Vengeance 10 (53 page)

‘How are your men disposed in front?’ Memling demanded as he moved down the corridor towards the door, keeping well to one side.

‘Head-on attack by two men and one more on each flank. Grenades and machine pistols.’

That explained the explosions, then, Memling thought. He had not the slightest idea what was going on, and there was no time to find out. Already the volume of gunfire was slackening. He waved the two Germans to either side of the door; there wasn’t even time to ask if either had combat experience. Jan tried the door, and when it gave, a rictus of anger slashed across his face. He slung the machine pistol, twisted the screw covers from the grenades, and pulled their igniting cords.

‘Damned careless of them,’ Prager grunted as he threw the door open.

Memling stepped forward and lobbed the grenades with easy underhand throws, aiming to bounce them from the walls so that the blasts would fill the long room with shrapnel. He hesitated long enough to see them strike walls; a white face turned towards him, the mouth forming a warning scream; a man in a suit paused in the midst of cranking a field telephone. Then Memling slammed the door. Twin blasts vomited through the front of the building and bulged the iron-reinforced door from its frame. It took the three of them to wrench it open.

The room was a shambles. The cement-block wall had contained the explosion and turned the blast inward, leaving the walls and every piece of furniture gouged and splintered by shrapnel. There were five bloody, torn bodies, one of them barely recognisable as a woman’s. He had once seen an American Sherman tank in Sicily. A grenade had been dropped down the hatch, and the shrapnel had spun and ricocheted around the interior, so that the crew had looked as if they had been blasted over and over with buckshot. These bodies looked the same.

A groan came from a small room off to one side, and Memling kicked the shattered door wide, almost losing one of his too-big boots in the process. Walsch was slumped on the floor. Blood ran down one side of his face, and his arm dangled at a strange angle as he tried to get to his feet. A small Mauser pistol lay on the floor nearby. From behind, Prager was shouting through a smashed window that they had succeeded. The wind howled in sudden fury, and papers flurried.

Bethwig pushed past him into the room.

‘He’s mine,’ he said, swallowing hard to contain the bitter sickness. ‘He killed my father and . . .’ He could go no further. Walsch looked up and unexpectedly laughed in genuine mirth.

‘And the little whore. Please do not forget her. The Reichsführer gave her to my charge. So, you will kill me now,’ he choked. ‘You must kill me.’ Walsch slumped but recovered himself and stared up at Bethwig. ‘You see, I have a cancer in the lungs. I will die soon in any event. You will spare me the pain.’ He tried to laugh again but collapsed on the floor instead, coughing harshly.

Bethwig raised the pistol. ‘I don’t give a damn for your cancer, you sadistic bastard,’ he screamed.

Memling caught his arm. ‘Have you ever killed before?’ he demanded. ‘Shot a man to death in cold blood?’

Bethwig shook his head. ‘This isn’t a man, he’s ... he is an animal.’

‘Then let me do it. It’s not an easy thing to live with.’

Bethwig hesitated just as Sussmann staggered in. Walsch read the uncertainty in Bethwig’s eyes and tried to laugh at him. He knew.

‘It will live with you for ever,’ Memling warned.

Sussmann leaned against the door-frame to watch. Walsch started to speak, but Memling turned then and shot the Gestapo officer once, through the forehead.

‘One more can’t make my nightmares any worse,’ he muttered.

Bethwig parked the car on the northern boundary of the deserted POW camp. He and Jan Memling got out while Prager worked to bandage the surviving grenadier’s shattered arm. The corporal and the other grenadier had been killed, and Sussmann had received a shrapnel wound in the stomach. The pain and loss of blood were sending him into shock. He lay back in the front seat breathing heavily, his face pale.

The wind whipped tatters of snow at them once again, and Memling shivered in his ill-fitting uniform. They stood just below a small rise where the trees had been cleared, and talked for what seemed a very long time. Bethwig told him of the work they had done, passing lightly over the details in his haste to cover everything. He wanted this quiet, capable Englishman to understand what had brought them to this night; more, he wanted his help.

Memling nodded when he began to describe the V-10. ‘I know. I was here.’

Bethwig hugged his coat about himself. ‘It was rumoured you killed four SS soldiers.’

’How do you know about that?’

