V2

by Robert Harris

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re out of breath.’

  ‘It’s a long walk. I was worried about being late.’

  ‘Fancy a drink later? The four of us maybe?’ He nodded to the corner where Barbara was sitting smoking a cigarette.

  ‘That would be nice. I’ll ask her.’ She smiled and moved away. ‘Good morning, Barbara.’

  ‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’ Barbara squinted up at her through her smoke. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Well? You know what I mean.’

  ‘Let me at least get a cup of tea.’

  She went over to the table beneath the window. Tin trays of bacon, scrambled eggs and fried bread were laid out next to the tea urn. She hadn’t realised how hungry she was. That was sex for you, she thought. She resolved at that moment not to say a word about what had happened. If Arnaud was avoiding her, it was probably best forgotten, at least until she found out where she stood. She piled food on her plate. When she returned, Barbara said, ‘Come on, then. Something’s happened, hasn’t it? I can tell. You’ve got that look.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. My goodness, I’m famished.’ She started to eat her breakfast. The eggs were too chewy to be anything other than powdered, but it didn’t matter. The effect of the warm food in her stomach was instantaneous. She felt her spirits lift. ‘Anyway, never mind about me. How was your walk home with Jens?’

  ‘Highly satisfactory.’

  Kay stared at her, a forkful of bacon suspended in mid-air. Despite her own behaviour, she was slightly shocked. ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘It’s wartime, darling.’ Barbara took a drag on her cigarette. ‘One could be killed at any moment.’

  ‘So you’re going to see him again?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Where did you go? Not to your old lady’s house, I assume.’

  ‘No, we went back to his apartment.’

  ‘My God!’ Kay shook her head and laughed.

  ‘I’m a tart, darling, what can I say?’ Barbara waved her cigarette dismissively. ‘And you? Tell me he made a pass, at least.’

  ‘He was a perfect gentleman.’

  Barbara gave a knowing look. ‘Ah, so he tried to kiss you.’ Kay held her gaze and sipped her tea. ‘God, you’re so discreet! Old Sitwell would be proud of you.’

  ‘Now you’re just being rude.’ She was keen to change the subject. She looked at her watch. ‘Speaking of Sitwell, we ought to get over there.’

  She took her dirty crockery to the table and scraped off the leftovers. When she came back, Barbara was on her feet, talking to Sandy and Bill. ‘We were just arranging to have a drink tonight at six. What do you think?’

  ‘Fine.’ Kay forced a smile. And you’ll go off with Sandy, she thought, and I will be stuck with Bill.

  The four of them once again walked across the street to the bank and showed their identity cards. It was becoming a routine. The men went off to the radar vans with a cheerful ‘Good luck, girls’, and the women descended to the vault. The atmosphere was stale with cigarette smoke and the odour of too many bodies pressed into too small a space with no ventilation. The WAAF sergeants lolled, bored, behind their desks. Joan and Joyce had the pasty-faced, red-eyed look that always came with the graveyard shift. Kay recognised the symptoms. It was the same at Medmenham.

  ‘Anything happened?’ She shrugged off her coat.

  ‘No,’ said Joan, ‘not a peep all night.’ Her normally cheerful expression was crushed and sulky. ‘I expect they’re saving it all for you.’

  Flight Officer Sitwell came down the stairs behind them, exuding a strong scent of carbolic soap, followed by the morning shift of WAAF sergeants. She strode to the front of the room and dropped a heavy file on the table. She cleaned the blackboard until it gleamed.

  ‘So, ladies: a new day, a new start.’

  Kay took her seat, sharpened her pencil, blew away the shavings and made a determined effort to put Arnaud out of her mind.

  17

  GRUPPENFÜHRER KAMMLER WAS AT THAT moment arriving in Scheveningen.

