He wondered if Eric was down there and could hear, or perhaps even see, the American fighter as it climbed steeply into the sky.
He hadn’t seen anything of great significance. And he wasn’t even sure that the Germans really intended to use the Marburg facility’s electric furnaces to make the special alloy steel parts for their jet-propulsion engines. But it was important that he have a look for himself. Now that he’d done so, he was glad that he had–even if his fund of knowledge was not appreciably greater than it had been.
The odds were that he would be responsible for mounting a mission against that particular factory. He wanted to know what something that would certainly cost American lives looked like. And he would now be in a position to recommend the path attackers would take. Having been there, he was now an expert.
As he came out of a cloud layer at 15,000 feet, he saw the bomber stream above him. When he reached 20,000 feet,.50-caliber tracers from several of the bombers began to arc in his direction.
That was bad, but worse would follow. There was a mob instinct. If the guy in the next plane is firing at that airplane, maybe be can see something I can’t, like Maltese crosses on the wings. Why take a chance?
Canidy put the P-38F into a steep dive away from the bomber stream, to get out of range, and when he felt safe, he went to 23,000 feet and caught up with the fighter escort. He got there just as a swarm of Messerschmitts based near Frankfurt began their attack, and the fighter formations broke up to repel it. He didn’t find Douglass until long after the bombing run, when they were headed home.
When he pulled beside him, Douglass took off his glove so there would be no question but that he was giving Canidy the international aviation hand signal known as “The Finger.”
The commanding officer of the 344the Fighter Group went on the air-to-air.
“You goddamn sonofabitch,” he said.
“I was worried about you.”
[TWO]
East Railway Station 1145 Hours 31 January 1943
When the Opel Admiral -was found parked in the reserved area of the East Railway Station, it quite naturally caused a certain curiosity among the Gestapo agents assigned to the station.
For one thing, there were few Admirals–which was to the line of Adam Opel GmbH automobiles as Cadillac was to General Motors–around anywhere, and possession of one was a symbol of power and authority. This one, moreover, bore Berlin license plates, a CD (Corps Diplomatique) plate, and affixed to the Berlin license tag where the tax sticker was supposed to go, a sticker signifying that taxes had been waived because the automobile was in the service of the German Reich, and specifically in the service of the SS-SD.
Obviously, whoever had parked the car was someone of high importance.
The question was just who he was.
First things first. Josef Hamm, the ranking Gestapo agent, ordered that the Hungarian railway police be “requested” to station a railway policeman to watch
the car. If there was one thing known for sure, it was that, whoever the high official was, he would not be at all pleased to return to his car and find that someone had taken a key or a coin and run it along the fenders and doors. There had been a good deal of that, lately. A number of Hungarians took offense at the Hungarian-German alliance generally, and at the large–and growing-presence of German troops and SS in Budapest specifically, and expressed their displeasure in small, nasty ways.
Then Hamm called the security officer at the German embassy and asked whom the car belonged to.
“It probably belongs to von Heurten-Mitnitz,” the security officer said.
“That would explain the SD sticker, and he’s the type to have an Admiral.”
“Who’s von HeurtenMitnitz?”
“Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz,” the security officer said.
“He’s the new first secretary.”
“How does he rate an SD sticker?”
“Because when he’s bored with wearing striped pants, he can wear the uniform of a Brigadefuhrer SS-SD,” the security officer said.
“You could say that von Heurten-Mitnitz is a very influential man. His brother is a great friend of the Fuhrer. If you’d like, I can check the license plate number by teletype with Berlin.”