The Furies

SISTERS OF THE NIGHT

A shiny-faced aerodynamics expert, Felix von Steiner, turned up one morning from Kammler's rocket group. He wasn't much more than a schoolboy and he glowed with schoolboy enthusiasm everywhere he went. Within days of his arrival he transformed the design of the flying volcano. It lost its flanges: "No! No! No! Don't you see, you're just making wasteful turbulence! Just blowing air around!" Instead, he built four angled rockets into the design to give both lift and spin. He made the volcano shallower, with a big dome on top to hold the sarin or anthrax, and the lower part to hold the fuel and propulsion mechanism. In fact the machine no longer looked like a volcano; rather, it was beginning to look vaguely like a saucer holding a shallow inverted cup.

With Kammler's authority …

The man had a lot of authority in the Third Reich, the journalist tells me. He had fourteen million forced laborers under him, and he was in charge of nearly all the secret weapon projects. He was also a nasty piece of stuff. I don't know what to say to that, and nod.

… von Steiner and I took full-scale models to a huge wind tunnel south of Munich, carved out of a mountain, its entrance disguised by a row of chalets. We passed sleek two-stage rockets that looked as if they could reach New York. The wind tunnel was run by a conservative old aerodynamics engineer called Best with a double chin which waggled every time he shook his head. It did a lot of waggling as we explained what we wanted, but he quickly improvised experiments with the disks mounted on a motor-driven axle to spin them up to various rates. Foreign workers, gray-faced as if they hadn't seen sunlight for months, coated our models with a mixture of fluorescent paint and paraffin. Little flecks blew off in the slip-stream and traced out the wind flow around the tilted, spinning disks.

Best grudgingly conceded that if the disk spun quickly, a gyroscope effect might make it stable, up to a point, but that without control surfaces the device would roll, bank, and sideslip away from a straight-line path. "This device is idiotic. Don't you see, the angle of attack increases as the flight progresses? The disk will first roll and bank to the right, then the pitching moment will change and it will veer to the left, and so on."

"What are you telling us, Dr. Best?" von Steiner asked, looking through the glass at the flecks of paint streaming and glittering in the spotlights.

"Without flaps and rudders your machine will never fly in a controllable manner," he warned us. "Look at those trailing vortices." His voice was quivering with professional indignation. "It's an asymmetric wake. Look at the way your disk is wobbling. It will fly like a drunken goose." And he turned to us and outlined a big S-shaped flight path with his hands — which, of course, was exactly what we needed.

We came back with an armful of numbers: sideslip, pitch, roll, lift coefficient, drag coefficient, pitching moment and rolling moment for various underside shapes, spin rates and flow velocities. Under Hess's orders, we gave these to Daniela to work out the flight dynamics, knowing it would stretch her formidable mathematical talents to the limit: Her days of underutilized talent were long past. Meantime we got on with constructing more scale models with what we'd learned.

Von Steiner seemed cheerfully indifferent to the payloads and their intended effects; the fun was in the design and building of the flying machines. He reminded me of myself eighteen months earlier. In spare moments he would chatter enthusiastically about spaceflight and the idea that one day men would walk on the moon. I got the impression that, for him, the war was just a sideline on the way to space. But his rocket experience proved invaluable: It began to look as if Goering's insane deadline could just possibly be met.

An innovation was solid fuel. The V2, von Steiner confided, was propelled by an alcohol/liquid oxygen mixture, but this was too sophisticated for our purpose. All we really wanted was a glorified skyrocket with multiple nozzles.

With the facilities of the Reich behind us we had no problem in acquiring material. Our first flying model, hastily thrown up in one of our own workshops, was about a meter across, made of aluminum and containing nothing more dangerous than water. It had four rockets, angled as von Steiner suggested to give spin as well as lift. Above a certain spin threshold, centrifugal force would open valves and water, representing sarin or anthrax, would spiral out. The "eggs" I'd envisioned were unnecessary and abandoned: The saucer would spin so fast that the spores or aerosol would be shot out for a hundred meters around; wind and drunken goose aerodynamics would do the rest.

Four of us could lift the device when it was empty. We heaved it onto the back of a truck and drove it down to the meadow, where a relay of soldiers with buckets filled it with water from an icy Alpine stream. Von Steiner lit a fuse — real schoolboy stuff, just string impregnated with saltpeter — and we scampered off to what we thought was a safe distance.

It was a spectacular disaster.

One of the four rockets didn't ignite and the machine rose on the other three, blasting out smoke and flames, roaring, and wobbling erratically while we ran for our lives. A few hundred meters up, spinning furiously, it started to spray arcs of water. Then it flipped on its back and hurtled straight at us, screaming and bellowing. We dived to the ground as the machine skimmed over our heads, touched grass, and then bounced and skipped over the meadow like a giant Catherine wheel out of control, pursued by half a dozen terrified soldiers. How it missed the cattle I don't know. It disappeared into the trees at supernatural speed, while cordite smoke and drizzle enveloped us.

Von Steiner was running up and down, arms stretched out and laughing excitedly. "It flew! It flew! First time and it flew!"

We bundled into the front of the truck with Bosch at the wheel, Daniela on von Steiner's knee, Edith and Hess squeezed in the middle. We were all caught up in von Steiner's enthusiasm. "It's much more stable than our early trials with the V2. It's the four engines. And the rotation."

"How will we get forward motion?" I asked.

"Launch it upwind and let it drift. It will stay airborne longer than a parachute, drifting along in a big lazy S while it scatters its seed. In a strong wind we might even have a transverse movement, thanks to Bernoulli's equation, like the spin on a tennis ball. I don't know how big that effect will be, though."

Hess had the look of a saint entering Paradise. "Daniela, we need your mathematics. Can we make the disks tack across the wind using this tennis ball effect? Answer within a week!"

I remember that day well. We were naughty children who had just seen their homemade rocket disappear into the clouds. In the excitement we all forgot, for a little while, what the flying disks were for.

As if her theoretical study of the flight dynamics weren't sweat enough, Hess summoned Daniela to the bishop's procuratory and ordered her to design the firing mechanism. Bosch proved remarkably adept at things mechanical and turned her abstract ideas into hardware. It was a wonderful team effort; it drove us all to exhaustion; and it made sabotage impossible. And Oberlin had now put armed guards in every corner of the convent and outside the door of every occupied room.

