‘No.’
‘Then let’s stay right here.’
‘Aren’t we supposed to take shelter?’
‘They come over nearly every night,’ Gladys said, then reached out for his hand. ‘Let’s just stay here and watch.’
Glancing left and right along the Embankment, Bradley saw men and women hurrying in every direction, heading, as Gladys explained to him, for the concrete-and-brick air-raid shelters, the platforms of the underground train stations, or the more comforting confines of pubs, clubs, hotels, or even the rooms of prostitutes. Even as he was watching them, he heard a distant, muffled rumbling emerging out of staccato explosions, and he looked along the river to where clouds of black smoke were bursting under the stars and being criss-crossed by phosphorescent lines of tracer bullets that formed a web around the rise and fall of shadowy shapes flying in from the sea.
He was looking at an immense fleet of German bombers – too many to count.
‘God almighty!’ he whispered.
Gladys squeezed his hand and the wind beat at his face as more ack-ack guns opened fire. The beams of searchlights swept the sky. He heard the distant explosions, felt the ground beneath him shaking, and saw clouds of black smoke billowing up from sheets of yellow flame and spreading out to cover the rooftops in a sky turning crimson.
‘They’re pounding the docks,’ Gladys said. ‘God help the poor bastards there.’
She squeezed his hand again and he appreciated the gesture, being almost overwhelmed by the spectacle along the river, by the knowledge that the fabulous mixture of fire and smoke and light was being created by destruction and death on a terrible scale. Over there, where the bombs were falling, people were dying in flame and smoke, being crushed and suffocated and incinerated and blown apart, while the buildings were collapsing into rubble and hot ash and choking dust.
Yet from here it was beautiful.
Bradley choked up with emotion, feeling torn by awe and shame, then raised Gladys’s hand to his cheek and pressed her knuckles into his skin in mute affirmation. Then the bombers were overhead, suddenly roaring like ravenous beasts, and he actually saw the bombs falling, turning lazily in the moonlight, and then the river erupted in a series of mighty explosions, the water geysering up and fanning out and raining down over the debris of the boats that had been hit and blown apart while he was blinking.
Icy water poured over him and he pulled Gladys down, held her tight behind the wall, and looked up to see the British fighter planes, the famous Spitfires, descending on the German bombers like birds of prey, their guns spitting fire as they dove and climbed and returned, until one of the bombers exploded, shuddered in mid-air, erupted in fire, and went down through a black pall of smoke that obscured its last seconds.
The rest of the bombers passed on, heading toward the East End, still dropping their bombs, their guns firing at the attacking Spitfires. Gladys tugged at Bradley’s hand. He looked at her and saw her pointing toward the city. The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, majestic in its halo of criss-crossing searchlights, towered over the rubble that burned and smoked far below, protected, as if by a miracle, from the destruction surrounding it.
Bradley’s heart was racing. He wanted to cry with joy. He felt Gladys’ hand, her fingers slipping between his, then she raised his hand to kiss his fingers one by one as the ground shook and bellowed. Bradley took a deep breath, tasted smoke, heard more bombing. Then he saw Gladys’ face, erratically illuminated in flickering crimson and white light, moving in toward him, her eyes wet, until her lips touched his. They kissed there, on the Embankment, kneeling behind the protective wall, then clung to one another, exploring each other like children, and stood up only when the bombers had returned and flown back to the sea, leaving silence and a pall of black smoke that was streaked with red flames.
‘I love you,’ Gladys Kinder said.
Bradley was speechless.
Of course, she laughed about it later. She had meant it, but she laughed about it. She told Bradley that the expression on his face had just made her want him more. Yet they didn’t go to bed together. They talked around it, but didn’t do it. Bradley wanted to do it, but felt foolish, too old, and Gladys said that to do it would probably spoil a beautiful friendship.
‘Right,’ Bradley said. ‘I agree.’ He loved being with her, loved her flirting and teasing, and was enthralled by her conversation, her stories of politics and war, and was jealous when she mentioned the many men she had known over the years. She showed him the city, always kissed him good night chastely, and in letting him know she loved him and simply wanted to be with him, she raised him out of the grave of his grief and turned him into a new man.