Bethwig laughed humourlessly. ‘Peenemunde abounds in rumours. They were confirmed when the Gestapo arrested Wernher von Braun, Ernst Mundt and Helmuth Gottrup.’

‘Arrested ... then ...’

‘No, all three were subsequently released. The SS wanted to hang them, but in those days we still had a few connections that meant something.’

He took Memling’s arm and urged him up the slight rise until they were standing on the crest. Below them lay the immense sprawl of the V-10 launch complex. The area seemed a fairyland of lights and broad avenues leading to the towering conical shape of the V-10.

‘Jesus,’ Memling breathed.

The rocket was immense. He had never imagined anything so huge in his life. It was as if he had stepped into another world, another time. Even at this distance it was staggering. A lorry moving past the rocket’s base snapped the scene into scale. The rocket was wider than the lorry was long. Technicians swarmed like ants over the three-stage rocket and its scaffolding. Against the moonlit sky the thrusting, brilliantly lighted shape glistened as if alive. Looking into the shallow valley formed by the surrounding hills, Memling knew he was witnessing for the first time in the history of the human race a scene that would be repeated endlessly into the future as man struck out from the tiny, cramped world of his birth in search of his ultimate destiny. That barely remembered French scientist had been right after all; they all, he and Franz Bethwig and Wernher von Braun and all the other scientists and technicians at Peenemunde shared a magnificent dream, which even the savagery of total war could not destroy.

‘The V-Ten.’ Bethwig leaned sideways to make himself heard over the wind, it was designed to bombard the eastern coast of the United States with atomic explosives.’

Memling turned to him, eyes growing wide, but Bethwig shook his head before he could ask the question.

‘Our atomic projects were cancelled long ago. But not the V-Ten. We have test-flown four of them. This is the fifth and final rocket.’

‘Then you are going to launch it?’ Memling found his voice at last.

‘Yes. Tonight. But not at the United States.’

‘Where?’ Memling asked the question even though he already knew the answer.

A sudden current of happiness shot through Bethwig; he could not explain it, but he laughed and clapped Memling on the back and pointed at the moon. ‘There, my English friend, to the moon, as we talked about all those years ago in Arnsberg, remember? Tonight, we shall do it.’

Memling watched the car recede until its tail-lights disappeared. He then hitched on the sling of his machine pistol and started off towards the northern end of the island. Prager scratched his head and, as if reaching a decision, strode after him. The Englishman grinned as he came up, but said nothing. Both men were busy with their own thoughts.

He had an idea of Prager’s mental struggle; he had been through it himself. It was conceivable, he had decided, that this rocket might have some military value, even though at this late date it could have no real effect on the course of the war. In any event, what Bethwig intended to do was far bigger, far more important to the human race, than any of its petty and - after tonight - outdated squabbles. He really had nothing to lose, Memling decided. His own chances of survival were slim in any event, and he might as well see that something came of this damned war. And besides, he admitted, he wouldn’t miss the launch of the first rocket to the moon for life itself. After a while the trees hid the launch site, but the glow remained in the sky as a beacon and they trudged on towards the petrol and fuel storage tanks.

No one turned to look at Bethwig as he entered the control room and stood for a moment watching the orderly chaos. This was the part he loved, these final hours when everything came together and a thousand men worked as one towards a single goal.

Tangles of cable ran across and along the aisles, taped to the floor here and bundled together with lengths of flex there. A huge ready board was mounted on the wall where it could be seen from every corner of the room. Bethwig scanned the coloured markers quickly; everything was proceeding on schedule. As he watched, a technician scurried across the metal platform to replace a yellow marker with a green diamond indicating that the return stage liquid oxygen tanks had been pressure-tested successfully.

A twelve-year-old boy skidded to a halt before him; the son of a test engineer, he was serving as a messenger. His face was flushed with exertion, and he could barely contain his excitement. ‘Please, Herr Doktor. There is a telephone call for you. From Brigadeführer Kammler. He has been waiting fifteen minutes.’

Bethwig followed the boy to the main console where Wernher von Braun scowled at him. Bethwig nodded and drew a finger across his throat. Von Braun’s scowl deepened, but he offered the receiver, one hand across the mouthpiece.

‘I told him you were on the launch stand, checking the second stage gyro assembly.’

