V-S Day: A Novel of Alternate History

THE FLIGHT OF THE LUCKY LINDA

JUNE 1, 1943 (CONTINUED)

Within minutes, Frieda Koenig’s radio message made its way around the world.

First it reached MI-6 headquarters in London, where a duty officer decoded the signal and, realizing its importance, alerted his superior. The Naval Intelligence officer instructed the duty officer to relay the signal to Washington, D.C., as a priority flash message.

In a Pentagon basement, a radio operator alerted a U.S. Army intelligence officer. This captain had been briefed on Silver Bird; he ordered alert messages sent to both McChord Field in Washington State and Alamogordo Army Air Field in New Mexico.

Silver Bird had just completed its first atmospheric skip when the Hollywood Babe took off from McChord. From his seat in the back of the B-29’s cockpit, Lloyd Kapman spotted the German spacecraft as it approached the American coast. The bomber’s radio operator sent a confirmation message to Alamogordo, which was already scrambling to prepare Lucky Linda for immediate launch.

And then…

“Six… five…”

Henry Morse’s voice reverberated through loudspeakers as Robert Goddard, standing at the periscope, watched the distant launchpad with the growing realization that he was too far away. He shouldn’t be in this concrete igloo, protected from the noise and the blast, but outside, where he could see the rocket lift off with his naked eyes.

“Four… three…”

“Primary ignition!” Goddard shouted. He didn’t stick around to see Harry Chung push a large red button on his console. Instead, he bolted away from the periscope and rushed toward the door. Startled, Omar Bliss tried to stop him, but Goddard impatiently shoved him out of the way.

“Two… one…”

“Coming through!” he snapped at the MP guarding the door. The sergeant shoved it open, and Goddard charged outside just in time to see a distant flash across the desert sands.

“Zero… launch!”

Brighter than the rising sun, white-hot flame poured from Lucky Linda’s main engine, followed an instant later by the simultaneous ignition of its six solid-fuel boosters. Dense grey smoke billowed out of the blast pit beneath the launch ring, a massive rooster tail of spent rocket fuel. For a moment, it seemed as if the spacecraft weren’t going anywhere, and Goddard felt his heart stop.

Please, no, he thought, unable to breathe. Please, God, no, not after all this…

Then, slowly at first, the spaceship rose from its pad, perched atop a blazing shaft that looked like nothing less than a column of hellfire.

“Go!” someone in the nearby trench shouted, and his cry was picked up by others around him. “Go! Go! Go…!” Goddard found himself joining the chant. “Go! Go! Go…!”

As Lucky Linda cleared the tower, a thunderball rolled across the desert, shaking the TV platform and causing the onlookers to clamp their hands over their ears, followed a moment later by a hot wind against their faces.

Goddard watched the craft as it hurtled upward. The thunder became a steady, crackling roar, louder than anything he’d ever heard before; it sounded as if the sky itself were being torn open. Shielding his eyes with an upraised hand, he suddenly found himself speechless. Here was his life’s ambition, born in a childhood moment of epiphany, made real; he was no longer looking at a weapon of war but the opening of the road to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. He was seeing the future.

Within seconds, the rocket became a brilliant circlet of lights moving swiftly away, leaving behind it a dense white trail as it veered to the northeast. The noise was just beginning to subside when Goddard remembered where he needed to be. Ears ringing, he turned and rushed back to the blockhouse.

Inside, he found his team no less excited than anyone who’d watched the launch from the trenches. They were all was on their feet, yelling at the images on the television screens, clapping each other on the back, tears streaming from their eyes. Only Jack Cube remained calm. Bent over his microphone, hands clasped against his headphones, he sought to hear something from the man in the spacecraft’s cockpit:

“Lucky Linda, this is Desert Bravo, do you copy?”

From the speakers, a voice filtered through the crackling static: “Desert… Lucky Linda. All systems…”

“Lucky Linda, can you repeat…?”

“Everyone, be quiet!” Goddard shouted. “Back to your stations!”

Silence fell across the blockhouse as everyone remembered what he was supposed to be doing. They sat down at once, returning their attention to their consoles. “Trajectory nominal,” Gerry Mander reported from the radar screen. “Range thirty-two miles, altitude forty-five thousand feet, velocity five thousand feet per second and rising. She’s…”

“Wa-hooo!”

