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familiar hissing roar of the V-2’s ignition engine. He could almost feel the rocket rising off the launch pad, as if the great assembly of wiring and steel were a part of his own body. A second later, he caught sight of the poppy-red flame of the V-2’s exhaust as the rocket tore away through the night sky.
    Almost immediately, the misty air swallowed it up.
    Hagemann turned and set off towards the launch trailer, a specially built vehicle known as a Meillerwagen.
    There was nothing to do now but wait for the report from the observation ship to confirm where the rocket had come down.
    He could see the tiny suns of cigarettes as the launch crew moved about, dismantling the V-2’s aiming platform so that, by daylight, nothing would remain for Allied reconnaissance planes to photograph. Even the tell-tale disc of charred earth where the ignition flames had scorched the soil would have been carefully swept away by men with wooden rakes, as solemnly as Buddhist monks tending to the sand of a Zen garden.
    As Hagemann approached them, he straightened his back and fixed a look of cheerful confidence upon his face. He knew that they would look to him for confirmation that all of their sacrifices had been worthwhile.

Far out in the freezing waters of the Baltic
    Far out in the freezing waters of the Baltic, a wooden-hulled trawler named the Gullmaren wallowed in a freshening breeze. Spring had been late in coming and, from time to time, stray clumps of ice bumped up against her hull, triggering loud curses from the helmsman.
    Below deck in the ice room, where a boat’s cargo of fish was normally stored in large pens, the rest of the three-man crew had gathered around a large radio transmitter.
    The radio had been bolted on to a table, to prevent it from sliding with the motion of the waves. In front of this radio sat an Enigma coding machine. It bore a vague resemblance to a typewriter except where the rolling-pin-shaped platen would have been there was instead a set of four metal rotors. Teeth notched into these rotors corresponded to the letters of the alphabet, and they could be placed in any order, allowing the sender and receiver to adjust the configuration of the messages. When typed into the machine, the message would then be scrambled by a series of electrical circuits so that each individual letter was separately encrypted. This system allowed for hundreds of thousands of mutations for every message sent.
    Stooped over the radio, with a set of headphones pressed against his ear, was the radio man. Against the damp and cold, he wore a waist-length, black collarless leather jacket of the type normally worn by German U-boat engineers.
    Beside him stood Oskar Hildebrand, captain of the Gullmaren , his body swaying slightly and unconsciously as the trawler wallowed in the swells.
    But Hildebrand was no fisherman, even though he might have looked like one in his dirty white turtleneck sweater and black wool knitted cap.
    In fact, Hildebrand held the rank of Kapitan-Leutnant in the German Navy, and for over a year he had served as liaison officer with V-2 Research Facility back on shore.
    ‘Anything?’ Hildebrand asked the radio man.
    ‘Nothing yet, Herr Ka-Leu.’ But almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, the radio man flinched, as if a slight electric current had passed through his body. At that same instant, miniature lights fitted into the Enigma’s keyboard began to flash. ‘They have launched,’ he said.
    From that moment, Hildebrand knew that he had about six minutes before the V-2 reached the target area. His task then would be to note down the point of impact and radio the details back to General Hagemann.
    Hildebrand had been in this role of observer for almost a year now, shuttling back and forth across the sea and watching very expensive pieces of machinery smash themselves to pieces as they plunged into the waters of the Baltic. Originally stationed on the coast of France and in command of an S-boat