Page 34 of V2

‘Where?’

‘This brothel.’

Seidel laughed. ‘My dear Graf, you surprise me every day! Are you serious?’

‘No, not really.’ He felt embarrassed. ‘Forget I said it.’

‘But now you’ve put the idea into my head.’ Seidel drained his glass. ‘Why not? Let’s at least get out of this morgue.’

Graf was conscious of the others watching as they walked towards the door.

Huber called after them. ‘Goodnight, gentlemen!’

They descended the staircase, past black-and-white photographs of pre-war holidays, and went out onto the deserted promenade. The breeze was stiff with the scent of brine and seaweed. A canopy was flapping somewhere. A steel cable clinked a hollow beat against a metal pole. The massive hulk of the Palace Hotel, with its towers and high domed roof, loomed like an ocean liner run aground. A defensive concrete wall topped with barbed wire screened the view of the beach.

Seidel’s Kübelwagen was parked alone on the empty forecourt. He switched on the shaded headlamps, started the engine and executed a sweeping loop over the wet asphalt. Graf put his hand out of the side and felt the spray.

Seidel said, ‘There must have been some women at Peenemünde?’

‘Naturally. Hundreds.’

‘And? What were they like? Young? Old?’

‘Young mostly. Secretaries. Assistants. Some mathematicians. The senior engineers were allowed to bring their wives and children.’

Seidel fell silent for a moment. ‘Are you married – do you mind if I ask?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘Yes. Why?’ He shot Graf a sideways look. ‘Do you think it matters if I go to a brothel?’

‘Not to me.’

Seidel laughed. ‘If there were hundreds of women, even you, Graf, must have found one, surely?’

‘I did.’

‘Go on.’

‘Her name was Karin. She died in an air raid.’

‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

Graf leaned out of the window and put his face into the breeze. In the month or more he had been in Holland, it was the first time he had mentioned her name.

The RAF’s attempt to destroy Peenemünde, code-named Operation Hydra, was mounted in near-perfect conditions under a cloudless full moon on the night of 17–18 August 1943. At 11 p.m., eight Mosquitoes dropped target flares and two dozen bombs over Berlin to trick the Germans into believing the capital was to be the main focus of the attack. The Luftwaffe scrambled 150 fighters to meet the threat. While they searched the empty skies above the city, and 89 flak batteries fired more than 11,000 rounds at the imaginary attackers, just after midnight, 200 kilometres to the north, 600 heavy bombers crossed the coast.

Peenemünde’s population that night was nearly twenty thousand: engineers, scientists and technicians with their families; mechanics, clerks, secretaries, typists, guards, cooks, teachers, construction workers and foreign slave labourers, mostly French and Russian. The evening of the raid, a Tuesday, had been hot and still. The slaves were locked in their wooden barrack huts behind electrified wire. The Germans strolled through the fragrant pine woods and sat on the sand. A game of volleyball was being played on the beach within sight of the rocket assembly building.

Graf swam out and lay on his back with his feet pointing towards the setting sun, buoyed by the salinity of the water. He had only to rotate his arms occasionally to float without effort. The surface was warm after the long summer, but he could sense the great chilly depths beneath him, could feel the pull of the current carrying him eastwards out to sea, the motion of the waves flexing his body to their shape. He surrendered to the drift for as long as he dared, then rolled over and swam hard against the current, back towards the shore, where Karin, her slender figure haloed in his memory by the sunset, waited with a towel.

He had met her in the spring. She was the new personal assistant to von Braun’s deputy, and Graf’s immediate superior, Dr Walter Thiel. Her duties covered everything from scheduling her irritable boss’s meetings to helping look after his two children. Everybody liked her; she was beautiful; she had a gift for spreading calm. When he asked her out and she accepted, he was amazed. After the war, she wanted to teach kindergarten. She was twenty-three. He had already decided he wanted to marry her, was intending to ask her – might have done so that night, in fact, if things had gone differently. But she hated it when he swam out so far and her anxiety had put her in a rare bad mood.

He emerged dripping and breathless. She handed him the towel, turned away with a frown and went back up the beach to pack away their picnic. He changed out of his trunks beneath the towel, wobbling first on one leg, then the other. A brief kiss on her warm cheek, a last taste of salt from the sea, and abruptly she was gone, walking in the direction of the old pre-war hotel where most of the single women lived.

Irritated, his good mood spoilt, Graf made his way back along the forest road in the humid twilight, through the security gate to the Experimental Works compound. His bachelor apartment, one of a dozen allotted to senior engineers, including von Braun, was on the second floor of Building 5, next to the main offices. He showered in cold water in an effort to cool off, draped his trunks on the bathroom windowsill to dry, and lay naked on his bed under a single sheet.

He had expected an enemy air raid sooner or later. Several times that summer he had looked up and seen a thin line of vapour, like the scratch of a fingernail, high in the cloudless cobalt blue. He suspected they were being photographed by the British. Even so, when the air raid siren woke him just after midnight, his first instinct was to stay in bed, listening out for the usual drone of the enemy formations as they streamed overhead down ‘Berlin Alley’ on their way to bomb the capital. He waited for the all-clear. Minutes passed. Then came the rapid thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft fire. He sprang out of bed and went to the window. The full moon was brilliant. In its quicksilver flood, the buildings cast sharp shadows. Beyond the workshops and laboratories, a spray of multicoloured flak was rising from the harbour battery like a strand of glass beads. Strange configurations of lights – red, green, yellow – seemed to hang in the sky like Christmas decorations. White flares descended slowly by parachute. Machine-gun fire rattled from the rooftops. It all seemed to be happening towards the south of the island. He watched for a while, then it occurred to him he ought to get to a shelter. He was still pulling on his shoes when a huge detonation blew out the window where he had been standing a moment before.