"Yes, sir."
"Then there"s no point in waiting."
The man at the radio console relayed Wilson"s permission to take off to the pilot. Kammler smiled and crossed his fingers. General Nebe remained impa.s.sive. Ernst took a deep breath and licked his lips, then bit his index finger. Wilson heard the birds singing, the wind moaning through the forest, the babbling of a brook beside the hangar, where the land rose protectively. He thought of his first prototype, the Flegelrad, or Wingwheel, which had been a crude affair based on the principles of the wheel, with its many wings radiating out to the rim and revolving around the pilot"s c.o.c.kpit at the centre of gravity. Impossible to control, its balance destroyed by its vibrations, it had been superseded by a later model, in which balance was achieved with a new stabilizing mechanism and the earlier Rocket-motor was replaced by an advanced turbojet engine. That second model flew, but not much better than a helicopter, so Wilson had experimented with his smaller, remote-controlled model, the Feuerbatl. Finally, this, the Kugelblitz, the perfect aeronautical machine, would allow for frictionless air flow and defeat the former limitations imposed by the boundary layer. Thus, he was giving the world a saucer-shaped, jetpropelled aircraft of extraordinary speed and manoeuvrability.
And at last it was taking off. Tilted downward, the adjustable jet engines roared into life, spewed searing yellow flames at the earth, and created a circular wall of fire around the saucer, between its rim and the ground. The flames beat at the blackened earth, roaring down, shooting up and outward. The saucer shimmered eerily in the rising heat waves and then took on a crimson glow. It shuddered violently for a moment, swayed from side to side, bounced up and down on its shock-absorbing legs, then lifted tentatively off the ground.
It hovered in mid-air, floating magically on a bed of fire, then roared louder and ascended vertically, thrust upward by the flaming jets, and was distorted in the shimmering heat waves. It turned to a silvery jelly, then became a lava flow, red and yellow and glaring white, then hovered magically once more, about ten metres up, before roaring demonically, the noise shocking, almost deafening, and suddenly disappearing, though in fact it had shot vertically skyward, to be framed by the rising sun.
It stopped there, bouncing lightly in the sun"s shimmering, oblique striations, then shot off again, this time flying horizontally, to disappear beyond the horizon in the wink of an eye.
Wilson heard the applause around him, then the pilot"s voice on the radio, distorted by the static but obviously exultant, confirming that he was flying beyond the limit of his air-speed indicator, higher than the upper limit of his altimeter, and already could see the Elbe River, winding toward Hamburg. He soon saw the curved horizon, the Baltic Sea, the port of Rgen, then he turned back and was soon crossing Magdeburg and reappeared as a flash of light above the green, forested hills of the majestic Harz Mountains. That flash of light became a silvery coin, a flying saucer, a glowing disc then, abruptly, the Kugelblitz was right above them, hovering high up in thin air, again framed by the rising sun. It descended vertically, perfectly, on pillars of yellow flame. The flames scorched the earth and flew outward in all directions and formed a bed of fire and smoke, then the Kugelblitz settled down on the steel platform, which its flames had made red-hot. It subsided onto its shock absorbers, bouncing lightly, swaying gracefully, then its engines cut out, leaving a sudden, shocking silence, and the flames died out and the smoke drifted away and the flying saucer was visible.
It was resting on its shock-absorbing legs, gleaming silvery in the sunlight, a technological object of rare beauty, an extraordinary achievement.
"We"ve won," Wilson said with quiet pride. "Now let"s blow it to smithereens."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR The landscape that Ernst drove through on his way to Himmler"s unofficial headquarters in Dr Gebhardt"s sanatorium at Hohenlychen, 120 kilometres north of Berlin, resembled the interior of his own mind: a place of ruins and mounting rubble, a cold, bleak terrain.
He had felt this way since the death of Ingrid and the children first grief, then guilt, then despair, then a feeling like death and he now sensed that he would never feel better as long as he lived. He understood that this was why he"d decided to throw in his lot with Wilson. He needed the American"s icy confidence, his air of calm invincibility, but he also needed to hide away in a place like the Antarctic the way other men, disillusioned with or frightened by life, hide themselves in isolated monasteries, wanting only the silence of the day and the night"s lonesome wind.
He wanted escape.
Reaching the sanatorium, he wasn"t surprised to find it surrounded by trucks and heavily armed SS troops, just as the Fhrer"s bunker in the Chancellery had been. Even though wearing his uniform, Ernst had to show his papers to an unsmiling guard at the main gate, then was escorted inside the building, past other guarded doors, and into Himmler"s personal study. The Reichsfhrer was at his desk, leaning slightly forward to look down through his pince-nez at a large astrological chart, but he looked up when Ernst entered and offered a wan smile. Ernst saluted and murmured "Heil Hitler!" because this ridiculous formality was still being kept up then Himmler, who rarely invited his guests to sit, actually told him to do so.
