'Yes,' Ernst said. 'his is the woman Kosilewski... This is the woman I know.'

'Oh, my G.o.d!' Kryzystina exclaimed in disbelief.

The soldiers dragged her away from Ernst and threw her into the van, then climbed in behind her and slammed the doors shut. Ernst followed Ritter into the front and turned away from his gloating grin, but was forced to listen to Kryzystina sobbing in the back. The journey seemed interminable, all the way back to the grim, guarded entrance to the SS headquarters and bas.e.m.e.nt cellars where, he knew, Kryzystina would be tortured and interrogated by Ritter.

He tried to walk away then, but Ritter called him back.

'Excuse me, sir,' he said, forcing Ernst to turn around and see Kryzystina, no longer sobbing, but with pale, tear-streaked cheeks, staring at him with fierce hatred and condemnation from between the two soldiers. 'Don't you want to say goodbye to your Jewish wh.o.r.e?'

Ernst could not reply, but he didn't turn away. The soldiers dragged Kryzystina toward the entrance. She suddenly howled like a wild animal, and only when Ritter had kicked her into the building did Ernst make his escape.

Kryzystina did not talk in twenty-four hours nor in twenty-four days. Three weeks later, she was, according to a frustrated Ritter, still in her bas.e.m.e.nt cell, a b.l.o.o.d.y mess but unbroken, and waiting for the train that would take her to the living h.e.l.l of Auschwitz.

During that time, Ernst managed to recover from his humiliation and shame by remembering Kryzystina only with hatred. He accepted that he had made a fool of himself, fought back tears when he learned that the German army had entered Paris, and threw himself more devotedly into his task of finding suitable candidates for forced labour in the underground factories, or a worse fate in the concentration camps.

In doing this, he paid penance for his sins and regained his lost pride.

Because Kryzystina was one of those earmarked for the camps, there was no way of avoiding her at the station; nor, by this time, would he have attempted to do so if he could. Indeed, when he saw her bruised and scarred face in that hopeless queue of the d.a.m.ned, a cloud of steam blowing across brown eyes darkened even more by weeks of torture, he felt neither surprised nor shocked, only a quiver of suppressed rage. Then, on a perverse whim, he had an SS guard with a snarling dog drag her out of the queue, to be placed before him.

When she recognized him, her eyes brightened with the enduring strength of contempt, and her lips, which had been shivering with despair, formed a line of defiance.

'You're a terrible mess, Frau Kosilewski,' Ernst said sardonically, 'and where you're going, the treatment will be even worse than what you've already had. Would you like me to help you?'

'What's the price?' she replied.

Ernst pointed at the queue forming at the far side of the platform and said, 'The people in that queue have been selected to live, while these poor wretches' he indicated the queue she had just left 'have been selected for death. Tell me where your boyfriend, Andrzej Pialowicz, is hiding and I'll let you leave this queue and join that one over there.'

She stared at him with disbelieving eyes, too shocked to speak.

'This queue or that one,' Ernst said. 'Life or death, Kryzystina. Now, where's Andrzej Pialowicz?'

She spat in his face.

Ernst didn't have time to react before the SS guard stepped forward, struck Kryzystina with his bullwhip, then hurled her back through the snarling dogs, into the queue heading to certain death.

Kryzystina didn't look back at Ernst to see him wiping her spittle from his forehead. Instead, she stared straight ahead, as if he had never existed. She didn't even look back when she was herded into the carriage, dissolved behind a cloud of steam, and then became just another nameless face in a mosaic of the d.a.m.ned.

Then Ernst crossed the platform and boarded the other train: the one taking those destined to work in the underground factories in support of his Reichsfhrer's Projekt Saucer.

That train, when it moved out of Cracow, took him back to Berlin.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

'Nostradamus,' Himmler said, sipping effetely at his tea, 'foretold the conquest of France by Germany. Did you know that, Herr Wilson?' 'No,' Wilson said. He had not known and did not wish to know, any more than he wanted to be reminded that Adolf Hitler based many of his most vital decisions on the advice of his Swiss astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft; or that Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goring, ran his war with the aid of rainmakers and teams of clairvoyants; or that his deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had recently flown to England without permission in an insane attempt to establish peace with Britain, kept a pet lion, believed in astrology, and was known to have dabbled seriously in the occult; or that Himmler himself, now sipping his tea so sedately, was as mad as a hatter.