Daniela used the back entrance to the kitchen overnight at least once more to my knowledge; it wasn't guarded, maybe because it didn't lead to any offices, maybe because they didn't know about it. It was still a highly dangerous journey through the corridors. I followed her again, why I don't know. I was being torn apart, revolting at the treason against my country, unwilling to betray Daniela, outraged by Natzweiler. And I wanted to see what she was leaving for the spy among the forced labor.

It took me twenty minutes of silent searching in the dark kitchen, while a guard patrolled up and down outside and I sweated with fear, searching among metal pots and utensils. I eventually found the treasonable material in a massive cast-iron pot, covered by a dishcloth. It was six bars of Swiss chocolate.

Three months down the line, after countless calculations and crashed disks, we had our specifications. Krupps, despite the crumbling war effort, said they could deliver three full-sized disks. The fourth was going somewhere else. It was going somewhere else because it would be bigger, too big for our facilities and maybe too big for anything but towing behind a U-boat. It would be bigger because it was going to carry uranium oxide, which was heavy stuff. And it would carry uranium oxide because someone thought it would be a fine thing to spray the radioactive chemical over a city. There was a canteen rumor that this disk would eventually go to our Japa nese allies. I don't know how that rumor started, and I don't know whether there was anything in it. But we'd escaped the firing squad. We concentrated on getting the first three disks ready for their deadly contents and Bosch, with his literary background, proposed to call them after the three Furies of Greek mythology.

"The Furies, I like the sound of that," Hess declared, nodding his drunken approval.

"Otherwise known as the Sisters of the Night." We'd raided the nuns' wine cellar and were enjoying an evening of bliss, a celebratory binge in Daniela's office. "They were gods of vengeance. They had snakes for hair, dogs' heads, and bats' wings. Their bodies were coal black and blood dripped from their eyes. They carried whips with brass studs, and their victims died in torment."

"They sound like me on a bad day," Edith said. We all laughed, and so we had names for our flying disks. Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone.

INCIDENT

We soon found that the wind wasn't enough. A big innovation was another two rockets, each a meter long and attached to the underside of the disk. Von Steiner touched the side of his nose late one night and told us he had contacts. This was a project classified as Geheime Reichs Sache, an SS security grading even higher than the usual Geheim Kommando Sache. He could undoubtedly have been shot for mentioning it to us. It was just that the mysterious project called for high-thrust, solid-fuel rockets to get something into the air quickly, and we could use those rockets.

It was probably the Viper project, the young man tells me. They made a machine out of wood. It was halfway between a plane and a missile. It launched vertically at over two g with the thrust from SR34 solid-fuel rockets. It went up half a mile in twelve seconds just on the boosters, then carried on up to seven miles in altitude. The pilot was supposed to glide down on the enemy bombers, but the war ended before they could use it. How does a journalist know about things like that, I ask. I wrote a piece on Nazi secret weapons some time ago, he says. I don't believe him.

Whatever their name, the rockets were ignorant and powerful brutes, banshees that screamed and roared at ear-damaging level — they must have heard our static trials in Mittelwald. The idea was to get the disk up using these roaring monsters; at a few hundred meters in height their empty casings would fall away, and the spin-up rockets would then take over, giving additional lift as well as the vital spin.

From the very first trial, they were a tremendous success. We took a trial disk up a perilous, unpaved track, skirting waterfalls and glaciated boulders as big as houses until we arrived at a plateau with a view of the Alps to die for. Bosch thought he could see the Führer's Berchtesgaden in the distance, but I wasn't so sure. It took two of us to slot the heavy banshees into place, with the disk held up by car jacks. We cleared off to the shelter of an ice-scored boulder and watched the full-scale model roar into the sky, the boosters drop off, and then the fantastic spin-up begin as the angled rockets took over. Even after these had died, the saucer glided on into the distance, weaving lazily from left to right as Best had predicted, and spraying out a blanket of yellow mist — we had dyed the water for visibility. And as the machine disappeared gracefully behind a distant hill, almost hovering and glinting in sunlight, we knew we were ready for the sarin.

Hess decided we would put anthrax in one of our saucers and sarin in the other two. Otto Klein was nervous about sarin — we all were — and asked for a colleague. Within days a man known only as Thomsen arrived from Hochwerk. He turned out to be about the same age and build as Klein, and equally devoid of humor. I thought that working with sarin maybe did that.

With the Reich collapsing about our ears, the three containment vessels finally arrived from Krupps, and Daniela finally got her wish: The Poles and Russians were allowed to sleep in the empty dormitory. I needed the laundry cleared to take the weapons, which were just too big to go into the convent. The big saucers filled the laundry room, and we had to remove some of the iron pillars supporting the roof. But it was too late to matter for the forced labor. The weather was warm, and the war would soon be over one way or another.

The babies were due for delivery and all that morning Hess had been seen everywhere at once. He had been spotted on Balthazar, riding far beyond the lake, at dawn. He had been in the library, in the refectory, in the chapel. He had walked halfway down the hairpin road and actually ran back up, puffing and red. And now at last, delivery was imminent. From the courtyard, we looked down at the army truck laboring up the mountain road, trailing black smoke. Bosch, Thomsen, and Myers were tiny figures standing next to the cable car. Hess gave a running commentary. He could hardly contain his excitement. "Here come our babies. Our beautiful babies!"

I could make out the truck halting at the cable car platform, and three soldiers jumping out. Then they were carefully unloading what looked like four milk churns and transferring them over to the waiting cable car. They seemed to be color-coded, two yellow and two blue. Then Bosch was scribbling his signature and the truck reversed and took off hastily back down the hill. I imagined that the soldiers were relieved to be shot of their perilous burden, safely delivered from Spandau. The wheel house whined, the cable tautened, and Hess started to pace up and down the courtyard agitatedly.

Edith was following the progress of the cable car through binoculars. It was about halfway up when she gave Hess a worried frown, then looked again. "Something's wrong."

"What?" Hess ran over and snatched the binoculars from her. We crowded together at the parapet. Someone had opened the cable car door and was on his knees at the edge of the void. It was Myers, swaying. Someone else — it looked like Thomsen — was trying to climb onto the roof. There was a thousand-meter drop below the car.

