Stephen Baxter - Last and First Contacts

Other guests walked with us, many from the upper tiers of the occupied nations of Europe. We were tailed by an excitable movie-film crew. Leni Riefenstahl is said to be directing a film of our momentous voyage, though she herself isn’t aboard. And many sinister-looking figures wore the black uniforms of the SS. Pressed by Jack Bovell, Ciliax insists that the Goering is a Luftwaffe crate and the SS has no authority here.

Below decks, we walked through a hold the size of the Albert Hall. We marvelled at mighty aquifers of oil and water. And we were awed by the double transverse internal bulkheads and the hull of inches-thick hardened steel: rivets the size of my fist.

‘She really is a battleship in the sky,’ Jack said, rather grudgingly. And he was right; the ancestry of this monstrous schlachtschiff lies truly among the steel behemoths of the oceans, not fragile kites like my Spitfire.

Jack Bovell is around thirty, is stocky – shorter than me – stinks of cigar smoke and pomade and brandy, and wears a battered leather flight jacket, even at dinner. I think he’s from Brooklyn. He’s smarter than he acts, I’m sure.

‘Ah, yes, of course she is a schlachtschiff ,’ said Ciliax, ‘but the Goering is an experimental craft whose primary purposes are, one, a demonstration of technology, and two, an explorative capability. The Goering is the first vessel in human history capable of challenging the mighty scale of the Pacific.’ That habit of his of speaking in numbered lists tells you much about Wolfgang Ciliax. He is quite young, mid-thirties perhaps, and has slicked-back blond hair and glasses with lenses the size of pennies.

‘“Explorative capability”,’ Jack said sourly. ‘And that’s why you made a point of showing us her armour?’

Ciliax just smiled. Of course that was the point.

Every non-German on board this bloody plane is a spy to some degree or other, including me. Whatever we discover about the world as we attempt to cross the Pacific, we neutral and occupied nations are going to be served up with a powerful demonstration of the Reich’s technological capabilities. Everyone knows this is the real game. But Jack keeps breaking the rules. In a way he is too impatient a character for the assignment he has been given.

Jack, incidentally, sized me up when he met me, and Ciliax, who isn’t completely juiceless, takes every opportunity to touch me, to brush my hand or pat my shoulder. But Jack seems sniffy. To him I’m an emblem of a nation of appeasers, I suppose. And to Ciliax I’m territory to be conquered, perhaps, like central Asia. No doubt we will break through our national types in the days to come. But your heroine is not going to find romance aboard the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering , I don’t think!

Day 3 . Memo to self: follow up a comment of Ciliax’s about the ‘helots’ who tend the atom engines.

These machines are contained within sealed lead-lined bulkheads, and nobody is allowed in or out – at any rate, not me. The atomic motors are a focus of interest for us spies, of course. Before this flight the RAF brass briefed me about the Nazis’ plans to develop weapons of stunning power from the same technology. Perhaps there is a slave colony of untermenschen , Slavs or gypsies, trapped inside those bulkheads, tending the glowing machines that are gradually killing them, as we drink wine and argue over politics.

In the afternoon I sat in one of the big observation blisters set in the belly of the Beast and made a broadcast for the BBC. This is my nominal job, to be Britain’s eyes and ears during this remarkable mission. We are still orbiting Germania, that is Berlin. Even from the air the vast reconstruction of the last decade is clear to see. The city has been rebuilt around an axial grid of avenues each a hundred yards wide. You can easily pick out the Triumphal Arch, the Square of the People, and the Pantheon of the Army which hosts a choreography of millions. Jack tuts about ‘infantile gigantomania’, but you have to admire the Nazis’ vision. And all the while the tanker planes fly up to service us, like bees to a vast flower…

Day 5. A less pleasant lunch today. We nearly got pranged.

We crossed the old border between Germany and Poland, and are now flying over what the Germans call simply ‘Ostland’, the vast heart of Asia. With Ciliax’s help we spotted the new walled colony cities, mostly of veteran German soldiers, planted deep in old Soviet territories. They are surrounded by vast estates, essentially each a collective farm, a kolkhoz , taken from the Bolsheviks. There the peasantry toil and pay their tithes to German settlers.

Jack grumbled and groused at this, complaining in his American way about a loss of freedom and of human rights. But he’s missing the point.

‘Americans rarely grasp context,’ said Ciliax with barely concealed contempt. ‘It is not a war for freedom that is being fought out down there, not a war for territory. Asia is the arena for the final war between races, the climax of a million years of disparate human evolution. As the Fuhrer has written, “What a task awaits us! We have a hundred years of joyful satisfaction before us.”’ I must say that when Ciliax spouts this stuff he isn’t convincing. He’s fundamentally an engineer, I think. But one must labour for whoever holds the whip.

(Memo: check the source of that Hitler quote.)

Since Germania we have been accompanied by fighters, mostly Messerschmitts, providing top cover and close escort, and Jack Bovell and I have been happily spotting types and new variants. And we have seen lighter, faster fighters streaking across our field of view. They may be the ‘jet fighters’ we’ve read about but have never seen up close. I know plenty of RAF brass who regret that the Phoney War ended in May 1940, if only for the lost opportunity for technical advancement. This ravaged continent is obviously a crucible for such advancement. Jack and I craned and muttered, longing to see more of those exotic birds.

And then the show started. We were somewhere over the Ukraine.

One fighter came screaming up through our layers of escorts. It arced straight up from the ground like a firecracker, trailing a pillar of smoke. I wondered aloud if it actually had rockets strapped to its tail. Ciliax murmured, as if intrigued by a puzzle.

You have to understand that we were sitting in armchairs in an observation blister. I even had a snifter of brandy in my hand. There was absolutely no sense of danger. But still the unmarked rocket-plane came on.

A deep thrumming made the surface of my brandy ripple; the Beast, lumbering, was changing course.

‘If that thing gets through,’ I said, ‘it’s harps and halos and hello St Peter for us.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Jack Bovell.

Ciliax said nothing.

Then a chance pencil of flak swept across the nose of the rocket-plane, shattering the canopy over its cockpit. It fell away and that was that; I didn’t even see the detonation when it fell to earth.

Jack blew out his cheeks. Wolfgang Ciliax snapped his fingers for more brandies all round.

We orbited over the area of the attempted strike for the next eight hours. Ciliax, meanwhile, took me and Jack down to a hold. The bombs were slim, blue and black steel, perfectly streamlined; they looked like ‘upturned midget submarines’, as Jack said. You can drop them from as high as twenty thou. I thought this was another piece of typically beautiful Nazi technology, but Ciliax said the bombs are a British design, made under licence by Vickers Armstrong in Weybridge, whose chief designer is a man called Barnes Neville Wallis. ‘They are as British as the banks of Rolls Royce Merlin engines that keep the Goering aloft,’ Ciliax told me, his bespectacled eyes intent, making sure I understood my complicity. But I thought he was mostly incensed that anybody had dared raise a hand against his beautiful machine.