INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1)

by W. A. Harbinson

  Thinking of that possibility only reminded him again that his time was running out. Even more pleased, then, that the Kugelblitz was to be tested this morning, he pressed the bell to call his breakfast and went for his shower in the adjoining bathroom. He returned to find his meal on the table, placed there by his servant who, like all the rest of the workers, came from one of the camps. It was his usual frugal breakfast of cereal and fruit juice, and when he had finished it, he left his room and went down to the hangar.

  Ernst Stoll, who now had the eyes of the walking dead but otherwise looked handsome in his SS uniform, was already waiting for him in his glass-walled office, looking out at the hangar.

  ‘You’ve come straight from Berlin?’ Wilson asked, surprised. ‘You must have travelled all night!’

  ‘No, Herr Wilson, I didn’t. I arrived here yesterday evening with General Kammler, but spent the night in the Nordhausen Central Works.’

  ‘Kammler’s still at Nordhausen?’

  ‘Yes. He’s just checking things out. He’ll be here on time.’

  ‘I haven’t been to the Central Works since Christmas. How are things there?’

  ‘Busy,’ Ernst said. ‘There are now about forty thousand political prisoners and civilians working there. And Camp Dora and the many other subcamps in the area are expanding tremendously. Production of the rockets proceeds at full speed, the underground passages are being enlarged, as requested by Himmler, and four new factories are being undertaken: one as a refinery, another for liquid oxygen, and two for Junkers jet engines.’

  ‘So much ambition at the end of the road!’

  ‘It keeps Himmler happy. Bear in mind that the original plans were drawn up in much better days, and if we don’t stick to them now, we’ll arouse suspicion. Besides, it’s good experience for where we’re going. For instance, in the town of Bleicherode, about twenty kilometres from the Kohnstein Mountain, there’s an old potassium mine where we’d already begun to bore new tunnels, galleries, and accommodations at a depth of seven hundred meters, with the idea of reaching sixteen hundred metres. The plan was to tunnel through to another potassium mine nearby, in Neubleicherode, and there install more factories for work on the V-2 and smaller anti-aircraft rockets. Not far away, in a cliff face near the town of Lehestein, a tunnel is still being bored, intended to end in a large cave in which we were going to install a liquid oxygen plant and quarters for rocket crews... and so forth. Naturally we no longer have use for these places, but they keep the work force busy, allay the suspicions of Himmler’s Nordhausen spies, and incidentally prove that what we’re planning for Neuschwabenland can actually be accomplished.’

  ‘And today, after testing the Kugelblitz, we’ll start preparing to leave. How much time do we have left?’

  ‘Not much,’ Ernst replied, gazing out of Wilson’s glass-walled office at the large, pilot-controlled flying saucer that was resting on a hydraulic steel platform in the centre of Kahla’s biggest underground hangar.

  The saucer looked exactly like the Schriever saucer, except for the smaller, less visible, but infinitely more powerful, adjustable jets around its rim, as well as its more seamless surface. This was made from Luftschwamm, porous metal, thus allowing the saucer to fly at least as fast as the much smaller Feuerball, and probably faster. The saucer’s top body rose up to the central pilot’s dome, made of unbreakable Perspex.

  ‘The war is being lost and a lot of our leaders are breaking down,’ Ernst continued. ‘The Führer’s permanently on drugs supplied by his quack, Dr Morell, and is also rumoured to be suffering from syphilis and going insane. Himmler spends most of his time in his sanatorium in Hohenlychen, a hundred and twenty kilometres north of Berlin, where he talks to his astrologer and discusses the possibility of arranging a private surrender to the Allies. I myself was visiting the rebuilt Peenemünde in October when Marshall Goring was shown a successful launching of a V-2 rocket. Goring’s eyes were tired and his face was very puffy. During the rocket launching, he swallowed a lot of pills; then he pulled his pistol from his holster and kept tossing it in the air and catching it, as if in a trance, until his aide-de-camp gently took it away from him.’

  Never before had Wilson heard Stoll talk with such weary contempt about his masters. Now he knew that he could finally get the SS Kapitän to do whatever he wanted.

  Wilson was pleased. Disillusioned romantics always made the most fanatical converts.

  ‘And how goes the war?’ he asked.

