I will become a biological mutation with my mind unimpaired. I will not find immortality no, it's too late for that but the operations I've had, which have so far been successful, are merely the first steps on the road to man's transformation, physical and mental... Those who follow me, on the operating table and with my philosophy, will evolve, as their regressive fellow men die off, into the Superman.

This will be my achievement.

Thinking about it, he smiled. He was still travelling, after all. He had left his home in Iowa, left his friends, then his country, and now he was on the road out of Germany.

He was going to where the air was clean and mankind could be reborn.

Not immediately, however. He was still in the real world. He was reminded of that fact when the Allied bombers returned, growling low overhead, and the darkness outside the noisy train became a fabulous tapestry. There were ballooning b.a.l.l.s of white light, jagged yellow flames, clouds of black smoke, then the luminous, scorching heat of the explosions lent the darkness a crimson hue. Sparks fountained to the sky, decorating moon and stars, and the buildings of the town outside the train collapsed into more beauty. It was the singular beauty of death, the awesome radiance of destruction. Wilson saw the walls exploding, the smoke billowing up from the flames, and knew, even as the noise erupted and clawed through him, that the beauty and horror of life on earth were one and the same.

When the train screeched and shuddered, then ground to a halt, the SS officers crowded up against the windows to look out at the night.

'Why are we stopping?' Kammler asked, glancing at Nebe.

'I don't know,' Nebe replied. He stood up and crooked his finger at Ernst Stoll. 'Come with me, Captain.'

The train had stopped on the outskirts of town. The darkness outside was filled with sheets of yellow flame and geysering sparks. Smoke billowed up from the buildings, obscuring the moon and stars, and the steady droning of the Allied bombers seemed to make the air vibrate. Nebe stopped and glanced out, started forward, then stopped again when an SS sergeant hurried into the carriage and gave the n.a.z.i salute.

'Why have we stopped?' Nebe asked.

'Some of the prisoners are panicking, sir. They're hammering on the doors of the box cars and might start a riot. We don't know what to do.'

'What we do is set an example,' Nebe said softly. 'Captain Stoll, come with me!'

Wilson watched them departing, followed closely by Kammler, then he pulled his window down enough to stick his head out. The noise of the air raid was deafening, hammering at him like a huge fist. He saw collapsing buildings, more showering sparks, billowing smoke, and glanced backward along the train to where armed troops were covering one of the box cars, the dogs straining at the end of their tethers, barking and snapping.

Nebe, Kammler, and Stoll were there, standing in front of the box car. Nebe was removing his pistol from his holster as his troops opened the door. Bombs were exploding nearby, the ground roaring and erupting, and even as earth and debris showered back down, Nebe took aim with his pistol. The first prisoner was dropping. Nebe shot him and he fell. Another prisoner jumped out as Kammler and Stoll unholstered their pistols and also started firing. The prisoners were shot as they jumped out, screamed and jerked and collapsed. Then the women inside started wailing as the SS troops, encouraged by their leader, fired into the box car.

The noise was atrocious, a savage, staccato roaring, adding to the crescendo of the aircraft growling overhead, the bombs exploding on all sides, and the sibilance of the tracer bullets criss-crossing the sky above the boiling black smoke.

No more prisoners jumped down, but Wilson heard the women wailing. That dreadful sound was shut off when the box car doors were closed again, locking in the subdued prisoners, then Nebe led Kammler and Ernst Stoll back to the carriage.

The train moved off again as they returned and took their seats, Kammler and Nebe facing Wilson, the pale-faced Stoll beside him.

Wilson noted Stoll's shocked appearance. It was something worth remembering. Stoll obeyed orders, but not without distaste, and that virtue, which Wilson viewed as his weakness, was what would make him useful.

Wilson closed his eyes again. He fell in and out of sleep. The train rumbled through the night, through more air raids and long silences, pa.s.sing smouldering ruins and columns of troops on the roads and villages still remarkably untouched and silhouetted in moonlight. The ruins gradually disappeared, giving way to pine forests, The forests rose and fell over the hills of Thuringia, shielding picturesque villages, nineteenth-century houses, and the remains of fortified castles that stood majestically on the crest of the hills, overlooking the babbling brooks and rivers that crossed lush valleys.