Thomsen's scrabbling increased the sway of the car. He was holding on to the roof while his legs dangled over space. The sway tipped Myers out, and we could only watch as he hurtled downward, picking up speed at a terrifying rate. One of the milk churns, a yellow one, rolled out after him, tumbling end over end. Thomsen, half on the roof, was using his elbows in a sort of lizard-like crawl, but he was sliding inexorably backward again, toward the edge. There was no sign of Bosch.

The milk churn overtook Myers on the way down, and his body fell into an exploding yellow-brown vapor before he smashed onto the rocks, making a little red splotch.

Thomsen, somehow, made it to the roof. He lay facedown, spread-eagled like a man in supplication to God. As the cable car approached, we could now see Bosch struggling to his feet. He stood upright and clutched tightly at a pole next to the open door, coughing, shaking violently, and staring up at us.

"Stop the car!" Hess screamed suddenly. Oberlin rushed toward the winch house. The car stopped, thirty meters short of its platform, swaying gently backward and forward, the taut cable creaking. Bosch, now gulping for air, stretched an arm toward us. He was sinking to his knees.

"Get your suits on!" Hess yelled, then dashed through the convent archway.

Far below, the vapor from the destroyed churn was rolling slowly over the ground, spreading and thinning. A light wind was drifting it inexorably in the direction of Mittelwald. I took off after Hess and caught up with him in the cloister. "The sarin's heading straight for Mittelwald."

"What the devil can I do about that?"

"Phone people. The church, the post office. Get the news around. Make people evacuate."

Hess stared wildly at me. "Are you mad? If people are warned, the news will get out."

"Hess, if you don't warn them, they'll die."

"The deed's done. We can't help them."

"The hell with you." I barged past Hess, heading for the director's office, one of only two with a telephone. The door was unlocked and the telephone was on the desk among a heap of papers. I would go through the operator. I lifted the receiver and was about to dial when I heard the distinct click of a gun hammer being cocked behind me. Oberlin at the door, a pistol pointing at my head, Aryan blue eyes holding no expression whatever.

Hess was behind Oberlin and his brow was damp with sweat. "If we warn Mittelwald now and people clear out, word will be around half of Bavaria by tomorrow and the Americans will be over us the day after. We'd be bombed to hell and the war would be lost. It has to be this way."

I put the receiver down carefully. Oberlin used a conciliatory tone. "Sensible fellow."

Bosch was gone by midday, shaking and gasping in the cable car, thirty meters away from us, Hess ignoring his desperate gestures to let the car into the station. Thomsen tried to climb onto the cable but slipped, fell, and slithered slowly along the the cable car roof, toward its edge. "Pull me in! Please!" he shouted frantically, staring and wild-eyed. But we just watched, mesmerized, as he kicked and scrabbled meters from us. He finally slid off the roof with a child-like wail and hurtled to his death.

Tables were set up with microscopes and agar cultures in the courtyard, the car was brought in, and Edith took swabs around the milk churns, stepping around Bosch's purple-faced corpse. In mid afternoon she raised her thumbs: The surviving milk churns were still hermetically sealed. We drenched everything with formaldehyde, but still none of us dared to take off our protective suits. The fourth milk churn, we inferred, had somehow developed a leak during transfer from the truck.

A small, tough, no-nonsense Unterfeldwebel ordered a platoon of gray-faced soldiers to load the churns onto the back of a truck. They did so sullenly, while Oberlin's fingers strayed around the holster of his pistol and the sergeant adopted an aggressive, snarling tone. Hess watched nervously. Edith set off down the hill with another platoon, and an hour later drove back with the smashed bodies of Myers and Thomsen in the back of an army truck. Bosch, too, was heaved into this truck, along with ninety liters of petrol brought in relays from the garage. Edith, Hess, Oberlin with her platoon, all in protective suits, again took off down the hill. Later that evening Daniela and I stood in the minaret and watched a column of black smoke rising from the forest below. It rose higher than the convent and generated a long black trail stretching to the horizon. The vapor heading for Mittelwald had become invisible by the time it reached the brow of the hill, from where it would by now have rolled over the village like a poisonous avalanche.

The next morning brought a thin crescent moon set in a deep blue dawn, and a distant burst of gunfire. Daniela was asleep, exhausted. I jumped out of bed and crossed quickly to the window, ignoring the icy breeze on my skin. It was coming from the direction of Mittelwald and I knew the rasp, too well. MP44 machine pistol, five hundred rounds a minute, utterly reliable; the soldier's favorite for close work. I returned to the warmth of Daniela's bed and lay on my back. The bursts were coming at thirty-second intervals. I stared at the ceiling for a long time after they had stopped.

THE SHEIK OF ARABY

"It's here." She might have been a condemned prisoner opening her eyes to her last day. She was in an ankle-length white dressing gown, looking out the leaded-glass window. The sound of a powerful engine was coming up from below. "It's arrived."

I threw the blankets back and wrapped a gown around myself. It was the sort of spring morning, sharp but sunny, that made me want to take Daniela into the hills and just disappear. We looked down at a huge articulated truck, trying to negotiate the steep hairpin bend into the convent. An overweight soldier was waving his arms ineffectually at the driver, and the truck was shuddering. "We've got to get out of this, Daniela." We'd had this conversation before, too often.

"We? You're all right, Max. You're safe."

"What does that mean?"

She stroked my unshaven chin. "For you, the war's almost over. You survived. When it's finally done, you'll go back to your estate. You'll meet some nice Aryan girl, get married, have three blond kids."

"Daniela …"

"Hush!" Touching my lips. "Someday you'll have grandchildren. I'll become a distant memory, some war time romance. As time goes by, you'll even forget what I looked like. You know, Max, you might even make it to the twenty-first century? Do you think von Steiner's right? That people will have walked on the moon? Or will they have cars that fly? I wonder what music will be like then? You'll know. Me, I'll be gone by next week."

I ran a hand around the back of her neck, underneath her hair, pulled her gently toward me, kissed a damp cheek. "There's got to be some way out of this. I'll find it while you're gone."

"But Max, don't you see? I won't be coming back."

She's right. As soon as she's delivered the goods in the submarine pen, she's finished. "Jump ship somewhere between here and there. You only need to hang out a short while. The war's nearly over. Even if they hit the big cities with the Furies …"

The Prussian soldier again, doing the corridor. Knock knock. "Breakfast in thirty minutes." Knock knock. "Breakfast in thirty minutes …"

"God help his family after the war," Daniela said, and started to giggle.

