CHAPTER 26

As Dorothy gains altitude and brings the plane around over the Rio Tejo, Ira holds up two parachutes and says, “These are spares in the storage locker. Just these two. For you, sir and miss, when we get in position. You can float into the water without harm.”

“And you’re gonna jump out and flap your wings?”

“I am doomed,” he says, unbuttoning his shirt to show chest sores. “I was exposed to radiation. They made me do much of the work in the transfer of the isotope. To save my family, they said. If they were lying, there was nothing I could do anyway. Show me how to work the controls and I will point the plane into the ocean until it runs out of fuel. Who knows, maybe I will land softly and it will float. I can have another week or two to live.”

“Looks like chicken pox,” Harry says. “Don’t worry. Everyone gets it.”

“No, Ira,” Dorothy says. “You are not going down with this ship.”

“I second the motion, Hyphen,” Harry says.

Ira says, “But sir and miss, I searched everyplace. I fear there are two and only two chutes.”

“Okay, this is what we’ll do,” Harry says. “Dorothy, can you make one of those pneumonia autopilot things by tying the seatbelts around the controls and aim it toward the ocean? We’re close enough to open water that we can’t miss.”

“I’ll try,” she says.

“We’ll strap on the chutes, and fly low and slow, and I’ll jump out over the river with Ira. It’ll be a soft landing. We’ll swim ashore.”

“Harry, you don’t know how to swim. I thought you were afraid of water too.”

“Hey, I’m afraid of guns and clowns, not water.”

“Aha! Clowns,” Dorothy yells. “I knew it. I knew it, I knew it. I just knew it.”

A death-bed kind of confession, Harry thinks; not much is going my way today.

“I insist, ma’am and sir. Turn around and after you show me how to work the controls, I will fly the plane into the middle of the ocean and angle it downward after it runs out of gas.”

“Wait a minute, not so fast,” Harry says. “Do you know how to fix your mad science lab so it can’t make any more of this powder or anything else, ever.”

“Yes I do.”

“Does anybody else?”

“No, not as well as I. Nobody who would cooperate. They are Germans or people owned by the Germans.”

“Do you know where it is, the building?”

“No. We were moved blindfolded from the airport and confined to the facility.”

“Other than passing onto a wharf to get to it and thumping along on heavy timbers, me neither.”

“My confession, sir.”

“Oh yeah. Is it important and do we have time for it? We’re kind of busy now, Ira.”

“The powder does not work as the Germans demand that it will. It is too, shall we say, dilute. It was impossible with our small centrifuge and our knowledge of nuclear fission to make the isotope do what the Germans think it will do. If the powder drops on London, it will be so scattered and diffused, it will not be too harmful. That is how I stayed alive. We are carrying one ton of slightly-enriched uranium. I calculate that it would require an aerial armada carrying eight thousand tons of it to be effective.”

Dorothy says, “There aren’t that many airplanes available. Hitler would have to borrow some from Churchill and FDR.”

“An apt comparison,” Ira says.

“Shit. So I’m not saving the fucking world?”

“But you are, sir. I suspect that the Germans will retry on their own and waste many frustrating years. You are instrumental in giving them false expectations that will divert many of their research resources. There is also the possibility they will succeed, which will be horrendously hideous for the world.”

“Who’s the guy who escaped and died that horrible death?”

“My brother,” Ira says. “In the process of development, he was the lead scientist. There were accidents. He lived with the material day after day, contaminating himself. The powder is deadly, but not mass-murder deadly. My brother knew he was a dead man anyway if they discovered that the project was a failure and by doing so, perpetuated the myth that we were making a deadly weapon. He practically bathed in it, coating himself when the Nazi minders were not looking.”

“So it’s your brother who saved the world?” Harry says.

“You can share the credit, sir. You deserve to.”

“Yeah, well.”

Dorothy has the plane in position, headed east on the Tejo, close to the north shore and Lisbon.

“Can you boys put an end to your coffee klatch,” Dorothy says, getting up and putting on her chute. “The Clipper has just touched down. We can go.”

“Keep your lips buttoned on this, okay?” Harry tells Ira.

“Yes sir.”

Harry looks downward, unsure of the wisdom of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

“Go,” Harry yells to her.

She jumps out the doorway, hands clasped to her chest.

Like she’s done it before, Harry thinks. In her top-secret secret agent training.

He throws his arms around Ira.

“We cannot do this, sir. I will fly the plane to the Atlantic.”

“Bullshit you will. It’ll fly itself. How much do you weigh?”

“Sixty kilos.”

“I’m not thinking straight. How much is one kilo?”

“One kilogram.”

“Right. Don’t tell me how much that is in English. You’re as light as a feather.”

“Very well, but we must hurry.”

Harry squeezes him tighter and says, “Ira Hyphen, old pal, don’t get any funny ideas that we’re going steady.”

Out they go, Harry envying Superman, who can defenestrate an airplane without a chute.