V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History (21 page)

“Yes, well . . .” Sanger coughed in his hand. “If it does, please tell me at once. We’ll need not only to alter the dimensions of the couch, but we’ll also have to adjust the cockpit’s oxygen-pressure variables to suit him.”

Von Braun nodded, his face grim. That was something else he didn’t like to think about, the high-altitude research done by a physician Sigmund Raschler, for the Luftwaffe Institute. When Dr. Raschler had expressed reluctance to use Luftwaffe pilots for his experiments, Himmler had given him a solution: concentration camp prisoners. One by one, detainees had been marched into decompression chambers or submerged in tubs of ice water, their reactions closely studied until they died. The results had been volumes of medical data invaluable for the development of manned spaceflight, but at a hideous and inhuman cost.

Von Braun looked away from Silver Bird, toward the interior end of the tunnel. The tunnels were being expanded for reasons beyond the current mission. If it was a success, the plan was for more Silver Birds to be built until there were enough for the Third Reich to impose its military might across the entire globe. No place on Earth would be beyond their range. The spacecraft could dive from space and drop their bombs on an enemy nation’s cities, killing civilians by the thousands, until their governments surrendered.

Or at least that was the idea. Privately, von Braun doubted it would happen. The
Silbervogel Projekt
was far more expensive than anyone had anticipated, draining human and material resources from the war effort. The cost of the titanium alone was so high that he doubted that they’d be able to construct even a second spacecraft, let alone a fleet. If so much time and energy hadn’t already been committed to building Silver Bird, von Braun had little doubt that the High Command would have already pulled the plug.

Yet Goering was convinced that Silver Bird would change the course of the war. Hitler might not conquer the world, but if the Americans invaded Europe—which was inevitable, and everyone knew it—at least he’d be able to dictate terms for their withdrawal. Once that happened, the Reich would be able to solidify its control of western Europe, and a new German empire would be born.

Many years ago, as a teenager entranced by Hermann Oberth’s visions, von Braun had decided to devote his life to the exploration of space. This was not where he’d ever expected to find himself, and he doubted that Sanger had either, despite his unswerving dedication to
Silbervogel
. One day, perhaps soon, a spacecraft would carry men to the Moon, maybe even to Mars. But the idea that it might bear the red swastika flag . . .

We will pay a terrible price for this,
he thought.
If we are successful, history will never forgive us for the way our victory was achieved.

=====

In the nearby village of Nordhausen, a sedan driven by a young woman named Greta Carlsberg came to a halt in front of the small Bavarian-style cottage on the outskirts of town. Climbing out of the car, Frau Carlsberg took a moment to look around, as if to admire the remote and wooded place where she’d chosen to live. Then she opened the trunk, pulled out a couple of suitcases, and lugged them beneath the garden trellis and up the flagstone walk to the front door. Putting down her luggage, she retrieved a brass key from a pocket of her shapeless overcoat and used it to let herself in.

Greta Carlsberg was a sort of woman who’d become sadly familiar in Germany: a war widow, her husband recently killed in service to the Reich. Until then, she’d lived in Berlin, where she’d made a living as a commercial artist. Her husband’s death in Russia had shattered her—she didn’t even have his body to bury since it had been left on a battlefield outside Leningrad—and she’d soon discovered that she could no longer bear to remain in the apartment they had shared until he’d joined the Army. So she’d decided to sell the apartment, pack up her belongings, and move away from the city to a place in the country where she could quietly paint and be alone with her grief.

This was what she’d told the real estate agent who’d searched for a furnished house that she could rent for a year or two. At her request, he’d looked for something in Nordhausen, a town Greta fondly remembered from family vacations when she was a little girl. She was lucky; just such a place was available. So here she was, taking occupancy of the place where she could retreat from the world while she recovered from her loss.

All of this was, in the parlance of the espionage profession, a “legend” created to conceal the truth. Frieda Koenig was her true name; although she had indeed been born and raised in Germany, her family had moved to England when she was a child, and most of her adult life had been spent working as a deep-cover field agent for MI-6. Operating under the code name Mistletoe, she’d visited Germany twice already during the war, using her carefully constructed background for short-term intelligence-gathering missions. A couple of months earlier, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services had borrowed Frieda from MI-6 for another assignment, perhaps a little more sedate than the ones she’d done before but also more important.

She paused to shut the door behind her and take off her coat, then carried her bags through the cozy sitting room to the bedroom in the back of the house. The rest of her belongings were still out in the car, including the easel and paints she’d use to establish the appearance of a reasonably talented painter—which in fact she was—but just then her first priority was the concealment of the most important thing she had brought with her from England.

