Vengeance 10

During the next two weeks the total resources remaining at Peenemunde were mobilised to prepare the V-10. In mid-January a barge docked at Peenemunde village, and under heavy SS guard, a steel cylinder five metres in diameter by four in length was unloaded and moved by specially constructed trailer across the island to the V-10 launch complex. The cylinder contained the thirty metric-ton warhead of Amatol high explosive. The assembly crews took two days to substitute a set of auxiliary fuel tanks for the explosive and mate the final stage of the V-10 to the second. The cylinder containing the explosive was then removed from the launch complex and hidden.

The V-10 had assumed its final configuration: a tapering cylinder more than fifty metres high, twenty-five wide at its base, and consisting of four main sections or stages. The first contained twenty-one M 103.5 rocket engines, each generating one hundred and fifty-nine thousand kilograms of thrust, plus two immense fuel tanks which were kept pressurised at all times to support the weight above, and which would contain ninety per cent of the total weight of the entire assembly in liquid oxygen and alcohol. The second stage was a miniature version of the first, powered by four of the same engines and containing five per cent of the vehicle’s weight in fuel and liquid oxygen.

Bethwig had worked out the equations for the Earth-moon trajectory in 1939, and he and von Braun had spent many hours since refining and polishing them, even to the point of modifying a Luftwaffe pilot’s circular slide rule to calculate the effects of changes in velocity and weight quickly and accurately. With sufficient fuel load and power, the moon, a target constantly visible to an observer in space, could hardly be missed — providing the initial orbital injection speed fell within defined limits.

The third stage contained the relatively crude pilot’s cabin above the fuel tanks. Designed originally for transatlantic flights lasting no more than thirty minutes, it had little to offer in the way of pilot comfort. No body waste relief facilities had been included, and the system cobbled together by the Peenemunde staff presented one insurmountable problem — there was no way to test it under weightless conditions. The usual test procedure required an aircraft to fly a shallow outside loop, but now all flights had to be approved by Kammler’s office, and no one could think of a sufficiently believable excuse.

The warhead had originally been designed to separate from the third stage containing the pilot, which would then re-enter the atmosphere well behind the warhead. A steel mesh parachute would be deployed to slow the third stage sufficiently to permit the pilot, who would be carrying a pack including a rubber raft, small radio, and rations for several days, to bail out. If the pilot survived, it was hoped that he would be picked up by a U-boat stationed for that purpose in the area approximately one hundred kilometres off Long Island. If he was not picked up and it appeared that he would be rescued by an Allied ship, the pilot was to take his own life. Under no circumstances was the pilot to allow himself to fall into Allied hands. Each pilot, therefore, had been selected from the ranks of the SS especially for dedication as well as ability.

The entire Peenemunde staff had been drafted to ready the V-10, and they fell to with a willingness that surprised Kammler and his aides. Von Braun eased his suspicions by suggesting that as this was probably the last rocket launch they would ever conduct, the staff was eager to give its all. That seemed to satisfy Kammler, so that on the twelfth he shifted his headquarters south to the outskirts of Berlin, leaving the final details for the evacuation to be completed by a special staff which included a one-hundred-man SS security unit to supplement the five-man Gestapo team already well ensconced in Trassenheide.

The following day Bethwig set the launch date for Saturday, 27 January 1945.

* * *

Jan Memling could hear Janet humming in the tiny kitchen; the rattle of dishes and the clink of silverware acted as counterpoint. When she came out a few moments later with a wine bottle for him to open, he was standing by the telephone, one hand on the receiver.

‘Who was it, Jan?’ She threw one arm around his back, tickled his neck, and pressed hard against him. When he did not respond, she drew back, puzzled. ‘Jan…?’

He turned slowly, expression strained. For a long moment he stared as if she were not there. Janet had swept her hair up into a roll and was wearing a sheer negligee and high-heeled slippers. They had turned down invitations to several Christmas Eve parties to spend the night alone, and he had obtained a rare bottle of French champagne and two steaks from an American friend with access to a commissary officer at SHAEF.

‘I predict this as the last Christmas of the war in Europe,’ he had announced a week before. ‘So let’s celebrate properly.’