Post # 221 July 20 2020

“The Eureka Gambit”

As a writer who feels more comfortable in longer fictional forms, I often have to plan new projects ahead by several years. 

One of my next projects, likely not available until summer 2021 or possibly later, is called The Eureka Gambit.  It’s an alternate history novel, a sort of what-if? story.

Below is an excerpt from my notes on Chapter 1.  I’ve actually plotted and outlined the entire story, but there is still a lot of background and research work to do.  Note the date in the chapter intro.

Chapter 1

Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, Iran

Lat. 35 North, Long 53 East

November 26, 1943

0235 hours

It is past midnight in the Iranian desert, some 150 km from Tehran.  A convoy of trucks waits patiently alongside a cleared landing strip in the desert hardpan.  There is a sound of distant aircraft.  Suddenly, landing lights come on, outlining the crude runway.  Then, one after another, three Junkers Ju-52 small transports bearing no markings make bumpy landings on the strip, a location their maps call Alpen-Eins.  The landing lights go out immediately and the scene is then illuminated by lights from the trucks.

 

Standartenfuhrer Otto (‘Scarface’) Skorzeny emerges from one of the planes and witnesses a hurried transfer of men, equipment, guns and munitions from the planes to the trucks.  There are nearly a hundred men, three detachments of Operation Long Jump, all handpicked from SS Battalion Friedenthal for this special mission.  Their target: Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill, all meeting in two days in Tehran at the Soviet legation.  The gathering is code-named Eureka.

Skorzeny knew that an advance party of six German radio operators  had already dropped by parachute near Qum, 60 km (37 mi) from Tehran. An existing Abwehr network had been set up in a villa in Tehran. From this location, the German observers had radioed numerous intelligence reports back to Berlin. A second group of operatives, led by Skorzeny, had now been dropped into Iran for the actual kidnap attempt in late November.

In Tehran, the Abwehr field station had readied a villa and a warehouse for their stay. The first reconnaissance group had traveled by camel, and were loaded with weapons. They would stay at the villa. The second group would be led by Skorzeny himself and would be housed in the warehouse.

Skorzeny supervises the transfer and loading of gear, discusses conditions with White, Gold and Black detachment commanders (Obersturmfuhrers) Hans Eisler, Jurgen Holtz and Fritz Born, and reviews the latest intel on Soviet, British and American security force deployments in and around Tehran.  Consulting crude maps by flashlight, they discuss the best route into Tehran to their safe house, their weapons and ammunition supplies, the forecast weather and the best exfiltration route, for they fully expect to be back at Alpen Eins with their special ‘cargo’ in less than three days.

 

There is a sudden commotion on a nearby road.  Detachment troops have spotted an old bus wheezing along the road in the middle of the night.  It’s a routine passenger bus, en route overnight to the nearby town of Samnan.  At Skorzeny’s orders, the German commandos flag down the bus, order all passengers off for interrogation, and then commandeer the bus for their own use.  The passengers are marched off into the desert (there are some sixteen of them, men, women and two children).  We hear staccato burps of machine guns in the distance.  The commando detail escorting the passengers returns to the convoy.  The passengers don’t come back.  They have all been executed and left in the desert.

 

Finally, the transfer is done.  The trucks form up into a crude convoy with the bus in the middle.  Several dozen troops board the bus.  It will be taken to the safe house in Tehran that is their destination.  The convoy gets underway, even as the Ju-52 transports are revving engines and preparing to take off again into a black, moonless night sky.

 

The last of the planes is airborne and the landing lights are doused.  But a small crew stays behind to gather up all evidence of their work.  The runway lights and markers will be used again in three days, for if all goes well, the convoy will return with their hostages in tow and the planes will be used to exfiltrate them to distant places, ultimately to a castle in the Austrian Alps, guests of the Third Reich. 

 

The convoy moves quickly through the desert and approaches Tehran before sunup. The trucks scatter and disperse to take different routes into the city, though they will all wind up at the same place.  Their destination: an abandoned warehouse on Mehrabad Street, down the street from the Greek Orthodox Church of the Ascension. The trucks all contain various innocuous-looking gear and even farm produce to cover their real cargo. 

 

One truck encounters a Soviet military checkpoint as they enter the city.  There is high tension as the Soviet troops (part of a 3000-man contingent of Red Army, NKVD, Interior Ministry and Border Patrol troops) examine the truck, its crew and cargo, and their (forged) papers.  But the Germans manage to elude or pass through the checkpoint, thanks to Iranian sympathizers who ride with them.  One Iranian is even a local police chief and he vouches for the truck and its equipment as needed to support crowd control for the upcoming conference.

 

After some discussions and consultation with headquarters, the Soviets let the truck pass. 

 

The truck eventually reaches Mehrabad Street, which is mostly deserted at this early hour.  Skorzeny gets out, hears the local call to worship from loudspeakers of a nearby mosque and brusquely orders the truck to be quickly off-loaded and hidden.  Then, over the next hour, the other trucks and men of the convoy and appear at the warehouse and do the same.  The other detachment commanders have safely made it into the city without major incident.  Skorzeny knows the easiest part of Operation Long Jump has been successfully completed. 

 

As the men check off and stow their gear and bed down to lie still for the daylight hours, Skorzeny and his commanders go over the details of the next phase carefully, reviewing every little detail: the route to the Soviet Embassy compound, likely security deployments, the floor plan of the critical buildings, the timing, the weather, traffic conditions in that part of Tehran, their supplies and route out of the city back to Alpen Eins.

 

Finally, exhausted but unable to relax, Skorzeny walks outside with Fritz Born and they  reminisce about the operation they just finished several months before, rescuing Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans.  Skorzeny opines that Mussolini was a breeze. 

They both know that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt will be much harder targets.  The sun comes up over the ornate gold dome of the Greek church, they see churchgoers beginning to appear and both hear the wailing of the muezzin admonishing Muslims to come to a nearby mosque.

 

“Perhaps, we too should be praying,” Skorzeny mutters, dousing his Sulima-brand (Turkish) cigarette.  They both laugh at the idea and duck back inside. 

 

 

So that’s the excerpt and this is a good example of how I outline a novel chapter.  From what you have just read, I should be able to write a 15-20-page chapter, with characters and appropriate background to kick this story off.  I expect to begin writing this one next fall, at the latest.

Look for it in late summer 2021.

The next post comes on July 27.  See you then.

Phi. B.