'Would you care to inspect our flying saucer, Herr Wilson?'

'I don't have to inspect it, Reichsfhrer,' Wilson replied, 'to know that it won't fly.'

Himmler simply smiled. 'How arrogant you are, Herr Wilson! But come,' he added, crooking a delicate index finger and indicating the men standing nervously behind him, 'please let me introduce you to the rest of our team. This,' he said, indicating with a nod a young man with a lean and hungry look, 'is Flugkapitn Rudolph Schriever, who originally designed this flying saucer, which you insist will not fly. And this,' he continued, when Wilson had shaken the hand of the solemn young designer, 'is the physicist Klaus Habermohl, and his a.s.sociate, Otto Miethe. And this,' he ended, when Wilson had shaken the hands of Habermohl and Miethe, both of whom were middle aged, 'is Dr Giuseppe Belluzzo who, though Italian, has become an invaluable member of our team. Gentlemen, I give you Herr Wilson, an American genius!'

Ignoring Himmler's quiet sarcasm and the resultant nervous chuckles, Wilson shook the hand of the small, plump, balding Belluzzo and expressed his grat.i.tude that he would soon be working with him. When the rest of the team had crowded around him to congratulate him on his work, which they had a.s.sessed for Ernst Stoll, Wilson said to Schriever, 'Few experiments work out the first time, and the fact that this particular saucer will not fly is of no great importance. What is important, Flugkapitn, is that you've already made such progress and that now, if we all work together, we can build successfully upon it. I therefore congratulate you, Flugkapitn, for building the first flying saucer prototype.'

'Thank you, Herr Wilson.'

Schriever bowed stiffly, acknowledging Wilson's praise, but before anything else could be said, Himmler walked away from them and Lieutenant Stoll urgently waved his hand, indicating that he and Wilson should follow. Falling in beside Stoll, Wilson left the office and found himself standing in the great hangar, beside Himmler, who was facing Rudolph Schriever's skeletal flying saucer prototype and smiling in his mild, chilling way.

'You do not think it will fly?' he asked, still studying the prototype.

'No, Reichsfhrer,' Wilson replied.

'You're deliberately being bold in telling me this, Herr Wilson, where others would be too frightened to do so. This means you are cunning. Not too cunning, I hope.' He then turned to Wilson, looked up through his glittering pince-nez, and said, 'For obvious reasons, Flugkapitn Schriever is still in charge of this project, but you're the one from whom we expect results. Once a week you will visit Wernher von Braun at the Rocket Research Inst.i.tute at the other side of the firing range, and anything you've discovered that's of no use to this project but may be of use to von Braun, you will pa.s.s on to him, to be used as he sees fit.'

'I understand, Reichsfhrer.'

'You understand also, I hope, that I will be kept informed of your progress, or lack thereof, by Oberleutnant Stoll here' he indicated the nervous Ernst Stoll with a nod of his head 'and that anything you wish to discuss, you must discuss with him, not with Flugkapitn Schriever.'

'Yes, Reichsfhrer, I understand.'

'Good,' Himmler said. 'Now is there anything else you need to know before I take my leave?'

Wilson glanced across the hangar, saw that mostly empty, valuable s.p.a.ce, then returned his gaze to Himmler and said, 'My task is a large one, and apart from scientists and engineers, I'm going to need hundreds of unskilled labourers. Where will I find them?'

Himmler adjusted the pince-nez on his nose, gazed across the vast hangar at the glittering skeleton of Schriever's saucer, then looked up at Wilson with a thin, icily controlled, deadly smile.

'The camps,' he said, almost whispering.

CHAPTER TEN The administration buildings at Langley Field, Virginia, had been completed when Bradley made his next visit officially as an advisor on aeronautical law, unofficially as one of General Dwight Taylor's intelligence agents to attend a meeting of the recently formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Seated with him around the table in the main building were his old friend General Taylor, of the still too informal army air force intelligence branch, and the twelve members of the committee. Though most were Pentagon officers with technical backgrounds, also included were the aging yet still dapper Orville Wright who, in 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, with his brother Wilbur, had made the first airplane flight in history; and Charles A. Lindbergh, the handsome, aristocratic flyer who had won the nation's heart when, in 1927, he had made the first nonstop airplane flight between two continents in his now-legendary monoplane, The Spirit of St Louis, then won the sympathy of that same nation when, four years ago, his two-year-old son had been kidnapped and murdered.

Since its formation, the committee had been meeting once a month to discuss national and international aeronautical developments. This day should have been no different from any other... but most of those present were looking shocked.