  ‘Most of France and Belgium are liberated. Soviet divisions have taken Warsaw. Italy is virtually lost. Most of Germany is in ruins. Our air force has no fuel. Our industry has been wiped out by Allied bombs. Our rocket attacks came too late.’

  ‘It’s only a matter of months, then?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Wilson. No more than that.’

  ‘And Kammler?’

  ‘Since last July, when the attempt on the Führer’s life turned him against the Wehrmacht and encouraged him to place the whole rocket program in the hands of the SS, meaning Kammler, our recently promoted brigadier has been making an admirable public display of criss-crossing the country to take charge of the rocket firings – which means he has freedom of movement and is above suspicion. I still don’t like him, but he’s certainly no fool and knows just what he’s doing, though now that most of the launching sites have been captured, he has less to do there.’

  ‘Do you think he’s still dependable?’

  ‘Yes. His sole desire is to avoid being captured and hanged as a war criminal – which means he wants to go with us.’

  ‘When is he coming here?’

  ‘Any minute now,’ Ernst said. ‘He wants to witness the test flight of the Kugelblitz. It’s not something he’d miss.’

  Glancing across the hangar, the doors of which would soon open to reveal the southern Harz Mountains of Kahla, Wilson saw that the German workers, under the supervision of the engineers, were already starting to raise the hydraulic platform under the saucer.

  In that gloomy space, the saucer looked even larger than its seventy-five metres in diameter. It was resting on retractable shock absorbers, had an almost seamless, perfect aerodynamical shape, and even the pilot’s cockpit, located at the machine's centre of gravity, could be retracted during high-speed flight, thus making the machine look like a perfect disc, with no surface protuberances of any kind.

  It was, to Wilson’s way of thinking, something worth seeing.

  Just as the whining, clattering steel platform came to rest on its adjustable wheels and went silent, Kammler and Nebe entered the hangar by the rear door and marched past the saucer into Wilson’s office. Looking as handsome and cold as ever, Kammler sat on the edge of Wilson’s desk. Nebe, as dark and unreadable as always, stood near the door of the office with his hand on his pistol.

  He feels naked without that pistol, Wilson thought. The man is a predator.

  ‘Welcome,’ Wilson said, addressing his words to Kammler. ‘How are things going?’

  ‘Excellent,’ Kammler said. ‘At the end of January, Himmler placed me in complete control of the rocket program. I’ve just returned from the Hague, from where the V-1s and V-2s are being fired. We’ll keep firing them from there until Antwerp falls, which it surely will, and then we’ll be firing them no more, since we’ll have run out of launching sites. When that time comes, it will be time to move from here, let’s say March or April, certainly not much longer, since, as from yesterday, Allied troops were massed along the Rhine on a sixteen kilometre front, preparing to launch themselves into Germany. In other words, our time is running out, so let’s hope this test flight succeeds and we can start making arrangements in the knowledge that we have a workable saucer to take with us.’

  Even as he spoke, the large doors at the far end of the hangar were being opened. Sunlight poured in to reveal an immense open space that ran out to the base of a steep, densely forested hill. The smooth, metallic-gray surface of the Kugelblitz took on a brilliant, silvery sheen that cle
arly reflected the images of the men around the platform. Then the engine of the hydraulic platform roared into life and the platform, now on its raised wheels and manipulated by a combination of remotecontrol console and jib and crane, started moving slowly out of the hangar, into the open air.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Ernst murmured, awe making him seem more alive. ‘It’s absolutely superb!’

  Wilson could not resist a smile, then, nodding at Kammler and Nebe, led them, with Stoll, out of his office and across the concrete floor of the hangar, toward the open doors and the still moving Kugelblitz.

  ‘Has the escape route been organized yet?’ he asked of Nebe, who had fallen in beside him.

  ‘Yes,’ Nebe said in his flat, passionless manner. ‘The matter of when and how we leave will be complicated by the Soviet offensive, which is moving rapidly toward Peenemünde. Because of that, Wernher von Braun and five thousand of his workers are being moved this week to the new research station still under construction in the Bleicherode mine. Because the technicians and their families are going to be housed in the surrounding villages, as requested personally by Himmler, we’re going to have to keep this place secret and leave at night, when we won’t be observed.’

