The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, Part 3.0 of 6

A pilot on a deadly mission in an untested aircraft learns why the person with the slide rule should never be rushed.

This is the first half of Part 3 of The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1 and 2 first. It is the fourth story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth and is a stand-alone story spanning decades.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, gore, gaslighting, creeps, Nazis, tobacco use, mild swearing.

SATURDAY NIGHT, APRIL 10, 1943
ABOARD THE SILBERVOGEL
ABOVE THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN

//Translated from German.//

Sparteführer Adler should have made some rat perform this experiment, not me.

FALSE. REALIGN.

If Bruder Drei’s body had not been tensed to the point of paralysis already, the piercing correction would have locked him in place. He clenched his jaw. The mission was bequeathed to him by the Sparteführer himself, right hand of the Führer, representative of the All-Highest. Such provenance was entitled to the highest respect and priority.

As a member of the Brotherhood, he was most qualified to see such a mission through. He was the perfect weapon: trained, unyielding, loyal, unwavering. He did not suffer the fallacies of lesser men. Thus, he had been gifted a mandate, a calling. If the Silbervogel must fly, it must have the most capable at its helm.

The plane itself was little more than a bullet, a cockpit and bombing bay bolted to the nose of a screaming rocket. Its speed was such that only minor course corrections could be made during flight, and even those could have catastrophic consequences if applied with a heavy hand.

In his rebirth, Drei hand had been trained to hold both the broadsword and the scalpel.

The philosophies of the Brotherhood were those of the soft touch and the hard strike. He had been sculpted into a leader, one who could suss out the fears of lesser men and turn them into his strengths. Everywhere he went, his autonomic mandate was to build an army around him. Only when his shield of willing soldiers was pierced would he raise his own hand, and when he did, it would fall with definitive force.

When Drei had been thawed for his assignment to the SS Department Three’s Second Arm, he had begun his process immediately. Growing his bruderchen was an instinct, he built people into followers with every breath. The cadre of crewmen and pilots he gathered grew daily. His feats awed them, his encouragement drew them in, the mythology he crafted for them tied them to him.

Within a week of arriving at Flugplatz Augnelos, he had a dozen men of the SS willing to kill and die for him, as if he were an angel of the All-Highest.

Sparteführer Adler grew jealous.

FALSE. REALIGN.

Sparteführer Adler was right to sequester him. The bruderchen was a distraction from his command. And the Sparteführer’s authority was derived from the All-Highest. There could be no question.

Drei was simply a tool for the works of the divine.

So Sparteführer Adler used his tools and placed Drei in the seat of the Silbervogel, the most advanced aircraft ever designed, a jewel of the Reich. When the Sparteführers had gathered in Berlin last July to show off their achievements to the Führer himself, it was said that only one project captured his imagination.

Obersturmführer Sänger, the designer, had named it the ‘silver bird,’ but the Führer had a better name for it: the Amerikabomber.

When the sparteführer selected him, it was because he was the best pilot for the mission. He would wrest the rocket free from gravity’s avaricious grasp, ride it out of the Earth’s atmosphere, and guide it across the sea that the Americans thought their greatest defense.

The g-forces pressed Drei into his seat. He was still in the initial assent. The roaring rocket engines sought to peel the skin back from his face. What had started as the pounding of blood in his ears had softened to a sad trickle. The thin liquid was limited by its nature. Unlike Drei, it could not resist the fundamental forces.

His altimeter read one hundred kilometers and rising. He felt the acceleration pushing his bones out of socket. He twisted in his seat as much as he could, forcing them back into place.

One-hundred-twenty kilometers altitude. The speedometer maxed out at ten-thousand kilometers-per-hour. Sänger explained that the Silbervogel would reach in excess of twenty-thousand K.P.H. before the plane reached its apex. Red encroached on the edges of his vision.

He had to stay awake.

