V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

HORROR AND MISTLETOE

DECEMBER 12, 1942

God forgive me, Wernher von Braun thought, what have I done?

A vast canopy of camouflage netting concealed the construction site in the river valley that ran through the Kohnstein range of the Harz Mountains. Made of parachute silk, opaque triangular segments interspaced with transparent segments, the nets were suspended eight meters above the ground from long poles, effectively hiding the construction site from any enemy reconnaissance aircraft that might happen to fly overhead. Indeed, when von Braun had flown in from Peenemünde, he had had trouble spotting the site from his Storch; everything below looked like a forested mountain ridge. Yet even the most clever camouflage couldn’t hide what lay below from anyone who walked beneath the nets.

A long monorail, shaped in cross section like an isosceles triangle with its broad side against the ground, was being built beneath the net. Five meters in height and already one and a half kilometers long, it stretched out along the dry valley like a white ribbon made of steel-reinforced concrete. Perfectly horizontal and painstakingly flawless in every detail, the half-finished monorail would have been an engineering marvel worthy of admiration were it not for the reason it was being built.

Although von Braun tried to focus his attention on the Silbervogel launch rail, his gaze kept returning—reluctantly, despite his best efforts—to the men laboring in its shadows. Dressed in tattered and grimy prison stripes, their feet often bare despite the fresh snow that lay thick upon the ground, the men were so emaciated that they resembled walking corpses; shaved heads and missing teeth only added to their ghastly appearance. Hundreds of men, perhaps as many as a thousand, struggled to build the rail: pouring concrete, mixing cement, pushing wheelbarrows, using pickaxes to dig a path across the frozen ground and break down rocks and boulders in their way, laying down steel rebar and hammering it into place… all beneath the watchful and merciless eyes of soldiers who strode up and down the site. The sounds of men at work were punctuated with the crack of leather whips, the occasional agonized cry.

And those were the lucky ones, the prisoners who got to work outside. Behind him, the rail made a long, gradual turn that went up a slope to a large, n-shaped iron tower still under construction. On the other side of the tower, the monorail merged with a railroad track; from there, the monorail and the rail track split apart and, running in parallel, continued uphill to the nearby mountainside, where they disappeared into giant tunnels that had been excavated in the steep granite bluff.

Von Braun knew what was going on in the tunnels. And although it was his duty to visit them, it was the last thing he wanted to do.

“It’s coming along well, don’t you think?” A short, barrel-chested man with dark brush-cut hair and a thick mustache walked alongside von Braun, gloved hands thrust in the pockets of his wool overcoat. It was a cold morning, and everyone except the prisoners was bundled up against the brisk wind that moved through the mountains. “One and a half kilometers of launch track already laid, ahead of schedule.”

“Yes… ahead of schedule.” Von Braun was distracted. Not far away, an old man—probably really only in his early fifties yet withered by starvation and cruelty—dropped a sledgehammer and sagged against the rail, his head dropping to his chest.

“Not progressing fast enough for you, Wernher?” Eugen Sanger peered at him, thick brows furrowing. “I assure you, the track will be finished by summer even though we’ve had some problems we’re still trying to overcome.”

“What sorts of problems?” Von Braun watched as one of the guards angrily stormed over to the prisoner. Two other laborers had stopped what they were doing to try getting their companion back on his feet, but the soldier yanked them away as if they were nothing more than mannequins. He grabbed the old man’s shoulder and shook him roughly, yelling something von Braun couldn’t quite hear.

“Well, as you know, this track has to be perfectly straight and level for its entire length from the point of engine ignition.” Silbervogel’s designer and the Luftwaffe’s chief engineer at Mittelwerk pointed toward the eastern end of the valley, the direction in which the monorail was being built. “So much as the slightest bend or dip and”—he threw up his hands—“poof! the sled goes off the track, and Silver Bird is destroyed.”

