Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 113

He reported to the Reichsfhrer. The nightmare closed in upon him. The death list was completed and the rounding up began and the days and nights after were filled with beatings and entreaties and roaring guns and blood-soaked, riddled corpses. They were shot in their homes, in floodlit courtyards, in their beds and in cars and in fields where the wind howled and bent the gra.s.s.

Ernst had to be part of it, prove his worth, show his loyalty, and he managed it by denying it, by pretending it wasn't happening, or by convincing himself that those begging and sobbing deserved what they got. The innocent died with the guilty, the same way, without mercy; and the ghastly climax was held in the great courtroom of the Kammergericht, where, for the cine-cameras, the most notable of the defendants were humiliated even as they were sentenced.

They were brought in wearing old clothes, haggard, unkempt, some deprived of their false teeth, all forced to hold their beltless trousers up, and then, when sentenced, were led out of the courthouse and into Plotzensee Prison where, in a small room, they were stripped to the waist and hanged from meat hooks with nooses made of piano wire.

Ernst and his fellow officers were obliged to look on, all sweating in the bright lights required for the cine-cameras that were taking moving pictures of the stripped bodies writhing in agony.

That's when it ended, when Ernst was reprieved, and he returned to his bed in the SS barracks and slept the sleep of the d.a.m.ned, haunted by nightmares.

Meanwhile, the western front had collapsed, the fate of France had been sealed a few days before when General Patton's divisions poured through the gap at Avranches, and the Allied bombing of Berlin was now reaching new heights of appalling efficiency. The ruins stretched as far as the eye could see; the sky was a constant pall of smoke.

Ernst was called to Kammler's office and went dazed from lack of sleep. He was informed that General Nebe had gone underground in Kahla, in Thuringia. Nebe had been listed officially as missing, possibly dead in the recent ma.s.s executions, when many bodies had been buried unnamed. Ernst was to return to Kahla, to keep a close eye on Wilson. He was to leave the next morning.

Feeling haunted and lost, dispossessed of his soul, he returned to the barracks and started packing... and then heard the wailing of the air-raid sirens.

The noise seemed to cut through him, lacerating his stripped nerves, and something collapsed inside him: the final, sad remnants of his will. He lay on the bed and closed his eyes and begged the planes to turn back. Naturally, they ignored him, were soon above him, making the room shake, and then the darkness outside erupted and filled up with h.e.l.lish noise. He covered his ears with his hands. It didn't help at all. The noise seemed to fill his head, a vast symphony of destruction, and his bed shook and rattled as a brilliant light washed over him and the men in the other beds cursed and jumped up and ran for the door.

Ernst hurried out through clouds of dust, felt waves of heat, saw fire and smoke, then was struck by a dreadful premonition that could not be cast off. He thought of Ingrid and the children, of that old house in Wannsee, and sensed, even as he visualized it, that something had happened.

It was there and would not budge the conviction that they were dead and he commandeered an SS car and drove out of the barracks and raced through the blazing, erupting city, heading for Wannsee. This time he found no respite the pattern of bombing was widening and a cloud of smoke and dust covered the river and the houses around it. Ernst glanced up at the sky, saw the criss-crossing searchlights, the Allied bombers as thick as flies in the paler light of the full moon and stars. It was a lovely August night only mankind had made it h.e.l.lish

and as he drove through the gateway of the house in Wannsee, he knew that he had been part of it.

He squealed to a halt in a cloud of smoke, climbed out into scorching heat, and rushed toward the flames that licked up from the rubble. It had been a direct hit most of the house had collapsed and he was beaten back by the heat. He fell to his knees in hot ash and looked up at the flames licking over the exposed beams and beating at the broken walls. Then he screamed like an animal, out of the deep well of his old self, as another wall collapsed, causing more geysering sparks and smoke, and then he covered his face with his hands and shed the last of his tears.

Ingrid and his children were dead.

Now he had only Wilson.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO A V-1 rocket had been found intact. It lay near an enormous bomb crater in a field not twenty yards from the southern wall of the immense main building of the launching site in the Pas de Calais in liberated northern France.

'It's nearly twenty-six feet long,' explained US Army Major General Ryan McArthur, 'has a wingspan of about seventeen point five feet, a body diameter of approximately two point five feet, and a launch weight of four thousand eight hundred and sixty pounds. Its warhead weighs eighteen hundred and seventy pounds and its fuel, twelve hundred pounds. She's some baby, right?'

'Right,' Bradley said, suitably impressed. He had not seen McArthur since being introduced to him by Gladys Kinder in London, three months ago. Now, as he followed the major general across the bomb-cratered field near the launch site and its silos, he couldn't stop thinking of her.

'And this,' McArthur said, stopping where an even bigger rocket, approximately twice the size of the V-1, was being hoisted into the air by a British-controlled Straho crane, 'is, we think, one of the enormous sons of b.i.t.c.hes that devastated parts of Chiswick and Epping a few days back.'

'The V-2,' Bradley said.