The Silbervogel was the culmination of years of study, experimentation, and creation. He would exit the blue, enter the black, then return, bringing definitive power down upon the interloping Americans.

The Ionen-Aktivierung device riding in the Silbervogel’s belly was the largest the Tenth Arm had ever produced and the first to be used in an open attack. It had taken years of research and its construction had impoverished their entire Arm. He had seen what a model massing only two kilograms could do to a man, and to a building. The bomb he would send into the heart of New York City weighed nearly four thousand kilograms.

The tenth Sparteführer had described a second sun rising out of what had been Central Park. The rubble would burn for years.

The Americans would be humbled. The friends the Abwehr had been supporting there were influential. From those ruins they would convince their mourning countrymen to pull back from the war. Germany would have room to breathe and time to focus. Africa could be retaken, the communists could be crushed, and the cowering British could be smothered where they hid.

Sparteführer Glasbläser was a visionary, willing to share the Tenth Arm’s strengths for the betterment of the Reich.

He was as unlike Adler as a man could be. He was a hero. Adler was a peacock.

FALSE. REALIGN.

Adler was a champion of the coming world, the greatest pilot Germany had produced in a generation, and the chosen of the All-Highest. His judgement was final and divine.

Drei was the best pilot to guide the Silbervogel over the ocean, out of the atmosphere, into the heart of their enemies. If the untested rocket plane failed, Drei’s life, the loss of his rebirth and training, was worth the effort. Adler would not assign one of the Reich’s greatest assets to a mission over vanity.

One-hundred-forty kilometers altitude. Drei could not even blink. The invisible demons were still latched into him, pulling his flesh and skeleton back and apart. His silver suit compressed around him, keeping his blood pumping. The reinforced dome helmet forced oxygenated air and aerosolized Pervitin into his crumpling lungs.

With fine motor control compromised by gravity, Drei could only lurch. He nudged the Silbervogel’s pointed nose down, leveling off and releasing the accumulated g-forces.

It felt like a noose being removed from his neck. He could breathe again.

“Now, the fall,” Drei whispered to no one. Perhaps it was to hear something other than strained grunts emerge from his mouth.

Beyond the windscreen, Drei could see only black and the twinkling of spinning ice beyond. Through Hörbiger’s works, declared truth by the Führer himself, cosmology was known. The Earth was a island of warmth in the center of the vast interstellar tundra. Below, he could see its curve, and the dark blue of the North Atlantic. The warmth of duty welled in his chest.

Their planet was small, it could not defend itself. It needed stewards, and the Reich would willingly take on that role. He simply had to wrest it away from those who desired without the capacity to deliver.

All Drei had to do was burn a hole through their enemies’ heart.

At the speeds the Silbervogel sustained, it would be minutes before he was over New York. He watched the clock tick down. Only one barrier remained to his victory: gravity.

Gravity was powerful, wrathful, and jealous. As the Silbervogel reached the apex of its flight, that inherent force grasped at it and dragged it back down. It would be Drei’s responsibility to guide the plane earthward at the right angle. Its stubby wings and polished belly would gradually catch the air as its thickened, generating enough drag to ricochet the whole plane off the atmosphere to continue its journey.

They left it to Drei to press the button at the appointed moment. He was the final arbiter. It was up to him to secure the future of their planet.

Drei’s belly rose inside his torso as the plane dropped. He wrestled the controls, watching his altimeter and the little bubble in his level. He leaned in as gravity shoved his back into his seat once more.

His eyes bounced across his console. It was the angle that determined the ricochet, but bearing and time were his only means to determine release the bomb. The greatest minds in Department Three had worked the numbers for years until they could no longer lift their pencils. Every bit of speed, meter of altitude, and degree of temperature change was accounted for.

Frustration blossomed within him.

A mistake in arithmetic would turn him from humanity’s savior to a meteor, burning and twinkling to the delight of stargazers across the Atlantic.

FALSE. REALIGN.

The Reich’s engineers and mathematicians were the greatest in the world. There was nothing that they could not measure and predict.