'Eighteen years ago,' a radio announcer was saying, 'dejected German soldiers retreated from France across the Hohenzollern Bridge spanning the Rhine. Twenty-two days ago, at eleven-thirty a.m. on March 7, 1936, three of Adolf Hitler's battalions crossed that bridge again, this time marching back into the Rhineland. Within hours twenty-five thousand German troops had occupied the Rhineland, with no retaliation from the French. Today, March 29, 1936, again without benefit of guns, ninety-eight point eight percent of the electorate voted for Adolf Hitler, thus making him the Fhrer of all Germany. War in Europe is now virtually guaranteed...'

General Taylor turned the radio off, stared thoughtfully at it for a moment, then returned to take his seat at the head of the long committee table.

'Well, gentlemen,' he said, 'there it is. Adolf Hitler's now the absolute dictator of the Third Reich and he's not going to be satisfied with the Rhineland. As the man said, this clearly means war in Europe.'

'War in Europe is not our concern,' said a silvery-haired gentleman from a cloud of cigar smoke at the end of the table.

'I think it is,' Taylor replied, 'to the degree that it affects Germany's interest in aeronautical research, which already is alarmingly advanced. Mike,' he added, turning to Bradley, 'what do you think?'

'I'm seriously worried,' Bradley said. 'The n.a.z.is are, as you say, already dangerously advanced in aeronautical research and I think it's safe to say that most of that research will now be turned toward its potential for warfare.'

'It still doesn't affect us,' the dapper Orville Wright said, 'since America is taking an isolationist stance and Europe's a long way away.'

'I don't believe we can cling to isolationism for too long,' Bradley said, 'and as long as there's even the faintest possibility that we'll be involved in war, sooner or later, we should be seriously concerned about technological advances anywhere in the world but particularly in n.a.z.i Germany.'

'Your concern seems extreme,' a technical advisor said, puffing on his pipe and pursing his lips to blow the smoke out. 'Have you sound reasons for this?'

'For the past couple of years,' General Taylor said, 'Bradley, in an unofficial intelligence capacity, has been trying to track down someone for us a mysterious physicist and aeronautical engineer called John Wilson, who once worked with Robert G.o.ddard...' here the general glanced at G.o.ddard's friend, Charles Lindbergh... 'before reportedly travelling on to Germany to work for the n.a.z.is, possibly under a false pa.s.sport.'

'Bradley's already asked me about this John Wilson,' Lindbergh pointed out, 'and I had to tell him, honestly, that I'd never heard of him in connection with G.o.ddard until Bradley himself mentioned him. Obviously, as Bradley had already done, I then checked with G.o.ddard and received confirmation that Wilson had indeed worked with him in 1930 for approximately six months.'

'So what's so worrying about this fellow?' Orville Wright asked impatiently.

'What worries me,' Bradley said, 'is that according to G.o.ddard, this Wilson was a scientific genius with a particular interest in rocketry and s.p.a.ce flight. He also appears to have been a completely unemotional, ruthless son of a b.i.t.c.h who didn't give a d.a.m.n about anything other than his own work.'

'Sounds like your average scientist or politician,' someone said, thus encouraging a spasm of cynical laughter around the smokewreathed table.

When the laughter died down, Bradley said patiently: 'What I'm trying to get across is that this mysterious Wilson, who's possibly a scientific genius and utterly ruthless, had reason enough, and is certainly fanatical enough, to contribute his genius to a foreign power, irrespective of its nature or motives. And it seems clear from the evidence that the country he's chosen is n.a.z.i Germany.'

There was a long, uncomfortable pause until Charles Lindbergh said thoughtfully, 'Are you suggesting that this Wilson was actually more advanced in his thinking than G.o.ddard?'

'Yes,' Bradley said without pause.

'I find that hard to credit,' Lindbergh said.

'So did I,' Bradley replied, 'but not any longer.' He pushed his chair back, stood up, and walked around the table, distributing to all the members of the committee typed copies of Wilson's curriculum vitae. While they were reading it, he lit a cigarette, smoked it, and gazed out the window, thinking of how far aeronautics had advanced since Samuel Pierpont Langley, American astronomer, secretary of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, and aeronautical theorist (ironically also born, like G.o.ddard and Wilson's father, in Ma.s.sachusetts, where Wilson himself had attended MIT), had sent his quarter-scale, steam-powered 'aerodrome' into a flight over the Potomac River and these very fields, which had since been named in his honour. From those innocent beginnings, nearly forty years ago, a dark new age was dawning...