Her last night in the convent, and Daniela defied the moon.

She played the forbidden music for hours. Hot music, blues, swing, even the bebop that was sweeping through the American radio stations that we all listened to illegally. The atonal rhythms preached subversion in every corridor and cloister of the convent. Around three, I could just make out her voice, singing in English.

Against spirit like that, my own stance was derisory.

THE RED CROSS PARCEL

Hess was on a high. "This is a great day," he declared, waving bratwurst on his fork. His plate was laden with sausages, tomatoes, eggs — two fried — and landbrot, baked to perfection in the kitchen early that morning.

"So, where are our little Furies headed?" Klein asked. "And don't tell us that's forbidden knowledge."

"You can't be told." Hess smirked. "It's forbidden knowledge."

"After all we've done?"

"My guess is New York for Megaera, the Hague for Alecto, and London for Tisiphone," Edith suggested. "Am I right, Director?"

Hess smiled knowingly and said nothing. Von Steiner said, "Wherever, we know they have to make their way to U-boats. That means a trip to the far north."

"What about Berlin for all three?" I suggested.

Edith said, "Don't spoil the atmosphere, Max."

Hess sighed. "I'm tired of warning you about that kind of joke."

Joke? I stayed silent.

Nobody was taking chances. Not with the Furies. We wheeled Megaera out of the laundry at dawn, lashed down in chains like a drugged King Kong. We raised her gingerly with a heavy crane, using wooden poles to control her swaying, while Hess fussed like a fearful old spinster, his voice shrill with tension. We lowered her onto the flatbed as if she were full of nitroglycerin. Alecto and Tisiphone followed.

Welders now got busy constructing a steel box around the Furies. All we could do was watch and try to keep our nerve as they clambered around the Furies with welding equipment and big boots. A gang of grenadiers draped the box in tarpaulin and wrapped it in ropes. Then an elderly sign writer, hauled out of Munich in the early hours, made a scaffold from ladders and planks. By noon he had written hochwerk medikament on the side of the tarpaulin and painted a red cross alongside the words. It looked like a giant Red Cross parcel.

"Krafft!" Hess, in long black leather coat and boots, waved from the archway. He was slapping his thigh impatiently with leather gloves. I walked over. Walked — in the old days I marched and saluted. My stomach felt queasy; maybe it was the heavy breakfast, maybe not. "Krafft, my office, now."

We cut smartly across the quadrangle and into Hess's office, which after two years we still called the bishop's procuratory. The atmosphere was thick with hostility, and I didn't give a damn.

"Change of plan," Hess snapped. "I've just had a call from Berlin. You are to accompany the Furies in place of von Steiner."

"Why?"

"I don't question my orders and neither should you. All you need to know is that von Steiner stays, you go."

"What are you up to, Kurt?"

Hess stared at me with open hostility. "I suppose, at this late stage, there's no point in asking you to address me properly. I've put up with your unruliness, your defeatism, and your treasonable talk for long enough. You only got this far because we needed you. Well, Maximilian von Krafft, shortly I will no longer need you. It's something to bear in mind before your next bout of impertinence."

"I'm sorry, I don't know what you're getting at."

Hess put on his high-peaked cap and grew by five centimeters. "Hopefully you won't be needed. But suppose something went wrong, like a derailment. We couldn't have a lot of ignorant clodhopping railwaymen thumping and banging at the Furies. Or if something happened to Daniela."

"What could happen to Daniela?"

"Von Steiner knows aerodynamics but nothing else. No, we need somebody on hand who understands what we're dealing with. Well, come on, Krafft, grab some overnight stuff, they're waiting for us."

The convoy was waiting, a motorbike with a machine gun on its sidecar leading, followed by a black six-seater Horsch, and then the truck with the Furies, and then a lorry-load of Waffen-SS, and finally an armored car, swastika on its side. Hess settled in beside the driver of the Horsch, and I sat beside Daniela, facing Klein and Edith. Hess tapped the driver's shoulder with his gloves, the driver touched the car horn, the motorcyclist took off, and the trek got under way.

Halfway down the mountain road, I had a last backward look at the convent, my home for the last two years. It had dwindled to insignificance against the massive gray Alps.

Good-bye, Sister Lucy.

That evening, in a railway siding outside Munich, the Red Cross parcel with the hochwerk medikament sign was hoisted on a crane and swung carefully over onto open wagons while a dozen SS men with submachine guns surrounded the operation. A troop of soldiers — boys and old men — were assigned to the open wagons, squeezing between anti-aircraft guns. We climbed aboard somebody's private train, pulled by a heavy locomotive, and spread ourselves around warm carriages that would have done credit to the Orient Express. The boys and old men sat in the freezing wind outside.

The journey took three days. Hess was in a permanent state of excitement. In the evenings, in the bar, he drank to excess. And why not? We were going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, halt the enemy in his tracks, defeat the forces of world Jewry, and save civilization from Bolshevism. And he, Kurt Hess, had led this history-making project.

And all this time, in the dining car, in the toilets, in the private compartments, Daniela and I looked for a way out. There was none. When it was moving, the train trundled along at a steady forty kilometers an hour through flat countryside, almost featureless apart from the occasional farm. There was literally no place to run. Once, overnight, we trundled slowly through a big switching yard stuffed with endless lines of immobile freight cars. Whether the rails had been destroyed, or the trains had no fuel, I don't know. But it was becoming clear that the Third Reich was in process of collapse.

From time to time the train would stop. Always, when this happened, the old men and boys would jump on to the tracks, pointing submachine guns out over empty fields. Once it stopped in a tunnel for half an hour, to avoid the attentions of what Hess called "terror bombers."

More ominously, apart from our private compartments, we were never out of sight of black-uniformed SS men, smoking in the corridors, gazing out windows at the dull countryside, chatting. Never once looking in our direction. I began to think Daniela and I both were under surveillance. And I had a hardening suspicion that she was right, that I would be joining her in whatever fate was waiting at the end of the journey.

I went over and over the points in my head. The sudden change of plan, replacing von Steiner with me. Hess's hatred for me, now quite open. Daniela and Hess and me, the age-old triangle, except that Hess had abruptly gone cold on her after the Goering visit. Daniela the Jewess: Hess must have been told by now. They can get me under the race laws. For the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.

