late 1940s to complete the mopping up and partitioning of the Soviet empire and to set up the administration and resettlement of the new territories. Then came the wars of anti-Nazi Moslem insurgency in the Middle East and western Asia, which had given America its chance to close the technological gap sufficiently to develop a workable bomb. Thus, an immediate follow-up assault on North America had been averted. Instead, the Axis powers had turned their attention southward in the late fifties and sixties to Africa, inflicting the horrors of Nazi-style domination and genocide on its black peoples to provide colonial empires for Fascist Italy and Spain.

  While Cassidy and Jeff continued talking with Janet about scholarships and job prospects, Ferracini sat back and stared through the window at the Manhattan rooftops. The voices seemed to fade, and he found himself brooding about the mission and their place in it.

  The American A-bomb hadn't become a reality until late 1951; the Germans, on the other hand, had dropped their first atomic weapons on Russia in July 1942. So how could Kennedy's Task Force, standing by in 1975 for the return-gate connection to be completed, hope to stop Hitler by keeping Britain and France fighting if they could, and by bringing the U.S. into the war? If America was still twelve years away from making an A-bomb, and it tried taking on the Nazis now, the only possible outcome could be its total destruction, along with the Soviet Union's. The only answer that Ferracini could see would be if Kennedy planned to send bombs through to the West from 1975 to counterbalance Hitler's. But that, surely, would result only in all-around devastation, with both sides being supplied from different futures.

  Unless, of course, something was done in the meantime to deprive the Nazis of their nuclear capability.

  For normal security reasons, the precise role to be played in the Proteus Operation by the military contingent under Major Warren had never been disclosed. It had been said that they were to provide security at Gatehouse, but none of the troops believed that was all there was to it. During the training period at Tularosa, they had discovered that all of the Special Operations troopers had worked on clandestine assignments; that all of them were experienced in undercover operations in Nazi-dominated Europe; and that, perhaps most remarkably of all, at one time or another, all of them had done tours of duty in the Leipzig area of Germany, a hundred-odd miles southwest of Berlin. All of that, surely, was too much to be coincidence.

  And Ferracini knew well that nothing Winslade was mixed up with ever happened purely by chance.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE TRAIL THAT HAD eventually led to the unraveling by U.S. intelligence of the real story behind Nazism began back in the scientific world of the 1930s with the birth of atomic physics.

  In the early years of that decade, Enrico Fermi, then working at the University of Rome, had speculated on the possibility of producing artificial radioactive isotopes by bombarding substances with neutrons, which had been discovered recently by Chadwick at Cambridge. He went on to conduct a series of experiments along such lines and published various papers. But in late 1938, his work was interrupted when he visited Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize and seized the opportunity to escape to the West from Mussolini's Fascism, accompanied by his wife, Laura, and their two children.

  By that time, however, similar investigations were under way in other places, n
otably the Joliot-Curie Laboratory in Paris and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry at Dahlem, in Berlin. Further experiments on the neutron bombardment of uranium had proved puzzling: analysis of the reaction products failed to reveal the heavy elements, such as radium, that should have resulted from the decay of artificially activated heavy nuclei. Finally, in December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin conducted an experiment which showed conclusively that while radium and other predicted elements were definitely not created by the neutron bombardment of uranium, certain much lighter substances, such as barium and krypton, were. For a while, the experts were unable to offer a satisfactory interpretation.

  Hahn wrote a letter detailing these puzzling results to a former colleague of the two scientists, Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jewess forced to flee the country after Hitler's annexation of Austria, who was by then working at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. It so happened that Meitner's nephew, Otto Frisch, who worked with Niels Bohr at Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, had come to Sweden to spend Christmas with her, and between them they worked out what had happened.

  The uranium nuclei, instead of simply absorbing neutrons to become heavier, unstable isotopes as had been expected, were splitting into nuclei of lighter elements of approximately half the original weight. Unlike spontaneous radioactive decays, which undergo comparatively small changes in mass by ejecting single particles and therefore involve only minor releases of internal binding energy, the uranium nuclei had been induced to split, or "fission," resulting in enormous yields of energy.

  At the end of his Christmas vacation, Frisch brought the news back to Denmark just as Bohr was about to leave for the U.S. to attend the Fifth Washington Conference of Theoretical Physics. Bohr announced the findings to the conference on January 26, 1939, and the proceedings degenerated into a flurry of frantic scientists, many still in black tie, rushing through the exits to set up repeat experiments in their own laboratories at Johns Hopkins University, the Carnegie Institute, Columbia, Chicago, Princeton, Berkeley, and elsewhere.