The fall began pressing upon him again, injecting red into the corners of his eyes. His arms weighed on him, but he held fast. The controls fought and he fought back. The level’s bubble stayed still even as he was ground to meat by his own mass.

Drei felt his ribs compress. The clock was ticking down, so close. The bubble in the level wobbled but stayed nestled between its lines. The altimeter was spinning downward, kilometers lost per second. The speedometer was still maxed out. Out of the corner of his eye, hiding behind the spreading red, the exterior thermometer was rising.

A rumble shuddered through the Silbervogel. The atmosphere was a wild, untamed place, the next frontier once the world below was saved. His dreams were of the Führer’s grand plans: to build shining cities above, great ships and fortresses to temper its invisible waves, castles and cathedrals dedicated to the greatness of the All-Highest. His mission was the key to those dreams. A solid foundation could not be built with American tremors beneath.

All of their grousing and rebelliousness would be quashed in a flash of blue light.

“Soon,” he grated. His voice was strangled into a grunt. In the time it took his to struggle through another breath, the Silbervogel dropped another ten kilometers.

The yoke was warm in his hands. Sweat beaded from his every pore and collected brine-sharp in his eyes. He blinked them clear, forcing it to run in tears straight back down his scalp to pool behind his head.

Another shudder ran through the plane’s aluminum bones, then a jolt. The Silbervogel shifted around him. Something screamed inside the cockpit so loud that he heard it through the helmet.

The altimeter read too high for the ricochet.

Drei’s eyes danced from the altimeter to the speedometer to the fuel levels to the hundred other gauges wobbling in front of him. One glared red: the thermometer.

“Too much,” he grunted. The readings were higher than they should have ever gotten, even were he at the point where the stratosphere dragged the plane and flung it back across the sky. The air itself was burning around him and it was chewing into the Silbervogel like a swarm of termites. Drei realized that every nudge of turbulence was a piece of the plane melting and tearing away.

The thermometer’s needle pulsed on the far edge of the red.

Drei knew the numbers: they had been drilled into his dreams. The Silbervogel was not designed to survive such heat. The air was not supposed to burn so hot, yet it was.

The engineers had fouled up the math.

FALSE. REALIGN.

The thermometer was broken. There was no possibility that the plane could actually be so hot. The Reich's greatest engineers declared it so.

Drei’s mind raced through acceptable possibilities and quickly settled on the most likely: Allied defenses. The guileful Yankees had an atmospheric weapon, it was the only answer. They were burning the Silbervogel out of the sky.

The plane rocked once more. The cowards’ device tore another control surface off the plane. He twisted in his seat as much as the relentless g-forces would allow. He could not see anything that could have been doing that to him.

“Snakes,” he muttered.

The Silbervogel lurched and the yoke suddenly went dead in his hands. The compass needle shifted to the right. Bulbs flared all over his console. Fire alarms in the fuel lines, electrical shorts, the bomb bay doors registered open, the Ionen-Aktivierung Stadtkiller claimed to be awake.

The Allies’ weapon must have targeted his electronics systems. They had their own Crying Maiden. He was dead one hundred kilometers above the sea, moving dozens of times faster than the speed of sound.

Drei did not have time to attempt to reset his aeronautic systems before the Silbervogel broke like a rod across a man’s back. The roar ceased around him ceased. He could see a great landmass out of his windscreen, gray with distance beneath the clouds. He twisted around and could only see the void of frozen space. The rear half of the Silbervogel’s fuselage fell away. Its chromed skin was scorched black, its stubby wings charred down to nubs. The I-A bomb tumbled from its open belly, glowing bright blue as it fell towards the dark sea.

Flames licked across the windscreen. When the speedometer broke, its needle stuck on over twelve-thousand kilometers-per-hour.