Yet he still wanted to complete his mission, to find Wilson before it was too late. After five unparalleled days with Gladys, he tried to get back to work.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth-King said after pouring Bradley a cup of tea in his cramped office in the busy SOE headquarters, ‘but your request to parachute into occupied Europe has been denied.’
‘ What?’
‘I think you heard me.’ Wentworth-King sat behind his desk and lit one of his awful British cigarettes. ‘You will not be allowed into occupied Europe until after D-Day.’
‘What the hell!’
But Bradley’s intended protest was cut off by an airy wave of the hand and a rather chirpy, British public-school grin. ‘Fear not,' Wentworth-King said, holding up a bulging, official envelope. ’You have not been forgotten. I have here, in this envelope, enough detailed instructions to keep you busy for the next year or so – and certainly busy enough until the invasion.’ Still grinning, he handed Bradley the envelope while asking, ‘Did you know about this when you first came to see me?’
‘No,’ Bradley said, staring at the bulky envelope. ‘Whatever it is, I didn’t know a damned thing about it.’
‘Operation Paperclip,’ Wentworth-King explained. ‘You were concerned with the Peenemünde scientists, I believe?’
‘Yes,’ Bradley said.
‘Well, OSS has decided to mount an operation, code-named Paperclip, to seize the German rocket teams and prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets, who will also be greatly interested in them.’
‘And what about Wilson?’ Bradley asked.
‘According to reports recently received from the same European resistance groups that originally informed us about the Peenemünde rocket project, the rocket teams have recently been moved from the Baltic to underground sites in Nordhausen, and possibly nearby Bleicherode, in the southern Harz mountain ranges of Thuringia. Since those establishments are top secret and under the control of Himmler’s most trusted SS troops, and since we’re no longer talking about an occupied country, where you might expect assistance, but about Germany itself, it’s felt that a parachute drop into Thuringia would be suicidal. It’s therefore been decided that your time would be spent more profitably in mounting, staffing, and planning the specific aims of Operation Paperclip, which will come into effect once Europe has been breached.’
‘That may be too late,’ Bradley said in growing frustration. ‘If Wilson’s already helped the Nazis to build remote-controlled rockets, God knows what else he has in the pipeline. We have to stop him before the invasion commences, since he might come up with something even worse than the reported Peenemünde rockets.’
Wentworth-King simply shrugged. ‘Can’t be helped, old chap,’ he said. ‘For a start, we simply can’t have anyone parachuting into Germany at this particularly sensitive point in time. Second, it’s believed that Wilson, whilst contributing to the V-1 and V-2 rocket projects, was never actually a member of von Braun’s team and is therefore probably still at Kummersdorf – which makes it even more sensible for you to follow the invasion troops into Berlin, once the invasion is underway. Either way, you are staying here, old son, until Operation Overlord commences.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘It’s all down to the tid
es,’ Wentworth-King said, ‘and here in England they
can be unpredictable. In the meantime, I suggest you collect who you want for Operation Paperclip and otherwise enjoy your time in London. Anything else?’
‘Go to hell,’ Bradley said.
He stormed out of the lieutenant colonel’s office with the bulky envelope under his arm, on the one hand bitterly disappointed and even outraged, on the other hand surprisingly, helplessly relieved that at least he could see more of Gladys Kinder, who had given him back the will to live.
She was a huge consolation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX ‘We must talk to them,’ Wilson said as Ernst drove him from the BMW plant in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, back around the dreadful ruins caused by increasing Allied bombings, and then south toward the research complex at Kummersdorf. ‘As you’ve just seen, the new multidirectional jet propulsion system for the flying saucer works beautifully and can be installed any day now. Once we do that, we can arrange a test flight of the saucer, but we must sort this business out first.’
‘It’s dangerous to go behind Himmler’s back,’ Ernst insisted, glancing out at the bombed suburbs, the skeletal houses and mountains of rubble, and deciding that he must persuade Ingrid, who was living with her parents in the nearby suburb of Wannsee, to move out of Berlin before it was too late. ‘No one can be trusted these days. If they talk, we’ll be shot.’