Placing the smaller of the two suitcases on the bed, she opened it to reveal what lay inside: a Type A Mk III wireless radio, specially designed by the British Army for covert operations. Built into the suitcase itself, it was completely self-contained except for the power supply, which could run on either alternating or direct current. The radio didn’t have a microphone but instead relied on a Morse telegraph key, yet it had a range of eight hundred kilometers, sufficient to reach MI-6 headquarters in London.

Frieda closed the bedroom door and took a moment to check the window before running the power cord to a wall socket and plugging it in. She examined the crystal to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged, then turned on the radio and, once it was warmed up, fitted the headphones over her ears. The telegraph key was located on its wood plaque; she rested it on her leg, turned the frequency knob to the proper setting, then tapped out a quick, coded message—
Mistletoe arrived and in position
—before switching off again. Repeating the message or waiting for confirmation was an unnecessary risk; if the Gestapo picked up the transmissions, they might be able to trace them to their point of origin. As it was, she was on and off the air so fast, it was doubtful that she’d even been noticed.

Frieda switched off the Mk III and unplugged it, then put everything back into the suitcase, closed it, and found an innocuous place for it on a closet shelf. Now she could begin the more routine business of making herself at home. But first, she wanted to get a look at the scenery. After all, it was the principal reason why she was here.

A back door from the sitting-room door let her out into a small garden, its flower beds and rosebushes colorless with the coming of winter but no doubt quite pleasant the rest of the year. The cottage was surrounded by woods, with no other houses in sight; her privacy was assured, but it still made sense for her to set up her easel here and get started on a painting, to provide an explanation to anyone who might happen to drop by as to why Frau Carlsberg spent so much time in the backyard.

Standing with her arms folded across her chest, Frieda gazed into the distance. Beyond the trees, she could see the Harz Mountains just a few kilometers away to the north. Approaching the rocket base MI-6 knew to be hidden somewhere within them would be risky, even if she pretended to be lost, but those weren’t her orders. Her job was to simply maintain an observation post: watch, listen, and immediately report any unusual activity.

Frieda smiled to herself as she turned to go back inside. An important assignment, yes, but probably rather tedious as well, at least on a day-to-day basis. At least she’d get a chance to broaden her skills with a few landscapes. Being a spy was only her wartime occupation; once this was all over, she intended to become an artist for real.

DECEMBER 25, 1942

The first snow of winter fell on Worcester the night of Christmas Eve, a tender and sparkling powder reminiscent of childhood, lifting spirits depressed by a war that was only a year old but had already cost thousands of American lives. It put a sugarcoating across rooftops and sidewalks and cars and glittered as it drifted through streetlights. The snow softened the footsteps of families who went door to door, singing yuletide carols while collecting pennies and nickels for the Red Cross. It quietly hissed as it fell, and when the midnight hour came, it whispered secrets.

The City Hall bell tower had just tolled twelve when a pair of double doors parted at a massive warehouse deep inside the Wyman-Gordon Company’s sprawling factory complex on the outskirts of town. The factory was silent this evening; all three shifts had the day off, so the only people present were night watchmen and custodians. Or at least this was the appearance that had been deliberately created. Yet, although the doors were being opened by workmen, no lights shone from within the warehouse. The ceiling fixtures had been turned off; the only illumination permitted were handheld flashlights, and even those were shielded with cardboard strips to narrow their beams, making them hard to spot from a distance.

Once the doors were open, one of the workmen stepped onto the railroad tracks leading into the warehouse. Facing away from the building, he raised his light above his head and flashed it three times. From another side of the factory grounds, three more flashes answered him. He stepped off the tracks and waited, and a few minutes later a diesel locomotive slowly rumbled from the darkness.

The locomotive approached the warehouse backward, the engineer and brakeman leaning from the cab windows to watch the flashlight signals of the man beside the tracks. The big machine backed into the darkened warehouse and slowly came to a halt, brakes making a shrill shriek that nearby residents had become so used to that they barely noticed it, until there was the loud bang of railcar couplings coming together. Long minutes passed. Then, slowly and still with the minimal amount of light, the train emerged from the warehouse.

The locomotive now had six cars: three tankers, two of them refrigerated; a flatbed carrying a diesel electric generator and other pieces of equipment; a passenger car whose windows had been blacked out by heavy curtains; at the end, another flatbed, this one holding an enormous, vaguely cylindrical object concealed by heavy canvas. U.S. Army infantrymen in winter gear and bearing submachine guns rode on each corner of the flatbed; others were in the locomotive and the passenger car.

Slowly and quietly, the train followed the tracks until it left the factory through the north rail gate. There it switched to the siding, which, in turn, led it to a freight line just outside town. The train had no trouble going on the line; there was no schedule for it to keep save its own. In cooperation with the War Department, the company that owned this particular railroad had cleared the tracks so that, for a six-hour period in the wee hours of Christmas morning, only one train would be able to use them between Worcester and Greenfield, about a hundred miles to the west.