‘Herr Brigadeführer Kammler? How nice to hear from you. Have you been held up? We expected you this afternoon.’ Bethwig made his voice drip.

‘Never mind that now.’ Kammler was shouting, his words almost lost in the roar of atmospherics. ‘What the hell is going on there? I am being prevented from reaching Peenemunde ...’ The next few sentences disappeared in the crash and pop of static.

‘I am sorry, Brigadeführer,’ Bethwig said into the mouthpiece. ‘The line is so bad I cannot understand you.’

‘ ... status there? Will you ...?’

Bethwig was able to guess at the question. ‘We will launch on time. All stations have reported in. The submarine is on station and everything appears ready at this time. Please do try and get here,’ he finished, and handed the phone to the boy.

‘If Brigadeführer Kammler comes back on the line so that you can understand him, son, tell him what’s happening. Otherwise, hang up.’

The boy’s eyes went wide as he accepted the phone; he stammered something, but Bethwig had already turned away, motioning von Braun to follow.

‘What the hell is going on?’ von Braun demanded, grabbing his arm as they reached the corridor. ‘Magnus telephoned an hour ago to say that Sussmann was arming some men to deal with a problem. What problem, damn it?’

‘The problem of Inspector Jacob Walsch. Do you remember an old friend of yours, Jan Memling?’

Wernher von Braun blinked in surprise. ‘Of course ... oh no, not again!’

Bethwig nodded. ‘Yes. He was sent to Peenemunde to persuade you and the staff to surrender to the British or Americans, rather than the Russians.’

‘But we’ve already decided,’ von Braun protested, and waved a hand as Bethwig started to point out that London could hardly know that. Then he blanched under the impact of Bethwig’s news. ‘My God, if he should be caught ...’

‘He was,’ Bethwig told him calmly. ‘With three German citizens, all members of the resistance. Early this morning.’ Quickly he described to von Braun what had taken place over the past eighteen hours. ‘Two hours ago it came to a head. My contact in the Gestapo reported that the three traitors had signed confessions, and been shot. That left only your English friend. If he confessed, which I was assured he would, you and I and a good many others would be dead by now.’

Von Braun slumped against the wall. ‘Where do we stand now?’ he asked finally. ‘You said if he confessed. If? What about Kammler? Surely he won’t ...’

‘Forget Kammler. He’s in enough trouble himself.’ He reviewed what Prager had told him of the SS’s own intramural squabbles ‘The Gestapo was our major enemy, primarily because Walsch hated us both. But it doesn’t matter any longer. Walsch is dead.’

Von Braun perked up at that. ‘How?’

‘Your English friend Memling shot him. Saved me from doing so, for which one of these days, I am sure, I will be grateful. I don’t know how, but Memling had a weapon when we arrived and had already killed four of the SS. If it had not been for him, we might not have made it.’

‘I don’t believe any of this.’ Von Braun shook his head, it sounds like a thriller story.’

‘Never mind that now. We are not out of the woods by any means. The SS will soon discover what happened in Trassenheide, and if they should find out who was responsible, we are all dead. But we could also have them about our ears anytime now if someone gets cold feet and decides to stop the launching or if Kammler screws up his courage and bulls his way through the roadblocks. Don’t forget that his orders about shooting us are still in effect.’

Von Braun pushed himself away from the wall and took a few steps down the hall, then spun and came back. ‘How in hell can we stop them? What about Sussmann? He was supposed to be setting up some kind of defence ...’

‘Sussmann was wounded quite badly. He’s in hospital right now, but I persuaded Memling to keep the SS busy. Your English friend, it turns out, is a commando officer.’

‘I thought he was a spy, worked for that ... I don’t remember ...’

‘So did I.’ Bethwig shrugged, in any event, I made a deal with him, one it will be up to you to honour.’

Bethwig glanced at his wristwatch. Time was running out. ‘I promised that after the launch you would help hide him. He speaks excellent German, and it shouldn’t be difficult to pass him off as a middle-level technician for a while. Everything is falling apart here, and with the entire Gestapo staff dead, security checks are certain to fall by the wayside, at least for the moment. Memling said there is a submarine standing by for him and anyone else who wants to leave, but you can deal with that. I gave him directions to your house in Zinnowitz. He will be discreet. Now, I have one more thing to do. Stay on the control console for me a while longer, please?’