The boat slipped silently, impelled by muffled oars, toward the shore that lay dark and seemingly lifeless a furlong away. The underground in New York had a couple of motor launches—but there might be sound detectors on that shore, which would not be fooled by the powerful invisibility unit that purred quietly, clamped to athwart amidships. So they rowed.
The boat was laden with men, weapons, and explosives. The men were monstrous-headed shapes, for they wore gas masks under the featureless hoods; but the poised alertness of Kane's figure, upright in the bow as he scanned the black shore and called soft directions to Vzryvov at the steering oar, expressed all their eager anxiety on the threshold of decision. Manning and Dugan sat side by side; in front of the former was lanky Clark, and beside him a chemist named Larrabie, who clasped between his knees a box full of bombs of his own making—canisters of a versatile compound which with a detonator had the violence of TNT, without one was an excellent substitute for thermite.
Manning had to remember that he had once taken part in another landing on a conquered shore—Normandy in 1944, when the air had been full of planes and the sea of ships, and the invasion had rolled ashore like a resistless juggernaut.... If those millions had failed, what could six men in a rowboat do?
The night before, in the room Kane had given them, Manning had lain long sleepless, and passed the time turning through Kane's books of history—titles like Aufstieg Deutschlands zur Weltherrschaft, Eroberung der Erde, Das deutsche Jahrhundert.... One thing about the oddly twisted story they told had piqued his curiosity, and he had sought earnestly before he found mention—in a footnote—of the fact that one Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) had occupied the civic office of Reichskanzler (later abolished) at the time of the Conquest. But the leaders of that period, according to the histories, had been the generals and military men such as Rundstedt, Rommel, Keitel and Doenitz.
The future had obviously not gone according to anybody's plans made prior to 1949. A new factor had come in—the monstrous reality of atomic weapons, which had suddenly made it possible for a few men in one nation to hold the threat of death over all life on Earth. America had had them first and had used them to subdue Japan. But the German onslaught had been too swift; the combination of atomic dust and atomic bombs had paralyzed the U.S.A. before she could strike back.
"Up oars," whispered Kane. The boat glided forward the last few yards as the dripping oars rose over the water, then sand crunched under the keel.
Cautiously they sloshed ashore. Vzryvov knelt in the boat for half a minute, working with wires and one of Larrabie's compact bundles of death—booby-trapping the priceless invisibility unit against possible discovery.
Each man carried a slung automatic rifle, three bombs, and a long knife. An invisible man could kill with a knife in the midst of a crowd and walk away before anyone noticed.
They started moving without time wasted in consultation or casting about. All had studied the available maps of the area until their eyes smarted; and the moon was up, which for them was a special advantage.