The train picked up speed once it left Worcester; it moved quickly into the rural countryside of western Massachusetts. The engineer didn’t once blow the air horn when the train approached a crossing, nor did he need to; at each crossing, the soldiers on the rear flatbed caught glimpses of others maintaining a series of roadblocks along the route, not letting anyone get near the tracks. Some might hear the train as it went by, but few would actually see it.

An hour and a half after the train left the Wyman-Gordon yard, it entered the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, where the Connecticut River forms a lowland east of the Berkshires. At the valley’s north end lies a small range of low mountains. Bordered by the villages of Sunderland, Montague, and Leveritt, with Greenfield the nearest large town, these Berkshire foothills were largely uninhabited. Farms had come and gone from here since the 1600s, leaving behind exhausted fields the forests had reclaimed; only loggers, hunters, and hikers ventured into the mountains, save for the occasional hermit who’d inhabit a lonely shack in solitude.

The train slowed as it came into the hill country, and the last house lights had already vanished when it entered a narrow ravine between Mount Toby and its smaller neighbor, Roaring Mountain. Once again, brakes squealed as the train came to a halt. A brakeman jumped down from the engine and, lantern in hand, ran forward to a siding running parallel to the tracks. Four concrete pillars, each five feet tall with deep grooves running through their flat tops, had been recently built on the siding by the Army Corps of Engineers, two on either side of the tracks. The brakeman pulled down the switch beside the tracks, then raised the lantern and swung it back and forth. Once again, the locomotive huffed and slowly moved forward, pulling the cars onto the siding. The brakeman carefully guided him until the rear flatbed was exactly between the four pillars, then he swung the lantern again. The train stopped, and several things happened at once.

The soldiers who’d been riding the rear flatbed jumped off and trotted down the track in both directions, taking up positions fifty yards east and west of the siding. As they did this, other soldiers climbed onto the first flatbed and unloaded four portable spotlights. Once they’d set them up in a ring around the siding, they ran insulated cables from them to the generator. It growled to life; a second later, the tripod-mounted lights flared on, wiping away the darkness with a bright oval flecked by falling snow.

The lights had barely come on when more men emerged from the passenger car. Three figures dressed in hooded aluminum suits trudged forward to the tanker cars. As they checked the gauges and began uncoiling the thick fuel hoses, soldiers trotted back to the last flatbed, climbed up on its platform, and began untying the ropes that held down the canvas tarps hiding its cargo.

By then, several civilians had disembarked from the passenger car. They spent a few moments stamping their shoes against the ground and blowing into their gloved hands, then the oldest turned to the man standing beside him.

“You’d better take care of that, Henry,” Robert Goddard said quietly, nodding toward the soldiers on the rear flatbed. “See that they don’t hurt our girl.”

“Sure thing.” Henry Morse pulled down the earflaps of his hunter’s cap, then trotted forward. “Hey, there . . . mind what you’re doing with those ropes!”

Gerry Mander looked around uncertainly, shoulders hunched against the cold. “You sure no one’s gonna hear this? I can’t see any house lights, but even out here . . .”

“Oh, we might wake up someone.” Ham Ballou pulled his muffler more tightly around the neck of the fisherman’s sweater he was wearing. “There’s towns on the other side of these mountains. But this time of night on Christmas, y’know who’s going to be up? Kids waiting for Santa Claus, and who’s gonna believe anything they have to say?”

“Yeah, that’d be good.” Taylor Brickell grinned from the depths of his parka hood. “Daddy, I heard Santa fly over last night, and he was
really loud
!”

“Okay, wise guys, knock it off.” Omar Bliss came up behind them, boots crunching against snow-covered cinders. “We don’t have much time, so let’s get to work.”

The remaining members of the 390 Group moved away to perform the few tasks they still needed to do. Only Goddard stayed where he was. Battered fedora pulled down low against his head, coat lapels pulled up against the chill wind that spit snow against his face, he stood with his hands in his pockets, quietly observing everything. Bliss watched him for a moment, then stepped closer.

“How are you doing there, Professor?”

Goddard nodded.

“Sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable in the passenger car?”

Goddard shook his head.

“Well . . . all right, then. Let me know if I can help you.”

Goddard didn’t reply. Bliss lingered another moment, then walked away.

A couple of minutes later, the last tarps were removed from the rear flatbed, and the rocket engine lay revealed in the bright glare of the spotlights. Sixty feet long, the stainless-steel temporary skin that protected the liquid oxygen, nitrogen, and kerosene tanks, along with the turbopump, coolant, and ignition complex gave it the appearance of an oversized septic tank with a conical nozzle at one end.

