‘It’s in English, you speak English do you not?’
‘Well, yes, a little. Give it to me.’ She took the sheet of paper from the officer and read it briefly.
‘Oh my…’
‘What is it?’ asked the officer.
Traudl Jung looked up at him and snapped angrily. ‘It’s addressed to your leader, not you!’ She stared challengingly at the officer until he turned on his heels and headed back up the corridor towards the telephone exchange room. She angrily muttered something about the slipping standards of discipline around the Fuhrer as she turned smartly around and knocked lightly on the door to Hitler’s study. Hauser heard him call her in, and she disappeared inside.
Hauser remained where he was, standing in the small ante-room, staring at the door and straining to hear what was being said beyond. Both Frau Jung and Hitler must be talking quietly, whispering even. He could hear nothing.
A minute passed before finally the handle of the door turned, and the door swung open, revealing Adolf Hitler. He had changed his tunic to a similar one, freshly laundered. He smiled at Hauser.
Chapter 53
Mission Time: 21 Hours, 20 Minutes Elapsed
4.25 p.m., EST, fifty miles off the east coast of America
He awoke with a start.
‘Max, wake up, we’re nearly there,’ said Hans, jabbing his arm insistently.
Max felt the world quickly invade the warmth and comfort of his dream. It faded all too quickly. He hazily recalled images of a long dining table, Lucian beside him, his eyes as wide as saucers staring at the feast arrayed before him. It was a Christmas dinner, and Lucian must have been only seven, nearly eight; it had to have been Christmas 1933, perhaps ’34. He had been eighteen that year, and back from his first term at university. Max smiled; what a wonderful time that was, enjoying the novelty of his new life away from home. But he had been surprised at how much he’d missed Lucian during his first term. He had spent some of the money he had saved for several raucous nights down the local beer cellar to mark the end of term on a present that he knew would make that little porcelain face light up with ecstasy… a small army of painted soldier figurines. All through that meal he’d teased his brother about what surprise lay within his parcel beneath the Christmas tree.
‘Pieter said I should wake you up,’ Hans said apologetically.
He would have given anything for another five minutes back there, back then. ‘That’s all right, Hans,’ he said, stifling a yawn, ‘I need to prepare the bomb.’
He turned to look at Stef to see the boy was still unconscious. He lifted the blanket to check his leg wound and found several small patches of wet blood soaking through.
‘He’s still losing blood.’
It looked like a slow trickle of blood, but it was still leaking out of him. If they could find him some medical attention as soon as this was all over, he would pull through. The lad had lost a fair bit, but he guessed he still had a chance. It was more likely he was simply sleeping from exhaustion than passed out from lack of blood.
Good, let him sleep. If he’s moving around less, the tourniquet will do a better job.
‘Hans, what’s our position?’
The gunner shook his head like a horse trying to shake off a bridle. ‘I don’t know, Pieter just told me it was time to wake you up.’
Max pulled the blanket off and stood up stiffly. He plugged into the interphone beside the port waist-gun and lifted his mask. ‘Pieter, what’s our position?’
‘Ahhh, good afternoon Max,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We’re about forty minutes off the coast.’
‘You kept to two-fifty-five degrees?’
‘Yeah, and cruising at two hundred and fifty.’
That was fifty miles per hour faster than the minimum cruise speed; the burn from that extra speed had been unnecessary. Fuel, not time, was the important variable. Max wondered anxiously what their reserves were. There couldn’t be much left. ‘What’s the fuel look like?’
‘Don’t worry, Max; we’ve probably got an hour, maybe two, of fuel left. Looks like we’ll make it with some to spare.’
Max checked his watch: if they hadn’t drifted too far north or south they might actually make it to New York after all. He smiled. Not only did it look like, against the odds, they would actually make it, but it looked like they were going to arrive more or less on time. As the hour of midnight struck in Germany, they would be dropping the bomb over New York.
Pieter had done well, flying a little faster than they’d needed to bring them in on time. Max trusted his co- pilot would have calculated the fuel burn before making that kind of decision, and he had calculated well, so it seemed. Drift and head or tail wind would, of course, affect any dead reckoning Pieter could make, but at 5000 feet altitude that wasn’t going to throw his reckoning off by too much.
‘Well done, Pieter.’
Hans was looking longingly at the thick grey blanket wrapped around Stef.
‘Jump in under the blanket,’ he said to the gunner, ‘it’s quite warm under there.’
Hans nodded eagerly and slid along the wooden-panel floor to sit beside Stef. He pulled the thick grey blanket up over himself, up to the chin.
‘Keep an eye on that wound, though.’
‘Yeah.’
Max climbed through the bulkhead into the navigation compartment, and then through the second bulkhead into the bomb bay. The bomb hung at the bottom of the rack before him, cradled in its metal frame. He sat down on the floor and dangled his legs over the narrow walkway into the darkened bay below. When the bomb bay doors were open, that area would be a dazzling bright abyss. Max was surprised at how little protection there was either side of the narrow walkway, perhaps only eighteen inches wide, and the open space above the bomb bay doors. It would be perilously easy to misplace a foot and fall through. But then he reminded himself that the space above the doors normally would be packed full with 600lb bombs, stacked one above the other in the racks, allowing no room for a clumsy crew member to slip through and fall to his death. He also recalled reading in the manual that while the bay doors were open, the bomb bay was off limits to the crew.
He felt inside his tunic pocket for the envelope and pulled it out. Major Rall had used a normal, unmarked envelope, no insignia. Against his better judgement, Max felt himself injecting this moment with portentous significance. He was about to open the most important envelope in the world. Curiously, it seemed poetically right that such an envelope would be so unremarkable — plain, white, small. He pulled off a leather glove and put a finger under the flap, sliding it along and opening it up.
So, here we are.
He reached in and felt a single sheet of paper and pulled it out. He unfolded it and scanned the words on the paper. It was letter-headed stationery from the Ministry of Armaments, from Albert Speer’s office no less. Halfway down the page was a short paragraph and a diagram indicating how the altimeter detonator should be set up. Max glanced down at it. The detonator could only be reached by lining up the correct six-digit code on a thick locking bar that ran over the top. The digits could be set by rotating a series of cylinders with numbers on the side. It reminded him vaguely of the code wheels on an Enigma machine. He looked back at the piece of paper and found the code number at the end of the paragraph.
One… five… zero… eight… two… seven.
He reached down to the locking bar and carefully rotated each of the number wheels to arrange the six numbers in a line. With the last digit set, the locking bar clicked, and Max lifted it away from the altimeter display.
He glanced back at the paper. The bomb was to detonate 1000 feet above the ground. He wondered why it would be set to explode at such a height. Perhaps the scientists who’d put this weapon together had become paranoid that it might land with a thud on the rooftop of some Manhattan skyscraper and remain there, unexploded
