A Dad Ought to Have Nightmares
A Dad Ought to Have Nightmares
By Dale Cozort
Raymond Oakes, Ray to his friends, paced in the waiting room at six in the morning on February 25, 1955, as his wife had their first son. The world remembers that day for a different sun, the brief one the Nazis created in a depopulated stretch of jungle in the German Kongo.
Ray didn’t hear about the German-made sun—the first of three that blossomed within the next month—for several hours. The crowd around the TV caught his eye, but he ignored it, engaged in his own worries. He discovered what had happened when his pacing took him near the waiting room’s bulky black and white TV. The TV showed the mushroom cloud and said President Dewey would address the nation in the evening.
Ray missed the speech because he finally got a chance to see his wife and his incredibly tiny, fragile son. Nobody offered to let him hold the little boy and he didn’t feel any urge to do so. I would drop it…him.
The doctor told him to go home and get some sleep. He drove his three-year-old Studebaker sedan to an empty ranch-style house in the Misty Ridge subdivision, upper-middle class and recently torn from a cornfield. Ray hadn’t thought much about the German atomic bomb blast at the hospital or on the way home. Another piece of German bombast, like their satellites and space station and moon base. The Führer was on TV when he got home, looking old and paunchy as he spoke, and an interpreter passed on the words, touting the new German weapons as a demonstration of German power, but also a symbol of the Reich’s desire for peace.
How does that even make sense? Ray wished the fat German a massive coronary, but Herman Goering droned on. Douglas Edwards of CBS News came on. “This just in: British Prime Minister Eden has announced that the British Commonwealth has developed the same technology the Germans used for their super bomb and will be testing it in Australia within the month. French Premier Faure has announced a similar test. Neither Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele IV nor Josef Stalin, the increasingly reclusive General Secretary of the Soviet Union, have had any comments so far.”
News anchor Douglas Edwards summarized President Dewey’s speech. A lot of nothing. Blah blah concerned this new technology will escalate tensions in Europe. Blah blah confirms the wisdom of US policies of avoiding entangling European alliances. Blah blah our technology is the best in the world. Except in ship-building, rockets, and now super bombs. Blah blah the power of the new German bomb is unknown and may or may not represent a breakthrough in power. Except it’s obvious from the pictures that it does unless they managed to fake the size of the explosion.
Ray’s engineering mind did an order of magnitude calculation. He went back over his figures a couple of times, writing them down on the back of an ink-stained receipt, and finally figured he had to have misplaced a decimal point. He tossed the paper on his desk.
Nazis. A bunch of bloody-handed idiots. And now they ruin my son’s special day. “Daniel Oakes.” He said the name out loud. There was still some question as to whether that would be the little boy’s final name. Ray liked the sound of it. Jenny, his wife, was less enthusiastic.
Ray didn’t know what to make of the new German bomb. He worried about tensions in Europe but while Europe always seemed headed toward another Great War, it never quite got there, not since the Great War’s guns fell silent.
The oceans isolated the US from Europe’s squabbles, though not as much as they once did. German, French, British, and Italian satellites passed over the US daily, advertising their owners’ global reach. The Dewey Administration mostly ignored space, leaving the field to private efforts by big aerospace and auto companies.
He didn’t intend to fall asleep in front of the TV, but he did. The phone woke him late that evening. He heard a familiar voice. “Raymond, we have a job for you. “
“I have a job. And a son. Daniel Oakes.” I hope. I love that name.
“Congratulations. You’re doing well as a commercial pilot, too, I hear.”
“Very well. I’m happy. I’m looking forward to time with my son and my wife. You aren’t part of my plans.”
“The Germans aren’t part of my plans or your plans,” the familiar voice said. “But there they are. Their rockets can send satellites over the United States. And now they have super bombs. I’m sure you calculated the power to weight ratio.”
