Page 20 of V2

‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll see. I’ll promise them such a weapon they won’t be able to resist it.’

On their return to Kummersdorf, von Braun had sat down with Papa Riedel and the head of weapons development, Colonel Dornberger, to start sketching out the most advanced ballistic missile that might be technologically feasible based upon what they had achieved so far. Graf had always got on well with Dornberger. He was a congenial artillery veteran of about forty, clever enough and ambitious, whose obsession was the Paris gun that had shelled the French capital in the Great War. Von Braun played him as skilfully as he played his cello – flattering him, sometimes deferring to him, always allowing the older man to feel he was in control. Between them they came up with the specifications for a workable weapon: one that could be transported intact on a railway wagon to wherever it was required. The need for mobility limited its size to less than fifteen metres. Even so, it would be capable of carrying a one-ton warhead of either high explosive or poison gas over a distance of 275 kilometres. To accomplish this, Riedel calculated, would require a motor capable of developing twenty-five tons of thrust – seventeen times more powerful than anything they had achieved before. This would be Aggregate-4.

One morning at the beginning of April, Dornberger and von Braun were driven to the Air Ministry in Berlin to present their plans to General Kesselring of the Luftwaffe. Graf watched them go, sitting together in the back of the Mercedes with their briefcases on their laps like a couple of salesmen. He didn’t know what was said, but by lunchtime, a Luftwaffe staff officer was in a fast car to Usedom, and by nightfall, the Air Ministry had rung Dornberger to say the deal was done: the Peenemünde site had been bought from the local council for three quarters of a million marks and the Luftwaffe would pay half the costs of construction.

The whole thing had an element of madness from the start. Indeed, there were a couple of times during his interrogation in Stettin when Graf had been tempted to throw up his hands and simply confess what he believed: that von Braun hadn’t created Peenemünde in order to build a weapon so much as created a weapon in order to build Peenemünde. The audacity of it – the risks of it – was dizzying.

It wasn’t until the third day that they finally asked him the question they had been leading up to all along.

Did you or did you not, on the evening of Sunday 17 October 1943, at a beach party in Zinnowitz, in the company of Professor von Braun, Dr Helmut Gröttrup and Dr Klaus Riedel, state that the war was lost, the rocket would not save Germany, and your aim all along had been to build a spaceship?

In the second or so that followed, even as his throat constricted and his heart seemed to hollow, his engineer’s brain tried to work through every possible option to find the safest reply. What had the others said? If this, then that; if that, then this …

Gentlemen, I don’t recall saying any such thing. I think there must be some mistake …

Listen to me, Rudi. This is the absolute truth. The road to the moon runs through Kummersdorf.

No, my dear Wernher, for all your genius, the road from Kummersdorf has not led us to the moon. It has led us precisely here.

He heard a noise behind him. His joints had stiffened in the cold. He stood and turned awkwardly. Someone was coming up the track through the forest. Torches flashed between the trees. A dog barked. First one SS guard appeared, his gun aimed from his shoulder, then another, and finally the dog handler with a big German shepherd straining at its leash. Graf raised his hands. A torch shone straight into his face, blinding him. He tried to shield his eyes.

One of the shadowy figures shouted, ‘Don’t move!’

‘I’m Dr Graf. I have authorisation.’ He flinched and turned his head away. ‘Can you get that thing out of my eyes?’

A second SS man said, ‘It’s the civilian from Peenemünde, Sturmmann. Don’t you recognise him?’

‘Yes, I know him. Papers!’

Wearily Graf reached into his inside pocket. ‘If you recognise me, why do you need my papers?’

In the distance, a klaxon sounded.

He handed over his pass. ‘That’s a launch. I ought to be there.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Just get on and check it, will you?’ He glanced into the trees as the guard went through the laborious process of shouldering his gun, transferring his flashlight to his other hand and directing it onto Graf’s identification. Sensing Graf’s impatience, he took his time.

‘I asked you a question, Doctor: what you are doing in a restricted area?’

