A screaming comes across the sky....
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

На тему этого

Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noiceable. He leans on the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short vertical white line. It must be somewhere over the North Sea... at least that far... icefields below and cold smear of sun...

What is this? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight... it's a vapor trail. Already a finger's width higher now. But not from an airplane. Airplanes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Secret, German rocket bomb....

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel cutoff, end of burning, what's their word... Brennschluss....

The trail, smuggled, slightly torn in two or three directions, hangs in the sky. Already the rocket, gone pure ballictic, has risen higher. But invisible now.

Ougthn'y he to be doing something... get on to the operations room at Stanmore, they must have it on the Channel radars - no: no time, really. Less than five minutes Hague to here. Run out in the street? Warn the others?

(c) Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"

PS: Пинчон - безусловный рулез. И V-2 в его параноидально-стебный сюжет вписалась идеально.