It made too much sense.

It was midnight on the second night when I answered a tap at my door. Daniela, in her white dressing gown, carrying a tray of coffee, croissants, and, incongruously, a box of matches and a menu card. She was wearing lipstick, slightly smudged, which threw the pale complexion of her face into contrast, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. She looked as if she hadn't slept since the convent.

She flopped down on the bed opposite mine. "Can we talk?"

"Are there microphones, do you mean? Of course not. Anyway, what do we have to hide?" While I was speaking, I was shaking my head. "Pour the coffee, would you?" I scribbled on the back of the menu card: 800 kms, Munich to Denmark. Probably there day after tomorrow.

She took the card and my pen. "Two sugars, right? Real sugar." While she was speaking she wrote: Denmark? Are we heading there?

"It's been a long slog, but if these weapons work, it will have been worth it." Either Denmark or the submarine pens at Bergen. Bergen is double the distance. If it's Bergen we could contact the Norwegian resistance, they might take us over the mountains to Sweden.

"I asked the steward to heat the croissants. How's yours?" What if it's Denmark?

"It's fine, thanks, hot all the way through." I don't know.

"I hope you don't mind my calling in like this. I just needed a little company." This is my problem. You don't have to do this.

"I think you should get some sleep. You want to be at your best for priming the Furies." We were running out of space on the card. Of course I have to do this, you beautiful idiot. We'll just have to grab a chance when we can get it.

"You're right. Do you mind if I smoke? Then I'll get out."

"Smoke away. I'll join you." I scribbled Je t'aime. The matchbox had the eagle-and-swastika insignia and was no doubt made for some minister or high Nazi official. Daniela lit a match and held it to the corner of the card. We watched it burn to ash. She saved Je t'aime to the last.

Hess tapped a breakfast plate noisily with a spoon. "Ladies and gentlemen. Heil Hitler! I can now reveal our destination. In one hour we will be approaching Hamburg. Unfortunately the bombers have destroyed much of the rail network around that fine city, not to mention the city itself. We will therefore have to detour through Lubeck. Once past Lubeck, we will have a straight run to our destination." He paused dramatically. "Denmark. Flensburg, to be exact. To be even more exact, the Flensburger Schiffau construction yard."

"When will we arrive?" Klein asked.

"Our estimated time of arrival is half past two this afternoon. There will be no leisure time. We'll have to load our little toys into three U-boats this evening, with bows specially adapted to take them. Once loaded, Daniela will prime the Furies under my supervision. And when that has been done, our work is over. Our brave Wolves, and the Führer, will take care of the rest. We can all look forward to a wonderful victory."

I asked, "Will we have time for sightseeing in Denmark?"

"Sightseeing in Denmark? Sightseeing in Denmark? We are about to win the war for the Reich, open up a new golden age, and you ask, do we have time for sightseeing in Denmark?" Hess was ham-acting, eyes wide and mouth open and raising the pitch of his voice to demonstrate his incredulity. My training sergeant again. "No, Krafft, you will not have time for sightseeing. And in case you are unaware of it, there are no mountains to climb in Denmark. The train will return us to Berlin, where it is wanted. After that we will have to use ordinary trains, like the rest of humanity."

Except for Daniela and me. We'll be in some other form of transport. I glanced at her across the table. She gave me a tense little smile. And I glanced at the clock at the head of the restaurant car.

Half past eight. Estimated time of arrival half past two. And not a chink of light in the tunnel.

KIEL CANAL

Here and there, in the distance, I saw long streams of trucks. They were heading south. I could make no strategic sense of that: No doubt our beloved Führer was directing operations. Near the Kiel canal, the railtrack cut across a road. An endless convoy of lorries, interspersed with mud-spattered panzers, field guns, and trucks, had stopped at the level crossing. Some troops, exhausted and filthy, were relieving themselves at the roadside. Daniela waved but nobody waved back. I thought, Soldiers who don't return the wave of a pretty girl have reached the end of the rope. We drank coffee morosely in the restaurant car. A couple of SS men were playing cards at the next table. Always ignoring us; never eye contact.

Just before noon, the rhythm of the train began to change; it was slowing down. We exchanged glances, stood up casually, and left the car. I didn't dare to look toward the SS men, not even a glance. At the end of the carriage, we pulled down the window of the door and looked out. Icy air air blew in, mixed with the sulfurous smell of the cheap braunkohle they were burning these days. Daniela's hair got in my eyes, and we changed places. A child waved from a back garden. We were approaching some suburban station. We looked at each other: Was this an opportunity?

Four men waiting on the platform, Gestapo written all over them.

"Bitte." This from behind me. One of the SS men, tall and thin, with round spectacles that made him look like a teacher or librarian. We stepped back as the train squealed to a halt. The SS man stepped off and spoke briefly to the Gestapo men. The spark of hope died. Daniela and I got back to our half-cold coffees. The Gestapo men came into the car, began to overflow the seats, got into noisy chat with the officers, lit cigarettes, ordered coffees. Daniela now got a fair share of glances. It might be the usual attention paid to a strikingly beautiful woman, except for the hardness around the eyes and the turned-down mouths. Or was it my imagination? My throat was parched.

Daniela leaned forward and whispered: "My guardian angels."

"And mine."

She gripped my hands. She was cold. "I don't have much longer, Max."

U-BOAT PEN

Hess was being important. "Dress warmly, people, it's chilly out there. Leave your things — we'll be back on board tonight if Daniela does her job properly."

In my compartment, I took out my SS major's uniform. I have no idea why I'd taken it along. I hadn't worn it for two years. I put it on and looked at the stranger in a full-length mirror, and I didn't know what to think. Maybe it was the sense that, whatever fate was waiting for me, I would meet it as a German soldier.

Then we were spilling out into the corridor. There was an air of excitement. Edith was jumping up and down on the spot, as if she were skipping. For the last hour the train had been trundling along beside the sea. It was ambling now, little more than twenty kilometers an hour. There was the occasional whiff of seaweed, or fish. There was a sprinkling of small pastel-colored houses, boating huts, and even the occasional fishing boat on a jetty. We could easily have jumped out. But the ground was flat and open, and we would have been spotted immediately by the soldiers guarding the Furies. Childhood images of holidays by the sea kept jumping into my head. I found them hard to reconcile with the knowledge that Daniela and I were perhaps reaching the end of our lives.