“The bomb is too heavy to fit on a rocket,” Ray said. “We’ve stayed out of Europe’s problems. The Germans don’t worry me.” His voice betrayed the uncertainty that lurked in the back of his mind. He felt a fierce surge of protectiveness toward his son, still untouched by his hands and only glimpsed for a few minutes. Careful. That’s what he wants. A decision made from fear.
“It will certainly fit in one of their bombers. And are you sure they won’t make it smaller? Maybe not in a month, but in a year or five years? You’re in this for the long haul now. That’s what having a kid is all about, isn’t it?”
Ray leaned his head back, stared at the white-tiled ceiling, and thought about a little boy, Daniel! playing in a crib, taking his first steps, saying his first words, tossing a soft oversized ball to his dad, all in the shadow of Goering’s rockets and the big German jet bombers coming over the North Pole, equipped with the new bomb.
“There isn’t a lot I can do about it,” Ray said. “They have this super bomb and we don’t. It’s a good thing we stay out of European politics.”
“Except that we don’t have any friends in Europe and if Germany decides to put battleships off Brazil or Mexico we’ll have to keep those bombs and missiles in mind when we decide what to do about it. Or if Goering and company screw up the German economy beyond redemption, do you think they won’t come to us and politely but firmly tell us that cut-rate loans will be necessary, with their super bombs sitting at the negotiating table, with the threat of burning US cities sitting in the back of everybody’s minds?”
“What do want me to do?” That wasn’t something he wanted to ask, not exhausted, not on this special day, not with Daniel’s life just starting. He asked it anyway, his voice resigned.
The voice at the other end of the line, the voice from another life, one before wife or Daniel, didn’t change. No hint of triumph. No relief. No emotion at all. “Meet me at Eagle Park. Nine tomorrow morning. Call in sick to work. You should be done in time for work Monday. Oh, and congratulations. I’ll have a cigar for you tomorrow.” Those last words sounded warm and sincere, an oddity given their source.
Ray sat staring at the receiver as the dial tone grew angry. Finally, he put it firmly back on its black base. Thoughts of Daniel and his wife clung to a corner of his brain as he shifted to a rusty but still solid set of habits. He pulled a box off the top shelf of his closet and extracted a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, along with a magazine and a box of ammo. He checked the mechanism, then paused and stared at the weapon. He saw the nearly hairless, fragile face of his son—still red from the trauma of birth—in the air between him and the weapon. Finally, he filled the magazine. For you, Daniel. I hope.
He put the magazine in the weapon and held it with a mix of eagerness and revulsion. Revulsion won, temporarily. He popped the magazine out and put the unloaded weapon in the nightstand drawer.
The TV was still on. He walked over and turned the dial. All four channels were filled with news of the German bomb. CBS news was calling it an “atomic bomb,” quickly shortened to A-bomb. Douglas Edwards mentioned the short time between the German test and the planned British and French ones and asked retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay if it was the result of a close-run arms race. The general shook his head. “If the British and French really do test A-bombs within a month, they have almost certainly had A-bombs for a while, but wisely, in my opinion, decided not to do a public test of them. The biggest secret about this type of bomb is that it is possible.”
“Does the US have a secret program similar to the British and French ones?” Edwards asked.
“If we didn’t yesterday, we do now,” General LeMay said. “And if we didn’t yesterday that’s the biggest and darkest secret that our government has at this time.”
The commentator went on to talk about Europe’s bloody history, about the madness of the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the final horrible spasm of the Great War. He also talked about Europe’s bloody conquest and colonization of most of the world, and ended with the “cleansing,” the ironic term the Nazis used for their systematic deportation of black Africans from their Kongo colony to death camps deep in the interior or to be worked to death in the huge public works projects that the original Führer was so fond of.