‘They won’t talk,’ Wilson replied, looking straight ahead, thinking, his eyes bright with that icy intelligence that seemed not to know fear. ‘Like you, they’re becoming wary of Himmler’s state of mind and think he’s becoming unpredictable. They’re also worried about how he’ll react when the end finally comes — and now they know it’s coming.’
‘ No one knows that,’ Ernst insisted, clinging stubbornly to a vain dream. ‘The Allies haven’t yet launched their invasion and might never do so.’
‘They will and you know it.’
‘We can use the rockets against them.’
‘The rockets won’t be enough to stop them. Now nothing can stop
them.’
‘Don’t sound so pleased,’ Ernst said.
‘I am pleased,’ Wilson confessed. ‘Not because of my countrymen,
nor because of the British, but because I want to go where I can work without feeling threatened.’
‘Does nothing else matter to you?’
‘No,’ Wilson said flatly.
Ernst glanced to the side as they passed some blackened ruins and saw a one-legged child hopping along on crutches, surrounded by other children, all of whom were looking for valuables in the high mounds of rubble in which broken glass and twisted metal glinted in the light of the sun. The ruins were extensive, surrounding him on all sides, and he thought of the awesome power of modern technology and then glanced at Wilson.
He was seventy-four years old but looked perhaps sixty.
Ernst knew that it was due not only to a lifetime of strict dieting and the ruthless application of mind over matter – Wilson’s will was unyielding and he used it to recharge his energy – but also to the surgical operations that he’d recently been having in various SS hospitals. Operations on the stomach, on his varicose veins and joints, reportedly even on the heart, perhaps more than that. The experimental work had been done on humans, on the inmates of the camps, and then Wilson, when he thought the risk reasonable, had them performed on himself, so far with remarkable results. Indeed, at seventy-four years of age he was more vigorous than Ernst.
And Wilson was different from other men in more ways than one.
Exactly what was he?
Ernst thought of him as a mutant, a creature not quite human, someone who had transcended normal emotions to embrace the god of pure logic, beyond kindness or cruelty. Ernst had tried to find out why
– what childhood trauma had perverted him – but every record indicated that he’d had a lonely childhood, his parents strict but decent, so that the only explanation for his unique personality was his extraordinary intelligence. Such intelligence is beyond pity, feeding on logic, not emotion, and Ernst was now convinced that Wilson was an evolutionary accident, the product of pure reasoning, a human being for whom emotions were no more than unwelcome distractions. He was neither cruel or kind, good or bad, right or wrong: He was a creature impelled by the inhuman force of his mind: a mutant, without emotions, the personification of man’s evolutionary drive toward mathematical absolutes.
His was the face of the future.
Ernst shivered involuntarily, gripped the steering wheel tighter, and was feeling decidedly uneasy when the ruins of Berlin gave way to open fields and eventually, as clouds covered the sun, to the barbedwire fences and heavily guarded main gate of the research complex at Kummersdorf.
Waiting for them in Wilson’s office in the main hangar were Hans Kammler, the blond, blue-eyed, former head of SS construction programs, now a brigadier and in charge of the Nordhausen Central Works in the Harz Mountains of Thuringia, and Artur Nebe, former commander of one of the notorious Action Groups in Russia, head of the dreaded Kriminal Polizei, or Kripo, the Prussian intelligence service, and now a full general of the SS, though his allegiances shifted with the wind and his actions were shadowy. Both men were wearing their SS uniforms and looking slightly annoyed.
‘You’re late,’ Kammler said.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Ernst replied. ‘We were observing a test at the BMW plant at Spandau and it took a little longer than expected.’
‘I’m not interested in excuses,’ Kammler said. ‘My time is limited and I resent waiting for anyone, much less for an officer of lower rank.’
‘Yes, sir, I understand, but – ’
‘How are things at Nordhausen?’ Wilson asked, deliberating changing the subject in an unusual display of tact.
