The Doomsday Testament

XIII

It was over. SS Brigadeführer Walter Brohm couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when intuition had become truth, but he knew the war was lost. He could taste defeat in the air he breathed and smell it on the people who surrounded him. As a physicist he understood the concept of critical mass better than most. He wondered why he hadn’t recognized earlier the moment it had all turned to dust. Perhaps he could blame the fact that he had been trapped in this enormous concrete prison for most of the past two years, but he knew that wasn’t true. The evidence had been there for all to see despite the Führer’s grandiose promises. Goebbels could trumpet Wehrmacht success as loud as he liked, but anyone who could read a map knew that each ‘victory’ brought the enemy ever closer to the heart of the Reich. Brohm had watched the Ami bombers making their stately, invulnerable way across sacred Germany’s skies like shoals of tiny silver fish through a pale blue sea. Only a few weeks earlier he had seen the results as he flew into Berlin across whole districts reduced to barren fields of crater and rubble. Everyone knew a family who had lost a loved one at the front. The truth was, like everyone else in Hitler’s Germany, he had deluded himself that it could never happen. The promised wunderwaffen existed; the unstoppable rockets and jets that could fly faster than any Allied plane, the pulse cannon and the new tanks and improved U-boats. But there had never been enough and now there never would be. The Reich’s industrial base had already been crippled beyond repair. Not even Speer could make artillery shells with dead engineers in a factory that was just a pile of bricks.

He looked around the office that had been his home for the last twelve months. Wood-panelled walls, works of art and Persian carpets couldn’t disguise the chill reality of a subterranean existence and the all-pervading damp earth scent of quick-drying cement. He lit one of his little black cigarettes to mask the smell, the smoke swirling through the glare of artificial light to be consumed by the extractor fan in the ceiling. Beyond the internal window SS troopers from the security battalion hurried back and forth helping his research staff carry boxes of files and records to be burned in the furnaces two floors below. The occasional metallic crash told him that the work of dismantling or destroying the plant and removing the experimental machinery was being carried out as he had ordered.

Such a waste, after all the years of struggle and effort.

This bunker’s existence was known only to the highest ranking members of the SS hierarchy and had been built to last for a thousand years, but he had never truly believed the Reich would survive that long, and had never much cared. What mattered was his work.

At first, no one would even consider his theory about the material in the casket from Tibet. It was beyond the intellectual capacity of even the finest minds. Schumann and von Braun had looked at him as if he were mad. In the two years leading up to 1939, the theoretical and the experimental were only of interest if they applied to technology that would help Germany win the war everyone knew was coming. Even in 1940 the High Command had issued an edict banning research and development that would not produce military results in four months.

Chastened by the professional setback, Brohm had been recruited to work with Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Lise Meitner on a project that involved bombarding uranium with neutrons, continuing the work begun by the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford who had split the first atom. Meitner, a chain-smoking dynamo of a woman, was undoubtedly the brightest of the team and the acknowledged leader, but as an Austrian Jew her genius could not offset the massive disadvantage of her tainted blood. In 1938 she had fled Germany for Sweden. A year later Brohm had watched as Hahn discovered barium in a uranium sample. They had achieved what would become known as nuclear fission.

But that had not been enough for Walter Brohm. During the years with Hahn and Meitner, he had continued with his own experiments to discover the exact nature of what he had found in the casket. He worked at night, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion and mental breakdown, driven by the absolute conviction that this substance had been placed on earth for him and him only. He understood that his quest went beyond obsession, that it took him to the very brink of madness, but he revelled in the pain and disappointment as he rode ever closer to his goal on a tidal surge of anticipation. Eventually, he had come close enough to be sure of what he had. Now it was a matter of examination, analysis and theory as he tried to understand where the material took its place in the periodic table of earthly elements, if it had a place there at all. Row upon row of calculations on a blackboard concluded, studied, then dismissed. At first it had been as if he was wandering through a jagged, fissured landscape in a dense fog, each step uncertain and fearful, but gradually his mind had cleared. Eventually, he realized that he’d wasted hundreds of hours trying to peer forward into the unknown when he should have been looking back at the celestial origins of what the casket contained.

A timid knock at the door interrupted his thoughts and he looked up as a lovely dark-haired girl of about nineteen carried a tray into the office.

‘Your coffee, Herr Direktor.’

‘Thank you, Hannah, that is kind of you.’ He smiled. She truly was beautiful. Even wearing the dowdy, striped grey shift, Hannah Schulmann radiated a kind of inner tranquillity that always made him feel at ease with himself. And she was as talented as she was pretty; he had never heard the piano played more movingly than when her supple fingers moved over the keys. Her presence in his bed had made the last few months almost bearable.

The girl flinched as a guard dropped a box of files and he stood up and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t be frightened, my dear. You must go and join the others now.’

He watched her leave and experienced a painful twinge of what, in another man, might have been conscience.

