Somewhere out there, people were trying to ignore the war and get ready for Christmas. Esau had no wife or children to bother about such things, and all those whom he might call his friends were merely colleagues, and colleagues did not treat each other for holidays. Especially not in times like these.
He drank several cups of tea the next morning and ate a croissant. The train arrived at Stettin just after sunrise, and Esau transferred to a different train. They reached Wolgast an hour later. After the conductor’s announcement, Esau stood up, took his valise from the rack overhead, then moved his aching body off the train.
The island of Peenemunde lay on the northern coast near Rugen, just across the water from Bornholm and the Swedish mainland. The island, about ten miles long, looked like a splayed chicken’s foot, with three toes on the southward end pointing into the wide Oder Lagoon, while the narrow top half of the island extended into the Pomeranian Bay in the Baltic Sea. The island lay next to the German mainland, separated by a channel of water.
In the adjacent city of Wolgast, Esau found a ferry to take him across the half-frozen river to the restricted area on the island. Children skated on the ice shelves near the mainland, as if nothing could possibly be wrong with the world.
Barbed wire and slatted-wood fences bordered the edge of Peenemunde. A railroad extended from the ferry landing to various parts of the island for delivering supplies and equipment, but Esau found no train in sight.
As the ferry landed and he disembarked, shivering in his overcoat and carrying his own valise, a team of guards came out to meet him. He let them inspect his papers from Reichminister Speer, and one of the men took him in a car along the bumpy gravel roads of the island. Esau felt too sleepy and grumpy for conversation, and the guard drove without looking at him.
They passed dunes and thick stands of dark fir trees, a desolate-looking frozen lake, and small army settlements on the island—Trassenheide, Karlshagen, and various buildings obviously used for research or construction. At Peenemunde village, the guard let him off and sent Esau toward a set of small office barracks, telling him to ask for General Dornberger.
It took him another half hour, with his voice gradually rising in anger and impatience, before a lieutenant finally accepted his demand for the unscheduled meeting with the head of the research station. Apparently, Reichminister Speer had not telegrammed or telephoned ahead.
“The general is preparing for this morning’s test shot out at Stand X,” the lieutenant said. “We have orders not to disturb him during the final stages. Would you care to wait for him?”
Esau, feeling ruffled, stood his ground. “I would love to rest, change clothes, and eat a decent meal. But I cannot afford the luxury, and neither can General Dornberger. Reichminister Speer ordered me to see the general immediately upon arrival. I have been on a train all night. Don’t you have any inkling of who I am? I am the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics for all of Germany. You will take me to General Dornberger—now!”
Esau seethed in the front seat of the battered car when they finally departed to find the general. Despite the winter cold, the lieutenant kept his window rolled down as they drove across the island to the preparation areas near Test Stand X.
General Walter Dornberger, when they finally found him, looked harried and focused entirely on the rocket test in progress. “Another one?” he said, assessing Esau. A gray-haired man with a boyish face, Dornberger’s build appeared slight in his gray uniform. He was not imposing or commanding, but Esau recognized a hard and practical intelligence behind his eyes.
“I am here on orders from Reichminister Speer—” Esau began, reaching into his overcoat for the detailed letter Speer had given him.
General Dornberger motioned for him to follow. The general’s smile and comfortable attitude displayed his pride in the project, and his familiarity with showing it off. “I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the test. Follow me, and we can answer questions a little later.”
“I have a letter from the Reichminister,” Esau said, holding out the folded note. “Here it is.”
“Only a handful of minutes left Professor, uh, Esau, was it? Let me try to explain everything as we finish the preparations.” He indicated a man beside him, “This is my colleague and our brightest hope, Dr. Wernher von Braun. He is of prime importance to this project.”
Von Braun stood tall and impressive, dapper in his dark suit and clean overcoat; he wore a tie that looked oddly incongruous in the rough conditions of the rocket test area. Most of the other people standing around wore Army uniforms, but von Braun seemed proud of the fact that he was a civilian. Von Braun’s dark hair was slicked back and neat even in the chaotic moments before the test.
“This one will work,” von Braun said. His eyes held a spark of defiance as he turned to Esau. “You’ll see.”
General Dornberger smiled. “Dr. von Braun is an optimist, and he occasionally forgets the difference between reality and his wild ideas.” Dornberger clapped a hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “He is also, though, usually right in whatever he says.”
“Today I am right,” von Braun said. He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes remaining. We should get to our observing posts.”
Dornberger disappeared through the door of a bunker. Esau and von Braun followed him down five concrete steps.
They went through a long underground corridor that led from the measurement room beneath the wall of the arena to the test stand itself. Double and triple rows of thick, heavy measurement cables ran along the corridor, making Esau feel as if he were hurrying down the gullet of some prehistoric beast.
They passed through a long room beside another tunnel. “This is a blast tunnel,” General Dornberger said, running his fingers against the concrete-block walls. “Those cooling pipes are four feet in diameter and can pump water at 120 gallons per second. They’re made of molybdenum steel. This wall is three feet thick. Even during a test, you can feel very little heat through it.”
