V2

by Robert Harris

  The door banged open and Barbara Colville breezed in. ‘Oh, thank Christ, I thought I was late! Morning, all. That smells good.’ She threw her slide rule and logarithm tables down on the table and went over to the urn.

  Kay looked at the slide rule in dismay. Sandy offered her a cigarette from a silver case. She shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’ The two lieutenants lit up.

  Barbara came back with her tea and sandwich and sat down opposite Kay, who was still staring at the slide rule. ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘I’m an idiot. I was in such a panic about being late, I left my stuff back in my billet.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. There are bound to be spares.’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘What’re your digs like?’

  ‘Spartan. Yours?’

  ‘I’ve struck lucky, actually. I’m with a widow who seems to have decided to mother me. She made me a vegetable pie.’

  Bill said, ‘I hope you didn’t touch it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bill has heard some rumours about the local food.’ Kay introduced the two lieutenants to Barbara. As Bill repeated his lugubrious warnings, and Barbara made dutiful expressions of horror, she sipped her tea and cursed her absent-mindedness. She imagined Dorothy Garrod whispering in her ear, as she had when she’d first arrived at Danesfield House: ‘Concentrate, Kay, dear. Concentrate.’

  Barbara took a cigarette from Sandy, leaned in to the flaring match. Kay noticed how she briefly touched his hand. She sat back and exhaled a jet of smoke through her nostrils. The door opened and Flight Officer Sitwell came in, followed by a major with a handlebar moustache. The three smokers quickly stubbed out their cigarettes in the ashtray. They all stood and saluted.

  The major said, ‘Right then. Let’s get this show started.’

  Sitwell looked with distaste at the smouldering ashtray, and then at Kay and Barbara. ‘Good morning, ladies.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘When you’re ready.’

  They left the mess together and went out into the street. It was starting to get light. A few pedestrians were on their way to work. In the bank opposite, the windows were now lit. A sentry had taken up position beside the door. They showed their identity cards and went inside. The group separated with mutual wishes of good luck. The lieutenants followed the major left across the lobby – to a rear exit, presumably, allowing them access to the waste ground behind the bank where the radar vans were stationed. Kay and Barbara trailed Sitwell to the right, through the counter and down the steps to the vault. Knowsley was at his desk, talking on the telephone. At a table beside him sat a Signals Corps corporal. On the other side of the room three WAAF sergeants were already behind a row of desks. Kay and Barbara took their old seats in the centre. Kay was relieved to see that their places had already been set with slide rules, logarithm tables, pencils, notepads. She slipped off her coat and hung it over the back of her chair.

  Sitwell stood in front of the blackboard. Behind it, an old-fashioned station clock showed two minutes to eight. She said, ‘All we need now is a V2. And while we wait, we practise. Let’s see how much you’ve forgotten.’ She turned and began chalking rapidly on the board.

  * * *

  —

  As the morning went on, the vault began to get busier. WAAF sergeants came and went. Messages arrived by motorcycle courier. A colonel of the Survey Regiment, immaculate in his uniform, stiff as a guardsman, conferred with Knowsley then prowled around the room. He checked the maps and the telephones, looked at his watch, sat in the corner for five minutes and finally got up and left. Knowsley came over and perched on the edge of the central table, watching Kay and Barbara as they worked their slide rules, leafed through their logarithms, filled sheet after sheet with calculations. Sitwell timed them with her stopwatch: seven minutes twenty – no good. Six minutes fifteen – better. Five minutes fifty-two – that’s more like it. The wing commander lit a pipe and clamped it between his teeth. Pungent clouds of blue smoke drifted across the maps. His foot tapped nervously against the table leg.

  Just before ten o’clock, Flight Officer Sitwell announced that they had practised enough. ‘Take a break. If you need the lavatory, go now. It’s upstairs. But one at a time. Be quick about it, and don’t leave the building.’

  Barbara said to Kay, ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘In a minute. You go first.’