Skid Sloman’s yell burst from the ceiling speakers, startling everyone in the room. Goddard jerked, his eyes widening behind his glasses. “Oh my God, is he…?”

“This thing’s climbing like a bat out of hell!” Sloman shouted. “Oh, yeah, Linda… bring it to me, baby!”

“He’s fine, Bob.” Jack smiled. “Just having the ride of his life.” He touched his mike again. “We copy loud and clear, Lucky Linda. Keep talking to us, Skid.”

“Perhaps he shouldn’t.” Bliss moved up beside Goddard. “May I remind you that he’s broadcasting in the clear?”

The colonel had a point. Lucky Linda was transmitting on a shortwave frequency of thirty thousand kilohertz, with sufficient power and range for Sloman’s voice to be picked up by ham operators from Southern California to the Maine coast.

“Little late to think of that now, isn’t it?” Henry asked.

Goddard simply smiled and shook his head. “Colonel, whatever happens next, if you think you’re going to be able to keep this secret any longer…”

He didn’t finish the thought. Now wasn’t the time to argue about military secrecy. Lucky Linda had gotten off the pad, but their work was only beginning.

Never letting his gaze leave the instrument panel, Skid Sloman clutched the attitude controller within his left hand and the main engine throttle with his right. Acceleration shoved him back in his couch; vibration constantly shook his body, rocking him back and forth. Skid hung on, though, consciously taking deep breaths as he peered through eyelids being squeezed shut by mounting g-force.

“Lucky Linda… still go,” he managed to gasp. “Altitude… ninety thousand feet. Velocity… seven thousand feet per second.” He checked the chronometer and fuel-pressure gauge. Yes, everything was going according to the mission flight plan. “Time to booster jettison… five… four… three…” He reached between his legs, found the yellow ring next to the attitude-control stick. “Two… one…”

He yanked the bar upward and heard a series of sharp, muffled bangs as explosive bolts fired along Lucky Linda’s stern. He couldn’t look back, but the sudden kick he got in the back told him that the six strap-on boosters had been successfully jettisoned. They would be falling away behind him now, leaving the spacecraft to continue its ascent on main-engine thrust alone.

The boosters were no longer needed. Lucky Linda was at the edge of space. Looking up from the instrument panel, Skid saw that the sky was rapidly changing from dark blue to black, the sun a merciless spotlight that threatened to blind him the instant he looked in that direction. The vibration was easing off, the ride becoming smoother. He could barely hear the engine.

“Bravo to Linda.” Jack Cube’s voice was thin and distorted by static, yet still discernible. “Coming up on main engine cutoff.”

“Roger that, Bravo.” Skid checked his instruments. Yes, his altitude was nearly thirty miles. Time to cut the main engine. He raised his right hand, found the engine’s toggle switch. “Cutoff in five… four… three… two… one…”

He snapped the switch, and instantly everything became still and silent. The vibration ceased entirely, and there was no more noise; the g-force pressure left his body at once, leaving behind a strange and ethereal sensation of lightness. It was free fall, of course; he’d felt this before, in fighter planes he’d put into power dives, but never quite like this.

No doubt about it. He was in space.

Skid laughed out loud. “Zero g and I feel fine. Tell Mutt and Jeff they’ve nothing to worry about.”

A moment passed, then he heard Jack’s voice again. “I’ll let ’em know. They’ll be happy to hear that. We got a lot of people down here gnawing their fingernails. Want to tell us your position, just so we know you’re not really in Texas?”

Skid looked at his instruments again. Without a functional pitot, his air altimeter and airspeed indicators were useless; the gyroscope, compass, and theodolite were his primary navigation instruments. But there was an easier way of figuring out where he was.

He toggled another switch to activate the orbital maneuvering system, then grasped the stick and—ever so carefully, the way he’d spent countless hours learning in the simulator—moved it to the left. Lucky Linda made a slow roll to starboard, maneuvering thrusters along its midsection silently firing to change its attitude. As Skid looked up through the canopy, his breath caught in his throat as Earth rolled into sight, a vast panorama of green, brown, and tan, traced by rivers and spotted with lakes that reflected the early-morning sun. The horizon was curved slightly at the ends; it stretched away for miles and miles and miles, farther than he’d ever seen before. There was a thin blue haze above the limb of the Earth, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the atmosphere.

“Oh, wow,” he murmured. “Jack, you gotta see this.”

“If you’re trying to make me jealous, you’re doing a good job. What’s your position?”

