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A black Mercedes staff car hummed in the driveway, the back door open. It was an expensive vehicle with a convertible roof, Corinthian leather upholstery and a license plate that read SS-3 in bold black letters. In the back seat was Reichsprotektor Heydrich. Henrik could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
“Good morning, Lieutenant Kessler,” Heydrich said as Henrik entered the black Mercedes. “I hope all is going well at the Institute.”
“Yes, obergruppenfuhrer.” Henrik steeled himself for the subtle interrogation that must surely follow. He may not have made friends at the Institute but he shared their distrust of Heydrich. Nevertheless, he was forced to ask himself: where did his loyalties fall? Heydrich was his direct superior now. Surely he must report his progress. “Things are going well,” he said vaguely.
“Good, good.” Heydrich handed Kessler a black pillowcase. “Put this on. The location of the weapons testing facility is a state secret known only to a handful of officers in the Third Reich.”
Henrik looked at the pillowcase. “We will not be going to the Institute then?” he asked stupidly.
“No, not today.” He looked at the pillowcase. “Hurry, now. We have a long drive ahead of us.”
Henrik wondered if he’d dodged a bullet merely to step on a mine. He put the pillowcase over his head and nearly choked. It smelled grotesquely of mothballs.
“That’s the way. Comfortable? Then we may go. Driver!”
It was a long, uncomfortable drive to the secret weapons facility, especially with the rancid pillowcase over his head. As part of his training under Admiral Canaris, Henrik had learned to focus his abilities to recall and identify sounds, physical sensations and even directional changes with alarming accuracy. He could detect a temperature drop in the air of less than one degree, decode a ten-tone chord on the piano by ear, read a thousand page textbook in a few minutes with perfect retention.
According to Canaris, these were abilities well within the reach of ordinary men, but very few possessed the self-discipline to develop them. Henrik, on the other hand, was born with them. In his mind’s eye, he saw the strange coded paper he’d found in the Chancellery Archive, and as the staff car arrived at its final destination, Henrik knew exactly where he was—a place marked simply as P.
“Okay, Herr Kessler. We’re here,” Heydrich said with a yawn just before his voice was drowned out by the loud roar of an engine. He pulled the pillowcase off of Henrik’s head. “I’m starving, and I simply must use the lavatory,” he continued. Another engine roared. “I hate coming here. Always so noisy, and the smell.” He pinched his nose comically. “It’s never good to stay outside too long. You never know when something is going to blow up. Come on. Let’s go.”
Henrik followed Heydrich out of the car and into a massive concrete bunker nearly four stories high. The compound was built like a prison, with an electrified, barbed-wire fence all around and a heavily armed front gate. There were guards everywhere with MP40 machine guns, but they looked edgy and nervous and Henrik imagined they, too, would prefer to be inside the bunker.
“Excuse me, obergruppenfuhrer, but what is this place?”
“Welcome to Peenemunde,” he said dramatically, “home of the Fuhrer’s secret vengeance weapons. They are still at the experimental stages, I’m afraid. Little more than firecrackers. But perhaps with your new information, they can finally be put to some use.”
Heydrich and Henrik turned to see a tall young man in a white lab coat enter from a front office. “Heil Hitler,” he said formally with a raised hand, and when the salute was returned by Heydrich, a warm smile overtook his expression. “Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich, what a pleasant surprise.”
“Professor von Braun, I’d like to introduce Lieutenant Henrik Kessler. He will be joining the Uranverein shortly.”
“The Uranverein.” Von Braun nodded his approval. The professor was an amiable fellow with handsome almost movie-star good looks and a warm air about him, not the kind of man that Henrik had imagined would be designing weapons of war for a living. “So, Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich, what brings you to my humble facility?”
“Your lack of progress,” Heydrich snapped. “The V-1 was promised—”
“And it is ready,” von Braun interrupted with a winning smile. “I have prepared a special demonstration for you. Would you like to see it?”
“Of course.”
“Right this way.” Von Braun marched off briskly in the direction of the tower elevator and Heydrich and Henrik followed mutely behind. Secretly Henrik was impressed with the way the professor had handled the obergruppenfuhrer. Heydrich was a dangerous man, a rising star in the Third Reich and the wielder of unspeakable power. And yet, von Braun had silenced him with just a few, polite words, at least for the moment.
“For your sake, professor, I hope this demonstration goes better than the last one,” Heydrich commented sourly as he stepped into the stainless steel elevator. Von Braun just laughed as if it had been a joke, which Henrik was fairly certain it was not.
“The A-4 rocket is an extremely sophisticated piece of machinery. We have had several successful test flights since then. But that is not what you came here to see.” The elevator doors opened and von Braun stepped out into a large observation room. He conferred briefly with several technicians dressed in similar white lab coats and then turned his attention back to Heydrich. “If you’d like to come this way, I’ll show you the fully operational Fieseler Fi-103, or as you like to call it, the V-1.”
Following Heydrich’s lead, Henrik stepped forward and looked out the thick, plate-glass observation window. Below was a ramp like a ski jump, maybe 400 yards long, with a rail track built onto it. At the start of the ramp there was a small, oddly shaped airplane with a jet engine piggy-backed on top of it.
