After the last of the support vehicles had disappeared around the corner, the two men resumed their walk. Biwack said, ‘You’re not worried about enemy bombers?’
‘Of course, night and day. Luckily they haven’t found us yet.’ Graf scanned the sky. According to the Wehrmacht’s meteorologists, there was a weather front passing over northern Europe that weekend. The clouds were grey, heavy, oozing rain. The RAF would not be flying in this.
Further inside the treeline, they were halted by a checkpoint. A barrier lay across the road, a sentry post beside it. Graf glanced into the woods. A dog handler with a big Alsatian on a leash was moving through the dripping vegetation. The dog cocked its leg and stared at him. One of the SS guards shouldered his machine gun and held out his hand.
No matter how many times Graf attended a launch, it seemed to amuse the sentries to act as if they had never seen him before. He reached into his inside pocket for his wallet, opened it and pulled out his identity card. A small photograph slipped out with it and fluttered across the road. Before he could move, Biwack had stooped to retrieve it. He glanced at it and smiled. ‘Is this your wife?’
‘No.’ Graf didn’t like seeing it in the SS man’s hands. ‘She was my girlfriend.’
‘Was?’ Biwack put on the professionally sympathetic face of an undertaker. ‘I’m sorry.’ He handed it back. Carefully Graf returned it to his wallet. He could tell Biwack was expecting a fuller explanation, but he did not want to provide one. The barrier lifted.
The road with its ornamental street lamps stretched ahead, crowded on either side by trees, once a place for a stroll or a bicycle ride, now shrouded overhead by camouflage netting. At first it looked empty. But as they penetrated deeper, it became apparent that along the tracks running off to right and left, the woods concealed the main business of the regiment – tents for storage, tents for testing, scores of vehicles, a dozen missiles wrapped in tarpaulins and hidden beneath the trees. Shouts and the throb of generators and of engines revving carried on the damp air. Biwack had stopped asking questions and was striding ahead in his eagerness. The land to their left fell away. Through the branches a lake glinted, dull as pewter, with an island and an ornamental boathouse. As they rounded the sweep of a bend, Graf raised his hand to signal they should stop.
Two hundred metres further on, in the centre of the lane, hard to distinguish at first because of its ragged green-and-brown camouflage, a V2 stood erect on its launch table, solitary apart from a steel mast to which it was attached by an electrical cable. Nothing moved around it. A thin stream of vapour vented silently from above the liquid oxygen tank, condensing in the misty air like breath. It was as if they had come upon some huge and magnificent animal in the wild.
Biwack instinctively dropped his voice and said quietly, ‘Can’t we go closer?’
‘This is as far as it’s safe.’ Graf pointed. ‘Do you see the support vehicles have withdrawn? That means the firing crew are already in their trenches.’ From his raincoat pocket he pulled out his ear defenders. ‘You should wear these.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll be all right.’
Biwack waved them away. ‘Then so shall I.’
A klaxon sounded. A startled game bird – it must be a real survivor, Graf thought, as the soldiers liked to shoot them to supplement their rations – struggled out of the undergrowth and took clumsy flight. Its hoarse panicked cry as it flapped noisily down the road echoed the note of the klaxon.
Graf said, ‘She weighs four tons empty, twelve and a half fuelled. On ignition, the fuel is gravity-fed. That yields eight tons of thrust – still lighter than the rocket.’
A voice carried over a loudspeaker: ‘Ten … nine … eight …’
Sparks, vivid as fireflies in the gloom, had begun cascading from the rocket’s base. Suddenly they coalesced into a jet of bright orange flame. Leaves, branches, debris, dirt whipped into the air and flew across the clearing. Graf turned and shouted at Biwack, ‘Now the turbo pump kicks in, thrust goes to twenty-five—’
‘… three … two … one!’
His last few words were lost in a sharp-edged cracking roar. He clamped his hands to his ears. The umbilical cable fell away. A mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen, forced by the turbo pump into the combustion chamber and burned at a rate of a ton every seven seconds, produced – so they claimed at Peenemünde – the loudest sound ever made by man on earth. His whole body seemed to tremble with the vibrations. Hot air buffeted his face. The surrounding trees were brilliant in the glare.
Like a sprinter poised on her starting block a split second after the pistol was fired, the V2 at first appeared stalled, then abruptly she shot straight upwards, riding a fifteen-metre jet of fire. A thunderous boom rolled from the sky across the wood. Graf craned his neck to follow her, counting in his head, praying she would not explode. One second … two seconds … three seconds … At exactly four seconds into the flight, a time switch was activated in one of the control compartments and the V2, already two thousand metres high, began to tilt towards an angle of forty-seven degrees. He always regretted the necessity for that manoeuvre. In his dreams, she rose vertically towards the stars. He had a last glimpse of her red exhaust before she vanished into the low cloud towards London.
He let his hands drop. The wood was quiet again. The only residue of the V2 was a distant drone, and very soon even that stopped. Then there was only birdsong and the patter of rain on the trees. The firing platoon had started to emerge from their trenches and were walking towards the firing table. Two men wearing asbestos suits moved stiffly like deep-sea divers.
Slowly Biwack took his hands from his ears. His face was flushed, his eyes unnaturally bright. For the first time that morning, the National Socialist Leadership Officer seemed incapable of speech.
2
SIXTY-FIVE SECONDS AFTER TAKE-OFF, AT an altitude of twenty-three miles and a velocity of 2,500 miles per hour, an on-board accelerometer simultaneously cut off the fuel supply to the V2’s engine and activated a switch that armed the warhead fuse. The unpowered rocket was now ballistic, following the same parabolic curve as a stone flung from a catapult. Its speed was still increasing. Its course was set on a compass bearing of 260 degrees west-south-west. Its aiming point was Charing Cross station, the notional dead centre of London; hitting anything within a five-mile radius of that would be considered on target.
At roughly the same moment, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Kay Caton-Walsh – her first name was Angelica, but everyone called her Kay, after Caton – emerged from the bathroom of a flat in Warwick Court, a quiet narrow street just off Chancery Lane in Holborn, about a mile from Charing Cross. She was wrapped in the short pink towel she had brought with her from the country and was carrying a sponge bag containing soap, toothbrush, toothpaste and her favourite perfume, Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, which she had dabbed generously just beneath her ears and on the insides of her wrists.
She savoured the feel of the carpet beneath her bare feet – she couldn’t remember the last time she had known that small luxury – and walked down the passage into the bedroom. A moustachioed man smoking a cigarette watched her from the bed through half-closed eyes. She put the sponge bag in her valise and let the towel drop.