The Nazis still denied the existence of the “cleansing,” as did their apologists in the US. Way too many of them burrowed into our society and this A-bomb will encourage them, just like the moon shots and the moon base did. They’ll claim that it’s German super-technology, from the master race, from the political and economic system of the future. The fat comic-opera figure of the Führer on TV made a mockery of that carefully orchestrated propaganda, though not in the eyes of the true believers, the inevitable discontents of society, always looking for simple answers to unanswered problems in their own lives. They aren’t so much Nazis or Commies; they simply want convenient answers, a system of beliefs to embrace the way they would have embraced religion before that went out of style among intellectual types.
Ray fell asleep with his clothes on. It was surprisingly untroubled, fueled by exhaustion. If he dreamed, those dreams faded before he woke.
The park was nearly deserted on Saturday morning, with the exception of a gray man standing by a teeter-totter, idly swinging the ends up and down. The gray man, in his gray suit, gray hat, and faintly gray complexion, turned as Ray approached him.
The men did not exchange pleasantries. The gray man said, “Are you still good at what you did?”
“I’m rusty. Why me?”
“The other side has been suspiciously successful at rolling up or turning our assets lately, enough so that we’re in a mole hunt.”
“Which other side? The Nazis or the Soviets?”
“The Nazis, which is part of the reason to suspect a mole. The Abwehr has historically not been that good. But suddenly they are.”
Ray nodded. “And you haven’t isolated the source of the problem.”
“Not yet. And now we have a walk-in that may give us a break in the biggest mystery of the last two decades. I want him alive. I want him unintimidated. I don’t want to give our mole any chance to tip off the Abwehr. So I know about this, and you. Nobody else. I called you last night from a random payphone after I made sure I wasn’t being followed.”
“How about this morning?”
“Are you trying to be insulting?”
Yeah, the thought had crossed my mind. “Everybody slips up sometime. Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“The source checks out as far as I could tell without drawing attention to him, but you have the engineering background to know if he really has something useful. Debrief him, get the information and the source directly to me, and go home to your wife and your son. That’s all.”
Ray didn’t ask what the mystery was. He didn’t have to.
The gray man gave him the details of the mission, then forced an anomalous smile to his face and produced a pricey Cuban cigar. “Congratulations!”
The tradecraft came back to Ray quickly, too quickly to suit him. He checked his car for bugs and automatically went through a couple routines to throw off trackers. He stopped and called the hospital from a pay phone. A nurse told him that both mother and baby were resting comfortably. He gave the woman a message to pass onto his wife, a lie, that he was sick with a touch of the flu and didn’t want to give it to mother or newborn. The lie came off his lips too easily. I’ve never lied to her before. That seemed incongruous given his current employment. Just for two days, then I go back to being husband, pilot, and dad.
The source was a retired German engine technician, now in his late sixties. Ray drove to the man’s hotel, a rundown extended-stay place with thin, tired-looking hookers hanging out in the lobby, pale under their heavy makeup. The hookers looked interested, then took a closer look and headed for the door. I have cop on me somehow, the way I move, the way I’m dressed.
Ray concentrated on blending in. Horny businessman. Here to meet someone specific, someone classier and higher priced than you. Based on the reactions of the working girls he met in the stairway and the hall on the way to the contact’s third-floor room, he got back closer to the groove. Blending in. Not getting noticed by hotel security/pimps. In this hotel the two were probably the same.
The German was tall, well over six feet, and bulky. His face looked all of his sixty-plus years, wrinkled and mottled. He held a gun, a Luger, mostly hidden behind a towel when he opened the door.
Ray brought out the identification the gray man had given him. The gun muzzle moved subtly, no long quite pointing at him.
“Otto Hessler?”
“Yes. And you are the man whose name doesn’t matter, according to my contacts.” Otto spoke near perfect English with a hint of a Bavarian accent.
Ray nodded. “I imagine they would say that. Call me Ray.”
