Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

Clutching the leather document tube against his chest, it seemed to Hagemann just then that even his magical drawings might not save him now.

Looking down through patchy clouds from an altitude of 10,000 feet, the landscape, just coming into bloom, appeared so peaceful to the general that his mind kept slipping out of gear, convincing him that there was no war, that there had never been a war, and that it was all just a figment of his own imagination.

But as they descended over the outskirts of Berlin, that calm hallucination fell apart. Ragged scars of saturation bombing lay upon the once-orderly suburbs of Heinersdorf and Pankow. The closer they came to the centre, the worse the damage appeared. Whole sections of the city, laid out like a map beneath him, were completely unrecognisable now. The cargo plane touched down at Gatow airfield. As the plane rolled to a stop, Hagemann’s gaze was drawn to the carcasses of ruined aircraft which had been bulldozed to the side of the runway.

A car was there to meet him. The last time he had come here, several months before, he had been met by Hitler’s adjutant, Major Otto Gunsche, as well as the Fuhrer’s own chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who had entertained him on the drive to the Chancellery with stories of his days as a motorcycle mechanic before the war.

This time, however, his escorts were two grim-faced members of General Rattenhuber’s Security Service, who were in charge of protecting the bunker.

At the sight of them, Hagemann felt his heart clench. He wondered if he was already under arrest.

Neither of the men spoke to him on the drive to the Chancellery building. They sat in the front. He sat in the back.

So this is how a life unravels, thought Hagemann.

This brief moment of self-pity evaporated when he saw what was left of the Chancellery. Barely a single window remained intact and the stone work, particularly on the first floor, was so stubbled with shrapnel damage that it gave the impression of being unfinished, as if the masons had abandoned their work before the final touches on the building had ever been completed.

The car came to a halt. The man who had been sitting by the driver climbed out and opened the door for the general.

Hagemann climbed out. ‘Where should I go?’ he asked.

The man gestured up the staircase to the main entrance.

‘People are still working in there?’ gasped Hagemann. ‘But the place is in ruins!’

‘Once you are inside, Herr General,’ said the man, ‘someone will show you the way.’

He took care climbing up the stairs, so as not to trip upon the broken steps. Once inside, he was directed to the entrance of the Fuhrerbunker. Although he had known of the existence of the underground fortress, he had never been down into it. On every other visit, the entranceway had been shut.

He handed his credentials to a guard, who allowed him to pass through the checkpoint after relinquishing his sidearm, a Mauser automatic pistol, which he had never actually fired. He was then escorted down two more sets of stairs, during which time Hagemann noticed the air becoming stale and damp.

Having arrived at the third level below ground, he encountered a new set of guards, who directed him down a narrow corridor to the room where the twice-daily meetings of the High Command had been taking place ever since they migrated underground.

It so happened that Hagemann had arrived just as the midday meeting was about to start.

Entering the conference chamber, Hagemann found himself in a cramped, tomb-like space lit by a single bulb suspended from the ceiling in a metal cage.

At the only table in the room, and sitting on the only chair, was Adolf Hitler. On the other side of the table, herded into a cluster which reminded Hagemann of penguins crowded on to an ice flow, were more high-ranking individuals than he had ever seen collected in one space.

Albert Speer, sweating in a long leather coat, nodded in greeting to Hagemann. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, eyed Hagemann suspiciously, making no attempt to welcome the professor. Beside him stood Joseph Goebbels, in his neatly pressed caramel-brown uniform, as well as Lieutenant General Hermann Fegelein, liaison officer to Heinrich Himmler, Lord of the SS. There were several others whom Hagemann did not know, but he did recognise Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s private secretaries and the only woman present in the room.

Unprepared as Hagemann had been for this unceremonious descent into the bunker, he now felt equally out of place among this crush of National Socialist celebrities.

But the thing which unnerved Hagemann most of all was the sight of Adolf Hitler himself.

The Fuhrer had aged visibly since their last meeting, even though it had taken place only a few months before. His eyes had taken on a glassy sheen and flaccid skin hung like wet laundry from his cheekbones. His hair, although still neatly combed, looked matted and dull and a salting of dandruff lay across the shoulders of his double-breasted jacket.

One thing that had not changed, however, was the fierceness of his glare, which Hagemann now felt as if a searchlight had been turned upon him.

‘Hagemann,’ drawled Hitler. ‘What have you done with my rocket?’

If there had been any warning, even a couple of seconds, about what the Fuhrer was going to say to him, Hagemann would almost certainly not have said what he said next. Instead, he blurted out the first thing that came into his head. ‘I have perfected it,’ he answered defiantly.

Hitler paused, slowly drawing in a breath as if he meant to suck in the last remaining particles of oxygen in the room. Then he sat back in his flimsy wooden chair and drummed his fingers on the table. ‘This’, he asked, ‘is what you call the loss of a V-2, whose whereabouts you cannot trace and which, even now, might have fallen into enemy hands?’

‘Preposterous!’ snapped Goebbels. ‘Hagemann, you will be put on trial for this.’

‘If you will allow me to clarify the situation,’ began the general.

‘By all means,’ answered Hitler. ‘We are all of us here very anxious to see how you interpret perfection.’

‘Especially when you don’t have the rocket to prove it!’ shouted Goebbels.

There was a quiet murmur of laughter in the room.

It was all Hagemann could do not to grab these cackling bullies by their throats and choke the life out of them. Instead of acknowledging this triumph, which signalled the birth of a new age of discovery for the entire human race, very little mattered to the men inside this room except to know exactly how much damage could be done with Hagemann’s invention.

‘Quiet!’ barked Hitler. ‘This is no cause for amusement.’ Then he turned to Hagemann. ‘Well, what have you to say in your defence?’

The general had plenty to say.

Over the next few minutes, he explained how steam, produced by concentrated hydrogen peroxide and catalysed by sodium permanganate, propelled a mixture of ethanol and water along a double-walled combustion chamber contained within the rocket. This double wall simultaneously cooled the combustion chamber and heated the fuel, which was then sprayed through a system of more than twelve hundred tiny nozzles.

‘One thousand two hundred and twenty four to be exact,’ said Hagemann.

He went on to describe how the fuel combined with oxygen as it entered the combustion chamber, shaping the air with his hands as if to trace the flow of blazing particles.

‘When the newly designed guidance system is functioning as it should,’ said Hagemann, ‘it creates an ideal trajectory for the rocket, which in turn allows for an optimum fuel consumption ratio. This balance of trajectory and fuel consumption, when perfectly aligned, produces an exhaust plume which appears, to observers on the ground, to resemble a halo of diamonds. Hence the name of the device. This phenomenon, known as the Diamond Stream effect, was witnessed by my observers in the Baltic. That is how we know of our success, even without the physical remains of the rocket.’ As Hagemann paused to catch his breath, he glanced around the room. His eyes met only the blank stares of the assembled dignitaries.