“Yes, of course,” von Braun said. “I can see how that might be…”

His voice trailed off. Instead of standing up, the old man fell forward, collapsing on his hands and knees at the soldier’s feet. The soldier was still shouting at him, but the prisoner was exhausted past the point of being able to get up on his own power. Another prisoner started to come forward to help him, but two other men held him back.

The soldier said something more. Von Braun couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like, “Go to hell.” Then he pulled his Luger from his belt holster, planted its muzzle against the back of the old man’s head, and squeezed the trigger.

Von Braun quickly looked away. The gunshot was still echoing off the valley walls when he felt Sanger touch his arm. “Don’t show your feelings,” he said softly. “There’s nothing you can do, and someone might see you.”

Von Braun darted a glance at Sanger, was surprised to see sympathy in his eyes. Until then, he’d always considered the Austrian engineer to be something of a cold fish, obsessed with making his creation a reality at the expense of all else. It was a small relief to discover otherwise.

Von Braun had been secretly pleased when Goering finally ceded to Sanger’s repeated demands that he be allowed to supervise the final steps of Silver Bird’s construction. That gave von Braun an excuse to remain in Peenemünde, which continued to be Wa Pruff 11’s headquarters and research facility, while the final vehicle fabrication moved south to Mittelwerk, the underground rocket base built within unfinished railroad tunnels in the Harz Mountains. He’d never liked Eugen Sanger very much, but there was also another reason why he was reluctant to move to Mittelwerk.

Like many other German citizens, von Braun had tried hard to ignore the concentration camps that had sprung up around the country. At first he’d pretended that they didn’t exist, or that the only people there were criminals who deserved to be incarcerated. And even after it became obvious that the Gestapo and SS were cleaning out the cities and towns and sending anyone they considered to be less than a perfect German—Jews, gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, dissidents, or anyone else they determined to be detrimental to the Third Reich—he’d preferred to believe the newsreel footage of the camps: clean and uncrowded dwellings with comfortable beds, good food served in dining halls, contented “detainees” tending vegetable gardens and sewing Army uniforms in workshops. Anything else was nothing more than ugly rumors that had no basis in truth.

Concentration camp prisoners had done hard labor at Peenemünde, but they were mainly foreigners, Russian and Polish soldiers who’d been sent to Germany. None of them seemed to be mistreated, at least not so much to draw von Braun’s notice. So when he was presented a form requisitioning prisoners from the nearby Dora camp to Mittelwerk, he signed it without a second thought. Himmler’s demand that Silbervogel be ready to fly by late next spring was his top priority; the project was already behind schedule, and it needed a new source of raw labor if it was going to be completed by its deadline.

It wasn’t until lately that he’d discovered the horror that he had helped create.

And there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Sanger took him by the arm and gently turned him away from the monorail. “The main engine has been installed within the fuselage,” he said, deliberately changing the subject, “but I’d like to test it again, just to be sure.”

“It was given a final static test before it was shipped down here,” von Braun said.

“Yes, it was… but still, I’d like to make sure.” Sanger motioned to the iron tower that straddled the launch rail. “Once the mating tower is complete, I think we can use it to brace Silver Bird for a short ignition test… say, ten to fifteen seconds. We can do the same for the launch sled. In fact, I’d recommend it.”

Von Braun nodded, barely noticing that Sanger was leading him uphill toward the tunnels. “That would be a good idea, yes. And it will give us a chance to practice the procedures for mating the vehicle with the sled… but only if we can do so without damaging either of them,” he added.

Sanger chuckled. “Wernher, the very last thing I’d ever do is damage my Silver Bird. You know that.”