Checking the compass, Skid confirmed that he was on a fifty-seven-degree north-by-northeast bearing, then he peered more closely at the ground below. No oceans in sight; he must be somewhere over the American heartland. Yet there was a long, twisty river just ahead, with another river converging upon it from the west. He grinned with recognition: the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

“I’m above Missouri,” he said, “just about to fly over St. Louis.” The city was too far below for him to see; he was relying on his memory for geographic location. Something he’d read in the paper came back to him and he grinned. “Hey, I think the Yankees are playing the Cardinals today. Maybe I’ll drop in for the game.”

“Roger that.” Jack’s voice was terse. “Doctor G says to stop kidding around.”

Skid rolled his eyes. Goddard had no sense of humor. “Understood, Bravo,” he said. They were right, though. He had work to do.

Skid moved the stick to the right again, and once more Lucky Linda rolled around. Earth disappeared from sight; Silver Bird wouldn’t be coming from that direction but instead from somewhere above. That was where he needed to look for it.

He reached to his left side, unfolded the collapsible handle of a small, vertically mounted wheel, and began to slowly turn it. From just behind his head there came a small thump as a hatch in the cowling was opened; Skid twisted his head around as much as his helmet would let him and saw that the periscope had been successfully deployed. He had to strain against his pressure suit to reach the horizontally mounted eyepiece and telescope it over his right shoulder, but once the L-shaped reflector was in place, he had an adjustable rearview mirror to show him what was going on above and behind the ship.

The helmet had to go. He wouldn’t be able to use the periscope well while he was still wearing it. A quick glance at the interior pressure gauge to make sure that the cockpit hadn’t sprung a leak, then he reached up and twisted the helmet away from the suit-collar ring. A slight hiss, then his ears popped; he took a deep breath, then shoved the helmet between his legs and shut off the suit air. He adjusted the eyepiece and nodded to himself. Yeah, that was better.

Skid snapped another toggle switch, and the small radar screen in the center of the instrument panel glowed to life, tiny concentric circles pulsing outward every fifteen seconds. Nothing yet, but he knew Silver Bird was out there.

“Lucky Linda to Desert Bravo,” Skid said. “Time to go hunting.”

Silbervogel fell toward Earth.

Horst Reinhardt’s suit was plastered with sweat, so much that he’d decided to trust the cockpit’s integrity and remove his mask and goggles. The sweat didn’t only come from the heat generated by the seven atmospheric skips his craft had made in the past hour and twenty-two minutes. It came from the effort it took for him to keep the ship on course as it circled the globe.

Reinhardt had been warned that Silver Bird would be difficult to fly, so he’d prepared for that. During the months spent training for this mission, he’d had countless sessions in a cockpit simulator, learning how to navigate with only a few instruments and celestial bearings to rely upon; he wouldn’t be able to use the bombsight periscope until he opened the bomb bay doors, and he couldn’t do that until he completed his final atmospheric entry. He’d become adept at instrument flying during the simulator sessions, yet even so, actual practice was proving to be more difficult.

Silver Bird had no maneuvering thrusters other than its auxiliary engines, and he’d used up the rest of his fuel in the first minutes of his flight. Inertia, gravity, and the aerodynamic properties of his craft were the factors keeping it airborne. Each time gravity pulled Silbervogel back into the upper atmosphere, the ship would lose a little more momentum and altitude. Each of those dives tested Reinhardt’s abilities to their limits; he had to carefully watch the angle of pitch and yaw, since too steep an attitude would cause him to burn up during reentry, while at the same time making the minute course corrections that would keep him on a precise east-by-southeast heading. And it didn’t help that the damn ship handled more like a brick than a bird; Reinhardt was glad that he’d committed a couple of hours each day to weight lifting and running track because he needed all his strength to control the yoke during the skips.

Somehow, he’d managed to maintain a suborbital trajectory that had carried him across the southern Soviet Union, Mongolia, northern China, and the Pacific Ocean to the shores of hated America. His last skip had been just east of the Rocky Mountains, somewhere above the Black Hills of South Dakota; he was beginning to make his final descent, the one that would take him into the atmosphere one last time, on his way to New York and victory.

