Projekt 1065: List 4

“We older ones are used up,” Hitler said. He spoke so softly at first that we had to lean in to hear him—which was a good trick, I realized. “We are rotten to the marrow. We are cowardly and sentimental.”

“It is true. We adults bear the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters!” Hitler said, gazing out lovingly at all of us.

“It is true. We adults bear the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters!” Hitler said, gazing out lovingly at all of us.

Hitler’s voice rose and fell, ebbing and flowing like the Irish Sea.

“Youth must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness in you. No tenderness. You must learn to do without, to endure criticism and injustice, to be reliable, discreet, decent, and loyal. You must be as swift as greyhounds. Tough as leather. As hard as Krupp steel!”

“Youth must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness in you. No tenderness. You must learn to do without, to endure criticism and injustice, to be reliable, discreet, decent, and loyal. You must be as swift as greyhounds. Tough as leather. As hard as Krupp steel!”

From the corner of my eye, I watched Fritz and Horst and Ottmar and Erhard, the four boys on the science team. They quivered as Hitler spoke, like five-year-olds so anxious to open their presents on Christmas morning they were going to puke. They were euphoric. Ecstatic.

From the corner of my eye, I watched Fritz and Horst and Ottmar and Erhard, the four boys on the science team. They quivered as Hitler spoke, like five-year-olds so anxious to open their presents on Christmas morning they were going to puke. They were euphoric. Ecstatic.

“That’s why they were recruited. Because they’re zealots. You should have seen these four guys. It was like God himself had come down from on high to talk to them. I saw it in their faces. Heard it in their shouts. It’s like a religion for them. They believe Hitler’s nonsense. Aryan supremacy. The Jewish threat. World domination. All of it.”

“Michael, you have to save Professor Goldsmit,” Simon said. “The only way you can do it is to get on that team, and the only way you can get on that team is to do something so radical they automatically promote you, like the boy who turned in his parents. And you’ll be doing him one better—you’ll be turning in a British spy who also just happens to be a Jew.”

Or had we unwittingly scheduled this little piece of theater in the same place and on the same night that some family was trying to escape, some Edelweiss Pirates were attempting an act of vandalism?

“The embassy—go. Go!” Trumbauer said, dispatching some of his soldiers. “Find them!”

“You should know, it was the O’Shaunesseys’ son who turned you in. Turned his parents in too,” Trumbauer said with unmitigated delight.

I said the word like an insult. Like profanity.

It was Nazi claptrap propaganda, but SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer nodded with approval.

Standing at the base of the aerial tramway in Mürren, I had watched the tiny little cable cars as they moved up and down the mountain, hanging from spiderweb-thin cables that snaked up into the snowcapped peaks above us.

Now I was inside one of those little trams, dangling a hundred feet over a sea of green fir trees and white snow.

The last thing I needed right now was Nazi platitudes, but I nodded.

I kept my back to the view and my eyes on the resort, where all the passengers were queuing up in a Warteschlange—a “waiting snake,” German for a long line—to go through security.

It took another agonizingly long few minutes for the Swiss Guard to confer with his lieutenant, and for me to explain all over again.

I slammed into a stack of chairs three times as tall as me, the tower of seats swaying precariously as I clung to it, trying to stay on my feet.

We tumbled head over heels, kicking and punching and scrabbling for control of his dagger.

“Well, Strassmann’s done excellent work on the thermodynamics of superconductors, but I was the one who first proposed the idea of electron spin—”
I had no idea what he was talking about.

Pulled me up over the edge, until I lay dazed and addled in the middle of the cable car’s roof, Fritz panting beside me.

Then it turned into a low rumble, like a plane flying high overhead. And then ten planes. And then a hundred planes. And then a waterfall, a never-ending torrent.

Fritz and I watched, transfixed, as snow roared down the side of the mountain toward the forest of fir trees below.

At first I couldn’t believe it would possibly reach us, but as the snow rolled down the mountain, giant clouds of it blossomed and roiled, growing bigger and taller.

This was Switzerland, protected from the horrors on their doorstep by the thin shield of neutrality, the paper wall of diplomacy and politics.

When the war was over, the world would be ruled one way, or the other—by freedom or fascism, by hope or by fear.

He was in the SOE—Special Operations Executive, Britain’s secret war intelligence organization—and a ramrod English aristocrat to the core.

While my parents had spent the last three days being debriefed by the SOE and receiving their new orders from Dublin, I had worked with Chief Technician Ross to rebuild the plans for Projekt 1065 from memory, exactly the same way Simon and I had in the little secret room at the Irish Embassy.

The British Intelligence officer looked a little taken aback. He glanced at the Scottish engineer, who just shook his head and smiled.

“You and your family may yet get a commendation from His Majesty’s government,” Agent Faulkner said.

Agent Faulkner sat back down across from me. “Michael, it’s imperative that you tell no one about what you and your parents have done. Not one bit of it. If you go telling your story, it will be obvious that we’ve had Irish agents working under Hitler’s nose the whole war. That we still do have Irish agents in the field.”

“Welcome to the world of international espionage,” Agent Faulkner said, and he got up to leave.