My Silver Bird. This wasn’t the first time von Braun had heard Eugen Sanger refer to the spacecraft as if it were his personal possession. On the other hand, he couldn’t be blamed for doing so. As much as von Braun hated to admit it, the fact of the matter was that Silver Bird was a more ambitious—indeed, more imaginative—design for spaceflight than the multistage rockets von Braun and the other former VfR scientists had been pursuing. It would never reach the Moon, of course, but later versions might be able to lift into orbit the components of a lunar spacecraft, perhaps even ships for a Mars expedition. Sanger himself saw Silver Bird as the prototype of an intercontinental transport, one capable of carrying passengers from one side of the world to the other in only a couple of hours. Although von Braun was still irate that the A-4 had been canceled just as it was on the eve of success, he was forced to acknowledge that Silbervogel was superior technology…

If it worked. And if its maiden flight was a success, its birth would be marked by the violent deaths of thousands of American civilians.

Not for the first time, von Braun wondered if Sanger had forgotten this or even cared. But then, hadn’t he himself chosen to accept the same willful ignorance?

By then, they’d reached the top of the slope. The tunnels lay ahead, giant stone-lined shafts cut straight into the living rock. They slowly approached the tunnel on the left, following the railroad tracks that prisoners were hammering into place. From the tunnel came the echoing sounds of the work going on within: sledgehammers pounding away at granite, the hissing roar of acetylene torches, the occasional clang of iron beams being dropped.

Von Braun was just about to follow Sanger into the tunnel when something caught his eye: a raised wooden platform erected just outside, with three tall posts shaped like upside-down L’s rising behind them. It wasn’t until he saw a coarse hemp rope tied into a noose dangling from one of the posts that he realized what they were.

From the corner of his eye, he saw that Sanger was watching him. “How often has that been used?” he whispered.

“Four times,” Sanger whispered back, his face carefully neutral. And then he added, “That is, four times yesterday.”

Nausea swept through his stomach. Von Braun hastily looked away. A soldier stood nearby, submachine gun cradled in his arms. The guard seemed to be closely observing him, watchful for any sign of emotions that, in turn, might betray disloyalty to the Fatherland. Von Braun pretended not to notice as he let Sanger lead him into the tunnel.

Before the war, the two tunnels had been intended to allow passenger and freight trains to pass beneath the Kohnstein range. Work had stopped on them a couple of years ago; now they were being enlarged to serve as an underground hangar for Silver Bird and its launch sled. The pounding noise came from the far end of the tunnel, where slaves broke granite beneath the flickering light of oil lamps. The air they breathed was heavy with rock dust, their hands were swollen and bloody, and they sweated like animals. Not far away, their companions slept uneasily upon four-tier bunk beds that were little more than storage shelves for human beings; anyone who had a blanket was fortunate. No one dared speak in the presence of the guards or even try to rest. There was only one form of punishment; if you were lucky, it came swiftly as a bullet to the brain, and if you weren’t so lucky, you slowly choked to death at the end of a rope.

Silver Bird lay within a cradle that rested upon the flatbed train car that had carried it down from Peenemünde. It took up most of this end of the tunnel, with each wingtip just a couple of meters short of touching the walls. The craft was clearly complete; workmen on scaffolds were welding the last titanium plates to its fuselage, while technicians standing beside open service panels beneath the wings were rigging the control surfaces. As von Braun strolled past the spacecraft, he noticed his reflection, distorted yet distinct, upon the sleek surface of the lower hull.

At least Silver Bird was living up to its description. What remained to be seen was whether it would actually fly. It bothered him to no end that there would be no test flights before it was sent on its mission, but the High Command was adamantly opposed to anything that might prematurely reveal the existence of Germany’s secret weapon. So all tests were being done on the ground, under conditions of maximum secrecy.

“We’re still awaiting delivery of the acceleration couch,” Sanger said, pointing to the open cockpit hatch. “I trust that the pilot’s dimensions haven’t changed, yes?”

“Not unless someone decided to change the pilot.” Von Braun hesitated, then quietly added, “If that happens, you’ll be the first to know… after me, that is.”

