“Sir, we will be shot.”
“Fly over them, I say,” Willem shouted and brought out his pistol. “Or I will shoot you myself.”
We flew over the churning mass of tote M?nner and humans. They took no notice of us. All of their attention was focused on the horrifying apparitions among them.
“Good,” said Willem grimly. “Return.”
It was a safe bet that each of the tote M?nner had likely managed to bite at least three soldiers. Assuming an overlap of twenty percent, that meant better than thirteen thousand Allied tote M?nner would be awakening in a week. This was a conservative estimate, assuming the infected soldiers would not infect others during the euphoric period.
We landed, and General Marcks himself joined us. Willem told him of the adventure and the anti-tote M?nner equipment—mostly flame throwers and protective jackets—waiting in trucks not ten kilometers distant. The Allied invasion would not succeed.
And it did not.
The Allies, so demoralized by the Reich’s new weapon, were unable to advance. German bombers were able to sink support craft in the channel. The war stalled in western France all that summer.
When I returned to Krakow in July to see my wife I still smelled of burning diesel and gunpowder. She made me bathe before I could kiss her.
The Daimler-Benz flying barges were deployed. These, I had not known about. They were gliders filled with forty or fifty tote M?nner, towed overnight by bombers and released near the front to land where they would. The crashes released most of the tote M?nner but mechanical relays released the remainder. Willem informed us that there were now highly localized tote M?nner infections in Britain, where wounded men had been returned before they had turned completely and before the Allies had realized what they were dealing with.
But the Russians continued to advance. They were no less ruthless than the tote M?nner and had devised a simple but effective defense. Any group of tote M?nner they found they slaughtered without regard to coincident casualties. We estimated they were killing as much as 10 percent of their own men with this technique. But it was effective. It was only a matter of time before they reached Germany.
The Allied advance had not been routed as we’d hoped but only stalled as they tried to cope with their own problems. Had Germany remained the fighting force it had been at the beginning of the war, this would have been enough. However, now the Allies had a foothold in France and would not give it up. Antiaircraft batteries were brought over the channel and the bombers could no longer eliminate the shipping. Soon, the Allies would figure out a method of containing the infection just as the Russians had done. A stalemate in this war would inevitably lead to an Allied victory.
Willem created the todeskommandos. These were the last paratroopers still left in the Luftwaffe. They were infected without their knowing and dropped far behind enemy lines. Their mission was to spy on the enemy and return in two weeks’ time. Of course, they transformed in less than half that time and infected the Russians.
I refused to participate in this activity. I would not be a party to infecting unwitting German soldiers. Willem did not press me at that point though I knew a day of reckoning was coming. Knowing this, I persuaded Willem to loan me one of the Daimler-Benz engineers—preferably Joseph Bremer, a friend of Hans Braun and the engineer who had later proposed the trebuchet. I liked the way his mind worked. Willem sent him to me with the warning that something needed to be done about the Russians.
Bremer, being a mechanical rather than a chemical engineer, immediately saw solutions to the issues we had not solved. We had to maintain the environment of the worm and virus for the duration of delivery and then spray it out into the surrounding area without shredding either. Weber and I had already determined that inhaling the inoculum would not infect the host unless some portion was swallowed. The worm needed to actually enter the digestive tract to enter the blood stream. The only result from a purely pulmonary inoculation would be a sterile partial infection.
It was Bremer who devised an irritant to be added to the mixture. The irritant would not be poisonous in any way but would cause a mucous flow from the nose. The subjects would be forced to swallow. It worked in Birkenau experiments with great success.
By this time, Hitler had been sending V1’s against Britain for a few weeks. My purpose was to be able to replace the explosive in the V1 with a Todesluft canister and infect the Allies in their home territories.
Once we had the Todesluft device perfected, we approached Willem with it. Willem at once saw the possibilities but denied us the chance to try it out in a V1. Instead, he told us of a new rocket, vastly more powerful and accurate. It was to be called the V2.