Page 56 of V2

‘I might.’

‘Where did you go? Not to your old lady’s house, I assume.’

‘No, we went back to his apartment.’

‘My God!’ Kay shook her head and laughed.

‘I’m a tart, darling, what can I say?’ Barbara waved her cigarette dismissively. ‘And you? Tell me he made a pass, at least.’

‘He was a perfect gentleman.’

Barbara gave a knowing look. ‘Ah, so he tried to kiss you.’ Kay held her gaze and sipped her tea. ‘God, you’re so discreet! Old Sitwell would be proud of you.’

‘Now you’re just being rude.’ She was keen to change the subject. She looked at her watch. ‘Speaking of Sitwell, we ought to get over there.’

She took her dirty crockery to the table and scraped off the leftovers. When she came back, Barbara was on her feet, talking to Sandy and Bill. ‘We were just arranging to have a drink tonight at six. What do you think?’

‘Fine.’ Kay forced a smile. And you’ll go off with Sandy, she thought, and I will be stuck with Bill.

The four of them once again walked across the street to the bank and showed their identity cards. It was becoming a routine. The men went off to the radar vans with a cheerful ‘Good luck, girls’, and the women descended to the vault. The atmosphere was stale with cigarette smoke and the odour of too many bodies pressed into too small a space with no ventilation. The WAAF sergeants lolled, bored, behind their desks. Joan and Joyce had the pasty-faced, red-eyed look that always came with the graveyard shift. Kay recognised the symptoms. It was the same at Medmenham.

‘Anything happened?’ She shrugged off her coat.

‘No,’ said Joan, ‘not a peep all night.’ Her normally cheerful expression was crushed and sulky. ‘I expect they’re saving it all for you.’

Flight Officer Sitwell came down the stairs behind them, exuding a strong scent of carbolic soap, followed by the morning shift of WAAF sergeants. She strode to the front of the room and dropped a heavy file on the table. She cleaned the blackboard until it gleamed.

‘So, ladies: a new day, a new start.’

Kay took her seat, sharpened her pencil, blew away the shavings and made a determined effort to put Arnaud out of her mind.

17

GRUPPENFÜHRER KAMMLER WAS AT THAT moment arriving in Scheveningen.

He had left Hellendoorn at four in the morning, travelling the entire distance of some 180 kilometres under cover of darkness to avoid the daylight Allied air patrols. He was never still. He seldom seemed to eat or sleep. ‘The Dust Cloud’, his staff called him. These days he spent half of his life on the road, sitting in the front passenger seat of his armoured Mercedes with his personalised machine gun stowed in the footwell, restlessly driving between the five V2 regiments – four Wehrmacht and one SS – that made up his command. Division zV, he had insisted on calling it. He felt it had a certain ring – zV. Zur Vergeltung. For Vengeance.

Kammler the builder – the man in charge of revenge!

Graf watched his big car swerve at speed around the corner and pull up with a gangsterish screech of rubber outside the Hotel Schmitt, saw him throw open the door and spring out bare-headed onto the pavement, followed from the rear seats by his two staff officers. Slam, slam, slam – the volley of closing doors ricocheted in the still morning. Kammler paused to pull on his cap and adjust it minutely – there was vanity in even his tiniest action, Graf noticed – then trotted smartly up the steps and into the headquarters. There was no sign of von Braun.

Graf turned up his collar and resumed his walk.

A weak dawn was breaking over the dilapidated guest houses, with their peeling wooden balconies and salt-streaked glassed-in verandas. And as the tide of darkness receded, it revealed the scars of the previous night. Some had had their front doors broken down. Damaged windows banged in the strong easterly wind. Broken glass lay in pools across the pavement. The men of the rocket battalions were going about their duties with their heads down, not talking much. Graf waited for a lorry to pass, then crossed the road towards the engine shed.

Inside, the three faulty V2s were being readied for their return on the next train to Nordhausen. It had not proved possible to repair them on site; each now required its own docket to explain its particular malfunction to the engineers in Germany. He moved from bay to bay like an automaton, studying the diagnostic reports, exchanging a few words with the technicians, signing off the reports. It was a relief to be able to focus his thoughts on the familiar dry details of fuel pump pressure and electrical resistance. His mind was numb. He had not quite finished when the door to the shed was rolled back by one of Huber’s staff officers.

‘Dr Graf, you are needed at headquarters straight away.’

‘I’m busy here.’

‘Gruppenführer Kammler wishes to speak with you.’

‘What on earth does he want with me?’

The officer bridled at his tone. ‘No doubt he will tell you that himself. It is an order. Come with me, please.’

Graf followed the lieutenant outside, back across the street towards the Hotel Schmitt. He had a premonition of something unpleasant, as was generally the case with Kammler. For more than a year he had watched him slowly take control of the rocket programme – studied him with a kind of resigned and detached horror, as a man who had been bitten by a venomous spider might observe his body succumbing to paralysis limb by limb. Kammler had not only built the factory at Nordhausen; he had also been given the task of constructing a new testing facility for the V2 on an SS proving ground in Poland – another thoughtful gift from Himmler following the bombing of Peenemünde that it had proved impossible to refuse.