Alex Scarrow - A thousand suns

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 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.