The victory at the gambit of graphite was silent, strategic, and incredibly fulfilling. Ezra had won at the battle of defense, protecting his own atom project while disabling his opponent's. But as he perused the smuggled photos of microfilm spread out before his desk, he knew that defense never did win all battles.
The grainy pictures illustrated a nightmare being built along Germany's Baltic coast. He saw rockets, larger than any aircraft, standing erect on enormous launch platforms. He saw enormous, half-complete assembling structures and railway tracks that vanished into underground tunnels. That was the Peenemünde Army Research Center. Back in his original timeline, those rockets, V-2s, would rain down upon London and Antwerp years later and bring a new type of terror to the war. They were a top-priority strategic threat.
He knew that British intelligence would eventually learn of the threat and that there would be a massive raid, Operation Hydra, by the RAF Bomber Command to knock it out. But that was years down the line. He could not, would not, wait for history to take its slow, bloody course. The project at Peenemünde directly threatened his allies back home in London and therefore to the entire anti-Nazi war he secretly sponsored. The project had to be stopped. Now.
But how? America was resolute, stubbornly peaceful. The U.S. government was paralyzed with isolationism. He could not pick up a telephone and demand that the Army Air Corps drop a sovereign nation with which he was not at war. The very idea was absurd. He would have to do this with his own private means. He would have to wage his own private war.
He summoned David Sterling, his capable but overworked chief engineer, to his New York offices. He laid out before Sterling the plans of the Seversky "Executive," that streamlined corporate transport that had been the crowning glory of his industrial collection.
"David," said Ezra, his voice frosty and direct, "I need a change to this plane. A special mission. I want to do this off the books, with a skeletal team that you completely trust."
Sterling leaned forward over the plans. "You wanted something particular, Mr. Prentice? Something with a bigger engine? Greater passenger capacity?"
"No," replied Ezra. "I want you to make one of them the best long-range photographic reconnaissance aircraft in the world."
Sterling stared at him, bewildered. "A spy plane? Sir, the army already has observation craft—"
"Those air force planes are slow, low-flying relics," cut in Ezra. "I want an aircraft that can carry a load to fly at well over thirty-five thousand feet, where the fighters can't readily touch it. I want to carry the best resolving camera that can be built—the kind that comes out of Eastman Kodak developmental laboratories—under a heated, pressurized blister belly-mounted. Its range shall be further boosted by five hundred miles as well. I want to have it able to fly from a neutral base at Sweden, across the Baltic, and home again without refueling."
The audacity of the demand left Sterling speechless. This was a plane to fly in violation of a foreign country's sovereign airspace. It was espionage. But he wasn't just an engineer anymore, he worked for Prentice. He had been trained to not worry himself with the 'why,' but with the 'how.'
"It'll be a challenge," Sterling said, his mind already working around the technical obstacles. "The pressurization, the engine modifications to high-altitude performance... but it can be done."
"Good," he said. "I'll need this within six weeks."
Meanwhile, Sterling's ghost team worked around the clock, but Ezra himself leveraged still another part of his network. He phoned a pilot, a man named Jack Corrigan who maintained on his own payroll. Corrigan was one of the early airmail giants, a hardened, tough-as-nails scoundrel who'd flown into storm and blizzard in lightweight biplanes. He was loyal, still owed a debt of gratitude to Ezra from years back, and had a unique ability to synthesize expertise with that most holy aviation commodity, sheer devilry, that this mission required.
It was a scheme of sheer bravado. The modified plane, with not a mark upon it to give away its American lineage, would be transported to Sweden under false guise of a "demo flight" to a potential Swedish industrial buyer—a buyer who never existed, but whose existence could be fabricated by fictitious company papers by Ezra's legal team. Corrigan would fly out of a remote airfield up north in Sweden and fly a very deliberate serpentine route over the Baltic Sea, "incidentally" flying into German airspace as a result of a "navigation error" before returning to base to land.
Six weeks elapsed before the mission sailed under cover of a gray dawn. The waiting was torture to Ezra, a period of pure helplessness to act. He had made his moves upon the board; he could do no other but wait to see whether they were to be taken up by his opponent or not. Two days later there arrived an enigmatical one-word telegram from a holding company at Stockholm. "DELIVERED."
Corrigan had made it back. The movie had been snuck out of Sweden by diplomatic pouch and vetted at a classified location Ezra had organized at the Rockefeller Center East Basement himself. The photos were magnificent. The hi-resolution cam had captured everything. Clear, conclusive pictures of those V-2 rockets at their launchpads, the research facility, scientists' barracks. He had the weapon now. He just required someone to pull the trigger.
He did not go to the American government. They would form a committee, spend months investigating, and freeze by political implications of acting upon intel gleaned by such illegal means. His focus was single-minded, driven.
Through Senior's veteran network, he could have access to a secure, encrypted line and contacts with his intel counterpart in London, whom he had been advised by regarding von Hauser. He forwarded a sampling of most compromising photos along with a very brief, anonymous note.
"A gift from a friend of the Crown. I am confident that you will find that this development centre at these coordinates will be of significant strategic importance to the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. I am told that their new Lancaster bombers are proving very efficient."
He had delivered them the intended item on a silver platter. The intel was perfect, source unverifiable. He had provided cause and means to act to the British, observing that their backs were against the wall and that such a threat would not go unturned.
Weeks passed without a whisper. Ezra scoured all foreign news wires, but there was no reporting. He feared that the British had restrained themselves, that the opportunity had been forfeited.
Then, one morning, he was reading The New York Times while having his coffee. Concealed on page eight, at the tail end of a brief column of miscellaneous foreign dispatches translated from a paper in Switzerland, he discovered it. The article comprised just three sentences.
ZÜRICH—Eyewitness accounts from independent travelers who returned from Germany relate a massive, inexplicable explosion and fire at a remote German industrial installation just south of Peenemünde along that country's Baltic coast late last week. German authorities cordoned off that area and to date have made no public statements as to that facility's mission nor as to how that episode took place.
Ezra laid down the paper, a slow, cold smile spreading up his face. They'd done it. Not that great raid of his own universe, but something less spectacular, something surgical, a deniable pinpoint strike by a few Mosquito bombers. It wouldn't have derailed that V-2 program, not exactly. But it had damaged it. It had caused chaos and paranoia. It had set back their schedule. But most of all, it had made a point.
Later that day, there was a diplomatic courier at his office with yet another personal envelope from the German consulate. Same thin, ivory writing paper as before, but this time there were only two words, in the infuriated, slashing writing style.
"Well played."
Ezra set the note down next to the clipping from the paper. The face of courtesy had dropped away. The war of shadows was no longer clandestine, if only to two men who fought it between themselves and a continent away. He had risen above finance, above industry, even above espionage. He was an actual participant in an unvoiced international war. He had just made his initial attack.