Before von Braun could answer, Walter Dornberger came to the rescue. “I’m sorry, Herr Reichsminister, but we were unable to comply with your request. We deliberately kept Lieutenant Reinhardt in medical quarantine for the last forty-eight hours, to make sure that no one carrying any germs or viruses would inadvertently make him sick just as he was about to carry out his mission. I’m sure you understand.”
Goebbels said nothing although his expression became even more vulpine than ever. If he was about to respond, though, he was cut off by a voice booming from a loudspeaker mounted on a nearby post: “Launch in sixty minutes! Repeat, launch in sixty minutes! All technical personnel, please report immediately to control bunker!”
“We must go,” von Braun murmured to Sanger and Dornberger, then he turned to the dignitaries in the front row of the viewing stand. “Thank you for your best wishes,” he said, giving them a hasty bow. “We’ll brief you following the conclusion of this mission.”
Without another word, he went as fast as he could to an open-top sedan parked nearby, Sanger and Dornberger trotting along beside him. He was relieved that none of the High Command insisted upon joining them; they weren’t so arrogant not to realize that their place was here, not in the bunker. Making a brief appearance at the viewing stand was something he and the others were obliged to do. Now that it was over, their real task lay before them: getting Silver Bird safely off the ground, into space, and on its way to its target.
The day had come. By the time it was over, New York would be in ruins.
Frieda Koenig was about to bicycle into town to go shopping when, from somewhere in the far distance, she heard something odd. Halfway to the front gate, she stopped, put down her market basket, and listened intently. No, there was no mistake. It was the Deutschlandlied that she heard echoing off the granite bluffs of the nearby mountains: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt…”
In the months she’d been living in Nordhausen, carrying on the impersonation of a recently widowed artist, she’d seen and heard enough to confirm OSS suspicions that the Nazis had a secret missile base located in the mountains not far from town. All these things she’d dutifully reported to London during her radio transmissions, which she was careful to keep brief and at irregular intervals. Yet this was the first time she’d heard martial music coming from the vicinity of Mittelwerk.
Listening, Frieda frowned. The only reason the Nazis would break out a brass band was if they had something to celebrate. On the other hand, it was only a few hours ago, just as she was getting out of bed, that she’d heard a couple of twin-engine Junkers transports passing low overhead, as if coming in for a landing. Party officials paying a visit? Very possibly, yes, but why…?
Suddenly, a bike ride to the village grocer was no longer important. Picking up her basket, Frieda hurried back into the cottage. She’d learned to leave a ladder propped up against the back wall of the house; the rooftop made a good observation post, with the chimney hiding her from the road. Once she climbed up there with her binoculars, she might have a chance to see what was going on.
First, though, she went into the bedroom. Frieda pulled the suitcase radio down from the closet shelf, placed it on the floor beside the bed, and plugged it in. Better get the wireless warmed up, just in case…
Stiffly and slowly, the rubber-insulated leather of his flight suit resisting his every move, Horst Reinhardt climbed down into Silbervogel’s cockpit. Once again, he was astonished by just how small it was. Not even the experimental Messerschmidt jet fighters he’d been flying before being recruited for this program were as cramped as this. He gritted his teeth as the two technicians standing on either side of the cockpit eased him into the heavily padded seat, one holding his arms at shoulder height while the other fitted his legs into the horizontal well beneath the instrument panel. The parachute he wore pushed against his lower back, making him even more uncomfortable. He muttered an obscenity, knowing that no one would hear him; his throat mike wasn’t yet plugged in, and the airtight goggles and full-face breathing mask that made him resemble a bug muffled his voice.
Once he was seated, though, he was able to move a little more freely. As one of the technicians reached down to move the air mask’s oxygen hose from its portable unit to the valve located beneath the dashboard, Reinhardt ran a line from his throat mike to the wireless system. “Radio check, radio check,” he said, clamping the throat mike between his thumb and forefingers. “Do you hear me, Control? Over.”
“We understand you, Silbervogel.” The voice in his headphones was unfamiliar. Apparently Dr. von Braun wasn’t in the control bunker. Probably still shaking hands with the brass.
“Thank you,” Reinhardt said. “Time to launch?”
“Launch in fifty-one minutes, thirty-one seconds.”
“Very good. Proceeding with preflight checklist.” A small notebook was attached to the upper-right corner of the instrument panel. While the technicians leaned in to wrap his seat and shoulder straps in place around him and clamp them shut, Reinhardt looked at the first item on the list. “Primary electrical system, on…”
The control bunker was a steel-reinforced concrete pillbox built into the mountainside not far from the tunnels, on the other side of the launch rail from the viewing stand. Resembling an oversized gunner’s nest, its slot windows were fitted with quartz glass five centimeters thick. The precautions were necessary, for the bunker was located only a hundred meters from the launch rail.
Within the bunker, nearly a dozen men were seated at workstations divided into two rows, each facing the windows and the large wall map between them. Pneumatic tubes were suspended vertically from the ceiling to each desk. Von Braun discarded the uniform jacket as soon as he came through the vault door that was the bunker’s sole entrance. Ignoring the brisk salute given him by the soldier standing guard, he pulled on his white lab coat as he headed straight for his station, the center desk in the third row back. Walter Dornberger sat down beside him, while Sanger went to a desk in the second row, the logistics section.
Von Braun sat down at the desk and pulled on a pair of headphones. He took a moment to light a cigarette, then opened the loose-leaf binder on the desk. Through the headphones, he heard both Lieutenant Reinhardt’s voice and those of the flight controllers as they made their way through the prelaunch checklist:
“Oxygen-fuel pressurization, complete.”
“Confirm oxygen-fuel pressurization completion.”
“Initiate gasoline-fuel pressurization.”
“Initiating gasoline pressurization.”
“Gyro platform check.”
“Gyro operational.”
They’d rehearsed the launch procedure countless times over the past four months, in practice sessions that lasted hours on end. This time, though, there was a tension that had been lacking before. Everyone knew that this was the real thing, not just another exercise. Scanning the room, von Braun saw that everyone was focused entirely upon the dials and meters before them. Now and then, there was a short, sharp hiss, then the hollow clunk of a message capsule dropping into a cup beneath the pneumatic tubes that carried handwritten data from one workstation to another, removing the need for the controllers to stand up and walk across the room. Otherwise, the bunker was quiet, disciplined.