Hauser took the glass tumbler offered him, and Hitler awkwardly poured a dash of the liquor into his own glass and a much larger measure into Hauser’s.

‘To you and your wonderful bomb, Karl.’

‘Th-thank you, my Fuhrer,’ he said, emotion thickening his voice.

Hauser smiled and drank his brandy. Hitler smiled and sipped his.

Chapter 21

Test Flight

5 p.m., 16 April 1945, an airfield south of Stuttgart

Major Rall stood on the grass outside the entrance to the bunker and watched a flock of seagulls swoop and circle the airfield.

‘There must be a storm out at sea, that’s what brings them inland,’ he muttered to no one in particular.

Storms at sea.

He wondered how U-1061 was faring. The North Sea was becoming a dangerous place for the Kriegsmarine. There was a fair chance that the sub had failed to receive its orders, or worse, had been destroyed by a Royal Navy vessel. He had yet to hear from the U-Bootflotille in Bergen any news on whether the sub was on its way back. Of course, no news meant nothing, it was getting increasingly difficult these days to keep the lines of communication open between disparate elements of their armed forces. It hadn’t been easy to get the order through to Norway, partly because it had not gone through the usual channels.

Worrying about the U-boat demonstrated quite clearly to Rall how fraught with uncertainties this whole operation was. The U-boat was just one small piece in the jigsaw. It was the only way of transporting a platoon of troops from Norway, north around the coast of Scotland and Ireland to a particular airstrip on the west coast of France. Intelligence reports indicated that the airfield was operated by the USAAF and staffed only by aviation mechanics and administrative personnel; a perfect place for the Messerschmitt escort planes to refill their tanks and continue escorting the B-17 beyond fighter range of France. No U-boat, no troops; no troops, no captured airstrip; no airstrip, no fighter cover for the bomber those first few hundred miles into the Atlantic — and that’s undoubtedly where the Americans and British would converge to take her down.

And then there were the other uncertainties: would the bomb be ready before it was all too late? Could it be safely transported here without being accidentally intercepted by an Allied plane or ground troops?

He had received precious little information about the bomb from Speer since he’d been headhunted and assigned the task of planning its delivery all those months ago. Other than being informed that it employed a new explosive formula that allowed it to yield destruction well in excess of its size, there had been no information about its dimensions and whether the B-17’s bomb racks would need to be modified to accommodate it. Nor had there been any information about the weight of this weapon, so the size of the extra fuel tanks had been guessed at. Although the brief he had been given by Speer, the Minister for Armaments, months ago had been very specific, the paucity of details about the bomb itself was causing Rall an immense amount of concern.

And then there was the fighter escort. He had two Me-109s in the hangar; they had both been flown in the previous night under cover of darkness. The pilots that had flown them in said it had been touch and go getting them across skies crawling with American, British and Russian aircraft. What about the other ten or so he had been promised? Would they make it here?

The seagulls lost interest in the airstrip and swooped away northwards. His gaze fell upon Max and his men playing football with some of the ground crew just inside the hangar. The dim light of the late afternoon made little impression on the darkened interior of the building where the B-17 and the first two Messerschmitts of the squadron were discreetly hidden in the shadows. He watched the men kick the football between them; each one taking turns to do a trick with the ball.

It was good to see them play like that.

The morale of the men seemed quite high here on the airfield. It had become a remote outpost where order still reigned, while beyond the solitary guard hut it was a turbulent sea of drifting refugees, running before a Russian tidal wave. On the airfield it almost felt like another time, the happy days at the beginning of the war when it appeared as if every campaign they embarked upon would lead inevitably to victory. Just a few days ago, all of these men had nothing else on their minds other than how to find American or British troops to surrender to safely. Now, once more, they looked like men with some fight left in them, some purpose greater than making it through the next few days alive. Rall found it hard not to smile. Even with grim defeat staring them all in the face, and an uncertain future ahead for them at the hands of their Russian conquerors, it seemed to take the smallest spark of hope to turn them once more into soldiers.