A knowing smile played beneath Sanger’s mustache. Although he, Arthur Rudolph, and von Braun had coauthored a long memo to Goering carefully specifying the requirements for the Silver Bird pilot, the final selection hadn’t been up to them. Goering had interviewed a dozen Luftwaffe pilots before settling upon four final candidates, then a committee comprised of him, Himmler, and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had picked the one who’d have the honor of being the first man in space. Von Braun had met him when Goebbels escorted him to Peenemünde: Lieutenant Horst Reinhardt, twenty-seven years old, a Messerschmidt Bf-109E fighter ace with seven confirmed kills over Britain, and more recently a test pilot for the Luftwaffe’s experimental jet-aircraft program. Upon talking with him in his office, it didn’t take von Braun long to determine that Lieutenant Reinhardt was an unimaginative drone who barely comprehended the nature of his mission. However, intelligence probably wasn’t the reason why he’d been chosen; blue-eyed and blond-haired, he was just the sort of Aryan superman the propaganda minister adored. He’d look great in newsreels once his mission was complete.

“Yes, well…” Sanger coughed in his hand. “If it does, please tell me at once. We’ll need not only to alter the dimensions of the couch, but we’ll also have to adjust the cockpit’s oxygen-pressure variables to suit him.”

Von Braun nodded, his face grim. That was something else he didn’t like to think about, the high-altitude research done by a physician Sigmund Raschler, for the Luftwaffe Institute. When Dr. Raschler had expressed reluctance to use Luftwaffe pilots for his experiments, Himmler had given him a solution: concentration camp prisoners. One by one, detainees had been marched into decompression chambers or submerged in tubs of ice water, their reactions closely studied until they died. The results had been volumes of medical data invaluable for the development of manned spaceflight, but at a hideous and inhuman cost.

Von Braun looked away from Silver Bird, toward the interior end of the tunnel. The tunnels were being expanded for reasons beyond the current mission. If it was a success, the plan was for more Silver Birds to be built until there were enough for the Third Reich to impose its military might across the entire globe. No place on Earth would be beyond their range. The spacecraft could dive from space and drop their bombs on an enemy nation’s cities, killing civilians by the thousands, until their governments surrendered.

Or at least that was the idea. Privately, von Braun doubted it would happen. The Silbervogel Projekt was far more expensive than anyone had anticipated, draining human and material resources from the war effort. The cost of the titanium alone was so high that he doubted that they’d be able to construct even a second spacecraft, let alone a fleet. If so much time and energy hadn’t already been committed to building Silver Bird, von Braun had little doubt that the High Command would have already pulled the plug.

Yet Goering was convinced that Silver Bird would change the course of the war. Hitler might not conquer the world, but if the Americans invaded Europe—which was inevitable, and everyone knew it—at least he’d be able to dictate terms for their withdrawal. Once that happened, the Reich would be able to solidify its control of western Europe, and a new German empire would be born.

Many years ago, as a teenager entranced by Hermann Oberth’s visions, von Braun had decided to devote his life to the exploration of space. This was not where he’d ever expected to find himself, and he doubted that Sanger had either, despite his unswerving dedication to Silbervogel. One day, perhaps soon, a spacecraft would carry men to the Moon, maybe even to Mars. But the idea that it might bear the red swastika flag…

We will pay a terrible price for this, he thought. If we are successful, history will never forgive us for the way our victory was achieved.

In the nearby village of Nordhausen, a sedan driven by a young woman named Greta Carlsberg came to a halt in front of the small Bavarian-style cottage on the outskirts of town. Climbing out of the car, Frau Carlsberg took a moment to look around, as if to admire the remote and wooded place where she’d chosen to live. Then she opened the trunk, pulled out a couple of suitcases, and lugged them beneath the garden trellis and up the flagstone walk to the front door. Putting down her luggage, she retrieved a brass key from a pocket of her shapeless overcoat and used it to let herself in.

