Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

The other man, who sported a three-piece Harris tweed suit, had a small chin, curly hair gone grey and had not shaved in several days, leaving a stippling of white stubble on his cheeks.

The man with the pencil moustache stood in the middle of the laboratory floor and, in a loud and nasal voice, informed the dozen technicians who were working on the main floor of the laboratory that they had been dismissed for the remainder of the day.

No one argued. No one even asked why. The sight of the gun wedged under the man’s armpit were all the credentials he needed.

Only one person was kept behind: a small, bald man with fleshy lips and cheerful eyes. Instead of the faded blue lab coats worn by the other technicians, this man had put on a chef’s apron, with a large kangaroo pocket at the front which sagged with pencils, handkerchiefs and scraps of notepaper on which mysterious equations had been written.

‘Professor Greenidge?’ asked the man with the pencil moustache.

‘Yes?’

‘My name is Warsop,’ said the man. ‘I’m with the Home Office.’ And, as he spoke, he removed a folded piece of paper from his coat. ‘I’d like you to sign this, please.’

‘What is it?’ asked Professor Greenidge.

It was the man in the tweed suit who answered. ‘Official Secrets Act,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘As soon as you’ve done that, we can show you what we’ve got in here.’ He gave the crate a jab with his toe. ‘I think you’ll find it worth your time.’ Then he held out his hand to the professor. ‘My name is Rufford. I’m a member of Crossbow.’

Greenidge had heard of the Crossbow organisation although, until now, he had never met anyone who was a part of it. The organisation had been put together to study German rocket technology. It was all top-secret stuff, far beyond his own level of clearance.

‘What’s this got to do with me?’ he asked. ‘I’m a steam technician. I don’t build rockets.’

‘We pulled your name out of a hat,’ muttered Warsop. ‘Now are you going to sign the document or not?’

‘I do suggest you sign it, old man,’ said Rufford.

‘Very well,’ said Greenidge, suspecting that he had no choice. With a few swipes of his Parker pen, the professor did as he was told.

‘In any of your work,’ asked Rufford, ‘have you ever come across the mention of a project known as “Diamond Stream”?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘What would that be?’

‘Well,’ began Rufford, ‘we are hoping it might be the contents of this box.’

As Warsop unlatched the crate, a smell of mud and manure swept out into the room. Warsop reached inside and removed a gnarled piece of machinery, still clogged with dirt and threads of straw. That it had been torn from its mountings by incredible force was clear to see in the bent and shredded steel.

Warsop handed it to Greenidge. ‘See what you can make of that,’ he said.

Greenidge held the cold metal in his hands for a few seconds, but it was too heavy and he had to put it down upon a work bench. Then he took out one of the many pencils from his apron and began to poke around among a cluster of wires which splayed out of the machine like the roots of a tree wrenched from the ground. After several minutes, he stood back, tapping the pencil thoughtfully upon his thumbnail. ‘It appears to be some kind of gyroscopic mechanism, possibly for stabilising an object in flight. It’s not one of ours or I would know about it. Where did you get it?’

‘From a crash site on an island in the Baltic,’ replied Rufford. ‘That’s about all we can tell you for now.’

‘Can you at least inform me of the type of craft it came from?’

‘We think it was a test rocket that went off course, probably fired from the German research facility at Peenemunde.’

‘So it’s either a V-1 or a V-2,’ remarked Greenidge.

Warsop glanced at Rufford. ‘Might as well tell him,’ he said.

‘It is the latter,’ confirmed Rufford.

‘I thought we bombed Peenemunde,’ said Professor Greenidge.

‘We did,’ Warsop answered. ‘Just not enough, apparently.’

‘Which would imply that the mechanism didn’t work.’

‘Possibly,’ replied Rufford. ‘We’ve managed to salvage a number of rocket parts out of the recent bombings of Antwerp and London . . .’

‘London!’ exclaimed Greenidge. ‘There’s been no report of that.’

‘Ah,’ Rufford scratched at his forehead. ‘Well, you see, in order not to generate panic in the city, we have been reporting these rocket strikes as gas-main explosions. Since they come in faster than the speed of sound, the detonation actually precedes the noise of its arrival, which itself is drowned out by the explosion.’

‘How long do you think you’ll be able to keep that fiction working?’ the professor asked incredulously.

‘As long as we have to,’ said Warsop, ‘but that’s not why we’re here.’

‘Yes, quite,’ said Rufford, who seemed anxious to defuse whatever animosity was already brewing between the two men. ‘We’ve brought you this piece of equipment, because we’ve never come across anything like this before. We have reason to believe that the enemy may be close to perfecting a radio-controlled homing system for these weapons.’

‘Radio-controlled?’ asked Greenidge, and suddenly he understood why they had come to him.

Before the war, he had experimented with radio-guidance technology for weapons, but he had never been able to develop a successful prototype. His government funding had eventually been cut and he came to work at the propulsion lab as a steam-turbine engineer. Now, it seemed, the enemy had fulfilled the dream which had once been his own.

‘Any chance you might be able to reconstruct it?’ asked Rufford.

Greenidge shook his head. ‘Not from what you’ve given me. This is only part of the mechanism. If you can find me schematics, even partial ones, I should be able to make some headway pretty quickly.’

‘We’re working on that now,’ said Warsop.

‘In the meantime,’ continued Greenidge, ‘I can take apart what we do have here and should be able to tell you what is missing.’

‘Then that will have to do,’ said Rufford. ‘Have you got some place where you can work on it without anyone looking over your shoulder?’

‘Yes,’ said Greenidge. ‘There’s space in the storage room at the back.’

‘Put a lock on the door,’ ordered Warsop.

‘There is one.’

‘On the inside,’ said Warsop, ‘so you can keep out any unintended visitors.’

Greenidge nodded. ‘I’ll see to it right away.’ He shook hands with Rufford. Warsop only nodded goodbye.

‘I do have one last question,’ said Greenidge, as the two men headed for the door.

They turned and looked at him.

‘Are you sure there’s no one on the other side who knows we’ve got hold of this?’

Rufford looked nervously at Warsop.

‘Why do you want to know that?’ demanded Warsop.

‘Because if I can build it’, answered Greenidge, ‘I might also be able to build something which could defeat its purpose. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? The simple fact that we might be able to duplicate the technology isn’t going to prevent it from being used against us.’

For the first time, Warsop’s scowl faltered.

‘We’re as sure as we can be that the enemy has no idea where these rocket pieces went,’ explained Rufford, ‘but that’s never one hundred per cent. The men who brought us that wreckage took extraordinary risks in doing so, but who knows if someone saw them on their journey, or if the local authorities where the rocket came down have been able to figure out what was taken from the wreck. The way things are in Germany right now, they’ve got plenty of other things to worry about. Let’s hope this stays off their radar.’