Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

On the runway at the Augsburg works it was waiting for him: the Messerschmitt Bf110D, radio code VJ+OQ, fitted with heavy drop-fuel tanks for long-distance flight. His chariot. He was ready for take-off. Ready as he waited in the summerhouse. Ready as he sat in his cell listening to the broadcast of the Apollo mission:

Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts reported, ‘Feels good’. T-25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T-15 seconds, guidance is internal, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, all engines running. lift-off. We have a lift-off, thirty-two minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11.

He flew north over Hanover and Hamburg, over the North Sea coast, tuning his radio compass to the Kalundborg radio station in Denmark that was on the same latitude as his intended landfall in England. Kalundborg transmitted directional beams, interspersed with classical music. That night Wagner’s Parsifal was being broadcast. Or had he imagined that? Albrecht Haushofer had called him a Parsifal. The innocent seeker.

He was approaching the point at which he would have to turn due west, out of friendly airspace, towards the unknown. Like the Apollo astronauts he would have to leave orbit and head into deep space.

CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston at one minute. Trajectory and guidance look good and the stage is good. Over.

ARMSTRONG: Apollo 11. Roger.

CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Thrust is good. Everything is still looking good.

ARMSTRONG: Roger.

The signals kept coming in from Kalundborg. In Act One of Parsifal , the old knight Gurnemanz rebukes the young Parsifal for shooting down a flying swan but when he learns that the boy has been raised in ignorance of courtly manners, he suspects that he might be the prophesied ‘pure fool’. He tells him of the Grail.

PARSIFAL

Who is the Grail?

GURNEMANZ

There’s no saying; but

If you are the chosen one,

The knowledge shall not escape you.

Yes, thought Hess. He had been chosen. This had been his quest, his Everest, his moon-shot. He was reaching the point of alignment with the radio transmitter.

CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Around three and a half minutes. You’re still looking good. Your predicted cut-off is right on the nominal.

ARMSTRONG: Roger. Apollo 11’s GO.

They completed their final manoeuvre around the earth and prepared for translunar injection. Hess turned due west, the Jutland coastline falling away below him. It was nearing twilight.

PARSIFAL

I hardly move,

Yet far I seem to come.

GURNEMANZ

You see, my son, time

Changes here to space.

Time and space and a holy mission. Six planets in the constellation of Taurus. Full moon in the Second House.

CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. We show cut-off and we copy the numbers in noun sixty-two…

ARMSTRONG: Roger, Houston. Apollo 11. We’re reading the VIL 35 579 and the EMS was plus 3.3. Over.

CAPCOM: Roger. Plus 3.3 on the EMS. And we copy the VI.

ARMSTRONG: Hey, Houston. Apollo 11. This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.

CAPCOM: Roger, 11, we’ll pass that on, and it looks like you are well on your way now.

They jettisoned the final stage of von Braun’s Saturn V. Soon Hess would jettison the drop tanks from his Messerschmitt.

The astronauts blasted out of orbit and fired up towards the moon.

Hess was out of German radar range now, out over the cold, deep North Sea. He had never flown above open water before.

GURNEMANZ

Now take heed and let me see,

If you be a fool and pure,

What knowledge may be granted you.

What knowledge! To find the Grail Castle at Dungavel House. He was the bringer of peace.

The evening light over the ocean was magically beautiful; small clusters of red-tinged clouds bejewelled the shimmering sea. He found himself profoundly affected by the northern latitudes, feeling a surge of magnetism. What was this? he wondered. Then at once he remembered his childhood fancy. Thule! Yes, the mythic island of the black sun. This was the journey he had foreseen amid the hot and dusty afternoons of Alexandria. The Hyperborean Atlantis spoken of at the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich as they valiantly resisted the Bavarian Soviet.

It was not yet fully dark, the time of civil twilight when the sun descends to six degrees below the horizon. He could just make out land, the knoll of Holy Island marking out the far edge of the Northumbrian coastline. A veil of mist hung over England. The full moon had risen above the thin cloud, shrouding it in phosphorescence. Hess gasped at the brightness of the heavenly body. For a moment it shone, the blazing beacon of his great purpose. Then he had a moment of doubt.

Hitler had always despised the moon.

His Tribune might think that this flight was out of fear, not love of hazard. Hess had left him a letter that alluded to Schopenhauer’s notion of a heroic passage through life encountering great difficulties that receives a poor reward or no reward at all. He had assured his leader that should the project fail, it need not have any evil consequence for Germany. They need only declare him mad.

Moonstruck. In a second he saw the clear and stark lunacy of it. If you be a fool and pure, what knowledge might you be granted. He could see the sharp details in the pock-marked face. Mountains and craters, sublime desolation.

ARMSTRONG: We’re about 95 degrees east, coming up on Smyth’s Sea… Sort of hilly-looking area… looking back at Marginus… Crater Schubert and Gilbert the centre right now… a triple crater with a small crater between the first and the second, and the one at the bottom of the screen is Schubert Y… zooming in now on a crater called Schubert N… very conical inside wall… coming up on the Bombing Sea… Alpha 1… a great bright crater. It is not a large one but an extremely bright one. It looks like a very recent and, I would guess, impact crater with rays streaming out in all directions… The crater in the centre of the screen now is Webb… coming back toward the bottom of the screen into the left, you can see a series of depressions. It is this type of connective craters that give us most interest…

CAPCOM: We are getting a beautiful picture of Langrenus now with its really conspicuous central peak.

COLLINS: The Sea of Fertility doesn’t look very fertile to me. I don’t know who named it.

ARMSTRONG: Well, it may have been the gentleman who this crater was named after, Langrenus. Langrenus was a cartographer to the King of Spain and made one of the early reasonably accurate maps of the moon.

CAPCOM: Roger, that is very interesting.

ARMSTRONG: At least it sounds better for our purposes than the Sea of Crises.

Enemy radar would have detected him by now, and the moon had become a celestial searchlight. He had to get below what cloud cover there was. He put the Messerschmitt into a dive and flew at full throttle, greeting England with the wild scream of his engines. The aeroplane burrowed through the light haze. At low altitude and high velocity he turned to starboard, then to port, heading almost due west to Dungavel House. He was enjoying himself, hedge-hopping mere metres above trees and rooftops. He reached the Cheviot Hills and climbed the slope with both throttles open, dropping down the other side, across the border. He was in Scotland.

He had the chart of his route strapped to his right thigh but he had memorised every landscape that marked his way to Dungavel House. He passed through the peaks of Broad Law and Pikestone, banking right and descending towards his destination. He flew over Hamilton’s country seat, trying to discern the runway. He could barely make out a blacked-out house below. Had he expected the landing strip to be marked somehow?