‘Livelier than they are here,’ Kammler said.
‘The rockets are still being produced?’
Kammler practically sneered. ‘Of course, American,’ he said. ‘A total of one hundred and forty V-2s were produced in January and February alone. Another hundred and seventy were produced in March, and a further three hundred in April. With luck, we’ll soon be aiming them at London, and then – ’
‘They won’t stop the invasion,’ Wilson said. ‘They’ll just cause a nuisance.’
‘And your flying saucer will do better?’ Nebe asked sceptically.
‘Yes,’ Wilson said.
‘So far it hasn’t even flown,’ Kammler said.
‘The saucer we’ve been openly testing is Rudolph Schriever’s adaptation of my work. The saucer I’m talking about, the Kugelblitz, is the one we’ve constructed at Spandau without Schriever’s knowledge. We’ve just tested the new jet engines today and now know it will fly.’
General Nebe, who was a lover of intrigue, leaned forward in his chair to say, ‘What’s the difference between your saucer and Schriever’s? And why haven’t you told Schriever about yours?’
‘Because I don’t trust Himmler,’ Wilson said boldly, ‘and Schriever is Himmler’s man.’
Ernst felt a tremor of fear, but willed himself to show nothing, He caught Kammler’s searching glance and looked away, too nervous to meet it.
‘We are all Himmler's men,’ Nebe said softly.
‘Himmler’s not the man he once was,’ Wilson replied. ‘It’s rumoured that he sees the end in sight and is starting to crack up ... just like the Führer.’
There was a long, dreadful silence, as if everyone was in shock, then Kammler, coughing into his fist, said, ‘Continue, American.’
‘As you know, it was Himmler’s dream to create a colony of SS élite under the ice of Neuschwabenland in the Antarctic and protect it from the world with highly advanced weapons, including my saucer.’
‘Yes,’ Nebe said, ‘we do know.’
‘Then you must also know that the first of the underground accommodations has been constructed, that some of the finest SS troops, some scientists, and the necessary slave
workers have already been shipped there, and that an escape route has been organized for those of us who wish to avoid imprisonment or even death here in Germany.’
‘Yes,’ Nebe said, ‘we do. And we also know that your flying saucer is supposed to be the ultimate weapon, but now you tell us these stories. I repeat: I want to know about you and Schriever. Why the deception?’
‘Because it’s my belief that Himmler’s forgotten the Antarctic and thinks only of using the saucer to fight the Allied invasion, when it comes.’
‘And if, as you say, your saucer works, what’s wrong with that?’
Wilson turned his gaze upon Kammler, who had spoken with icy sarcasm. ‘Because to stop the invasion we’d need a great number of flying saucers and there’s no way we can construct them in time. And that in turn means that if Himmler’s paranoia keeps him in Germany, the war, the Antarctic colony, and the saucer will all be lost to the Allies. And then all of us – me and Captain Stoll here, you, Brigadier Kammler, and you, General Nebe – will undoubtedly be tried as war criminals, found guilty, and hanged.’
There was another uneasy silence, a brief trading of questioning glances, then Kammler, his blue eyes clear beneath the blond hair, said, ‘So we make our escape to the Antarctic... with your flying saucer... without Himmler... Which gets us to Schriever.’
‘You’re a clever man, Brigadier.’
‘I don’t need your compliments,’ Kammler replied. ‘Just tell us your plan.’
Awed by Wilson’s icy control, but also terrified of where it was leading, Ernst glanced across the large hangar and saw Schriever’s saucer on its platform. Yearning for a cigarette but frightened of lighting one, he returned his gaze to the men in the small, spartan office. Kammler and Nebe were an odd couple, one blond and blueeyed, the other dark and unreadable. Wilson, with his silvery-gray hair and lined face, was as unfeeling as stone.
None of these men is truly human, Ernst thought, and I have sold myself to them.
It was a dreadful admission...
‘If Himmler gets any worse,’ Wilson said, speaking softly, seductively, ‘he’ll change his mind completely about the Antarctic and refuse to let us go there. He’ll want us to make a last stand in Germany
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 30