The House of Rumour A Novel

18

the moon





Hitler had always despised the moon.

‘You know, Rudi,’ he had told him when they had been in Landsberg prison, ‘it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead, and terrible, and inhuman. And human beings are afraid of it . . . It is as if in the moon a part of the terror still lives which the moon once sent down over the earth . . . I hate it! That pale and ghostly creature.’

Yet Hess had allowed himself to be beguiled by it. Inconstant, deceptive, a reflected light illuminating a hidden imagination. A journey into the unknown, a dream or a nightmare. The astrologers had delivered an auspicious reading for the night of his flight. The horoscope had indicated six planets in the constellation of Taurus, enough bias to cause the earth to tilt. But it was the conjuction of a full moon that had spurred him on.

In Spandau he followed the Apollo landings. He obtained minute-by-minute timetables from NASA giving details of space activity. That they might get to the moon first: this was his adamant wish as he followed the flight of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. With, of course, the legacy that Germany had bequeathed them. Then they might defeat the Russians in space, as the Reich had failed to defeat them on land.

On the eve of the launch Wernher von Braun eulogised his adopted nation at a press conference. ‘Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’ declared the former SS Sturmbannführer and chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that would propel the Apollo spacecraft into orbit.

Hess listened to the launch on the radio in his cell:



Guidance system goes internal at seventeen seconds leading up to the ignition sequence at 8.9 seconds. We’re approaching the sixty-second mark on the Apollo 11 mission. T-60 seconds and counting. We have passed T-60. Fifty-five seconds and counting. Neil Armstrong has just reported back: ‘It’s been a real smooth countdown.’ We have passed the fifty-second mark. Forty seconds away from the Apollo 11 lift-off. All the second-stage tanks are now pressurised. Thirty-five seconds and counting. We are still GO with Apollo 11. Thirty seconds and counting.



On 10 May 1941, he had his own countdown. Alfred Rosenberg, head of the party Foreign Affairs Department, had arrived at noon. Hess had given him lunch, his mind distracted with thoughts of instruments, jettison fuel tanks, auxiliary oil pumps, radio-direction finders, Scottish mountain altitudes. A light meal of cold meats and salad had been laid out in the dining room. They ate alone – Hess had given instructions to the household staff that they were not to be disturbed, and his wife Ilse was in bed with a cold.

Hess did not speak of his secret mission but merely listened while Rosenberg told him of his own preparations for the planned offensive against Russia. ‘The solution of the Jewish question will presently enter its decisive phase,’ Rosenberg assured him. Himmler was busy preparing his Einsatzgruppen who would follow in the wake of the offensive to eradicate communism and its carriers. Special instructions had already been issued concerning the army’s operational area that ‘commissioned the Reichsführer-SS with special tasks resulting from the final settlement of the struggle between the two opposed political systems’. Directive 21, the order to invade the Soviet Union, had been given the code name Barbarossa.

This made his own operation all the more crucial. He had seen Professor Haushofer only days before and they had talked once more of the geopolitical situation, and his former mentor’s theories on the subject. Peace in the West was essential so that all the Reich’s resources could be concentrated against Russia. Finally the source of Jewish Bolshevism could be burnt out and purified. This was the very presage of their Weltanschauung.

In his final conversation with the professor they had talked of the struggle for survival. A war on two fronts must be avoided at all costs. The continuing war in the West was suicidal for the white race. He did not tell the professor of his planned flight. Haushofer had described a dream in which he had seen Hess striding through the tapestried walls of an English castle, bringing peace to the two great Nordic nations. Did he suspect something?

Rosenberg left at one o’clock and Hess went to take tea with his wife. She had been reading The Pilot’s Book of Everest, an account of the first flight over the Himalayas by the Duke of Hamilton. Albrecht Haushofer, the professor’s son, had been a close friend of Hamilton before the war. Albrecht was a passionate advocate of peace between Britain and Germany and had tried to contact the duke via a dead-letter drop in Lisbon.