The German let him in and they sat at a once-expensive oak table, its surface marred with interlocking water-stain circles. A lamp with a crushed woven shade shot a circle of glaring light on the table. Otto insisted that they each have a beer before they settled down to business. Ray took his pick from a six pack of unopened cans and watched the German do likewise. They sat in hard wooden chairs that creaked at every movement, not saying much as Ray sipped his beer and the German slowly savored his.
Finally, Otto placed his empty can on the table and spread a taped-together collection of five lined notebook pages across the surface next to it. He pointed to a hand-drawn sketch that spanned the pages. “This is the engine layout of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spree, as of September 1939. I drew it from memory, so there may be small mistakes after these fifteen years.”
Ray studied the sketch. The layout looked plausible. He asked a couple of questions designed to trip up a non-mechanic and got replies that at least indicated experience with German sea-craft.
Ray nodded. “I’ll put you down as a maybe. The Nazis don’t let mechanics who have worked around their special ships or planes or rockets out of the country. How did you get here?”
Otto grinned. “They screwed up. I asked for a visa and got one.”
“The Nazis may be morons, but they’re careful with their special projects. Why did they screw up this time?”
“I got out of the navy under special circumstances. I like the beer. The brass thought I liked it too much. It was early days of the Nazi regime and they were gearing up for war, so for a while they looked the other way. But then they got the fleet up to staff and cut back naval construction after the Baltic War. I got cut back to civilian. After the Baltic War they focused on building up the army to take on the Bolsheviks for real, so not much later I was on a Panzer III assembly line sending those sad tanks to the Dnieper River. I retired as an assembly worker for the defense industry. Perhaps that took me off one special list and put me on another. The brass doesn’t care if a boozing old tank assembler comes to America for the night-life and that’s how they class me.”
Ray didn’t totally buy that, though it wasn’t impossible. The German did show signs of the heavy drinker now that Ray looked for them. Only so many fields on a Hollerith card. One for getting kicked out of the navy as a drunk. One for “worked in the war industry.” No room for the one that said, “this guy worked near the biggest secret Germany has.” Unlikely, but not impossible given the foibles of bureaucracies.
“All of that’s interesting, but unless you got a look at the private parts it doesn’t do us any good. The people at our embassy seemed to think you got a peek. Tell me about it.”
“It is not quite so simple. I mentioned a two and whole bunch of zeroes after it at the embassy. Show me the right number of Grover Clevelands and I’ll draw you a picture of what I saw.”
“Thousand-dollar bills, huh? You don’t see many of them around these days. I don’t think they make them anymore.” Ray pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. “If this is all about beer money, start by earning out a Benjamin Franklin?”
“It isn’t all about beer money. Germany used to be a civilized place, with great poets and scientists and thinkers. Now the face of Germany is rats who climbed out of the gutter.” The German drew a circle on his engine room layout. “There was a metal circle about eight feet in diameter on the inside mounted here. It was two feet thick. You could tell it was heavy because of the time it took to spin up. It would only spin up if the ship was moving fast and, even then, it didn’t spin fast, maybe once every fifteen seconds. It spun quiet. You wouldn’t hear it moving even right next to it. If you were in the engine room when it was spinning, you’d get little jolts, not unpleasant and not a shock. It was like when a car goes down a small steep place, not too long and not too steep.”
“A feel-good drop?” Ray didn’t know what the word for the feeling really was, but thought he understood what the German was describing.
“Perhaps. The jolts came more often the faster the circle spun.” The man moved his hand toward the hundred.
Roy hesitated. Everything the German had said so far had been known inside the agency when Ray left. At the same time, it was accurate and not known outside the intelligence community. He pushed the hundred to the center of the table. “So far you’ve convinced me that you may have seen their device. Convince me you’ve seen inside it.”
The old German grinned. “I know how much you want this. This one thing has let the Nazis lord it over the rest of the world and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what lets German ships go faster than anyone else’s with less fuel. I’ve seen what lets their big planes fly further and faster than anyone else’s. I’ve seen what let them get to the moon. I’ve seen what lets that fat fool Goering tramp around like he is the master of the master race. You want what I know so bad I could ask almost any price and your Uncle Sam would pay it. Two million and a quiet place to retire. That’s not much to ask.”