  He had left Hellendoorn at four in the morning, travelling the entire distance of some 180 kilometres under cover of darkness to avoid the daylight Allied air patrols. He was never still. He seldom seemed to eat or sleep. ‘The Dust Cloud’, his staff called him. These days he spent half of his life on the road, sitting in the front passenger seat of his armoured Mercedes with his personalised machine gun stowed in the footwell, restlessly driving between the five V2 regiments – four Wehrmacht and one SS – that made up his command. Division zV, he had insisted on calling it. He felt it had a certain ring – zV. Zur Vergeltung. For Vengeance.

  Kammler the builder – the man in charge of revenge!

  Graf watched his big car swerve at speed around the corner and pull up with a gangsterish screech of rubber outside the Hotel Schmitt, saw him throw open the door and spring out bare-headed onto the pavement, followed from the rear seats by his two staff officers. Slam, slam, slam – the volley of closing doors ricocheted in the still morning. Kammler paused to pull on his cap and adjust it minutely – there was vanity in even his tiniest action, Graf noticed – then trotted smartly up the steps and into the headquarters. There was no sign of von Braun.

  Graf turned up his collar and resumed his walk.

  A weak dawn was breaking over the dilapidated guest houses, with their peeling wooden balconies and salt-streaked glassed-in verandas. And as the tide of darkness receded, it revealed the scars of the previous night. Some had had their front doors broken down. Damaged windows banged in the strong easterly wind. Broken glass lay in pools across the pavement. The men of the rocket battalions were going about their duties with their heads down, not talking much. Graf waited for a lorry to pass, then crossed the road towards the engine shed.

  Inside, the three faulty V2s were being readied for their return on the next train to Nordhausen. It had not proved possible to repair them on site; each now required its own docket to explain its particular malfunction to the engineers in Germany. He moved from bay to bay like an automaton, studying the diagnostic reports, exchanging a few words with the technicians, signing off the reports. It was a relief to be able to focus his thoughts on the familiar dry details of fuel pump pressure and electrical resistance. His mind was numb. He had not quite finished when the door to the shed was rolled back by one of Huber’s staff officers.

  ‘Dr Graf, you are needed at headquarters straight away.’

  ‘I’m busy here.’

  ‘Gruppenführer Kammler wishes to speak with you.’

  ‘What on earth does he want with me?’

  The officer bridled at his tone. ‘No doubt he will tell you that himself. It is an order. Come with me, please.’

  Graf followed the lieutenant outside, back across the street towards the Hotel Schmitt. He had a premonition of something unpleasant, as was generally the case with Kammler. For more than a year he had watched him slowly take control of the rocket programme – studied him with a kind of resigned and detached horror, as a man who had been bitten by a venomous spider might observe his body succumbing to paralysis limb by limb. Kammler had not only built the factory at Nordhausen; he had also been given the task of constructing a new testing facility for the V2 on an SS proving ground in Poland – another thoughtful gift from Himmler following the bombing of Peenemünde that it had proved impossible to refuse.

  ‘Whereabouts in Poland?’ Graf had asked von Braun when the plan was first mooted.

  ‘About two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Warsaw.’

  ‘What? Inland?’ Ever since Max and Moritz in 1934, they had always fired their rockets out to sea, so that they would fall harmlessly into the Baltic at the end of the test.

  ‘Yes, I pointed out the risk of civilian cas
ualties, but apparently it can’t be helped.’ He had held up his hand to forestall Graf’s protests. ‘It has to be situated somewhere out of the range of the RAF.’

  Graf had started attending the tests in Poland a couple of months later, flying down from Peenemünde to stay for two or three days at a stretch. The engineers were accommodated in railway cars in a siding near the village of Blizna. The whole facility, which was called Heidelager, was guarded by the SS. It was hard not to feel a prisoner. General Dornberger was still nominally in charge, but soon Kammler was turning up to watch the launches. At first he was content merely to observe, ‘on behalf of the Reichsführer-SS’. But as the winter went on, he began to take a more active part in the technical conferences, arriving sometimes unannounced when Dornberger wasn’t present. It was yet another period when the missile repeatedly misfired. As rocket after rocket flew horizontally over their heads or exploded in mid-air, Kammler’s tone became increasingly sarcastic. He even challenged von Braun. ‘Your head is in the stars, Professor! This whole project needs to be gripped more ruthlessly!’ Once, when Graf was passing his office, he overheard him on the telephone to Himmler, talking sufficiently loudly to make sure his voice carried. ‘Yes, Reichsführer – another failure!…I agree…I agree…Utterly irresponsible. Now that we have had the opportunity to study them more closely, I am starting to think we should arrest the whole lot of the swine for treason!’