The boom of the V2’s first-stage ignition rolled across the forest. Graf swivelled in the direction of the sound. The SS men followed suit. It was impossible to say how far away the launch site was. A glowing hemisphere appeared in the darkness, lighting the pointed tips of the firs so that they seemed to extend like a sea in moonlight. Above them, a column of fire ascended slowly. It reached a height of perhaps fifty metres, then stalled. For several seconds it hovered, pulsing red and blue, before appearing to drift sideways. Still vertical, it slowly subsided on a diagonal line and disappeared out of sight. The wood lit up with the brilliance of a summer’s day. Moments later came a roar as the fuel tanks exploded.

No one spoke, or made a sound – at least that was how Graf remembered it – and then he came out of his trance and pushed his way past the SS men, scrambled down the sandy track and started running through the trees.

He ran for a couple of minutes until he could see the fireball up ahead. Not the warhead, he prayed, not the warhead. Men were shouting. Figures were moving to and fro. He wanted to shout at them to keep back, but he was too far away. Behind him the SS guards were crashing through the undergrowth, almost on his heels. The dog was barking. One of them was blowing on a whistle – an action as pointless as it was irritating. He was just about to turn and tell him to shut up when the trees bent towards him and he ran head first into what felt like a wall of earth. It filled his mouth and eyes. The ground dropped away beneath his feet. He trod air. His arms flailed in panic. His back struck something hard.

When he opened his eyes again, the trees around him were on fire. Burning leaves and paper floated in the smoke. He crawled on his knees, then pulled himself up and staggered through the blasted trees towards the smouldering crater. Just before he reached it, the dog trotted past him, proudly carrying something in its mouth that only afterwards he realised was a hand.

8

IN THE GROUNDS OF DANESFIELD House, in the dormitory at the far end of the hooped metal Nissen hut, Sunday night turned into Monday morning to the accompaniment of nothing more noisy than a murmuring of snores. Of the four women, only Kay was awake – lying on her side, studying the luminous green markings of her travel clock with such concentration she convinced herself she could see the big hand edging forward with infinitesimal slowness.

Beside the softly ticking clock, on the chair that served as a nightstand, lay the papers that were to be her passport out of this place. The first affirmed that WAAF Section Officer A. V. Caton-Walsh of the Central Interpretation Unit, RAF Medmenham, had been temporarily reassigned to 33 Wing, 2nd Tactical Air Force, the transfer having been requested by Wing Commander C. R. Knowsley, approved by her commanding officer, Wing Commander L. P. Starr, and authorised by Air Commodore M. S. Templeton, DFC. Attached to this chit by a paper clip was a second document: a crudely typed and duplicated movement order directing her to report to RAF Northolt by 0900 hours the next day. The rows of dots left empty for name, rank and serial number had been filled in by a careless hand in an indecipherable scrawl of blue ink.

She wondered how much aggravation it had cost Mike to pull rank and do her this favour – quite a bit, to judge by the way Starr had marched past her while she was sitting in the lobby of the Air Ministry and driven off without offering her a lift back to Danesfield House. Wing Commander Knowsley, lost in thought, had also ignored her. The bushy-browed officer from Bomber Command had given her a knowing wink. Finally, when the flight lieutenant who served as Mike’s aide had descended the stairs half an hour later to hand over her orders – ‘The Air Commodore asked me to give you this’ – his manner had been one of cold distaste, like a footman sent down by his master to pay off a tart.

Word of this would spread, she thought. Starr would see to that. She wanted very much to leave before the others were awake, but she didn’t dare set the alarm in case she disturbed them. She rolled onto her back and dozed through the night, occasionally hearing the cry of a waterfowl on the Thames or the hooting of the owls in the big elms. When she checked the clock for what felt like the twentieth time and saw that it was nearly six, she finally decided to risk it. She eased herself out from beneath her blanket and struck a match. The rasp sounded to her as loud as a gunshot. She lit a candle.