‘A fire? You’ve shut off the power?’
‘Completely. Come and look.’
They walked around to the front of the armoured car. Two hundred metres down the road, the rocket stood alone and unsupported, ready to launch. Seidel handed him a pair of binoculars. Graf trained them on the V2. Smoke was issuing silently from just beneath the warhead and was being whipped away by the wind.
‘Is she fuelled?’
‘Fully. That’s why we’ve evacuated the site. Apparently they only noticed it a minute before launch.’
Graf lowered the field glasses. He stroked his chin and tugged at his nose with his thumb and forefinger. There was no alternative. ‘I suppose I’d better take a look.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m the one who built the damned thing.’ He tried to make a joke of it. ‘Frankly, it’s not the thought of an explosion that scares me – it’s climbing that damned Magirus ladder.’ It was not far off the truth. He detested heights.
Seidel clapped him on the arm. ‘Right, I need two volunteers.’ He winked at Graf and glanced around. He pointed to a pair of soldiers standing nearby. ‘You and you. Take the ladder over to the missile.’
They came to attention, faces suddenly grey. ‘Yes, Lieutenant!’
Graf called after them, ‘I’ll need a pair of gloves, and tools for the compartment.’ For the first time, he was aware of Biwack, listening to their conversation. He turned back to Seidel. ‘By the way, this is Sturmscharführer Biwack. He’s joining the regiment as our new National Socialist Leadership Officer.’
Seidel laughed again, as if this were a continuation of their joke, but then Biwack clicked his heels and saluted – ‘Heil Hitler!’ – and his smile shrank. He returned the salute. ‘And what exactly will your role be in the regiment, Sturmscharführer?’
‘To raise morale. To remind the men what we’re fighting for.’
Seidel’s mouth turned down. He nodded. ‘Useful.’
Graf had gone back to studying the rocket through the binoculars. Was it his imagination, or had the smoke got thicker? It wasn’t the proximity of the heat to the warhead that worried him – until the fuses were armed, the amatol was no more dangerous than a one-ton lump of yellow clay. But the closeness of the fuel was a different matter. He had witnessed fuel tanks explode before. He had once seen three men blown to pieces directly in front of him. And that was by a small experimental tank, whereas the V2 contained eight and a half tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen. He tried to put the images out of his mind. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said. ‘Tell them to hurry up with that ladder.’
He set off towards the rocket. There were footsteps behind him, and he turned to find Biwack catching him up. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do. You need to keep well back.’
‘I’d prefer to come with you.’ Biwack fell in beside him. ‘The lieutenant seems to believe I’m just some pen-pusher from the Brown House, whereas actually I fought in the East for two years. I am making a point to the men – you understand?’
‘As you wish.’ Graf lengthened his stride.
The V2 was a monster more than seven times his height, although at this moment it seemed even taller. As he walked, he took off his hat and squinted up at it. The transformer would be the problem, he was sure. At Peenemünde they had discovered that the rocket had a tendency to airburst at the end of its flight due to the heat of re-entry, so they had added a metal sleeve to protect the upper section. But somehow in the winter weather that seemed to increase condensation, which in turn shorted the electrics. You solved one problem and created another.
The ladder was on its way, towed on a trailer behind a small truck. The driver parked at the base of the rocket, jumped out and immediately began uncoupling it – the type of ladder that firemen used: three sections, extendable. The other soldier handed Graf a box of tools. Both men kept glancing anxiously at the smoke. Graf selected a couple of small wrenches, a screwdriver and a flashlight and stuffed them into his coat pockets.
The men ran the ladder up to a spot just below the smouldering control compartment, then set off on foot back towards their comrades – a dignified walk at first that quickly became a jog. Graf watched them go. Sensible fellows, he thought. He took off his hat, gave it to Biwack and pulled on a pair of asbestos gloves.