According to his instruments, his altitude was approximately eighty kilometers, his velocity nearly 2,700 km per hour. Silbervogel’s prow was pitched downward, and although he couldn’t see straight ahead, his view through the side windows showed him the sunlit curve of the horizon slanting toward him at the desired angle. Through most of the flight, the stars had been his best means of checking his position. This close to Earth, though, at this time of day, he discovered to his dismay that the morning sun all but obliterated the stars, making all but the brightest difficult to see.

Leaning closer to his port-side window, Reinhardt peered outside, trying to get his bearings. Although he could barely make out Draco or Ursa Minor, far below was an enormous, finger-shaped swatch of blue, like an inland sea. Lake Erie, if he correctly remembered the geography of North America. He was over Cleveland, with Pennsylvania just ahead. And after Pennsylvania…

Something lanced the window’s thick glass, a bright glimmer of light that stabbed the corner of his eye and made him wince. Startled, Reinhardt cursed beneath his breath and reflexively looked away. Then the intuition of a Luftwaffe fighter pilot kicked in. The sun was above him, yet the gleam had come below. A sundevil. A stray beam of light, reflecting off…

Another spacecraft?

“Impossible,” he muttered. All the same, he peered through the window again. For a couple of seconds he saw nothing except Earth far below. And then, far away yet nonetheless distinct, a tiny silver shape moved into sight, catching the light.

As incredible as it might be, he was not alone.

Radar picked up Silver Bird before Skid’s eyes did, just as he’d expected. Nonetheless, he was startled when it made a sharp ping! indicating that its waves had connected with a solid object. There had been a couple of those already, yet when they didn’t repeat, he knew that they’d been nothing more than small meteors passing through his range on their way to disintegration in the upper atmosphere. This time, he waited thirty seconds… and ping! there it was again.

Lucky Linda was above the Midwest by then, still climbing at a shallow angle as it soared over the southern Great Lakes region. For the last fifteen minutes, Skid Sloman had searched the black and nearly starless sky, praying that Goddard’s bright boys hadn’t been wrong when they’d estimated Silbervogel’s likely flight path. He’d seen nothing, though, and was beginning to wonder if everyone was wrong and the damn Nazis had sent the thing over the Atlantic…

Then he looked up, and there it was, slightly to his right and almost directly overhead, a tiny winged shape that caught the sun as it coasted across the black sky.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, a predatory grin spreading across his face.

“Lucky Linda, this is Desert Bravo.” Jack Cube’s voice sounded as if it were coming from Mars. “Please repeat.”

“Desert Bravo, I’ve acquired Silver Bird.” Skid was surprised by how calm he was. “He’s at eleven o’clock, range”—he glanced at the radar again—“approximately seven miles.”

He heard a commotion somewhere in the background. Although he couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, it wasn’t hard to imagine what was going on in the blockhouse. Then Goddard’s voice came over the wireless. “You’re still out of range,” he said, his voice clear and sharp. “Don’t fire until you’ve got a dead bead on him.”

“Affirmative, Bravo.” Like it or not, Doctor G was right. The missiles didn’t require a precise targeting, but nonetheless he had to time their release just right; once they were fired, there was no way to guide them. And he’d learned in the simulator that he needed to get within four miles of Silbervogel to have a chance of hitting it.

Even before he looked at his radar, he knew from the increasing repetition of each ping that he was getting closer. The scope told him that he was nearly five miles from target and closing. When he glanced up again, though, he saw that Silver Bird was no longer in sight. A second later, the pings abruptly ceased, and when he looked down again, he saw that the radar screen was suddenly empty.

Silver Bird had vanished.

Startled, he anxiously swung his head back and forth, trying to spot the German spacecraft, before he realized what was going on and checked his periscope. Yes, there it was, above and behind him at one o’clock. Lucky Linda must be traveling faster than Silbervogel; within seconds, it had passed the other spacecraft from underneath.

Yet his trajectory was still angled upward as opposed to Silver Bird’s descent angle. If he wasn’t careful, he’d overshoot the other craft entirely and lose the chance to target it.

“Now or never,” he muttered.

“Lucky Linda, please repeat.” Jack Cube had taken the mike back from Goddard.

Skid ignored his friend. Keeping a close eye on his periscope, he carefully nudged his stick to the left. The starboard RCRs fired, and in the eyepiece he watched Silver Bird move toward the center of the eyepiece. When it was where he wanted it to be, he braked his sidewise momentum by moving the stick back to the right, firing the thrusters on his port side.

