On the reverse was a crudely sketched symbol of a type he’d never seen before.
XIII
Central Germany, 7 February 1945
IT WAS OVER. SS Brigadeführer Walter Brohm couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when intuition had become truth, but he knew the war was lost. He could taste defeat in the air he breathed and smell it on the people who surrounded him. As a physicist he understood the concept of critical mass better than most. He wondered why he hadn’t recognized earlier the moment it had all turned to dust. Perhaps he could blame the fact that he had been trapped in this enormous concrete prison for most of the past two years, but he knew that wasn’t true. The evidence had been there for all to see despite the Führer’s grandiose promises. Goebbels could trumpet Wehrmacht success as loud as he liked, but anyone who could read a map knew that each ‘victory’ brought the enemy ever closer to the heart of the Reich. Brohm had watched the Ami bombers making their stately, invulnerable way across sacred Germany’s skies like shoals of tiny silver fish through a pale blue sea. Only a few weeks earlier he had seen the results as he flew into Berlin across whole districts reduced to barren fields of crater and rubble. Everyone knew a family who had lost a loved one at the front. The truth was, like everyone else in Hitler’s Germany, he had deluded himself that it could never happen. The promised wunderwaffen existed; the unstoppable rockets and jets that could fly faster than any Allied plane, the pulse cannon and the new tanks and improved U-boats. But there had never been enough and now there never would be. The Reich’s industrial base had already been crippled beyond repair. Not even Speer could make artillery shells with dead engineers in a factory that was just a pile of bricks.
He looked around the office that had been his home for the last twelve months. Wood-panelled walls, works of art and Persian carpets couldn’t disguise the chill reality of a subterranean existence and the all-pervading damp earth scent of quick-drying cement. He lit one of his little black cigarettes to mask the smell, the smoke swirling through the glare of artificial light to be consumed by the extractor fan in the ceiling. Beyond the internal window SS troopers from the security battalion hurried back and forth helping his research staff carry boxes of files and records to be burned in the furnaces two floors below. The occasional metallic crash told him that the work of dismantling or destroying the plant and removing the experimental machinery was being carried out as he had ordered.
Such a waste, after all the years of struggle and effort.
This bunker’s existence was known only to the highest ranking members of the SS hierarchy and had been built to last for a thousand years, but he had never truly believed the Reich would survive that long, and had never much cared. What mattered was his work.
At first, no one would even consider his theory about the material in the casket from Tibet. It was beyond the intellectual capacity of even the finest minds. Schumann and von Braun had looked at him as if he were mad. In the two years leading up to 1939, the theoretical and the experimental were only of interest if they applied to technology that would help Germany win the war everyone knew was coming. Even in 1940 the High Command had issued an edict banning research and development that would not produce military results in four months.
Chastened by the professional setback, Brohm had been recruited to work with Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann and Lise Meitner on a project that involved bombarding uranium with neutrons, continuing the work begun by the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford who had split the first atom. Meitner, a chain-smoking dynamo of a woman, was undoubtedly the brightest of the team and the acknowledged leader, but as an Austrian Jew her genius could not offset the massive disadvantage of her tainted blood. In 1938 she had fled Germany for Sweden. A year later Brohm had watched as Hahn discovered barium in a uranium sample. They had achieved what would become known as nuclear fission.
But that had not been enough for Walter Brohm. During the years with Hahn and Meitner, he had continued with his own experiments to discover the exact nature of what he had found in the casket. He worked at night, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion and mental breakdown, driven by the absolute conviction that this substance had been placed on earth for him and him only. He understood that his quest went beyond obsession, that it took him to the very brink of madness, but he revelled in the pain and disappointment as he rode ever closer to his goal on a tidal surge of anticipation. Eventually, he had come close enough to be sure of what he had. Now it was a matter of examination, analysis and theory as he tried to understand where the material took its place in the periodic table of earthly elements, if it had a place there at all. Row upon row of calculations on a blackboard concluded, studied, then dismissed. At first it had been as if he was wandering through a jagged, fissured landscape in a dense fog, each step uncertain and fearful, but gradually his mind had cleared. Eventually, he realized that he’d wasted hundreds of hours trying to peer forward into the unknown when he should have been looking back at the celestial origins of what the casket contained.