“We’re still awaiting delivery of the acceleration couch,” Sanger said, pointing to the open cockpit hatch. “I trust that the pilot’s dimensions haven’t changed, yes?”
“Not unless someone decided to change the pilot.” Von Braun hesitated, then quietly added, “If that happens, you’ll be the first to know… after me, that is.”
A knowing smile played beneath Sanger’s mustache. Although he, Arthur Rudolph, and von Braun had coauthored a long memo to Goering carefully specifying the requirements for the Silver Bird pilot, the final selection hadn’t been up to them. Goering had interviewed a dozen Luftwaffe pilots before settling upon four final candidates, then a committee comprised of him, Himmler, and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had picked the one who’d have the honor of being the first man in space. Von Braun had met him when Goebbels escorted him to Peenemünde: Lieutenant Horst Reinhardt, twenty-seven years old, a Messerschmidt Bf-109E fighter ace with seven confirmed kills over Britain, and more recently a test pilot for the Luftwaffe’s experimental jet-aircraft program. Upon talking with him in his office, it didn’t take von Braun long to determine that Lieutenant Reinhardt was an unimaginative drone who barely comprehended the nature of his mission. However, intelligence probably wasn’t the reason why he’d been chosen; blue-eyed and blond-haired, he was just the sort of Aryan superman the propaganda minister adored. He’d look great in newsreels once his mission was complete.
“Yes, well…” Sanger coughed in his hand. “If it does, please tell me at once. We’ll need not only to alter the dimensions of the couch, but we’ll also have to adjust the cockpit’s oxygen-pressure variables to suit him.”
Von Braun nodded, his face grim. That was something else he didn’t like to think about, the high-altitude research done by a physician Sigmund Raschler, for the Luftwaffe Institute. When Dr. Raschler had expressed reluctance to use Luftwaffe pilots for his experiments, Himmler had given him a solution: concentration camp prisoners. One by one, detainees had been marched into decompression chambers or submerged in tubs of ice water, their reactions closely studied until they died. The results had been volumes of medical data invaluable for the development of manned spaceflight, but at a hideous and inhuman cost.
Von Braun looked away from Silver Bird, toward the interior end of the tunnel. The tunnels were being expanded for reasons beyond the current mission. If it was a success, the plan was for more Silver Birds to be built until there were enough for the Third Reich to impose its military might across the entire globe. No place on Earth would be beyond their range. The spacecraft could dive from space and drop their bombs on an enemy nation’s cities, killing civilians by the thousands, until their governments surrendered.
Or at least that was the idea. Privately, von Braun doubted it would happen. The Silbervogel Projekt was far more expensive than anyone had anticipated, draining human and material resources from the war effort. The cost of the titanium alone was so high that he doubted that they’d be able to construct even a second spacecraft, let alone a fleet. If so much time and energy hadn’t already been committed to building Silver Bird, von Braun had little doubt that the High Command would have already pulled the plug.
Yet Goering was convinced that Silver Bird would change the course of the war. Hitler might not conquer the world, but if the Americans invaded Europe—which was inevitable, and everyone knew it—at least he’d be able to dictate terms for their withdrawal. Once that happened, the Reich would be able to solidify its control of western Europe, and a new German empire would be born.
Many years ago, as a teenager entranced by Hermann Oberth’s visions, von Braun had decided to devote his life to the exploration of space. This was not where he’d ever expected to find himself, and he doubted that Sanger had either, despite his unswerving dedication to Silbervogel. One day, perhaps soon, a spacecraft would carry men to the Moon, maybe even to Mars. But the idea that it might bear the red swastika flag…
We will pay a terrible price for this, he thought. If we are successful, history will never forgive us for the way our victory was achieved.
In the nearby village of Nordhausen, a sedan driven by a young woman named Greta Carlsberg came to a halt in front of the small Bavarian-style cottage on the outskirts of town. Climbing out of the car, Frau Carlsberg took a moment to look around, as if to admire the remote and wooded place where she’d chosen to live. Then she opened the trunk, pulled out a couple of suitcases, and lugged them beneath the garden trellis and up the flagstone walk to the front door. Putting down her luggage, she retrieved a brass key from a pocket of her shapeless overcoat and used it to let herself in.
Greta Carlsberg was a sort of woman who’d become sadly familiar in Germany: a war widow, her husband recently killed in service to the Reich. Until then, she’d lived in Berlin, where she’d made a living as a commercial artist. Her husband’s death in Russia had shattered her—she didn’t even have his body to bury since it had been left on a battlefield outside Leningrad—and she’d soon discovered that she could no longer bear to remain in the apartment they had shared until he’d joined the Army. So she’d decided to sell the apartment, pack up her belongings, and move away from the city to a place in the country where she could quietly paint and be alone with her grief.
This was what she’d told the real estate agent who’d searched for a furnished house that she could rent for a year or two. At her request, he’d looked for something in Nordhausen, a town Greta fondly remembered from family vacations when she was a little girl. She was lucky; just such a place was available. So here she was, taking occupancy of the place where she could retreat from the world while she recovered from her loss.
All of this was, in the parlance of the espionage profession, a “legend” created to conceal the truth. Frieda Koenig was her true name; although she had indeed been born and raised in Germany, her family had moved to England when she was a child, and most of her adult life had been spent working as a deep-cover field agent for MI-6. Operating under the code name Mistletoe, she’d visited Germany twice already during the war, using her carefully constructed background for short-term intelligence-gathering missions. A couple of months earlier, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services had borrowed Frieda from MI-6 for another assignment, perhaps a little more sedate than the ones she’d done before but also more important.
She paused to shut the door behind her and take off her coat, then carried her bags through the cozy sitting room to the bedroom in the back of the house. The rest of her belongings were still out in the car, including the easel and paints she’d use to establish the appearance of a reasonably talented painter—which in fact she was—but just then her first priority was the concealment of the most important thing she had brought with her from England.
Placing the smaller of the two suitcases on the bed, she opened it to reveal what lay inside: a Type A Mk III wireless radio, specially designed by the British Army for covert operations. Built into the suitcase itself, it was completely self-contained except for the power supply, which could run on either alternating or direct current. The radio didn’t have a microphone but instead relied on a Morse telegraph key, yet it had a range of eight hundred kilometers, sufficient to reach MI-6 headquarters in London.