'Move out— now,' snapped Stumpf. The men rushed from concealment, protected by bodysuit armor they no longer needed, wearing gas masks to fend off any inhalation of residual phosgene. They scrambled down the embankment in wellrehearsed and perfectly executed moves.
Small packages of nitro blew open the heavy doors to the armored car. Inside, submachine guns at the ready, they found eight men in the twisted death agony of asphyxiation. They dragged one body aside, set explosive charges about the safe, and retreated outside. Again a handle was twisted and the muffled roar of an explosion sounded within the armored car. They went back inside immediately, ignoring the smoke boiling out the opened door.
The safe door lay hanging by a single hinge. One man removed a steel box, pried open the cover. Inside, wrapped in velvet bags, lay their quarry. Dazzling, an emperor's ransom and much more in huge diamonds of various shapes and colors.
The man kneeling by the safe with a fortune before him seemed transfixed. Not by the diamonds, but by a single cube, three inches on each side, and engraved with strange symbols. A cube of burnished copperbronze. Quickly he and another man placed the diamonds and the cube in sealed flotation bags. The leader gestured to one man, and the three men started down the hillside. At the water's edge Colonel Stumpf waited for them. He gestured at the flotation bag. 'It is all there?' he asked, his usual hard tone pitched higher by concern.
The men removed their gas masks. 'Yes, sir. It is all here. Everything from the safe.'
'And the, ah, special item?'
A gloved hand patted the bag. 'It is here, too.'
The colonel managed a trace of a smile, then his lips tightened. 'Excellent.
Berlin will be pleased. Proceed.'
They moved quickly to a large rubber raft concealed in a cove. 'It is getting dark,' Stumpf remarked aloud, scanning the sky. 'Have the men finish with the train. I want everyone aboard their rafts ready to move in twenty minutes.'
Along the railroad the men remaining with the train set new explosive and incendiary charges. Everything happened with practiced efficiency, and soon they joined their comrades along the shoreline. Night was falling quickly as Colonel Stumpf scanned the open sea with binoculars.
'Ah!' he called aloud. 'I see the blinker light. Move out! Everyone, move!'
Four rubber rafts pushed the two miles across the sea to where they saw the dim silhouette of a submarine conning tower. Remaining low in the water, the submarine swallowed the killing team. Stumpf was the last to slip through the waiting hatch. He stopped, turned to look at the train barely visible in the gloom of early night, and jammed his thumb down on a radio transmitter. Huge chunks of train and bodies ripped upward from a series of powerful explosions. In moments the dry brush along the radio line was also ablaze. Stumpf nodded with selfsatisfaction, and tossed the transmitter into the water to sink along with the rafts that had been stabbed with knives and were also sinking into dark water. Moments later the submarine was gone.
The rescue train appeared two hours later. Its crew stared in disbelief at the horrifying devastation that greeted them.
The next morning . . .
Seventyfour miles westsouthwest of Cape Dernburg, beneath a sky gray with rain squalls, the submarine rose to just beneath the surface. A high radio antenna rose below a balloon released from the conning tower. Two hundred feet high the balloon stopped, tugging at the antenna, holding it taut as a homing signal beamed outward.
A lookout called to Colonel Stumpf. 'The aircraft, sir! On the port beam. Very low over the horizon and he is coming directly to us!'
Stumpf brought binoculars to his eyes. They were taking no chances. This would be the Rohrbach Romar of Deutsches Aero Lloyd or they would shoot it to pieces with machine guns and continue their voyage submerged.
The big flying boat engines throbbed unmistakably, the sound of heavy propellers slightly out of synchronization. It circled the submarine in a low, wide turn, confirming by coded radio signal its identification.
Colonel Stumpf turned to the sub captain. 'The smoke, sir, if you please?' he requested.
The captain nodded and called out to crewmen on the deck. 'Smoke! Two grenades! Schnell!'
Two men pulled grenade pins and placed the grenades on the sub deck. Flame hissed and thick smoke boiled out, marking wind drift and velocity. The flying boat turned in the distance for its landing run into the wind. Colonel Stumpf looked with pride at the great highwing monoplane, so perfect for this mission. Its rugged hull was flat on both fuselage sides above the contoured bottom, and its wings spanned more than a hundred and twenty feet from tip to tip. Three powerful BMW VLuz engines throbbed with a physical force. Those fourbladed wooden propellers, massive and thick, churned a heavy blow all about them. Stumpf knew that von Moreau was flying. He was the best, and to handle this fortythousandpound monster on the open sea demanded the highest skill. The Romar settled onto the water, skimming along as it felt gingerly for the surface, then lowering deeper as von Moreau came back on the power. The Romar taxied close to the submarine; close but safe. Deckhands lowered a raft into the water and held it by securing lines.
Three of the men from the attack forces came to the deck, one carrying the flotation bag. Stumpf motioned them to wait for him in the raft. He turned to the captain. 'Thank you, Captain Loerzer. Your timing, everything, was splendid.'
The two men shook hands. Loerzer smiled. 'When I think of what this will do for our new Ger many . . . '
H e shook his head, almost overcome with emotion.
Stumpf offered a quick salute and climbed into the raft.
'Go,' he snapped. The men paddled steadily, powerfully, to the waiting Romar and climbed aboard as Stumpf turned back to the raft and fired several pistol shots to assure it would sink.
He recognized von Moreau looking back from the cockpit. 'Hello, Erhard!'
Stumpf shouted. 'Waste no time, my friend!'
Von Moreau waved back as he nodded. Moments later deep thunder rolled across the darkened ocean surface. Flares from the submarine arced high overhead, their reflection providing von Moreau with the visibility he required. Well before the flares, drifting beneath their small parachutes, hissed into the sea, the great Rohrbach
