by Joe Poyer
Memling had expected to find a taxi, but as he came out of the station into the raw, dark morning there was only a single cab waiting with its light off. A military officer jumped in, and it drove off without hesitation. Memling turned back into the station then and went along to the Circle Line to join the long, long queue.
He came up the well-remembered steps. The cold fresh air blowing off the Thames helped dissolve the memory of the interrogation and the smugness of those who had not been there and who twisted facts to suit their preconceptions. He was free of the terror, and that made the rest endurable. No matter what happened now, Walsch could never touch him. He drew a deep, icy breath and laughed.
Memling crossed Victoria Embankment to stand watching the river for a moment. A policeman hesitated, taking in his worn, baggy clothes, then passed on.
The sky was turning from grey to blue as the sun edged up and the cloud eased away; but the wind had also stiffened, and Memling was thoroughly chilled by the time he had walked up Northumberland Avenue to the grey unassuming building that had been MI6 headquarters for so many years.
Inside, the same elderly porter nodded politely to Memling, as if he had seen him only yesterday. There was no recognition in the nod, and no surprise either at his ill-kempt appearance. It was said the porter condescended to recognise the director but only now and again.
Memling gave his name and asked to see Englesby, and the porter consulted a child’s exercise book in which he kept a list of appointments for the day.
‘I am afraid, sir, that your name is not here. Do you perhaps have the wrong building?’
‘Perhaps Mr Englesby has forgotten, or has not been notified. Please telephone his office.’
A marine sergeant stepped from a tiny cubicle and looked Memling up and down. ‘Here now. What’s this? Lost your way, have you? Off with you now. There’s no ...’
Memling shook his hand off. ‘My name is Jan Memling, and I have business here. Who the bloody hell are ...’
He shut up abruptly as a revolver was pressed against his head and he was surrounded by three other marines, all heavily armed. His wrists were cuffed, and he was shoved into the cubicle and slammed against the wall.
‘All right, now,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Just you stand right there, mate. Try any more funny moves and I’ll break your neck.’
Memling heard a clatter of high-heeled shoes on the stairs, and a moment later a woman’s voice was demanding to know what was going on. The officer tried to send her on her way, but she pushed past him.
‘Are you Jan Memling?’ she demanded, and he nodded, bemused.
‘Turn around,’ she snapped, and when he did so she compared his face with the photograph in her hand. ‘Take those handcuffs off that man,’ she told the red-faced soldier, ‘and next time, know what you are about.’
Memling rubbed his wrists where the steel rings had bitten deeply. The sergeant glared at him.
For a long moment he said nothing, then, ‘There are a lot of people like you, Sergeant, across the Channel. They wear black uniforms and they like to abuse people too.’
The man’s face went even redder, and Memling turned to the woman. ‘Thank you, miss. I wish to see Mr Englesby.’
‘I know,’ she smiled. ‘‘I’m his secretary, Janet Thompson. I’ll take you up.’
She turned without waiting for an answer and started up the stairs. Memling followed, thinking that her accent was definitely not London. Closer to south-west with the burr and the zz’s removed. At the top of the steps she gave him a quick smile and led him along to the well-remembered office. He noticed, as she opened the door and half-turned to see if he was following, that her figure was slim but full and that she walked with a slight sway, all of which reminded him very much of Margot. My God, he thought, I’ll see her in a few hours. What a surprise... she’ll come home from the shop and I’ll be there. It was only the strictest self-discipline that had kept him from going straight home as it was.
‘Mr Memling?’
He snapped awake as if from a trance, and she smiled at his awkwardness. ‘‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Don’t quite know where I am yet.’
Englesby was waiting for him in the inner office. He looked up as Janet ushered Memling in, then motioned to a chair set before the desk. ‘Be with you in a moment, Memling.’ He could have been gone only a few hours rather than eight months from the warmth of Englesby’s reception, but he was too tired to care.
