Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

Mark looked sternly at Chris. ‘Grab him and we run?’

Chris nodded. ‘Grab him and run, that’s the plan.’

Mission Time: 5 Hours, 42 Minutes Elapsed

7.47 a.m., 2 miles outside Nantes

‘We’ve definitely got a damned leak,’ said Max, studying the fuel gauge.

Pieter tapped the glass of the display hopefully with his finger; the dial remained resolutely still.

‘Shit, that’s nearly three-quarters of it gone,’ growled Pieter.

Three-quarters of it gone, and we’ve flown about one-fifth of the distance.

‘We must have taken some damage to the internal tanks and we’ve been leaking fuel since.’ Max could have kicked himself; he should have spotted this earlier. If it had been the familiar cockpit of a Heinkel he would have.

‘We haven’t got enough, Max.’

‘I know that,’ he answered testily.

There was not enough fuel left to complete the mission. The choices on how to proceed were limited. Either the mission was going to have to be aborted or they were going to have to go down with the fighters to refuel.

‘I don’t think we’ve got a lot of alternatives here, Pieter.’

‘We abort or we refuel?’

Max nodded. ‘If we abort, you know what that means, don’t you?’

Pieter knew. Major Rall had instructed them both very carefully on this potential outcome. If damage to the plane meant they would be unable to reach America, they should arm and drop the bomb anyway. At the very least, the detonation of the bomb, albeit not on the required target, would still demonstrate to the world that the Germans had got there first and had a massive destructive capability. That alone might still be enough to cause the Americans to think things over.

‘What do you think about refuelling?’ asked Pieter.

‘Let me think, let me think.’

They were approaching the last waypoint before Nantes; from there they should be able to navigate their way by eye to the airfield. It didn’t give him much thinking time. Going down with the fighters to refuel hadn’t been a part of the plan. It seemed the Major hadn’t considered what they should do if fuel became an issue. The extra tanks had been internal. Rall must have assumed they were safe from damage there.

Now Max was alone in having to make the risk assessment of doing this. If they were overrun while they were on the ground, the bomb could fall into the hands of the Americans.

‘It’s risky, Pieter. They could get their hands on it.’

Max pushed the mask to his face and switched to the radio frequency for their men on the ground.

‘ Medusa calling, what is your status?’

He was about to call again when a reply came back.

‘ Medusa we are ready for you now, come in as quickly as you can.’

‘How long can you hold there?’

There was some delay in the answer; when it finally came, it was a different voice that answered. ‘Half an hour, possibly as much as an hour if we’re lucky.’

‘It’ll take about twenty-five minutes to refuel the plane, if we forget the extra tanks,’ said Pieter. ‘Would that get us there?’

Max let his mask fall away again, so that their conversation remained between them. ‘It should do, this plane has a 4000-mile one-way range without them. It should get us there, with very little to spare, though.’

He heard Stef’s voice over the interphone. ‘Approaching waypoint seventeen.’

Pieter looked at Max. ‘Come on, we can’t throw it away now.’

Time was running out, and Max felt the enormity of this tactical decision resting squarely on his shoulders. He cursed Rall for not anticipating this scenario and giving him a brief for it.

‘If we go down, we should refuel first, the fighters will have to wait.’

Pieter sure as hell didn’t have a problem with that. ‘Fuck… yeah, of course.’

Stef was on the interphone again, asking Max to confirm he’d heard the last navigation call.

Pieter shrugged, ‘Max? What are we going to do?’

Time is running out.

He tried to visualise Rall, to imagine what the Major would advise him under such circumstances. For what he knew of him, the Major seemed a cautious man, a meticulous planner, Max made a guess that he would reluctantly advise them to return home if they could make it, or if not, to drop the bomb right there. But then he could see Rall’s ruined face; a rakish smile on the good side suggested the man had gambled once or twice before in his life.

‘If we’re overrun, I’ll have to detonate it on the ground,’ said Max.

Pieter nodded with reluctant agreement. ‘You’ll have to.’

‘You understand what that would mean?’

Pieter nodded. ‘Yeah. There are worse ways to go.’

‘Fine, we’re going down, then.’

Max had made his decision; his hands loosened around the control yoke. He was relieved, almost elated to have cut through the last few moments of indecision.

‘All right, Pieter, let’s get ready.’

He pulled the mask to his face and spoke into the interphone. ‘Stef, Hans… we’ve got a fuel leak, which means we’re landing alongside Schroder and his boys so we can get a top-up.’

Mission Time: 5 Hours, 50 Minutes Elapsed

12.55 a.m. EST, the White House, Washington, DC

Truman stared silently at those members of his war cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been recalled and able to attend at such short notice. Many of them, with the exception of Donovan and Wallace, looked as if they had been dragged out of their homes, their beds, or reluctantly from some social function.

‘Little more than an hour ago, I was informed of something very disturbing, gentlemen, an intelligence report from our people in Europe. Colonel Donovan, will you please…?’

Donovan nodded and picked up a piece of paper; he read from it. ‘At 2100 hours, Eastern Standard Time, we received a wire from our OSS operation in Germany. Yesterday, a platoon of our airborne troops discovered a partially destroyed laboratory on the outskirts of Stuttgart.’ Donovan looked up from his sheet of notes. ‘I should stress that, although these boys passed on news of their discovery promptly to the intelligence people over there, it took them a little time to work out what it was they had, and for the information to make its way back to the OSS over here. So this is nearly twenty hours old. Anyway, the laboratory appears to have been used to refine uranium, a cyclotron was discovered there and — ’

‘Would you explain to us all what a cyclotron is?’ asked Truman.

Donovan turned to Wallace, who stepped forward to address the men at the table. ‘A cyclotron is a machine that magnetically separates U-235 from U-238. It’s an efficient way to refine on a small scale. We tried it over here, but it was too slow a method, requiring frequent cleaning of the magnetic heads.’

‘So then it appears that the Germans have been at it,’ interrupted Truman.

The response from around the table was one of quiet discomfort.

Truman nodded at Donovan to carry on.

Donovan cleared his throat and resumed reading his notes. ‘One of their technical team was taken prisoner near the lab; he had been wounded. This technician spoke briefly to a field medic before being taken to a field hospital, where he died a few hours later.’

Donovan looked up at the men around the table and finally to Truman. ‘The medic reported that this technician talked about working on atomic weapons, and that a bomb had been moved from this installation in preparation for imminent deployment.’

This time, there was only silence from around the table. Truman’s face hardened as he studied the faces of his cabinet members and the Chiefs of Staff present. This assembly of middle-aged and distinguished faces around the conference table, faces that still poorly concealed a disapproval of him, cast judgement on him as the man who could never replace Roosevelt. They all remained impassive, poker faces, none prepared to offer the vaguest gesture of support or encouragement as he continued to fumble his way through this problem, alone it seemed. None of these wise men seemed to have any advice for him now. He turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Leahy. ‘Do you have any thoughts on this?’