Greta Carlsberg was a sort of woman who’d become sadly familiar in Germany: a war widow, her husband recently killed in service to the Reich. Until then, she’d lived in Berlin, where she’d made a living as a commercial artist. Her husband’s death in Russia had shattered her—she didn’t even have his body to bury since it had been left on a battlefield outside Leningrad—and she’d soon discovered that she could no longer bear to remain in the apartment they had shared until he’d joined the Army. So she’d decided to sell the apartment, pack up her belongings, and move away from the city to a place in the country where she could quietly paint and be alone with her grief.

This was what she’d told the real estate agent who’d searched for a furnished house that she could rent for a year or two. At her request, he’d looked for something in Nordhausen, a town Greta fondly remembered from family vacations when she was a little girl. She was lucky; just such a place was available. So here she was, taking occupancy of the place where she could retreat from the world while she recovered from her loss.

All of this was, in the parlance of the espionage profession, a “legend” created to conceal the truth. Frieda Koenig was her true name; although she had indeed been born and raised in Germany, her family had moved to England when she was a child, and most of her adult life had been spent working as a deep-cover field agent for MI-6. Operating under the code name Mistletoe, she’d visited Germany twice already during the war, using her carefully constructed background for short-term intelligence-gathering missions. A couple of months earlier, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services had borrowed Frieda from MI-6 for another assignment, perhaps a little more sedate than the ones she’d done before but also more important.

She paused to shut the door behind her and take off her coat, then carried her bags through the cozy sitting room to the bedroom in the back of the house. The rest of her belongings were still out in the car, including the easel and paints she’d use to establish the appearance of a reasonably talented painter—which in fact she was—but just then her first priority was the concealment of the most important thing she had brought with her from England.

Placing the smaller of the two suitcases on the bed, she opened it to reveal what lay inside: a Type A Mk III wireless radio, specially designed by the British Army for covert operations. Built into the suitcase itself, it was completely self-contained except for the power supply, which could run on either alternating or direct current. The radio didn’t have a microphone but instead relied on a Morse telegraph key, yet it had a range of eight hundred kilometers, sufficient to reach MI-6 headquarters in London.

Frieda closed the bedroom door and took a moment to check the window before running the power cord to a wall socket and plugging it in. She examined the crystal to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged, then turned on the radio and, once it was warmed up, fitted the headphones over her ears. The telegraph key was located on its wood plaque; she rested it on her leg, turned the frequency knob to the proper setting, then tapped out a quick, coded message—Mistletoe arrived and in position—before switching off again. Repeating the message or waiting for confirmation was an unnecessary risk; if the Gestapo picked up the transmissions, they might be able to trace them to their point of origin. As it was, she was on and off the air so fast, it was doubtful that she’d even been noticed.

Frieda switched off the Mk III and unplugged it, then put everything back into the suitcase, closed it, and found an innocuous place for it on a closet shelf. Now she could begin the more routine business of making herself at home. But first, she wanted to get a look at the scenery. After all, it was the principal reason why she was here.

A back door from the sitting-room door let her out into a small garden, its flower beds and rosebushes colorless with the coming of winter but no doubt quite pleasant the rest of the year. The cottage was surrounded by woods, with no other houses in sight; her privacy was assured, but it still made sense for her to set up her easel here and get started on a painting, to provide an explanation to anyone who might happen to drop by as to why Frau Carlsberg spent so much time in the backyard.

Standing with her arms folded across her chest, Frieda gazed into the distance. Beyond the trees, she could see the Harz Mountains just a few kilometers away to the north. Approaching the rocket base MI-6 knew to be hidden somewhere within them would be risky, even if she pretended to be lost, but those weren’t her orders. Her job was to simply maintain an observation post: watch, listen, and immediately report any unusual activity.

Frieda smiled to herself as she turned to go back inside. An important assignment, yes, but probably rather tedious as well, at least on a day-to-day basis. At least she’d get a chance to broaden her skills with a few landscapes. Being a spy was only her wartime occupation; once this was all over, she intended to become an artist for real.