Vengeance 10

Holland – Germany December 1944

Franz Bethwig dived for the slit trench as the Mustang leapt over the hedge. Four distinct lines of machine-gun bullets raced across the frozen mud towards the V-2 squatting on its erector. As he plopped into the mud there was a dull boom and a flash that lit the waning afternoon. Pieces of metal showered the area, and when he dared raise his head above the lip of the trench, the rocket, its erector, and the firing and tracking caravan were little more than flaming masses of twisted metal.

An officer ran towards him shouting, trying to make himself heard above the blowtorch roar of flaring alcohol. His message was clear enough, and Bethwig vaulted from the trench and dived into the woods, while more aircraft raced in to drop their bomb loads and machine-gun the launch site.

Franz stumbled to a halt and sank down beside the trunk of a fallen beech. He huddled into himself, breath rasping, and stared dully into the declining twilight while the explosions went on and on. Somehow during the headlong run he had tom his army overcoat so that it gaped along one shoulder. He had also twisted an ankle.

A stiffening wind was getting up, and a few desultory snowflakes drifted past. Aircraft raids had become a way of life to V-2 launch crews. No matter how far they retreated into Holland, American Mustangs and Thunderbolts and British Spitfires and Typhoons sought them out. They always came like that, he thought, low over the forest so that they seemed to jump down on to the launching area, their only warning a snarling engine and stuttering machine-guns. The launch crews were so thoroughly demoralised that the SS had found it necessary to add a contingent of guards to stop the high rate of desertion. Just in the past two weeks there had been three executions within his own battalion. Two SS guards had been found with their throats cut, victims of army retaliation. Bad feelings between SS and army troops were developing into open warfare. No SS man dared walk about by himself, even in daylight.

The light was fading fast, and Bethwig knew that he should find his way back to the assembly point before darkness fell completely. He fumbled for a cigarette, found one that was comparatively dry, and lit it, shielding the match against the wind. He drew the smoke into his lungs and coughed; the tobacco was foul and musty-tasting. He stared at the glowing end with distaste but did not snuff it out.

‘You in there! Come out immediately and with your hands up.’ Startled, Bethwig peered through the branches to see two men in dark overcoats and coal-scuttle helmets watching him. One had a rifle levelled.

He muttered a curse and fought his way out of the tangle of branches to glimpse the lightning-bolt device on one man’s collar. ‘SS!’ His voice dripped contempt.

The tall one smirked. ‘Another deserter, Clement.’

Bethwig shook his head. ‘I am a civilian, an army employee. And you have no jurisdiction.’

‘Is that so.’

Bethwig could identify the rank now; the tall one was a sturmmann and the other an SS-mann, equivalent to lance corporal and private, respectively, in the army.

The sturmmann reached forward to rub the material of Bethwig’s torn greatcoat between his fingers. ‘This looks like an army issue to me.’

Bethwig knocked his hand away. ‘It is, you idiot.’ He unbuttoned the coat and flung it open. ‘But no uniform underneath.’

‘Not so unusual. Most deserters get rid of their uniforms as quickly as possible. They think to fool us that way.’

Bethwig shook his head in disgust. They were one of the SS patrols detailed to search behind the front lines for deserters. Soldiers caught away from their units without proper authorisation were summarily executed by men like these.

‘We are at least twenty kilometres from the front lines. Are you two skulking back here because there is no one to shoot at you?’ The private chuckled. ‘For someone about to be shot, your mouth certainly flaps a lot.’

Bethwig snorted. ‘I am an engineer assigned to a V-Two launch team, B company. Four hundred eighty-fifth Battalion, about a kilometre from here. It was shot up twenty minutes ago by an Allied aircraft.’

‘And so you ran away?’ the other sneered.

‘Of course, you fool. Those are standing orders, written by SS General Kammler himself. The Allied aircraft always try to kill as many of the launch crew as possible. The general’s orders are to scatter and return to a specified assembly point within sixty minutes. We have few enough trained technicians as it is.’

The sturmmann laughed. ‘Well, if that is the case, the Four hundred eighty-fifth is about to be one fewer.’ He looked around the clearing. ‘This spot is as good as any, I suppose.’

He undid the holster flap and drew his Walther pistol. Bethwig was so cold and exhausted that for a moment his actions did not register. To be shot almost seemed a welcome idea, but he forced himself to make the effort.

‘You damned fool. How do you think you will explain my execution to your superiors?’

‘Quite simply. We complete the report forms when we return to our unit. Whatever we say is accepted. Right, Clement?’ The SS-mann nodded in solemn agreement.

Oddly enough, Bethwig felt absolutely no fear, only curiosity as to the outcome, and he could not decide if this was a result of exhaustion or self-confidence. ‘You do have to submit the executed prisoner’s identification tags and paybook, do you not?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then before you shoot, you had better search me. You aren’t going to find either.’

The sturmmann shrugged, it is not unusual.’

‘What you will find are my identification papers that show clearly I am an employee of the Army Weapons Research Centre, now under the direction of the SS. I report directly to General Kammler and through him to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.’ He tilted his head to one side as the man released the safety.

‘You really should check, you know. If I am killed you and your friend are liable to hang – from a meat hook. Himmler prefers that method of execution, I am told.’

The other SS trooper, Clement, put a hand on his companion’s arm. ‘Wait. I think we had better check, just to make certain. What if he isn’t lying?’

He pushed Bethwig’s arms up, yanked open his coat, and searched until he found the wallet and dragged it out. Using his electric torch, he examined Bethwig’s papers.

‘See, just as he said.’

The sturmmann shook his head. ‘Probably forgeries. ‘I’m cold, damn it. ‘I’m going to shoot him now, and then we are going back…’

Clement shook his head, if these papers are correct, we will hang. If not, we can shoot him later.’ He turned to Bethwig. ‘Where is this assembly point? Will there be anyone there to identify you?’

Bethwig nodded. ‘Of course. In the village of Vreden.’

The sturmmann muttered to himself, but Clement shoved Bethwig around. ‘Get started.’ Bethwig suppressed a snort of satisfaction and began to retrace his steps in the fading light. Apparently the sturmmann, although superior in rank, was deficient in brains.

It took them almost thirty minutes to find the clearing, and when they pushed cautiously into the deserted area, they found the remains of the launching site still burning. Bethwig trudged on across the trampled field towards the distant village of Vreden without waiting for them.

Bethwig had spent the previous month living a gypsy-like existence, moving from one raw launch crew to another in support of the offensive in the Ardennes. Peenemunde had been stripped of experienced personnel to direct the barrage of rockets launched against Antwerp, Brussels and London in an effort to disrupt Allied supply lines and kill reserve troops and headquarters units. For two weeks they had operated in the comparative safety of bad weather, but a few days after Christmas the weather had begun to clear, and they were being hunted again.

He had slogged from one frozen, wind-blasted forest clearing to another, following the same exhausting drill. The crews were all ill-trained, some lacking any idea of what they were about. He had only a few key veterans to assist him, and the spate of air attacks had killed the last of them two days before, leaving him with the sole responsibility for moving the train of vehicles from one location to another, checking the rockets, seeing that the necessary repairs were made – often doing them himself – then supervising the erection and launch procedures. Even so, with certain shortcuts he had managed to whittle down the time between launches to less than six hours. He could have improved on that, he knew, but the quartermaster corps seemed to have given up on the war, and as a result, his men were constantly hungry, cold, and exhausted. Then there were conflicting orders from Berlin and Kammler’s headquarters, all of which were interpreted by a succession of arrogant SS officers whose loyalties to Germany rarely seemed to coincide with their loyalties to obscure superiors who had other objectives in mind.

Now he sat on his bunk in the unheated caravan housing the launching and tracking equipment and stared stupidly at the piece of paper shoved at him by an orderly who had just wakened him from the first bit of sleep he had had in more than two days. It took several moments for the message to make sense.

He was to return immediately to Peenemunde. Nothing more. The order was signed by Kammler. Bethwig stepped to the door and pulled the curtain aside. Bright sunlight forced him to squint as he looked across the Dutch barnyard towards the amazingly flat fields beyond. He knew they were somewhere west of the River Ems, but had not had the strength to ascertain exactly where when they had arrived shortly before dawn. Wherever it was, they were nearing the absolute limit for V-2 operations against England. It must be true, then, he thought. The Ardennes offensive had failed. If so, troops would soon be falling back into Germany and the effectiveness of the V-2s would suffer accordingly.

He packed his few belongings and went over to the mess tent for a hurried breakfast of coffee – burned toast steeped in boiling water – hard bread, and ersatz jam. He showed the orders to the SS officer commanding the unit. The man was the fourth in as many weeks, and Bethwig had not even bothered to learn his name. The officer stared with glazed eyes at the yellow sheet of paper, then nodded. Franz went out and hitched a ride with a lorry heading east towards the Ems. Less than a kilometre along the road a Spitfire flashed towards them, waggled its wings in derision, and a few moments later they heard the explosions begin.

‘Herr Doktor, the Führer has granted the A-Ten operational status as a retaliation weapon. It is to be known as Vengeance Ten, and you are to see that its deployment is accelerated!’ Bethwig shook his head. ‘General Kammler, it is impossible.’

‘Nothing is impossible to a member of the German…’

Bethwig laughed. ‘General, do not waste my time with party slogans. I was a veteran party member while you were still at university. Slogans no longer impress me and do you know why? Because people like you have destroyed the party and, in the process, destroyed Germany.’

Kammler thrust his head forward and glared at Bethwig. ‘Defeatist talk! For that you could be shot!’

‘And then you would lose all hope of deploying the V-Ten, wouldn’t you?’ Bethwig shot back. He opened the box of cigarettes on the general’s desk, took one, and glanced at the name printed on the paper.

‘These are American.’

‘Help yourself,’ Kammler sneered. ‘They were taken from a convoy of American supplies a few weeks ago.’

Bethwig smiled. ‘That is my point, General. You, safe, warm and well fed in a rear area, have good American cigarettes, while the frontline soldier dies on the battlefield, with dried leaves for tobacco.’

Kammler’s face flushed, and he started to retort, but Bethwig, weary of arguing, held up a hand. ‘General, I did not say that I would not, I merely said that it was impossible to ready the V-Ten batteries in the time you expect. I am not averse to trying; I merely wish it to be understood that I do not expect to succeed. There is no longer a possibility of establishing four batteries by May thirtieth. My preliminary studies indicate that they will not be ready until September even if the priorities you claim could produce the raw materials. And a miracle would be needed, even for that late date. With the loss of the Dutch industrial areas, we cannot even produce sufficient liquid oxygen to fuel the existing four battalions of V-Twos, let alone four more of V-Tens. And you know as well as I how meaningless priorities now are. Where are the two railway locomotives I requested months ago? They are heading to the east, pulling wagons loaded with Jews. Why do these people, enemies of the German Reich, take precedence over the survival of Germany?’

Kammler turned to the window, his expression hardening. ‘I do not know. And I do not concern myself with matters that are not my responsibility. You would be well advised to follow a similar policy.’

‘Sound advice, General. And very necessary in our Germany today. However, please remember, it was you people in the SS who created the Germany in which such practices are accepted.’

Bethwig stared at Kammler who returned his look without flinching. Finally, Bethwig shrugged.

‘Perhaps I can furnish that miracle, General Kammler.’ When he was certain he had the general’s attention, Franz went on. ‘Three V-Tens were near completion when you sent me to Belgium. I told you then that given another month I could have had them ready for launching. If you had left me alone, perhaps now your batteries of transatlantic missiles might be nearing readiness.’

Kammler remained silent. His stare would have disconcerted anyone but Bethwig, who now had little to lose.

‘I can have one ready by the end of January, the remaining two by mid-February. The pilots have been selected, and fortunately their training has not been interrupted. While I no longer believe that America can be forced from the war unilaterally by a few rockets landing on her soil, I do believe that two or three such, with the promise of more to come, might send them to the negotiating table, dragging their British and French allies along. If an armistice can be achieved, Germany could turn its attention solely to the east and the defeat of Russia. An old tune, General, but it is Germany’s last hope, and the only reason I comply with your demands.’

Kammler’s silence indicated that he accepted this rationale, and without a further word, Bethwig left the office. This is the last opportunity we will have, he thought bitterly, and we’ll damn well make the most of it. The old dream was far from dead.

Peenemunde January 1945

On New Year’s Day Bethwig knocked on the door of the test office in the air tunnel laboratory. A moment later a technician clad in a fireproof asbestos suit opened the door and handed Bethwig a similar suit to pull on over his working clothes. The suit was hot, smelly, and heavy. Muttering to himself, he followed the technician across the room to a steel door and waited while he fiddled with the lock, swung it open, and motioned him through. Bethwig ducked and wriggled past the heater cells behind the stationary wind-tunnel vanes. Three other men waited for him, none of them in protective clothing, and he removed his helmet.

‘Keep the suit on, Franz,’ Wernher von Braun told him. ‘This won’t take long.’

Bethwig nodded. He had worn the suit only to persuade the Gestapo guard who followed him everywhere to remain outside. ‘All right, Wernher. What’s going on?’

Von Braun glanced at the other two men – his brother, Magnus, and Ernst Mundt. ‘I’ll come right to the point, Franz. We’ve had a meeting with the department heads still at Peenemunde as well as those we could reach at Nordhausen. It is clear that the war is lost, and it remains only for the Allies to occupy Germany. Even your V-Ten will not delay that for long.’ He looked anxiously at Bethwig who nodded.

‘I agree.’

Von Braun looked relieved, and the other two exchanged puzzled glances. ‘We know that Kammler has orders to begin planning an evacuation. Rumours from the most reliable sources say that the facility is to be completely destroyed. No trace is to be left of the work being done here. I suppose those fools in Berlin believe it possible. There is another rumour to the effect that Himmler has ordered the SS to shoot all scientific and technical personnel. While I don’t quite believe it, I do not dismiss it either. We have all seen how the POWs have been treated since the SS took over, and I can tell you that Peenemunde is paradise compared to conditions at Nordhausen.’

He looked uncomfortable for a moment. ‘I must also tell you this, Franz. Most of the other department heads were against bringing you into our plans. Many of them feel your loyalties are to Himmler and that you cannot be trusted.’

Bethwig remained silent, and von Braun struggled on. ‘You know what I think about such nonsense but…’

Bethwig nodded. ‘I understand.’ He paused a moment. ‘I doubt there is anything I can say to convince them otherwise.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose you could shoot me. That seems to be a common solution to problems these days. Otherwise, you will have to put up with me.’

The three men exchanged looks, and von Braun muttered, ‘I think there is no question of that.’

Magnus broke the uncomfortable silence. ‘Franz, we have all decided to arm ourselves, just in case this rumour about executing all scientists and technicians should be true. When the Luftwaffe left last fall, they abandoned a great deal of equipment. Several cases of automatic rifles, ammunition and hand grenades have been located and shifted elsewhere, in case they are needed. In addition, the decision has been taken, unanimously, to surrender to the Americans or British. Under no circumstances will we allow ourselves to be captured by the Russians.’

‘I should think the English are to be avoided at all costs,’ Bethwig replied dryly. ‘Surely they would not lavish much love on people who helped destroy their capital city with long-range rockets.’

‘No more so than our bomber crews, yet by all reports they are treated as well as, if not better than, English airmen in our prisons.’ Magnus hesitated, then at a nod from his brother he continued. ‘We have reason to believe that the British would welcome us if we surrendered to them.’

‘Reason to believe? Nothing more than that?’

Magnus shook his head. ‘No. Nothing more than that. Nor would I say more if I could, except that we have also been approached by the Russians.’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘Your agreement,’ Wernher told him, after a moment of consideration in which the strain was evident in his expression. ‘Your staff will follow you. Until now, we dared not approach any of them because of the disagreement over…’ He hesitated, and Bethwig nodded.

‘I understand. When is the evacuation to take place?’

‘We don’t know. As I said, most of what we have learned is rumour. But everything points to the end of January. The Russians are well into East Prussia, and it is almost certain that they will make a concerted effort to take Peenemunde before it can be destroyed. The best guess is they will reach here no earlier than mid-February, if their present rate of advance continues.’

‘There is the V-Ten to launch. I cannot go until that is completed.’

Von Braun’s expression was full of sympathy as was Mundt’s; they both shared his dream, but Magnus broke in with an exclamation. ‘How can you think of the V-Ten now, Franz? It can do nothing to help the war effort. The Russians will have arrived even before the second rocket can be launched. To attempt to do so would jeopardise us all and contribute nothing to a war that is already lost…’

Bethwig’s voice was calm when he spoke, but von Braun and Mundt understood his determination. ‘The V-Ten, Magnus, is no longer a war weapon. And I am no longer concerned with the war effort, nor have I been since my father was murdered. People like Himmler and Kammler have betrayed the Führer and Germany with their greed. Prolonging the war only serves their purposes. I am concerned only with launching the V-Ten. I have given it seven years of my life, and now I have nothing else to live for.’

His expression was still calm as he gauged their reaction. ‘The rocket will not be launched against the United States. Wernher, do you remember what we resolved on that evening on the Greifswalder beach, before the war began? Then again last fall when you tried to talk me into this one final time?’

