V2 A Novel of World War II - Robert Harris Page 0,35

Labour Front. ‘But I know just the place,’ his mother announced suddenly, looking up from her tapestry. ‘It’s right next to Rügen. Your grandpapa used to go duck-hunting there every winter. What was it called, Magnus?’

The old baron removed his cigar and grunted. ‘Peenemünde.’

That was the first time Graf heard the name.

And so for the second time, he found himself heading north, this time just the two of them, in von Braun’s new car. They stopped off overnight at Carmzow, near Stettin, at the ancestral home of von Braun’s mother’s family, the von Quistorps – a far grander property – and continued the next day for about fifty kilometres through the flat Pomeranian countryside until they crossed a bridge that spanned the narrow straits to the island of Usedom. For ten minutes or so the road curved through woods and marshland and ran along a narrow spit, with water sparkling on either side, taking them past pretty little fishing villages painted pink and yellow and pale blue, until at last it dwindled into a forest track at the northern tip of the island. They parked the car and completed the journey on foot.

That morning remained imprinted on Graf’s mind as a visit to paradise before the Fall – ancient oaks and hundred-foot Scots pines, dunes and peat bogs, white sandy beaches with reed beds; silent, immemorial, not a human to be seen, only swans and ducks, warblers and cormorants, streams with otters, and immense Pomeranian deer crowned by dark antlers wandering among the heather, placid and unafraid. It took more than an hour to clamber along the coast to the point where the mouth of the river Peene opened out to the Oder Lagoon. Von Braun, the winter sun on his broad face and his blond hair blowing in the sea breeze, flung out his arms to embrace it all. ‘This is fantastic, no?’ He started gesturing to where everything could go, abolishing nature with a sweep of his hand. He saw test stands in the forest and launch pads on the foreshore; on the grasslands there would be workshops and laboratories, a factory to manufacture the rockets, chemical plants to make the methyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, a power station, an airfield where they could work on jet engines for the Luftwaffe, a railway station, a model town for the workforce.

‘But you would need to bring thousands of people up here,’ Graf objected. He couldn’t help laughing. It sounded so absurd, like one of their boyhood fantasies. ‘Who on earth would pay for such a place?’

‘Oh, they will pay for it.’

‘They?’

‘Our masters in uniform. Believe me, they have so much money for rearmament right now, they don’t know what to do with it. They’re falling over themselves to spend it.’

‘Come on! The costs would be unbelievable.’

‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll see. I’ll promise them such a weapon they won’t be able to resist it.’

On their return to Kummersdorf, von Braun had sat down with Papa Riedel and the head of weapons development, Colonel Dornberger, to start sketching out the most advanced ballistic missile that might be technologically feasible based upon what they had achieved so far. Graf had always got on well with Dornberger. He was a congenial artillery veteran of about forty, clever enough and ambitious, whose obsession was the Paris gun that had shelled the French capital in the Great War. Von Braun played him as skilfully as he played his cello – flattering him, sometimes deferring to him, always allowing the older man to feel he was in control. Between them they came up with the specifications for a workable weapon: one that could be transported intact on a railway wagon to wherever it was required. The need for mobility limited its size to less than fifteen metres. Even so, it would be capable of carrying a one-ton warhead of either high explosive or poison gas over a distance of 275 kilometres. To accomplish this, Riedel calculated, would require a motor capable of developing twenty-five tons of thrust – seventeen times more powerful than anything they had achieved before. This would be Aggregate-4.

One morning at the beginning of April, Dornberger and von Braun were driven to the Air Ministry in Berlin to present their plans to General Kesselring of the Luftwaffe. Graf watched them go, sitting together in the back of the Mercedes with their briefcases on their laps like a couple of salesmen. He didn’t know what was said, but by lunchtime, a Luftwaffe staff