  Barbara hurried up the stairs. Kay stood and stretched, rotated her head. The room had gone very quiet. There was no sound except the ticking of the clock. Knowsley looked pensive. ‘They seem to be taking their time today. Normally they’ve launched by now.’

  ‘There’s no pattern to it, sir?’

  ‘None. Sometimes there are three or four hours between launches. Sometimes they send up two, more or less at the same time.’ He sucked on his pipe and inspected the bowl. He was fiddling, Kay realised, to calm his nerves, talking to fill up the silence. ‘I don’t know what their thinking is, operationally. I guess they have a lot of technical problems and just have to fire when they’re ready.’ He had smoked all his tobacco. The pipe made a whistling noise. ‘I’d love to watch one take off.’

  ‘Would you really?’

  ‘Oh yes. It must be a hell of a sight. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  ‘How odd. Perhaps it’s just a male thing. Freudian, and all that.’

  A telephone rang. They both swung round to look at it. The Signals Corps corporal snatched up the receiver, listened for a second, covered the mouthpiece with his hand and called out, ‘They’ve launched!’

  An electric bell began to ring. Just like school, Kay thought. Everybody moved quickly back to their places. She could feel her heart thumping. Barbara clattered down the stairs and rushed to her seat. She made a face at Kay across the table. ‘Bloody typical – it has to happen while I’ve got my knickers round my ankles.’

  ‘Quiet!’ shouted Sitwell.

  Kay sat with her pencil poised above her notepad. A few seconds passed. The corporal was listening intently. He had his hand held up, like a marshal with a flag at the start of a race. ‘Contact bearing two six zero; altitude thirty-one thousand; velocity three two four seven feet per second…Contact bearing two six zero, altitude thirty-nine thousand, velocity three eight six two…’

  ‘There she goes,’ muttered Knowsley.

  ‘…Contact bearing two six zero, altitude fifty-seven thousand, velocity four zero three eight…’

  ‘My God, the speed of her…’

  Sitwell said, ‘Has anyone got the positions for the y-axis yet?’

  One of the WAAF sergeants was writing rapidly. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The corporal announced, ‘Contact lost.’

  ‘She’s already out of range,’ said Knowsley. ‘Well!’ He shook his head and let out his breath. ‘Now we wait.’

  One of the sergeants sat with the phone tucked under her chin, on an open line to Stanmore, a pencil in her hand. Another stood by the large-scale map of London and south-east England holding a tin of pins.

  The room fell silent again. Minutes passed. It was sinister to contemplate the rocket soaring towards space, Kay thought, the curve of its flight path flattening, the gradual turn, the speed of its descent. There will be someone on the ground in London just like I was, someone going about their life on a normal Tuesday morning, full of plans and trivial concerns, entirely unaware that the mathematics of the parabolic curve have already condemned them. She looked down at her sheet of paper – at the pencilled figures representing the values of bearing, height, speed and position. The integers of death. She remembered how she had just pulled her dress over her head in Warwick Court when something changed in the atmosphere, as if the air had been sucked away, and then came the crack of the sonic boom, the express-train roar of the incoming rocket, all of it swallowed by
the rumble of the collapsing building.

  ‘Report of impact,’ called the WAAF sergeant with the phone. Her voice pulled Kay back to the present. Another pause, while the radar operators in Home Defence in England made their calculations. ‘Latitude bearing fifty-one point thirty, three one point six one four six. Longitude zero, zero, thirty-seven point eight seven nine two.’

  The sergeant put a red pin in the map. Kay picked up her slide rule. All thoughts of what was happening in London evaporated. She was surprised at her own calmness. Her mind bifurcated, one part concentrating on the procedure that had to be followed, the other making sure her calculations were accurate. The window on the slide rule moved back and forth, comforting in its precision. The world reduced to numbers. After exactly six minutes, she raised her hand and passed her notebook across the table to Barbara. Knowsley and Sitwell gathered at Barbara’s shoulder to watch her check Kay’s calculations against her own. Kay studied their faces. Now she was nervous. She would have liked a cigarette. After a minute, Sitwell took the notebook over to the map that showed London and the North Sea all the way to the Dutch coast. She measured off the distance.