He put his foot on the first rung and began to climb. The bottom section, where the ladder was thickest, was firm enough, but as he ascended from one section to another, it became spindly and more rickety, and the wind grew stronger, whipping his overcoat around his legs. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, making sure he had his foot firmly planted on each rung before he took the next step. He passed the sections housing the engine compartment, the liquid oxygen tank, the alcohol tank. At the point where the fuselage began to taper to the nose cone, he reached control compartment number two.
Smoke was gushing out of the sides of the inspection hatch. He had to take off his right glove to hold the screwdriver and unfasten the hatch. When he pulled it open, there was a great billow of acrid fumes. He twisted his head away to avoid inhaling it, and the movement forced him to look off to the side. The road, the support vehicles, the distant soldiers watching him all slid into view, and his legs and arms seemed to lose their strength. He clung to the ladder until his nerves had recovered enough for him to be able to take one hand away and pull the glove back on.
He thrust his hands into the innards of the rocket, turning his head back and forth, coughing, his eyes smarting. It was just as well that he knew the layout of the control compartment blindfold, for that was effectively how he had to work, feeling his way down from the fuse box to the filter circuit to the main electrical distribution unit. He pulled a wrench from his pocket and ran it around until he found the pair of bolts holding the transformer in place, and after a couple of minutes he succeeded in unfastening them. He gripped the transformer in both hands and pulled it free. As he lifted it out of the compartment, he could feel the heat of the metal on his face. He called down a warning to Biwack, and then flung it as far away as he could.
The smoke inside the compartment immediately diminished. He switched on the flashlight and shone it around. Much of the thick rubber coating on the main cables had melted. The plywood casing that surrounded the compartment was charred. Otherwise there didn’t appear to be any serious damage. He closed the compartment. Very slowly, taking care not to look down, he began his descent.
By the time he reached the ground, several dozen men had converged on the V2, on foot and in trucks – not just Seidel and the launch platoon, but Colonel Huber himself in the front seat of a staff car. Biwack was bending to examine the burned-out transformer. He tried to pick it up, but it was too hot to hold, even with his leather gloves, and he dropped it at once.
Seidel said, ‘How badly damaged is she?’
Graf pulled off his gloves and squatted on his haunches to recover his breath. ‘Not damaged at all that I can see, apart from the transformer.’
‘What do you recommend?’
‘Drain the fuel tanks. Send her back to the workshop to run some electrical tests.’
‘We can’t just fit a new transformer?’
‘We could, but why take the risk?’
Biwack interrupted. ‘I thought you said there was no damage?’
Graf pushed himself back to his feet. ‘Probably not, but we can’t be absolutely sure until the avionics have been tested.’
‘How long does it take to drain the fuel?’
‘A couple of hours.’
‘So you’ll lose half a day and London will have the afternoon off! Suppose you launch – what’s the worst that can happen?’
‘The missile could misfire,’ replied Graf. He was starting to find it hard to hide his irritation – an hour in Scheveningen and already the NSFO was an expert! ‘Or it could stray
off target, in which case we’ll have wasted a hundred thousand Reichsmarks.’
Huber came over to join them. ‘So, gentlemen? What have we decided?’
Seidel said, ‘Dr Graf recommends cancelling the launch. The Sturmscharführer seems to disagree.’
‘Pay no attention to me,’ said Biwack. He waved his notebook. ‘I’m merely here to observe.’
Huber looked at the rocket, then at the blackened transformer, then at Graf, and finally he eyed Biwack’s notebook. Graf could almost hear the machinery creaking in his brain. ‘One must take risks in war,’ he said at last. ‘That is the essence of National Socialism.’ He nodded to Seidel. ‘Replace the component. Proceed with the launch.’
Graf turned away in disgust. He would have liked to smoke to settle his nerves. Instead he could only pace around the launch site, as he had done so often at Peenemünde while the final preparations were made.
