The Second Sun, page 2
Not an attack boat, then. Maybe she was what the Germans called an Atlantic milch cow, a resupply ship for the attack boats. They’d go out to sea and loiter in an area away from the convoy routes. The attack boats would go alongside for fuel, water, torpedoes, mail, and food. That way they didn’t have to go back all the way to Germany to replenish. Except, as I studied her, she had no visible refueling fittings, either. I also thought her conning tower was smaller than it should be for such a large submarine. She just looked “off,” as the lieutenant had observed.
Admiral Carter was already there, and together we went aboard. He was dressed as I was—shipyard coveralls with no rank insignia. He could have been a shop foreman, except for the deference being shown by all around him. There was a hatch on the boat’s weather deck that led into the conning tower. From there we proceeded down into the boat’s interior. I was surprised to see a German officer waiting for us, accompanied by three grim-looking Marines from the penitentiary. The admiral introduced him to me as Kapitänleutnant Eric Groff, the skipper of the boat. He did not look happy to be there. I made sure to let him see that I was devastated. The admiral had brought along a German-speaking officer, who explained to Groff that we wanted a thorough tour of his boat. I don’t speak German, but it appeared to me that Groff said something along the lines of, help yourself, amerikanischer dolts. I checked with our interpreter, who said that was about right.
“Tell the captain that I am from the headquarters of the national security intelligence office in Washington. He will give us a personally led tour or there will be consequences. Extreme consequences, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße-style.”
Groff gave me a hard stare once that message—including the address of SS headquarters in Berlin—was delivered. I gave him one back. For a moment, he did nothing, but then his shoulders slumped and he agreed.
We began at the back end, where normally there would have been the after-torpedo room, which turned out to be just a storage area. We progressed forward through some crew quarters, the engine room, generator room, galley and messing, the control center, officers’ quarters, the sonar sound-shack, the radio room, more berthing, and finally the compartment that normally would have been the forward torpedo room, but was more crew accommodations. No torpedo tubes. Groff stopped and gave us a look that said: satisfied?
“No,” the admiral said. “I want to see the second deck.”
The interpreter spoke and then turned to Admiral Carter. He said the captain had told him there was no second deck. I’d had enough of his bullshit. The admiral had said the captain spoke broken English. I turned to the admiral and said that the captain was being uncooperative. He should be taken back to Portsmouth Naval Prison and hanged forthwith. I turned on my heel and started aft. The captain called out: “Vait!” I kept going. A second call: “Vait, please!” I turned around. The admiral had been playing along, beckoning to his Marines.
“Well?” I said.
“Hier,” the captain said, pointing to an unobtrusive hatch in the deck, almost concealed between two storage lockers. I made him open the hatch, which produced a strange smell almost immediately. Chlorine? Some other halogen? Hydrogen-something? I looked down into the hatchway. Darkness.
“Lights,” I ordered. Groff found a switch.
I looked again. There certainly was a second deck, and it consisted of two rows of what looked like vertical torpedo tubes. Big, heavy, round hatches with compressed air connections and brass operating wheels that stretched in each direction for what looked like the length of the boat. There was an overhead gantry track for loading the vertical tubes.
Now I knew what this boat was for—she was a minelayer. An advanced minelayer, at that. Instead of the usual method, by which a sub would deploy mines out of her after torpedo tubes, this boat had been designed to maneuver to precise undersea locations for the minefield and then fire the mines straight down to their programmed positions. Much more accurate. The sub would take time to nail down her exact position, and then lay the field array. But what was that strange smell? Acidic. Metallic. Chemical, too. Like acid vapors. I couldn’t place it.
I told the captain to lead the way down there. He refused. He then made it clear there was no way he was going down there. Hanging threats or no. He sat down on the deckplates like a sulking child and wouldn’t look at any of us.
The Marines were armed with .45 sidearms. I summoned one, asked for his .45, and then bent down over the captain. He shook his head. Nein. Nein. Nein.
“Why not?”
He shook his head again.
I pointed the .45 at his head.
“Nein, nein, nein!”
“Why not?”
“Warum nicht!” the interpreter shouted from behind me.
“Strahlung!” the captain yelled. I looked at the interpreter, who seemed to be trying to dredge up what that word meant. Then he got it.
“Radiation,” he said. “He’s saying there’s radiation down there.”
The admiral spoke up. “Captain, if that’s true, we need to close this hatch and get everybody off this boat, right now.”
There was no doubt about who was giving orders now. I had the Marines secure the hatch to the lower compartment, but told them to leave the light on. We then followed the admiral and the German skipper up and out of the boat. I told the Marines to get the shipyard guards down from the weather deck and then to post two armed sentries on the pier by the brow leading to the sub. The very unhappy-looking skipper was dispatched back to the penitentiary.
Back in the admiral’s office, we were met by the head of quality control in the shipyard, a CEC commander. Admiral Carter had called him in to explain to me about radiation, about which I knew not much, other than that certain elements from the periodic table naturally emitted radiation. And the fact that X-ray techs wore lead aprons. The QA officer went into lecture mode.