  ‘Latitude bearing fifty-two point seven, four point two seven zero two. Longitude four point one seven, fifty-two point three zero nine eight.’

  ‘Latitude bearing fifty-two point seven…’ One of the WAAF sergeants, in the polished accent of a BBC announcer, repeated the coordinates clearly and calmly down the line to Fighter Command.

  Barbara smiled across the table at Kay. ‘Don’t worry, sweetie, you got it bang right.’

  * * *

  —

  At RAF Coltishall, nine miles north of Norwich, four Spitfire pilots – members of 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron – who had been sitting in their cockpits for several hours, were ordered to scramble. Their warplanes were brand-new Type XVIs, only received from the factory that month, specially modified to serve as bombers. For several days the squadron had been studying high-altitude reconnaissance photographs of The Hague, familiarising themselves with the Type XVIs and practising dive-bombing. Straining under the weight of two 250-pound bombs, one under either wing, they roared down the runway and took off into low cloud. Flying in tight formation, they turned east, crossed the long sandy beach between Waxham and Winterton-on-Sea and headed over the North Sea towards the Dutch coast, 120 miles away. The attack coordinates were radioed to them by the control tower. At a maximum speed of just over 300 mph, they would reach their target in twenty-five minutes.

  * * *

  —

  Sitwell moved to the large-scale map of The Hague, carefully rechecked the bearings, and pressed a pin into the corkboard. Kay rose from her seat and went around the desk to examine it. The red bead – like a drop of blood, she thought – was positioned precisely in the centre of the Scheveningen Wood.

  On the corporal’s desk, the telephone rang. All eyes turned to watch him as he reached to answer it. He listened, nodded, covered the mouthpiece.

  ‘They’ve launched again.’

  13

  AS FAR AS GRAF WAS concerned, the first missile of the day had gone off without a hitch. A minute after it had disappeared into the clouds, the crew had emerged from their slit trench and started rolling up the electrical cables. The firing control vehicle had lumbered out of its burrow and reversed up to the launch table. Afterwards, when he looked back on it, he would concede that perhaps there hadn’t been quite the sense of urgency there should have been. But it was so long since the men had seen an enemy aircraft – Jabos they called them, from Jagdbomber: fighter-bomber – that a certain laxity was understandable.

  A sergeant leaned out of the half-track’s window. ‘Do you want a lift?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ve got to check on Schenk’s platoon.’

  Like a doctor making house calls, Graf moved on from one rocket to another. About five hundred metres to the west of the first launch site, a second V2 was standing on its platform, ready to take off. Yet again there had been a fault in the transformer, and the launch had been delayed for two hours while a replacement was fitted. Sergeant Schenk, the veteran of the Eastern Front who had left his frostbitten ears behind in a field hospital near Leningrad, was standing at the base of the missile. The control compartments were shut. Condensed air was venting from close to the liquid oxygen tank. She was ready to go.

  Schenk said, ‘Do you want to stay and watch?’

  ‘I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you. I need to get back to the base.’

  ‘No problem. Your signature’s enough.’ He held out his clipboard for Graf to confirm that the repair had been carried out. ‘I hear they’re burying Lieutenant Stock and the others tomorrow morning. Should be quite an occasion.’

  Graf wondered if the remark was meant to convey reproach, but he could see no evidence of it in the sergeant’s battered face. ‘So I understand.’ He signed the chit and handed back the clipboard.

  ‘That’s war, isn’t it? Some of these kids are so wet, they still have their mothers’ milk on their lips.’

  ‘Well, nobody knows this war better than you, Sergeant.’ He was keen to avoid one of Schenk’s horror stories about fighting the Russians. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  ‘That you will.’

  He set off down the road.