To cover the lapse, Janet asked him if he would have a cup of tea; and when Memling shook his head, she glared at Englesby and went out. Englesby read on for a moment more, then closed the file and looked up.
‘Sorry about that. Too damned much to do. Home safe and sound, I see. Bit of a bad time over there?’
Memling realised the questions were rhetorical, and contented himself with a nod.
Englesby shifted in his chair. ‘Had some nonsense come through on the blower that you were asking to be pulled out. Something about vital information. Can’t be true, I told the director.’
Memling took a deep breath. ‘I did not ask to be pulled out,’ he said through clenched teeth as his anger welled up again. ‘The head of the local resistance unit made the request - without my knowledge.’ Thirty seconds had not passed and already Memling knew exactly what Englesby was doing - if this blew up, he wanted to make certain that the blame fell anywhere but on him. ‘As my controller, you had the option of accepting or refusing that request.’
‘True enough.’ Englesby’s stare was empty. ‘Now that we have that settled, suppose you tell me what this is all about.’
‘It’s to do with rockets again,’ Memling said quietly. He could not for the life of him have explained why he was deliberately antagonising Englesby, except, he realised, it made no difference either way.
Without raising his eyes from the sheet of paper on his desk, Englesby growled, ‘This had better be good, Memling. As I am certain you know by now, you have cost us an entire resistance network.’
Memling stared at his hands, watched them clench until the blood was squeezed away and the roaring grew and grew in his ears. How had the Germans known they would be there in that clearing...? Had the girl, Maria, not been able to commit suicide after all...? But then, Paul was so certain ...
‘Damn it, Memling, answer me. What about these rockets of yours?’
Jan looked up, and the blackness that had threatened to engulf him began to recede. But his face was stark and white, and even Englesby was a bit shaken. ‘Are you all right, man? Shall I call for a doctor ...?’
Memling shook his head and wiped at his damp forehead. He took a deep, shaky breath and heard Englesby telling the girl over the telephone to bring in some tea after all.
He forced himself to concentrate then, to ignore the implications of his reception. In a strained voice he described the past eight months in Belgium, the position he had held at the Royal Gun Factory, his glimpse of Wernher von Braun, his look at the rocket engines, and his calculations. ‘Paul was an artillery engineer, as you are no doubt aware. He repeated my calculations, and when he was convinced, he made the decision to take me out. The first I knew of it was last night’ - my God, he thought, was it only last night - ‘when they killed the Gestapo people following me.’
Of a sudden, Memling knew how the Germans had found the landing site. Walsch had cared nothing for Maria or for him. They were merely pawns, expendable, as were his own people, the two men in the Volkswagen. By applying enough pressure, Walsch had forced the Belgian resistance to move, to attempt to spirit Memling away, and he had then followed them to the landing site. Memling felt physically sick as he came to the realisation that he and not Maria was the Judas goat. He had been used to set up the Belgians. The presence of von Braun, the shrouded rocket engines, the closed section of the factory, were all part of an elaborate plot - Walsch, knowing of his friendship with Wernher von Braun, would certainly have guessed that he would be intrigued enough by rocket motors to
contact the resistance and send word to London. And it had worked. Ah, Christ. He closed his eyes, wondering how he could have been so stupid.
‘I see,’ Englesby murmured. ‘You say this Paul considered this information you have about these German rockets to be quite important? Then I suppose you had better talk with the ordnance people. I’ll try to set something up immediately. And you’d better work up a report right away while everything is clear in your mind.’
He paused, then shook his head. ‘‘I’m certain that what you say is substantially true, Memling. However, you must realise there’s bound to be a bit of a flap over the loss of an entire resistance group involved in bringing home one operative with a wild claim to having uncovered a new secret weapon . . . again. Whatever you say will be interpreted in that light. Perhaps in your excitement, or in the pressure of the moment, a bit of exaggeration crept into your estimates? Entirely understandable of course, but you must keep in mind that when the NBBS got the wind up about aerial torpedoes or some such nonsense last August, nothing came of it.’