  It was clear the poison was spreading from the limbs to the heart. Yet when it reached it four months later, the crudeness of the denouement still took him by surprise. Because of the bombing, he had been evacuated from his apartment in the Experimental Works compound and was living with the other senior engineers in a hotel in Zinnowitz, the Inselhof, that looked out over the reed beds to the sea. It was two o’clock in the morning when he was woken by a pounding on his door, and opened it to find two men in belted raincoats and black hats. ‘We have orders to arrest you. Dress and come with us.’

  ‘I demand to speak to Professor von Braun.’

  ‘He’s being detained as well.’

  He could hear the Gestapo going from room to room. Four engineers were picked up that night, including von Braun, and driven in a night-time convoy from Peenemünde to Stettin. They weren’t allowed to talk to one another – each prisoner in a separate car; each lodged in a separate cell; each interrogated separately.

  Did you or did you not, on the evening of Sunday 17 October 1943, at a beach party in Zinnowitz, in the company of Professor von Braun, Dr Helmut Gröttrup and Dr Klaus Riedel, state that the war was lost, the rocket would not save Germany, and your aim all along had been to build a spaceship?

  ‘Gentlemen, I don’t recall saying any such thing…’

  Of course, he remembered it perfectly clearly, at least until the point when he became too drunk to stand up properly. It had been just after their second visit to Nordhausen, when he was still in a state of shock. Von Braun had put his head round Graf’s door and said that Fraulein Butzlaff, the local dentist, was having a cocktail party further along the beach, and they were all invited. ‘Come along, it will cheer you up.’

  A warm, calm autumn evening. Chinese lanterns – pink, lemon, lime – strung along the dunes. Illegal American jazz music on the gramophone. Vodka cocktails, plenty of food – too many cocktails and too much food, in fact: he had thought at the time it was strange that a female dentist in a tiny seaside town should be able to lay her hands on such a spread in wartime. But what the hell? Perhaps it was the contrast with the slave labour factory that made them all get so drunk and loudly relive the good old days at the Rocket Aerodrome.

  GRAF: I wanted to build a spacecraft, not an instrument of murder.

  RIEDEL: On the bright side, it is not a very effective murder instrument.

  VON BRAUN: When the war is lost, our task will be to ensure that what we have achieved is not destroyed.

  GRÖTTRUP: Peenemünde will fall into the hands of the Soviets. It is only a question of time. The communist system is our best hope.

  Every word had been written down, either by their hostess or by some other guest who was an informer for the Sicherheitsdienst. When Graf was shown it in black and white, he assumed they were all dead men. But as the questioning went on, for day after day, ranging back over the whole history of the rocket programme, he began to change his mind. After all, if the SS had known this much since October, why had they waited until March to arrest them?

  After a week, they were driven back to Zinnowitz and released. The story was that Dornberger had spoken to Speer, and Speer had spoken to Hitler, and Himmler had magnanimously agreed to release them. Why shouldn’t he? They were much more useful alive than dead. Their words were on file. He could snuff them out any time he wanted. Not long afterwards, Dornberger was shunted sideways and Himmler was formally given full control of the rocket programme. He appointed Kammler operational commander.

  ‘In Germany now there are three choices,’ Kammler told them. ‘You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS.’