A new transformer was fetched by motorcycle from the technical store and one of the NCOs in the launching platoon quickly climbed the ladder to fit it. The compartment was sealed, the ladder was collapsed and driven away, the electrical cables were reconnected. A klaxon sounded. The men took cover in their slit trenches. Seidel, Huber and Biwack, with Graf at the rear, made their way in single file through the undergrowth to the launch vehicle, buried almost up to its roof at the bottom of the slope leading down to its dugout.
It was cramped inside the armoured car once the door was closed, and cold – the roof hatch was still open. Over the loudspeaker, the radar station in The Hague confirmed there were no enemy aircraft within fifty kilometres. ‘You are clear to launch.’
‘What is the procedure here?’
Graf squeezed into a corner and left it to Seidel to continue Biwack’s tutorial. ‘There are five positions on the firing switch. We’re now at position one…’
The sergeant controlling the launch stuck his head out of the roof hatch to observe the rocket. ‘Begin the countdown.’
Ten…nine…
Position two closed the valves on the fuel tanks and pumped compressed air into the liquid oxygen tank.
Eight…seven…six…
Position three forced a mixture of peroxide and permanganate into the turbo prop to begin ignition. An igniter shaped like a swastika, spinning like a Catherine wheel, began throwing out a shower of sparks.
Five…four…
Position four released both main fuel tanks into the combustion chamber. A flickering roaring flame spread around the base of the rocket.
Three…two…one…
‘Launch!’ The sergeant ducked his head inside the cabin and pulled down the hatch.
Position five turned the turbo pump to full power, forcing fuel into the combustion chamber at high pressure. The armoured car shook. The noise seemed to start in one’s solar plexus and radiate outwards. Small pieces of forest debris clattered onto the roof. Graf clamped his hands to his ears and prayed.
4
KAY WAS AT THAT MOMENT on the corner of Chancery Lane and Warwick Court, her suitcase in her hand, watching as the ambulance tried to make its way through the crowded street in the direction of Barts Hospital. It was seventy-six minutes since the rocket had struck. The area was clogged with survivors and spectators. The driver had to turn on his bell to clear a path. People looked over their shoulders, moved aside onto the pavement, pulled others out of the way then stepped back into the road again.
Finally the ambulance was swallowed from her view. The sound of the clanging bell faded. Even so, she did not move. Her mind seemed to be working at half speed. She could only make sense of one thing at a time.
Better not. Had he really meant that? Should she have insisted on going with him?
Midway over the North Sea, the missile was functioning perfectly, the twin gyroscopes – one controlling pitch, the other roll – turning at 30,000 revolutions per minute, holding the V2 steady on its flight path.
She realised she was cold, shivering in her dress without a coat. She looked about her for the first time, saw that virtually every shop window on Chancery Lane had been blown in – along with most of the glass in the higher storeys, and in the windows of the cars that were strewn at odd angles and abandoned in the road. The wide street, though packed, was oddly static, like the West End at night when the shows were ending and people stood around waiting for their friends to come out, discussing what they had just seen or what they should do next. There was a lot of blood – on faces, on clothes, in little patches on the pavement. An elderly couple were sitting on the kerb holding hands, their feet in the gutter. A small boy was clinging to an empty pram, crying. Shards of glass were everywhere, and bricks and lumps of masonry. She noticed an odd piece of thin flat metal at her feet and picked it up. It was still warm. She guessed it was a piece of the rocket, part of the fuselage casing perhaps, or a tail fin. She replaced it carefully. Someone said something to her, but by the time she managed to focus her attention, they had gone.
After a while, she began to walk in the same direction as the ambulance.
Barts Hospital was in the City of London – she knew that much. If she couldn’t see Mike, she might at least stand outside on the pavement. She hadn’t really thought it through.