Von Braun stared at him. ‘Franz, the moon? Are you crazy?’

‘Am I? It can be done, Wernher. Kammler would not know the difference – until too late. The requirements are virtually the same but for the fuel load.’

The three men stared at him in shock; finally, Magnus broke the silence. ‘Franz, it would be suicide-even if successful, how would the pilot get back? Who would fly it under those circumstances?’

‘I have two volunteers even now. Both understand clearly what the outcome will be. There is no need to be concerned. Both are party members, both fanatics, and they will die gladly for the greater glory of the Reich.’

Ernst Mundt and Magnus von Braun exchanged dubious glances, but Wernher was grinning broadly as he clapped Bethwig on the shoulder.

‘You can depend on us,’ he cried, thus confirming Bethwig in the decision he had made privately the week before in Kammler’s office.

Von Braun followed Bethwig up the scaffolding to a narrow platform some seventy metres above the launch stand. To the west they could see across the island to the snow-covered fields on the mainland where farms and forests were etched diamond-sharp in the clear January air. To the south the pines almost hid the buildings that housed the laboratories and administrative offices and, beyond them, the staff living quarters. Lost in the distance was the prison camp, most of its buildings deserted. The prisoners had been shipped to the underground factories of Nordhausen deep in the Harz Mountains where, under the direction of the SS, the V-2s continued to pour off the assembly lines for shipment to western Germany and the shrinking areas of occupied Holland.

To their left the cobalt-blue reaches of the Baltic stretched north to Sweden and Finland. Only a few naval patrols dared move on the Baltic now. Most of the merchant ships that had survived the Russian and British submarine onslaught were busily engaged in the forbidden evacuation of German troops from East Prussia and northern Poland.

‘We will be ready before the end of January.’ Bethwig broke the silence. ‘Unless something completely unexpected develops, there is nothing of a technical nature to stop us.’

They had ridden the elevator to the top of the gantry and climbed the rickety scaffolding to the pilot’s cabin in the third stage of the rocket. There had not been time to extend the gantries, or the material to do so, and the makeshift platform teetered dizzily in the wind.

Von Braun gave him a worried glance, then, grasping the hand bar bolted above the hatchway, lifted himself, inserted his feet, and slid in. He settled down, released the gimbal brake, and the couch swung freely to assume a horizontal position.

‘My God,’ he exclaimed, ‘this chair is comfortable. If everything wasn’t going to hell, I’d have one made up for my study.’ Von Braun rocked the couch a moment, then reached up and began to finger switches and tap dials, making certain the needles moved freely against their stops.

‘You’ve designed well, Franz. Nothing more than twenty centimetres away from the hand.’ He tapped another dial, then remarked off-handedly, ‘I was going over the flight plan last night and noticed you increased the initial G forces to six. Do you think that’s wise? Won’t it be too exhausting?’

Bethwig shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. We need that increased speed to eliminate the need to carry so much fuel into orbit around the Earth. I would rather expend it going up than reduce our manoeuvrability on landing. Anyway, I have spent several sessions in the centrifugal chamber at higher G rates myself. The increased gravity does exhaust one quickly, but I have been able to function in an acceptable manner well in excess of the time required.’

Von Braun turned on the couch to face him. Since the death of the elder Bethwig, von Braun was not certain he knew Franz any more. He had hardened to the point of abrasiveness. Every moment of his life now seemed to centre on the damned rocket. The risks he took with Kammler and the Gestapo security staff were appalling; it was as if he were challenging them to discover what he was up to. He also knew that Bethwig had taken to carrying a Mauser pistol, and von Braun had no doubt that he would use it if pressed.

‘Franz,’ he said after some hesitation. ‘You and I have been friends for a hell of a long time now. We can talk about things that… well, you know what I mean. I want you to tell me now why you are doing this. You know what Kammler will do if he finds out, as he is bound to. If not before, then certainly after the launch.’

Bethwig nodded. ‘Are you suggesting he will shoot me? Of course, he will. But I suspect that by the time he finds out, it will be too late to take such action. If the rocket lands on the moon, the impact on the Allies might well be so great that Berlin will consider me a hero. If the rocket fails, well, then we have only to claim that it has crashed in mid-Atlantic, and go on to try again – providing there is time left to do so.’

‘Franz, you have been away for over a month, you don’t know…’

‘Damn it, Wernher, you will not talk me out of it. If you don’t wish to be involved, say so now and let me get on with it alone.’

Von Braun looked abashed for a moment. ‘I… I am sorry, Franz, I didn’t mean to imply that…’

‘Let’s forget about it, then, all right?’

As he followed Bethwig into the elevator von Braun found himself even more troubled by his friend’s off-hand dismissal of Kammler and his SS and Gestapo thugs.

During the next two weeks the total resources remaining at Peenemunde were mobilised to prepare the V-10. In mid-January a barge docked at Peenemunde village, and under heavy SS guard, a steel cylinder five metres in diameter by four in length was unloaded and moved by specially constructed trailer across the island to the V-10 launch complex. The cylinder contained the thirty metric-ton warhead of Amatol high explosive. The assembly crews took two days to substitute a set of auxiliary fuel tanks for the explosive and mate the final stage of the V-10 to the second. The cylinder containing the explosive was then removed from the launch complex and hidden.

The V-10 had assumed its final configuration: a tapering cylinder more than fifty metres high, twenty-five wide at its base, and consisting of four main sections or stages. The first contained twenty-one M 103.5 rocket engines, each generating one hundred and fifty-nine thousand kilograms of thrust, plus two immense fuel tanks which were kept pressurised at all times to support the weight above, and which would contain ninety per cent of the total weight of the entire assembly in liquid oxygen and alcohol. The second stage was a miniature version of the first, powered by four of the same engines and containing five per cent of the vehicle’s weight in fuel and liquid oxygen.

Bethwig had worked out the equations for the Earth-moon trajectory in 1939, and he and von Braun had spent many hours since refining and polishing them, even to the point of modifying a Luftwaffe pilot’s circular slide rule to calculate the effects of changes in velocity and weight quickly and accurately. With sufficient fuel load and power, the moon, a target constantly visible to an observer in space, could hardly be missed – providing the initial orbital injection speed fell within defined limits.

The third stage contained the relatively crude pilot’s cabin above the fuel tanks. Designed originally for transatlantic flights lasting no more than thirty minutes, it had little to offer in the way of pilot comfort. No body waste relief facilities had been included, and the system cobbled together by the Peenemunde staff presented one insurmountable problem – there was no way to test it under weightless conditions. The usual test procedure required an aircraft to fly a shallow outside loop, but now all flights had to be approved by Kammler’s office, and no one could think of a sufficiently believable excuse.

The warhead had originally been designed to separate from the third stage containing the pilot, which would then re-enter the atmosphere well behind the warhead. A steel mesh parachute would be deployed to slow the third stage sufficiently to permit the pilot, who would be carrying a pack including a rubber raft, small radio, and rations for several days, to bail out. If the pilot survived, it was hoped that he would be picked up by a U-boat stationed for that purpose in the area approximately one hundred kilometres off Long Island. If he was not picked up and it appeared that he would be rescued by an Allied ship, the pilot was to take his own life. Under no circumstances was the pilot to allow himself to fall into Allied hands. Each pilot, therefore, had been selected from the ranks of the SS especially for dedication as well as ability.

The entire Peenemunde staff had been drafted to ready the V-10, and they fell to with a willingness that surprised Kammler and his aides. Von Braun eased his suspicions by suggesting that as this was probably the last rocket launch they would ever conduct, the staff was eager to give its all. That seemed to satisfy Kammler, so that on the twelfth he shifted his headquarters south to the outskirts of Berlin, leaving the final details for the evacuation to be completed by a special staff which included a one-hundred-man SS security unit to supplement the five-man Gestapo team already well ensconced in Trassenheide.

The following day Bethwig set the launch date for Saturday, 27 January 1945.

Jan Memling could hear Janet humming in the tiny kitchen; the rattle of dishes and the clink of silverware acted as counterpoint. When she came out a few moments later with a wine bottle for him to open, he was standing by the telephone, one hand on the receiver.

‘Who was it, Jan?’ She threw one arm around his back, tickled his neck, and pressed hard against him. When he did not respond, she drew back, puzzled. ‘Jan…?’

He turned slowly, expression strained. For a long moment he stared as if she were not there. Janet had swept her hair up into a roll and was wearing a sheer negligee and high-heeled slippers. They had turned down invitations to several Christmas Eve parties to spend the night alone, and he had obtained a rare bottle of French champagne and two steaks from an American friend with access to a commissary officer at SHAEF.

‘I predict this as the last Christmas of the war in Europe,’ he had announced a week before. ‘So let’s celebrate properly.’

Janet had paused for a moment. ‘If it really is the last year, then I want a special Christmas present.’ When he had asked what it was, she grinned. ‘Throw away those damned rubbers. I think Christmas Eve is a good time to start a family.’

He shook his head, muttered, ‘Just a wrong number,’ and kissed her soundly, then nuzzled the hollow of her throat.

‘The steaks,’ she protested, the phone call and his expression already forgotten. ‘We should start them, shouldn’t we?’

‘When I was a boy,’ Memling offered impishly, ‘we followed family tradition and always opened our presents on Christmas Eve, before supper.’ He undid the gown’s single tie and slipped it from her shoulders. ‘I believe in tradition, don’t you?’

Janet lay quietly against his chest. Her breathing had evened, and he thought she might be asleep. For a long moment he revelled in the silky feel of her body and its gentle pressure, but only for a moment, as the memory of the telephone call came crowding back.

As much with Janet’s help as the psychiatrist’s, he had come to terms with himself, and with her, after his return from Poland. Not even the committee’s disappointing rejection of his contention that the A-4 rocket was not radio-guided, as the rocket recovered from Sweden suggested, could surmount the satisfaction and contentment that Janet had brought to him during the past months.

Both the doctor and Simon-Benet had suggested that he take a long holiday in the Irish Republic, away from the ‘alarms and excursions’, as Simon-Benet had phrased it. For once, he had done as he was told, and Janet’s patience and humour had helped him overcome his imagined impotence. Looking back then, he was astounded that he could have taken fear so seriously, could have built it into such a mountain. He realised that continually dwelling on one’s own problems was the height of selfishness and that to do so until they assumed such awesome proportions as to block every other consideration was worse than selfish – it was the path to insanity.

Surprisingly, the doctor had agreed with his self-analysis, and as the weeks passed, Memling had gradually cancelled so many of his appointments that two weeks had gone by before he realised he had completely forgotten the last one. When he phoned to apologise, the doctor pronounced him out of danger.

The V-2, or Vengeance Weapon Two – as the A-4 had been renamed – offensive began on 8 September 1944. The first rocket fell on Paris, near the Porte d’ltalie, and caused minor structural damage. The following morning two V-2s smashed into London, one on Chiswick Road and the other in Epping Forest, killing three people and smashing water and gas mains.

Eight more V-2s fell on or in the neighbourhood of London during the next five days. At first the Ministry of Home Security’s Research and Experiments Department tended to dismiss the V-2 as a no more effective, and a good deal less accurate, weapon than the V-1 unmanned bomber aircraft. Memling had argued, but without success, that the German launch crews needed time to break in, and that for the first weeks it would be impossible to judge the effectiveness of the V-2s, much as it had initially been difficult to rate the effectiveness of the V-1s. But his argument had been dismissed, and Home Security had presented a chart of the first week’s operational use of the V-2 showing that the average number of people killed or wounded was similar for both the V-2 and V-1:2.7 killed and 8.5 wounded per launch, as against 2.7 and 9.1, respectively.

Because of his active and very loud opposition to measures being taken to defend London, Memling’s involvement with V-2 analysis came to an abrupt end. A week later, direction of the ‘New Battle of Britain’, as the newspapers were calling it, was transferred to a special committee, code-named Big Ben, that was charged with the responsibility of ferreting out launch sites and perfecting defences against the rocket. Before his transfer to Combined Operations Headquarters in London where he was to begin planning commando-style actions against the Japanese home islands, Memling had the distinct pleasure of seeing his original suggestion for a concerted bombing campaign against operational launch sites of both the V-1 and the V-2 put into operation by direct order from the Prime Minister. He had only just received orders to report to Honolulu in April and had been saving that, and the news that he had wangled Janet a place on his personal staff, as a Christmas present.

Now everything was shattered by Simon-Benet’s phone call. As before, it had been put to him as a voluntary operation. He could accept or refuse as he wished; yet the general had known he would go.

Janet mumbled something and lifted her head. She smiled sleepily at him. When he was certain she was asleep again, he got up and went out to the kitchen. The steaks lay ready on the sideboard, and he picked up the bottle of barbecue sauce given to him by a ranger captain from Lubbock, Texas.

He shook his head impatiently. Why delay any longer? The general had said three hours. He looked at his watch, then sat down at the writing desk and thought about what to tell Janet. After a few moments he scribbled a brief note to the effect that he had been called away and would be back in a few weeks. He thought briefly of telling her about Hawaii, decided that it sounded too much like a bribe, then did so anyway.

Memling dressed quickly in the bathroom, found his overcoat in the closet, and felt along the top shelf for his knife. He paused in the bedroom doorway for a moment while he strapped it to his leg. When he left the flat, the gleaming Buick was waiting for him in Montague Street.

As they sped north out of London the general gave him a quick rundown on the mission. ‘The Russians have had agents active in the Peenemunde and Nordhausen areas for several months now. We believe they made their first contact with the German scientists in Poland and are trying to follow up. In any event, your friend Englesby at MI-Six is of the opinion that unless we take immediate action, we may come out of this with little more than a handful of broken rocket parts while the Russians carry off everything else. He pushed very hard and General Eisenhower is concerned enough about this matter to give it the go-ahead. SHAEF has set up the mission and code-named it Project Paper Clip. When SHAEF asked SOE for an agent, they suggested you. The Big Ben committee and MI-Six endorsed the suggestion, and SHAEF asked me to sound you out.’

Memling swore violently enough to cause the driver to jump. ‘For seven years everything I’ve said has been ignored. Each time I’ve been proven correct and still no one cares. Now they come up with this ridiculous idea and everyone points to me. Why, for God’s sake?’

‘Don’t be a damned fool,’ the general snapped. ‘There is no one else with your qualifications. You know Wernher von Braun personally and you’ve been to Peenemunde. Because of that, von Braun might listen to what you have to say.’

‘Or throw me to the Gestapo.’

Simon-Benet snorted at that. ‘You will be wearing your uniform. They can’t shoot you as a spy. For God’s sake, the war is almost over.’

It was Memling’s turn to snort. ‘Has anyone told them yet?’

‘You will do it, won’t you?’ Simon-Benet said.

‘You know damned well I will.’

‘Good.’ The general sat back, satisfied. ‘You’ll be given brush-up training at Northolt and then sent over by air. They’ll drop you right on the island this time. Agent reports and reconnaissance indicate the place is nearly deserted. We’ve infiltrated a few people who will be able to help you. All you have to do is persuade von Braun to come to us and bring anyone he, and you, trust. A submarine will be standing by in the Baltic to take you off. If for some reason the submarine cannot come in, there will be an aircraft standing by in Sweden. We have the full co-operation of the Swedish government in this matter. They don’t want to see the Russians in possession of these people any more than we do.’

‘There is one thing you have to do for me,’ Memling said, turning to face the general. There was a full moon and the sky was ice-clear; he could see Simon-Benet watching him.

‘I want you to tell Janet where I’ve gone and why.’

When the general started to protest about security Memling cut him off. ‘Damn it, don’t give me that nonsense. She’s worked for MI-Six for four years. If I don’t have your solemn promise that you will see her first thing tomorrow morning to explain where ‘I’m going and why, then you can turn this car around now.’ Simon-Benet studied him for a moment, then nodded. ‘You have my word.’

Memling sat back against the cushions, relieved. The car sped north between hedgerows glistening dark against the snow-covered fields and grey hills.

27 January was cold, overcast, and threatened rain. Kammler telephoned early to check on the V-10’s progress and promised to fly in by mid-afternoon. Bethwig then drove to Administration Building 4 which had been established as V-10 headquarters. He trudged wearily to the third floor, as the elevator was out of order. Everything is falling apart, he thought. Just like the war effort. Department heads waited for him in the director’s conference room, and he took his place at the head of the table. Von Braun came in a moment later, and as Bethwig stood to begin, the door opened and an out-of-breath Gestapo agent looked in.

‘Come in or stay out, you fool,’ Bethwig roared, ‘but don’t leave the door gaping. It’s cold enough in here as it is.’ The man gave him an embarrassed glance and stepped in while the others in the room contrived to look elsewhere.

‘Sit over against the wall there’ – Bethwig pointed – ‘and keep your mouth shut.’ He turned back to the table, glanced at the clock, and began:

‘Gentlemen, it is now nine in the morning. We have exactly fifteen hours remaining before the launch. You know your jobs and you know the importance of this mission.’

He grinned, and eyebrows went up. This was the first time in weeks they had heard anything from Bethwig that even approached humour.