Ray put another hundred on the table. “Convince me that you got a peek inside that oversized wheel.”
“I only saw inside it once, and it has been sixteen years,” Otto said, “but I can give you more than anyone on the outside has ever seen.” His eyes went far away. “There were electric cables, of course, huge things that snaked around in there, maybe two inches thick for each one of them.” He drew a rough sketch on the paper. “And there were huge capacitors here and here.” He marked them in. “Getting interested?”
“You wouldn’t have to peek inside to figure that out.” Ray shifted in his seat impatiently.
“And there was the watch. We weren’t supposed to wear watches, but I did. I hid it just because I’m a contrary guy. I’m lucky I didn’t get a nine-millimeter lesson in the back of my head. When the wheel whirled, the day ended long before the watch said it should.”
Some kind of time dilation. That was one of the fringe theories on the German advantage in large-scale transportation, which made it useless to identify the truth of the German’s statements.
As he mulled that over, Ray became aware of the noises of the hotel. A woman screamed down the hall. Something creaked in slow rhythm above them and a woman yelled “Oh yes!” over and over. She managed to sound bored. There was something missing from the pattern of sounds though, something that caught Ray’s attention. He moved his hand closer to the holster under his jacket.
Otto caught the movement. “Unless you’re reaching for Mr. Cleveland, I wouldn’t go any further.” He shifted his Luger, still in his left hand, though resting on the table. “I have what you want. No need for violence. The only problem is that once I give you the good stuff, I’m just an old drunk to you.”
“I understand. Been drunk since you got here? Or maybe on the flight over?”
“No more than usual.”
“Talk to a nice stranger? Maybe a twenty-something young lady?”
“Girls that age stopped talking to me thirty years ago,” the old German said. “Only reason they would talk to me now is if they wanted something.” He stopped abruptly and stared at the door, then stood and moved a flimsy wooden chair in front of it. “Check to see if you were followed?”
“I’ve done this sort of thing a few times.” Ray padded quietly to just inside the bathroom door, keeping half an eye on the Luger. “Things may get noisy.” He quietly pulled out his pistol. “This isn’t intended for you.” Otto didn’t move the Luger.
The thin walls of the hotel didn’t keep many noises out, but Ray didn’t hear anything in the hall. Above him, “Oh
yes!” woman or her companion was apparently taking a shower, a very brief one.
The silence in the hall lingered. Ray glanced around the room. Just the main room with the bed, a closet, and the bathroom. There was no door to an adjoining room. So, the door. No other way to get in or out. Except the windows!
Ray focused on the tacky floral-print curtain that covered most of one wall of the room. We’re on the third floor, but is there a balcony? He heard a slight scuffing outside the window, tiny but conspicuous in the silence. Simultaneous entry from the window and the door. Synchronized watches? Probably. Ray wished he knew what the old German was thinking.
Otto stood in the corner of the room, his Luger pointed upward. Unless he has been in this kind of situation before he’ll be more danger than help. My job is to keep him safe. The Luger makes that a lot harder. The silence from the hall held. No yells. No foot traffic. Ray kept part of his attention on that but focused most of his attention on the curtain.
Otto apparently noticed. The old man took two quick steps and swept the curtain open, revealing two men in black clothing and ski masks positioning themselves on the balcony, silenced pistols in hand.
Ray fired first, twice, given the split-second advantage of seeing what the old man was doing before the intruders did. The crack of the gunshots filled the tiny room and silenced, for a second, the noises from the floors above and below them. One of the black-clothed men fell in a way no conscious, living man could. The other fired two quick shots as his Luger roared.