The train climbed up through the forests. There were no air raids here. The sun rose beyond the hills, a pearly light through starlit darkness, then the gray light turned into silvery striations that gave the trees back their colour.

The trees covered the hills and mountains, hiding the great caves hacked out of them. The train, which had been climbing more slowly by the hour, finally stopped in a cleared area by the old walled town of Kahla, in the region of the southern Harz Mountains, on the same line that led on to the underground Nordhausen Central Works.

Wilson looked out. The pine trees soared all around him. The old walled town of Kahla could not be seen from here, but the train lines branched off into a tunnel that led inside the forested hills.

In there lay his destiny.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE After spending a nightmarish week in the Harz Mountains, supervising the resettlement of Wilson and his flying saucer project, Ernst returned to Berlin to do the same for the ungrateful and increasingly arrogant Flugkapitn Rudolph Schriever, though in this case the move was to Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Having settled Schriever, his two trusted engineers, and other a.s.sistants and slave workers in the research complex just outside the city, where the naive scientist had been looking forward to testing the flying saucer before the Soviets advanced too far, Ernst returned to a bomb-shattered Berlin. He felt older than ever and was no longer able to sleep at night. When he made his report to Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfhrer, who had once seemed so icily calm, now was oddly distracted. His eyes behind the glittering pince-nez roamed restlessly left and right.

'Four days ago,' he said, before Ernst could utter a word, 'the Russians took Minsk and captured one hundred thousand German soldiers. One hundred thousand,' he repeated slowly, like a man in a trance. 'It is something to think about.'

Embarra.s.sed, Ernst didn't know what to say, so he simply remained standing in front of Himmler's desk, looking down at his chubby, pale face and surprised by the change in him. Eventually, as if remembering what Ernst was there for, the Reichsfhrer looked up and said, in a less distracted manner 'So, you have completed the resettlements. I myself have recently visited the new site at Prague, but haven't been to Nordhausen since last there with you. What's it like there?'

'Very good, Reichsf hrer. The Nordhausen Central Works are, as you know, hidden deeply in the Kohnstein Mountain. As of this moment, more than three thousand prisoners from the concentration camp at nearby Buchenwald are being used as slave labour and housed in a new subcamp named Dora. It's antic.i.p.ated that by October this year, the whole of the Dora subcamp will have been transferred underground and also increased to a total of over thirteen thousand slave workers. Another camp for the prisoners is being set up in a mountain valley to the south, less than a kilometre from the entrance to Nordhausen's tunnel B.'

'The prisoners are disciplined and work well?'

'Yes, sir,' Ernst said, thinking of how the unfortunates were driven

to work with whips, worked exceptionally long, exhausting hours, and were not allowed to rest for a single moment. 'How are they disciplined?' Himmler asked, for such matters always interested the bureaucrat in him.

'Naturally they're supervised at all times by SS guards armed with pistols, automatic weapons, bullwhips, and sticks. When not working, many of them are shut up in the tunnels of the underground complex. When they refuse to work on the V-1 or V-2, they're shot or hanged in full sight of the other prisoners, either in the underground corridors or in the roll-call ground of the open camps.'

'Excellent, Captain. It's always best to carry out disciplinary measures in full view of the other prisoners. It's always good to remind them of the consequences should they, too, commit an infraction.'

'Yes, sir,' Ernst said. The nightmares generated by his week in Nordhausen and the other underground factories in the area, including the one at Kahla, were the cause of his inability to sleep.

'And the underground factories are definitely invisible from the air?'

'Yes, Reichsfhrer.'

'Good.' Himmler offered a smile that seemed to. be turned inward upon himself. 'As you know,' he said, clasping his hands under his double chin and returning to his former distracted manner, 'as early as 1941, I personally set up an SS proving ground near Blizna, a small village located by the confluence of the rivers Vistula and San, in southern Poland.'