‘You might even say this is the culmination of a dream we have shared for more than fifteen years. Tonight, before midnight has come, we will have taken man’s greatest stride into the unknown reaches of space. You all know what this mission represents and why it is important.’

Bethwig stole a glance at the young Gestapo officer who was watching with a puzzled frown, and nodded to the propulsion plant chief to begin his report on the oscillation problem that had plagued the project from the start.

‘We completed successful firing tests at four this morning,’ he concluded with a wry grin. That part of the announcement was unnecessary, as the roar of the twenty-one engines had been heard for miles. ‘The solution is patchy at best, but I believe it will work.’ The other department heads gave him a tremendous round of applause. The solution was a brilliant piece of engineering accomplished under the most difficult conditions. After the oscillation problem, fuel had been their greatest concern. With the loss of the Dutch liquid oxygen plants and the great damage done to German facilities over the past year, obtaining the full 3.9 million kilograms of fuel and oxidiser had become a tricky proposition. Peenemunde’s own liquid oxygen plant had been put back into service late in the fall, and the last refrigerated tank cars were at that moment moving on to sidings for loading. Fuelling was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. An additional half million kilograms had been diverted from the Nordhausen V-2 production plant at Kammler’s reluctant order. The Russian offensive had overrun East Prussia and western Poland before the autumn harvesting of potatoes – the raw material from which the alcohol was distilled – had been completed. The Logistics Supply Department had been forced to use meagre reserves of hard currency to buy sufficient potatoes from Sweden, but the shipments had never arrived, delayed first by the Allied Baltic submarine offensive and then by a Swedish ban on all strategic raw materials to the Reich. Alcohol reserves, as a consequence, were down to less than fifty thousand kilograms stored in a single tank in the almost deserted Luftwaffe storage yards. No one worried any longer about a second launch attempt.

The meeting broke up at noon, and everyone scattered to offices and command centres to begin the final vigil. The most intensive stage in the launch operation had begun, and there would be no rest for anyone before midnight.

Bethwig gathered up some papers while he and von Braun discussed last-minute details. As they were leaving, the Gestapo agent called to Bethwig and motioned him to the table. Annoyed, Bethwig shook his head and started to follow von Braun, but the man ran around the table and grabbed his arm.

‘You had damned well better listen to me,’ he whispered angrily.

Bethwig jerked his arm free, but the young man kicked the door shut and thrust a photograph at him. ‘Do you know this man?’ Bethwig was surprised, and his anger now changed to puzzlement. The face seemed familiar, but he could not recall when or where he had seen it before.

Before he could respond, the Gestapo agent said in a low voice, ‘I know what you people are up to.’

Bethwig stared at him. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’ The agent shrugged. ‘The war is lost. Perhaps you can still accomplish something useful.’

‘What…?’

‘I am talking about the rocket you are going to send to the moon.’

Bethwig’s face was a mask of astonishment.

‘Herr Doktor, there is no time for games. I am not stupid. I may not be a scientist, but I did spend two years at university. You people always overrate the ignorance of non-scientists.’

He went to the door to listen, then glanced at his old-fashioned pocket watch. ‘We haven’t much time. I believe in what you are doing and will do what I can to help. My superior, Major Walsch, is watching you closely, more so than you think. There are others besides me. The man in this photograph is an English spy named Jan Memling. He was captured early this morning with three others, just after landing by parachute in the salt marshes to the south. Walsch seems to know him personally. I had time for a quick look at his file. He is a friend of Doktor von Braun’s from before the war. There is also a notation that you and Doktor von Braun met him in 1938, in the Ruhr.’

‘Good God,’ Bethwig muttered. ‘Not again.’

‘Walsch hates you and Doktor von Braun for some reason. The Englishman and the three others are undergoing interrogation. Afterwards, I am certain, Walsch will send to Berlin for your arrest warrants.’

Bethwig groped for a chair. Everything he had planned for, worked for, in spite of the ignorance and stupidity emanating from Berlin all these years, was crashing in a heap about him, owing again entirely to the same stupid, ignorant, grasping fools who put their own greed and desire for power ahead of the Reich. People like Walsch, Kammler, Heydrich, Himmler – he raged silently – they were the ones who had betrayed the Führer and Germany, and even now, in the fatherland’s death struggles, they were doing their best to twist the knife.

The agent pulled a chair around to face Bethwig. ‘Look here, I said I would help and I will. Walsch will not finish the interrogations before tonight. Even if one breaks, he still must break the others. One man’s testimony will not be sufficient to arrest someone of your stature. But even then, it will take time to get a warrant for your arrest. The teletype transmission lines have been broken. He will have to telephone to Berlin, persuade someone in Himmler’s office, if not the Reichsführer himself, to issue the warrants, and then they must be flown or driven here before he dare move. He cannot approach Kammler, as the general is counting on the V-Ten to restore his prestige with the Führer. If the rocket is successful, Walsch will not be able to touch you, so he must do so before it is launched.’

Bethwig took a deep breath. When he lit the cigarette offered by the Gestapo agent, his hands were rock-steady. Now that the first shock had passed, he was thinking clearly once more.

‘All right. You have obviously had time to think this through. What do you suggest?’

The agent lit his own cigarette and blew a stream of smoke towards the windows. ‘You must launch the rocket well in advance of the announced time.’

‘Impossible! The sequence is extremely complex and is dependent upon the completion of parallel activities. It can be delayed but not accelerated by more than a few minutes.’

The agent did not waste time arguing. ‘Then you must go about your business as usual. I’ll have a word with Hauptsturmführer Schulz who commands the SS security unit in Kammler’s absence. He and Walsch are at odds, and I am certain he’ll be most happy to make Walsch look bad. He is also in line for the position of aide to Kammler, which would mean a promotion and fat graft before the war ends.’

Bethwig nodded in an absent fashion, then glanced up sharply. ‘Look here, what’s your name?’

‘Prager, sir. Thomas Prager.’

Bethwig studied him a moment, noticing for the first time the thin scar that ran from his hairline, then down his left cheek, to end beneath his chin. Prager stood hunched slightly to one side. ‘Why are you doing this, Prager?’

The Gestapo agent looked momentarily abashed. ‘Until a year and a half ago I was a front-line soldier and proud to be so. Then I was wounded in Sicily. When I recovered, the army discharged me as unfit. My father had been a policeman in Hamburg before the war. He was killed in a bombing raid in 1943, but he still had many friends there. They needed men, and I was hired. A few months later I was transferred to the political police.’

His expression became angry, and he shook his head. ‘I don’t like what they have done to Germany, or the German people. I joined the Hitler Youth and the party at thirteen. But it’s all changed since the war. All the goals have been forgotten, all the good things. Now everyone is out for himself. The worst are the SS. After those army fools tried to murder the Führer, we were given lists of people to arrest. Most had nothing to do with the plotters. They were people who knew someone or had once been friends of, or even went to school with, others who had been arrested. Every name squeezed out by the Gestapo was added to the list and that person arrested. Trials were a farce. The accused were rarely allowed to defend themselves. Those who were not sentenced to death were sent to concentration camps. I escorted many such, and I can tell you that when the war ends, the German people will see how we have been disgraced.’

Prager was silent a moment. ‘Perhaps, if you succeed in this attempt to travel to the moon, you will show that not all Germans are like the SS, that we are still capable of great accomplishments.’

He stopped abruptly then, as if embarrassed, and went to the window. ‘Will this weather interfere with the launching?’

Bethwig stared after him, wondering how many other people there were like him in Germany. If they had only revealed themselves earlier, perhaps… But then, Himmler was a shrewd enough judge of human nature to understand that. His answer to such a threat was the systematic terror that his SS and Gestapo had unleashed. Why had the Führer not stopped him? he wondered; and then the old rumours of Heydrich’s files filtered back. Perhaps they are true, he thought. Even the Führer could be afraid of such men.’

‘Why did the Englishman come to Peenemunde?’

The Gestapo agent turned to rest against the windows and rubbed his head against the cold glass as if to relieve a headache. ‘Only rumours so far. I was told that one of the people helping him, a woman and a German national, confessed that this Major Memling had been sent to try and persuade you, Doktor von Braun and the scientific staff to revolt against the SS and defect to England. Foolishness! But that is what Walsch believes, or wants to believe. The man was probably sent to sabotage the V-Ten project.’

Bethwig wondered. He lit another cigarette but said nothing more. He suspected that Walsch was closer to the truth than he knew, and if so, all of them were in real danger. Himmler could very well be persuaded to carry out his threat to shoot all scientific personnel. Wernher was convinced that he was badly frightened of their capture by the Russians. Something would have to be done, but what?

The interior was pitch-black. There was no sound. They designed it this way, he told himself over and over until it became a chant. They designed it this way to make you concentrate on your own terror. Memling gagged and tried to vomit again, but his stomach was empty and the retching went on and on. When the spasm subsided, he lay back on the wet cement floor and tried to breathe through his nose.

It was a set-up, Memling thought for the hundredth time. They were waiting; the SS troops rose, seemingly from the ground, as he was gathering his parachute. Within seconds he and the three Germans were disarmed, handcuffed, blindfolded, and pushed and kicked towards waiting lorries. The Germans even knew how many of them there would be, as there were exactly four empty lorries.

They were driven for what seemed like hours over rough tracks before the lorries stopped and they were taken one by one inside. Blinded by the lights, he was stripped and searched, photographed and fingerprinted, then taken naked into an administrative area where three female clerks had giggled and darted glances at him as he was shoved on to a hard bench and ignored for an hour or more before a door opened and a tall, very gaunt man in a black, ill-fitting civilian suit emerged. Memling went rigid.

‘Major Jan Memling, I believe. We have met before, if you recall. Twice in fact. You worked for your secret service, MI-Six, at the time. At our first meeting you jumped from a train to avoid a conversation with me. The second time you ran away from a very fine position in Liege.’ He chuckled. ‘Unfortunately you do not have those options this time.’

Memling remembered the skeletal figure unfolding from a seat to pursue him through a crowded train racing towards the Belgian border, a grinning death’s-head leering at him from across a scaffolding in a factory yard. He rarely dreamed, but for the past seven years he had endured nightmares in which Walsch’s face predominated.

‘My name, in case you have forgotten, is Major Jacob Walsch, of the Secret State Police Office, Division Three. I would suggest that a great deal of time and pain can be spared if you are prepared to co-operate and answer my questions.’

Memling nodded, fearful that his voice would betray his terror. ‘Good. Then perhaps you will tell me about your mission here on Peenemunde – most particularly, the names of the three traitors who agreed to assist you, and any others of whom you may have knowledge?’

‘My name,’ Memling began, speaking softly to disguise the tremor, ‘is Jan Memling. My rank is major, Royal Marines. My identification number is S5698034. I am a member of the regular military establishment of the United Kingdom and, as such, am entitled to the treatment accorded to prisoners of war under terms of the Geneva Convention.’

‘That may well be true, Major Memling. But you must realise that you have forfeited all rights to such protection, as you are out of uniform.’ Walsch chuckled at his own joke. ‘I suppose you will make the usual protest that your clothing was taken from you, and so it was. I did instruct my people to make certain that it was properly labelled and stored. I can show you if you wish, but you will find, I am afraid, that they are still civilian clothes. In any event, Peenemunde is not a military installation but a secret research centre owned and operated by the SS and therefore not subject to civil or military law. I might also add that I have had a request from the local SS commander to have you released to their custody. It seems they wish to settle an old score.’

Memling had expected nothing else when they had taken his uniform away. He strove not to allow his fear to show.

‘I am concerned most with three traitorous German citizens,’ Walsch continued, ‘arrested while aiding an enemy of the Reich. I intend to root out and eliminate the rest of their pack. You can spare yourself a great deal of pain, very severe pain, and perhaps even death, if you co-operate. You will have time to think the matter over while I discuss the situation with your comrades.’

As Walsch turned back into his office, Memling was yanked to his feet and hustled down a bare corridor to a heavy wooden door. A uniformed guard unlocked it, and he was shoved inside. The door slammed shut, and Memling sank down on his haunches, enduring the recurring waves of fear that washed over him with an intensity he had never known before.

The cell door was opened without warning, and two guards jerked him up and dragged him out into a small yard. Floodlights glared at each corner of the enclosure. Against the building stood two uniformed SS men with rifles slung. Opposite, a badly chipped brick wall edged the yard. At first its significance did not register, but then Memling realised that the scars and chips had been made by bullets and that the two soldiers were executioners. The omnipresent fear receded for a moment; they were going to shoot him immediately, rather than subject him to torture. An emotion approaching gratitude swept through him. Memling took a deep breath, bracing himself as he was pushed against the wall.

It was dark; an entire day must have passed since he had been dragged into the prison at dawn. Rain spattered intermittently, and he shivered horribly in the freezing cold. A dull roaring noise puzzled him; it came from beyond the wall, advancing and receding, but he could not identify the sound even though he concentrated with all the intensity at his command. What were they waiting for? he screamed silently.

An eternity passed before the door opened again and Walsch appeared. He stopped in the centre of the yard and glanced at the riflemen, then at the half-frozen man drooping against the wall. He smiled and motioned towards the building.

A non-commissioned officer pushed something sprawling into the mud. He bent, grabbed a handful of hair, yanked and ran across the yard to slam the figure against the wall beside Memling. Only then did Memling see that it was the woman. Shock coursed through him at the sight of her. Blood streamed from several places beneath her hair. Skin had been flayed from her back and buttocks, and there were burn marks on her breasts and abdomen. She was only half-alive, and they had to fasten a chain around her neck to hold her upright. For a moment she looked at Memling; there was no recognition in her eyes, only the starkest, staring terror.

Walsch had sauntered over then. ‘You may be interested to know, Major Memling, this piece of swine flesh has told us everything.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette, then reached out and yanked the woman’s chin up. ‘As a reward, we are going to give her a surcease from her labours. She has worked quite hard, you know. And it shows.’ He laughed. ‘Pity. She was rather attractive. My men appreciated that.

‘Ah well, as we no longer need her services, of any kind…’ He chuckled at his joke and nodded to the unterscharführer who slowly drew his pistol.

The woman’s eyes fastened on his movements, and in spite of what must have been terrible pain, she mouthed over and over again, ‘No, please, no.’

The unterscharführer raised the pistol and brought it down to rest on the bridge of her nose. The chain collar prevented her from twisting her head away, and the man smiled and pulled the trigger. There was a loud click, and feigning astonishment, the SS man turned to Walsch who shook his head in mock dismay.

‘Once again, Unterscharführer.’

The performance was repeated, and again there was a loud click. Memling lost his head then, dived for the sergeant, and was clubbed to the ground by his guard. Walsch knelt and twisted his head around, forcing him to watch.

‘Once again, please.’

The woman had collapsed against the chain and was choking. The unterscharführer slid a magazine home, racked the breech back, and gently held the woman up while he aimed the pistol once more and pulled the trigger. The gun went off this time, and blood spattered Memling. The bullet had shattered her skull, and she slipped through the chain into a crumpled heap.

Walsch smiled down at him. ‘Perhaps it will be your turn next. Are you strong enough to endure what she did?’

Twice more, at long intervals, Memling was dragged forth to witness similar executions. Each time, Walsch smiled at him around his cigarette and promised that his turn was next.

The countdown stood at minus six hours. Bethwig turned away from the controller’s ready board, crossed the room, and stepped out into the windblown night. The sea air eased his headache, and he lit a cigarette, ignored by the SS guard huddling in the corner of the entryway for shelter from the wind.

As the launch drew nearer, a curious lassitude had settled on him, and it was with great difficulty that he forced himself to continue. The countdown had gone like clockwork, days of intense rehearsal paying off. No major problems had arisen, and the tricky liquid oxygen tanks would be topped in the final hour.

So far, Prager had reported nothing of serious consequence from Gestapo headquarters in Trassenheide, and Bethwig was beginning to think they would beat Walsch in spite of the odds. He was puzzled then as to the origin of the depression engulfing him. He was about to realise the dream of a lifetime, despite insurmountable difficulties. The countdown had proceeded so smoothly they were ahead of schedule by some fifty-four seconds. For a moment he smiled to himself in the darkness, remembering the early days at Kummersdorf and Greifswalder Oie where they had struggled not only to launch rockets but to develop orderly methods for doing so.

And what would happen to their carefully constructed countdown procedures, to the painfully learned concept of built-in holds, included as much to allow everyone to catch their breath as to cope with unforeseen emergencies. An entire vocabulary had been evolved and would be lost after tonight. The Peenemunde crew would never launch another rocket. The Russians would overrun the area before his next V-10 could be readied. But that had not affected his decision in the slightest. The war would soon be over and with it experimentation with rockets. If the crew has learned one thing, he thought, it is that rocket research is so expensive only a government can afford it. And they would do so grudgingly, even under the exigencies of war.

The fact that the Allies might have sent an agent to make contact with von Braun suggested their interest. But Bethwig also suspected that interest would be short-lived; as soon as the war was ended, the various democracies would revert to peacetime pursuits, and economic depression would follow, as always happened after a major war, and the cycle would repeat itself as endlessly as in the past.