And now the train was almost crawling, and tall fencing topped with barbed wire was lining the track. We passed a field gun and a searchlight battery, neither of them manned. Finally, with a squeal of brakes and a clack-clack-clack of buffers, the train came to halt.

Someone in a railwayman's uniform opened a carriage door from outside and heaved himself up, accompanied by a fat, purple-faced soldier in his fifties. There was a lot of chatter, and then Hess was shouting, "Out! Everybody out!"

An opportunity?

Not a chance. A Gestapo man was helping Daniela off the train. Dozens of people were milling around outside: civilians, Wehrmacht soldiers, over-the-hill guards, SS men, a few female clerks with notepads.

The Flensburger yard was a different proposition from Hamburg: It was smaller, less claustrophobic, and the U-boats were apparently assembled inside what looked like huge wooden huts, hardly Lancaster-proof. The scientists were conducted along the railway track toward one of these huts. Four Gestapo men were with us. Workers — civilians, maybe forced labor — were starting to uncouple the flatbeds from the train under the eyes of soldiers with submachine guns.

Inside, it was cold and echoey, and rows of high, piercing lights provided the illumination, harsh after the gentle light of day. Here the smell of seaweed was mixed with diesel and hot oil. There were four U-boats, two on each side of a rectangle of deep black water. I had the same tingling feeling that I'd experienced at Hamburg. No question, the sight of those sleek, sinister ships brought out some atavistic feeling, some triumphalism — patriotic pride even — that I now felt uncomfortable with. A thick cable led from a massive, throbbing generator into the bowels of the nearest boat. From the dockside, the conning tower of the boat was surprisingly high; a smiling shark was painted on its side. The dockside was heaped with supplies. Sailors were throwing massive tins of food from these piles to others on the decks of the boats, and they in turn were throwing them down an open hatch. They had developed an efficient rhythm.

Someone with an air of authority — at least he had a beard and a high-peaked cap with the Reich Eagle insignia — approached the huddled scientists. "Keep together, and keep out of the way." His tone seemed unduly hostile. Keeping out of the way wasn't so easy, as small electric trucks were buzzing to and fro along the length of the dockside. For a while, fascinated by the activity, I almost forgot my situation.

"We're on!" Hess was clapping his hands. HOCHWERK MEDIKAMENT had appeared at the far end of the hut. Strips of black and dangling material, intended to keep curious eyes from the interior, were being pushed aside as the flatbeds were shunted slowly into the interior. Suddenly clouds of steam and stinking smoke were filling the hut. Somebody was shouting "Schnell! Schnell!" and waving. We all backed up as the flatbeds approached. And then, with a shudder, the uncoupled train disappeared back out, and sailors got busy with hoists.

"Mein Gott! Have a care!" Hess shouted as Megaera swung alarmingly under the crane.

"Excuse me." The bearded harbormaster — I could think of no other term for him — turned to Hess in high dudgeon. "I'll look after the loading, if you please."

"It mustn't be allowed to swing like that. You don't know what's inside it."

"Can it be worse than Amatol?"

"I think it would be as well if you read this." Hess produced a letter. The harbormaster scanned it, and then shrugged sourly as if to say It's your funeral.

The loading took two hours, about twice as long as it would have taken if the sailors had been allowed to get on with it. Hess, however, with the authority to supervise the loading and the documentation to back him up, fussed like an excited old maid. By the time three U-boats were loaded through the specially designed forward hatches, I had forgotten all about the cold. The beads of sweat on my brow and back were a mixture of physical exertion, nervous tension as the Furies swung alarmingly under Hess's incompetent directions, and a gut-wrenching apprehension about Daniela's future and my own. And all through the loading, the Gestapo men stood quietly in the shadows, watching.

PRIMING THE FURIES

It was dark outside now, and cold. The U-boats were slowly sinking against the dockside as fuel was taken onboard. At this level I could see more of the sail. It was revealing twin twenty-millimeter cannons, front and back, and an impressive array of sensors: the periscope, what looked like a sonar, a big metal DF loop, a long, thin high-frequency wire antenna, several short rod antennae. It was an imposing display of devices for radio traffic, much of it no doubt gratefully intercepted by the British.

The loading of provisions had finished. Most of the sailors were already inside the boats. At the far end of the hut, on the fourth submarine — the one without a Fury — the submariners were lined up at attention on the deck while some officer addressed them.

Now the chains were being pulled out of the "Furies hatch." The man with the beard approached. "We're ready for you." Hess nodded and waved fingers imperiously at Daniela. I watched nervously as the captain, Daniela, Hess, and a sailor carrying a toolbox crossed the narrow gangplank and disappeared through an access door at the side of the sail. I knew that, once the Furies were primed, Daniela's usefulness was gone. Anything could happen in there. She could slip and crack her skull. A gun could discharge accidentally. Anything.

It was Daniela's first time inside a submarine. Her first impression was one of warmth, after the bitter cold of the wooden hut. The captain turned. "Watch your head." Her second impression was one of congestion and narrowness. There were no concessions to human comfort here; no vases of flowers, no wallpaper, no subdued lighting. There was only a confusing mass of overhead pipes, circular handles and dials, interspersed with hanging sacks of onions, potatoes, and every sort of fruit. It smelled like a fruit shop, but this was a killing machine, pure and simple.

A killing machine manned by sex maniacs, it seemed. She ran a gauntlet of lewd grins and sotto voce comments between the crews. One or two of the older men looked less than happy; Daniela assumed she was bad luck on board, as if they needed it.

"We had to take out some bunks," the captain explained. They were in the forward torpedo room, but it was empty of torpedoes. Oilskins were hanging along either side, and they had to step over wooden chests. But there she was at the far end, a gleaming aluminium saucer taking up almost the full width of the room. Megaera, come to save the Reich.

"How long will this take?" The captain had an impatient tone.

Hess looked at Daniela expectantly. She thought, fifteen minutes. Something made her say, "Half an hour."

"Try to do it in fifteen minutes," the captain suggested.

Hess grew red-faced, began to splutter, but the captain interrupted sharply. "We should have been at sea by now. If you had left the loading to us."

