Projekt 1065: List 3

“You were so quick to volunteer,” he told Fritz, “and so quick into the fray. We should call you Quex.”

Quex was shorthand for the German word for “quicksilver.”

“He’s been touchy because he’s a doddering old man who serves no purpose to the war effort,” Fritz said.

“We have no use for these clever monks in their quiet cells,” Max said, spouting overblown propaganda from our weekly meetings.

I waited for Fritz to tell me the truth, but that appeared to be all he was going to say about it. I smoldered.

Melcher stood frozen, hand still raised, eyes bulging in a mix of indignation and horror.

Yes, I had painstakingly memorized and redrawn eleven pages of schematics with Simon over the last couple of weeks, but there was still one page left to memorize.

“Michael! There you are,” Fritz said. “Where have you been?”
“Walking your sister to school,” I said, a little testily. “Where have you been?”

“The old man should be proud his son died for Hitler. Not go soft. He’s a defeatist. Germany can’t win with people like him around.”

I followed the boys to Gestapo headquarters, where they dumped the broken, blubbering body of Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher on the floor in front of the SS officer on duty.

“This man has forsaken the Führer and is undermining our will to fight,” Fritz told him.

How Fritz, the youngest and smallest of them, had become the de facto leader of the group, I didn’t know.

He bundled up the pages we had worked on together and tied a leather string around them. “It’s an incredible coup. I came to take pictures, and I’ll be going back with full-blown schematics. They’ll be waiting to pin a medal on you when you get back to England.”

“Where I’ll raise a pint of Guinness and sing the Irish national anthem in your honor,” Simon told us with a wry smile.

“We’re narrowing it down to a list of targets—an American businessman visiting Portugal, a French Resistance fighter in Algiers, a member of the Danish monarchy,” Ma said. “But it’s all speculation at this point. We haven’t got a solid shred of evidence one way or another. But Davin and I will deal with that.”

From high in the cloudy night sky, we could hear the low, steady, ominous drone of British airplanes growing closer.

The barrel of the gun was a long, thin shiny silver proboscis like a mosquito’s nose, sticking out of a stocky jumble of gray hydraulic pistons and levers and gears that could swivel the cannon in any direction and any elevation.

I was one of the boys assigned to run the artillery shells from the storage crate to the gun.

I ducked and put a hand to my helmet to keep it in place as a piece of metal shrapnel pinged off it.

I had to be at the rendezvous at exactly 3:45 to take Simon across the city to the next agent in Ma’s network.

I hauled myself up on the radar machine, and found myself staring at a panel of knobs and readouts for calibrating the thing.

At optimum speed, we were supposed to be getting off fifteen to twenty rounds per minute, but because it was our first night—and because we were all thirteen to seventeen years old—it was probably more like five to seven rounds per minute.

Max took advantage of my reverie. He slammed the heel of his boot down on my toe, making me jump back.

I was shaking so badly I almost couldn’t move, but I had to get as far away from the carnage as I could.

He looked up at me in abject horror, probably because I was covered in Max’s blood and guts.

I threaded my way through the melee, stopping to defend myself against a boy with a broken bottle.

My temple exploded with pain. I put a hand to the throbbing, tender lump on my head and rolled away.

Fritz ran to help another Hitler Youth beset by Edelweiss Pirates, and I looked at my watch.

“I’ve never once been part of a covert action that went according to plan,” he said.

My jokes were bombing more than the airplanes overhead. I had to admit, they might have gone over better if any of them understood English. I carried on undaunted.

Horst jumped out of the line and threw his arm into the air in a fervent Nazi salute.

The Nazis loved their Amtsschimmel. Their “bureaucratic mildew.” The stacks and stacks of government paperwork they used to document every little thing. In English we called it “red tape.”

But the chancellery still looked immaculate. I didn’t know how they did it. It was brilliant white in a city filled with dust and gray smoke, and covered in crisp, clean, red, white, and black swastika flags.

To see Hitler in person, the great boogyman that had bedeviled Europe and the rest of the world, was like catching a glimpse of a leprechaun.

“This is a great day for you. A great day indeed. To meet me, and meet the Führer. I hope you all appreciate what an honor this is. You will tell your grandchildren of this day. I may be your inspiration, your mentor, your second father, but the superimposing leader of all desires of youth is Adolf Hitler.”