The Trinity Paradox (24 page)

“Must you go?”

“You don’t want your colleagues to see me coming out of your room in the morning, now do you?”

He grinned, and she thought he was probably blushing. “Might I see you again?”

She shrugged and kept her back turned toward him so he couldn’t see her smile. “It’s a small town. It’s going to be kind of hard to avoid you.” She stood at the door and blew him a kiss. “Good night.”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth left as quietly as she could, already trying to decide which story would make the best excuse for Mrs. Canapelli.

13

Peenemunde Experimental Rocket Station December 1943

“We have developed this weapon. We can service it and put it to tactical use. It was not our task to assess its psychological effect, its usefulness in present conditions, or its strategic importance in the general picture.”

—
General Walter Dornberger, head of Peenemunde

“Europe and the world will be too small from now on to contain a war. With such weapons, humanity will be unable to endure it.”

—Adolf Hitler

The white cuffs
of the Peenemunde estuary reminded Esau of the chalk cliffs of Dover. Graham Fox had taken him there one humid day when they were students at Cambridge. They had made a picnic on the grass, listening to the distant crashing surf, arguing esoteric points about the nature of the universe....

The cold wind of winter removed the charm from the Baltic coast, made Peenemunde look harsh and hellish—a perfect place to be building a secret weapon of destruction. Esau imagined that the waters of the bay here would also be quiet in the summertime; the brown and broken reeds he saw now would be green, a place for ducks to gather. Above the low hills on the mainland side of the Peene River, he could see the red-brick tower of the Wolgast Cathedral and rooftops of the nearby village.

Across the Peenemunde experimental site Esau located dozens of craters; some from failed rocket launches that had fallen back and exploded near the test stands; others from the Allied bombing raid of the previous August.

Esau had not slept well on the long train ride to the northern coast. He never could relax in the crowded closeness of other passengers, the rattling movement of the train, the drafts whistling through the windows. People were not meant to sleep while war-torn scenery rushed by during the day, while villages came and went, some lighted and some dark, all through the night.

His mouth still carried an onion-and-sausage aftertaste from the meal he had eaten during a long stop at Leipzig. When the train pulled into the Berliner station at midnight, Esau longed to disembark and go home, change clothes, clean himself, and get a good rest. He could take another train the following morning.

But Speer would find out. The Reichminister had given him very clear orders. So Esau remained on the train, staring out the window with sleepy eyes at the echoing, uncrowded station, knowing he had to arrive in Peenemunde as soon as possible. He asked the conductor for another blanket, but it failed to warm him from the winter chill.

Somewhere out there, people were trying to ignore the war and get ready for Christmas. Esau had no wife or children to bother about such things, and all those whom he might call his friends were merely colleagues, and colleagues did not treat each other for holidays. Especially not in times like these.

He drank several cups of tea the next morning and ate a croissant. The train arrived at Stettin just after sunrise, and Esau transferred to a different train. They reached Wolgast an hour later. After the conductor’s announcement, Esau stood up, took his valise from the rack overhead, then moved his aching body off the train.

The island of Peenemunde lay on the northern coast near Rugen, just across the water from Bornholm and the Swedish mainland. The island, about ten miles long, looked like a splayed chicken’s foot, with three toes on the southward end pointing into the wide Oder Lagoon, while the narrow top half of the island extended into the Pomeranian Bay in the Baltic Sea. The island lay next to the German mainland, separated by a channel of water.

In the adjacent city of Wolgast, Esau found a ferry to take him across the half-frozen river to the restricted area on the island. Children skated on the ice shelves near the mainland, as if nothing could possibly be wrong with the world.

Barbed wire and slatted-wood fences bordered the edge of Peenemunde. A railroad extended from the ferry landing to various parts of the island for delivering supplies and equipment, but Esau found no train in sight.

As the ferry landed and he disembarked, shivering in his overcoat and carrying his own valise, a team of guards came out to meet him. He let them inspect his papers from Reichminister Speer, and one of the men took him in a car along the bumpy gravel roads of the island. Esau felt too sleepy and grumpy for conversation, and the guard drove without looking at him.

They passed dunes and thick stands of dark fir trees, a desolate-looking frozen lake, and small army settlements on the island—Trassenheide, Karlshagen, and various buildings obviously used for research or construction. At Peenemunde village, the guard let him off and sent Esau toward a set of small office barracks, telling him to ask for General Dornberger.

It took him another half hour, with his voice gradually rising in anger and impatience, before a lieutenant finally accepted his demand for the unscheduled meeting with the head of the research station. Apparently, Reichminister Speer had not telegrammed or telephoned ahead.

“The general is preparing for this morning’s test shot out at Stand X,” the lieutenant said. “We have orders not to disturb him during the final stages. Would you care to wait for him?”

Esau, feeling ruffled, stood his ground. “I would love to rest, change clothes, and eat a decent meal. But I cannot afford the luxury, and neither can General Dornberger. Reichminister Speer ordered me to see the general immediately upon arrival. I have been on a train all night. Don’t you have any inkling of who I am? I am the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics for all of Germany. You will take me to General Dornberger—now!”

Esau seethed in the front seat of the battered car when they finally departed to find the general. Despite the winter cold, the lieutenant kept his window rolled down as they drove across the island to the preparation areas near Test Stand X.

General Walter Dornberger, when they finally found him, looked harried and focused entirely on the rocket test in progress. “Another one?” he said, assessing Esau. A gray-haired man with a boyish face, Dornberger’s build appeared slight in his gray uniform. He was not imposing or commanding, but Esau recognized a hard and practical intelligence behind his eyes.