It had been the late summer of 1941 before he had felt confident enough to approach Himmler with his findings. He found it difficult to think of Heini as the bogey man who had terrorized Europe. The intense, myopic stare and the unnatural stillness could be unnerving at first, but the Heinrich Himmler he had come to know was an affable dinner companion who called him by the familiar du and had always shown a genuine interest in his work. Himmler, who delighted in anything mysterious or enigmatic, had been fascinated by the Changthang casket, and when Brohm presented the paper outlining his discovery’s possible potential the owl’s face shone with excitement. As the panzers probed the suburbs of Leningrad, threatened Moscow and completed the encirclement of Kiev, Brohm received a call telling him to report to Templehof aiport. Two hours later he was on a Junkers 252 transport to Rastenburg for a personal interview with Adolf Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters. It was the only time he had met the Führer and he had emerged both hugely impressed and hugely disappointed. With the war all but won, Hitler had been at his most affable. In person, he had none of the enormous presence he projected at the great rallies Brohm had attended, but the scientist found himself mesmerized by the aura of power surrounding the man. To meet him was to truly believe. Hitler had clearly been well briefed on the subject and had immediately grasped its potential, but, just when Brohm believed he had received agreement to proceed, the Führer had called a third man into the room. The moment he recognized the visitor, Brohm realized he had been outmanoeuvred. Six years earlier Werner Heisenberg had been involved in a scientific scandal that had brought him into conflict with Himmler. Brohm had supported his chief and Heisenberg had been fortunate to survive. Now he was back in favour and Brohm knew he was in trouble.

Heisenberg went over the arguments for and against Brohm’s project and then pointed out the potentially catastrophic consequences of an error. Brohm had been forced to acknowledge the hazards and argued that no scientific experiment was without risk, but he knew he had already lost the battle. The Führer had brusquely shaken his head, too timid to truly appreciate the capabilities of what Brohm was offering. He left the meeting in a rage. Hitler had cost him his place in history.

But he had underestimated Heinrich Himmler.

When he met Himmler two weeks later, the Reichsführer-SS had been at his most charming. Since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Führer had a great deal to occupy his mind and could not be expected to oversee every tiny detail of national policy. Brohm’s project would go ahead, but under the auspices of the SS-WVHA, the economic and main administration office of Himmler’s vast organization. It was only now that Brohm was given an insight into just how vast. The SS had developed from Hitler’s bodyguard into a state within a state and with the financial power to match. After years of fighting for funding and laboratory time, Brohm now had everything he wanted, and more. More staff and more funding meant he could make greater progress, which in turn increased the project’s importance. When the bombs began to fall on Berlin the scientists and engineers had been evacuated to the bunker, the most advanced research facility in the world, and Brohm had been able to experiment on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable. And with each experiment he moved a step closer. Closer to harnessing the power of the stars.

And just as he had it within his grasp, it was over.

He felt a surge of anger that restored his resolve. His work was too important to stop now. Much more important than petty considerations like nationhood.

‘The Sun Stone is ready to be transferred, Herr Brigadeführer.’

Brohm looked up at his aide, Ziegler, in the doorway. He nodded. ‘Good, and you have my personal documents and records?’

‘Yes, Herr Brigadeführer. They have been placed in fireproof security boxes as you ordered.’

‘Very well.’

He could trust Ziegler. The Sun Stone and the records, the bargaining chips that would assure his future, would travel by convoy to the armoured train which would take them to their final secret destination. The Ivans and the Amis were closing in. Free Germany was like a piece of ham between two slices of pumpernickel and the ham was getting thinner with every hour. Still, he’d left enough time for the move. He would make his own personal arrangements for escape. It was time to go.

The grey-clad commander of the security detachment appeared at the door, his face red from the exertions of the morning and one of the new Sturmgewehr automatic rifles on his shoulder.

‘Shall we take the Jews outside?’

Brohm considered for a moment. The Jews. Such an all-encompassing, unsatisfactory and entirely fatal classification. In reality many of the three hundred scientists, engineers and technicians in the barracks below were men and women he had worked with long before the war, people he had come to like and respect. People like Hannah.

‘No, do it where they sit. It will cause them less anxiety.’ The SS man frowned; what did he care about anxiety? They were only Jews. Nobody had bothered about anxiety on the Ostfront. Brohm saw the look. ‘It will save time,’ he suggested. ‘And this place will make a very appropriate tomb.’ The frown was replaced by puzzlement. ‘They will be like three hundred of the pharaoh’s servants, buried in memory of his achievements,’ Brohm explained wearily.

He risked one last look at the painting on the wall. A pity, he would have liked to take the Raphael. It had been a birthday gift from poor old Heydrich, who had somehow, in his sinister way, prised it from Frank’s grubby little fingers. But he wasn’t going to escape Germany’s Gotterdamerung carrying a large piece of wooden board. He would be travelling light; just his new identity and the secret that would change the world.