Silver Bird was directly above and behind him. He could see the Nazi spacecraft clearly now; it looked like a little metal toy he might find in a Woolworth’s back home. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he was almost certain that it was just within four miles of his own ship.

He had two missiles, but he realized that there was no point in keeping one in reserve. If he missed the first time, there was no way he’d be able to perform the complex maneuver he’d need to retarget Silver Bird before it left his range and entered the atmosphere. Both missiles had to be fired at once.

“Target acquired,” Skid said as he reached forward to two bright red toggle switches positioned just above the radar screen. “Firing missiles.”

And then he snapped the two switches.

Horst Reinhardt watched helplessly as the other spacecraft—it had to be American; there was no other explanation for its existence—approached Silbervogel from below, coming closer with each passing second.

Frustrated, he slammed his hands against the yoke. With no fuel for his engines, he was unable to maneuver; with no guns, he was unable to fight. The Americans would have no ability to strike at him before he completed his mission, so weapons and countermeasures were unnecessary—that was what he’d been told all along. Well, someone was wrong, wasn’t he?

Reinhardt wasn’t even able to tell that particular someone how badly he’d underestimated the enemy. He was out of radio range of the U-boat standing by in the North Atlantic. If he died today, no one would know how… except the pilot who killed him.

The American spacecraft disappeared as it passed beneath him. A few seconds later, Silbervogel’s forward radar array began to echo. Looking down Reinhardt saw a small blot appear on his scope. The American was closer now, yes, but it also appeared to be moving ahead of him.

A smile slowly crept to his lips. Was it possible that the American pilot had made a mistake? Reinhardt couldn’t tell what sort of armaments the other ship might have, but he sincerely doubted that they could be fired backward. And if the enemy craft continued to fly upward as he continued to descend, Silbervogel would pass behind the American and begin its final atmospheric entry untouched.

Reinhardt intently watched the scope. The American was still below him, just a little more than six kilometers away. He couldn’t see it through either of his side windows, but it appeared to be…

Suddenly, the radar pinged three times in rapid succession, and Reinhardt looked down to see two more blotches on the scope, smaller than the first one and quickly moving away.

Damn it! Missiles!

But then he saw that the blotches were moving away from him, and laughed out loud. “You idiot!” he shouted at the unseen American pilot. “There’s nothing in front of you! You missed me!”

Still laughing, he watched as the two small blotches continued to move away from him, angling upward so that they would cut across his angle of descent… and then they suddenly blossomed, becoming a pair of large, irregular patches directly in front of him.

The missiles had detonated less than two kilometers from his ship, and they’d left something behind.

Looking up, Reinhardt turned his head to peer through the left-side window. His breath caught in his lungs as he saw what appeared to be a translucent black mist spreading before him, one that sparkled in the sunlight as it came closer.

He was still wondering what it was when he heard a dull tap against the prow. Then there was another, louder this time, against the hull just in front of his window, and he caught a glimpse of a small object as it bounced away.

A nail, a few centimeters long. Reinhardt chuckled. Just a common nail…

And then Silbervogel flew into a cloud of thousands of them, and he barely had a chance to scream before they ripped his ship apart.

Through the periscope, Skid watched as Silver Bird disintegrated.

The German spacecraft never had a chance. It was probably traveling several thousand feet per second when it entered the swarm of roofing nails the missiles had carried as their payloads. At that speed, the result couldn’t be anything except lethal. The German spacecraft came apart as if it had been thrown into a shredder, pieces of it flying away in all directions, oxygen spewing from what was left of its cockpit. Skid hoped that the guy flying the thing was dead by then; he almost felt sorry for him.

And then something must have short-circuited the electrical system controlling the bombs in the payload bay, for what remained of the ship was lost in a massive yet completely silent explosion. Skid winced as he saw this, but it was too far away for it to pose any threat to him. He’d veered away just after firing the missiles, to avoid running into the nail cloud himself.

That was it. Silver Bird was gone.

“Desert Bravo to Lucky Linda. Do you read? Please respond.”

Skid let out his breath. It had probably been only a few seconds since he’d fired his missiles, but he had no doubt that Jack Cube, Doctor G, and everyone else in Alamogordo were ready to faint. Time to let them know how things stood.

“Lucky Linda to Desert Bravo.” Skid grinned; he’d been waiting to say this for months. “Silver Bird is nailed. Repeat, Silver Bird is nailed. And I’m coming home.”