Bethwig threw his cigarette away and walked out to the service road. Hands in pockets, he stood with his back to the wind looking down the paved surface to the floodlit gantries surrounding the cone-shaped tower that was his V-10. He could see its entire length, including the two sharply raked wings on the third stage. He stood there for a while, feeling no urgency to return; the launch team was thoroughly drilled. He was like a ship’s captain, needed only for emergency decisions. Unless something completely untoward happened, six more hours would see it finished. For a moment he was close to praying.

Prager was waiting for him in the blockhouse. The Gestapo agent nodded, and a few minutes later Bethwig crossed the room to the lavatory. Prager followed him in and locked the door.

‘Walsch has finished with the three traitors. All confessed and have been executed. He will start on the Englishman soon. I won’t go into details, but if he resists for even one hour, then he is made of iron.’

Bethwig fought down the urge to scream, to swear, to smash his fist against the wall. They were so close, so damned close. Instead, he held himself rigid, under iron control, until he could think coherently once more.

‘How long?’

Prager shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Walsch has nearly exhausted himself. The man is sick and may decide to rest a while.’ Prager shrugged. ‘Every minute he delays makes it that much easier to break the Englishman.’

‘But didn’t you tell me that it would still take time to get arrest warrants from Berlin?’

Prager nodded, his defeat evident now. ‘So I thought. But as soon as he had the first confession, Walsch persuaded Himmler’s office to issue a conditional warrant. Now he only needs the Englishman’s. He would prefer to do it legally.’ Prager shrugged. ‘But believe me, if for some reason Walsch fails to break the Englishman, he will falsify the confession and kill him.’

Bethwig stooped over a sink and drenched his face with cold water. ‘I just cannot believe that Himmler would allow us to be arrested, at least before the V-Ten is launched. There is too much…’

Prager pushed himself away from the wall. ‘Stop thinking like that. Logic has no bearing on the matter. Himmler realises that neither the V-Two nor the V-Ten can affect the war any longer; in fact, I doubt he is even aware you are attempting the V-Ten launching.’ When Bethwig stared at him in astonishment, Prager nodded.

‘He is much too busy gathering together the final reins of power. As commander in chief of the Replacement Army, as well as Reichsführer and head of the SS, he virtually controls Germany. Why should he spend time worrying about another secret weapon when the previous ones have failed to live up to expectations?’

‘But who…?’

‘Kammler.’ Prager answered his unfinished question. ‘General Kammler chose incorrectly when offered a choice between command of the Vengeance weapon battalions and a division on the eastern front last year. It is said that even Himmler’s staff members no longer accept his telephone calls. Kammler is desperate to regain favour before Himmler remembers to hang him from a meat hook for sabotaging the war effort. He believes the V-Ten will save him.’

Bethwig thought about that a moment. ‘But Kammler was supposed to arrive this afternoon and did not. How much importance can…?’

Prager dismissed the objection with an abrupt gesture. ‘Tempelhof was badly bombed. The runways are not usable at the moment, so Kammler is driving to Peenemunde. Walsch found out and alerted friends at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Roadblocks have been established to delay him. Again, all this is without Himmler’s knowledge; but then, it makes no difference in any case. Walsch is determined that von Braun and you be arrested before the rocket can be launched. Having failed yet again, you will both be discredited and no one will raise a voice in your defence. And do not forget that Walsch also has a hole card – the old charges of diverting war materials to personal ends are still pending against your friend. As soon as the arrests are made, the same charges will be made against you, using the V-Ten as evidence. An SS tribunal will find you guilty, and the sentence will be carried out. Kammler will have no choice but to agree or be charged as an accessory.’

‘What about the SS commander here? You said he might be persuaded to intervene?’

Prager shrugged. ‘He refused. He won’t help Walsch, but he won’t hinder him either. Hauptsturmführer Schulz knows that Kammler may be for the high jump, and wants to make certain he doesn’t go with him.’

There was no reason, Bethwig knew, to doubt Prager’s analysis. It made sense according to the Byzantine style of thinking that characterised the upper echelons of the SS.

His mind was working now at a feverish pace. There were two alternatives remaining. He could press ahead with the launch in the hope that it could be completed before Walsch received the warrants, but as soon as the thought was formulated, he saw its hopelessness. If, as Prager said, Walsch was that determined to stop them, he would merely have them arrested and held until the confession and the warrants were forthcoming. The man was a fanatic; he had known that since their first meeting in 1938. Logic did not affect his thinking. Walsch was determined to destroy them, to demonstrate his own power in return for the slights he had suffered, or supposed he had suffered, all these years.

That left the second alternative. Walsch had to be destroyed. They might then survive long enough at least to complete the launching. After that, nothing else mattered.

All these years he had built weapons of mass destruction, had worked willingly, joyfully and skilfully to do so, while enjoying the camaraderie that such difficult and complex tasks engendered among teams of specialists. He had seen such weapons move from his imagination to drawing board to test stand. He had participated in and directed operational launchings of the V-2 on London and Antwerp and Brussels with hardly a thought for the thousands of civilians he was killing by remote control. But now the moment had come when he must kill with his own hands, at close range, close enough to see into the eyes of the man he was murdering. The thought was sickening, and Bethwig experienced a rare sensation of futility and indecision.

Surprisingly enough, Prager did not protest the conclusion. ‘How would you go about it?’ he asked. ‘You couldn’t get near enough to Walsch now, nor could I.’

A scheme was already forming in Bethwig’s mind. ‘How many SS troops are left on Peenemunde?’ he demanded.

Prager glanced at him, then shook his head. ‘I’m not certain. Perhaps a hundred. Certainly not more.’

‘Would they obey orders given by Walsch?’

‘No!’ Prager’s answer was emphatic. ‘Not even if the Russians were crossing the River Peene.’

‘But they would defend him if he were attacked?’

‘Of course…’

‘How many Gestapo agents?’

‘Five including myself, plus another eight clerical staff.’

‘And where do you stand?’

‘With you,’ Prager answered simply.

‘Even if it means killing the policemen you work with…?’

‘I am a policeman. They are murderers,’ he answered simply.

‘Then we must work fast and finish them before the SS can interfere.’ Bethwig told him then about the Luftwaffe arms. Prager’s eyes lit up at the news, and for the first time the defeated slump was gone from his shoulders. They left the lavatory and drove the eight kilometres to the tracking station on the north shore where Magnus von Braun was at work.

Memling heard boots moving restlessly outside. He tensed, waiting for the painful flash of light and the shouted commands, which did not come. Perhaps this was more psychological pressure to intensify his fear.

He had only the haziest idea how much time had passed since his capture. He knew for certain that at least twelve hours had gone by. The woman’s execution had taken place in darkness; the man he knew only as Hans had been shot during the daylight, although the heavy overcast made it impossible to judge the time of day, and the final resistance agent had been killed in darkness again; there had not even been time to learn his name.

As he crouched in a corner of the cell he began to examine the possibility of extinction dispassionately. Memling recalled the relief he had felt when he had thought they were going to shoot him. He had been grateful then that he could escape the pain, that it would end simply in the crash of a bullet.

His parents had insisted on a parochial school in spite of strained circumstances, but the religion the nuns had endeavoured to impress on their charges had been wasted in his case. Even now, he realised, his thoughts did not turn to salvation. He also found it curious that he thought little about Janet… as if she belonged to another time and had no business in this present. It was, he knew, a result of his intense preoccupation with his own fate and another manifestation of the selfishness that could drive one to madness.

When he had been returned to his cell after the first glimpse of Gestapo justice, he had made a singular discovery: he was not afraid of dying. He had never been subject to paralysing fear in combat situations, because he knew death, if it came, would be quick. What he did fear, to the point of gibbering nonsense, was pain and torture. When he thought back to the times he had been frightened into panic, it was because torture seemed an imminent possibility. That first time on the train, then in Liege, during the long walking trip to Peenemunde – and now. He knew the pain would be prolonged and excruciating. No matter what he told them, no matter how he begged, Walsch would see that the torture continued until he died.

The solution to his fear was therefore simple enough. Suicide. Even though they had stripped him naked, it was possible to kill himself – not pleasantly – but possible. A major vein ran close to the surface of the wrist. A knife or sharp edge would be less painful, but one could bite through the vein and bleed to death in less than thirty minutes.

Under other circumstances the pain involved would have repulsed him, but compared with Gestapo torture techniques, such pain would be minor. Once he had made that decision, the fear that paralysed him, that had nearly driven him insane in the darkness, receded to a controllable level. And as it did he began to think about alternatives.

Each time they had come for him, one guard had swung the door open and the other had entered to haul him out, clearly expecting no resistance. In fact, the one guard had remained in the doorway the last time, looking off down the hall as he joked with someone out of sight. Death in action, however feeble, was preferable to gnawing through one’s own wrist, Memling decided.

A second pair of boots stopped outside, and a key was jammed into the lock. It happened so quickly that Memling barely had time to crouch into position against the far wall before the door swung open. He anticipated the blast of light and shut his eyes tightly. A hand grabbed his left arm and yanked him up, but Memling was limp and the man swore under his breath and reached for his other arm. As his knees came under him Memling straightened abruptly and shot his left arm out straight to break the soldier’s grip. As it reached full extension he doubled his fist into a hammer and whipped it straight back and down to smash into the man’s testicles. The blow was so sudden and powerful that it paralysed him for the vital second needed to spin, flip the holster open, and extract the heavy Walther pistol.

Memling had thought each move through during the endless hours, rehearsing them over and over in his mind. His thumb sought the safety catch and shoved up as he turned, crouching and pushing the agonised soldier out of his way. A startled exclamation from the guard in the corridor gave him the last bits of necessary data. He fired once, blindly, lining up by instinct and sound. The blast of the nine-millimetre cartridge was deafening, drowning the results, but Memling was already moving sideways. He parted his eyelids the tiniest fraction to focus on the darkness inside the door. Even so, the glare was intensely painful after hours in pitch blackness, and he could distinguish nothing more than a blotch of light as the echoes died inside the cell. There was no answering shot. He covered his eyes with his left hand and peered through slitted fingers. Legs sprawled across the doorway, and shouting could be heard somewhere in the building. Feet pounded towards the cell-block.

Memling jumped to the door and dragged the body inside. A scraping sound told him that the guard’s machine pistol was still slung over his shoulder. The Walther P-38 held eight cartridges, one now gone. There was no time to check the magazine, but no experienced soldier would keep his weapon less than fully loaded. He eased to the cell door, extended the pistol into the corridor, and fired six shots, three in either direction. A scream told him he had scored at least one hit, and a door slammed. There was now one cartridge left for himself.

Jan pulled the door partly shut. In the near darkness his sensitive eyes could see enough to strip the machine pistol from the dead man’s shoulder. The guard he had struck was trying to get to his knees, holding his groin with one hand, scrabbling at the wall with the other.

Memling kicked him down again and in the shaft of light, saw that it was the same unterscharführer who had shot the three resistance people so brutally. Without thinking, Memling jammed the muzzle of the machine pistol against the man’s throat.

‘You bastard,’ he snarled in English, pushing on the gun so that the man gagged. The SS officer tried to plead with him. There was another shout in the corridor, a door was slammed open, and a burst of automatic rifle fire ricocheted the length of the hall. Memling stared into the man’s eyes and pulled the trigger once. The body convulsed, and hands tore at the ruined throat.

Someone had turned out the corridor lights, but his eyes were still hypersensitive, and he could see clearly the two men crawling towards his cell from the courtyard entrance. He waited until both were well along, then fired two short bursts that struck them head-on. A long period of silence followed. Memling slumped against the wall, unmindful of the icy stone on his naked skin. He drew a deep breath, revelling in the loss of his terror. The time had come, he knew, but at least he had accounted for four, possibly five, Nazis, and he knew then how the two Poles he had met in northern Germany an endless time ago had felt. He was ready to die now. Memling took a deep breath and bit down on the pistol barrel.

An explosion whip-cracked through the building. Automatic weapons erupted and there were more explosions, until the noise and concussions drove him to bury his head in his arms.

It took Magnus von Braun an hour to assemble four former frontline soldiers at the radio direction station. They came as quickly as they could be detached from their duties, and replacements found, without incurring the suspicions of the SS guards. The four men – one oberfeldwebel, or sergeant major, one stabsgefreiter, or corporal, and two grenadiers – were members of the Versuchskommando Nord, or Test Command North, technically a combat unit assigned to guard the Peenemunde installation, but in reality a device used several years before to assemble six companies of technically trained men to ease the severe manpower shortage. Oberfeldwebel Harmutt Sussmann had served for three years in the Twenty-first Division of the Africa Corps. Wounded at Kasserine Pass, he was among the last to be evacuated from North Africa. After recovering from wounds, he had been assigned to command the VKN, most of which had now been reassigned elsewhere; only a few dozen from a ration strength of one thousand remained at Peenemunde. Sussmann’s eyes glowed when his assignment was explained, and when they were assembled, Magnus left to telephone the news to his brother.

With a few rapid strokes Sussmann sketched the location of Gestapo headquarters in relation to the village of Trassenheide.

‘As you see, the building is separated from the town proper by the sand dunes,’ he explained in gruff Bavarian accents. ‘They are not high but provide the privacy the Gestapo requires for its activities.’ Sussmann stared at them and singled out Prager.

‘Lay out the interior,’ he snapped. There was a distinctly hostile tone to his voice, which Prager wisely ignored.

The building is little more than a large box, thirty metres on a side,’ he began. ‘The front portion is devoted to offices and administrative areas. The files are kept in this locked room here. There are six cells, all three by three metres, on either side of this hall which runs like so.’ He sketched a narrow corridor leading from the centre front to back. ‘There are two rooms on the north wall for interrogation, and all are equipped as physicians’ examination rooms.

‘There is a garrison of eight SS and four Gestapo officers. The SS are part of a special unit attached to Division Three. They take their orders from Walsch and not from Kammler’s command. There are also eight more employees, none of them armed, and most will have been sent home for the night. The building is constructed of cement blocks. The interior is plyboard. The cells are reinforced ply and thoroughly sound- and light-proofed. In the rear, separated from the sea by a wall three metres high, is the courtyard where the resistance traitors were executed.’

‘Where will we find Walsch?’

‘We?’ Prager and Sussmann both asked simultaneously. Bethwig nodded. ‘We.’

‘You can’t go,’ Sussmann told him flatly.

Bethwig leaned across the table. ‘No one has a better right than I do. I intend to kill Walsch myself.’

Sussmann and Prager exchanged glances, and Prager, knowing why Bethwig felt as he did, nodded with reluctance. Sussmann saw the nod and started to protest, but Magnus von Braun, who had returned a few moments earlier, also agreed. Sussmann gave in and signed Prager to continue. The Gestapo officer placed a fingertip on a room off the administrative area.

‘Walsch will either be here or in one of the interrogation rooms with the prisoner.’

‘Which is the Englishman’s cell?’

‘The middle one, to the left or south side of the corridor.’ Bethwig glanced at each man in turn. ‘You know what we have to do and why,’ he said simply. ‘Let’s get started.’

The fitful snow had stopped by the time the six men drove up to the gate of the deserted Luftwaffe test area known as Peenemunde West, on the north-west tip of the island. A bored and half-frozen sentry was on duty at the dilapidated barrier, one of the few remaining Luftwaffe personnel on the island. He was in no mood to question Bethwig’s demand for admittance, and they drove on past rows of empty buildings that seemed like evil mountains in the furtive moonlight.

Sussmann led him to the side door of a two-storey warehouse, produced a key, and got out to unlock the door. They clattered up iron stairs to the loft, and Sussmann showed them several packing boxes labelled for machinery. Four long wooden crates were stacked on a pallet behind. Sussmann levered open the top crate, peeled back the greased paper, and exposed ten MP40 machine pistols to the gleam of the torchlight. The corporal passed them out while Sussmann opened another case and extracted ammunition already packed into thirty-eight-round magazines. A third case held potato masher-style hand-grenades.

‘Enough to start our own war.’ Prager grinned as he hefted one of the machine pistols and cocked the action, it feels good to handle one of these again.’

Sussmann directed him to park the car half a kilometre from the beach, and they went over the plan once more, then started off. They hiked along the beach towards the isolated building, depending on the sand dunes and the weather to conceal them. Two hundred metres from the building they came to the remains of the old fishing pier. They split here, Prager and Bethwig continuing along the waterline to the rear of the courtyard while Sussmann took the other four up on to the sand dunes. The sergeant major had been adamant: Bethwig would not be allowed to participate in the frontal attack. Prager had supported Sussmann, and Bethwig had given in. Their task was limited to seeing that no one escaped over the back wall. Faced now with imminent action, Bethwig was relieved at Sussmann’s decision. He discovered that he was scared to death in a way he had never been while serving with the V-2 battalion. There, death had seemed a random process of selection, much as a traffic accident would be. Here, it was entirely too personal.

The wind whipped at them as they crouched in the wet sand. The floodlit courtyard gave them sufficient light to see by, while at the same time providing concealing shadows. Even though both men wore heavy duffle coats, the wind slipped through folds and crevices to set them shivering.