The entire assembly was securely bolted to a concrete pedestal custom-built into the flatbed platform. Soldiers unloaded two short I-beams from the diesel flatbed and carried them back to the engine flatbed; they laid the beams atop the pedestals across the tracks, then secured them with heavy chains. Other soldiers hammered iron chocks into place between the car wheels and the rails. Braced by the beams and the chocks, the car was transformed into a static test platform, which—hopefully—would remain immobile for the duration.

This was the solution the 390 Group had devised for the problem of how to test a large rocket engine built in a major New England city. Its outcome was more than a matter of pride. If the engine failed to ignite or sustain thrust, then it was back to scratch paper, notebooks, and slide rules . . . and if it blew up, then clearing the debris from the tracks would be the least of their worries. Either way, Blue Horizon would probably be taken away from them entirely and given to someone else. Bliss had already warned Goddard and his people that the Secretary of War was nudging the president to turn the project over to Howard Hughes. If that happened, then the 390 Group would become little more than civilian advisors, and the entire operation would be thrown months, if not years, behind.

The test had to succeed. That was all there was to it.

The fuel men finished loading LOX, kerosene, and liquid nitrogen into the engine. Carefully disconnecting the hoses, they pulled them away from the flatbed. The soldiers helped them carry the lines back to the tankers, then one of the railroad men used a sledgehammer to uncouple the rear car from the rest of the train. The engineer released the brake and throttled up the diesel, and the train slowly pulled away, moving back onto the main line. The flatbed with the engine remained on the siding, captured within a ring of spotlights.

Still standing beside the rocket engine, Henry watched as the train went about a hundred yards farther down the ravine, then came to a halt. He looked down at Taylor and said, “Bring on the juice.”

Taylor nodded, then jogged up the tracks to the train. Two soldiers riding the flatbed with the diesel generator began unreeling a large spool of insulated electrical line. Taylor picked up its end and carried it back to the siding, where Henry knelt to pull it up on the engine flatbed. Once Taylor climbed aboard, the two of them opened a panel in the engine cowling, located the main electrical bus, and attached the cable to it.

The two of them spent the next few minutes connecting other electrical lines within the engine’s control systems, consulting a hand-drawn wiring diagram Henry carried in his pocket. They checked to make sure everything was the way it should be, then Taylor straightened up from his crouch. “Think that’s got it?”

“We’ll soon find out, won’t we?” Henry kissed the tips of his gloved right hand and patted the engine. “Make us proud, sweetheart.” Then he turned to hop down from the car. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

The soldiers who’d been guarding the eastern end of the tracks joined the two scientists as they ran back to the train. They were the last to leave the siding. Everyone else was already crouched behind the rail embankment beside the train except for the 390 Group, who’d returned to the passenger car.

Henry and Taylor jogged up the steps into the car, passing Colonel Bliss along the way. “We’re ready, Bob,” Henry said.

The car had been turned into a mobile launch control center. The seats at one end had been removed to make room for Bakelite instrument panels and patchboard circuitry systems. A tripod-mounted 35 mm camera stood nearby, its lens pointing through a window, even though no one believed that any useful photos would come out of this nighttime test. Goddard sat at the master control panel, Mike Ferris beside him, both eying the gauges and meters arranged before them.

“Very well,” Goddard said quietly, “I think we’re just about ready here, too.” He looked at Bliss. “Give your men the two-minute warning, Colonel. We’re counting down from 120 seconds, starting”—he flipped open his pocket watch, studied it for a couple of moments, then raised a finger—“now.”

As Bliss leaned from the car door to blow a shrill blast from a whistle, Goddard turned to his team. “Mike and I will monitor the test. The rest of you don’t need to be here. If you’d like to watch outside, feel free to do so.” The briefest of smiles appeared beneath his mustache. “Unless, of course, you feel safer in here . . .”

“Are you kidding?” Gerry asked, then he was out the door, rudely shoving past Colonel Bliss. The others grinned. They knew what he meant. If the engine blew up, they wouldn’t be much safer inside the train than they’d be outside.

Taylor shrugged, then he moved to follow the kid from the train. Ham did so as well. Henry started to do the same, then he paused to look back at Goddard. “Professor . . .”

“Good luck to you, too,” Goddard said quietly.

Climbing down from the train, Henry saw that everyone had taken cover behind the track embankment. He crouched on hands and knees between Ham and Gerry and peered over the rail. Illuminated by the spotlights, the flatbed looked like a toy left beneath a Christmas tree. Its nozzle was pointing toward them, for good reasons: not just so that they could watch the ignition, but also for range safety should the engine happen to break loose from its moorings.

“How much time left?” Ham asked.

“I don’t know,” Henry replied. “I wasn’t counting either.” It was just then that he noticed that snow was no longer falling. The wind had died down, too. Glancing up, he was surprised to see a few stars glimmering above the ravine. “Hey, what do you know?” he said aloud. “It’s starting to clear up.”