Hell's Gate(54)
She uttered a cry of frustration and stood, dusting herself off. “But we are at war with America and China. Have you forgotten that?”
Voorhees had no reply.
Lisl shook her head again and turned from him. “Your far frontiers,” she said, walking away from the crater. “One day you’ll go too far. If you haven’t already.”
Thinking back, Voorhees could not recall how many weeks had passed between his “first date” with Lisl and the afternoon that von Braun let out the words that confirmed Lisl’s worry that he was already in deeper than he understood. He had arrived early to a staff meeting with Dr. von Braun and the members of the Propulsion Lab. As he turned a corner, there in the hallway was the leader of the rocket men, speaking to General Dornberger, the Wehrmacht officer who ran Peenemünde.
“We aim for the moon,” von Braun had said, then giving a shrug, “but sometimes we’ll hit London.”
Voorhees pulled up short, wondering if perhaps he had misunderstood. The two men turned to him as he rounded the corner. Although they said nothing, their expressions told him that he had not misheard or misunderstood anything. Voorhees nodded at them as he passed, wishing he could rewind the last thirty seconds, wishing he could have been a minute late to the meeting rather than a minute early.
During the last night that he saw either von Braun or Lisl, Voorhees was called to a gathering for the famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch. One of Hitler’s die-hard supporters, Reitsch had arrived at Peenemünde earlier that day “to help with the latest V-1 tests.” Voorhees, having heard that Hitler’s pet aviator once crash-landed a glider into a stadium full of crazed Brazilian soccer fans, expected that the meeting might be interesting. (Now, at Nostromo Base, he was sorry that those soccer fans had not torn her to pieces.) He remembered hesitating outside the officer’s mess hall, watching as the moon climbed nearly ten degrees up the sky, before he stepped inside. Voorhees understood, perhaps even more clearly than von Braun, that their great machines were being aimed at the wrong planet.
You know, I never planned to become a test pilot,” Hanna Reitsch had said. Voorhees noted that the famed aviatrix was a shade over five feet tall, slightly built, with close-cropped blond hair. “When I entered medical school,” she continued, “my dream was to become a flying missionary doctor in Africa.”
Several of the men chuckled but others might have been reminded of how the Treaty of Versailles had clipped Germany’s wings in 1919. With her country’s air force dismantled by decree, missionary work and gliders were two of the only ways that a German could ever hope to fly. Now she flew experimental aircraft, including a new class they were calling “jets.”
She had stood in the Hearth Room of the officers’ mess, surrounded by a crowd of approximately twenty mesmerized admirers, engineers and officers mostly. A few, though, stood away from the crowd. They detested this woman, solely because of the heights to which she had risen (literally and figuratively). Heights that they could never hope to attain—even as men.
“Time has a way of rewriting our decided paths,” Reitsch said, “of setting us upon destinies we’d never planned for, or even dreamed of.”
Thank God Lisl hadn’t come, Voorhees thought. He knew that when Adolf Hitler ascended to power, the vivacious pilot quickly became one of his favorites. Her fame peaked after she piloted the world’s first helicopter, whereupon the Führer himself appointed her an honorary flight captain. She was the first woman to garner such rank. Now here she was in Peenemünde—far removed from gliders or soccer stadiums.
“Destinies we’d never dreamed of,” she emphasized. “Unfortunately, these are challenging times, my friends. So no more talk about me. I’m here with an announcement and a proposal. Some of you already know why I’m here, but I’ll now make it official. This week I plan to test-fly a piloted version of the V-1, the V-1e.”
There were audible gasps from some of the crowd but a few of the men stood by silently. They had either worked on the prototype before coming to Peenemünde or had heard about it from coworkers. Others, like Voorhees, were completely taken by surprise.
The gasps died away and after a moment the room went so silent that the grandfather clock in the corner could be heard emitting its single chime—forty-five minutes past midnight, forty-five minutes into the new day.
“Where is the cockpit?” someone asked rather meekly.
“On the fuselage, directly in front of the pulse engine,” the test pilot replied.
There was a momentary pause, then it seemed that everyone present had a question or a comment.
“What about landing?”
“. . . or bailing out?”
“. . . with a flight time of only thirty-two minutes . . .”
“. . . and a range of only three hundred kilometers . . .”
“. . . putting severe limits on any potential targets!”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Reitsch said, raising her hands to calm the crowd. “Understand—again—that these are challenging times. But the Führer’s call is our sacred order! And now he calls on us to meet these challenges and to overcome them. The design of this craft is the product of the Luftwaffe’s greatest minds.”
That’s what I was afraid of, three of the scientists thought, simultaneously.