indefinitely, undiscovered amongst the rooftop detritus of pipes and boilers.
The altimeter had a similar display of five number wheels. He read the instructions one more time before turning the wheels carefully until they displayed: 01000.
One thousand feet.
The last act now was to press a button to the right of the five number wheels, a single blue button. Pressing this would engage the air pressure sensor in the altimeter. Once this was engaged, if the air pressure around the bomb increased to an amount equivalent to that found 1000 feet above sea level, the bomb would detonate. Max would press the blue button, only at the last moment before the bomb was to be released. There would be all manner of localised fluctuations of pressure around the bomb when the bay doors were opened; so they would be opened first, and only then could the bomb be activated safely.
He pulled back from the small device slung within its metal cradle, relieved that the process of preparing it had been simple and straightforward. He folded the paper up, pulled the envelope from his pocket. It was as he was about to place the code back in the envelope, that he noticed another folded sheet of paper nestling inside.
A note from Rall wishing good luck, perhaps? A note even from the Fuhrer, maybe?
Perhaps…
He reached in with his ungloved hand, pulled it out and unfolded it. It was the kind of paper you would see in an exercise book or on a writing pad, not the sort of stationery you would expect the Fuhrer to write on. He unfolded it to find a paragraph of handwriting, oblique, spidery strokes. It was the writing of a man in a hurry. To the one responsible for arming this weapon, This is a confession from the man who has built this bomb. This device uses a new energy called atomic energy. We are using a new science that is attempting to harness the energy that holds the very atoms of this world together. The weapon I have made will unleash this energy in a way that cannot be predicted. It has either the potential to destroy a whole city, or, if God has no mercy for us at all, the whole world. We have taken a dangerous shortcut with this new science to deploy this weapon ahead of the Americans. There is an even chance that this bomb will destroy most of this world, perhaps all of it. The risk of this happening is too great. I implore you, whoever you are, to understand the terrible gamble you are about to take in arming and dropping this bomb. Think for a moment, what good is there in winning your war if there is no one left alive to inherit the ashes of victory?
Max stared in silence at the note, his mind momentarily locked in confusion. His first fleeting instinct was to suspect the note to be a poor attempt to sabotage the mission. Some disgruntled technician, perhaps even an anti-Nazi? God knows, there were very few Germans left who would proudly announce allegiance to the swastika. It was a person who had hoped that the note might bring an end to this endeavour. Misinformation like this at a crucial moment in time could just be enough to throw someone off their guard long enough that it might make a difference. That was most probably what this was. There had been plots before against Hitler, many in fact, and Max, not a Nazi, never a supporter of the National Socialists, might so easily have been one of those unfortunate men who had been sucked into any one of those conspiracies, if he had been approached.
It was possible, Max deliberated, that this might even be the handiwork of one of those in the highest echelons of power… Himmler, Goring, Goebbels? Perhaps an act of sabotage to buy themselves clemency from the enemy after this war was over.
He looked down at the note once more.
But we’re dropping this bomb for Germany, not Hitler.
That was why Max had agreed to carry out the mission. Not for that insane bastard who had brought this insanity down on all of them.
I volunteered for those of us poor wretches who are left, not the bastard who put us here.
It was their last chance to fight for a truce, that’s why he had volunteered, and for no other reason; not for glory, not for vanity. Whatever the motive behind the note, whoever had managed to ensure it had made its way to the last man to lay hands on this weapon, Max decided, the attempt had been in vain. The mission had to go on. He and his men had managed to fight their way across France and the Atlantic, he owed it to his men, to Schroder and his pilots, to the millions of civilians across their homeland who would die if the war didn’t come to an end right now.
He began to ball the note up in his hands.
And stopped.
What exactly is the risk of using this weapon?
He recalled those few words; words he had not been meant to hear. The door had closed on the answer, but the question, Major Rall’s question, he had heard.
What is the risk of using this weapon?
The civilian, Hauser, had answered quietly, the murmur of his reply for the Major’s ears only. Rall had heard the answer to that question only a short time before they had assembled outside the hangar ready to take off.
And how odd the Major had been.
Max recalled those few awkward moments, standing in front of the bomber, watching Schroder and his men climbing into their fighters and preparing to take off… and the Major’s unusual, uncharacteristic behaviour. And then Max recalled the Major had tried to say something, urgently, insistently, quietly.
He was trying to warn me.
Major Rall had attempted to warn Max of something. He had thought the Major was warning him to be careful handling the bomb; that Hauser had imparted to him at this late stage some element of risk that the Major felt in all fairness should have been relayed directly to Max. That particular rationalisation of the Major’s odd, hurried last exchange had made sense to Max as he had replayed it in his mind in the few moments he’d had since taking off to reflect upon the matter. The Major, he thought, had been trying to convey one last cautionary piece of advice, but in the haste, the moment, the noise, it had been lost and cast aside as Max had focused on the mission itself.
But this note… and those overheard words, and the Major’s hurried, desperate last-ditch attempt to warn him, interrupted, he now recalled, all too hastily by Hauser… all of those things gave Max a reason to pause, to unscrew the paper in his hand. He looked once more at the note, rereading the scribbled lines.
The Major must have been informed by the civilian, Hauser, of the bomb’s true nature. The discussion he had overheard a mere snippet of was just that: Rall’s discovery of the real danger, for the first time. And now, Max replayed those final moments on the airstrip — the haunted look on the Major’s face, his distracted demeanour and the final desperate look of anxiety on his face as he had tried to warn Max with a carefully phrased sentence.
And then there was that civilian, Hauser, his speech… perhaps, as he revelled in the moment, he had let slip more than he had intended.
We will turn all of New York into Stalingrad…
Max looked down at the crumpled paper in his hands. ‘Not just New York,’ he muttered.
His mind cruelly began to replay visions of devastation, the horror that he had seen with his own eyes in recent months. The ashes of a city, stretching as far as could be seen, a world of blackened wood, grey rubble and white dust. The bloated, twisted bodies poking from the ground, contorted by heat as they half-cooked from the flames of destruction, yet still raw inside, raw enough to rot, decompose and swell the dark leathery skin to the point of bursting with noxious gases.
Max had briefly struggled with the notion it would be he alone that would be responsible for arming and releasing a weapon that would turn an untouched city, a magnificent city by all that he’d seen of it from newsreels and the occasional movie, into that — that vision of hell upon earth. But now, if this letter was to be believed, if the Major was to be believed, then he might well be the one who would turn the whole world into — and that civilian, Hauser, had put it perfectly — Stalingrad.
Hans took a look at Stef sleeping fitfully beside him. He remembered when Stef had first joined them back in the early months of 1944. He had been a hastily trained recruit, drawn straight out of school to replace Jurgen Dancht, who had died in a field hospital after catching influenza. Stef had been a pain in the arse, too fucking young and stupid to deserve to make it through the war in one piece. But he had, and annoying though the lad could be, it would be a shame to have made it so far and die within sight of the end. Mind you, he thought, if the boy had been drafted into the infantry he wouldn’t have lasted long. Stef was too clumsy, too gawky, the kind of poor sod who stands out, whose head always seems to be the one found slap bang in the middle of a sniper’s cross-hair. Stef was the kind of poor fool who always died first.
He checked the boy’s wound; there was some more fresh blood soaking through, blending with the dark
