V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,14
the huge ballroom, twenty Phase Two interpreters, mostly female, seated at three rows of desks, had turned on their Anglepoise lamps and were bent over their work. The atmosphere was quiet, the air heavy with concentration, like an examination hall. From time to time someone crossed to the bookshelves and took down a box file or a manual, or stood in front of one of the charts that showed the enemy’s equipment from every conceivable angle: armoured cars and self-propelled howitzers, fighters and bombers, submarines, warships, tanks. On a long trestle table, wire baskets were piled with black-and-white photographs, marked by sector: ‘Ruhr’, ‘Saar’, ‘Baltic’. A WAAF sergeant sat behind it, filling out a record sheet.
Kay said, ‘Anything in from Holland?’
The sergeant pointed to an empty basket. ‘Weather’s bad, ma’am. No coverage for forty-eight hours.’
Kay went out to the hall and started to climb the stairs. Phase One was ‘current/operational’ and was responsible for debriefing the pilots at RAF Benson as soon as they landed from their sorties. Phase Two, in the ballroom, analysed all the photographs taken over the past twenty-four hours that might be of immediate use on the battlefield. Everything longer-term was passed upstairs to Phase Three. This was where she worked, in what had once been the main bedroom suites and bathrooms. She walked along the corridor to the registry and asked for the past week’s coverage of the Dutch coastal sector, from the Hook of Holland to Leiden. ‘Actually, make that two weeks.’
While the duty clerk went off to fetch the file, she rested her elbows on the counter and leaned forward. She closed her eyes. She was starting to feel faint again. People passed by in the corridor behind her. A telephone rang briefly somewhere. A man sneezed twice. The sounds reached her oddly muffled, as if she were underwater. Behind her, a woman’s voice said softly but precisely, ‘Kay, dear, are you all right?’
She took a breath, forced her mouth into a smile and turned to confront the thin and serious face of Dorothy Garrod – so slight a woman, barely more than five feet tall, it had proved impossible to find a uniform that did not look too large on her. She was in her early fifties, much older than the rest of them. Before the war, she had been Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge. Now her academic discipline was the photographic analysis of bomb-damaged German cities, to which she applied the same painstaking scholarship she had once devoted to the ruined settlements of the Palaeolithic era. Bomber Command might insist a target had been destroyed; she knew otherwise, and stood her ground. Air Marshal Harris was said to loathe her.
‘A slight bump on the head, Dorothy, otherwise fine.’ It was Professor Garrod, her supervisor at Newnham, who had recommended Kay for the Central Interpretation Unit in the first place. She still found it hard to call her by her Christian name.
‘You’re very pale. Are you sure you’re not overdoing it?’
‘I’m perfectly well, honestly.’
The clerk returned with her file. She signed for it, clutched it to her chest, smiled a quick goodbye and escaped from the registry.
She slipped into her usual place at a desk beside the window. The rest of her section were too absorbed to notice her arrival. She took off her cap, switched on her lamp and set out her equipment – a stereoscope viewer, a magnifier, mathematical tables, a slide rule – then opened the file.
The black-and-white photographs, flecked with wisps of cloud, showed a clear image of the long, straight, flat coast, the wide beach, the streets and buildings of The Hague and its suburbs, including Scheveningen to the north, and great sweeps of woodland interspersed with dunes and lakes. That the V2s were being launched from here was certain: it was the only German toehold left in Europe that was close enough to strike London, two hundred miles away. Patrolling Spitfire pilots had occasionally observed the rockets streaking through the sky above them. But where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.
Kay did not expect to solve it. They had been searching the area for weeks. But one never knew. Babs Babington-Smith had been asked if she could locate an object at Peenemünde that might be the Germans’ prototype jet fighter, the Messerschmitt-262. She had spent weeks going back over the old coverage with a jeweller’s Leitz magnifying glass until she discovered at the side of the airfield a cruciform less than a millimetre