Hess and the Haushofers had been exploring all possible channels for negotiation with the British. Peace feelers reached out all over neutral Europe: Switzerland, Portugal, Spain. There was talk of arrangements for a secret meeting between Hess and the British ambassador to Spain on an abandoned tennis court outside Madrid. There were intelligence reports of a powerful underground in England, virulently opposed to Churchill and ready to make terms. And all this time his astrologers had marked out the auguries for his own personal intervention. For now all boded well in his stars, but this could not last. At times his mood rose in exultation, then descended to deep melancholy. He was impatient, overcome with a growing sense of romantic destiny.

As he set down the teacup on his wife’s bedside table he had picked up the book and opened it. In the front there was a full-plate photograph of the duke.

‘He’s very good-looking,’ he said.

She had frowned, unsure as she so often was of her husband’s true sentiments and unaware that Hamilton had become the key to his quest. Hess had an intuitive understanding of the man: an aviator, just as he was. Hamilton had been selected as chief pilot for the Mount Everest expedition on account of his flying skills and his exceptional physical fitness.

‘He is very brave,’ he added, as if to reassure her. ‘Had his mission failed there would have been no hope of rescue.’

Hamilton had flown over the world’s highest mountain in 1933 when such an endeavour was only just technically possible, pushing the limits of the high-altitude flight, into the stratosphere and the edges of space.

The book had astonishing aerial photographs of the Himalayas that reminded Hess of Arnold Fanck’s mountain films with the young Leni Riefenstahl, when she was still just an actress. The stark sunlight on monumental rock and ice; the purity of a cold and frozen landscape.

Yes, flying had given Hamilton a greater understanding. Like Lindbergh, he must have a broad, clear vision of the world. Above all, he would comprehend the symbolism of Hess’s mission. The sporting gesture of it, replete with chivalry and mysticism. The aeroplane a deus ex machina in a flight of peace to bring to an end the war between brother nations.

Albrecht Haushofer had told him of his close personal relationship with Hamilton before the war. Hess had seen the man once, at a banquet in Berlin in 1936 during the Olympic Games. He was indeed handsome, with a strong and noble bearing. Hess had checked and found that a duke was the highest rank in British aristocracy below the monarch. Hamilton was an officer in the RAF, commanding the air defence of an important sector in Scotland. Albrecht had stayed at his country estate, Dungavel House, and had observed that it had its own airstrip.

This would be the chance for Hess to re-establish his authority in the Reich and in the eyes of his leader – his Tribune. In the last few years his star had been eclipsed but his mission would be spectacular. Yes, he would outshine them all.

He said goodbye to his wife. He kissed her hand.

He put on his trench coat and took a valise containing his charts, a wallet of family photographs, Albrecht Haushofer’s calling card and a flat box of homeopathic medicines. He walked out to his waiting Mercedes. They started out towards the Messerschmitt works at Augsburg, but they were ahead of schedule so Hess bade them stop by a wooded glade by the road and in the fading sunlight he walked among the spring flowers.

On the runway at the Augsburg works it was waiting for him: the Messerschmitt Bf110D, radio code VJ+OQ, fitted with heavy drop-fuel tanks for long-distance flight. His chariot. He was ready for take-off. Ready as he waited in the summerhouse. Ready as he sat in his cell listening to the broadcast of the Apollo mission:



Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts reported, ‘Feels good’. T-25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T-15 seconds, guidance is internal, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, all engines running. lift-off. We have a lift-off, thirty-two minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11.



He flew north over Hanover and Hamburg, over the North Sea coast, tuning his radio compass to the Kalundborg radio station in Denmark that was on the same latitude as his intended landfall in England. Kalundborg transmitted directional beams, interspersed with classical music. That night Wagner’s Parsifal was being broadcast. Or had he imagined that? Albrecht Haushofer had called him a Parsifal. The innocent seeker.

He was approaching the point at which he would have to turn due west, out of friendly airspace, towards the unknown. Like the Apollo astronauts he would have to leave orbit and head into deep space.



CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston at one minute. Trajectory and guidance look good and the stage is good. Over.

ARMSTRONG: Apollo 11. Roger.

CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Thrust is good. Everything is still looking good.

ARMSTRONG: Roger.