“Here at Portsmouth Yard, we build submarines, which have welded joints in their hulls in addition to rivets and other fastening techniques,” the commander began. “Where we do use welds, they must be perfect. No voids, no cracks, no discontinuities in the fused metal. Zero. You may have seen a regular welder hammer on a fresh bead to see if a part of it collapses because there was a bubble in the steel, but that’s not good enough for subs going deep underwater. So, we X-ray them.”
“You X-ray steel?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, sir. Let’s say the weld is joining two sections of pipe together that will never need to be opened at that point in the line. We use bolted flanges with gaskets wherever the sub’s crew might have to open that line for maintenance purposes, but for a long run of piping, we weld sections together. To X-ray it, we have a machine that can encircle the welded pipe joint. We put a long band of X-ray film down the pipe, and then we mount a radiation source in the machine. It then revolves all the way around the joint. We then pull the band and ‘read’ the X-ray, which will show any defects in the weld.”
“What’s the source of the X-rays?” I asked.
“The object of the game is to produce a stream of high-velocity electrons that can penetrate really dense materials, such as steel, or even lead—which is very dense—and then capture that stream on a recording material, such as a special film. These electrons can be produced by specially designed vacuum tubes, but that requires extremely high voltages. There are also natural materials that are fundamentally unstable and thus called radioactive—such as uranium or several of its isotopes. One of these is called cesium 137. Our source for high-velocity electrons is cesium 137. It naturally emits what’s called ionizing radiation.”
“And why do I care?”
“In simplest terms, because if you stand in the way of cesium-generated ionizing radiation, it will cook the cells of your body in pretty short order. Have you ever had an X-ray?”
“Yes, I have,” I said, suddenly alarmed. Cook the cells?
“They put you on a table, point the snout of a large, weird-looking machine at your whatever, drape a lead apron over your vitals, and then the techs leave the room. They told you to hold still, and then the machine made a noise, right?”
“Yes.”
“How long was the noise—in seconds?”
“Not even that,” I said. “Barely a blink.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Barely a blink. Like Speedy Gonzales—this won’t hurt, will it? Right?”
I nodded, smiling at his off-color analogy.
“An X-ray of the human body is deliberately as short as we can make it. We want to see the bone, but not fry it, or the marrow within. Minimize the exposure to ionizing radiation, while getting it to print the interior picture onto some film. Now: If something in that boat is producing ionizing radiation, I would say it’s probably uranium or one of its isotopes. Until you know which one, you can’t go down there and expect to live very long afterward.”
“Damn.”
“If that boat was transporting a radioactive material, it’s probably not a high-energy isotope, otherwise nobody would be alive when they got to wherever they were going. It might be just uranium oxide, or even uranium ore, unprocessed. But before you or anyone else can go down there, you need to know what stuff is in those mining tubes.”
“The boat’s captain wouldn’t even go down there,” the admiral pointed out. “Even with a .45 pointed to his head, courtesy of our Washington visitor here.”
The commander gave me a strange look.
“I have a low threshold of patience when it comes to Nazi U-boat skippers,” I said.
“Um, okay, I guess, Captain. But what I said stands—you need some expert help to determine exactly what you’ve got here.”
I nodded, thanked him, and the commander left.
“Uranium,” I said. “I need a drink.”
“You read my mind, young man,” the admiral said, opening a lower drawer in his desk. He produced a bottle of some good Scotch and poured out a generous measure for us both. We tipped glasses in a traditional salud and then just sat there for a few minutes.
“What’s significant about uranium?” he asked, finally.
“At the moment, it’s a dangerous word,” I replied. “If certain people hear you say it in Washington, some scary guys will come around.”
“It’s a word,” the admiral protested. “Just another element from the periodic table, albeit a pretty heavy one. What the hell, over?”
“Sir, are those two Japanese suitably restrained?” I asked, ducking his question for a moment.
“The hospital CO says they are. At least so they can’t open their bellies and make a big mess in the ward. And he knows that this is important.”
“I know someone,” I said. “And if this is about what I think it might be, two things: first, don’t even mention that word, officially or unofficially, and make sure you caution the QA officer not to mention that word. And, second, you should expect a crowd here in a few days.”
He gave me a raised eyebrows look.
I shook my head. “Admiral, this goes way, way above your pay grade and mine, assuming I’m right. The less you know, sir, the safer you are. Me, well, situations like this come with the territory, I’m afraid. May I please use your secure line?”
FOUR
VAN RENSSELAER
I first called my office in Washington on the nonsecure line and asked Marianne to put a call in to one Captain Van Rensselaer at the Old Executive Office Building. I then gave her the shipyard’s secure phone drop number and told her to ask him to call me, secure. ASAP. The admiral, overhearing my call, suddenly developed an urgent appointment and told me to make use of his office while he was out. I think he’d heeded my warning, and now that I was contacting someone in the National Security Office, he probably knew he shouldn’t be hanging around. Smart. Probably why he was an admiral.