The world is being conquered by a gang of lunatics, dope addicts, s.a.d.i.s.ts, occultists, and degenerates, Wilson thought, and I'm forced to use the sc.u.m.

'I believe that Nostradamus,' Himmler droned on, 'also prophesied the conquest of the West by a race of Aryans at approximately this time. Did you know that, Herr Wilson?'

'No,' Wilson said, though he knew what Himmler was driving at. Since he and the Reichsfhrer had last met, the German forces had overrun Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. They indeed seemed unstoppable, and the fall of the West had seemed guaranteed. However, Hitler had then become obsessed with his mystical notion of Lebesraum German expansionism and s.p.a.ce and was now preparing to invade Russia, even against the protests of his own generals. It was a two-front war that had defeated Germany in 1918 and would, Wilson reasoned, do so again which is exactly why so many of Hitler's finest officers had protested the planned invasion in the first place. Yet even now, as he and Himmler were having their chat over tea, fighter planes, bombers, Panzer tanks, and three million foot soldiers were ma.s.sing along a 930-mile front, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, prepared to advance into Russia and certain doom.

The beginning of the end is in sight, Wilson thought, which means that my time is running out, my situation becoming more tricky. I must be more careful now. 'You are an admirably concise conversationalist, Herr Wilson,' Himmler said, his eyes, magnified by the pince-nez, as dead as his smile. '"Yes" and "no". A curt nod of the head. A distinct lack of verbal elaboration. No more said than is absolutely necessary. A man of few words.'

'I'm sorry, Reichsf hrer.'

'You have no need to be. Clearly it's in your nature. I think you're a man who trusts in his own nature and devoutly follows his chosen path.'

'That's true,' Wilson said.

They were having their tea in Wilson's gla.s.s-panelled office in the main hangar at k.u.mmersdorf. After glancing at Himmler's immobile bodyguards, both granite-faced and wearing menacing black-leather overcoats, Wilson studied Captain Ernst Stoll who, in his SS uniform, was sitting silently beside his beloved Reichsfhrer.

After returning about a year ago from Poland, where reportedly he had laid the groundwork for the regular movement of Jews and Poles to either the concentration camps or the secret underground and research establishments of the rapidly growing Third Reich, Stoll had been a changed man: a more fanatical n.a.z.i, now devoted to Himmler, and untiring in his dedication to Projekt Saucer and its ultimate goal, which was to protect an underground colony of SS masters and their slaves in Neuschwabenland. Yet as Wilson knew, Stoll remained a frustrated romantic... and Wilson could use him.

Indeed, he already had.

By the time Stoll had returned from Poland with his renewed dedication to Himmler's planned world of ice and fire, Wilson had come to understand something important: While it was true that German scientists as a whole were producing extraordinary innovations in weaponry and aeronautics, it was equally true that their separate projects were not being coordinated. So great were the rewards for success in n.a.z.i Germany, but so terrible the penalties for failure, that even formerly cooperative scientists had been reduced to currying favour by competing ferociously with one another.

In this sense, the Peenemnde situation was typical.

While Himmler had the cream of his rocket engineers working on the V-I and V-2 rockets at Peenemnde, on the Baltic, the V-I was a Luftwaffe project, the V-2 was an Army project, and both sides were competing instead of putting their heads together. Similarly, while various research establishments scattered throughout Germany and Austria were working separately on gas turbines and jet propulsion, heat-resistant and 'porous' metals, gyroscopic mechanisms and boundary layer-defeating airfoils, only Wilson had had the sense to link their often startling innovations together, into the one, revolutionary aircraft.

That aircraft was not Schriever's flying saucer, about to be testflown. It was the small, disc-shaped Feuerball, which Wilson was ostensibly creating as a flying anti-radar device, but which in fact he was secretly using as an experimental prototype for a full-scale, vastly more advanced flying saucer, to be constructed and used only when he saw fit.

As Stoll did not know about the secret Feuerball experiments, he had been more than willing to arrange for Wilson to travel the length and breadth of the Third Reich on numerous visits to other research establishments.