The Trinity Paradox (25 page)

“He didn’t send me to observe the test! I am here to confer with you about the deployment of another weapon my team of researchers has developed.’’

Dornberger’s smile became suddenly forced. “And what type of weapon is this?”

“I’ve been trying to show you this letter—”

The white steam curls vanished from the sides of the rocket, like gusts of breath from a sleeping dragon. Von Braun pointed at it. “Venting valves have closed. Oxygen pressure will start building up.”

The loudspeaker blared again, “X minus one minute. Regular counting will progress.”

The general and von Braun turned back to observe the test stand. “Tell us afterward.”

Esau settled down to watch.

“Forty-five seconds.’’

Unable to squelch his tour-guide tendencies, Dornberger spoke over his shoulder at Esau. “The steering gyroscopes are now running inside the rocket. Only a few seconds more.”

A small shell hissed into the air, sending a streamer of green marker smoke across the sky. Esau couldn’t figure out what it was for. To test wind direction?

“X minus fifteen seconds.”

Esau realized he was holding his breath. So, he could tell, were General Dornberger and Wernher von Braun. Even the wind seemed to have dropped away in the overcast winter sky.

“Ignition!”

Clouds gushed from the nozzle at the bottom of the rocket. A rain of sparks built from the nozzle, splashing off the blast deflector and bouncing along the concrete launch platform. A sound like a gigantic blowtorch burned through the air as the sparks gathered into an arm of flame, pushing beneath the black-and-white rocket.

“Preliminary stage!” von Braun shouted.

Smoke billowed up from around the rocket’s bottom, obscuring the view. Esau squinted through his binoculars. Debris, wood chips, sand, and blasted chunks of cable flew through the air. Diagnostic wires fell from the sides of the rocket. Esau could feel the tension building.

“How much more is it going to take?” he shouted.

Then the rocket heaved itself from the ground. Casting-off cables dropped from the smooth white sides. The flame suddenly redoubled in strength as the main stage ignited. The rocket rose and picked up speed, climbing into the sky. Esau followed it with his binoculars. Behind on the test stand only a whirling dust cloud remained.

He flicked a glance sideways to see General Dornberger grinning like a child. Von Braun continued to stare through the binoculars with one fist clenched at his side. His face carried an expression of intense seriousness.

The jet of flame extended yellow and orange, longer than the rocket itself. The black-and-white patterns did not change as Esau watched, meaning the rocket was not rotating.

“Plus five seconds,” the loudspeaker announced. Esau found that incredible. Surely more time had passed than that! He remembered what the general had said about Peenemunde minutes.

“It’s beginning to tilt,” von Braun reported without taking his eyes from the binoculars.

The rocket flew out in a graceful arc over the Peenemunde estuary, toward the small green hook of another island.

“Sixteen ...
 
seventeen ... eighteen ...
 
” the loudspeaker continued.

“At twenty-five seconds the rocket will go faster than sound,” von Braun said. Dornberger concurred.

A “boom” startled the watchers. The loudspeaker voice said, “Sonic velocity!”

The rocket grew smaller and smaller as it sailed on. Esau thrilled at the power and grace of this weapon. He could understand Speer’s excitement.
“Brennschluss
approaching. Five seconds,” von Braun said.

“What?” Esau grabbed the general’s sleeve.

“The end point of combustion. The primary flame will go out.”

Von Braun shouted. Esau flicked up his binoculars and searched for the rocket in the field of view. He found white mist spewing from the side of the rocket.

“Did it happen again?” Dornberger demanded. “No, that’s just the oxygen vent opening! It has to be.”

Suddenly an explosion split the rocket, silent over the great distance. In a flash the metal javelin had vanished into a cloud of debris, flame, and steam.

General Dornberger muttered to himself. The loudspeaker made one last announcement, “Forty-three seconds. Forty-three seconds total flight time,” then fell silent. Von Braun brooded down at the ground.

“This is terrible. We must try again and again and again. We must learn to make it work properly!” The general kneaded his hands together.

Esau lowered his binoculars and stared at the spreading cloud of steam, smoke, and debris dispersing over the choppy sea. The lumpy scar on his lip itched when he smiled so broadly.

“No,” he said, startling them. “It is splendid just as it is.”

Both Dr. von Braun and General Dornberger spoke no more about the rocket’s failure that morning. They addressed Esau’s ideas with growing enthusiasm.

“We did develop a prototype rocket to be launched from a German U-boat, but we determined it would not be feasible for actual deployment.”

“Until now,” Esau corrected.

“I am still not convinced,” General Dornberger said. “We shelved the submarine rocket proposal because of the effort it would require and its low potential for payoff. We would have to specially modify a U-boat to carry the rockets, and even then the boat could carry no more than three on each journey.”

Dornberger removed his hat and laid it on the scarred old tabletop. Inside the dim barracks conference room, cold breezes pushed through ill-fitting window frames and wall joints.

“It just does not sound worthwhile. To modify a U-boat and send it on a journey across the Atlantic to strike a target with only three bombs? Unexpected, to be sure, but the destruction could not justify the effort. I would rather continue work on the V-2 program here.”

Von Braun sat impatient in his wooden chair, then he got up and paced the room. Esau began to speak, but von Braun interrupted him and stood directly in front of Dornberger.

“You don’t understand, General! If this radioactive dust is as effective as Professor Esau claims, then three rockets would be enough to ... to subdue an entire city. For many years!”

“Yes,” Esau said, “it makes all the difference! Conventional explosives don’t cause sufficient damage in a case like this. But with radioactive dust, we can take a greater toll in a single attack than a hundred bombing raids.”

