The technician rapped on his helmet, and Bethwig came to with a start. The man was motioning for him to switch on the radio. For an instant, panic gripped him; if he turned his radio on, his voice would be transmitted over the intercom to the .launch area and the command centre. If they discovered that he had substituted himself for the pilot before the hatch was sealed, the SS would certainly end the launch attempt. The man pointed again, but the chief technician elbowed him aside and plugged his headset directly into Bethwig’s helmet.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant. Got delayed. Small problem in the instrument bay, but it’s fixed now. Some idiot left a bolt just loose enough to keep the hatch from closing.’
Bethwig suppressed a sigh of relief. Over the tinny intercom the chief technician would be unable to tell who was inside the pressure suit. He rocked the seat back until he could see the chronometer in the main panel. The two dials showed local and elapsed time. There was less than thirty-five minutes to go now.
They finished the instrument check, tested the oxygen and other support systems, checked the engineering and fuel systems, and ran through the final inventory of food and water stores. At the end the chief technician handed in the special tool kit made of non-sparking aluminium and bronze. When the hatch was closed and sealed, the air inside the cabin would be replaced with pure oxygen. Bethwig was not happy about that, but the original design had envisioned a flight of not more than fifty minutes’ duration for which oxygen was the cheapest and most efficient system. Now, in the event of a fire, even normally non-flammable materials, such as the kapok stuffing in the couch, the leather of his suit, the composition board of the instrument panel, and even the aluminium panelling, would burn furiously in a one-hundred-per-cent-oxygen atmosphere.
‘That’s it, then, Lieutenant Gross.’ The technician clapped him on the shoulder and set the gimbal brake. The couch immediately swung into a reclining position. The chief technician hesitated, as if he wanted to say more but could not find the words. He contented himself with a mumbled ‘Good luck’ and unplugged the headset. A moment later the interior of the cabin went dark as he lifted the hatch panel into place and began to bolt it down. Franz turned his head as far as the cumbersome suit would allow, and caught a final glimpse of the chief technician peering in at him. The thought occurred to him that the technician’s face was probably the last he would ever see.
Bethwig was alone. The silence was total but for the faint whisper of oxygen inside his suit. He took a deep breath, feeling the excitement rise, and grinned. He had expected to be terror-stricken at this point. Instead, he was elated.
The chronometer hands stood at minus thirty minutes. The winking red light indicated that the command centre was trying to contact him. He reached up and inserted his helmet radio leads into the main panel. There was nothing that could stop him now.
Memling was crouched in a stand of pine less than thirty metres from the SS headquarters in Zinnowitz. Two five-ton lorries were parked on the gravelled parade, and he counted forty SS men drawn up in two columns. An officer ran from the building shouting orders, and the men hurried to their trucks. The officer leaned from the cab to give last-minute instructions to a sergeant, and the lorries lurched and bumped across the parade and out through the gate. Memling watched, waiting to see which direction they would take – north-west to the launch area or due north to the coast where he had ambushed the patrol. There was little more he could do if the SS had decided to halt the launching, but the lorries reached the main road and sped north.
The noise of engines dwindled, and he turned back to the barracks where the sergeant was still looking towards the road while the sentry behind stood at rigid attention, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. According to Sussmann, the garrison had been reduced, in anticipation of the final withdrawal, to one hundred men. He had killed six and one officer twenty minutes ago, forty had just left, and there were at least another thirty, according to Prager, guarding the launching area and the various command centres. There would be ten to fifteen more SS still searching for him in the vicinity of the tank farm and a few guarding the burned-out Gestapo headquarters several kilometres to the south in Trassenheide. So there should not be more than a few left in the barracks.
There would also be radio equipment that might enable him to make contact with the submarine. He decided it was worth a try.
The parade was twenty metres in diameter and fringed closely about with trees that reached to the building on either flank. The intent obviously had been to create the same park-like surroundings found throughout the rest of the Peenemunde facility. Memling found it incongruous. He worked his way through the trees to the south-east side of the building, checking each window. The construction was cement block, as was nearly every building on the island, and the ground-floor windows were at eye level. Most of the interior was dark and the few lighted rooms empty. The central dormitory for enlisted personnel extended the length of the building at the rear; it was empty. What weapon racks he could see were also empty. He had then to depend on his single remaining grenade, the machine pistol and three magazines.
Memling completed the circumnavigation of the barracks. The single sentry and the sergeant seemed to be the only ones left, but he couldn’t be certain of that. He studied the sentry from the trees. Now that his sergeant had gone, the man had relaxed and was sneaking a smoke. His rifle, however, was still slung muzzle downwards, ready for instant use.
He faded back into the shadows and worked his way to a darkened room with an unlocked window on the south-east side. Cautiously he worked it up by pressing the frame back against the casement and lifting. It rose in jerks, binding on either side, and Memling swore silently. When he had it up as far as it would go, he passed the machine pistol through and eased himself into the room.
Memling knelt at the partly opened door for several minutes until satisfied the corridor was empty. The building was a single-storey cube, and there was no way to find out how many people were left inside except by checking each room. He opened the door carefully and stepped into the hall. The first door on his right opened easily. The room was dark, and when he turned the light switch, he found himself in a mess hall. The room was huge and, combined with the dormitory, probably accounted for half the available floor space.
He checked three more rooms, each empty, before reaching the end of the corridor. Two had been quarters for officers, and he wondered which had belonged to the man who had executed Prager. The hall made a right-angle turn across the front of the building. He knelt and peered around the bottom edge of the wall. Two doors were open, and light flooded into the corridor. He could hear voices and radio static but could not tell from which room they came. Jan quickly retraced his steps to the end of the hall. There was another corridor, as he had expected, running across the rear of the building. Three doors led off to rooms on either side, and he realised the two on the left would lead to the canteen and dormitory. The single door to the right was locked. There wasn’t time to open it, and he hurried on to the end of the corridor, repeated the minute examination from a prone position, then checked two more unlocked and empty offices. Again he found one door locked and another leading to the dormitory.
Satisfied that the building was empty but for the room in front, he crouched at the junction of the corridors. Again he could hear the same voices and static. So that was it, he thought. It was like France or Norway all over again. He felt the sudden surge of exhilaration and, realising that it was little different from fear, almost laughed aloud at himself. Memling walked past the entrance – two sets of double glass doors beyond which he could see the sentry – and stopped beside the first doorway. A burst of static sounded and someone swore. Another voice demanded silence. Two at least, he thought, and how many more in the next room? The radio was in there, so he dared not use the hand-grenade.