"Forgive me, Captain," Daniela said, "but I'd like you to clear everyone out of the torpedo room now. Only Colonel Hess and I should be here." The captain gave her a sour look. No doubt he resented being ordered away on his own ship, by a woman at that; he surely resented heading into the Atlantic naked.

"Okay, get busy." Hess was licking his lips. He loosened his coat and pulled out a short-nosed pistol.

"What are you playing at?"

"If you make any mistakes I'll shoot you."

Now he produced a small, red hard-backed notebook. He stepped behind Daniela. She became conscious of his breathing, almost in her ear.

"You always were a bundle of fun, Kurt."

"No matter, Jewess." It was out.

"I felt like a whore with a customer, that night."

"You were."

"You coupled like a rabbit."

"Bitch."

"And you smelled."

"And you whored for nothing. Your little Dutch boy got it in the neck a month later."

The priming of Megaera was a simple operation, but it carried the potential for catastrophe. Hess handed over a key. Daniela took it over her shoulder and used it to open a small hatch at eye level. Opening this hatch swiveled the combination lock outward and exposed a space the size of a biscuit tin. The metal at the back of this space contained two coin-sized portholes, one made of thick green glass, one of red. The space was sealed off from the Fury's deadly interior; it had been flushed out repeatedly with hydrazine to remove any trace of spores, or a drop that might have evaporated into the small airspace of the hatch, waiting for Daniela to breathe.

To unleash the Fury, it was only necessary to break the red glass.

All that Daniela now had to do was turn the lock to three numbers, one at a time, clicking a toothed wheel into its correct place after each number. Hess opened his notebook and spoke the first number, clearly, repeating it to make sure there was no error. The numbers were Daniela's in the first place, and were emblazoned in her mind. It was just that, at this stage, any mistake could not be rectified and would deactivate the weapon forever. Her hand was trembling. She turned the wheel — click click click click — and said, "First number done." She found that she was breathing heavily.

Hess gave the second number, repeating it clearly. Click click click click. "Done." And the third number. Finally, she gave the external knob a few random turns.

The numbers were in. The next stage was to arm the detonator. This was a comically antiquated device, in essence a miniature crossbow. The whole apparatus was set inside a little metal box, painted red and welded to the inside of the hatch door. Hess handed over a second key and watched carefully as Daniela inserted it in the box and turned it, as if she were winding up a grandfather clock. There was a ratcheting sound, like something being wound up, and a sharp-tipped metal bolt, also red-painted, was being pulled slowly backward, sinking into a hole in the box. Inside this box, a little steel hook clicked neatly into a notch on the bolt, holding it back. She heard a distinct, double click-clack as it locked into place.

The bolt was now under terrific pressure from a steel strip pulled back like a bow. It was important that the steel hook stayed in the notch. If it were to lose its grip — say, if the Fury were to suffer a heavy fall — the bolt would fire, breaking the glass and unleashing Megaera. By setting the numbers, the operator who was to fire the device would pull the hook away from the notch, firing the weapon with incalculable effects for him, except for one simple device: an alarm clock timer. The agent who primed the bomb would wind the timer up with a key and set it according to his own circumstances.

It was eighteenth-century clockmaker stuff. Daniela was perversely proud of it while knowing what it would unleash. The duplicate mechanism, with everything painted green, would come into play if the wrong numbers were set. If the wrong numbers were set, a different bolt would fire, a green one, penetrating the green porthole and bursting through sacs of caustic chemicals. These would mix, creating a high-pressure foam that would neutralize the sarin or destroy the anthrax spores, depending on which of the Furies was involved. Should Megaera be captured, the enemy who experimented with the combination lock would destroy her, and so the Fury could never be turned against her creators.

The operator had to get the numbers right. First time.

The last part: booby-trap the hatch. Daniela slipped a hook at the end of a piece of fishing line into a hoop on the inside of the door. Now all she had to do was close the door. Once closed, she could never open it again. If she did, the fishing line would fire the green bolt and destroy the Fury.

The act of closing the door pointed the bolts, armed and ready to fire like crossbows, directly at the little glass portholes. She found that she was trembling. She turned to Hess, who was licking his lips. "I'm ready to close."

"Everything checked?"

"Of course."

"Do it."

The hatch door clicked shut. Megaera was ready and waiting. Hess put his pistol away, tucked the notebook into an inside pocket, and buttoned up his leather coat.

"Have you received your instructions yet, Captain?"

"In my safe. They'll be opened at sea. Why?"

"Until you read them, you must keep your crew out of the forward torpedo room. I have to insist on that."

The captain put his face within a foot of Hess's. "It may have escaped your notice, but there's not a lot of room on board a submarine. My crew need to sleep somewhere and you've already taken up half their sleeping space with your damned saucer. If they can't bunk down in the torpedo room, they'll have to sleep standing up."

"I'm so sorry, Captain, I don't wish to intrude on your domain. But I think you'll find that your instructions are clear on the matter."

"Forgive me if I seem a little resentful. But how come you know more than I do about my sailing orders?"

The tension that had lined Hess's face was replaced by a smile of glorious superiority. "Admiral Donitz and I drew them up."

ARREST

The officer emerged briskly from the U-boat, followed by Daniela, with Hess taking up the rear. She managed a glance in my direction, but I could read nothing into her expression. The trio marched quickly toward the second U-boat and disappeared into the open access door.

"Come on, come on, Daniela," Klein said, making a big thing of flapping his arms and stamping his feet. Beyond the hut, the sea was now black, and it was hard to make out where sky ended and ocean began. The breeze circulating around the big building had acquired a distinct chill.

Unaccountably, I felt the hairs prickling on the back of my neck. I looked around. The four Gestapo men were huddled together with Oberlin, making no conversation. Two of them were smoking. There were NICHTRAUCHER signs everywhere, but nobody was pointing them out. One of them glanced at me and grinned. Another smiling shark.

I wondered when they'd make the arrest. When Daniela had finished the arming? Or would they let her take the train, all unsuspecting, back to Berlin?

There was a few minutes'distraction as sailors suddenly poured out of the nearest U-boat. Commands were shouted, ropes cast off. Then the submariners stood briefly to attention. For the first time I saw their individual faces in the stark overhead lighting, saw them as farm boys, students, apprentices; but then at a sharp word of command they disappeared back into the boat as quickly as they had emerged. Within seconds the U-boat was slipping out quietly, leaving a wake that reflected back from the opposite quay: the days of brass bands and tossed bunches of flowers were long gone. Next stop some quiet coastline on Maine or Ireland. I watched the U-boat disappear into the dark. The wake was still sloshing backward and forward in the hut, making complicated patterns on the oily water.

