and stretched out his legs, his arm resting along the back of the bench. Because the ground fell away slightly towards the lake, he had a good view. There was something melancholy about a lake in winter that suited his mood. He had disposed of the fragments of the burned-out rocket motor that morning, dropping them at intervals in the woods. He supposed he had made himself Femke’s accomplice. Once again he toyed with the idea of trying to rescue her, driving her back to her home town. But they were bound to be stopped. Perhaps there was someone in the resistance who could hide her in The Hague. He could drive that short distance, surely? That was feasible. Maybe he would go back after all, and suggest it.
He was still turning the idea over in his mind when the wail of the air raid siren carried from the direction of the town.
It was the first time he had heard the warning for weeks. His immediate thought, just as it had been at Peenemünde, was that it was most likely to be a drill. He was only about three hundred metres short of the tented base of the technical troop. But instead of running up the road to take cover in its air raid trenches, he stayed on the bench and scanned the sky. Judging by the way the V2s had disappeared that morning, almost as soon as they began to tilt, he reckoned the cloud cover must be high, maybe as much as 3,000 metres – dangerously high, now he came to think about it. Suddenly, against the grey, he saw tiny smudges of black erupting, like puffs of squid ink, followed by the distant pom-pom-pom of the anti-aircraft batteries opening up from their positions in Oostduinen.
That brought him to his feet.
The tactics of a Spitfire formation on a bombing run were to approach from a height of around 8,000 feet, identify the target, roll onto their backs and dive in line very steeply, at an angle of 75 degrees, to an altitude of 3,000 feet; release their bombs from an almost vertical position, the leader first; and then pull back hard on their joysticks and climb away at full throttle. This was the manoeuvre that 602 Squadron had been practising above the fens of East Anglia over the past few days, and this was the spectacle Graf witnessed that November morning: four dots dropping out of the clouds to the north, in perfect file, swelling rapidly in size and noise, the whining note of their dives rising to a crescendo, heading straight towards him. The precision of it was so extraordinary – the loud piston-crack of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engines so unlike anything he had ever heard – that the engineer in him remained riveted to the spot, even as he saw the bombs detach from beneath the warplanes’ wings. Only when he heard the whistle of their descent did he realise the danger.
He threw himself full-length, pressed his face into the wet grass and covered his head with his hands just as the boom of the explosions started rolling across the lake. Each detonation vibrated through his stomach. He felt horribly exposed with his back presented to the sky. He imagined the pattern of the bombs creeping closer. He counted eight in all. When the last of the reverberations died away, he lay for another minute listening to the drone of the Spitfires’ engines dwindling in the distance, pursued by the rattle of heavy-calibre machine-gun fire.
He picked himself up. A shroud of black smoke was rising above the woods on the opposite side of the lake. Some of the thin pines close to the shore were on fire from top to bottom, like burning brands.
Was it really over? At Peenemünde the bombing had gone on for the best part of an hour, wave after wave of it. He squinted at the sky, but there was nothing to see except a few dirty wisps of brown smoke, the residue of exploded shells, already fading.
He set off up the road. As he rounded the curve, several dozen men in grey overalls began emerging from the side lane that led to the technical troop’s tents. They crossed the street and gathered to stare across the lake. A Kübelwagen appeared behind them, sounding its horn to clear a path. Colonel Huber climbed out of the front seat, followed by Lieutenant Klein from the driver’s side. Biwack jumped out of the