Page 42 of V2

AS FAR AS GRAF WAS concerned, the first missile of the day had gone off without a hitch. A minute after it had disappeared into the clouds, the crew had emerged from their slit trench and started rolling up the electrical cables. The firing control vehicle had lumbered out of its burrow and reversed up to the launch table. Afterwards, when he looked back on it, he would concede that perhaps there hadn’t been quite the sense of urgency there should have been. But it was so long since the men had seen an enemy aircraft – Jabos they called them, from Jagdbomber: fighter-bomber – that a certain laxity was understandable.

A sergeant leaned out of the half-track’s window. ‘Do you want a lift?’

‘Thanks, but I’ve got to check on Schenk’s platoon.’

Like a doctor making house calls, Graf moved on from one rocket to another. About five hundred metres to the west of the first launch site, a second V2 was standing on its platform, ready to take off. Yet again there had been a fault in the transformer, and the launch had been delayed for two hours while a replacement was fitted. Sergeant Schenk, the veteran of the Eastern Front who had left his frostbitten ears behind in a field hospital near Leningrad, was standing at the base of the missile. The control compartments were shut. Condensed air was venting from close to the liquid oxygen tank. She was ready to go.

Schenk said, ‘Do you want to stay and watch?’

‘I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you. I need to get back to the base.’

‘No problem. Your signature’s enough.’ He held out his clipboard for Graf to confirm that the repair had been carried out. ‘I hear they’re burying Lieutenant Stock and the others tomorrow morning. Should be quite an occasion.’

Graf wondered if the remark was meant to convey reproach, but he could see no evidence of it in the sergeant’s battered face. ‘So I understand.’ He signed the chit and handed back the clipboard.

‘That’s war, isn’t it? Some of these kids are so wet, they still have their mothers’ milk on their lips.’

‘Well, nobody knows this war better than you, Sergeant.’ He was keen to avoid one of Schenk’s horror stories about fighting the Russians. ‘I’ll see you around.’

‘That you will.’

He set off down the road.

The morning was quiet, cold, grey. He was on the same stretch of road that he had walked with Biwack on Saturday morning, running east to west across Scheveningen Wood, with its view down to the lake. No one was about. He was glad of the solitude. He slowed his pace so he could enjoy it longer. From behind him came the roar of a rocket motor igniting. He stopped and turned to look. A second later, Schenk’s missile shot clear of the trees. ‘Go on, tilt, you bastard,’ he muttered, and as if on cue, the V2’s trajectory flattened just before it vanished into the ceiling of cloud. Good. There would be no more launches for an hour or two. He noticed a park bench overlooking the lake and decided to take a rest.

He still had a hangover from the previous night. A combination of curaçao and cognac and the memory of his conversation with the girl in the brothel weighed heavily upon him. Had he really told her all that stuff about the rate of misfires and the shortage of liquid oxygen? He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. I must be going crazy. He promised himself he would keep away from the brothel. But her image kept returning. Seidel had said, as they were driving away, ‘She was a funny, skinny little thing. What made you choose her?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she reminded me of someone I used to know.’

The explanation seemed to satisfy the lieutenant’s curiosity. ‘Fair enough. Each to his own. I always ask for Marta exactly because she doesn’t remind me of anyone.’

Graf lit a cigarette and stretched out his legs, his arm resting along the back of the bench. Because the ground fell away slightly towards the lake, he had a good view. There was something melancholy about a lake in winter that suited his mood. He had disposed of the fragments of the burned-out rocket motor that morning, dropping them at intervals in the woods. He supposed he had made himself Femke’s accomplice. Once again he toyed with the idea of trying to rescue her, driving her back to her home town. But they were bound to be stopped. Perhaps there was someone in the resistance who could hide her in The Hague. He could drive that short distance, surely? That was feasible. Maybe he would go back after all, and suggest it.

He was still turning the idea over in his mind when the wail of the air raid siren carried from the direction of the town.

It was the first time he had heard the warning for weeks. His immediate thought, just as it had been at Peenemünde, was that it was most likely to be a drill. He was only about three hundred metres short of the tented base of the technical troop. But instead of running up the road to take cover in its air raid trenches, he stayed on the bench and scanned the sky. Judging by the way the V2s had disappeared that morning, almost as soon as they began to tilt, he reckoned the cloud cover must be high, maybe as much as 3,000 metres – dangerously high, now he came to think about it. Suddenly, against the grey, he saw tiny smudges of black erupting, like puffs of squid ink, followed by the distant pom-pom-pom of the anti-aircraft batteries opening up from their positions in Oostduinen.

That brought him to his feet.

The tactics of a Spitfire formation on a bombing run were to approach from a height of around 8,000 feet, identify the target, roll onto their backs and dive in line very steeply, at an angle of 75 degrees, to an altitude of 3,000 feet; release their bombs from an almost vertical position, the leader first; and then pull back hard on their joysticks and climb away at full throttle. This was the manoeuvre that 602 Squadron had been practising above the fens of East Anglia over the past few days, and this was the spectacle Graf witnessed that November morning: four dots dropping out of the clouds to the north, in perfect file, swelling rapidly in size and noise, the whining note of their dives rising to a crescendo, heading straight towards him. The precision of it was so extraordinary – the loud piston-crack of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engines so unlike anything he had ever heard – that the engineer in him remained riveted to the spot, even as he saw the bombs detach from beneath the warplanes’ wings. Only when he heard the whistle of their descent did he realise the danger.

He threw himself full-length, pressed his face into the wet grass and covered his head with his hands just as the boom of the explosions started rolling across the lake. Each detonation vibrated through his stomach. He felt horribly exposed with his back presented to the sky. He imagined the pattern of the bombs creeping closer. He counted eight in all. When the last of the reverberations died away, he lay for another minute listening to the drone of the Spitfires’ engines dwindling in the distance, pursued by the rattle of heavy-calibre machine-gun fire.

He picked himself up. A shroud of black smoke was rising above the woods on the opposite side of the lake. Some of the thin pines close to the shore were on fire from top to bottom, like burning brands.

Was it really over? At Peenemünde the bombing had gone on for the best part of an hour, wave after wave of it. He squinted at the sky, but there was nothing to see except a few dirty wisps of brown smoke, the residue of exploded shells, already fading.

He set off up the road. As he rounded the curve, several dozen men in grey overalls began emerging from the side lane that led to the technical troop’s tents. They crossed the street and gathered to stare across the lake. A Kübelwagen appeared behind them, sounding its horn to clear a path. Colonel Huber climbed out of the front seat, followed by Lieutenant Klein from the driver’s side. Biwack jumped out of the back seat. Obersturmbannführer Drexler emerged after him, twisting his body to lever himself through the narrow gap. Huber lifted a pair of binoculars and scanned the fire. Graf was debating whether or not to join them when Drexler noticed him and beckoned him over.

‘Dr Graf – are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. Was anyone hurt?’

‘That is what we are trying to determine.’

Huber was still peering through his binoculars. ‘Half a kilometre closer and they would have wiped us out.’ He turned to Klein. ‘Do we have any stores in that area?’

Klein said, ‘Not that I recall, Colonel.’