Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 106

'Will you reconsider?' he asked her.

'No,' she replied.

'For the sake of the children. For your mother's sake ' 'Don't bring them into this.'

Her mother looked embarra.s.sed, staring down at the floor, and Ernst, not feeling angry but dead, walked up to the old woman, embraced her, formally kissed her cheek. Then, as her tears started falling, he simply nodded at Ingrid.

'I promise, I'll make it back,' he said.

'Don't make rash promises, Ernst. None of us can make promises these days. We take each day as it comes.'

'I'll be back.'

'Goodbye, Ernst.'

He turned away and walked out. The taxi was still there, making a small fortune in these otherwise bleak days, and even as Ernst walked toward it, his boots kicking up gravel, he heard that distant, familiar rumbling and the eerie wail of the sirens. Looking toward Berlin, at the large moon in the starlit sky, he knew that the Allied aircraft were returning for another night of destruction.

There's nothing left for me here, he thought forlornly. Now I have only Wilson.

Then he slipped into the rear of the taxi and was taken back to the city, which, even as he was driven toward it, was turning into a furnace.

h.e.l.l is on earth, he thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY Bradley was in church. He was, to be precise, in an annex of the sh.e.l.l of the Church of St Pierre in the ruined old town of Caen, France, to which he had driven, one week after its fall to the Canadian and British troops, from the town of Saint-Lo, which had been captured by the US 1st Army.

Bradley had driven in a jeep from Saint-Lo to Caen through a landscape devastated by bomb craters, burned-out barns, collapsed houses, mountains of rubble, and putrefying dead animals, mostly cows. He had arrived in Caen, at the invitation of the British SOE, which was now being more agreeable to him, after the lovely old cathedral town, eastern bastion of the German defence forces, had been reduced to ruins by relentless Allied artillery and air bombardment. He had then been directed by some weary British 2nd Army infantrymen to the Church of St Pierre, which he had found simply by heading for the tower that was visible above the ruins of what had once been prosperous streets.

The tower had been damaged and was surrounded by more rubble, but luckily the interior of the church remained intact. It had become a refuge for hundreds of the townspeople who had lost their homes in the artillery and air bombardments. The refugees were still there when Bradley arrived, but within days they had been moved out to more hospitable quarters. Bradley, at the invitation of the British Secret Intelligence Service, had set up a temporary office in this annex, where, with the a.s.sistance of members of the Manhattan atomic bomb project's ALSOS and OSS's Project Paperclip, he had begun an intensive interrogation of resistance members and local townsfolk as well as less cooperative collaborators, suspected and otherwise.

While the members of the ALSOS concentrated on tracking down details of all German V-1 and V-2 rocket projects, Bradley and his fellow OSS sleuths were attempting to trace the whereabouts of those scientists and engineers known to have been involved in the construction of rockets and other secret weapons, including any aircraft remotely saucer-shaped and relating to Wilson.

Bradley was not having much luck.

What he had learned so far was that the Germans had built a frightening number of V-1 and V-2 rocket launching sites, most of them in the Pas de Calais area and the recently captured Cherbourg peninsula. What he had also learned is that after the devastating RAF bombing raids of 1943, Wernher von Braun's rocket team had been moved out of Peenemnde to an unknown destination, had been returned when the damage had been repaired, but reportedly was about to be moved again. Unfortunately, no one knew more than that... and no one seemed to know Wilson.

The American.

G.o.dd.a.m.n him!

The more Bradley saw of the war's awesome devastation, the more

he wondered how much Wilson had contributed to it and the more he wanted to find him and put a stop to him. He was still haunted by the memory of that saucer-shaped aircraft in the barn near Montezuma, Iowa, where Wilson had been born and returned to work in secret, and he was convinced that the V-1 rocket program could not have been so advanced without Wilson's help. Now, more than anything else, he had to find out.

Sitting behind his makes.h.i.+ft desk in the annex of the damaged church, he had come face to face with the best and worst faces of the war: female collaborators with heads shaved by their liberated former friends; male collaborators bruised and scarred from beatings by their fellow countrymen; the pitiful victims of n.a.z.i torture; old and young members of the French resistance, whose features had been shaped by deprivation and constant fear. He was feeling overwhelmed and exhausted when finally he came up with something.

The man who sat facing him across the old, cluttered farm table the morning of July 20, 1944, was wearing the clothing of a French peasant black jacket and baggy pants, open-necked white s.h.i.+rt and beret but had strikingly handsome features and brown eyes filled with pa.s.sionate conviction. He had not been brought in, but had specifically asked to see the investigating officer. According to his papers, he wasn't French but Polish, and his name was Andrzej Pialowicz.

'I'm surprised,' Bradley told him, 'to find a Polish citizen in the French resistance.'

'I am a leading member of the Polish resistance,' Pialowicz replied

in surprisingly good English, 'but am forced to flee the country when

the Gestapo and SS round up and murder my group. When you finally get to Poland, and if you find your hands on the n.a.z.i secret services

doc.u.ments, no doubt you will find me listed there.'

Bradley nodded. 'Why did you not just go underground in Poland?' 'It is becoming too difficult in Cracow, where I operate, and when

my group is captured and my lover tortured and then sent to a

concentration camp, I know that the last people I can trust are all gone,

and if I stay in Cracow, it will only be a matter of time before I am

caught.'

'Good thinking,' Bradley said.

'Also, Major Riedel of the SS is becoming obsessed with capturing

me, which is a further motive to leave the country and go underground,

where even my name will not be known. So, convinced that the Allies