Voorhees took a deep breath, then let it out. He felt exhausted but turned to face the test pilot. “With all due respect Flugkapit?n Reitsch, wasn’t it King Leonidas who led the three hundred Spartans to their deaths at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.?”
Reitsch seemed surprised for an instant, then she smiled at the engineer. Voorhees thought, This must be what a captured bird feels, just before the cat’s nervous system initiates a death-dealing bite.
“I took you for a coward,” Reitsch said calmly, “but I see now that you are more than that. You are a coward who knows his military history.”
Then the room trembled slightly and, as dust sifted down from the ceiling, they heard the wail of sirens.
Operation Hydra was, this night, at this point in history, the largest single bombing sortie ever carried out by the RAF. Currently, Voorhees and his colleagues were in the bull’s-eye of nearly six hundred Halifax, Sterling, and Lancaster bombers. They were trying to kill him and as many of the other rocket men as possible. But now the party for Hanna Reitsch had intervened, putting many of them only steps away from a bomb shelter.
Voorhees, however, wasn’t thinking about the bomb shelter. He emerged from the officers’ mess with only one thought. Lisl. I must find Lisl.
Someone grabbed him, forcefully, by the arm. “This way!”
“I must find Lisl!”
“No time for this,” the soldier said, and smacked him with a gun butt. “Come to your senses and get in.”
Voorhees went down the concrete steps, half-stumbling, half-pushed. He heard the blast door slam shut above him, and then the six hundred giants came stampeding, directly overhead.
After an hour, Voorhees heard only the faint crackle of burning wood from above—thousands of tons of burning wood. The last of the enemy bombers had moved on, and soon after, a siren sounded the “all clear.” Someone gave an order, “Everyone outside to help!”
Voorhees emerged into pitch black—even though the moon was full this night. The world was eerily quiet, considering all that had happened. The smoke made it hard to see, and even harder to breathe, but the red glow, burning through from every direction, gave the impression that every building had been destroyed.
The engineer looked around. Nobody was paying attention to him now.
Maurice Voorhees disappeared into the smoke.
It had ended for Voorhees and Lisl much as it began—in a crater. The second and final crater had once been Lisl’s dormitory but that building had disappeared—utterly disappeared. In the bowl of the crater, Voorhees had located tattered pieces of garments belonging to at least a dozen people, and broken crockery that turned out to be chips of bone. Hope forever died the moment he found a familiar shoe. It was spotlessly clean and still warm.
When two of S?nger’s men found Voorhees, the morning after the RAF’s Operation Hydra had reduced much of Peenemünde to a smoking ruin, they did not know if the man they had been ordered to ferry to the newly arrived Demeter would ever be right enough in his mind to be of any use again. They had looked down from the crater rim upon a man whose expression gave the impression of a scientist working on a difficult mathematical problem. Although their memory of the event would blend undetectably with the chaos of the weeks to come, their initial impression was perfectly correct. Maurice Voorhees, who had an ability to “walk around” the intricacies of a rocket engine in his head, with every aspect of its three-dimensional geometry intact, did not know how to collect Lisl—or how to bury her.
CHAPTER 18
Lifeline
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
January 28, 1944
5 A.M.
Science had always been MacCready’s refuge, but tonight, in his cell, not even the draculae—his wonderfully obscene discovery—could save him from sliding down again into darkness.
Not very far ahead of first light, the distant, fog-muffled screams had ceased. Those who came and went in the night, removing the blood-spattered native woman from her cage, had neglected to shut off a lightbulb near the ceiling. Mac saw his own shadow stretched across the floor. He did not fully believe that his new bid to stay alive was going to succeed, and he was reasonably certain that in a day or two, the shadow on the floor would be that of another.
Little snatches of sleep came and went despite the interruptions. Survival instinct and prior mission experiences had seen to this, for the scientist knew he would need every watt of alertness and verbal sparring power if he ever got another audience with Wolff.
At least there are no draculae in here, he thought.