“I am here on orders from Reichminister Speer—” Esau began, reaching into his overcoat for the detailed letter Speer had given him.

General Dornberger motioned for him to follow. The general’s smile and comfortable attitude displayed his pride in the project, and his familiarity with showing it off. “I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the test. Follow me, and we can answer questions a little later.”

“I have a letter from the Reichminister,” Esau said, holding out the folded note. “Here it is.”

“Only a handful of minutes left Professor, uh, Esau, was it? Let me try to explain everything as we finish the preparations.” He indicated a man beside him, “This is my colleague and our brightest hope, Dr. Wernher von Braun. He is of prime importance to this project.”

Von Braun stood tall and impressive, dapper in his dark suit and clean overcoat; he wore a tie that looked oddly incongruous in the rough conditions of the rocket test area. Most of the other people standing around wore Army uniforms, but von Braun seemed proud of the fact that he was a civilian. Von Braun’s dark hair was slicked back and neat even in the chaotic moments before the test.

“This one will work,” von Braun said. His eyes held a spark of defiance as he turned to Esau. “You’ll see.”

General Dornberger smiled. “Dr. von Braun is an optimist, and he occasionally forgets the difference between reality and his wild ideas.” Dornberger clapped a hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “He is also, though, usually right in whatever he says.”

“Today I am right,” von Braun said. He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes remaining. We should get to our observing posts.”

Dornberger disappeared through the door of a bunker. Esau and von Braun followed him down five concrete steps.

They went through a long underground corridor that led from the measurement room beneath the wall of the arena to the test stand itself. Double and triple rows of thick, heavy measurement cables ran along the corridor, making Esau feel as if he were hurrying down the gullet of some prehistoric beast.

They passed through a long room beside another tunnel. “This is a blast tunnel,” General Dornberger said, running his fingers against the concrete-block walls. “Those cooling pipes are four feet in diameter and can pump water at 120 gallons per second. They’re made of molybdenum steel. This wall is three feet thick. Even during a test, you can feel very little heat through it.”

Von Braun looked at his watch again and cleared his throat. “Five minutes.”

In an observation room, technicians studied readings from their instruments, monitored by red, white, or green indicator lights. Dornberger gestured rapidly, speaking so fast that the words made little sense. Esau got the impression that the general had done this tour many times before. “Those are voltmeters and ammeters here, frequency gauges and manometers over there. We need to check every aspect of the firing. You never know where something might go wrong.”

Two telephones rang at once. The technicians talked among each other. The general moved on. “This morning we’ll observe from outside. It’s more impressive that way.”

Dornberger hurried along the rising corridor through the pumping house and into the open air. Water tanks on wooden towers, twenty-five feet high, stood built into the sand wall surrounding the test arena. “We use these towers to recool the water after a test,” the general said.

“I picked up another pair of binoculars,” von Braun said. He passed them over. “For you, Professor Esau.”

General Dornberger stood beside the heavy sand wall. “Yes, we’ll be able to see just fine from here.”

Esau looked across to Test Stand X. A dune covered with skeletal pine trees rose from a wide sandy plain beyond which lay the choppy Baltic Sea. The trees themselves had been stripped and scarred from the repeated blasts, and the dune lay under a dark blanket of cinders. Fresh concrete aprons, wooden test stands, and cleared patches of dirt dotted the dune surface. Meillerwagens— long metal rigs for hauling the rockets—waited in their positions.

But the sight that gripped Esau was the towering rocket poised on Test Stand X. Strings of fuel lines, steaming white with residual liquid air, sprawled on the ground. A small service car spun at a reckless speed away from the stand.

The rocket itself looked surreal, painted in alternating sections of black and white for proper heat distribution during reentry. Like a giant javelin it waited on the test stand, ready to leap into the air, with external aerial vanes like the feathers on a gigantic arrow.

“We call it the A-4, for Aggregate Rocket Model Four,” General Dornberger said, “though the Fuhrer wants us to change the name to V-2, for Victory Weapon Two. A different rocket concept, launched more like a “catapult projectile, is called the V-1, but that was developed by a second team. We have one V-1 catapult on the northern tip of Peenemunde. But this ... “He sighed and looked at the shining rocket swathed in white vapor tendrils on the test stand. “This is where our real interest lies.”

“It’s got alcohol and liquid oxygen for fuel within the cylindrical center section, along with a hydrogen peroxide tank,” von Braun said. “The fuse and the warhead are on top. We will load the rockets with explosives during actual attacks. Right now we are still trying to perfect the rocket flight itself.”

An announcement rumbled over the intercom system linked around the buildings throughout the site. “X minus three minutes.”

“We have a different way of measuring time here,” General Dornberger mused. “We call them ‘Peeneiminde minutes’—the clock measures them as sixty seconds long, but they seem so much more interminable than that.”

Esau kept his eyes on the rocket towering alone and dangerous on its concrete pad. The general tapped his shoulder. “Those big buildings over there under the camouflage netting are our Development Works and the oxygen-generating plant. We hung the camouflage only on the north side, where planes would see it coming in. On the other side are the hangars for the Luftwaffe section, then the chimneys for the harbor power station.”

“X minus two minutes,” the voice on the loudspeaker said.

“How much do you know of our work here, Herr Professor?” von Braun asked after a brief silence.

“Very little. I don’t even know what this is all about.”

General Dornberger frowned. Von Braun straightened his overcoat to hide a disappointed expression. “Then why exactly did Reichminister Speer send you here to observe this test?”