Absolutely ingenious, Herr JAger-mein Fuhrer-I salute you, salute your talent for bringing together other brilliant talents."
"You're too kind, but I would not know my way around a laboratory."."
"Laboratories are for cooks, the visions must come first! Yours was in 'attacking the most vital source of life on earth. Water.. .."
"The rich and even the less affluent will buy their Evians and Pellegrinos in the markets," countered 'a short man of medium build and close-cropped dark hair.
"The lower classes will be ordered to boil water for the prescribed twelve minutes-for purification."
"The accepted twelve minutes will be insufficient, Hekr Richter," interrupted the new hihrer.
"Replace that number with thirty-seven, then tell me how many can or will comply. Granted, the bottom rungs of the social ladder will be affected most severely, then again, that is not antithetical to our cleansing purposes, is it? Whole ghettos will be wiped out, saving us time later."
"I see an even greater advantage," said Von L6wenstein, son of a Reich's courtesan.
"Depending on the success of Water Lightning, those same compounds could be dropped into selected reservoirs throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa."
"Israel first!" shouted the senile Monsignor Paltz.
"The Jews killed our Christ!" A number of the congregation looked at one another, then up at Gfinter JAger.
"Surely, my brother priest," said the Brotherhood's Zeus, "but we must never raise our voices about such solutions, no matter how justified our anger, must we?"
"I simply wanted the logic of my demand made clear."
"It is, Father, it is."
On this same evening, at a long-forgotten airstrip ten miles west of the legendary Lakenheath in England, a small group of men and women studied blueprints and a map under the glare of a single floodlight. Behind them, in the distance, was a partially camouflaged vintage 727 jet, circa the middle 1970s. It stood by the bordering woods, its cloth covering pulled up to permit entry into the forward cabin. The language the group spoke was English, several with British accents, the rest with German.
"I tell you it's impossible," said a German male.
"The payload capacity is more than adequate, but the altitude is unacceptable.
We'd shatter windows for kilometers from the target and be caught on radar the moment we ascended. It's a harebrained scheme, any other pilot would have told you that. Insanity coupled with suicide."
"In theory it could work," observed an Englishwoman, "a single low pass as in a final landing approach, then rapid acceleration in the sweep away, staying below three hundred meters, thus avoiding the grids until over the Channel. But I see your point. The risk is enormous, and the slightest malfunction definitely suicidal."
"And the reservoirs here are relatively isolated," added another German.
"But Paris is treacherous."
"Are we back to land vehicles, then?" asked an elderly Briton.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Ruled out," answered the pilot.
"It would take too many large ones to be feasible, and it eliminates the spreading effect, requiring weeks for the poisons to enter the major sluice flows."
"Then where are we?"
"I believe it's obvious," said a young neo-Nazi who had been at the rear of the group; he now walked forward, arrogantly brushing' aside the aircraft blueprints.
"At least to anyone who kept his eyes open during our training in the Hausruck."
"That's a gratuitously harsh remark," objected the Englishwoman.
@"W eyesight's quite splendid, thank you."
"Then what did 'you see, what did all of you see, frequently swooping and circling down from the sky?"
"The glider," replied the second German.
"A rather small glider."
"What did you have in mind, mein junger Mann?" asked the pilot.
"A squadron of such aircraft, say fifty or a hundred, colliding above the water reserves?"
"No, Herr F1ugzeugfzihrer. Replace them with aircraft that already exist! Two giant military transport gliders, each capable of carrying twice or three times the tonnage of that excessively heavy relic across the field."
"What are you talking about? Where are such aircraft?"
"At the aerodrome in Konstanz, under heavy coverings, there are some twenty such machines. They have been there since the war."
"Since the war?" cried the stunned German pilot.
"I really don't understand you, junger Mann!"
"Then your studies of the Third Reich's collapse fail you, sit.
During the final years of that war, we Germanswho were the experts in gliding equipment-developed the massive Gigant, the Messerschmitt ME 323, which evolved from the ME 321, both the largest transport gliders in the air. They were initially created to aid the supply lines to the Russian front in full expectation for use in the invasion of England, their construction of wood and cloth eluding radar."