While the greater, more visible war stormed the European skies and Pacific islands, Ezra Prentice and Baron von Hauser waged an alternate, though less prominent conflict. It was war, but not war of armies, yet of ledgers of shipping, commodity futures, and shadowy emissaries. It was war over the sinews of industry.
Ezra's private war room in New Jersey had been transformed. A detailed map continued to trace the military fronts, but now another, broader map covered the adjacent wall. It was one of global resources, plotted with lines tracing shipping routes, railways, and supply routes. There, Ezra, Sullivan, and a small circle of economic analysts waged their economic war. A secure teletype clacked on, linking them with one discreet Swiss banker who was their lead European cutout.
"The Germans are short of chromium at a critical point," Ezra remarked at one of the late-night meetings, pointing to a new intel document. "Their Balkan conquests are not providing enough anymore. They are trying to get it through Turkey now. We need to shut it down."
In just hours, a series of purchase orders, directed via shell corporations from Panama to Lisbon, flooded the Turkish chromium market. The entire supply on offer was bought up at inflated prices by agents of Ezra, not because he desired the chromium, but simply to deny the enemy from doing so. The German war machine, thirsting for the metal to produce armor plating and engine parts, finds its sources suddenly dried up.
Baron von Hauser, meanwhile, back in his predicament at Berlin, was forced to fight this economic war with one hand tied behind his back. He knew what lay behind the bursts of shortages, the incomprehensible market reversals. He sensed the hidden hand of Prentice destroying the industrial life of the Reich. He struck back, carrying on elaborate and risky smuggling operations through the neutral nations of Spain and Portugal, trading German machine tools for the precious tungsten and valuable chromium they were short of.
It was a constant, enraged struggle. Nine times in ten, he would find his prey waited for. A Spanish freighter carrying an undetectable cargo of tungsten would be "coincidentally" detained by a British destroyer, which had been supplied an exact, nameless tip from one of Ezra's men in Gibraltar. Von Hauser was like a man caulking ninety-nine leaks on a bursting dam, and his foe stood upstream, deflecting the stream serenely.
Its most critical battlefield, however, was for control of one vital segment: ball bearings. Von Hauser knew that the entire German war machine—the entire complement of airplane engines, tank turrets, U-boat propeller shafts—depends upon the sustained production of a handful of gigantic factory centers concentrated in the city of Schweinfurt.
Ezra was aware of this too, obviously, not from intelligence, but from history. He also knew the Allied bombers' command, all its might notwithstanding, was grappling with the strategic issue of precision bombing. They were carpet-bombing urban centers, an inelegant and wasteful method, because they lacked the detailed, exploitable intelligence to target important industrial centers.
Ezra decided to provide it for them. Through his network, he moved an intensive intelligence package to an hand-selected group of aggressive, forward-thinking generals from the Eighth Air Force. The package contained not just the exact location of the Schweinfurt plants, but a complete study of how they manufactured, and identified the most critical and vulnerable structures at each facility. The next raid, made infinitely more accurate and lethal thanks to Ezra's meticulous intelligence, was a crushing blow to German war manufacturing.
Von Hauser was shocked by the news. It was a frontal paralyzing blow at the very center of his industrial empire, one struck with an intelligence so perfect it seemed unearthly. He knew, with a sickening certainty, that Prentice's men were not just outbidding him on the open market, but they were in his own house.
Realizing he could not win at the resource war, the Baron too shifted tactics. His new mission was not to win at the war—a war he now privately knew to be doomed—but to preserve the core of German industrial and scientific genius for the future beyond Hitler. He began to subtly cultivate an inner circle of pragmatic, non-ideological German industrialists and scientists. He wooed men who, like him, read the writing on the wall and were answerable first to their fatherland's future and less to Hitler's death wish.
He presented them with an offer. He would use the small power he still commanded within the SS to protect them and their plants from the fanatical scorched-earth policies certain to be waged as the Reich came apart. In return, they would pledge allegiance, and their skills, to an eventual, non-Nazi Germany he hoped to be part of building.
It was a shrewd, long-sighted act. But Ezra's intelligence network was one better. He learned of the Baron's "industrialist cabal" via an agent in Zurich. Rather than go to lengths to break it up, he recognized it for what it was: a cataloging of Germany's most precious war assets. He chose to insinuate himself into it.
His target was Wilhelm Fassbender, the proprietor of a firm making high-precision scientific instruments—spectrometers, centrifuges, and vacuum pumps. Fassbender belonged to the network of the Baron, but he was also one who nursed an enduring hatred of the Nazis, who had "reassigned" some of his finest Jewish scientists in the prewar years.
Ezra's Swiss agent came to see him. He came with no threat. He came with an offer, an offer similar to the offer from the Baron, but an offer backed by a much more secure future.
"There's a place for you in future Germany," the agent went on to Fassbender, speaking quietly in an Zurich hotel room. "An unsure future, at best. Mr. Prentice provides you with a place in the future of the world. He recognizes your genius and your company's genius. He's prepared to provide you and your best engineers safe escape to America, and a new, lavishly funded lab from which to continue your work. He'll help you reestablish your firm after the war, supported by the full economic resources of the Rockefeller name."
Fassbender, the pragmatist, could see the irrefutable logic. Von Hauser was offering survival. Prentice was offering guarantees of wealth and power. The choice remained clear. Wilhelm Fassbender secretly defected, and he became Ezra's mole inside von Hauser's own survival organization.
Several weeks later, the mole came up with his first, and most valuable, item of intelligence. At one of the cabal's secret meetings, von Hauser had discussed needing to protect Germany's "crown jewels"—the premier scientists. Fassbender was told by an agent at the Heereswaffenamt (the Army Ordnance Office) that the atomic research program, the Uranprojekt, was being moved from its vulnerable urban labs. The intelligence was descriptive and dramatic. The German program was plunged into disarray, disabled by infighting, resource shortages, and an irreparable failure of their experiments on graphite. And most importantly, the entire team, personally led by Werner Heisenberg himself, was being moved to a new, secret facility disguised as one behind a church at the small, unimportant town of Haigerloch.
The message arrived at Ezra's office as a code-teletype message. He read the city name. Haigerloch. And he now knew exactly where his key scientific target would be as Germany fell. He now had the final piece of the puzzle he needed to begin his post-war acquisition program. He had not only beaten back one important round of his secret war against the Baron, he had cleverly used the enemy's own network to do so. The hunter was very soon going to be made the hunted.