Von Braun looked at his watch again and cleared his throat. “Five minutes.”
In an observation room, technicians studied readings from their instruments, monitored by red, white, or green indicator lights. Dornberger gestured rapidly, speaking so fast that the words made little sense. Esau got the impression that the general had done this tour many times before. “Those are voltmeters and ammeters here, frequency gauges and manometers over there. We need to check every aspect of the firing. You never know where something might go wrong.”
Two telephones rang at once. The technicians talked among each other. The general moved on. “This morning we’ll observe from outside. It’s more impressive that way.”
Dornberger hurried along the rising corridor through the pumping house and into the open air. Water tanks on wooden towers, twenty-five feet high, stood built into the sand wall surrounding the test arena. “We use these towers to recool the water after a test,” the general said.
“I picked up another pair of binoculars,” von Braun said. He passed them over. “For you, Professor Esau.”
General Dornberger stood beside the heavy sand wall. “Yes, we’ll be able to see just fine from here.”
Esau looked across to Test Stand X. A dune covered with skeletal pine trees rose from a wide sandy plain beyond which lay the choppy Baltic Sea. The trees themselves had been stripped and scarred from the repeated blasts, and the dune lay under a dark blanket of cinders. Fresh concrete aprons, wooden test stands, and cleared patches of dirt dotted the dune surface. Meillerwagens— long metal rigs for hauling the rockets—waited in their positions.
But the sight that gripped Esau was the towering rocket poised on Test Stand X. Strings of fuel lines, steaming white with residual liquid air, sprawled on the ground. A small service car spun at a reckless speed away from the stand.
The rocket itself looked surreal, painted in alternating sections of black and white for proper heat distribution during reentry. Like a giant javelin it waited on the test stand, rea
dy to leap into the air, with external aerial vanes like the feathers on a gigantic arrow.
“We call it the A-4, for Aggregate Rocket Model Four,” General Dornberger said, “though the Fuhrer wants us to change the name to V-2, for Victory Weapon Two. A different rocket concept, launched more like a “catapult projectile, is called the V-1, but that was developed by a second team. We have one V-1 catapult on the northern tip of Peenemunde. But this… “He sighed and looked at the shining rocket swathed in white vapor tendrils on the test stand. “This is where our real interest lies.”
“It’s got alcohol and liquid oxygen for fuel within the cylindrical center section, along with a hydrogen peroxide tank,” von Braun said. “The fuse and the warhead are on top. We will load the rockets with explosives during actual attacks. Right now we are still trying to perfect the rocket flight itself.”
An announcement rumbled over the intercom system linked around the buildings throughout the site. “X minus three minutes.”
“We have a different way of measuring time here,” General Dornberger mused. “We call them ‘Peeneiminde minutes’—the clock measures them as sixty seconds long, but they seem so much more interminable than that.”
Esau kept his eyes on the rocket towering alone and dangerous on its concrete pad. The general tapped his shoulder. “Those big buildings over there under the camouflage netting are our Development Works and the oxygen-generating plant. We hung the camouflage only on the north side, where planes would see it coming in. On the other side are the hangars for the Luftwaffe section, then the chimneys for the harbor power station.”
“X minus two minutes,” the voice on the loudspeaker said.
“How much do you know of our work here, Herr Professor?” von Braun asked after a brief silence.
“Very little. I don’t even know what this is all about.”
General Dornberger frowned. Von Braun straightened his overcoat to hide a disappointed expression. “Then why exactly did Reichminister Speer send you here to observe this test?”
“He didn’t send me to observe the test! I am here to confer with you about the deployment of another weapon my team of researchers has developed.”
Dornberger’s smile became suddenly forced. “And what type of weapon is this?”
“I’ve been trying to show you this letter—”
The white steam curls vanished from the sides of the rocket, like gusts of breath from a sleeping dragon. Von Braun pointed at it. “Venting valves have closed. Oxygen pressure will start building up.”
The loudspeaker blared again, “X minus one minute. Regular counting will progress.”
The general and von Braun turned back to observe the test stand. “Tell us afterward.”
Esau settled down to watch.
“Forty-five seconds.”
Unable to squelch his tour-guide tendencies, Dornberger spoke over his shoulder at Esau. “The steering gyroscopes are now running inside the rocket. Only a few seconds more.”
A small shell hissed into the air, sending a streamer of green marker smoke across the sky. Esau couldn’t figure out what it was for. To test wind direction?
“X minus fifteen seconds.”
Esau realized he was holding his breath. So, he could tell, were General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun. Even the wind seemed to have dropped away in the overcast winter sky.
“Ignition!”
Clouds gushed from the nozzle at the bottom of the rocket. A rain of sparks built from the nozzle, splashing off the blast deflector and bouncing along the concrete launch platform. A sound like a gigantic blowtorch burned through the air as the sparks gathered into an arm of flame, pushing beneath the black-and-white rocket.
“Preliminary stage!” von Braun shouted.
Smoke billowed up from around the rocket’s bottom, obscuring the view. Esau squinted through his binoculars. Debris, wood chips, sand, and blasted chunks of cable flew through the air. Diagnostic wires fell from the sides of the rocket. Esau could feel the tension building.
