by Alex Scarrow
Max checked his watch: if they hadn’t drifted too far north or south they might actually make it to New York after all. He smiled. Not only did it look like, against the odds, they would actually make it, but it looked like they were going to arrive more or less on time. As the hour of midnight struck in Germany, they would be dropping the bomb over New York.
Pieter had done well, flying a little faster than they’d needed to bring them in on time. Max trusted his co-pilot would have calculated the fuel burn before making that kind of decision, and he had calculated well, so it seemed. Drift and head or tail wind would, of course, affect any dead reckoning Pieter could make, but at 5000 feet altitude that wasn’t going to throw his reckoning off by too much.
‘Well done, Pieter.’
Hans was looking longingly at the thick grey blanket wrapped around Stef.
‘Jump in under the blanket,’ he said to the gunner, ‘it’s quite warm under there.’
Hans nodded eagerly and slid along the wooden-panel floor to sit beside Stef. He pulled the thick grey blanket up over himself, up to the chin.
‘Keep an eye on that wound, though.’
‘Yeah.’
Max climbed through the bulkhead into the navigation compartment, and then through the second bulkhead into the bomb bay. The bomb hung at the bottom of the rack before him, cradled in its metal frame. He sat down on the floor and dangled his legs over the narrow walkway into the darkened bay below. When the bomb bay doors were open, that area would be a dazzling bright abyss. Max was surprised at how little protection there was either side of the narrow walkway, perhaps only eighteen inches wide, and the open space above the bomb bay doors. It would be perilously easy to misplace a foot and fall through. But then he reminded himself that the space above the doors normally would be packed full with 600lb bombs, stacked one above the other in the racks, allowing no room for a clumsy crew member to slip through and fall to his death. He also recalled reading in the manual that while the bay doors were open, the bomb bay was off limits to the crew.
He felt inside his tunic pocket for the envelope and pulled it out. Major Rall had used a normal, unmarked envelope, no insignia. Against his better judgement, Max felt himself injecting this moment with portentous significance. He was about to open the most important envelope in the world. Curiously, it seemed poetically right that such an envelope would be so unremarkable - plain, white, small. He pulled off a leather glove and put a finger under the flap, sliding it along and opening it up.
So, here we are.
He reached in and felt a single sheet of paper and pulled it out. He unfolded it and scanned the words on the paper. It was letter-headed stationery from the Ministry of Armaments, from Albert Speer’s office no less. Halfway down the page was a short paragraph and a diagram indicating how the altimeter detonator should be set up. Max glanced down at it. The detonator could only be reached by lining up the correct six-digit code on a thick locking bar that ran over the top. The digits could be set by rotating a series of cylinders with numbers on the side. It reminded him vaguely of the code wheels on an Enigma machine. He looked back at the piece of paper and found the code number at the end of the paragraph.
One . . . five . . . zero . . . eight . . . two . . . seven.
He reached down to the locking bar and carefully rotated each of the number wheels to arrange the six numbers in a line. With the last digit set, the locking bar clicked, and Max lifted it away from the altimeter display.
He glanced back at the paper. The bomb was to detonate 1000 feet above the ground. He wondered why it would be set to explode at such a height. Perhaps the scientists who’d put this weapon together had become paranoid that it might land with a thud on the rooftop of some Manhattan skyscraper and remain there, unexploded indefinitely, undiscovered amongst the rooftop detritus of pipes and boilers.
The altimeter had a similar display of five number wheels. He read the instructions one more time before turning the wheels carefully until they displayed: 01000.
One thousand feet.
The last act now was to press a button to the right of the five number wheels, a single blue button. Pressing this would engage the air pressure sensor in the altimeter. Once this was engaged, if the air pressure around the bomb increased to an amount equivalent to that found 1000 feet above sea level, the bomb would detonate. Max would press the blue button, only at the last moment before the bomb was to be released. There would be all manner of localised fluctuations of pressure around the bomb when the bay doors were opened; so they would be opened first, and only then could the bomb be activated safely.
He pulled back from the small device slung within its metal cradle, relieved that the process of preparing it had been simple and straightforward. He folded the paper up, pulled the envelope from his pocket. It was as he was about to place the code back in the envelope, that he noticed another folded sheet of paper nestling inside.
A note from Rall wishing good luck, perhaps? A note even from the Führer, maybe?
Perhaps . . .
He reached in with his ungloved hand, pulled it out and unfolded it. It was the kind of paper you would see in an exercise book or on a writing pad, not the sort of stationery you would expect the Führer to write on. He unfolded it to find a paragraph of handwriting, oblique, spidery strokes. It was the writing of a man in a hurry.
To the one responsible for arming this weapon,
This is a confession from the man who has built this bomb. This device uses a new energy called atomic energy. We are using a new science that is attempting to harness the energy that holds the very atoms of this world together. The weapon I have made will unleash this energy in a way that cannot be predicted. It has either the potential to destroy a whole city, or, if God has no mercy for us at all, the whole world.
We have taken a dangerous shortcut with this new science to deploy this weapon ahead of the Americans. There is an even chance that this bomb will destroy most of this world, perhaps all of it. The risk of this happening is too great.