Bethwig glanced at his watch again. The radium dial showed nearly 8 p.m. Less than four hours remained; and although he knew that Wernher was more than capable of carrying out the sequence without reference to him, if he was to complete the rest of his plan, he could not spare more than another forty minutes here. Yet he could not bring himself to leave until he was certain that Walsch was dead.

Two grenades exploded in quick succession, followed by burst after burst of machine-pistol fire. Bethwig and Prager could see the flares and concussive shock waves rippling outward from the building, although the wind, blowing away from them, muffled the sound. Shouts and screams mingled with the gunfire, and Bethwig was in a fury of apprehension. The battle was loud enough, he was certain, to bring SS reinforcements, even though Sussmann’s first task had been to cut power and telephone lines.

Prager nudged him; a head had appeared level with the wall. A moment later a figure dropped and, crouching, reached up to grab a weapon that someone was handing over. Prager’s hand was on his arm. ‘Wait until they are both over,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Aim low and fire short bursts.’

Bethwig nodded and pulled back and up on the bolt handle, as Prager did, trying to remember his long-ago Hitler Youth training.

‘Now,’ Prager shouted, and fired.

Over the sights Bethwig saw one man turn towards them; his face was hidden in shadow, but Bethwig could imagine the surprise that died as he fired two short bursts. The figure pitched forward, and Prager took the other as he dropped over the wall. Then Bethwig was running, propelled by the desperate need to reach Walsch. He ripped a grenade from his coat pocket, twisted the igniter, counted to three, and tossed it into the courtyard. Prager drew up, panting, machine pistol in hand, and mouthing blasphemies as he flung his grenade over as well. They both ducked against the base of the wall, and the bombs went off one after the other.

Bethwig started up, but Prager yanked him back and threw another grenade to make certain the courtyard was clear. After it exploded, Prager swung himself to the top of the wall, inched his head up, then swarmed over. Bethwig followed, shouting uncontrollably with excitement.

A man in black uniform lay dead. That made three. Prager held up a hand and edged towards the open doorway. From the front of the building sustained gunfire shattered the night. Sussmann’s rush had not carried the building as planned. Could they obtain reinforcements? he wondered. An explosion came, sharp and crisp against the wind – but from outside, not inside the building.

‘We’ve got to move!’ Prager shouted, and Bethwig peered along the dark corridor. He could just make out a partly opened door and, with a jolt, realised it was the cell in which he had been held the previous autumn. Two bodies were huddled on the floor of the hall. Prager jerked a thumb at them.

‘We didn’t kill those two. Who did?’

Bethwig started to shake his head, then smiled in sudden understanding. ‘Inside! Is that Jan Memling?’ he shouted down the corridor. ‘This is Franz Bethwig. Do you remember me?’

‘Franz Bethwig?’ a voice called back doubtfully.

‘Yes, Wernher von Braun’s friend.’ Bethwig had switched to rusty English and was forced to search his memory for the proper words.

‘We were at Hotel…’

‘I know who you are. What do you want?’

The Englishman must have armed himself somehow. That could be the only explanation for the two dead men in the corridor. ‘How many have you…’ He could not find the English word he wanted and awkwardly substituted one in German: ‘…. töten?’

‘The hell with you, you bloody bastards!’

‘God damn you for a fool, Memling.’ Bethwig was so angry he began to stutter. ‘We must… we need to know how many… remain in… are left, you damned ass.’

The English swear-words must have convinced him, for Memling answered after a moment. ‘Four,’ he shouted. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘There is not time…’ Bethwig began, then switched to German. ‘There is no time to explain. Do you have a weapon?’

Memling hesitated. It made no sense… but then nothing had for as long as he could remember. ‘Yes,’ he shouted back.

‘Some of us are attacking the front. We must come in through the back. Do not shoot us.’

Bethwig did not wait for an answer but raised his machine pistol over his head and stepped into the corridor. Prager lunged for him, but Bethwig twisted away and started forward, heart in his throat, skin crawling, as he waited for the bullet’s impact. After a few steps he saw a hint of movement behind the partly opened door.

‘If you kill me,’ Bethwig blurted in sudden fright, ‘you will lose your last chance.’

He was beside the cell door now, facing a crouched figure nearly invisible in the shadows. He pushed the door wider. The fear was as evident in Memling’s eyes as he knew it was in his own, but the machine pistol the Englishman held was rock-steady and aimed at his mid-section.

‘Get some clothes and come help,’ Bethwig said quietly, and put out a hand to halt Prager as he came up behind.

‘The Englishman?’ Prager asked, and Bethwig nodded.

Prager stared at Bethwig, then went back down the corridor and removed boots, jacket, and trousers from one of the dead soldiers, tossing the clothes to Memling who began to pull them on as if in a daze. When Prager handed him two stick grenades, Memling clutched them a moment, then shook himself and braced his shoulders.

‘How many are left?’ he demanded in excellent German.

‘Possibly eight,’ Prager answered. ‘I think we should go around the side and…’

‘I hold a commission as major in the Royal Marines.’ Memling’s voice was crisp. ‘This is your show, but I advise you to go through that door and fast.’

Prager and Bethwig exchanged glances, and Prager nodded. ‘Tell us what to do.’

‘How are your men disposed in front?’ Memling demanded as he moved down the corridor towards the door, keeping well to one side.

‘Head-on attack by two men and one more on each flank. Grenades and machine pistols.’

That explained the explosions, then, Memling thought. He had not the slightest idea what was going on, and there was no time to find out. Already the volume of gunfire was slackening. He waved the two Germans to either side of the door; there wasn’t even time to ask if either had combat experience. Jan tried the door, and when it gave, a rictus of anger slashed across his face. He slung the machine pistol, twisted the screw covers from the grenades, and pulled their igniting cords.

‘Damned careless of them,’ Prager grunted as he threw the door open.

Memling stepped forward and lobbed the grenades with easy underhand throws, aiming to bounce them from the walls so that the blasts would fill the long room with shrapnel. He hesitated long enough to see them strike walls; a white face turned towards him, the mouth forming a warning scream; a man in a suit paused in the midst of cranking a field telephone. Then Memling slammed the door. Twin blasts vomited through the front of the building and bulged the iron-reinforced door from its frame. It took the three of them to wrench it open.

The room was a shambles. The cement-block wall had contained the explosion and turned the blast inward, leaving the walls and every piece of furniture gouged and splintered by shrapnel. There were five bloody, torn bodies, one of them barely recognisable as a woman’s. He had once seen an American Sherman tank in Sicily. A grenade had been dropped down the hatch, and the shrapnel had spun and ricocheted around the interior, so that the crew had looked as if they had been blasted over and over with buckshot. These bodies looked the same.

A groan came from a small room off to one side, and Memling kicked the shattered door wide, almost losing one of his too-big boots in the process. Walsch was slumped on the floor. Blood ran down one side of his face, and his arm dangled at a strange angle as he tried to get to his feet. A small Mauser pistol lay on the floor nearby. From behind, Prager was shouting through a smashed window that they had succeeded. The wind howled in sudden fury, and papers flurried.

Bethwig pushed past him into the room.

‘He’s mine,’ he said, swallowing hard to contain the bitter sickness. ‘He killed my father and…’ He could go no further. Walsch looked up and unexpectedly laughed in genuine mirth.

‘And the little whore. Please do not forget her. The Reichsführer gave her to my charge. So, you will kill me now,’ he choked. ‘You must kill me.’ Walsch slumped but recovered himself and stared up at Bethwig. ‘You see, I have a cancer in the lungs. I will die soon in any event. You will spare me the pain.’ He tried to laugh again but collapsed on the floor instead, coughing harshly.

Bethwig raised the pistol. ‘I don’t give a damn for your cancer, you sadistic bastard,’ he screamed.

Memling caught his arm. ‘Have you ever killed before?’ he demanded. ‘Shot a man to death in cold blood?’

Bethwig shook his head. ‘This isn’t a man, he’s… he is an animal.’

‘Then let me do it. It’s not an easy thing to live with.’

Bethwig hesitated just as Sussmann staggered in. Walsch read the uncertainty in Bethwig’s eyes and tried to laugh at him. He knew.

‘It will live with you for ever,’ Memling warned.

Sussmann leaned against the door-frame to watch. Walsch started to speak, but Memling turned then and shot the Gestapo officer once, through the forehead.

‘One more can’t make my nightmares any worse,’ he muttered.

Bethwig parked the car on the northern boundary of the deserted POW camp. He and Jan Memling got out while Prager worked to bandage the surviving grenadier’s shattered arm. The corporal and the other grenadier had been killed, and Sussmann had received a shrapnel wound in the stomach. The pain and loss of blood were sending him into shock. He lay back in the front seat breathing heavily, his face pale.

The wind whipped tatters of snow at them once again, and Memling shivered in his ill-fitting uniform. They stood just below a small rise where the trees had been cleared, and talked for what seemed a very long time. Bethwig told him of the work they had done, passing lightly over the details in his haste to cover everything. He wanted this quiet, capable Englishman to understand what had brought them to this night; more, he wanted his help.

Memling nodded when he began to describe the V-10. ‘I know. I was here.’

Bethwig hugged his coat about himself. ‘It was rumoured you killed four SS soldiers.’

’How do you know about that?’

Bethwig laughed humourlessly. ‘Peenemunde abounds in rumours. They were confirmed when the Gestapo arrested Wernher von Braun, Ernst Mundt and Helmuth Gottrup.’

‘Arrested… then…’

‘No, all three were subsequently released. The SS wanted to hang them, but in those days we still had a few connections that meant something.’

He took Memling’s arm and urged him up the slight rise until they were standing on the crest. Below them lay the immense sprawl of the V-10 launch complex. The area seemed a fairyland of lights and broad avenues leading to the towering conical shape of the V-10.

‘Jesus,’ Memling breathed.

The rocket was immense. He had never imagined anything so huge in his life. It was as if he had stepped into another world, another time. Even at this distance it was staggering. A lorry moving past the rocket’s base snapped the scene into scale. The rocket was wider than the lorry was long. Technicians swarmed like ants over the three-stage rocket and its scaffolding. Against the moonlit sky the thrusting, brilliantly lighted shape glistened as if alive. Looking into the shallow valley formed by the surrounding hills, Memling knew he was witnessing for the first time in the history of the human race a scene that would be repeated endlessly into the future as man struck out from the tiny, cramped world of his birth in search of his ultimate destiny. That barely remembered French scientist had been right after all; they all, he and Franz Bethwig and Wernher von Braun and all the other scientists and technicians at Peenemunde shared a magnificent dream, which even the savagery of total war could not destroy.

‘The V-Ten.’ Bethwig leaned sideways to make himself heard over the wind, it was designed to bombard the eastern coast of the United States with atomic explosives.’

Memling turned to him, eyes growing wide, but Bethwig shook his head before he could ask the question.

‘Our atomic projects were cancelled long ago. But not the V-Ten. We have test-flown four of them. This is the fifth and final rocket.’

‘Then you are going to launch it?’ Memling found his voice at last.

‘Yes. Tonight. But not at the United States.’

‘Where?’ Memling asked the question even though he already knew the answer.

A sudden current of happiness shot through Bethwig; he could not explain it, but he laughed and clapped Memling on the back and pointed at the moon. ‘There, my English friend, to the moon, as we talked about all those years ago in Arnsberg, remember? Tonight, we shall do it.’

Memling watched the car recede until its tail-lights disappeared. He then hitched on the sling of his machine pistol and started off towards the northern end of the island. Prager scratched his head and, as if reaching a decision, strode after him. The Englishman grinned as he came up, but said nothing. Both men were busy with their own thoughts.

He had an idea of Prager’s mental struggle; he had been through it himself. It was conceivable, he had decided, that this rocket might have some military value, even though at this late date it could have no real effect on the course of the war. In any event, what Bethwig intended to do was far bigger, far more important to the human race, than any of its petty and – after tonight – outdated squabbles. He really had nothing to lose, Memling decided. His own chances of survival were slim in any event, and he might as well see that something came of this damned war. And besides, he admitted, he wouldn’t miss the launch of the first rocket to the moon for life itself. After a while the trees hid the launch site, but the glow remained in the sky as a beacon and they trudged on towards the petrol and fuel storage tanks.

No one turned to look at Bethwig as he entered the control room and stood for a moment watching the orderly chaos. This was the part he loved, these final hours when everything came together and a thousand men worked as one towards a single goal.

Tangles of cable ran across and along the aisles, taped to the floor here and bundled together with lengths of flex there. A huge ready board was mounted on the wall where it could be seen from every corner of the room. Bethwig scanned the coloured markers quickly; everything was proceeding on schedule. As he watched, a technician scurried across the metal platform to replace a yellow marker with a green diamond indicating that the return stage liquid oxygen tanks had been pressure-tested successfully.

A twelve-year-old boy skidded to a halt before him; the son of a test engineer, he was serving as a messenger. His face was flushed with exertion, and he could barely contain his excitement. ‘Please, Herr Doktor. There is a telephone call for you. From Brigadeführer Kammler. He has been waiting fifteen minutes.’

Bethwig followed the boy to the main console where Wernher von Braun scowled at him. Bethwig nodded and drew a finger across his throat. Von Braun’s scowl deepened, but he offered the receiver, one hand across the mouthpiece.

‘I told him you were on the launch stand, checking the second stage gyro assembly.’

‘Herr Brigadeführer Kammler? How nice to hear from you. Have you been held up? We expected you this afternoon.’ Bethwig made his voice drip.

‘Never mind that now.’ Kammler was shouting, his words almost lost in the roar of atmospherics. ‘What the hell is going on there? I am being prevented from reaching Peenemunde…’ The next few sentences disappeared in the crash and pop of static.

‘I am sorry, Brigadeführer,’ Bethwig said into the mouthpiece. ‘The line is so bad I cannot understand you.’

‘…status there? Will you…?’

Bethwig was able to guess at the question. ‘We will launch on time. All stations have reported in. The submarine is on station and everything appears ready at this time. Please do try and get here,’ he finished, and handed the phone to the boy.

‘If Brigadeführer Kammler comes back on the line so that you can understand him, son, tell him what’s happening. Otherwise, hang up.’

The boy’s eyes went wide as he accepted the phone; he stammered something, but Bethwig had already turned away, motioning von Braun to follow.

‘What the hell is going on?’ von Braun demanded, grabbing his arm as they reached the corridor. ‘Magnus telephoned an hour ago to say that Sussmann was arming some men to deal with a problem. What problem, damn it?’

‘The problem of Inspector Jacob Walsch. Do you remember an old friend of yours, Jan Memling?’

Wernher von Braun blinked in surprise. ‘Of course… oh no, not again!’

Bethwig nodded. ‘Yes. He was sent to Peenemunde to persuade you and the staff to surrender to the British or Americans, rather than the Russians.’

‘But we’ve already decided,’ von Braun protested, and waved a hand as Bethwig started to point out that London could hardly know that. Then he blanched under the impact of Bethwig’s news. ‘My God, if he should be caught…’

‘He was,’ Bethwig told him calmly. ‘With three German citizens, all members of the resistance. Early this morning.’ Quickly he described to von Braun what had taken place over the past eighteen hours. ‘Two hours ago it came to a head. My contact in the Gestapo reported that the three traitors had signed confessions, and been shot. That left only your English friend. If he confessed, which I was assured he would, you and I and a good many others would be dead by now.’

Von Braun slumped against the wall. ‘Where do we stand now?’ he asked finally. ‘You said if he confessed. If? What about Kammler? Surely he won’t…’

‘Forget Kammler. He’s in enough trouble himself.’ He reviewed what Prager had told him of the SS’s own intramural squabbles ‘The Gestapo was our major enemy, primarily because Walsch hated us both. But it doesn’t matter any longer. Walsch is dead.’

Von Braun perked up at that. ‘How?’

‘Your English friend Memling shot him. Saved me from doing so, for which one of these days, I am sure, I will be grateful. I don’t know how, but Memling had a weapon when we arrived and had already killed four of the SS. If it had not been for him, we might not have made it.’

‘I don’t believe any of this.’ Von Braun shook his head, it sounds like a thriller story.’

‘Never mind that now. We are not out of the woods by any means. The SS will soon discover what happened in Trassenheide, and if they should find out who was responsible, we are all dead. But we could also have them about our ears anytime now if someone gets cold feet and decides to stop the launching or if Kammler screws up his courage and bulls his way through the roadblocks. Don’t forget that his orders about shooting us are still in effect.’

Von Braun pushed himself away from the wall and took a few steps down the hall, then spun and came back. ‘How in hell can we stop them? What about Sussmann? He was supposed to be setting up some kind of defence…’

‘Sussmann was wounded quite badly. He’s in hospital right now, but I persuaded Memling to keep the SS busy. Your English friend, it turns out, is a commando officer.’

‘I thought he was a spy, worked for that… I don’t remember…’

‘So did I.’ Bethwig shrugged, in any event, I made a deal with him, one it will be up to you to honour.’

