He paused, then shook his head. ‘I’m certain that what you say is substantially true, Memling. However, you must realise there’s bound to be a bit of a flap over the loss of an entire resistance group involved in bringing home one operative with a wild claim to having uncovered a new secret weapon… again. Whatever you say will be interpreted in that light. Perhaps in your excitement, or in the pressure of the moment, a bit of exaggeration crept into your estimates? Entirely understandable of course, but you must keep in mind that when the NBBS got the wind up about aerial torpedoes or some such nonsense last August, nothing came of it.’
‘The NBBS?’ Memling asked dully.
‘Heh? Yes, I suppose you wouldn’t know about that. The New British Broadcasting System, they call themselves. Run by that fellow Goebbels. Radio station in Berlin, beamed here. Nothing but propaganda by renegade Englishmen. Anyway, like so many of Goebbels’s claims, there was nothing to this aerial torpedo nonsense. BBC did an analysis of their broadcasts over several weeks. Found most of them came right from those – oh, what do you call that silly stuff by that man Wells, and Verne… and, well, your kind of stuff, rockets to the moon and all that?’
‘Science fiction,’ Memling answered tightly.
‘Ah, yes. Science fiction. Buck Rogers and all that. Most of it seems to be American, doesn’t it?’
‘Submarines were once considered science fiction,’ Memling could not resist adding, but he knew Englesby was right.
‘Yes, I dare say. In the meantime I’ll just get on to the ministry…’
There was nothing for it now but to admit he had been duped and therefore was responsible for how many Belgian lives?
‘If you don’t mind, sir’ – Memling’s voice was full of defeat – ‘I would like to go home first and see my wife. She doesn’t know ‘I’m back yet – ‘ He broke off.
A strange expression passed across Englesby’s face. ‘Ah, Memling…’ He swallowed and took out a handkerchief to touch his upper lip. ‘As I am sure you saw, London has experienced a very heavy bombing… it began in September. There was a blitz. Caused a great deal of damage and in the first two weeks…’ Memling had never seen the man at a loss for words before, and then an ugly thought crossed his mind. ‘What are you trying to say, damn you?’ He was half out of his chair and shouting. ‘Your wife was killed during a bombing two months ago.’
For a moment Memling was certain that he had misunderstood. He stared at Englesby, trying to make sense of the words, but it was no use. He tried to rise, but his knees buckled and he fell back.
‘There was nothing anyone could do. The fire brigades were on to it as soon as possible. But there wasn’t anything… the entire block… I know what you must be feeling, old man, but the only thing to do’ – he wiped his forehead – ‘is to keep on.’
Memling left the office, thrust past the wide-eyed secretary, and raced down the stairs. Afterwards he was never to be certain how he crossed London. He was able to recall that as he approached the avenue everything appeared normal enough. There was no damage to be seen, and people went about their business in the usual manner. Only the absence of children and motor vehicles was remarkable. But when he turned the corner, the devastation was complete. Where had stood half a block of semi-detached houses and, across the road, a school, a police station, a fire-brigade headquarters, shops, and all the normal complement of a South London neighbourhood, now there was nothing. And beyond that, great gaping holes appeared where buildings had once stood, as if selected teeth had been removed from a giant’s mouth.
All the landmarks were gone, obliterated. Memling could not even know for certain if he were standing where his own house had been. The disposal crews had cleared the rubble from the road into long rows of broken timber, brick and twisted pipe, smashed furniture and torn cloth. He turned slowly, surveying the block. All the neighbours were gone as well; those not killed outright had been removed, said a sad-faced policeman who stood beside him a while and told him how the German bombers had struck in the early morning hours when people generally took shelter under the stairwells or in their basements rather than going out into the cold and wet. There was no reason to expect bombs here; there was nothing to attract them but shops and homes. The policeman shrugged. That was in the early days of the blitz, before they had all learned what was what.
After a while he left Memling standing before the rubble that had been his home. It was safe enough, the policeman judged. The man did not exhibit any of the usual signs of potential suicide, uncontrollable hysteria or violence. And he was profoundly glad of that. He had been on duty since the first raid at eight the evening before, and he was exhausted.
Peenemunde – Prague
September 1941
The scream gained in scale and volume. Franz Bethwig watched, fingers gripping the edge of the bench so hard his knuckles were bloodless. When the needle registered 128,000 kilograms of thrust, nearly five times that of the A-4, a slow grin spread across his face. The noise was deafening, even inside the blockhouse, and he could imagine what it was like outside. The twenty-centimetre protective quartz glass was vibrating so much that his view of the test stand was obscured. That was something he had not thought of; the cameras were sheltered behind such windows and the film would be too blurred to be of use.
The television screen, at any rate, was clear enough. As he shifted his glance he saw a white flare spring the length of the engine casing. Bethwig lunged for the fuel cut-off, but there was no time. Just before the test area disappeared in a whirlwind of flame, he thought he had seen the casing split along its centre line. The concussion slammed the blockhouse with a solid hammer of sound, and the television screen went blank.
Fire raged beyond the windows, two of which had been scarred with debris, but even so, he could see that the test stand was being flooded with sea water. The fire blast would cause little damage to the steel and concrete test area where everything was designed to minimise blast effects. But the prototype A-10 engine would be a total loss.
Exhaustion swept over him, and he turned away to gather the tangles of paper tape spewed from the recording instruments. He stripped the circular graph from the thrust indicator and left the building. A hot breeze enveloped him; Indian summer had settled over the island during the last week in September, raising the temperature well past twenty-eight degrees centigrade. The wind blew from the land and seemed starved of oxygen. The mid-afternoon sun glaring from the concrete produced an insistent headache as he trudged to his motorcar, which was parked beyond the safety barriers.
Bethwig drove slowly along the road, squinting at the glare from the crushed oyster-shell paving. The interior of the Lancia was blazing; he was tempted to put the top down but was even too tired for that. The flat, sandy, pine-covered island with its modernistic buildings reminded him of a Florida travelogue his father had taken him to see when he was much younger. Under the white sun Peenemunde seemed to have much the same ambiance as that bit of Florida somewhere near a place called Pensacola.
He had resolved to take the rest of the day off to go sailing in the little catboat he kept at Trassenheide. It had been months since he had had a holiday, and he was pale and sickly looking while the rest of the staff had grown sun-bronzed over the summer. There had been little enough project work, God only knew. Priorities evaporated as quickly as they were set. Speer had been a great disappointment. Not only had he failed to persuade Hitler of the promise of their work and the dire need to avoid delay, but he seemed to have lost interest himself.