Daniela reemerged between the officers as before, as if they were expecting her to run away. They disappeared into the third submarine.

Klein was now blowing into his hands, continuing the big Arctic Cold performance. The second U-boat, the one carrying Alecto, followed the first into the Baltic. Presumably heading for the Kiel canal, I thought, and then out into the Atlantic.

Daniela and her minders finally emerged from the last submarine. Alive, but her usefulness at an end. There was an exchange of conversation, and Hess was handing over a sheet of paper. The bearded officer signed it, using Hess's back as a prop, and then Hess was waving imperiously at us and heading toward the exit, Daniela beside him. On the track, soldiers guided us with torches. For some reason, the image of a Viking funeral jumped into my head. Ahead, I could see the orange glow from the locomotive's fire; they had turned the train around. And I could make out silhouettes about fifty meters ahead: presumably Daniela in the company of Hess and Oberlin, flanked by soldiers. Edith and Klein were together with me, and the Gestapo were somewhere behind us, taking up the rear like shepherding dogs.

"It's done, Max," Edith said excitedly. She was like a girl on her first date. "We did it."

We did it. I looked at the expanse of blackness on my left. There was nothing to be seen. But somewhere out there, the Sisters of the Night were on their way. I couldn't resolve the contradictions in my head: an immense pride in the creation of the wonderful monsters, and a guilty awareness of the horrors they would unleash.

"Yes, we did it. With what outcome, I wonder?" Klein asked.

We were speaking obliquely, aware of the soldiers and policemen around us, but aware also that our creations might change the course of history. Edith said, "Now we just wait and see."

I turned to the Gestapo man behind me. "What are you people doing here?"

"You are von Krafft, right?"

"Yes. I asked a question."

The man gave a sardonic grin. "But why do you ask the question? Maybe you have something on your conscience, von Krafft?"

I literally put my tongue between my teeth; answering Yes, the Third Reich, wouldn't go down well in a People's Court.

Desperation was now building up inside me. Somewhere, I'd heard rumors that Danish fishermen smuggled spies and Jews across to Sweden. I had a brief vision of walking ahead, collecting Daniela, disappearing off the track, and vanishing unseen into the darkness. But Daniela was with Hess and I knew it was just a hopeless fantasy.

"Smell that food!" Klein was sniffing the air like a hungry dog. We walked alongside the carriages to a flight of steps and pulled ourselves aboard. It was gloriously warm, and the smell of something roasting permeated the corridor. I joined the drift toward the dining car — there was no opportunity to do anything else, and anyway Daniela would be up ahead.

An opportunity at last? I was in fear that my tension would reflect in my face, that the thumping in my heart could be heard everywhere. In the dining car the SS men were milling around haphazardly, soaking up the heat, chattering; with their duty done, they were relaxed and expansive, maybe even careless. A long table had been covered with a white lace tablecloth and set with assorted delicacies. No Daniela. She'd passed through, clever girl. Klein, holding a sausage on a cocktail stick, looked as if he wanted to say something, but I pretended not to notice and pushed casually — casually! — toward the far end of the car.

Past the kitchens, buzzing with action, chefs sweating and swearing, sausages sizzling in a big pan, somebody basting a chicken, somebody else chop-chopping carrots at speed. Nobody noticed me. Along to the next corridor, the one with the bedrooms. Corridor empty, nobody in sight, I'm alone.

We can do this. We can clear the train, find a boat, vanish.

My whole skin is clammy. I tap at Daniela's door. It's unlocked. I turn the handle and step in. Daniela is sitting, pale and upright, on the couch. Oberlin is standing over her with a gun. There is a second man in the compartment, in civilian clothes. He's round-faced and bald, and is wearing thick-lensed spectacles. He has a beer belly and a waxy complexion; probably too old and too unhealthy for the army. He, too, has a gun. It's a standard-issue Walther, out of my reach, and he's pointing it at me almost apologetically. Too many guns. Nothing I can do. He nods toward the couch. I sit down beside Daniela. I feel gutted. Only when I'm seated do Oberlin and the fat civilian sit down, across from us.

Hess slides in and surveys the cameo at leisure. A broad smile spreads over his face. He shuts the door, turns the lock, and sits down with a happy sigh next to Oberlin. He is practically glowing with triumph.

The civilian adopts a clipped, formal tone. The big man, the important official. "Herr Maximilian von Krafft, I am arresting you under Section Two of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor of 1935."

I no longer care. "Verpiss Dich." His face grows purple with outrage.

Oberlin, in his smooth tone, the one he likes to use for intimidation: "We know about your background, Miss Bauer. You are the offspring of a relationship between your father and a Jewess."

Daniela laughs lightly. "My dear Oberlin, I look forward to your grovelling when this is sorted out. But it won't save you. My father will have you disemboweled."

"We have to be careful," Oberlin admits. "But you see, your father married the Jewess before September 15, 1935. That means Section One, forbidding marriages between Jews and German nationals, doesn't apply to him. Your father is in the clear. Your mother, of course, is a different matter. She has defiled the race by marrying an Aryan, as have you by coupling with Krafft here. However, I agree that if Papa finds his wife and daughter are in deep shit, he could well go on some sort of rampage, which could be embarrassing if not downright dangerous for us. Our best defense is keeping your father unaware until the deed is done."

"Max and I aren't married."

"No married couple ever performed like the pair of you." Microphones, the bastard. "However it doesn't save him. Section Two forbids not only marriage between Jews and Germans, but also relations outside marriage. Krafft would have to face a People's Court on that account alone."

Did they hear the pillow talk, the treason? If they did, I'll hang. They used piano wire and a butcher's hook for the July conspirators.

Hess takes a big puff. He is transported, loving the show. "You know, Max, I've dreamed of this for a very long time, and I'm loving every minute of it."

The fool is overconfident. But there are still too many guns. "You're still a failure, Kurt. What the Americans would call a Mickey Mouse. You're full of ice worlds and Atlantis and Aryans and scheisse."

Hess flushes, but then the beatific smile comes back. "Maybe so, Max, maybe so. But I've got you by the balls and I'm squeezing."