'Yeah, we think so. And this mother is nearly fifty feet long, has a body diameter of five point five feet, a weight, empty, of seven thousand-odd pounds, and a fuel weight of twenty thousand one hundred and fifty pounds, compared to the V-1's meagre twelve hundred. How'd you like that on your head?'

'A homburg hat will do fine, thanks.'

McArthur laughed and slapped Bradley on the shoulder. They stood side by side on the cold, windswept field, watching the enormous rocket being hoisted up off the ground by the crane, prior to be taken somewhere safer for a thorough examination by a team of Allied scientists. Bradley had driven here from Caen, after the recent capture of Antwerp. Major General McArthur's invitation had surprised him.

In fact, while Bradley had been interrogating people in Caen, McArthur's ALSOS agents had been swarming all over the liberated areas of France, particularly the Pas de Calais and the Cherbourg peninsula, where, it had been discovered, most of the V-1 and V-2 rocket launch sites were located. Over the past two days, then, since Bradley's arrival, McArthur had been taking him on a tour of the major captured rocket sites, which were, in their sheer size and design, something more than impressive. This particular site was located on the edge of the forest of Eperlecques, three miles north of the village of Watten, on the ca.n.a.l network between the sea and the Belgian border.

'It's our belief,' McArthur now said as he walked Bradley away from the V-2 rocket and back toward the site's huge main building, 'that this was intended to be one of the largest rocket sites of all. Mercifully it was put out of action by the repeated bombing raids of the B-17 Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force of the good old US of A.' He stopped a good distance from the towering, concrete-bunker-styled building in front of them. 'Just look at it,' he said. 'That was the reception building for V-2 trains arriving from Germany. It contained offices and staff accommodations. Over there,' he said, waving his right hand, 'is the railway station, with the lines two feet below floor level and the roof five feet thick though it has been penetrated by one of our bombs that didn't explode. Over there,' he continued, pointing past the damaged wall of the enormous bunker to a tower rising out of the windblown gra.s.s, 'is the launch control, approximately sixty-three feet by seventy-three feet and fifteen feet high no small silo, believe me and the launch silo, which is thirty by fifty, though now filled with water.'

He led Bradley into the enormous main building. Constructed from reinforced concrete, it was three hundred feet long, one hundred and thirty-eight feet wide, and had work levels going two hundred and sixty feet below ground.

'We believe it was their intention,' McArthur said, 'to construct a building that could be demolished only by a bomb so large that it'd be impossible for an airplane to carry it. That's why the ceiling above you,' he said, pointing up to the eighty-foot-high roof, 'is made from reinforced concrete twenty-three feet thick. Theoretically speaking, to pierce it you'd need a bomb weighing about twelve tons and striking the ceiling at Mach One, the speed of sound but we don't have that yet.'

Bradley looked up. Above the northern entrance, at the junction between the ceiling and the north wall, an explosion had blown off a large piece of concrete and forced out a mess of steel reinforcing bars. A second explosion, near the centre of the roof, had detached another large piece of concrete and caused a fine web of cracks.

'Something obviously damaged it,' he observed.

But McArthur shook his head. 'Not our normal bombing raids,' he said. 'In fact, what you're looking at is minor damage, right?'

'Right.'

'Well, it wasn't caused by our beloved Flying Fortresses during the course of normal operations. In fact, to test the strength of the structure, after we'd captured it, we deliberately tried to destroy it with a couple of twenty-two thousand-pound Grandslam bombs and this is all the damage we managed to inflict. This G.o.dd.a.m.ned place is d.a.m.ned near impregnable and so are most of the others.'

'How was it constructed?' Bradley asked him as they walked around the enormous, empty, silent building, looking up at its towering walls and high ceiling.

'Forty-nine-thousand tons of steel were needed to build that roof alone,' McArthur said. 'According to intelligence reports, based on the interrogation of locals, hundreds of jacks were used to raise the roof slowly, inches at a time, with the walls being built up beneath it, as it was raised. The enormous amounts of steel, cement, sand, and gravel needed were brought in from Watten on that standard-gauge railway track you saw outside. So far we've estimated that the site took six months to construct and used about thirty-five-thousand slave workers, who came from the two prison camps located about a mile and a half from here. At any one time there were always three to four thousand men at work, which went on around the clock on twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts. The slave labour, or Sklavenarbeiter, was controlled by armed members of the black-s.h.i.+rted SS Totenkopfverbande, who didn't hesitate to execute anyone too ill or exhausted to work. This place, then, is an extraordinary achievement... but the price... Jesus Christ! You don't want to think about it! Come on, let's get out of here.'

They went outside again, into the shadow of the towering wall, and were whipped by the wind howling across the bleak, bomb-blasted fields, where once livestock had roamed. Now the fields were covered with soldiers, British, French, Canadian, and American, as well as concrete silos and the usual debris of war: armoured half-tracks, overturned trucks, the blackened remains of burned-out tanks, melted tires, and scorched earth.

'I have to think about it,' Bradley said as McArthur led him toward his parked jeep. 'I have to fix firmly in my head just what they were capable of.'