A thousand suns

It was their last chance to fight for a truce, that’s why he had volunteered, and for no other reason; not for glory, not for vanity. Whatever the motive behind the note, whoever had managed to ensure it had made its way to the last man to lay hands on this weapon, Max decided, the attempt had been in vain. The mission had to go on. He and his men had managed to fight their way across France and the Atlantic, he owed it to his men, to Schroder and his pilots, to the millions of civilians across their homeland who would die if the war didn’t come to an end right now.

He began to ball the note up in his hands.

And stopped.

What exactly is the risk of using this weapon?

He recalled those few words; words he had not been meant to hear. The door had closed on the answer, but the question, Major Rall’s question, he had heard.

What is the risk of using this weapon?

The civilian, Hauser, had answered quietly, the murmur of his reply for the Major’s ears only. Rall had heard the answer to that question only a short time before they had assembled outside the hangar ready to take off.

And how odd the Major had been.

Max recalled those few awkward moments, standing in front of the bomber, watching Schroder and his men climbing into their fighters and preparing to take off… and the Major’s unusual, uncharacteristic behaviour. And then Max recalled the Major had tried to say something, urgently, insistently, quietly.

He was trying to warn me.

Major Rall had attempted to warn Max of something. He had thought the Major was warning him to be careful handling the bomb; that Hauser had imparted to him at this late stage some element of risk that the Major felt in all fairness should have been relayed directly to Max. That particular rationalisation of the Major’s odd, hurried last exchange had made sense to Max as he had replayed it in his mind in the few moments he’d had since taking off to reflect upon the matter. The Major, he thought, had been trying to convey one last cautionary piece of advice, but in the haste, the moment, the noise, it had been lost and cast aside as Max had focused on the mission itself.

But this note… and those overheard words, and the Major’s hurried, desperate last-ditch attempt to warn him, interrupted, he now recalled, all too hastily by Hauser… all of those things gave Max a reason to pause, to unscrew the paper in his hand. He looked once more at the note, rereading the scribbled lines.

The Major must have been informed by the civilian, Hauser, of the bomb’s true nature. The discussion he had overheard a mere snippet of was just that: Rall’s discovery of the real danger, for the first time. And now, Max replayed those final moments on the airstrip — the haunted look on the Major’s face, his distracted demeanour and the final desperate look of anxiety on his face as he had tried to warn Max with a carefully phrased sentence.

And then there was that civilian, Hauser, his speech… perhaps, as he revelled in the moment, he had let slip more than he had intended.

We will turn all of New York into Stalingrad…

Max looked down at the crumpled paper in his hands. ‘Not just New York,’ he muttered.

His mind cruelly began to replay visions of devastation, the horror that he had seen with his own eyes in recent months. The ashes of a city, stretching as far as could be seen, a world of blackened wood, grey rubble and white dust. The bloated, twisted bodies poking from the ground, contorted by heat as they half-cooked from the flames of destruction, yet still raw inside, raw enough to rot, decompose and swell the dark leathery skin to the point of bursting with noxious gases.

Max had briefly struggled with the notion it would be he alone that would be responsible for arming and releasing a weapon that would turn an untouched city, a magnificent city by all that he’d seen of it from newsreels and the occasional movie, into that — that vision of hell upon earth. But now, if this letter was to be believed, if the Major was to be believed, then he might well be the one who would turn the whole world into — and that civilian, Hauser, had put it perfectly — Stalingrad.

Hans took a look at Stef sleeping fitfully beside him. He remembered when Stef had first joined them back in the early months of 1944. He had been a hastily trained recruit, drawn straight out of school to replace Jurgen Dancht, who had died in a field hospital after catching influenza. Stef had been a pain in the arse, too fucking young and stupid to deserve to make it through the war in one piece. But he had, and annoying though the lad could be, it would be a shame to have made it so far and die within sight of the end. Mind you, he thought, if the boy had been drafted into the infantry he wouldn’t have lasted long. Stef was too clumsy, too gawky, the kind of poor sod who stands out, whose head always seems to be the one found slap bang in the middle of a sniper’s cross-hair. Stef was the kind of poor fool who always died first.