Bethwig glanced at his wristwatch. Time was running out. ‘I promised that after the launch you would help hide him. He speaks excellent German, and it shouldn’t be difficult to pass him off as a middle-level technician for a while. Everything is falling apart here, and with the entire Gestapo staff dead, security checks are certain to fall by the wayside, at least for the moment. Memling said there is a submarine standing by for him and anyone else who wants to leave, but you can deal with that. I gave him directions to your house in Zinnowitz. He will be discreet. Now, I have one more thing to do. Stay on the control console for me a while longer, please?’

Bethwig was half-way down the hall as he asked the final question. Von Braun started after him, demanding to know where he was going this time and why he couldn’t take care of the Englishman himself, before he realised Bethwig had already gone. Von Braun tore off his cap and slammed it to the tiled floor in frustration.

Outside, Bethwig hesitated, then turned away from the car park. There might be roadblocks and he could not afford the delay. The SS guard normally stationed at the blockhouse door had disappeared; he did not know if that was a good sign or not, but as there seemed to be no one about, he plunged through the shrubbery and began to run.

Jan Memling crouched in the shadows beside the fence while Prager, a few metres on, pushed up a strand of wire and wriggled through. The few incandescent lamps mounted on high poles swayed with the wind, flinging shadows and light in every direction. Memling slipped through after him, and they trotted towards the looming bulk of the tank farm. There were only two guards, one at each entrance – the first asleep in his hut, the other sheltering from the wind and staring glumly into the night. It was obvious that neither expected the slightest bit of trouble. And why should they? Prager observed. In the six years of its existence, the Peenemunde facility had had only one actual taste of war: the bombing in 1943. And here they were, a year and a half later, guarding a useless farm on a miserably cold January night while they waited for the Russians.

‘The tank contains approximately fifty thousand litres of alcohol,’ Bethwig had explained. ‘Not enough to do more than make a big flash. Wernher’s brother, Magnus, is in charge of our security, and he made it his business to see that if we needed it, a suitable distraction could be produced. The thirty thousand metric tons of high explosive removed from the V-Ten warhead has been stored inside a deserted petrol tank near to the alcohol tank. If it could be exploded, I am certain it would keep the SS far too busy searching for Russian saboteurs to interfere with us.’

Prager hissed, and they both went to ground. A shadow passed on the single-track road, and a moment later they heard the racketing sound of a motor fading into the night. The two men exchanged glances.

‘Let’s get this over with fast,’ Memling muttered, ‘before they come back. Do you have your bearings yet?’

Bethwig had given them the code number of the alcohol tank and described its location on the seaward side of the farm. Their way was impeded by a tangle of pipes, fire barriers and deserted buildings, and it was 21.39 hours when they reached a concrete wall that overlooked an isolated cluster of tanks squatting above the beach. The moon, jousting with broken cloud, silhouetted their target against the sullen Baltic.

They vaulted the wall and trotted down the slope. Memling explored the surrounding area for the fill pipes, which he then traced back to the metering valves mounted on the tank itself. The piping was stainless steel – to prevent contamination of the alcohol – which only made their task that much more difficult. The joint where the piping ran into the tank proper was well protected by a heavy riveted iron flange.

He backed off then and stared upwards. The tank was made of cast-iron sections, and therefore it had to be lined with glass or stainless steel to prevent contamination; somewhere inside would be the emergency drain valve. Memling found the ladder on the north side, jumped, caught hold, and went up quickly.

The top of the tank was gently rounded and covered with a glare of ice. He crouched against the wind and made his way along, clutching the handholds for dear life. The cloud was broken enough to make visible the entire northern end of the island. In the vague moonlight he could see the smaller, squatter petrol tank downslope and a hundred metres or more distant. He thought about the thirty thousand kilos of HE stored inside, and shivered. The damned thing had to be full of petrol fumes; it was a bomb waiting for a spark. Yet he had to be certain. Amatol was incredibly stable and damned hard to ignite. Only because of that had they dared hide it in the abandoned petrol tank.

He ducked his chin into the collar of his jacket. To the south, five kilometres or more distant, the launch area glowed as if aflame. Behind, the wind-whipped Baltic disappeared into the invisible horizon; somewhere out there was a submarine waiting for his signal. They would wait for a long time; the Gestapo had taken the ‘Joan’ radio transmitter lent by the OSS. For a moment the old uncertainty and fear swept him. Once the tank exploded, the SS would be out in force. Unless he and Prager kept moving and were exceptionally lucky… he stopped the wild, random thoughts. Bethwig and his mad scheme. The man was crazy, or was he? Wouldn’t he do exactly the same if he had the chance? This was perhaps the final opportunity of their generation to fulfil one of man’s oldest dreams. He had been asked to play a very small part and would do so no matter the cost. Bethwig was right. A man’s dreams are all he ever really has.

Memling found the access door leading into the interior and went down into pitch-blackness. The intense odour of raw concentrated alcohol was overpowering, and by the time he found the emergency drainage system near the base of the liner, adjacent to the fill-pipe junction, he was wobbling. He fumbled the clips holding the access door open, overrode the exterior lock, and swung the door wide, scaring Prager half to death.

Memling opened the emergency drain petcock wide and ducked out quickly as the liquid spurted. With Prager’s help he climbed the slope and crouched behind the retainer wall. The fumes were beginning to clear from his head, and after a few moments he pushed himself up beside Prager. Liquid had already overflowed the hatch sill and was coursing slowly down the slope. As he watched, it gathered in a small hollow, changed direction, and then resumed its course. It took ten minutes before sufficient alcohol reached the abandoned petrol tank to show in the fitful darkness.

‘Do you think there is enough there?’

‘Go ahead,’ Memling said, and Prager took the battered Walther flare pistol from his belt, loaded it, and hesitated.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Damn it, unless you have a better way to do it, go ahead and shoot.’

Prager shrugged, aimed carefully, and fired.

The flare arced in a shallow parabola and burst below the tank. Memling held his breath, but nothing happened. Prager swore, broke the pistol open, and loaded another round. This time he aimed well above the hatch.

Memling had an impression of a tongue of flame spewing upwards from the alcohol-soaked ground, and then all hell broke loose. The tank disappeared with a dull whump, vaporised into a perfectly round ball of flame. The concussion slammed them backwards, and a moment later a gale snatched the breath from their lungs as air rushed in to fill the void where the tank had been. The fireball rolled skyward, so bright that they could not look at it. It seemed to be standing on a single column of flame and smoke, and then bits and pieces of metal whirled out of the night.

‘God damn,’ Memling heard Prager muttering over and over again as they crouched behind the scorched wall. He grabbed his shoulder then and pointed. The base of the old petrol tank was ringed in flame.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here….’

They vaulted the retainer wall and raced up the slope, running desperately for the shelter of the far side. Memling had tried to memorise the way they had come, but the tangle of piping and jungle of tanks and columns were confusing in the moonlight, and he gave up trying to do anything more than maintain a heading. Prager ran beside him, clutching his side, his breath coming in harsh gasps. The anticipation was exquisite. They had no idea how long, if ever, the intense heat of the flaming alcohol would take to ignite the high explosive.

They could see the fence and the Luftwaffe guard shouting into a telephone when the sudden flare of light warned Jan. He dived for the ground, but the concussion caught him in mid-air and sent him sliding across the gravel surface. He buried his head in his arms as the world ended.

Explosion after explosion rocked the island; pillars of flame arced into the blazing sky. The tank farm had become an inferno of sound and fire. A searing wind raged across the sand waste, and Memling felt it scorch his back even through the wool jacket. He half turned then and stared with awe at the incandescent mushroom of smoke and gas erupting beyond the hilltop. He got to his knees, still staring, awestruck at the destruction they had caused. Nothing remained of the tank farm but twisted steel and flaming buildings. Prager was urging him up, dragging him towards the fence, shouting at him, and suddenly Memling began to shake. That cloud could have hovered over New York, or London. Janet could have been one of its many victims. He vomited, harshly.

Bethwig showed his pass to the SS guard, pushed through the glass doors, and hurried along the corridor. The few people about glanced at him in surprise, but he ignored them all. When he entered the ready room, a technician completing a pressure check on an oxygen bottle did a double take at finding the chief project engineer here and not at the command centre. Bethwig pointed to the dressing room, and the man could only nod.

Inside, the pilot was putting on the heavy pressure suit. Surprised, he tried to snap to attention and toppled into the arms of a technician.

‘Is everything ready, Artur?’ Bethwig asked the chief technician who was helping to right the pilot.

‘Yes, sir. The suit checks out properly. Everything is set. The command centre reports on schedule for boarding at T-minus-forty.’

‘Very good, gentlemen. Will all of you please leave us for a few minutes? I’ll send Lieutenant Gross out to you in a few moments.’

The four technicians, their white uniforms soiled with the exertions of the past twenty-four hours, exchanged puzzled glances but trooped out. The pilot tried to fix an earnest look on his face but failed miserably. Bethwig suspected that for the first time the man was beginning to comprehend the odds against him.

‘I understand the submarine is in place,’ the pilot began, thereby betraying his apprehension, but Bethwig cut him off. ‘Never mind that now. You will not be flying tonight.’

The pilot’s expression showed a combination of relief, surprise and disappointment. ‘Not… but why…?’

‘The flight is cancelled.’ Bethwig spread his hands in apology. ‘Wind conditions are near gale force at eight thousand metres. We are rescheduling for tomorrow night. I thought I should come and tell you in person, knowing what a disappointment it must be.’ Bethwig slipped from his pocket the syringe prepared earlier. ‘Well that’s a relief, I’ll bet,’ he said in a hearty voice. ‘Let’s have that suit off, then.’

The pilot’s hands went automatically to the zipper, and as he peeled the suit over his upper arms, Bethwig slipped the needle through the layers of woollen underwear and into the muscle. The pilot jerked back, but it was too late.

‘What the hell…? What are you doing…?’

Bethwig spoke softly: ‘It’s just a sedative. You’ll wake up in a few hours…’

The pilot’s eyes rolled, and his knees collapsed. Grunting, Bethwig stripped the suit off, strapped the unconscious Lieutenant Gross to a gurney, and hauled him into the storeroom.

Back in the dressing room, Bethwig removed his own clothes and pulled on the two layers of woollen underwear. He had to sit down on the floor to wriggle into the cumbersome leather and rubber pressure suit, a modification of the high-altitude pressure suit worn by Luftwaffe pilots in the Me163B rocket plane. When the zippers were closed and fastened, Bethwig tugged on the close-fitting cotton flying helmet, adjusted the earphone pads comfortably, and lifted the heavy plastic helmet over his shoulders, settled it into the rubber gaskets, and gave it a partial turn to lock it in place. Immediately the glass vision plate steamed over.

Moving clumsily in the heavy pressure suit, he made the connections to the cart containing the air bottles and air-conditioning unit and started up the systems. Bethwig sighed with relief as air began to flow into the helmet through the perforated shoulder piece. The air brought with it the smell of stale sweat, rubber, solvents, leather, and a host of other odours. The suit was amazingly stiff in spite of its cleverly articulated joints, and the twenty-five-kilo weight dragged at him. Bethwig took a deep breath, dragged the cart with him to the door, and knocked. The chief technician opened it quickly. He clipped a wire lead to the helmet and slipped his own earphones on.

‘Are you cert – ‘ he began, then broke off, and shrugged. ‘A bit too late to be worrying about that, isn’t it?’ The voice was tinny and distant through the built-in headset.

Bethwig lifted a ponderous arm and clapped him on the shoulder. When the technician asked where Bethwig had gone, he waved vaguely in the direction of the inner office and stepped into the corridor, at the end of which, beyond the glass doors, he could see the lorry waiting to drive them to the launch site. Technicians and well-wishers, family members of the staff and non-technical employees, had gathered to applaud the pilot as he passed. Bethwig waved, thankful that the vision plate was tinted, so his features could not be seen. The doors were opened for him, and he stepped out. A brilliant flare lit the northern horizon at that instant, and moments later sound struck them with the ferocity of a hurricane.

Prager’s estimate of the SS garrison’s ability to respond was obviously faulty, Memling thought with some bitterness. He had lost sight of the Gestapo officer just after they had slipped back through the fence and started towards the woods. A rifle shot snapped past, and the wind brought the sound of a lorry engine racing towards them. Memling made it to the cover of the trees, but Prager had disappeared in the darkness.

He could not see the soldiers crossing the field, but he could hear them: an officer’s whistle, the sound of booted feet on frozen ground, an occasional shout. When he was satisfied that they were in an extended skirmish line, suggesting that they did not know their quarry’s exact location, Memling trotted a few hundred metres into the scrub pine, switched direction abruptly, and headed north-east towards the coast, which, unless he had badly mixed his directions, was two kilometres away. There was nothing he could do for Prager except to hope the man had got clear.

There were no longer any sounds of pursuit as he came up over the crest of a sand dune, yet he continued to move carefully. The moon had slipped farther towards zenith, and heavy cloud was moving in for good this time. Memling studied the sky; it would snow before morning, he decided. The watch he had taken from one of the dead SS troopers in Trassenheide showed 10.55. Less than an hour to go. If they kept to schedule.

As he hunched into the shelter of a bush Memling found himself wondering at Bethwig’s confident assertion that the launching would not be stopped because of technical problems: had the Germans come so far that he could be that certain, or was it all an act for his benefit? He recalled the weeks and months of repeated failure in the years before the war, when he and Phil Cleator and Arthur Clarke and all the rest had struggled time and again to get their flimsy balsa and tin creations off the ground.

And that raised the question of why Bethwig was involved in this mad scheme to begin with. He was one of Germany’s premier rocket engineers. How in the name of God had he become involved in a gun battle at Gestapo headquarters? Was the dream strong enough, he wondered, to drive a man into open conflict with his government, even to the point of treason? He shook his head. It was damned unlikely that he would ever know.

But Bethwig had told him he was going to ride that shining monster to the moon, and his breath caught in his throat at the memory of the rocket towering from the centre of the launch complex. Only someone like himself, like Franz, like those of the Peenemunde staff, could ever really understand the lure of the dream that had driven them all these years. And given the slightest opportunity, Memling knew he would have taken Bethwig’s place without a second thought.

A figure materialised on the edge of the deeper blackness that was the pine forest. A smear of cloud slid away from the moon, and he saw Prager plodding in his direction. He watched as the Gestapo agent reached the fence edging the narrow track, stooped, and began to crawl through. A spotlight snapped on, catching Prager full in its beam, and a machine-gun stitched a dead-straight line of dirt explosions towards him; Prager’s coat caught on the barbed wire, and the stream of bullets marched past and left him dangling on the fence. A moment later soldiers ran down the road, and the lorry mounting the searchlight and machine-gun followed.

It happened so fast that Memling could do nothing but watch. Someone had made a correct guess and sent a detachment to wait in ambush. Sickened at the senseless cruelty of it, Memling edged down the flank of the dune as they dragged Prager up the road. An officer met them half-way, unholstered a pistol, and fired a single round into his head.

‘You bloody bastards!’ Memling ground out as two of the SS squad pulled Prager’s body to the side of the road and kicked it into the ditch. Memling reached the hard sand beach and began to run.

The plan had come into his mind fully formed. The track ran along the beach, just back of the dunes, as he remembered the map. Less than half a kilometre on, it snaked down into a gully and up again, making a sharp turn inland as it emerged. Memling reached that gully as the lorry came into sight, travelling slowly and rocking from side to side on the badly rutted road. The glare of its headlights whipped over him, and he flattened himself against the ground. The lorry lurched down the slope, gears grinding angrily as the driver fought the transmission and the steering wheel at the same time, and the soldier at the machine-gun hung on with both hands. As the lorry started up the short slope and entered the turn Memling twisted the cap off a grenade, pulled the igniter, and waited two seconds before tossing it into the open back. He heard someone swear, and then the grenade went off.

The blast swung the lorry half around; the petrol tank erupted and the rear became a mass of flames. The driver’s door flew open and Memling shot the man as he slid out, then shifted quickly and killed the gunner as he scrambled over the side. A figure leapt from the back, uniform blazing like a torch, and Memling ignored him as he rolled about on the ground for a moment, then lay still. A bullet kicked up dirt as he got to his feet, and instinctively he swivelled, finger squeezing short bursts from the MP40. The officer who had shot Prager jerked and fell across the hood of the lorry.

Memling climbed down into the gully. A series of pops sounded beneath the blazing canvas as ammunition exploded. He kept his eyes on the officer who was groaning and trying to push himself upright. The man saw Memling standing across the hood and lifted a hand as if to shield himself. Memling reached forward and picked up the officer’s pistol from where it had fallen into the open hood vent. The SS officer tried to speak, but Memling shook his head and shot him dead.

Memling crossed the road. By the time the first soldiers arrived to investigate the blaze, he was deep in the forest, moving south.

‘Right foot here, sir, then left foot on the couch. That’s it, sir, now ease in and down.’

The technician’s big hand pushed down on the helmet, forcing Bethwig’s chin against the rim, so that he spluttered in protest before he popped through the hatch like a melon seed, caromed off the far wall of the cabin, and bounced into the seat. With an air of exasperation, the technician leaned across and reset the three switches he had knocked out of position.