  ‘When the time comes to evacuate,’ Kammler said, ‘I’ll ensure that von Braun and his team don’t know about it. In the meantime, while they’re living in the Nordhausen area, I’ll keep them under close guard and make sure that none of them comes this far. In short, they won’t know you exist.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Wilson said as he led them out of the hangar and into the freezing wind of the cleared area, ‘but how will we go?’

  ‘The same way von Braun and his team are coming here,’ Nebe replied. ‘By train, truck, private cars, and even barges. To ensure that at least some of us get through, we’ll be split up into groups and make the journey on three separate nights by different routes. The first will go to Rostock, then round the coast of the Baltic Sea; the second also to Rostock, but then on to Lubeck; and the third and last to Hamburg, via Hanover, then on to Kiel from there. A meticulous schedule has been arranged for each group. Each journey will be made by a combination of vehicles to confuse anyone trying to track our movements; and each stop, or change-over point, along the way will be in a secret location heavily guarded by my most trusted SS men, all of whom, like me, had to go underground after the failed July plot against Hitler. In other words, they’re all men who’ve everything to gain and nothing to lose by coming with us. In that sense, at least, they’ll be trustworthy and reliable.’

  ‘It all sounds well organized,’ Wilson said.

  ‘It is,’ Nebe replied.

  The engines of the mobile platform in the clearing went dead, the wheels were raised to let the platform rest on the flat earth, and the Kugelblitz bounced lightly on its shock absorbers, then steadied again.

  Out there, in the open air and sunlight, it was a thing of great beauty.

  Wilson walked up to the pilot, who was waiting by the concrete observation bunker in the shadow of the high wall of the hangar. The man was wearing a Luftwaffe flying suit and seemed totally fearless.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Wilson asked of him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Then let’s do it.’

  Wilson escorted him across the clearing and up onto the steel platform, finally stopping at the curved rim of the Kugelblitz, their heads in line with its ring of tiltable jet nozzles. From there, the raised pilot’s compartment seemed to tower high above them, at the top of the ladder sloping upward to it. The pilot climbed up and Wilson followed to help him in. When the pilot was strapped in, Wilson checked that all seemed well, then scrambled down and let an engineer climb up to secure the Perspex hood. When that was done, the engineer climbed back down, pulled the collapsible ladder after him, gave the thumbs-up to the pilot, then marched with Wilson back to the concrete bunker in front of the open doors of the hangar.

  Kammler, Nebe, and Stoll were already there, staring through the protective, tinted glass in a long slit in the wall of the bunker. Because the Kugelblitz was being flown by a pilot, there was no remote-control panel, as there had been with the Feuerballs, though there was a man sitting by a radio console, prepared to talk to the pilot.

  ‘All set?’ Wilson asked him.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then there’s no point in waiting.’

  The man at the radio console relayed Wilson’s permission to take off to the pilot. Kammler smiled and crossed his fingers. General Nebe remained impassive. Ernst took a deep breath and licked his lips, then bit his index finger. Wilson heard the birds singing, the wind moaning through the forest, the babbling of a brook beside the hangar, where the land rose protectively. He thought of his first prototype, the Flegelrad, or Wingwheel, which had been a crude affair based on the principles of the wheel, with its many wings radiating out to the rim and revolving around the pilot’s cockpit at the centre of gravity. Impossible to control, its balance destroyed by its vibrations, it had been superseded by a later model, in which balance was achieved with a new stabilizing mechanism and the earlier Rocket-motor was replaced by an advanced turbojet engine. That second model flew, but not much better than a helicopter, so Wilson had experimented with his smaller, remote-controlled model, the Feuerbatl. Finally, this, the Kugelblitz, the perfect aeronautical machine, would allow for frictionless air flow and defeat the former limitations imposed by the boundary layer. Thus, he was giving the world a saucer-shaped, jetpropelled aircraft of extraordinary speed and manoeuvrability.

  And at last it was taking off. Tilted downward, the adjustable jet engines roared into life, spewed searing yellow flames at the earth, and created a circular wall of fire around the saucer, between its rim and the ground. The flames beat at the blackened earth, roaring down, shooting up and outward. The saucer shimmered eerily in the rising heat waves and then took on a crimson glow. It shuddered violently for a moment, swayed from side to side, bounced up and down on its shock-absorbing legs, then lifted tentatively off the ground.