  He was seated now in Huber’s office, leaning back in Huber’s chair, with his polished boots on Huber’s desk, as usual speaking loudly into the telephone. His two staff officers stood behind him, stiff as footmen in their immaculate uniforms. ‘Yes…Yes…So I have your agreement to proceed?’ He noticed Graf and beckoned him forward with a single crook of his finger. Huber, Drexler, Biwack, Klein and Seidel were standing at a respectful distance, watching him. ‘Excellent!’ He gave the receiver to one of his aides, who replaced it in its cradle. ‘Dr Graf?’ He frowned and cocked his head, waiting.

  Graf extended his arm. ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have to remind him, Huber. It is the law. Make sure your men give the correct salute at all times.’

  ‘Yes, Gruppenführer.’ Huber gave Graf a withering look.

  Kammler swung his boots off the desk. He went over to the conference table, where a map was spread out.

  ‘So, gentlemen. There has been a development overnight. It seems the enemy bombers may not have received their intelligence from the local population after all.’ He bent over the map. Behind his back, the Wehrmacht officers risked a brief exchange of glances. Seidel caught Graf’s eye. ‘Our intelligence department still has a few sources operating in Belgium, and one of them made contact with his controller last night. It appears the British have brought in some advanced new radar units and installed them here, in Mechelen.’ His finger tapped the town repeatedly. ‘In addition to the survey troops, a group of women’ – he pronounced the word derisively – ‘are apparently being employed to make mathematical calculations based on the radar data.’ He turned to Graf. ‘A technical question for you, Doctor. Is it possible for the enemy to determine the location of our launch sites using radar?’

  Graf’s hands had balled into fists; his fingernails were digging into his palms. In his head he was hearing the rattle of the machine-gun fire in the woods. He stared at Kammler. ‘I’m sorry, Gruppenführer. Could you repeat that?’

  Kammler sighed. ‘Is there any way the enemy could determine the location of our launch sites using radar and a team of female calculators?’

  ‘May I see the location?’ He indicated the map.

  ‘Of course.’

  Kammler stepped back. Graf took his place at the table. He hunted around for Mechelen and found it, glanced up at The Hague and then down again. The town was almost exactly due south of them – significant, given that the axis of the V2’s flight path was roughly east to west. And it brought the radars much closer, too: they were less than half as far distant as the stations on the English coast.

  He was aware of Kammler and the others waiting for his verdict. Well, that is clever, he thought. That is ingenious. Why did it never occur to us?

  He straightened. ‘Obviously I am not qualified to judge the sophistication
of the enemy’s radar. But that would certainly appear to place them within sufficient range to detect our rockets shortly after take-off – the terrain between us and them is entirely flat, so their view is unobstructed.’

  ‘The distance is significant?’

  ‘Yes – the distance, and more importantly the southerly position, which gives them a side-on view. If their radars can see high enough, it’s possible they could collect sufficient data to track the flight path for a few seconds. Then they would have the point of impact in England three hundred and ten seconds later. Put these two pieces of information together and it should be possible to calculate the parabolic curve, which would provide a rough approximation of the launch site.’

  Kammler said, ‘And they could do this in sufficient time to direct their bombers to attack us within thirty minutes?’’

  ‘Theoretically, if they were quick enough to make the calculations.’ He couldn’t resist adding, ‘It would seem we have been betrayed not by women in brothels, but by women employing the laws of mathematics.’

  Kammler was frowning, preoccupied; he seemed not to hear. ‘This is a serious flaw in the missile programme. Why were we not warned of it before now?’

  ‘We never thought of it.’

  ‘You never thought of it! All you clever fellows at Peenemünde, and you never thought of it!’

  ‘I suppose we never expected the rocket to be fired from such an exposed position, with the enemy all around us.’

  Kammler stared at the map and folded his arms. ‘Well now, we must respond.’

  Huber said, ‘If I might make a proposal, Gruppenführer? The simplest solution would be for us to switch all our launches to night-time, and take care to vary our locations. That way, even if the enemy does get a fix on our positions and attacks them the following day, the intelligence will be too late to be operationally useful.’

  Kammler shook his head. He was still brooding. ‘Too passive. We need to meet aggression with aggression.’