‘The NBBS?’ Memling asked dully.
‘Heh? Yes, I suppose you wouldn’t know about that. The New British Broadcasting System, they call themselves. Run by that fellow Goebbels. Radio station in Berlin, beamed here. Nothing but propaganda by renegade Englishmen. Anyway, like so many of Goebbels’s claims, there was nothing to this aerial torpedo nonsense. BBC did an analysis of their broadcasts over several weeks. Found most of them came right from those - oh, what do you call that silly stuff by that man Wells, and Verne... and, well, your kind of stuff, rockets to the moon and all that?’
‘Science fiction,’ Memling answered tightly.
‘Ah, yes. Science fiction. Buck Rogers and all that. Most of it seems to be American, doesn’t it?’
‘Submarines were once considered science fiction,’ Memling could not resist adding, but he knew Englesby was right.
‘Yes, I dare say. In the meantime I’ll just get on to the ministry ...’
There was nothing for it now but to admit he had been duped and therefore was responsible for how many Belgian lives?
‘If you don’t mind, sir’ - Memling’s voice was full of defeat - ‘I would like to go home first and see my wife. She doesn’t know ‘I’m back yet - ‘ He broke off.
A strange expression passed across Englesby’s face. ‘Ah, Memling...’ He swallowed and took out a handkerchief to touch his upper lip. ‘As I am sure you saw, London has experienced a very heavy bombing... it began in September. There was a blitz. Caused a great deal of damage and in the first two weeks ...’ Memling had never seen the man at a loss for words before, and then an ugly thought crossed his mind. ‘What are you trying to say, damn you?’ He was half out of his chair and shouting. ‘Your wife was killed during a bombing two months ago.’
For a moment Memling was certain that he had misunderstood. He stared at Englesby, trying to make sense of the words, but it was no use. He tried to rise, but his knees buckled and he fell back.
‘There was nothing anyone could do. The fire brigades were on to it as soon as possible. But there wasn’t anything ... the entire block ... I know what you must be feeling, old man, but the only thing to do’ - he wiped his forehead - ‘is to keep on.’
Memling left the office, thrust past the wide-eyed secretary, and raced down the stairs. Afterwards he was never to be certain how he crossed London. He was able to recall that as he approached the avenue everything appeared normal enough. There was no damage to be seen, and people went about their business in the usual manner. Only the absence of children and motor vehicles was remarkable. But when he turned the corner, the devastation was complete. Where had stood half a block of semi-detached houses and, across the road, a school, a police station, a fire- brigade headquarters, shops, and all the normal complement of a South London neighbourhood, now there was nothing. And beyond that, great gaping holes appeared where buildings had once stood, as if selected teeth had been removed from a giant’s mouth.
All the landmarks were gone, obliterated. Memling could not even know for certain if he were standing where his own house had been. The disposal crews had cleared the rubble from the road into long rows of broken timber, brick and twisted pipe, smashed furniture and torn cloth. He turned slowly, surveying the block. All the neighbours were gone as well; those not killed outright had been removed, said a sad-faced policeman who stood beside him a while and told him how the German bombers had struck in the early morning hours when people generally took shelter under the stairwells or in their basements rather than going out into the cold and wet. There was no reason to expect bombs here; there was nothing to attract them but shops and homes. The policeman shrugged. That was in the early days of the blitz, before they had all learned what was what.
After a while he left Memling standing before the rubble that had been his home. It was safe enough, the policeman judged. The man did not exhibit any of the usual signs of potential suicide, uncontrollable hysteria or violence. And he was profoundly glad of that. He had been on duty since the first raid at eight the evening before, and he was exhausted.