“The V-1 carries a quarter-ton payload and can reach speeds in excess of 500 miles per hour. It uses diesel fuel and is remarkably cheap to mass produce, being made almost entirely of steel and plywood.”
“Where’s the cockpit?” Henrik asked.
“There’s no cockpit, lieutenant. This is a robot plane. It flies entirely by our remote guidance system.”
“And how does it land? Surely not on those rails.”
“Land?” Von Braun laughed. “It does not land. It explodes. It is a bomb.”
Before Henrik could ask another question, fire belched loudly from the jet of the V-1 in rhythmic pulses. The plane stumbled forwards a few yards and stopped. Henrik feared that something had gone wrong, but then the catapult mechanism in the ramp engaged and the V-1 took off like a bullet from a gun.
In moments, the robot plane had accelerated to full speed. Within a few minutes, it had disappeared over the horizon, although its loud, pulsing engines could still be heard at a great distance. Henrik had never seen an airplane, not even his Mustang X-50, fly that fast. He felt a sudden swell of German pride.
“Congratulations, professor. It didn’t blow up on the launch pad this time. But what is its range?”
“Well,” von Braun backpedaled, “we’re still working on that problem. There are many factors which—”
“Can you reach London?”
“Not from here, but possibly from the north of France.”
“Possibly?”
“Yes.” Von Braun nodded as if trying to convince himself. “From Calais or Dunkirk, I’m almost certain we could reach London, or the English coast at the very least.”
“And the V-2 rocket?”
“Oh, most certainly, as soon as we have ironed out the logistics of the guidance system, of course.”
Heydrich seemed unimpressed. “I want both vengeance weapons in mass production by the end of this year. Use the dissident camps. Requisition as many workers as you need. The Fuhrer has given this project top priority.”
Henrik’s ears burned. So they were using the prisoner camps to build von Br
aun’s vengeance weapons. Perhaps the Jacobs family would be taken to one of these camps. They were educated. They could read schematics and use specialized tools and machinery. It was a remote hope, but at least it was hope.
“Obergruppenfuhrer, might I be allowed to see the V-1 production facility?” Henrik asked shyly.
“Why would you want to see a factory? Dirty, disgusting places.” Heydrich looked at Henrik with a puzzled expression on his long, sallow face.
Henrik thought quickly. “I have never seen a weapons production facility. It might give me some insight into future design limitations for a uranium fission device.”
“But these are only prototypes,” von Braun protested. “Large scale production was to be moved to Mittelwerk once the tunnels were completed. Obergruppenfuhrer, this is highly irregular.”
Heydrich smiled at Henrik. “All in good time, Herr Kessler. All in good time.” He turned back to von Braun. “Of course, professor. We will visit the Mittelwerk factory when it has begun operation.”
The professor regained some of his composure. “Thank you for your interest in this project, obergruppenfuhrer. We will redouble our efforts.”
“Of course you will. Your life depends upon it.”
Von Braun led them out of the bunker with the same enthusiasm with which he had led them in, but Henrik could sense a change in his demeanor. He was a man under pressure. He faced a deadline for his works of wizardry, and dire consequences if this deadline was not met. What any of this had to do with the uranium bomb, Henrik could not imagine.
Nevertheless he was fascinated by von Braun and his experiments. He couldn’t help but wonder to what uses they could have been put in peacetime. But then, in peacetime, no one would ever put up the money to have such things built. It was a paradox of war that it often produced the greatest progress for mankind and the greatest suffering at the same time.
When they reached the staff car, a large black and white object that looked very much like a giant bomb was just being erected on a concrete pad in the distance. It stood about 30 feet high, perfectly streamlined and tapered smoothly to a lance-like point at the top. Around the base were four square-shaped stabilizer fins, similarly painted with alternating patterns of black and white.
Was this Hitler’s secret weapon—a giant bomb? At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese sunk the Arizona with a 1000-pound bomb, but this was ten times the size. How could they deliver such a weapon? Germany didn’t have bombers that were big enough. Nobody had bombers that were big enough.
“We better get out of here before they fire that thing,” Heydrich said inexplicably, looking up at the black and white bomb with some trepidation.
“What is it?” Henrik asked.
“Von Braun’s pet project—the A-4, or as it has been re-designated by Reich Command, the V-2 rocket. I think he plans to go to the moon in it.”
“So that’s the V-2. It’s so big.” Henrik looked on with wonder. “And it flies without a pilot?”
“Oh, yes. It flies. At speeds in excess of 3000 miles per hour, it is impossible to shoot down. But most of the time it just blows up on the launch pad.” Heydrich waited for the driver to open his door.
“Obergruppenfuhrer, I hope you will not misunderstand me. I have enjoyed our visit, but there is apparently no atomic research being done here. Why did you bring me here?”
“What good is a bomb if we cannot deliver it?” Heydrich asked simply. “As much as General Goering likes to blow his own horn, we have no long range bombers and three years of war have greatly depleted the Luftwaffe’s resources. But if von Braun’s V-2 can deliver your uranium device—why, such a weapon would be invincible. London, Moscow, even Washington would be wiped off the face of the earth in the blink of an eye. Germany would rule the world with an iron fist.”
Heydrich’s eyes seemed to light up with the prospect. But then he looked at the A-4 rising in the distance and hurried into the back seat. “Come on, Henrik. Before that thing kills us all.”