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Target Area”.’
    ‘That’s all?’
    ‘No.’ But then Hagemann hesitated.
    ‘Herr General?’ asked the signalman.
    ‘Diamond Stream observed,’ said Hagemann. ‘Add that to the message. Send it now.’
    Hitler had been waiting for that message for almost two years. Hagemann just hoped to God those boys floating out there on the Baltic were right about what they had seen.
    By now, the technicians, sitting in their huddle, had noticed that something unusual was going on. Leaving their helmets, which resembled a crop of large grey mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted from the road, they came over to the radio truck.
    Among them was Sergeant Behr. ‘What is it, Herr General?’ he asked.
    Hagemann handed him the message which they had just received.
    ‘Diamond Stream,’ whispered Behr.
    Soon the words began to echo among the small group of men gathered beside the radio truck.
    Hagemann stared at the list of calculations scribbled on his clipboard. He had waited so long for the Diamond Stream to become a reality, rehearsing in his mind the precise array of emotions which hearing those words would evoke. But now that the moment was finally here, and so unexpectedly, the only thing he felt was nauseous.
    By now, Behr had also read the trawler’s message. ‘But why would it have overshot?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m not sure yet,’ answered Hagemann. ‘The Diamond Stream must have had some unintended effect on the propulsion system. I’ll have to go over the flight calculations again. It might be a while before I know for certain what took place.’
    ‘Do we have any idea of where it might have come down, Herr General?’
    Hagemann shook his head. ‘Most likely in the water.’
    ‘And even if the rocket did crash on land,’ Behr stated confidently, ‘there would be nothing of it.’
    Hagemann didn’t reply. He knew that whole sections of V-2 fuselage had survived their supersonic impacts, even those which had been fully loaded with explosives. Disoriented, the general began walking down the sandy road towards the ocean, as if he meant to swim out into the freezing waters of the Baltic and retrieve the missing rocket by himself.
    ‘Congratulations!’ Behr called after him.
    Hagemann raised one hand in acknowledgement as the darkness swallowed him up.

Far to the west, at a British Special Operations listening post
    Far to the west, at a British Special Operations listening post known as Station 53A, located in a rural manor house in Buckinghamshire, the messages exchanged between General Hagemann’s launch site and the observation ship had been intercepted.
    In less than an hour, the message had been decoded by the station’s Head of Operations, a former member of the Polish Intelligence Service named Peter Garlinski.
    Garlinski, a thin-faced man with round, tortoiseshell glasses and two thin swabs of hair growing on either side of his otherwise bald head, had been en route to England in September of 1939, carrying rotors stolen from a German Enigma machine, when the Germans invaded his country. With no way to return home, Garlinski offered his services to British Intelligence. He had been at 53A ever since, rising to Head of Operations thanks to his ability to stay at his post for thirty-six hours at a stretch, monitoring the airwaves for enemy transmissions, relying on nothing more than strong tea and cigarettes to keep him going.
    The capture of a complete Enigma machine from a U-boat that foundered off the English coast had enabled British Intelligence to begin decoding the messages.
    For several minutes, Garlinski studied General Hagemann’s text, wondering if he might somehow have misread the transmission. He processed it a second time to reassure himself that there had been no mistake. Then he sent the message on to cryptographic analysts at Bletchley Park to await confirmation.

At the same moment
    At the same moment as Sergeant Behr was congratulating General Hagemann, two elderly brothers on the