“And you believe Hitler intends to strike against America with this weapon? Why not Britain?”

Esau went to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, but didn’t know what he wanted to draw. “We are not certain what will happen with this poison. If we release the dust and contaminate London, the dust might spread and actually reach Normandy, perhaps even to the German Lowlands here. In America, though, we need not worry. It will be a perfect test case. We can see exactly how effective the weapon is.”

He raised his eyebrows and looked back at the general and the rocket scientist. “It will also strike fear in the Americans. We will surprise them in a way they will never forget.”

General Dornberger ran his fingers along the inside brim of his hat. “And Reichminister Speer is enthusiastic about this?”

“Very much so. He wants to use the weapon within two months.”

“Two months!” von Braun said.

The general placed his hat back on his head and stood up. “Last March, Hitler had a dream that convinced him none of our rockets would ever reach England. We nearly lost all support then, but in July he changed his mind and gave us top priority. And now you are speaking of striking not England, but America. We can convince the Fuhrer his dream was right. If we can make your idea work.’’

Dornberger’s tour-guide smile had returned to his face. “Very well, Professor. We should try to find a suitable U-boat and begin modifications. This could win the war for us.”

14

German U-Boat415 April 1944

“If any attack is made by the Germans using radioactive poisons, it seems extremely likely that it will occur not in the United States, but in Great Britain.”

—
General Leslie Groves

“I was almost unnerved by the thought of what the great new misery [the Hiroshima bomb] meant, but glad that it was not Germans but the Anglo-American Allies who had made and used this new instrument of war.”

—
Otto Hahn

Breakers hitting the gray steel hull
of U-415 sent fine spray over the superstructure. The first watch officer and the executive officer stood out in the open air, breathing the tang of the Atlantic. Though cold, wet, and miserable in their oilskins, with wadded Turkish towels around their necks to absorb intruding water, they preferred this duty to the dimness and foul smells below in the interior.

“Captain on deck!” someone called from below.

In the conning tower Captain Werner stepped up the aluminum ladder, poking his head out. Werner paused halfway out into the air, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. The captain had the watch sparsely manned, though it went against everything he had been taught at the Naval Academy in Kiel. The submarine was not on a normal hunt this mission. U-415 had known its target from the moment they used their silent electric motors to leave port in occupied France.

“You are relieved, Leutnant Gormann, if you wish to go below,” Captain Werner said to the exec.

Gormann pressed his chapped lips together and used a gloved hand to wipe spray from below his eyes. Sunburn and windburn had turned his face raw and red. “Aye, sir.” He tossed a sodden cigarette butt over the railing into the water. A swell crashing over the deck sent a bucketful of water inside with him as he descended the ladder.

Captain Werner said nothing to the first watch officer, who stood at attention, focusing his concentration through salt-smeared binoculars. The man’s name was Tellmark, and he had joined the U-boat just before they set out on this mission. Werner knew little about him, other than that he was an untested cadet who had never before gone into battle. His reddish-blond hair left him with a sparse, patchy beard after a week out from port.

Tellmark swiveled to stare at the gray-blue emptiness that extended to the horizon. The surface of the sea showed nothing. The captain pulled his white Navy cap tighter over matted dark hair; only the commander could wear such a cap on board. With the salt spray and the dampness inside the submarine, a green-blue tarnish of verdigris already coated the brass ornaments. His long jacket of light gray leather had been stitched with heavy yarn and remained warm despite the abuse of the weather; his seaman’s braid epaulets were bleached white from exposure to harsh salt air.

By now, days out from port, his leather boots, wrinkled pants, blue sweater—even blue knitted underwear—felt like a part of him. Unable to wash, with too-few changes of clothes to be worth anything, Werner had already gotten into the submariner’s mindset of ignoring how filthy and smelly he felt.

Their journey westward across the Atlantic continued all day and all night. They kept a straight course; not a zigzag search pattern to locate and destroy Allied ships, but a distance-eating pace that would take them to the American coast. As U-415 rode on the surface, Werner swayed on the conning tower, listening to the thump of diesels and the splash of waves against the hull.

The submarine’s protective undercoat of red paint showed in streaks through the gray outer layer. Rust blossomed everywhere, even on the greased 8.8-centimeter gun on the foredeck. A green scum of algae glistened on the wooden deck overlaid on the steel hull. But this was Werner’s boat, and he allowed no flaws to diminish his pride.

Tellmark paused in his scanning. He kept his eyes to his binoculars, then extended his left hand. “Shadow bearing three-two-oh. Looks like a freighter. No, several of them.”

Captain Werner snapped around, got his bearings, then raised his own pair of binoculars. He could see the shadows approaching at an angle. As U-415 continued, the paths converged. “Looks like that convoy the radio informed us about.”

“Do we attack, sir?” Tellmark appeared excited.

The exec popped his head back out of the conning tower. “Sighting, sir?”

Captain Werner nodded in the direction of the approaching convoy, which was now visible to the unaided eye.

“Alarm!” the exec called down into the hull. “Battle stations!”

“No!” Captain Werner shouted. “Tell the radioman to transmit our position and summon all other U-boats in the area. We must leave the hunt to them. We are going to dive and avoid contact.”

“Sir?” the first watch officer said.

“Go below, Tellmark.” The captain motioned with his hands, following the man down the hatch. He slid down the aluminum ladder and hit the deck plates. On the bridge the other crew members looked at him in anticipation. The exec scowled.