I implore you, whoever you are, to understand the terrible gamble you are about to take in arming and dropping this bomb. Think for a moment, what good is there in winning your war if there is no one left alive to inherit the ashes of victory?
Max stared in silence at the note, his mind momentarily locked in confusion. His first fleeting instinct was to suspect the note to be a poor attempt to sabotage the mission. Some disgruntled technician, perhaps even an anti-Nazi? God knows, there were very few Germans left who would proudly announce allegiance to the swastika. It was a person who had hoped that the note might bring an end to this endeavour. Misinformation like this at a crucial moment in time could just be enough to throw someone off their guard long enough that it might make a difference. That was most probably what this was. There had been plots before against Hitler, many in fact, and Max, not a Nazi, never a supporter of the National Socialists, might so easily have been one of those unfortunate men who had been sucked into any one of those conspiracies, if he had been approached.
It was possible, Max deliberated, that this might even be the handiwork of one of those in the highest echelons of power . . . Himmler, Göring, Goebbels? Perhaps an act of sabotage to buy themselves clemency from the enemy after this war was over.
He looked down at the note once more.
But we’re dropping this bomb for Germany, not Hitler.
That was why Max had agreed to carry out the mission. Not for that insane bastard who had brought this insanity down on all of them.
I volunteered for those of us poor wretches who are left, not the bastard who put us here.
It was their last chance to fight for a truce, that’s why he had volunteered, and for no other reason; not for glory, not for vanity. Whatever the motive behind the note, whoever had managed to ensure it had made its way to the last man to lay hands on this weapon, Max decided, the attempt had been in vain. The mission had to go on. He and his men had managed to fight their way acro
ss France and the Atlantic, he owed it to his men, to Schröder and his pilots, to the millions of civilians across their homeland who would die if the war didn’t come to an end right now.
He began to ball the note up in his hands.
And stopped.
What exactly is the risk of using this weapon?
He recalled those few words; words he had not been meant to hear. The door had closed on the answer, but the question, Major Rall’s question, he had heard.
What is the risk of using this weapon?
The civilian, Hauser, had answered quietly, the murmur of his reply for the Major’s ears only. Rall had heard the answer to that question only a short time before they had assembled outside the hangar ready to take off.
And how odd the Major had been.
Max recalled those few awkward moments, standing in front of the bomber, watching Schröder and his men climbing into their fighters and preparing to take off . . . and the Major’s unusual, uncharacteristic behaviour. And then Max recalled the Major had tried to say something, urgently, insistently, quietly.
He was trying to warn me.
Major Rall had attempted to warn Max of something. He had thought the Major was warning him to be careful handling the bomb; that Hauser had imparted to him at this late stage some element of risk that the Major felt in all fairness should have been relayed directly to Max. That particular rationalisation of the Major’s odd, hurried last exchange had made sense to Max as he had replayed it in his mind in the few moments he’d had since taking off to reflect upon the matter. The Major, he thought, had been trying to convey one last cautionary piece of advice, but in the haste, the moment, the noise, it had been lost and cast aside as Max had focused on the mission itself.
But this note . . . and those overheard words, and the Major’s hurried, desperate last-ditch attempt to warn him, interrupted, he now recalled, all too hastily by Hauser . . . all of those things gave Max a reason to pause, to unscrew the paper in his hand. He looked once more at the note, rereading the scribbled lines.
The Major must have been informed by the civilian, Hauser, of the bomb’s true nature. The discussion he had overheard a mere snippet of was just that: Rall’s discovery of the real danger, for the first time. And now, Max replayed those final moments on the airstrip - the haunted look on the Major’s face, his distracted demeanour and the final desperate look of anxiety on his face as he had tried to warn Max with a carefully phrased sentence.
And then there was that civilian, Hauser, his speech . . . perhaps, as he revelled in the moment, he had let slip more than he had intended.
We will turn all of New York into Stalingrad . . .
Max looked down at the crumpled paper in his hands. ‘Not just New York,’ he muttered.
His mind cruelly began to replay visions of devastation, the horror that he had seen with his own eyes in recent months. The ashes of a city, stretching as far as could be seen, a world of blackened wood, grey rubble and white dust. The bloated, twisted bodies poking from the ground, contorted by heat as they half-cooked from the flames of destruction, yet still raw inside, raw enough to rot, decompose and swell the dark leathery skin to the point of bursting with noxious gases.
Max had briefly struggled with the notion it would be he alone that would be responsible for arming and releasing a weapon that would turn an untouched city, a magnificent city by all that he’d seen of it from newsreels and the occasional movie, into that - that vision of hell upon earth. But now, if this letter was to be believed, if the Major was to be believed, then he might well be the one who would turn the whole world into - and that civilian, Hauser, had put it perfectly - Stalingrad.
