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And lucky Grossman—now he gets to blow up something else.
He went to the door, opened it, and looked down the car and through the door windows. He could see the two men in gray suits and black fedoras, not in detail but clearly enough to tell that they were now about halfway through the first car. He closed the door.
“I don’t like the idea…but, frankly, I do not have a better one.”
“Okay, then,” Grossman said and unzipped the pouch. “I’ll start the acid fuse.”
He pulled out the pen, looked at it, then quickly looked at it more closely, and whispered, “Scheist.”
Cremer saw Grossman’s face lose all color.
“What?”
“The fuse…”
The initial explosion of the half-kilo bomb blew out the side of the train seconds later. Grossman and Cremer had only a heartbeat to begin to comprehend what the absolutely brilliant flash and vicious concussion meant.
Within a split second, secondary explosions were triggered when the twenty or so kilograms of plastic explosive that had been packed in the suitcases—and the half kilo in Grossman’s coat pocket—suddenly cooked off.
The massive blasts rocked the whole train and tore the last three Pullman passenger cars from the track, scattering the Red Rocket and its contents across the peaceful Oklahoma countryside.
[ TWO ]
Office of Strategic Services
The National Institutes of Health Building
Washington, D.C.
0630 7 March 1943
When President Roosevelt had informed Wild Bill Donovan in August of 1941 that he had made a few calls and found, in a town where office and living accommodations were impossibly tight, space from which Donovan could execute the duties associated with his new position as director of the Office of Coordinator of Information, Donovan at first was somewhat under-whelmed.
The National Institutes of Health? he had wondered.
In no time, however, it became clear that housing—or, more to the point, hiding—the supersecret OCOI (and then its successor, the Office of Strategic Services) in the nondescript NIH building with its innocuous name came as close to perfect as the parameters of wartime allowed.
The office of the director of the OSS was nicely furnished with a large, glistening desk, a red leather couch, and two red leather chairs. The director himself was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet up and crossed on a low glass-top table, and reading from a fat folder in his lap.
“From the looks of it, Professor Dyer has already earned his keep,” Donovan said to his deputy director.
“Yes, sir,” Captain Peter Stuart Douglass Sr., USN, said. “The list of scientists he thinks will follow him is impressive.”
Douglass was slender and fit, a pleasant-looking forty-four-year-old with sandy hair and a freckled face. His career in the Navy had been spent aboard deepwater vessels—most recently as the commanding officer of a destroyer squadron—and in intelligence. When FDR had given Donovan the OCOI, he said it was only just that he start his staffing, too, and—with Donovan’s blessing—asked the secretary of the Navy to put Douglass on indefinite duty as Donovan’s number two.
Douglass, who believed he had little hope of making admiral—and was not sure he in fact wanted such duty, especially if it meant sailing a desk in Washington—embraced the OCOI assignment because it promised to put him, as it now delivered, in the middle of some very exciting and important work.
“Question is,” Donovan went on, “can we get them out before the Germans (a) find out we grabbed Dyer and that he’s not simply ‘missing,’ and (b) decide that the loyalty of these remaining scientists is not with Hitler but soon with Leslie Groves.”
Until recently—as in two weeks before—Professor Frederick Dyer, a rumpled academic in patched tweed in his fifties, had been at the University of Marburg, working under duress on the molecular structure of metals in the pursuit of turbine engine technology for the propulsion of aircraft, among other projects critical to ensuring the Tausendjahriges Reich—the Nazis’ thousand-year empire.
The OSS—with Eric Fulmar as the mission operative and Dick Canidy as his control—had smuggled Dyer and his daughter, twenty-nine-year-old Gisella, out via an OSS pipeline. The difficult escape through German-occupied Hungary very nearly cost all of them their lives.
In the end—as in two days ago—the Dyers were escorted to the University of Chicago, where the professor joined the dozen or so scientists—including Enrico Fermi, Dyer’s friend and colleague from the University of Rome—working on a highly classified project led by Brigadier General Leslie Groves, Army of the United States.
Code-named the Manhattan Project, it traced its roots to when the brilliant Fermi had fled Mussolini’s fascism for the United States.
Once in the U.S., Fermi naturally had become involved with a number of other eminent scientists, many of them also Europeans who had sought freedom in America. There was the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the master German mathematician Albert Einstein, the Hungarians Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and others of remarkable scientific talent.
