” Wihi von K’?” Muller said as they drove off. “And you don’t even know this is for you! The name got wet, all you can read is the street number.” KERIC von Fulmar is the Baron Kolbe,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“That’s reaching for it,” Muxer said.
“Not if you can find his fingerprint on it,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
KHIS father, obviously, could be his father. Professor Dyer?
Is there a Professor Dyer at Philips University in Marburg? Did Fulmar know him?”
“I’m reasonably sure there’s a set of Fulmar’s prints in Berlin,” Muller said. “I’m not sure I can get at them without raising questions.”
“I think we have to take that risk, “von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“Okay. For the sake of argument, I dust this postcard, find a print, and match it with Fulmar. And it turns out there is a Professor Dyer at Marburg.
Then what?”
“Then we do what it says, “von Heurten-Mitnitz said. “We give his regards to his father and this Professor Dyer, presuming we can find him.” KGERMANS,” Muxer said, Kpeople I know, are freezing to death right now in Russia. And we’re..”
“We can’t help the people in Russia, “von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“The best we can hope for is to do what we can to end this insanity. I think of it as cutting off a gangrenous hand to save the arm.”
“You have the advantage on me,” Muller said. “You can think of this in philosophical terms. I’m just a simple policeman. I think of it in terms of being hung on piano wire to strangle in the basement of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison.”
“I feel like saying I’m sorry,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
There was the sound of a police siren behind them. They were by then back on the Avus, a perfectly straight, four-lane Autobahn. Muxer looked down at his speedometer. He was well over the speed limit.
He slowed enough for the motorcycle policeman to draw abreast.
The policeman looked just long enough to see the unifortm cap with the death’shead insignia and the insignia of an Obersturmbannfuhrer on Muller’s overcoat. Then the whooping of his siren died suddenly, and he fell behind.
Their lunch at the Hotel Adlon was very nice. There was roast loin of boar as an off-the-ration bonus. Stapled to the menu was a card printed in gold saying the roast boar was provided through the courtesy of Master Hunter of the Reich Hermann Goring.
It wasn’t free, of course, but Goring wanted the upper class of Berlin to know that he was sharing the bounty of his East Prussian hunting grounds, not keeping it all for himself. lchom U. S. Army Air Corpn Baue Stosord-bire, Englond ao December It was Major Doug Douglass’s prerogative as commanding officer to conduct the final briefing before his P-38s attacked the sub pens at Saint-Lazare, but he passed on that one. So the briefing was given by a light colonel from Eighth Air Force G3 (Plans and Training), the sonofabitch who had thought up the operation. The idiot was so happy with it that he actually had the balls to tell Douglass he wished he was checked out in P-38s so he could make the mission.
The light bird was a pilot, but he was a bomber pilot. And now he had come up with an operation in which fighter planes were supposed to do what the bombers had been unable to do, take out the German submarine pens at Saint-Lazare.
There were a number of reasons the bombers had failed, including the Big One, Where the sub pens weren’t under thirty feet of granite, they were under that much reinforced concrete. Conventional 500 pound aerial bombs chipped the granite and the concrete, but they didn’t crack it, much less penetrate it.
During his initial briefing, Douglass was told that super bombs–weighing up to ten tons–were “in development,” and that they would certainly take out the pens. But the pens had to be taken out now, the subs they protected while they were being fueled and supplied were sinking an “unacceptable” amount of shipping tonnage.
There were other reasons the B-17s and the B-24s had failed. The pens were ringed with 88mm Flakkanonen manned by the best gunners the Germans had available. These were effective at any altitude the B-17s could reach. And there were four fighter fields, capable of sending aloft as many squadrons of very capable pilots flying Messerschmidts.