The signals kept coming in from Kalundborg. In Act One of Parsifal, the old knight Gurnemanz rebukes the young Parsifal for shooting down a flying swan but when he learns that the boy has been raised in ignorance of courtly manners, he suspects that he might be the prophesied ‘pure fool’. He tells him of the Grail.



PARSIFAL

Who is the Grail?



GURNEMANZ

There’s no saying; but

If you are the chosen one,

The knowledge shall not escape you.



Yes, thought Hess. He had been chosen. This had been his quest, his Everest, his moon-shot. He was reaching the point of alignment with the radio transmitter.



CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Around three and a half minutes. You’re still looking good. Your predicted cut-off is right on the nominal.

ARMSTRONG: Roger. Apollo 11’s GO.



They completed their final manoeuvre around the earth and prepared for translunar injection. Hess turned due west, the Jutland coastline falling away below him. It was nearing twilight.



PARSIFAL

I hardly move,

Yet far I seem to come.



GURNEMANZ

You see, my son, time

Changes here to space.



Time and space and a holy mission. Six planets in the constellation of Taurus. Full moon in the Second House.



CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. We show cut-off and we copy the numbers in noun sixty-two . . .

ARMSTRONG: Roger, Houston. Apollo 11. We’re reading the VIL 35 579 and the EMS was plus 3.3. Over.

CAPCOM: Roger. Plus 3.3 on the EMS. And we copy the VI.

ARMSTRONG: Hey, Houston. Apollo 11. This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.

CAPCOM: Roger, 11, we’ll pass that on, and it looks like you are well on your way now.



They jettisoned the final stage of von Braun’s Saturn V. Soon Hess would jettison the drop tanks from his Messerschmitt.

The astronauts blasted out of orbit and fired up towards the moon.

Hess was out of German radar range now, out over the cold, deep North Sea. He had never flown above open water before.



GURNEMANZ

Now take heed and let me see,

If you be a fool and pure,

What knowledge may be granted you.



What knowledge! To find the Grail Castle at Dungavel House. He was the bringer of peace.

The evening light over the ocean was magically beautiful; small clusters of red-tinged clouds bejewelled the shimmering sea. He found himself profoundly affected by the northern latitudes, feeling a surge of magnetism. What was this? he wondered. Then at once he remembered his childhood fancy. Thule! Yes, the mythic island of the black sun. This was the journey he had foreseen amid the hot and dusty afternoons of Alexandria. The Hyperborean Atlantis spoken of at the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich as they valiantly resisted the Bavarian Soviet.

It was not yet fully dark, the time of civil twilight when the sun descends to six degrees below the horizon. He could just make out land, the knoll of Holy Island marking out the far edge of the Northumbrian coastline. A veil of mist hung over England. The full moon had risen above the thin cloud, shrouding it in phosphorescence. Hess gasped at the brightness of the heavenly body. For a moment it shone, the blazing beacon of his great purpose. Then he had a moment of doubt.

Hitler had always despised the moon.

His Tribune might think that this flight was out of fear, not love of hazard. Hess had left him a letter that alluded to Schopenhauer’s notion of a heroic passage through life encountering great difficulties that receives a poor reward or no reward at all. He had assured his leader that should the project fail, it need not have any evil consequence for Germany. They need only declare him mad.

Moonstruck. In a second he saw the clear and stark lunacy of it. If you be a fool and pure, what knowledge might you be granted. He could see the sharp details in the pock-marked face. Mountains and craters, sublime desolation.



ARMSTRONG: We’re about 95 degrees east, coming up on Smyth’s Sea . . . Sort of hilly-looking area . . . looking back at Marginus . . . Crater Schubert and Gilbert the centre right now . . . a triple crater with a small crater between the first and the second, and the one at the bottom of the screen is Schubert Y . . . zooming in now on a crater called Schubert N . . . very conical inside wall . . . coming up on the Bombing Sea . . . Alpha 1 . . . a great bright crater. It is not a large one but an extremely bright one. It looks like a very recent and, I would guess, impact crater with rays streaming out in all directions . . . The crater in the centre of the screen now is Webb . . . coming back toward the bottom of the screen into the left, you can see a series of depressions. It is this type of connective craters that give us most interest . . .

CAPCOM: We are getting a beautiful picture of Langrenus now with its really conspicuous central peak.