What was left of the Silbervogel’s nose dipped, catching the thickening air. The disembodied cockpit flipped end-over-end and spun as it fell. G-forces threw him back into the seat. The world outside blurred into alternating gray land and black sky, pinstriped with the orange of oxidizing aluminum. Somewhere behind and below, a blue pinpoint of light blossomed into a blinding flash before Drei he lost sight of it.

Drei inched his hands toward the belt release on his chest. What remained of the fuselage was vaporizing around him. His silver suit would hold off the flames for a time, but not forever. If he waited, the Allies would kill him, either roasted in the air by their mystery weapon or splattered against the very ground he’d intended to burn.

He looked once at his compass, its magnetic needle the only thing left functioning in the cockpit. He was south of his target, and at his speed every second meant scores of kilometers further.

Drei pressed the button and the straps whipped away. The buckles snapped like scorpions stings. He heaved himself out of his seat and let go.

The wind caught him and threw him around like a Löwenzahn seed in a tempest. His training activated within seconds and he laid himself out and flat against the fall.

He angled himself toward the land and used his limbs as rudders to direct his descent. High-altitude parachute jumps were part of his Brotherhood training. Of course he had never done one personally, but the skills and movements were scored like runes into the folds of his brain.

He estimated that he had exited the Silbervogel at nearly fifty kilometers altitude. That left him less than two minutes to decrease the lateral velocity he’d taken from the falling plane. It did not matter how much he slowed his fall if he was still moving eastward at mach three when he hit the ground.

He was already planning. There were many Abwehr resources in place in the regions several hundred kilometers south of New York City: militias, equipment, targets. Even without a city-burning bomb, a Brotherhood soldier could cause devastation. He could kill with near-impunity, foment revolution, and disappear into the harshest wilderness. He was the scalpel to the I-A bomb’s sledgehammer.

If he could slow down.

The Führer’s chosen champion would not be very impressive as a kilometer-long smear across the American countryside.

Drei stretched as wide as he could. The thin air hammered as him like fists. He pretended he was trying to float on the ocean’s surface. His silver insulated suit flapped around him, but it held. He was too high and too fast to deploy his parachute; it would shred, break his back, or both.

He watched the gray land grow green. The matte swaths before him grew shapes, rivers and ridges. The ocean was far behind. Only sawed-down mountains remained, old crags that had seen their majesty erode over countless eons.

He had scant seconds.

He shot over lowlands and valleys, far away from anything that had ever been called a city. Old growth forests whipped past. He tore at his ripcord. If his spine liquefied, so be it. He was out of time.

The parachute expanded, g-forces ravaging him once more, hauling back on him like he’d hit a brick wall. The red pulsed into the corners of his eyes like it was injected straight from the fang.

Drei pulled on his risers, attempting in vain to direct his fall. The masses of forests and ridge lines gave way to individual trees and peaks. The mountain winds threw him around.

“Almost!” he grunted. He clocked a pass between two peaks to the south, bisected by a gravel road. Beyond, in the depths sunk into the valley shadow, he could see the lights of a town so small that it wouldn’t have its own name. The narrow road snaked down to its heart.

If Drei could angle it right, he’d slip through the pass with enough time to slow down and land near the town. He jerked down on his risers again, nudging the parachute to the left.

The mountains loomed on either side of him. He was nearly clear. A shuddering gust from the north caught him and threw him southward. The closest peak came right at him. He tried to adjust, but he was still falling happened too fast.

He could catch arrows out of the air, dodge bullet and blade, but fighting the whims of a natural force were beyond him.

FALSE. REALIGN.

Bruder Drei was the third paragon of the All-Highest, the third soldier thawed from the cosmic ice beneath the sacred soil of Germany itself to be reborn for the Führer’s holy service, German soil. He had been granted mastery over every dominion, those of men and gods.

The wind blew him spinning off-course. He was disgusted at its audacity when he hit the grandfather elm atop Pigsback Mountain. The broken branch that plunged through his back and burst forth from his chest was nearly as galling.

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.