  It hovered in mid-air, floating magically on a bed of fire, then roared louder and ascended vertically, thrust upward by the flaming jets, and was distorted in the shimmering heat waves. It turned to a silvery jelly, then became a lava flow, red and yellow and glaring white, then hovered magically once more, about ten metres up, before roaring demonically, the noise shocking, almost deafening, and suddenly disappearing, though in fact it had shot vertically skyward, to be framed by the rising sun.

  It stopped there, bouncing lightly in the sun’s shimmering, oblique striations, then shot off again, this time flying horizontally, to disappear beyond the horizon in the wink of an eye.

  Wilson heard the applause around him, then the pilot’s voice on the radio, distorted by the static but obviously exultant, confirming that he was flying beyond the limit of his air-speed indicator, higher than the upper limit of his altimeter, and already could see the Elbe River, winding toward Hamburg. He soon saw the curved horizon, the Baltic Sea, the port of Rügen, then he turned back and was soon crossing Magdeburg and reappeared as a flash of light above the green, forested hills of the majestic Harz Mountains. That flash of light became a silvery coin, a flying saucer, a glowing disc – then, abruptly, the Kugelblitz was right above them, hovering high up in thin air, again framed by the rising sun. It descended vertically, perfectly, on pillars of yellow flame. The flames scorched the earth and flew outward in all directions and formed a bed of fire and smoke, then the

  Kugelblitz settled down on the steel platform, which its flames had made red-hot. It subsided onto its shock absorbers, bouncing lightly, swaying gracefully, then its engines cut out, leaving a sudden, shocking silence, and the flames died out and the smoke drifted away and the flying saucer was visible.

  It was resting on its shock-absorbing legs, gleaming silvery in the sunlight, a technological object of rare beauty, an extraordinary achievement.

  ‘We’ve won,’ Wilson said with
quiet pride. ‘Now let’s blow it to smithereens.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR The landscape that Ernst drove through on his way to Himmler’s unofficial headquarters in Dr Gebhardt’s sanatorium at Hohenlychen, 120 kilometres north of Berlin, resembled the interior of his own mind: a place of ruins and mounting rubble, a cold, bleak terrain.

  He had felt this way since the death of Ingrid and the children – first grief, then guilt, then despair, then a feeling like death – and he now sensed that he would never feel better as long as he lived. He understood that this was why he’d decided to throw in his lot with Wilson. He needed the American’s icy confidence, his air of calm invincibility, but he also needed to hide away in a place like the Antarctic the way other men, disillusioned with or frightened by life, hide themselves in isolated monasteries, wanting only the silence of the day and the night’s lonesome wind.

  He wanted escape.

  Reaching the sanatorium, he wasn’t surprised to find it surrounded by trucks and heavily armed SS troops, just as the Führer’s bunker in the Chancellery had been. Even though wearing his uniform, Ernst had to show his papers to an unsmiling guard at the main gate, then was escorted inside the building, past other guarded doors, and into Himmler’s personal study. The Reichsführer was at his desk, leaning slightly forward to look down through his pince-nez at a large astrological chart, but he looked up when Ernst entered and offered a wan smile. Ernst saluted and murmured ‘Heil Hitler!’ – because this ridiculous formality was still being kept up – then Himmler, who rarely invited his guests to sit, actually told him to do so.

  Ernst sat in the chair facing the desk as Himmler was saying, ‘You have come from Berlin, Captain Stoll?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ernst replied. ‘After flying in from Nordhausen, I was expecting to find you in the Chancellery, so naturally I went there first.’

  ‘I’m not feeling too well,’ Himmler said testily, ‘so I came here for a much-needed rest.’

  Ernst did not choose to argue, though he knew that Himmler had in fact come here to get away from the bombings and the general madness overtaking Berlin, now that his envisaged Thousand Year Reich had shrunk to the area confined between two rivers, the Rhine and the Oder, and was about to be annihilated completely with enemy attacks from the east and west. Also, since January, when he had been given the responsibility of stopping Marshal Zhukov’s advance to the Oder River but failed lamentably to do so, his position of trust with Hitler had been lost. Now, along with Goring and Speer, he was a rejected former favourite, forced to watch the fanatical Martin Bormann gain the trust of an increasingly paranoid Führer and become arrogant with it.