Captain Villem Amherst Van Rensselaer came from an interesting New York family that went way back. A long time ago that name would have been Wilhelm Horst Van Rensselaer, but he’d anglicized it when he entered the naval academy. Not that that fooled anyone. The Van Rensselaer family had once been the third-richest in the nation back in the 1700s, owning an estate of more than a million acres with a large manor house near the present city of Albany. He was in the class of 1925, one year ahead of mine, and known to be a blisteringly smart, somewhat aloof, and unusually tall Dutchman. So tall, in fact, that he’d required a waiver just to graduate, as he exceeded the academy’s height maximum. Through what many in the military assumed to be family connections, he’d been selected upon graduation for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, to study physical sciences and languages. Family connections notwithstanding, no one who knew him quibbled with his academic qualifications to go to Oxford.
He never did go to sea or serve in the usual sea and shore billets assigned to almost all recently graduated naval officers. He came back from Oxford with a PhD in physics and the ability to converse comfortably in German and Russian in addition to the French and Dutch he’d brought to Annapolis. He’d subsequently done assignments as a White House aide, a desk officer at the State Department, a professor at the Navy’s postgraduate school at the naval academy, and then at the Naval War College in Newport. After that he’d sort of fallen off the radar, reappearing in Washington the week after Pearl Harbor as a lieutenant commander. Six weeks later he was a full captain working on some secret project committee in the Executive Office Building, or EOB, of which there were rumored to be many during the war.
I’d worked with him a couple of times since coming to the CNO’s inner sanctum staff, so I was assuming he remembered my name. Having been at the top levels of government for so many years, he might well not, but this radiation business smacked of a new physics discipline called nuclear physics. Not to mention rumors of an extremely secret project, so secret that at least one officer I’d known who had stuck his nose in had literally disappeared. If Van Rensselaer couldn’t tell me what to do, he might know someone who could. I fervently hoped.
In the event, he called me back in Portsmouth, and to my surprise, he was immediately interested when I told him I had a captured German U-boat here at the shipyard that was showing signs of radioactivity. He fired off a couple of technical questions that I couldn’t answer, but when I told him we also had two Japanese civilians who’d been aboard the sub in custody he went silent for a moment. I thought he’d hung up.
“Do you know they are civilians?” he asked finally.
“I know they’re Japanese,” I replied. “That’s all. I’ve taken precautions to make sure they can’t commit suicide, because I figured someone in your world might want a word.”
He laughed quietly at that, and then said, “You’d be positively amazed at who would want a word with them, my friend. Good work, Wolfe Bowen. Very good work. Now: speak of this call to no one, especially in the shipyard. You may inform Admiral Carter that Washington will take this problem for action. You wait there at Portsmouth. I will be there in two days or less, with some, um, reinforcements. Keep everyone away from the U-boat, but don’t make such a big deal about it that the local press gets wind of something going on, understood?”
“Understood,” I said. “I’m staying at the BOQ. I did plan to go visit the prisoners and reassure them that we weren’t planning to cook and eat them.”
“Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep, Captain,” he said, and then hung up.
Okay, I thought, as I signed off the secure link. What the hell did that mean? Time to see if the shipyard had a gym. I was definitely feeling the need. What the hell was this all about?
One day later, not two, I found out. Admiral Carter’s duty officer called me in my BOQ room at 0530 and informed me that a “special military train” had entered the shipyard at 0330 that morning and had proceeded to Pier 5, where it had deployed an entire company of Marines. The officer in charge, one Captain Van Rensselaer, USN, had ordered that all shipyard personnel must remain clear of the waterfront and its adjacent buildings because it was possible the enemy submarine had been rigged with a large amount of explosives. Shift workers arriving at 0730 to relieve the night shift would be told to take the day off until tomorrow morning. These measures were precautionary only. No one should be unduly alarmed. Not to worry, I thought. No one in a naval shipyard would bitch about a day off.
On the other hand, don’t make a big deal out of it? All those measures would bring press jackals from three states on the run. Villem Van Rensselaer, you’ve been in Washington too long, I thought. Nobody’s gonna believe that bullshit.
Pier 5 was only a half mile from the BOQ. I got dressed in my anonymous jumpsuit, grabbed some coffee from the BOQ office, and walked over there. A conference seemed to be going on at the head of the pier. Admiral Carter was there, along with his chief of staff. Captain Van Rensselaer, distinguishable by just his height alone, six foot plus too much, was explaining to the admiral that he, and some civilian scientists he’d brought with him, needed to go aboard to inspect whatever was secreted aboard this strange-looking submarine. He said that there might be a need for some of his train cars to come down onto the pier so that material could be offloaded. His train, I marveled; now that was real juice. Admiral Carter told him the yard had a pusher engine that could manage that. He asked if Van Rensselaer needed the German captain. To my surprise, Van Rensselaer said, “No, but I do want Captain Bowen to accompany us aboard.”
Minutes later we were at the hatch to the lower, minelaying deck. Van Rensselaer’s two civilians unpacked some test equipment. They then donned white jumpsuits that I would have sworn were made of thick paper, respirators, gloves, and visored hoods. They each pinned on what looked like an oversize domino with a thin, lighted window and then climbed awkwardly down the ladder into the lower deck compartment. We went back up and waited on the main deck of the submarine. They came back up in two minutes. One of them debriefed us.