Peenemunde-Prague September 1941
The scream gained in scale and volume. Franz Bethwig watched, fingers gripping the edge of the bench so hard his knuckles were bloodless. When the needle registered 128,000 kilograms of thrust, nearly five times that of the A-4, a slow grin spread across his face. The noise was deafening, even inside the blockhouse, and he could imagine what it was like outside. The twenty-centimetre protective quartz glass was vibrating so much that his view of the test stand was obscured. That was something he had not thought of; the cameras were sheltered behind such windows and the film would be too blurred to be of use.
The television screen, at any rate, was clear enough. As he shifted his glance he saw a white flare spring the length of the engine casing. Bethwig lunged for the fuel cut-off, but there was no time. Just before the test area disappeared in a whirlwind of flame, he thought he had seen the casing split along its centre line. The concussion slammed the blockhouse with a solid hammer of sound, and the television screen went blank.
Fire raged beyond the windows, two of which had been scarred with debris, but even so, he could see that the test stand was being flooded with sea water. The fire blast would cause little damage to the steel and concrete test area where everything was designed to minimise blast effects. But the prototype A-10 engine would be a total loss.
Exhaustion swept over him, and he turned away to gather the tangles of paper tape spewed from the recording instruments. He stripped the circular graph from the thrust indicator and left the building. A hot breeze enveloped him; Indian summer had settled over the island during the last week in September, raising the temperature well past twenty-eight degrees centigrade. The wind blew from the land and seemed starved of oxygen. The mid-afternoon sun glaring from the concrete produced an insistent headache as he trudged to his motorcar, which was parked beyond the safety barriers.
Bethwig drove slowly along the road, squinting at the glare from the crushed oyster-shell paving. The interior of the Lancia was blazing; he was tempted to put the top down but was even too tired for that. The flat, sandy, pine-covered island with its modernistic buildings reminded him of a Florida travelogue his father had taken him to see when he was much younger. Under the white sun Peenemunde seemed to have much the same ambiance as that bit of Florida somewhere near a place called Pensacola.
He had resolved to take the rest of the day off to go sailing in the little catboat he kept at Trassenheide. It had been months since he had had a holiday, and he was pale and sickly looking while the rest of the staff had grown sun-bronzed over the summer. There had been little enough project work, God only knew. Priorities evaporated as quickly as they were set. Speer had been a great disappointment. Not only had he failed to persuade Hitler of the promise of their work and the dire need to avoid delay, but he seemed to have lost interest himself.
Franz parked in front of the b
lock of sterile reinforced-concrete apartments that served to house unmarried scientific personnel, and dragged himself inside abandoning all thought of sailing. He was too tired even to acknowledge the porter’s greeting. The heat seemed to have gathered inside, turning the building into an oven. Air conditioning had been included in the original plans but, like so many other promises, had never materialised. The units had actually been shipped to Peenemunde before being diverted somewhere else. He had seen the cartons stacked on the quay.
A persistent knocking woke him. Bethwig sat up, groggy with the heat and sleep, and swung his feet to the floor, ducking his head at the same time. His blood pressure, always low, had seemed abnormally so of late.
‘Who is it?’ he demanded, still half-asleep.
‘Franz, it’s Wernher. Are you awake?’
Bethwig swore. ‘I am now, yes! What do you want?’
‘I am going out to supper. I would like you to come along and meet someone.’
Bethwig lay back, spread-eagling himself to let the perspiration dry. ‘I don’t think so, Wernher. Not tonight.’
‘Franz, damn it, open the door. I can’t keep yelling like this.’ Bethwig stumbled to the closet and drew on a light robe. ‘Just a moment, just a moment,’ he muttered, and went into the bathroom to rinse his face with the tepid brownish water. Von Braun pounded on the door again and Franz flung it open. ‘Damn it, I told you ...’
Von Braun pushed him back into the room, spun him around, and shoved him towards the closet. ‘I know what you told me. Get dressed. We are driving to Swinemünde for supper.’
Bethwig changed direction for the bed. ‘Like hell. You go - ‘ Von Braun cut him off. ‘You don’t have a choice. It’s in the nature of a command performance.’
