‘On the night of the seventeenth of August nineteen forty- three, five hundred and ninety-six aircraft were sent here, everything that could fly from the bomber bases in the east of England. The target was Peenemunde where there was the programme for the development of the V2 rocket. There was a clear moon, a rotten night to come. If the target of Peenemunde had not been so critical, they wouldn’t have been asked to fly on a night like that. They were told that if they didn’t crack the target then they’d have to come back and do it all again, face the air defence again, and keep coming back till they’d cracked it. There were three target areas at Peenemunde, pushed up close to each other. The strike had to be really exact.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I read about it. The pilots of the bombers, of course, had never heard of Peenemunde. They weren’t told what was on the ground, just that it was important. There was a firestorm, the casualties were horrendous. But the bomber crews took bad casualties as well, because of the moon, lost forty-nine aircraft over the target and on the way back.’
‘Is that how you spend your evenings, reading about what’s gone?’
‘I read history because it’s important to me. The target area was comprehensively hit. The best of the German rocket scientists were here, and they were creating what was to be the best weapon of the war. Even though the target was pulped, the science survived. The scientists, after nineteen forty-five, were snatched by the Russians and the Americans. Neal Armstrong’s walk came from here, and Apollo and Challenger and the shuttle, and Gagarin and the space stations. It’s all about Peenemunde.’
Tracy said, distantly, ‘Did your wife leave you because you lectured her on what’s gone?’
He said, quietly, ‘I can’t help what drives me. Out of history comes everything. Codes, morals, ethics, they’re all learned from history. Why we’re here today, why we have to be here, is because of the need to learn the lessons of history.’
‘You were better quiet, better when you didn’t lecture.’
‘Please, Tracy, listen. History breeds principles. The history of Peenemunde is about fantastic scientific achievement, but it’s also about slave-labour compounds and about starvation and about men working until they died of exhaustion. That was wrong. The people who were here then, they closed their eyes to what was wrong, believed the wrong – slave labour – did not matter. They wanted to ignore principles, but principles are the core of life.’
‘Did she have to listen to your lectures before she left?’
‘You come to Peenemunde, Tracy, and you learn what was wrong, you learn about when principles were ignored. To get the rockets to London, to develop the science to put a man on the moon, slave labourers died of starvation and exhaustion. It’s the same story. It’s why I’m here. It was wrong to shoot Hans Becker. That is a principle and I try to live by it.’
‘Me, I only want to see the bastard hammered.’
‘You have to know why. You have to hold the principle as faith.’
She closed her eyes and turned away. They went through Trassenheide and Karlshagen, and he saw the cemetery with the exact lines of the stones, and he came to Peenemunde where the bombers had flown. Without principles his life would have been emptied.
‘I talk,’ Josh said, cold. ‘We are quite close. There won’t be any more lectures or much more history… I talk and you write it down.’
The man walked away, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his old coat, and was lost among the first tourists of the day.
Heinz Gerber had been sweeping the roadway that led past the scale-sized model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, past the old Me 163, the MiG-21 and the MiG-23 on their concrete stands. It was his job, each day, to sweep the roadway from the Feld Salon Wagen that had been used by the former ministers and generals, and which was now a cafe, and clear the rubbish and wrappings all the length of the roadway to the harbour where the Type P21 gunboat was moored. He was qualified to sweep the roadway because he had once been in charge of the refuse collection of a small town. The people he worked with did not know of his former life. It was his nightmare, lived alone in the dark hours of the single room he rented in Karlshagen, that it should be known he was a man accused of thieving precious money from his church.. He could never go back. There had been silence in the street when he had left his home. They had all believed it, that he had stolen from the church box, because it was what they had been told.
When he had first come to Peenemunde it had been to clean and scrub the sleeping quarters of the conscript soldiers of the military base. When they had left, he had been given the work of sweeping and brushing the roadway of the new museum.
He had finished the work, brushed the small heap of paper, dirt and wrappings on to his shovel. He had tipped the heap into his wheelbarrow. The roadway behind him was cleaned. He had left the wheelbarrow there, near to the model of the Vergeltungswaffe 2, with the brush and shovel laid neatly on it. He loved his work. He had gone to the store shed, near to the models of the SA2B and SA5 ground-to-air missiles, and lifted a coil of rope down from a nail. He loved to work with his brush and shovel and wheelbarrow, and he did not care whether the heat stifled him or whether it rained or whether the snow came.
He walked out, past the big Soviet troop-carrying helicopter, towards the pine forest and the path he took each day to and from his single room in Karlshagen. He loved the daylight: the nightmare only came with the darkness. He carried the rope into the forest, where the light was shut out by the high canopy.
Josef Siehl watched them pay the woman at the kiosk and take the tickets. He recognized her because he had seen her sit beside the lighthouse on the breakwater and throw flowers into the sea. He watched from his car. He recognized the man who had held the Leutnant and threatened to kill him, and he had believed the man. He watched them speak to the woman in the kiosk, who shrugged and pointed towards the roadway and the aircraft and the models of the rockets.
The brevity of her note was typical of Olive Harris.
An hour before the meeting she had circulated it to the personal assistant of the deputy director general, with copies to the assistant deputy director and to Fleming of German Desk. She had sat at her desk late into the previous evening, and she had come again early to Vauxhall Bridge Cross to check the note and make some, few, slight revisions to the text. Olive Harris succeeded, in a man’s world, by the clarity of her thought and by the instant dismissal of what she regarded as unnecessary.
She explained the concept of her plan.
‘The so-called seekers after truth – the young woman, Barnes, and the man who has tagged on to her, Mantle – they are unimportant. She is directed by sentimentality, he is governed by naive notions of retribution. They are a minor sideshow and should be ignored.’
The deputy director had come down from his quarters high in the building to the office suite of the assistant deputy director. He listened without comment, his angled chin supported by his fists, his elbows on the table. It would be his decision.
‘Krause is irrelevant. He is a small-time bit player. Whether he committed murder in cold blood is of no concern to us.’
The coffee provided by the assistant deputy director remained untouched, the biscuits uneaten. He would never interrupt Olive Harris and would seldom contradict her.
‘The carping between the German agencies, BfV and BND, and ourselves on the issue of influence in Washington is frankly demeaning. It may be sustainable by dwarf-sized minds. If we seek a position of supremacy then we should justify that position by achievement, not by whining.’
Fleming sat beside her. He had sniffed when she had sat down and he reckoned that she wore no scent.
‘But Perkins, plodding in Rostock, has provided us with the ammunition for sniping at a target of consequence. The situation