Franz lay back in the contoured seat while the technicians worked to secure him to the acceleration couch and hook him into the control panels. He could hardly believe that he had pulled it off, yet the couch rocked gently on its gimbals and there was the main instrument panel above his head. He was so excited that he no longer noticed the sweaty, oily smell of the pressure suit; nor did he notice that it chafed. The suit was just about one size too small, but that could not be helped. And his neck was just that much longer than the original owner’s that the top of his head rubbed against the padding.

The technician rapped on his helmet, and Bethwig came to with a start. The man was motioning for him to switch on the radio. For an instant, panic gripped him; if he turned his radio on, his voice would be transmitted over the intercom to the .launch area and the command centre. If they discovered that he had substituted himself for the pilot before the hatch was sealed, the SS would certainly end the launch attempt. The man pointed again, but the chief technician elbowed him aside and plugged his headset directly into Bethwig’s helmet.

‘Sorry, Lieutenant. Got delayed. Small problem in the instrument bay, but it’s fixed now. Some idiot left a bolt just loose enough to keep the hatch from closing.’

Bethwig suppressed a sigh of relief. Over the tinny intercom the chief technician would be unable to tell who was inside the pressure suit. He rocked the seat back until he could see the chronometer in the main panel. The two dials showed local and elapsed time. There was less than thirty-five minutes to go now.

They finished the instrument check, tested the oxygen and other support systems, checked the engineering and fuel systems, and ran through the final inventory of food and water stores. At the end the chief technician handed in the special tool kit made of non-sparking aluminium and bronze. When the hatch was closed and sealed, the air inside the cabin would be replaced with pure oxygen. Bethwig was not happy about that, but the original design had envisioned a flight of not more than fifty minutes’ duration for which oxygen was the cheapest and most efficient system. Now, in the event of a fire, even normally non-flammable materials, such as the kapok stuffing in the couch, the leather of his suit, the composition board of the instrument panel, and even the aluminium panelling, would burn furiously in a one-hundred-per-cent-oxygen atmosphere.

‘That’s it, then, Lieutenant Gross.’ The technician clapped him on the shoulder and set the gimbal brake. The couch immediately swung into a reclining position. The chief technician hesitated, as if he wanted to say more but could not find the words. He contented himself with a mumbled ‘Good luck’ and unplugged the headset. A moment later the interior of the cabin went dark as he lifted the hatch panel into place and began to bolt it down. Franz turned his head as far as the cumbersome suit would allow, and caught a final glimpse of the chief technician peering in at him. The thought occurred to him that the technician’s face was probably the last he would ever see.

Bethwig was alone. The silence was total but for the faint whisper of oxygen inside his suit. He took a deep breath, feeling the excitement rise, and grinned. He had expected to be terror-stricken at this point. Instead, he was elated.

The chronometer hands stood at minus thirty minutes. The winking red light indicated that the command centre was trying to contact him. He reached up and inserted his helmet radio leads into the main panel. There was nothing that could stop him now.

Memling was crouched in a stand of pine less than thirty metres from the SS headquarters in Zinnowitz. Two five-ton lorries were parked on the gravelled parade, and he counted forty SS men drawn up in two columns. An officer ran from the building shouting orders, and the men hurried to their trucks. The officer leaned from the cab to give last-minute instructions to a sergeant, and the lorries lurched and bumped across the parade and out through the gate. Memling watched, waiting to see which direction they would take – north-west to the launch area or due north to the coast where he had ambushed the patrol. There was little more he could do if the SS had decided to halt the launching, but the lorries reached the main road and sped north.

The noise of engines dwindled, and he turned back to the barracks where the sergeant was still looking towards the road while the sentry behind stood at rigid attention, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. According to Sussmann, the garrison had been reduced, in anticipation of the final withdrawal, to one hundred men. He had killed six and one officer twenty minutes ago, forty had just left, and there were at least another thirty, according to Prager, guarding the launching area and the various command centres. There would be ten to fifteen more SS still searching for him in the vicinity of the tank farm and a few guarding the burned-out Gestapo headquarters several kilometres to the south in Trassenheide. So there should not be more than a few left in the barracks.

There would also be radio equipment that might enable him to make contact with the submarine. He decided it was worth a try.

The parade was twenty metres in diameter and fringed closely about with trees that reached to the building on either flank. The intent obviously had been to create the same park-like surroundings found throughout the rest of the Peenemunde facility. Memling found it incongruous. He worked his way through the trees to the south-east side of the building, checking each window. The construction was cement block, as was nearly every building on the island, and the ground-floor windows were at eye level. Most of the interior was dark and the few lighted rooms empty. The central dormitory for enlisted personnel extended the length of the building at the rear; it was empty. What weapon racks he could see were also empty. He had then to depend on his single remaining grenade, the machine pistol and three magazines.

Memling completed the circumnavigation of the barracks. The single sentry and the sergeant seemed to be the only ones left, but he couldn’t be certain of that. He studied the sentry from the trees. Now that his sergeant had gone, the man had relaxed and was sneaking a smoke. His rifle, however, was still slung muzzle downwards, ready for instant use.

He faded back into the shadows and worked his way to a darkened room with an unlocked window on the south-east side. Cautiously he worked it up by pressing the frame back against the casement and lifting. It rose in jerks, binding on either side, and Memling swore silently. When he had it up as far as it would go, he passed the machine pistol through and eased himself into the room.

Memling knelt at the partly opened door for several minutes until satisfied the corridor was empty. The building was a single-storey cube, and there was no way to find out how many people were left inside except by checking each room. He opened the door carefully and stepped into the hall. The first door on his right opened easily. The room was dark, and when he turned the light switch, he found himself in a mess hall. The room was huge and, combined with the dormitory, probably accounted for half the available floor space.

He checked three more rooms, each empty, before reaching the end of the corridor. Two had been quarters for officers, and he wondered which had belonged to the man who had executed Prager. The hall made a right-angle turn across the front of the building. He knelt and peered around the bottom edge of the wall. Two doors were open, and light flooded into the corridor. He could hear voices and radio static but could not tell from which room they came. Jan quickly retraced his steps to the end of the hall. There was another corridor, as he had expected, running across the rear of the building. Three doors led off to rooms on either side, and he realised the two on the left would lead to the canteen and dormitory. The single door to the right was locked. There wasn’t time to open it, and he hurried on to the end of the corridor, repeated the minute examination from a prone position, then checked two more unlocked and empty offices. Again he found one door locked and another leading to the dormitory.

Satisfied that the building was empty but for the room in front, he crouched at the junction of the corridors. Again he could hear the same voices and static. So that was it, he thought. It was like France or Norway all over again. He felt the sudden surge of exhilaration and, realising that it was little different from fear, almost laughed aloud at himself. Memling walked past the entrance – two sets of double glass doors beyond which he could see the sentry – and stopped beside the first doorway. A burst of static sounded and someone swore. Another voice demanded silence. Two at least, he thought, and how many more in the next room? The radio was in there, so he dared not use the hand-grenade.

Memling hesitated. So far he had managed to pull the SS away to the north as Bethwig had asked. He could head into the southern part of the island and disappear in the marshes and thick forest, and it would take them days to find him. What the hell was he doing here, then? Even if he could make contact with the submarine, there was only the faintest chance they would get to him before the SS. Wasn’t it better to wait a few days, until the uproar died, then find a way to Sweden? He had done it once… But he was grasping at straws. The SS knew who he was. A few Gestapo personnel killed, a company of SS shot up, would not deter them in the slightest. There was an old score to settle, and he had only added to their anger in the past two hours. Nothing had changed. There was still no other way out.

He realised then that there was something heady about mastering one’s fear, something that made suicide a bit too attractive, and sobered, he stepped around the doorway. Two black-uniformed men leaned over a desk. The operator’s back was to Memling as he hunched over a microphone. A fourth man, an elderly officer with stooped shoulders, looked up as he appeared, his expression changing from annoyance to shock as the muzzle of the MP40 came towards him. He clawed for the pistol at his belt, too late. Memling fired a single burst as he swept the pistol diagonally. The officer collapsed, and the two others hunched over and fell together as the man at the radio slid out of his chair. The room was large, with two entrances – which accounted for the two doors. There was no one else inside, and, without hesitating, Memling knelt and lined up on the entrance doors. The guard burst into the corridor looking wildly in both directions. Memling killed the man with a single shot. Behind him the radio crackled with tinny static.

Jan checked the bodies at the desk. All were dead. He dragged the sentry into the radio room and took a few moments to replace his overlarge boots and trousers. He then stepped outside the building to listen but heard only the steady ululation of wind through the trees and the booming surf on the beach a few hundred metres distant. He glanced at the sky. The cloud cover was almost total now, and the wind seemed to be mounting. He had no idea what weather conditions were required to launch a rocket as large as the V-10, but he doubted if anything short of a full gale would stop Bethwig and von Braun tonight.

Returning to the radio room, he collected weapons and ammunition, moved the chair to face the door, and tuned the radio to the proper frequency. He had decided to give the radio fifteen minutes, and that was cutting it fine. He pressed the microphone switch and began to transmit his call sign.

Stunned silence held the command centre. Every eye had gone automatically to the speaker mounted above the status board.

Wernher von Braun stared at his microphone, then reached a hand forward, as if in a dream, and pressed the transmit bar. ‘Franz…?’

‘The main control board is showing every indicator at positive.’ Bethwig’s voice rumbled from the speaker. ‘My chronometer has T-minus-fifteen minutes,’ he added, as if prompting a response.

‘T-minus-fifteen minutes,’ von Braun repeated, and looked about the room helplessly. Everyone was staring at him.

‘I have a light indicating fuelling completed and pressure holding.’ Bethwig’s voice came through the speaker again. ‘What is the status of the count? I foresee no further holds.’ His calm, matter-of-fact voice eased von Braun from his daze; but before he could respond, the SS officer supervising the launch pushed through the crowd around his console.

He thumbed the transmit button twice, hoping that Bethwig would pick up on the warning, before the sturmbannführer grabbed his arm.

‘That voice, it belongs to Herr Doktor Bethwig!’ The man was practically screaming. ‘Where is he?’

Von Braun jerked his arm away. ‘Obviously inside the rocket, you ass! Get away from here! You are interfering!’

The SS officer was livid. ‘Get him out of there, immediately! What are you fools up to? I can have you all shot!’

He grabbed for the microphone, but von Braun leapt to his feet and shoved the major so hard he tripped and fell. Von Braun yanked him up. ‘I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,’ he grated, shaking the man like a rag doll. ‘You will not interfere again or I will kill you with my bare hands, do you understand? It is too late to stop now. Too late to stop the launching. Go telephone your boss Kammler for instructions.’

Von Braun flung him away and turned to the console as the major recovered his balance and clawed at his holstered pistol. A technician hit him with a wrench, relieved him of his pistol, and, grinning, dragged the inert body into a corner. Other technicians leapt for the SS guards posted around the room and took their weapons. Von Braun picked up the microphone.

‘Franz, what in hell do you think you are doing?’

Bethwig’s laugh floated from the speaker. ‘Care to change places with me, Wernher?’

‘You have to be mad. You are committing suicide!’

‘Of course. And how better? There is nothing left for me but this. Please, old friend, it’s much too late for recriminations. We both know there is nothing for it but to continue. There will be plenty of time to talk later.’

Someone pushed a note at von Braun and he spared a second to glance at it. ‘My God,’ he muttered, forgetting the live microphone. His voice bounced from the speaker, and everyone in the room turned to him.

‘Peenemunde is under attack,’ he announced, struggling to control his voice. ‘The fuel storage area in Peenemunde West has been blown up. An SS detachment was ambushed.’ This last brought a loud cheer, and the captured guards exchanged apprehensive glances.

Bethwig’s voice broke in on the babble in the control room. ‘Peenemunde is not under attack, at least not by the Russians. A friend is causing a diversion to keep the SS too busy to interfere with this launching. This is our last chance. Get on with it!’

For a single instant every eye was on the loudspeaker, then, as if of one mind, they set to work again; each technician present understood without explanation. Although he too understood and would gladly have traded places, von Braun shook his head in despair and announced the revised mission objective. Within minutes those of the launch crews whose tasks were completed began filtering into the empty VIP gallery, their excitement plain. A hoarse cheering broke out, all fear was forgotten.

The firing control officer announced T-minus-five minutes, and von Braun ticked the final entry in his log and relinquished control. His job was finished; the FCO had charge now. He watched the activity in the room with the detachment of someone far removed in time and space. For a moment he felt as if he had never had any part of the gruelling course that over the past fourteen years had led inevitably to this moment. And then the sensation was gone, and he realised they had done it. Now they would prove that man could travel to the moon. For just an instant there was a flood of bitter jealousy at the thought that he would never be first, but then he realised that for all his hopes and longing he had never really expected that he would be. Had Franz, he wondered, ever doubted? Had he ever thought, all those years ago, what this pact they had made with the Devil would cost? Had he suspected but gone ahead anyway, knowing that this was the only chance? Bethwig had given everything of value for this dream, far more than he, and now he was about to give his life.

The FCO’s voice broke in to announce T-minus-three minutes. Von Braun wished that he could talk to Franz now in these last few moments before the launching, but it was impossible. He could hear Bethwig’s calm, unemotional voice relaying an endless series of data readings to the FCO’s staff to confirm the telemetered readings. Already he could see the repeater dials on his console flickering. Telemetry had always been one of their biggest problems. Franz has chosen the correct course, he thought. Perhaps the Allies would want their services after this damned war ended. If they were still alive, that is, and the sight of the unconscious SS officer in the corner made him doubt that. Even so, no matter what, they would never again have the complete control they had here. If ever again they or anyone else was offered a similar opportunity, the bureaucrats would hound them to an extent that would make Heydrich’s and Himmler’s interference seem like child’s play.

There was so much to learn, to accomplish, so much that could be given back to humanity, but the fools and the bureaucrats would never understand that. Von Braun put his face in his hands and sobbed, as much for the loss of their dream as for his friend going willingly to his death.

Bethwig was relaxed in the couch, ignoring for the moment the constant stream of chatter flowing from the earphones, and hugging the idea to himself as the elapsed mission time chronometer hand wound down. With less than two minutes remaining, there was no way to stop him. Everything necessary to launch the rocket was under his control. He glanced again at the control panel; all lights were glowing green except for the launch sequencer and the first-stage turbine pumps. In another thirty seconds they would be started and those lights would turn from amber to green.

His thoughts turned to the Englishman Memling. He too had agreed to give his life for one final chance at a dream. Why? Was it the same demon that drove him? But how could it be? he wondered. Memling had experimented with rockets in an amateurish way, as they all had, but certainly such limited experience could not… or could it? For a moment the frustration and hope, the lack of money and food, and the camaraderie he had experienced as a member of the VfR during the primitive Rakentenflugplatz days were more real than the smell of the pressure suit or the glowing control panel above him. And he understood. The demon was the same.

Had they made a pact with the Devil as they so often joked, or had they merely recognised its existence in themselves? Was there any difference between Hitler and Himmler with their dreams of a world empire led by the Aryan race, or between himself and Himmler? He had his own dream as well. And each of them damned the cost, both human and economic, while citing the greater good that would result.

Intentionally or not, he had sold his father and Inge, Memling, Prager, and all the rest, even Wernher, to fulfil his ambition. Bethwig struggled to turn his mind from that line of thought as his elation faded and he realised that he was no better than Himmler or Heydrich after all.

The grinding vibration of the first-stage turbine pumps whining into operation far below brought him back to present awareness. Automatically his gloved hand went to the arming switch, lifted the protective tab, and pressed down. A voice sounded in his earphones, but he did not understand the words.

The chronometer stood at exactly T-minus-sixty seconds. Deep in the instrument bay among the tangle of painfully assembled resistors and transformers and wires and meters, a series of rotary switches were turning in final sequence. Franz watched their progress as lights changed from red to green on the status board to his left; the hydrogen peroxide generator tanks being charged, the auxiliary valves snapping open and the turbine pumps whirring to provide on-board power and pump the metric tons of liquid oxygen and alcohol towards the twenty-one engines of the first stage. Other valves flew open as the fuel and LOX coursed through an intricate net of piping which frosted instantly as damp night air condensed on frigid metal. The same rotary switches sent signals coursing through kilometres of copper cable to the command centre where technicians pressed buttons and turned switches as lights winked from red to green and the umbilical cables that were Bethwig’s last connection with Earth fell away and the spider-work gantries pulled back. Another light prompted a technician to start the massive pumps that pulled sea water through an inlet fifty metres under the Baltic and five kilometres of pipes before emerging in high-pressure sprays to cool and protect the tunnel and flame baffles channelling the near plasma blast of the twenty-one rocket engines into the sky half a kilometre away.

The vibration was growing, and Bethwig was frightened, not of his own death but of what he might have paid to achieve it.

Jan Memling found the path leading to the ridge, which, though less than ten metres high, offered a clear, uninterrupted view of the launching site. He sat down and laid the machine pistol across his knees, too exhausted to run farther. He found the crumpled packet of cigarettes Bethwig had given him. There was one left, and he lit it, shielding the match with both hands.