Ernst sat in the chair facing the desk as Himmler was saying, "You have come from Berlin, Captain Stoll?"
"Yes, sir," Ernst replied. "After flying in from Nordhausen, I was expecting to find you in the Chancellery, so naturally I went there first."
"I"m not feeling too well," Himmler said testily, "so I came here for a much-needed rest."
Ernst did not choose to argue, though he knew that Himmler had in fact come here to get away from the bombings and the general madness overtaking Berlin, now that his envisaged Thousand Year Reich had shrunk to the area confined between two rivers, the Rhine and the Oder, and was about to be annihilated completely with enemy attacks from the east and west. Also, since January, when he had been given the responsibility of stopping Marshal Zhukov"s advance to the Oder River but failed lamentably to do so, his position of trust with Hitler had been lost. Now, along with Goring and Speer, he was a rejected former favourite, forced to watch the fanatical Martin Bormann gain the trust of an increasingly paranoid Fhrer and become arrogant with it.
"And how were things in Berlin?" Himmler asked, as if he had not been there for months.
Ernst sighed and shrugged. "The same. There are air raids every day and night. Our courageous Fhrer insists on staying in the Chancellery bunker and refuses to give in."
"Most admirable," Himmler said.
"Yes," Ernst replied. "Indeed." Not mentioning that Hitler"s bunker, deep beneath the Chancellery garden, had more than once been badly damaged by Allied bombs and was a most depressing sight, with air vents covered in cardboard, the rooms now barren of their former paintings, tapestries, and carpets, rubble on the floors, planks thrown across gaping holes filled with water from burst mains, and an almost daily breakdown of water and electricity. Hitler himself had appeared to be in a dreadful condition, with a limp left arm, an incapacitated right hand, a general lack of muscular coordination, obvious breathing problems, and an embarra.s.sing tendency to absent-mindedness and outbursts of paranoid anger. Because of this, there were armed SS troops standing guard at every door, in every corridor. The bunker was rife with rumours about suspected plots, coups, and a.s.sa.s.sination attempts that, if nothing else, distracted everyone from the bombs raining down almost non-stop. In short, a nightmare.
"Did you speak personally to the Fhrer?"
"No, sir. I only saw him in the Chancellery air-raid shelter, when he was conversing with some of his officers."
"Did you hear my name mentioned?" Himmler asked anxiously, twisting his snake ring around on his finger.
"No, Reichsfhrer," Ernst lied.
"You don"t think he"s heard about...?" But his voice trailed off into an uneasy silence, as if he couldn"t even mention the subject that was, even more than his recent rejection, gnawing away at him.
Ernst knew what his deeper anxiety was about.
The past couple of months had seen the disaster in the Ardennes, the terrible bombing of Dresden, the Soviet crossing of the Oder River, and the Allied advance to the bank of the Rhine, where they were, this very day, ma.s.sing for their advance into Germany.
Not oblivious to this dreadful turning of the tide, and encouraged by his ma.s.seur, Felix Kersten a dubious character and doctor without a medical degree as well as by his chief of espionage, General Walter Sch.e.l.lenberg, Himmler had earlier in the month held a secret meeting right here with Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, in an attempt to negotiate a separate peace. The attempt had failed, but now Himmler was terrified that the Fhrer would find out what he had been up to behind his back even more so because his former personal adjutant and current SS chief in Italy, General Karl Wolff, had also been negotiating behind the Fhrer"s back, first with Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Switzerland, then with two Allied generals in Ascona, Switzerland.
Himmler was convinced that if Hitler found out, he, Himmler, would be executed without further ado. No wonder he was a dramatically changed man, his pale face now sweaty.
"No, Reichsfhrer," Ernst replied, keeping his face composed. "I don"t think he"s heard anything at all. In fact, I don"t think he hears much about anything except the war"s progress, which of course is disastrous."
"That"s the talk of a traitor!" Himmler snapped with a sudden, surprising burst of energy.
"I apologize, Reichsfhrer," Ernst said quickly. "I meant no disrespect. I merely point out that even the Chancellery is being bombed every day and the enemy is closing in from east and west and will soon be entering Berlin."
Visibly sagging again, Himmler looked down at the ring he was twisting neurotically on his finger, studied it for a moment, then looked up again with a hopeful gleam in his normally distant gaze. "We might still be able to stop them," he said, "with our new, secret weapons."