Interlude X (continued)
He landed gracefully, rolling along with the blow and up on his feet in the same movement. Immediately he unfastened his silenced MP-40 from his backpack and jammed in a clip from the combat harness that was strapped over his black uniform. Only then did he disengage from the parachute, which was now flopping about on the ground, a black mass of silk hardly visible even in the pale moon light. Dark figures around him were busy with similar tasks, but only the faintest rustle of flowing silk, oiled metal and creaking leather reached his ears. He had trained his men (former Fallschirmjäger and Brandenburgers, most of them) well, and they hadn’t ever failed him – not in France, not in that godforsaken hellhole of Sing-Sing, not even in Siberia. And they wouldn’t fail tonight either, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Skorzeny though with satisfaction. The Los Alamos facility was all but unguarded, with most of the soldiers having been sent off as replacements to shattered American units – most likely many of them were in POW camps already.
The Los Alamos facility, 1943
Brandishing “Schmeisser” submachine guns fitted with silencers (rather than noisy assault rifles) the men of the 502 Special Services Battalion of the Waffen-SS spread out through the darkness. Here and there a muffled rattle would spell doom for some unlucky guard soldier. Four men joining him, Skorzeny set out for the office buildings, the Schmeisser looking like a toy next to his gigantic frame. Ducking between parked cars and hugging next to the walls of the makeshift wooden houses littering the area, they moved like black ghosts through the night.
‘Halt! Who goes there!’ A soldier, or rather, a boy who dreamed up boogie men in the darkness, the big SS Commando thought. Only this time, the boogie men were for real. Skorzeny raised the Schmeisser, hardly bothering with taking proper aim. It was like swatting a fly. A short burst, a flash. Spent cases showered the ground as the boy-soldier in US Army fatigues fell like a broken doll.
The SS Commandos stepped over the bleeding body and mounted the stairs to the office building. Their Brigadeführer kicked in the door unceremoniously and rushed into the corridor beyond. Another guard, this one older and grizzled, whirled around, raising his M-1. Skorzeny pressed the trigger, the light weapon bucking in his fist. The American was thrown backwards, red flowers blossoming on his olive shirt, and the M-1 carbine fell to the ground with a clatter.
Now they had been heard. Skorzeny jumped over the body and crashed half crouching into the door behind him, the one with a fancy brass plate on it.
The first warning was a loud crash, someone kicking in the door to the administration building. Even as he heard the sound of automatic fire in the corridor outside, Groves dropped the receiver and pulled open a drawer on the desk. He had barely had time to reach his Colt .45, much less cock it, before the door to his office nearly exploded inward. A dark shape rolled over elbow and knee to a crouching position in front of the desk. Rising from his seat Groves managed to cock his weapon before he realized that he was staring into the muzzle of two, no three sub-machineguns. The attackers were clad in black, non-distinctive uniforms without insignia of any kind but the distinctive shape of their caps betrayed their nationality – Germans. The crouching one, who had crashed the door was a huge fellow, with a small downward pointing moustache and an ugly-looking scar on his left cheek. An almost demonic grin was playing on his mocking face as he shook his head slightly at Groves. The message was clear – don’t even think about it.
Groves froze, then thought better about it. He had no real desire to witness the final agony of his country from a POW camp. That is, assuming he would survive the tender mercies of the Gestapo interrogators. He calmly resumed the motion of pointing his weapon.
For the third time that night, Skorzeny pressed the trigger. Three streams of bullets converged on Leslie R. Groves’s chest.
When silence returned to the office, the din of automatic fire and falling cartridges epilogued by the wet thump of a falling body and the clatter of a pushed over chair, a thin voice became audible in the room, coming from the discarded phone receiver on the office desk.
‘General Groves! General Groves! Answer me! What is going on?’
Skorzeny rose and picked up the receiver. ‘Who is this?’ he asked in heavily accented English.
‘This is the President of the United States! Who are you? What has happened to General Groves?’
The grin returned to the big Austrians face. ‘This is SS-Brigadeführer Otto Skorzeny speaking, Herr President. General Groves is… indisposed. Permanently so, I’m afraid. But I promise to take good care of his team of scientists, don’t you worry. After all, many of them are Germans anyway. I look forward to reporting their progress to you in person soon.’
There was a click as the line was closed.
‘He hung up on me!’ Skorzeny said with a mock hurt expression on his face. ‘Such bad manners from a head of State, what is the world coming to?’
A Waffen-SS NCO entered the room with the briefest glance at the bloody shape lying behind the desk. ‘Herr Brigadeführer, we have secured the base.’
‘And the scientists?’
‘We have them, all of them. We have assembled them outside for you.’
‘Excellent, Hans. Let’s go greet our new lab-rats, shall we?’
Robert Oppenheimer was the head of the science team at the Manhattan project
They were ranged up outside, frightened men in white coats, held by two Commandos each. Skorzeny looked over them with glee. ‘Right. Let’s see… Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm and Felix Bloch… my, you’re a Germanic-sounding lot, aren’t you… but congratulations, as US and Swiss citizens, you’re not considered traitors! You’ll be awarded POW rights and released at the end of the war. The rest of you however, ARE traitors to your countries and to the Führer, the Duce, the Lord Protector or Admiral Horty respectively– or in your case, Bohr, to that assembly of mice that we refer to as the Danish Government. You will either work for us or suffer extremely unpleasant deaths. And then they say that National Socialism doesn’t offer any freedom of choice, eh?’
Skorzeny laughed like a madman at his own feeble joke. His laughter echoed through the desert, and coyotes whimpered in their holes at the sound.