“How much more is it going to take?” he shouted.
Then the rocket heaved itself from the ground. Casting-off cables dropped from the smooth white sides. The flame suddenly redoubled in strength as the main stage ignited. The rocket rose and picked up speed, climbing into the sky. Esau followed it with his binoculars. Behind on the test stand only a whirling dust cloud remained.
He flicked a glance sideways to see General Dornberger grinning like a child. Von Braun continued to stare through the binoculars with one fist clenched at his side. His face carried an expression of intense seriousness.
The jet of flame extended yellow and orange, longer than the rocket itself. The black-and-white patterns did not change as Esau watched, meaning the rocket was not rotating.
“Plus five seconds,” the loudspeaker announced. Esau found that incredible. Surely more time had passed than that! He remembered what the general had said about Peenemunde minutes.
“It’s beginning to tilt,” von Braun reported without taking his eyes from the binoculars.
The rocket flew out in a graceful arc over the Peenemunde estuary, toward the small green hook of another island.
“Sixteen… seventeen… eighteen… ” the loudspeaker continued.
“At twenty-five seconds the rocket will go faster than sound,” von Braun said. Dornberger concurred.
A “boom” startled the watchers. The loudspeaker voice said, “Sonic velocity!”
The rocket grew smaller and smaller as it sailed on. Esau thrilled at the power and grace of this weapon. He could understand Speer’s excitement. “Brennschluss approaching. Five seconds,” von Braun said.
“What?” Esau grabbed the general’s sleeve.
“The end point of combustion. The primary flame will go out.”
Von Braun shouted. Esau flicked up his binoculars and searched for the rocket in the field of view. He found white mist spewing from the side of the rocket.
“Did it happen again?” Dornberger demanded. “No, that’s just the oxygen vent opening! It has to be.”
Suddenly an explosion split the rocket, silent over the great distance. In a flash the metal javelin had vanished into a cloud of debris, flame, and steam.
General Dornberger muttered to himself. The loudspeaker made one last announcement, “Forty-three seconds. Forty-three seconds total flight time,” then fell silent. Von Braun brooded down at the ground.
“This is terrible. We must try again and again and again. We must learn to make it work properly!” The general kneaded his hands together.
Esau lowered his binoculars and stared at the spreading cloud of steam, smoke, and debris dispersing over the choppy sea. The lumpy scar on his lip itched when he smiled so broadly.
“No,” he said, startling them. “It is splendid just as it is.”
Both Dr. von Braun and General Dornberger spoke no more about the rocket’s failure that morning. They addressed Esau’s ideas with growing enthusiasm.
“We did develop a prototype rocket to be launched from a German U-boat, but we determined it would not be feasible for actual deployment.”
“Until now,” Esau corrected.
“I am still not convinced,” General Dornberger said. “We shelved the submarine rocket proposal because of the effort it would require and its low potential for payoff. We would have to specially modify a U-boat to carry the rockets, and even then the boat could carry no more than three on each journey.”
Dornberger removed his hat and laid it on the scarred old tabletop. Inside the dim barracks conference room, cold breezes pushed through ill-fitting window frames and wall joints.
“It just does not sound worthwhile. To modify a U-boat and send it on a journey across the Atlantic to strike a target with only three bombs? Unexpected, to be sure, but the destruction could not justify the effort. I would rather continue work on the V-2 program here.”
Von Braun sat impatient in his wooden chair, then he got up and paced the roo
m. Esau began to speak, but von Braun interrupted him and stood directly in front of Dornberger.
“You don’t understand, General! If this radioactive dust is as effective as Professor Esau claims, then three rockets would be enough to… to subdue an entire city. For many years!”
“Yes,” Esau said, “it makes all the difference! Conventional explosives don’t cause sufficient damage in a case like this. But with radioactive dust, we can take a greater toll in a single attack than a hundred bombing raids.”
“And you believe Hitler intends to strike against America with this weapon? Why not Britain?”
Esau went to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, but didn’t know what he wanted to draw. “We are not certain what will happen with this poison. If we release the dust and contaminate London, the dust might spread and actually reach Normandy, perhaps even to the German Lowlands here. In America, though, we need not worry. It will be a perfect test case. We can see exactly how effective the weapon is.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked back at the general and the rocket scientist. “It will also strike fear in the Americans. We will surprise them in a way they will never forget.”
General Dornberger ran his fingers along the inside brim of his hat. “And Reichminister Speer is enthusiastic about this?”
“Very much so. He wants to use the weapon within two months.”
“Two months!” von Braun said.
The general placed his hat back on his head and stood up. “Last March, Hitler had a dream that convinced him none of our rockets would ever reach England. We nearly lost all support then, but in July he changed his mind and gave us top priority. And now you are speaking of striking not England, but America. We can convince the Fuhrer his dream was right. If we can make your idea work.”
Dornberger’s tour-guide smile had returned to his face. “Very well, Professor. We should try to find a suitable U-boat and begin modifications. This could win the war for us.”
The Trinity Paradox Page 18
