Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“It’s a done deal,” Turner commanded. “As soon as a sub with nuclear warheads on board makes contact, they will be given the coordinates and nuclear strike orders.” He continued, “You’re only job is to manage the communications and see that everyone else stays the hell out of that hot zone. Have I made myself clear, Preston?”

With a barely perceptible nod, Preston capitulated. But that didn’t mean he had to like the idea.

The crew mess aboard the Barracuda was more spacious than Jack was expecting. Suited up in the pair of borrowed engineer’s coveralls, he’d made his way to the mess with Leah in tow to find out what had everyone excited. Loudly animated voices could be heard all the way to the sick bay.

As they entered the mess, Leah maneuvered her way past Jack to introduce her team, Dave and Juan and the two submarine officers, Captain Frank Jameson and the Executive Office, Peter Durand. All four men leaned forward and shook hands with Coulson before taking their seats and scooching over to make way for Leah in the booth.

Sam sat alone in his own booth. He’d managed to dry his clothes. Jack suspected they didn’t have anything to spare that would fit him, anyway.

“Leah, this is Sam Krupsky, my U-Boat expert.” After Jack made introductions he sat next to Sam. “I suppose you’ve told them the story of how we came to be here, not that I’d expect anyone to believe it.”

Sam nodded.

Jack sensed something was off. Sam wasn’t himself.

“What’s all the excitement about? Tell me you didn’t find a hoard of Nazi gold on the U-Boat, Sam?”

An awkward silence fell over the small group.

“I wish I did,” said Sam. His expression was grave. “I found the U-Boat commanders log book on one of the bunks and there’s a non-standard compartment on the boat that’s been welded shut.”

“That’s not unusual, is it?” asked Jack.

“From the inside.” Sam’s face darkened further.

“And then there’s this.” Jameson held up the leather bound log, its dog eared pages filled with a neat and very precise script and passed it to Jack.

“I speak enough Arabic and Farsi to get by in the Middle East, but my training didn’t include any German, I’m afraid. They’re on our side, after all.” Jack flipped through the log, regardless.

“That’s alright, I took enough German in college to make out most of what’s in there,” Durand offered. “Up until a few days before the log finishes abruptly,” he went on, “it’s a boring narration of life aboard a U-Boat. Navigational data, weather, crew issues, damage reports. Boring as bat shit. Until…”

Jack waited for him to continue. The man clearly had a sense for the dramatic.

“Until?”

“Until some kind of experiment with what they refer to as a Wunderwaffe … that’s Wonder Weapon,” he explained.

“Yeah, I kind of worked that out.” Jack didn’t really care for Durand. His instincts were rarely wrong and they were on full alert with this guy.

“Anyway,” Durand continued, unfazed, “it seems the captain, Helmut Sohler wasn’t too happy with having the weapon on his boat or he had some other beef with the guy that built it Kam—”

“Kammler,” Juan broke in, “the guy who built the weapon was Dr. Hans Kammler, a real nasty piece of work, even by SS standards…”

All eyes were now on Juan who realized that he’d interrupted the XO.

“Don’t stop now,” Leah encouraged, “you’ve got us hooked.”

“The name didn’t mean anything when you first said it,” Juan acknowledged Durand, “but it came to me just now. He was a top ranking Nazi General, reporting directly to Hitler. Those gas chambers disguised as showers in the concentration camps… they were Kammler’s brainchild. He did a bunch of other stuff, too, like the V2 rockets. He was supposed to be a hot shot engineer.”

“And he came here? On the U-Boat?” asked Sam.

“That’s the thing, he disappeared after the war. The Russians claimed the Americans had him as part of Operation Paperclip and the Americans thought the Russians had captured him and were using him to develop their own nuclear weapons program.”

“Operation Paperclip?” Leah raised her palms, not having a clue what Juan was talking about.

“That’s what the U.S. government called it. They scooped up a couple of thousand super smart Nazi scientists brought them to America and gave them and their families new identities and jobs in our own top secret military programs.”

“No way,” Leah objected.

“Yeah, way,” Dave cut in. “When I was studying the history of sonar technology, we learned a lot from research done by some of those guys. Their work was way ahead of anything we’d come up with during the war.”

“And who do you think put us on the moon?” asked Juan.

“Kennedy?” Leah suggested.

“Werner Von Braun. The same Nazi rocket scientist who developed the V2 rocket to destroy entire cities came over to our side and became the designer of the Saturn V rocket that put the first man on the moon.”

“Is this another one of your tinfoil hat conspiracies?” Leah arched a skeptical brow at Juan.

“I can vouch he’s telling it as it is,” said Durand. “The military history courses I took when I did my training at Groton lines up with what Juan’s saying, for sure.”

Sam’s angry baritone voice boomed through the crowded space, “So one of Hitler’s Nazi scientists actually put the first man, an American, on the moon?”

Juan responded, “Well, I doubt it actually says that on the About Us page on NASA’s website, but that’s more or less how it happened. It was literally a space race. We were racing the Russians, the communists, for the high ground. Space.”

Jack had a question for Juan. “Okay, so getting back to Kammler, you’re saying that he basically went missing, vanished without a trace after the war and each side thought the other had him, but he fled here, on the U-Boat and with this secret weapon?”

“When you say it like that, it sounds a bit thin,” Juan responded, “but the diary and the sealed compartment support the proposition. We’re scientists… we just follow the evidence. The question I’m asking is why they built this place. It must have been a mammoth undertaking, even by Third Reich standards and they were known for doing things in a big way.”

Coulson stroked his chin in thought. “I was thinking the same thing. This place has virtually zero strategic value from a military perspective. Could it have been for scientific or engineering reasons?” he asked Juan and Dave.

“We’ve only had a quick look around, but there’s no evidence of laboratories, manufacturing facilities or anything much of anything really, other than some decrepit generators and a few crates of ammunition of some sort,” replied Dave with a shrug.

“That only leaves one possible explanation,” Jack said, shaking his head as he said it. That couldn’t be right. His eyes tracked to the ceiling of the pokey mess room. Impossible.

But the heavily armed force up there on the ice suggested Jack was right.

He wished he wasn’t, but he kept his thoughts to himself, for the moment.

“I think the U-Boat commander wanted someone to find this.” Durand held up the old log. “He’s documented a lot more than just operational notes. He seems fixated on something he calls ‘Die Glocke’ , The Bell.”