Hell's Gate(96)

Meanwhile, the Japanese launched two rocket-powered versions of the flying bomb at the American aircraft carrier Intrepid. Both were dropped from distant, propeller-driven bombers. The pilots were seated behind a half ton of explosives, with rockets at their backs and steel bullet shields behind their heads. Unlike the German “Werewolves,” the Japanese zealots were denied parachutes. Luckily for the Americans, both Japanese rocket-planes were struck by conventional antiaircraft gunfire and detonated far short of their target.

Would-be jet-bomb pilot Hanna Reitsch turned up in Berlin during the last two days of Hitler’s command, weaving a small “Storch” plane through Russian antiaircraft fire and landing on a road near the Brandenburg Gate. Her plan was to fly Hitler out of Germany, but she found him in his bunker, refusing to leave and toying with cyanide capsules—one of which he offered to her. On April 28, 1945, Reitsch left Hitler with his cyanide and his new bride-to-be and flew out of Berlin, once again only narrowly avoiding being shot down by the Red Army. Like von Braun, she decided to head west, surrendering to the Americans. She was held and interrogated for eighteen months. By 1952 she was free to enter World Gliding Championships, where she began setting records that are still held to this day. Like the Japanese bioweapons experts and German rocketeers, Reitsch was also spared postwar prosecution. Near the beginning of the space race, in 1961, she was even invited to a White House sit-down with President Kennedy.

SS Sergeant Schr?dinger and the legend that followed his capture and escape (after smiling at an interrogator when punched in a bullet wound), are based on a real person, who put a very real scare (“Do you think Hitler has many more like him?”) through the U.S. Army’s 82nd Engineer Battalion.


In this novel, the fictional Maurice Voorhees makes several design modifications to S?nger’s suborbital space plane—including, finally, extreme measures to reduce the ship’s mass. (In all likelihood, the real S?nger design would not have worked without the Voorhees modifications.) During America’s Apollo program, scientists encountered the same challenges, with extreme mass reduction strategies directed at the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). Had the antipodal bomber program progressed to completion, as it does in Hell’s Gate, the problems addressed at Nostromo Base by redesign would likely have resulted in the same simplifications, along with booster-rocket staging. In the case of the Apollo engineers, scraping away every possible gram of mass resulted in a LEM with a hull that was, in places, only as thick as two sheets of newspaper. Under these conditions, far outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, had solar storms of the intensity experienced during 2003 erupted, the ship’s hull could have provided barely more radiation shielding than a silk shirt, and the astronauts would have received lethal doses of radiation within an hour. Since the engineering problems addressed at Nostromo Base would have been (and ultimately were) addressed by German rocket scientists during the Apollo program, the solid fuel boosters and other modifications on the original S?nger design have been made in this novel to accommodate reality.


The Battle of the Cherkassy Pocket really did occur in January and February of 1944, in the Ukraine. More than 130,000 exhausted German troops were encircled in a pocket near the town of Cherkassy, and as Soviet forces tightened their pincer operation, the Germans, outnumbered and outgunned, resisted. Incredibly, the German relief force (the 24th Panzer Division) was ordered away when Hitler learned that it had been moved without his approval. Weather became a major factor, as German tanks and trucks became mired in thick mud, and only the horse-drawn panje sleds could move supplies. With the Luftwaffe unable to deliver sufficient supplies, the Germans broke out, running a gauntlet through Soviet tanks and artillery. Tens of thousands were slaughtered or captured, but many escaped. For the purposes of our tale, Hanna Reitsch’s Silverbird attack on Soviet lines facilitated their escape. Coincidentally, this battle was also known as “Hell’s Gate.” For the Russians it was hell, and worse, with casualties nearly beyond measure. Had they not drawn more than half of the German forces away from Western Europe, through the battle of February 1944, those same forces could likely have overwhelmed the Allied landing force in France, and the Normandy invasion might have failed.


In New York, during World War II, the state-sponsored snatching of children from adoptive parents of German ancestry (the great calamity that turned R. J. MacCready increasingly toward solitude when we meet him at Waller Field) was a little-known but actual occurrence. In the family of one of the author’s friends, this happened to Emily H., an adoptive mother who was indeed called “Führer” during a decision that turned out to be anything but a fair hearing. Emily H. survived, as did the real Brigitte, though just barely. Emily’s husband, Will, an American World War I veteran doomed by mustard gas exposure, spent his last days barely able to speak, poking an index finger against a photograph of little Brigitte and begging to see her again.


The “Sparrow” seen perfecting a pan drum in Trinidad is based on “Mighty Sparrow,” an influential calypsonian (born Slinger Francisco, in 1935) who actually made his professional debut in the 1950s. In 1956, Sparrow won the first Calypso King competition with his song “Jean and Dinah.” The Allied base at Waller Field is described as it existed in 1944. World War II for the Trinidadians ushered in American soldiers, their dollars, and their refuse—most notably, fifty-five-gallon oil drums that offered local musicians a large surface area that could produce a far greater range of notes than the paint cans and biscuit tins they had been experimenting with since the 1930s. And while we’re on the topic of music, “Junk Ain’t Junk No More” was a real jingle—part of a series of public service announcements related to the use of junk and scrap metal for the war effort. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaD161ENV10.