COLLINS: The Sea of Fertility doesn’t look very fertile to me. I don’t know who named it.

ARMSTRONG: Well, it may have been the gentleman who this crater was named after, Langrenus. Langrenus was a cartographer to the King of Spain and made one of the early reasonably accurate maps of the moon.

CAPCOM: Roger, that is very interesting.

ARMSTRONG: At least it sounds better for our purposes than the Sea of Crises.



Enemy radar would have detected him by now, and the moon had become a celestial searchlight. He had to get below what cloud cover there was. He put the Messerschmitt into a dive and flew at full throttle, greeting England with the wild scream of his engines. The aeroplane burrowed through the light haze. At low altitude and high velocity he turned to starboard, then to port, heading almost due west to Dungavel House. He was enjoying himself, hedge-hopping mere metres above trees and rooftops. He reached the Cheviot Hills and climbed the slope with both throttles open, dropping down the other side, across the border. He was in Scotland.

He had the chart of his route strapped to his right thigh but he had memorised every landscape that marked his way to Dungavel House. He passed through the peaks of Broad Law and Pikestone, banking right and descending towards his destination. He flew over Hamilton’s country seat, trying to discern the runway. He could barely make out a blacked-out house below. Had he expected the landing strip to be marked somehow?

He flew further west to check his position on the coastline. He turned around over the Firth, its waters as flat and silvered as a looking-glass. Turning southwards he followed a spur of land curling out to the sea at Ardrossan, then inland he spotted the glint of the railway line that led north-easterly to Glasgow. The track made a bow at Dungavel; a small lake shimmered at the south of the estate. Illuminated by the moon, the Grail Castle now appeared to him and for an instant he felt triumphant. Then he saw that the duke’s airstrip was nothing more than a landing field for sports biplanes. There was no flare path or marking of any kind. It would be suicide to attempt a landing here in the heavy two-engined Messerschmitt.

All at once the whole enterprise seemed transformed into some awful trick. So close to triumph, he was now facing utter defeat. And an interceptor was closing in on him, a Hurricane perhaps, flying low. He climbed to two thousand metres and shut off the engine ignition. The propellers feathered as he set the pitch of the airscrews to zero. He would make a parachute jump, something he had never attempted before. He opened the cockpit canopy and tried to bail out. But as the plane was still at cruising speed, the pressure of the airstream pushed him back into his seat. Then he remembered something a fighter commander had once told him: that the best way to get out of a moving plane was to turn it over and simply fall out. He pulled up and went into a sharp loop. He blacked out.

Radio silence from the lunar module. Programme alarms and low-fuel warnings.



CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. If you read, you’re GO for powered descent. Over.

COLLINS: Eagle, this is Columbia. They just gave you GO for powered descent.

CAPCOM: Columbia, Houston. We’ve lost them on the high gain again. Would you please . . . We’re recommending yaw right 10 degrees and reacquire.



When he came to he was in a complete stall. The speed gauge was at zero, his aeroplane on its tail, hanging upright in space. He kicked with his legs and pushed himself out into the night air.

He pulled the ripcord and his parachute blossomed abruptly above him. He felt the sudden lift of its soaring drag. His machine crashed into the moorland beyond.



CAPCOM: You are GO to continue powered descent.

ALDRIN: Roger.

CAPCOM: And Eagle, Houston. We’ve got data dropout. You’re still looking good.

ALDRIN: Okay. We got good lock on. Altitude light is out. Delta H is minus 2900.

CAPCOM: Roger, we copy.

ALDRIN: Got the earth straight out our front window.



He floated down over the moonlit meadow. Suspended between heaven and earth. Exposed and triumphantly alone. You see, my son, time changes here to space.

As above, so below. He was ready once more. Ready as he listened in his cell. Ready as he waited in the summerhouse. He reached for the cable.



ALDRIN: Drifting forward just a little bit; that’s good. Contact light. Okay. Engine stop. ACA out of detent.

ARMSTRONG: Out of detent. Auto.

ALDRIN: Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.

CAPCOM: We copy you down, Eagle.



Space changes to time.

He hit the ground hard and blacked out once more.