Memling, forgetting how cold, exhausted and hungry he was, stared at the floodlit space – it was as large as a dozen football grounds – a kilometre away. The gantries had been pulled aside, and the rocket towered against the sky in the full glare of massed searchlights. Its polished fuselage, painted with red stripes, gleamed and scintillated through some atmospheric trick. He wondered if Bethwig had been able to carry through with his plan to board the rocket in place of the pilot, but he did not wonder why.

Something flickered along the rocket’s side, and he found himself wishing for a pair of field glasses. A red flare arced above the area, and he guessed the launching was imminent. He glanced at the dead SS guard’s watch, but somewhere in the past hour the crystal had smashed. The hands were stopped at 11.25, about the time he had shot the SS people in the barracks. It had all been wasted effort in any event as he had been unable to contact the submarine.

A mist rose around the base of the rocket, and he drew on the cigarette, watching with narrowed eyes as if that would help him to see better.

Wernher von Braun watched the clock hand begin its final sweep. The babble in the command centre had risen to its highest level, as always in these final seconds – the result both of excitement and a last torrent of reports. He saw several lights change from green to red indicating problems and just as quickly switch back again. Bethwig was overriding them as they occurred, and he closed his eyes a moment in fear. One light had remained red for several seconds now. It flamed beneath the gauge indicating that pressure in the oxidiser system had failed. The flight control officer was calling over and over into the microphone, trying to bring that fault to his attention, but either Bethwig was ignoring him or the communications link had failed. Then he realised that Bethwig could not have missed the indicator on his own board. He was simply overriding the system to stop the FOC from calling a launch hold.

Von Braun pressed the transmit bar on his microphone and broke into the FCO’s increasingly frantic calls. He struggled to keep his own voice under control.

‘Franz, can you hear me?’ He paused a moment, hoping that Bethwig would respond to his voice. The sweep-second touched the numeral twenty.

‘We have a light on the board indicating a LOX turbine pump failure. Do you have the same?’

He released the transmit button and held his breath.

‘Yes. I think it’s nothing more than a short in the sensor.’ Bethwig’s voice seemed crisp enough.

‘It should be checked. It might be a true report.’

‘It might,’ Bethwig agreed, ‘but it would take three days to stand down and restart. We could all be dead by then.’

The second hand was passing forty. ‘You could be dead in seconds if the pump has failed.’

‘Maybe. But the amount of vibration here suggests both turbines are working properly. We’ll soon find out in any…’

A thunderous roar began to grow as the second hand touched sixty, and white light from twenty-one screaming rocket engines flooded the command centre.

The explosion deafened him, and the monstrous rocket shook him like a mouse in the teeth of a cat. Lights blinked on the board, green to red and red to green again, and he closed his eyes, waiting for extinction. The shaking grew as the bellowing was transmitted through the rocket’s fabric until it had become physical pain. He was being crushed; he could not breathe, and he opened his mouth to scream and realised in that instant that the pressure was gravity crushing him as acceleration mounted. He was blind and deaf, wrapped in a cocoon of his own terror, unintelligible voices in his earphones screaming in defiance of the roaring that was filling his head with pain as he lapsed into unconsciousness.

The noise was greater than anything Memling had ever dreamed possible. He pressed his hands to his ears and bowed forward, mouth open in a soundless scream to ease the pain. The rocket engines roared and bellowed and thundered and screamed in every conceivable register, and slowly, gently, the squat tower began to rise on a white column of flame brighter than a welder’s torch. For an instant he had an impression – one that would remain with him for the rest of his life – of the V-10 balancing on a column of pure flame, screaming like all the banshees of hell, rotating slowly about its axis so that one delta-shaped wing appeared from the darkness, shuddered for the merest instant, and was gone. He blinked at the after-image and tilted his head back, but the rocket was already a point of flame in the night sky fleeing through the cloud rack. He lay back flat on the ground then and stared hungrily as the flame grew longer and longer, tipped towards the south-west, and continued to lengthen, flaring into a widening cone that surprised him until he remembered that the gases would expand as the air thinned.

Memling watched the point of flame until it vanished in the thickening cloud and his own tears.

The silence was blessed. As was the absence of vibration and the sensation of motion. Bethwig lay in the couch, mind drifting aimlessly, body exhausted to the point of collapse. His eyes drifted to the chronometer hand, and he groaned as he saw it sweep inexorably to the point marking second-stage ignition. He tensed as the hand passed across the point, and deep in the bowels of the rocket the vibration began again, sound and fury exploding to press him deep against the couch with a huge, padded, smothering hand. The raving went on and on, but the vibration and the screaming were less severe this time and the acceleration was bearable. As he waited for the trial to end he turned his head with difficulty to the tiny view port.

At first he saw nothing but the window itself, and then a brilliant diamond drifted into view. It was a moment before his mind grasped the implication. He was the first human to see a star without the interfering blanket of earth’s atmosphere.

An endless time later something shot past and a bluish haze filled the port while Bethwig’s mind grappled with too many unexpected inputs. It has to be Earth, he thought, has to be; but it was so different from the way he had always pictured it. Where were the continents, the oceans, the clouds? It was all run together in a sapphire mist. He struggled against the restraints, trying to get closer, to see more, before he remembered the buckles, and that recalled him to his senses. Where in hell was he? What had happened? Was he in orbit? These and a thousand other questions nearly overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes to force his mind blank. When he opened them again, the transmission light was winking and someone, von Braun, was shouting into his earphones. He pressed the chin switch and acknowledged.

Memling stubbed his cigarette and carefully buried it in the sand. Old habits, he thought. He stared once more at the launch area, now curiously empty. Water fountained above the launch stand, and steam rose in rolling clouds to the west. The area was still flooded with light, but it seemed as if the entire island had been abandoned. When he turned to the north, he saw that even the dull reddish glow on the horizon from the burning tank farm had died away.

He slung the machine pistol over his shoulder and hesitated. Mankind had, in the midst of its most destructive war, taken its most civilised step towards the future – he hoped to God. Whether Bethwig survived or not made little difference in the long run. The step had been taken, and it could not be denied. Where one man had gone, others had to follow. He glanced upwards, searching for a tiny pinpoint of flame, but the cloud cover was solid to the west. He started to salute, then laughed at himself, turned, and went down the ridge towards the marshes to the south.

Von Braun walled himself off from the clamouring, cheering people by sitting quietly at his desk and staring at the dials and gauges that registered the condition and progress of the rocket. No one dared intrude; he had become an island of despair in the midst of celebration. Even Magnus was standing quietly to the side, watching his brother, not wanting to infringe on a private grief.

Dawn slid silently, inexorably out of the South China Sea and began to slip across the Indochina landmass. Borneo, a faint mixture of browns and greens, was in view on the horizon, and soon the second (stage would fire a final time before being left behind. Australia could have witnessed the event, Franz thought, if anyone had known to look. He had finished the final computations that would regulate the firing, and had pinned the several sheets to the control panel where he could see them, even though the results were as logical and obvious to him as street signs.

He had been sick for a while, but the Dramamine tablets had helped to settle the nausea, even if they had left him drowsy and content to wait and watch the Earth turn beneath. From six hundred and seventy-three kilometres’ altitude, there was no sign that two-thirds of the globe had been mobilised into competing killing machines of which he had, until lately, been a part. His mind shied away from that thought; he had made a pact with himself not to dwell on such subjects. Instead, he watched the splendour of the blue world beyond the port.

Von Braun’s voice woke him. He acknowledged and laughed at the concern in his friend’s voice.

‘Just resting, Wernher, while I still have a few moments. I’ve set the chronometer alarm, and there are two minutes to engine ignition.’

‘Franz, our calculations show you have three minutes twenty-three seconds on my mark… mark! I suggest you recheck your calculations.’

Bethwig chuckled. ‘Have you ever known me to make an arithmetic mistake? What relative speed do you show?’

Von Braun relayed up the information, and Bethwig acknowledged. ‘You see, Wernher, that is the problem. You give me seventy-eight kilometres more than I have. Fifteen minutes ago I took a series of triangulations to measure my actual relative speed, whereas yours are only estimates. The next time, a chain of radar stations with the capability of detecting a spacecraft at several thousand kilometres would be very helpful… we are coming up to the ignition sequence, Wernher. Pardon me for a moment.’

Von Braun started to protest, then stopped. Even though he was troubled by the dreamy quality of Franz’s voice, he realised that as the pilot Bethwig must be the final authority. From nearly seven hundred kilometres’ altitude he could measure his speed quite accurately with the aid of a sextant.

‘The next time,’ he had said, and von Braun shook his head in despair. The needles flickered and then began to move across their dials indicating that ignition had begun. He watched them mount, aware of the tension growing in him. On both this final performance of the second stage and Bethwig’s abilities as a pilot depended his fate. Unless the rocket gained a specific speed within very defined limits, it would either crash back to Earth when its orbit decayed or bypass the moon and fall into orbit around the sun. He stared fixedly at the dials, which provided his only connection to the mote speeding away from the planet, conscious also of the intense silence in the command centre as the crews watched with him. A needle jumped on the telemetry signal strength link, steadied, then fell to zero.

Von Braun continued to stare at the dial, willing the needle to move, but it never did.

The explosion had damaged the instrument bay, Bethwig decided. Half of the system board was blank, and here and there on the control panel dead gauges and signal lights told the rest of the story. At least one engine had exploded on ignition, but the damage must not have been extensive, as the other four had continued to fire. He moved the switch that caused the gyros to speed up. For a moment nothing happened and he thought they had failed as well, but then a star slipped past and a moment later Earth swam into view. He was somewhere over Central America, he decided as he shot a series of bearings. A few moments of figuring gave him his speed, now barely at the lower edge of the margin. Another decimal point or so… He concentrated on doing what he could to repair the damage.

After an hour’s extensive work Bethwig knew that while the craft was continuing to operate, its performance was disintegrating steadily. From what he could calculate based on oxygen consumption, fragments of the engine must have ripped at least one pinhole somewhere below, or perhaps started a seam. The loss was not great, but it was steady, and at this rate the tanks would be exhausted in less than fifty hours. The fuel tanks had apparently escaped injury, as had his food and water stores. But the telemetry systems and the linked radio were out for good, as were the twin radar units he needed to perform the landing seventy-three hours away.

Bethwig chuckled to himself, and the sound was grim inside his helmet. He could be out of air before then, so it might make little difference. What he regretted most was the loss of the radio. Wernher would never know how far he had got, or that the rocket would reach the moon, whether he was dead or alive.

There was a choice; by shutting off the cabin atmosphere and feeding the oxygen into his suit, he could assure himself sufficient for another six days, three beyond what was needed to attempt the lunar landing but not enough to wait for re-supply. And he laughed aloud at the thought. Re-supply? he asked himself. There would be no re-supply. How in God’s name would they ever accomplish that? The SS would swarm all over Peenemunde, if they weren’t already there. In his arrogance he had calculated for everything but failure, and now von Braun and the rest would be lucky to escape with their lives. And with the radio gone, he could not even let them know that it hadn’t all been in vain. He smiled then at the punishments the gods were capable of inflicting upon man.

Bethwig made the decision and shut down the cabin pressurisation. He loosened the restraints so that he was floating, weightless, a few centimetres above the cushions and turned carefully, letting the friction of the straps hold him in position as he stared at the slowly receding planet beyond the view port. He would land on the moon if at all possible. Radar or not, he still had his eyes, damn it. Earth hung against a velvet blackness of incomparable richness, an amazing jewel. He was finally at peace with himself.

Peenemunde 31 January 1945

‘Don’t switch on the light, Wernher.’

Von Braun froze, arm partly extended.

‘Is anyone with you?’

Von Braun tried to speak, but his throat was suddenly dry and he had to swallow hard.

‘Well?’ the voice prompted.

‘No. No one. I… who are you?’

A table lamp went on, and von Braun blinked in the sudden glare before he made out the figure sitting on his couch, holding a machine pistol. The man was dressed in a uniform so ragged that he did not immediately recognise it as SS battledress. The face was stubbled and as dirty as the clothes, but the eyes drew von Braun the most. Pale green in the yellowish lamplight, they were steady and implacable. Von Braun had a feeling the man would kill him at the slightest sign of disobedience.

‘Who are you?’ he managed to croak.

‘Jan Memling.’

Von Braun sagged. ‘Good God in heaven, you scared the hell out of me.’ He straightened and motioned to a cabinet. ‘I need a drink.’

Memling nodded, and von Braun walked carefully across the room. He paused before he opened the door. ‘Do you wish to check first? There may be a gun.’

‘I have already.’

‘Yes.’ Von Braun rubbed his lower lip. ‘You would have.’ He poured two glasses of cognac and brought them across to the coffee table. He was stumbling with the fatigue of three days spent in the command centre, working until it was clear they could do no more.

‘What happened?’

He took a swallow, and then another, letting the liquid dissolve the cold in the pit of his stomach before he answered. Memling waited.

‘We don’t know.’

‘What are you talking about!’

‘We lost contact after second-stage ignition, as the engines were being fired to shift the rocket out of Earth orbit. We know the engines ignited, but after that…’ He shrugged.

‘It’s been three days…’

Von Braun shrugged again. ‘We just have no idea what happened. Radio contact was lost. This morning we tried to find him with radar as Earth rotated so that our antennas had a clear view, but we could not achieve a signal. If he had continued on the course prescribed, Franz would have…’ Von Braun’s voice broke, and he had to take a deep breath, then ‘…would have landed two hours ago.’

Memling took the glass and drank most of the cognac in a single gulp. He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes. ‘So it’s over,’ he said after a moment, and von Braun was struck by the sadness, the sense of loss, in the Englishman’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘What happens next?’

Von Braun walked to the window and stood looking out into the darkness. He was conscious of the beginning of a strange alliance that would have been unthinkable six months ago but which now seemed perfectly logical, the culmination of the random insanity that had held the world in thrall for seven years.

‘SS General Doktor Hans Kammler has given orders to evacuate immediately,’ he said. ‘The Soviets are less than fifty kilometres away. He is convinced that Russian commandos were responsible for the damage caused the night of the launching. There was a submarine sighted off the coast that night.’ Von Braun turned back into the room to study the gaunt Englishman, so different from the boy he had known before the war. ‘Franz told me you agreed to help. Were you responsible for the damage?’

Memling ignored the question. ‘Will you go?’

‘I have no choice.’ Von Braun shrugged. ‘We are ordered to make our way to Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains, where the SS can protect us… or kill us if necessary.’ Von Braun paused. ‘I understand that you may have brought us an alternative.’

‘I did.’ Memling described SHAEF’s offer of employment following the war, providing the Peenemunde scientists surrendered to the Western powers. ‘On no account will the offer hold,’ he warned, ‘if your surrender is made to the Russians.’

‘I assume there are both political and practical implications to that statement,’ von Braun observed dryly, and Memling nodded.

‘Then you need have little fear on that score. No one wishes to disappear into Russia. Most of us are fighting the war to prevent the spread of communism to…’

Memling held up a hand. ‘Your motives do not concern me. ‘I’m just the messenger. Arrangements were made to take some of you out immediately, but I doubt if they hold any longer. You will have to find another way to make contact.’ Memling nursed his drink for a long moment while staring into the shadows. ‘What will you tell them about the V-Ten?’

Von Braun sighed as he replenished his glass. ‘Nothing. The dangers of such a weapon, the temptation to use—’

‘No one has,’ Memling interrupted, ‘and I doubt anyone ever will, resist the temptation to use any weapon, no matter how deadly, if it will ensure his survival. It may sound naive after what we’ve been through, but perhaps we should make damned certain the next time that the correct side has the V-Ten. And there will be a next time.’

Memling’s eyes were hollowed by fear and privation, and von Braun shuddered. This man is war, he thought, a war which I had no idea existed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said then. ‘In any event, the SS collected all project films for destruction, so there is nothing to discuss. In addition, the Führer is said to have given orders to resist to the last man, woman, and child. This is clearly nonsense, yet how many will and thus prolong the fighting? What will be the attitude towards Germany then? As it was the last time? Or will forbearance be shown? What inroads will the communists make?’ He sat down abruptly. ‘I am tired to death. For now, let us agree to say nothing until we see the shape of the future. We do not know what happened to… Franz. Perhaps he died when the rocket motors exploded. Perhaps he did land on the moon. God in heaven only knows.’

On 2 May 1945 Magnus von Braun rode an old bicycle down a mountain road to make contact with a leading element of the American Army, the 324th Infantry Regiment, 44th Infantry Division, in the village of Schattwald, near the Austrian border. A few hours later a party including, among others, Magnus, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger and Jan Memling – disguised as a German technician – surrendered to First Lieutenant Charles L. Stewart, an intelligence officer assigned to the 44th Infantry. Memling was flown to London the following day.

Jan Memling and Wernher von Braun met for the next and last time on 15 July 1969 in a Cocoa Beach, Florida, motel room, and the following day, the two greying, middle-aged men stood beside one another in the VIP gallery as Apollo 11 began its historic journey to the moon. The photograph taken after the launch shows them standing arm in arm, tears clearly visible in their eyes.