  The morning was quiet, cold, grey. He was on the same stretch of road that he had walked with Biwack on Saturday morning, running east to west across Scheveningen Wood, with its view down to the lake. No one was about. He was glad of the solitude. He slowed his pace so he could enjoy it longer. From behind him came the roar of a rocket motor igniting. He stopped and turned to look. A second later, Schenk’s missile shot clear of the trees. ‘Go on, tilt, you bastard,’ he muttered, and as if on cue, the V2’s trajectory flattened just before it vanished into the ceiling of cloud. Good. There would be no more launches for an hour or two. He noticed a park bench overlooking the lake and decided to take a rest.

  He still had a hangover from the previous night. A combination of curaçao and cognac and the memory of his conversation with the girl in the brothel weighed heavily upon him. Had he really told her all that stuff about the rate of misfires and the shortage of liquid oxygen? He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. I must be going crazy. He promised himself he would keep away from the brothel. But her image kept returning. Seidel had said, as they were driving away, ‘She was a funny, skinny little thing. What made you choose her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she reminded me of someone I used to know.’

  The explanation seemed to satisfy the lieutenant’s curiosity. ‘Fair enough. Each to his own. I always ask for Marta exactly because she doesn’t remind me of anyone.’

  Graf lit a cigarette and stretched out his legs, his arm resting along the back of the bench. Because the ground fell away slightly towards the lake, he had a good view. There was something melancholy about a lake in winter that suited his mood. He had disposed of the fragments of the burned-out rocket motor that morning, dropping them at intervals in the woods. He supposed he had made himself Femke’s accomplice. Once again he toyed with the idea of trying to rescue her, driving her back to her home town. But they were bound to be stopped. Perhaps there was someone in the resistance who could hide her in The Hague. He could drive that short distance, surely? That was feasible. Maybe he would go back after all, and suggest it.

  He was still turning the idea over in his mind when the wail of the air raid siren carried from the direction of the town.

  It was the first time he had heard the warning for weeks. His immediate thought, just as it had been at Peenemünde, was that it was most likely to be a drill. He was only about three hundred metres short of the tented base of the technical troop. But instead of running up the road to take cover in its air raid trenches, he stayed on the bench and scanned the sky. Judging by the way the V
2s had disappeared that morning, almost as soon as they began to tilt, he reckoned the cloud cover must be high, maybe as much as 3,000 metres – dangerously high, now he came to think about it. Suddenly, against the grey, he saw tiny smudges of black erupting, like puffs of squid ink, followed by the distant pom-pom-pom of the anti-aircraft batteries opening up from their positions in Oostduinen.

  That brought him to his feet.

  The tactics of a Spitfire formation on a bombing run were to approach from a height of around 8,000 feet, identify the target, roll onto their backs and dive in line very steeply, at an angle of 75 degrees, to an altitude of 3,000 feet; release their bombs from an almost vertical position, the leader first; and then pull back hard on their joysticks and climb away at full throttle. This was the manoeuvre that 602 Squadron had been practising above the fens of East Anglia over the past few days, and this was the spectacle Graf witnessed that November morning: four dots dropping out of the clouds to the north, in perfect file, swelling rapidly in size and noise, the whining note of their dives rising to a crescendo, heading straight towards him. The precision of it was so extraordinary – the loud piston-crack of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engines so unlike anything he had ever heard – that the engineer in him remained riveted to the spot, even as he saw the bombs detach from beneath the warplanes’ wings. Only when he heard the whistle of their descent did he realise the danger.

  He threw himself full-length, pressed his face into the wet grass and covered his head with his hands just as the boom of the explosions started rolling across the lake. Each detonation vibrated through his stomach. He felt horribly exposed with his back presented to the sky. He imagined the pattern of the bombs creeping closer. He counted eight in all. When the last of the reverberations died away, he lay for another minute listening to the drone of the Spitfires’ engines dwindling in the distance, pursued by the rattle of heavy-calibre machine-gun fire.