The door splintered and slammed against the bathroom wall and three men rushed in, bunched up, with silenced pistols searching. The seconds seemed to slow. Ray fired reflexively, three times at the men rushing in the door, at point-blank range, so close that sprays of blood hit his arm and cheek. He turned, fired at the remaining man on the balcony, too late to stop the man from pumping two shots into Otto.
Balcony guy turned his pistol toward Ray as Ray shot him in the center of the chest. The pistol wavered, almost in line, then fired again and again as it sagged toward the floor. Finally, it stopped, empty or with its owner’s trigger finger no longer obeying his mind.
Time seemed to not just return to normal speed, but overshoot, turning jerky fast. Screams and running footsteps echoed from the rooms around them. Blood spread across the cheap green carpet from the three men sprawled by the splintered door, and from Otto, who was still partly upright, sagging slowly down the wall.
Ray stayed wary. He checked the three men by the door for signs of life, a formality given their wounds, and kicked their guns away. He cautiously poked his head out the door to an empty hall and checked the two guys on the balcony, both dead. He ran to the German.
Otto was still conscious, but a glance at his chest wounds told Ray the man would not be returning with him to tell his story to the gray man.
Otto raised his head, eyes unfocused. His voice came out as a wheeze. “There were crystals, long rods of translucent crystal in a triangle that just fit inside the circle. There were three green boards filled with resistors and capacitors. I could draw it, but my hands don’t seem to work anymore.” As if to emphasize that, the Luger slipped out of his hand. Ray caught it before it hit the bloody carpet. The old German grimaced. “That ought to be enough for a few Clevelands. I have a daughter in New York. She likes beer, too.”
Those were his last words. Ray grabbed the room phone. Blood dripped on the phone as he dialed and he discovered that it came from a wound high on his shoulder. As soon as he discovered it, the wound throbbed. He clapped a handkerchief over the hole and held it there until a cleanup team arrived, just ahead of the police. The gray man was with the team. He escorted Ray out, their shoes squishing on the sodden carpet.
The lies inevitably kept flowing. The bullet wound became the result of an attempted mugging. He minimized its seriousness to his wife, trying not to worry her. Debriefing took priority over seeing his son. The gray man sat expressionless through the meeting. Finally, he asked, “Any idea how the Nazis found out about your meeting and got a sleeper team there?”
“None. I know I’m not a mole. If you’re a mole the whole thing seems pointless. Maybe old Otto said something when he was drunk. Maybe he was working for them, trying to plant false information, and they decided to up his credibility by killing him. If that’s the case, this was worthless. But that doesn’t make sense. I would have to live to pass on what he told me. No way they could guarantee that in a firefight.”
“Quite a dilemma, isn’t it?” the gray man said. “Actually, the Nazis revealed a very important card. The only thing that makes sense is that they somehow tracked me to you, then tracked you to Otto and somehow figured out who he was. And how could they do that?” He pointed to the ceiling. “Think about it. You didn’t bring your man back alive, but you confirmed a theory I’ve had for the last several weeks as an alternative to the mole idea.”
“Satellites with ungodly good cameras.”
“A major advance. Far beyond what we expected. But now we can take precautions.”
“Don’t call me again.”
“Why not? You handled yourself well.”
“I lost my guy. I think he really knew what was in that German machine.”
“There was never much of a chance of that. A glimpse over a decade ago. You know the game. Yes, we want the big play and the touchdown, but the times we grind out a first down are just as important. You made them reveal a sleeper team and a vital asset.”
“The super bombs are still there. My son will still grow up with Nazi bombers probing our defenses over the poles, with their shipping dominating world transportation, with their moon bases sitting above us, on the high ground.”
The gray man closed his briefcase. “The world keeps getting smaller. We used to think we could hide from it. We can’t and old Goering just pushed it in our face. If we can’t hide, we need people like you and me. Your son needs us.”
Ray shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t have nightmares last night. Six men died in front of me. I killed five of them. A dad ought to have nightmares.”