While the duty clerk went off to fetch the file, she rested her elbows on the counter and leaned forward. She closed her eyes. She was starting to feel faint again. People passed by in the corridor behind her. A telephone rang briefly somewhere. A man sneezed twice. The sounds reached her oddly muffled, as if she were underwater. Behind her, a woman’s voice said softly but precisely, ‘Kay, dear, are you all right?’
She took a breath, forced her mouth into a smile and turned to confront the thin and serious face of Dorothy Garrod – so slight a woman, barely more than five feet tall, it had proved impossible to find a uniform that did not look too large on her. She was in her early fifties, much older than the rest of them. Before the war, she had been Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. Now her academic discipline was the photographic analysis of bomb-damaged German cities, to which she applied the same painstaking scholarship she had once devoted to the ruined settlements of the Palaeolithic era. Bomber Command might insist a target had been destroyed; she knew otherwise, and stood her ground. Air Marshal Harris was said to loathe her.
‘A slight bump on the head, Dorothy, otherwise fine.’ It was Professor Garrod, her supervisor at Newnham, who had recommended Kay for the Central Interpretation Unit in the first place. She still found it hard to call her by her Christian name.
‘You’re very pale. Are you sure you’re not overdoing it?’
‘I’m perfectly well, honestly.’
The clerk returned with her file. She signed for it, clutched it to her chest, smiled a quick goodbye and escaped from the registry.
She slipped into her usual place at a desk beside the window. The rest of her section were too absorbed to notice her arrival. She took off her cap, switched on her lamp and set out her equipment – a stereoscope viewer, a magnifier, mathematical tables, a slide rule – then opened the file.
The black-and-white photographs, flecked with wisps of cloud, showed a clear image of the long, straight, flat coast, the wide beach, the streets and buildings of The Hague and its suburbs, including Scheveningen to the north, and great sweeps of woodland interspersed with dunes and lakes. That the V2s were being launched from here was certain: it was the only German toehold left in Europe that was close enough to strike London, two hundred miles away. Patrolling Spitfire pilots had occasionally observed the rockets streaking through the sky above them. But where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.
Kay did not expect to solve it. They had been searching the area for weeks. But one never knew. Babs Babington-Smith had been asked if she could locate an object at Peenemünde that might be the Germans’ prototype jet fighter, the Messerschmitt-262. She had spent weeks going back over the old coverage with a jeweller’s Leitz magnifying glass until she discovered at the side of the airfield a cruciform less than a millimetre wide, which equated to a wingspan of twenty feet. Kay remembered the exact moment of discovery, Babs’s quiet excitement: ‘I say, Kay, come and take a look at this.’
And even if she did find something – so what? The launchers were mobile. They would almost certainly have been moved by now. But it was preferable to doing nothing; preferable to going back to the barracks and listening to Shirley Locke blowing her nose; preferable to lying on her bed and remembering that awful fraction of a second before the rocket hit, and afterwards Mike strapped to the stretcher saying Better not.
She laid two of the photographs side by side. One had been taken fractionally after the other, creating a sixty per cent overlap; when she placed her stereoscope on its folding stand above them, the two images magically fused to give her a three-dimensional image. Nevertheless, all she could see was a canopy of monochrome trees so tightly packed and tiny it was impossible to distinguish one from another. But that did not deter her. She would go on all night if she had to, as the sun sank over the Thames and the lights came on in the township of huts beyond the window, searching for what lay hidden in the forest.
5
IN SCHEVENINGEN, BY CANDLELIGHT, IN a corner of the mirrored dining room of the Hotel Schmitt – a large shabby-grand establishment that served as staff headquarters and officers’ mess – Colonel Huber was hosting a small dinner to welcome Biwack to the regiment.
The guest of honour was seated to his right. To his left, also in the midnight-black uniform of the SS, was Obersturmbannführer Karlheinz Drexler, chief of security. He was equivalent in rank to Huber – bespectacled, balding, plump: an unlikely representative of the Master Race, Graf always thought. Facing them were the three lieutenants in command of the firing battalions: Seidel, the chess-playing Berliner; Klein, a taciturn and skilful engineer who had risen through the ranks; and Stock, who had a reputation for being highly strung and who relaxed in the evenings by reading westerns. At the end of the table sat Graf.
A couple of white-gloved orderlies served the food on the hotel’s monogrammed pre-war china: a watery cabbage soup and the final, obscure remains of an ancient boar that had been shot in the forest by the SS guards the previous week. There was bread but no potatoes: the bulk of Germany’s potato crop that year had been requisitioned to be distilled into alcohol for use as rocket fuel. Like pampered children, the V2s took food from the adults’ plates.
Although Huber had produced two bottles of schnapps to celebrate the occasion and had told a couple of his risqué jokes, the atmosphere remained subdued.
The intimate patch of candlelight flickering in the tall mirrors emphasised the emptiness of the chilly dining room and the darkness of the surrounding tables.
Graf was only half listening to the conversations going on around him. Seidel was telling the other battalion commanders about the overheated transformer. Drexler was talking to Biwack about some action on the Eastern Front (‘We had to burn down the village …’). What he really wanted to do was get drunk. He had finished his schnapps and was just eyeing the nearest bottle and wondering if it would be impolite to reach for it when Huber tapped his glass with his knife and stood.
‘Gentlemen, as you know, a consignment of rockets is due to arrive at midnight, and therefore we need to finish early so that we can all get some rest in preparation. But before we disperse for the evening, I would like to welcome Sturmscharführer Biwack to the regiment. In the heat of battle, it’s all too easy to forget the reason why we’re fighting. The purpose of the National Socialist Leadership Officer in the German army is to remind us of our cause. I want you to make sure he has the chance to talk to all your men before the week is out.’ He bowed slightly to Biwack. ‘We are pleased to have you with us, Sturmscharführer.’ Biwack smiled up at him and nodded. ‘Today we launched six missiles,’ continued Huber. ‘An excellent tally! But let us make sure tomorrow is even better. I would like to set us a new objective.’ He glanced around the table. ‘Let us show our new comrade what we can do. Tomorrow we shall launch twelve!’
Twelve! Graf’s eyes widened. He was conscious of a brief hesitation, then Drexler started pounding his fist on the table in approval. The artillerymen followed the SS man’s lead without much enthusiasm.
‘Good,’ beamed Huber. He lifted his glass. ‘Then I propose a toast.’ As they all stood, Graf was able to take the opportunity to help himself to more schnapps. ‘To victory!’