A little over four miles to the south-east, in New Cross Road in Deptford, the Woolworths department store had received a consignment of saucepans – a scarce item in wartime Britain. Word had spread and a long queue of housewives had formed. This particular branch of Woolworths occupied a large building of four storeys. Saturday was its busiest day, lunchtime its busiest hour. A lot of the women had brought their children; many were at the confectionery counter. One young mother, with a two-month-old baby in her left arm, walking up New Cross Road on her way to the fabled saucepan bonanza, recalled forty years later ‘a sudden airless quiet, which seemed to stop one’s breath’.
When an object breaks the sound barrier and continues to travel at a velocity in excess of Mach 1 – 767 miles per hour – it carries the noise of its sonic boom with it, the way a speedboat pushes out waves from its prow in a constant wash. At 12.25 p.m. – she only knew the exact time because she saw it in the official report afterwards – Kay heard what sounded like a particularly noisy firework exploding in the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud but distant bang, as if a heavy door had slammed. Then came the rush of the rocket. Everyone around her stopped and looked up.
The V2 hit Woolworths dead centre and ploughed through every floor before detonating to form a crater thirty feet deep. Most of the victims died instantly, either in Woolworths itself, or in the Co-operative store next door, or in the draper’s across the street, or on the number 53 bus, where the corpses remained upright in their seats, their internal organs traumatised by the blast wave. One hundred and sixty people were killed.
Banfill, Brian John, aged 3; Banfill, Florence Ethel, 42…
Brown, Ivy, 31; Brown, Joyce, 18 months; Brown, Sylvia Rosina, 12…
Glover, Julia Elizabeth, 28; Glover, Michael Thomas, 1 month; Glover, Sheila, 7…
In front of Kay, a thin smudgy column of brown smoke began to rise above the roofs.
There was a debate both during and after the war about which was the more frightening: the V1, the pilotless drone bomb, which you could see and hear, and which would only start to fall once its fuel ran out, potentially giving you time in the silence to try to find cover; or the V2, which struck without warning. Most said the V2. It preyed on one’s nerves just as much as the V1 but offered not even a chance of escape. And it was also eerily futuristic – the harbinger of a new era, produced by an enemy who was supposed to be beaten. It made you wonder what else Hitler might have up his sleeve.
Kay contemplated the smear of smoke for a few more seconds, took a couple of steps backwards, then turned and began walking rapidly in the opposite direction, threading her way betw
een the onlookers gawping at the sky, heedless of who she knocked into and the curses they shouted after her.
The distinctive double bangs had reverberated across London. The Saturday shoppers she passed had their heads down; their faces tense, their voices muted. When the V2s had first started landing in September, the authorities had put out a story that the huge blasts were caused by exploding gas mains. Nobody believed it. (‘Have you heard about the Germans’ new secret weapon – the flying gas main?’) It was only in the last two weeks that Churchill had announced the truth in Parliament. A thin film of anxiety had settled over the city.
Kay hurried westwards, past Holborn station, Tottenham Court Road…There was a relief in the simple mechanical activity of putting one foot in front of the other. She knew a lot about the V2 – size, range, fuel, payload, launch sites; she had watched it grow before her eyes over the past eighteen months as a laboratory technician might watch cancerous cells multiply under a microscope. Her mental state was three parts panic to one part cool professional evaluation: if the Germans could land a pair of rockets on London in the space of little more than an hour, it suggested they might have increased their deployment and a whole new phase of the offensive was under way.
In Oxford Circus, a car backfired. She ducked instinctively, like everyone else. When they straightened, they exchanged rueful looks and resumed their separate journeys.
In the end, she walked nearly four miles, all the way to Paddington station. The next train to Marlow was in thirty minutes. She went into the ladies’ and studied her face in the wide communal mirror. No wonder people had been looking at her oddly. She had white plaster in her auburn hair and on her face like a powdered Regency tart, streaks of soot on her cheeks, a smoke smut on her nose, a trickle of dried blood from the cut on her temple. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and filthy. A dirty weekend, she thought, and laughed out loud – it was exactly the sort of stupid joke that Mike would make – then gripped the edge of the sink and started to cry.
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