Hans took a look at Stef sleeping fitfully beside him. He remembered when Stef had first joined them back in the early months of 1944. He had been a hastily trained recruit, drawn straight out of school to replace Jürgen Dancht, who had died in a field hospital after catching influenza. Stef had been a pain in the arse, too fucking young and stupid to deserve to make it through the war in one piece. But he had, and annoying though the lad could be, it would be a shame to have made it so far and die within sight of the end. Mind you, he thought, if the boy had been drafted into the infantry he wouldn’t have lasted long. Stef was too clumsy, too gawky, the kind of poor sod who stands out, whose head always seems to be the one found slap bang in the middle of a sniper’s cross-hair. Stef was the kind of poor fool who always died first.
He checked the boy’s wound; there was some more fresh blood soaking through, blending with the dark brown patches.
You idiot, stop bloody bleeding.
He cuffed Stef’s head lightly, a tress of ginger hair flopped over the boy’s pale, ghost-white face. He’d get a doctor soon. Pieter had said they were just over forty minutes away from America, in an hour it would be all done and they’d be finding a safe place to put down. Just another hour or so and they’d get him some help.
Hans wondered whether he would be able to spot the first signs of land. With a surge of curiosity he climbed out from beneath the blanket and leaned towards the starboard porthole. He pulled himself against the roaring, freezing rush of wind to look forward, over the plane’s giant wings, for a first glimpse of the continent.
The sky was clear around them and below, the Atlantic ocean was a deep blue. His eyes were drawn to a pale line carved across its glittering surface.
A ship?
New York had a port. They had to be on target, on the right course.
He plugged into the comm. ‘Pieter, I can see a ship below us!’
‘Yeah? Which way is it headed?’
Hans leaned back out and looked down. It was hard to tell which end of the pale line was the front, and even harder to detect it moving. He squinted tightly as the wind made his eyes water. After a few seconds he picked out the paler line of the ship’s wake.
‘The ship’s heading south-west, I think.’
‘Then if that’s heading into New York, we’ve drifted a little north,’ replied Pieter. ‘Max? Are you plugged in?’
There was no answer. Pieter called him again, but he still failed to answer.
‘I think he’s readying the bomb,’ said Hans.
‘Well, go tell him I think we need to turn south a little . . . no, just go get him to come forward, okay?’
‘Yeah.’
Hans took another look at Stef. ‘Hang on. We’re nearly there,’ he muttered. He stooped as he climbed through the bulkhead and again as he entered the bomb bay.
‘Pieter needs you up -’ He saw Max sitting on the walkway beside the bomb, studying a scrap of paper. ‘Hey, Max, is everything all right?’
He looked up at Hans, a look of anguish was stretched across his face.
‘Max?’
He held out the piece of paper towards Hans; he said nothing as he did so.
‘What is it?’
Max stood up and took a step towards him, the piece of paper still held in front of him. ‘Look at this.’
Hans reached for the paper and began to read the handwritten words.
To the one responsible for arming this weapon . . .
It took the young man only seconds to dismiss it. He looked up at Max. ‘What the fuck is this?’
‘Read it. Read it all.’
Hans obediently looked back down at it, and Max waited patiently for Hans to finish. Finally, the young man looked up. ‘So?’
‘We can’t go ahead with this.’
Hans looked up at him, confused. ‘What’re you saying, Max?’
‘We can’t complete this mission. It’s insane to go on, knowing this -’
‘Max?’
‘Can’t you see that? It’s insane to do this if there’s even the slightest chance.’
‘We have orders, not just from some fucking general, but from Hitler himself!’ Hans waved the sheet of notepaper in front of him. ‘This . . . this shit means nothing. Any fool could have written this.’
‘Hans, listen to me. I don’t kn
ow who wrote this, someone who worked on the bomb maybe, but the Major, just before we took off, I think he was trying to tell me that we shouldn’t complete this mission.’
‘What?’ Hans’s face was contorted with uncertainty and panic. ‘This is his plan! No, not the Major. He . . . he . . . why would he want to sabotage it? No, you’re wrong, Max, he wouldn’t -’
‘He was trying to tell me, Hans. He had only a few seconds to -’
‘No! No, that’s just fucking crazy.’
Max realised he was making a mistake trying to argue with Hans, justifying his thinking. The young man would respond to an order, he always had, and would do so now. The habit was ingrained into his thick skull.
Max straightened his back and pointed towards the bulkhead. ‘Get back to your post. We’re aborting the mission, Hans, that’s all there is to it.’
Hans remained silent, his body frozen with indecision, yet his eyes darting from Max to the note to the bomb, his mind now working hard to make sense of things.
‘No . . . I don’t underst—’
‘Back to the waist-guns. That’s an order!’
Hans recoiled slightly, and his mouth clamped shut; it was an automatic response to Max’s barked command. He turned to go, beginning to step aft through the bulkhead, and then he stopped.
‘No,’ he said after a moment, with a quiet and unfamiliar certainty.
Max deliberately ignored the young man’s whispered insubordination and began to turn round to climb forward through the bulkhead and into the cockpit.
Hans leaped forward suddenly, moving with a speed and agility that Max would never have imagined him to possess. He tugged Max’s Walther from its holster. He held it in both hands and aimed it uncertainly and shakily at Max’s head.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give me the gun!’ shouted Max.
Hans shook his head.
‘Give me the gun, Hans, I’m ordering you.’