Final Impact (34 page)

Duffy patted him on one leg. “Nice thought, but I’m going back to France.”

“You cannot be serious, surely?”

“I am, and don’t call me Shirley…sorry, old joke.”

He looked confused and for a sad, terrible moment she was reminded of Dan. Looking back on their relationship, he’d sported the same poleaxed expression more often than not.

Okay, that was a little unfair. Dan had been in love with her, truly, madly, and deeply, as the saying went. And he’d had that thing Halabi spoke about, that self-satisfied look all men get when they think their woman is the finest piece of ass in the room. He was a great guy, but in the end he just got confused.

Confused about why he loved her. Confused about why she couldn’t be what he wanted. Why she couldn’t give any more than she was willing to give. And why that was so little compared with what he’d come to expect of a woman. Most painfully she remembered the complete and utter incomprehension contorting his poor, sad, beautiful face when he discovered that she had aborted their child and sterilized herself.

Compared with that, Ronsard’s bemusement was minor.

“Don’t bother, Marcel,” she said. “I’m from another world. You’ll never understand.”

He held up a hand in protest.
“Non,”
he said, and she detected a deep sadness behind his martial façade. “I think I understand only too well. You forget I have been at war, too,
cherie.
I was with a woman recently who made a decision that she had to leave and run toward danger. She felt she had no choice.”

“And did she?”

“Have a choice. No. And did she go? Yes, she did. And now she is dead, which is why I am able to sit here talking with my beautiful American from another world.”

He reached out and stroked away a lock of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. It was a tender gesture.

“Was she a lover?” Duffy asked, surprised to find out that she cared about the answer, but not so much one way or the other. A strange feeling.

“No. A comrade.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Such is war, no?”

“I suppose so.”

Ronsard took her hand, and they sat in silence for a minute.

If he’d seen this room two years ago, he’d have known that Hitler was doomed.

Stepping into the CIC of the
Trident
was akin to passing into another world. The merest glance at the giant video wall that dominated the hexagonal space was enough to explain why the Allies had seemed almost omniscient at times. In effect, they were. There were too many individual display units for Brasch to be able to count, but all he needed to see was the eight networked monitors that took up three sides of the room. As he stood in front of them, they seemed to enclose him, providing a view of the entire European theater that was godlike. The density of information available was beyond his ability to interpret.

He assumed that the two or three dozen operators working quietly but briskly at the stations had trained for years before they even set foot in this place. The Continent was buried under hundreds of data tags and miniature video windows, which were themselves in constant flux as one controller or another called up some particular piece of information. As an engineer he could appreciate the complexity and the decades of development that must lie beneath such a system. So mesmerizing was the effect that he was almost tumbled to the floor when the ship dipped and rolled dramatically on the storm-tossed sea.

“Are you all right, General Brasch?”

It was Halabi, the captain. She had taken his arm with a surprisingly strong grip to save him from the indignity of a fall.

“I was just thinking that if the high command had really understood the danger of this ship, they would have devoted the entire resources of the Reich to its destruction,” he said.

“Well, then, best we keep it our little secret. Mr. Howard?”

A dark-haired man pointed a flexipad at the main display, inflating two windows from a couple of tiny data tags that were hovering over the Oder River on the German border with Poland. Brasch was instantly drawn by the movement, but forced himself to take in as much of the wider picture as he could.

It appeared, as far as he could tell, that both the Eastern and Western fronts seemed to be rapidly contracting toward the Fatherland. Fourteen, maybe fifteen Wehrmacht divisions in the Balkans were moving north. Dozens of divisions he knew to be in western Germany were now to be found heading east, or had already arrived there. The situation across Western Europe looked chaotic in the extreme. Indeed, there was no front, as such. It seemed to have collapsed in the face of the Allied assault, which was but a fraction of the size of the Soviet attack.

There could be only one explanation. Berlin was throwing everything into a defensive line to keep the Bolsheviks out, and allowing the Americans and British to advance practically at will. It was impossible to tell for sure, because of the complexity of the display. But the use of little electronic flags, just like the wood-and-paper markers on an old-fashioned map table, allowed him to get a rough idea of what was happening.

It meant the end of the Reich, one way or another.

“General Brasch, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Excuse me,” he muttered to Captain Halabi. “I am sorry. It is just so…so overwhelming.”

“The
Dessaix
had a CIC very similar to this one.”

“I never saw it,” he conceded, struck by the incongruity of the situation. Although he had been one of the most trusted men in the Reich, he still hadn’t been considered a safe bet by the SS, which jealously guarded all access to the Emergence technologies. Here, though, the demands of the situation and a word from Prince Harry meant that he found himself in the beating heart of the Allied war effort.

“The top left-hand screen, Herr General, if you wouldn’t mind.”

He refocused his attention on the appropriate display. Two windows were active. One displayed a Waffen-SS artillery unit busily servicing a battery of 88s; the other, what had to be Soviet infantry. Subsidiary windows leapt out of the second window, resolving themselves into close-ups with quite amazing clarity. It was as though he were hovering a few dozen meters off the ground.

“A penal battalion,” he said with distaste.

The British all turned in his direction.

“Why do you say that, sir?” asked the dark-haired man. Mr. Howard, if Brasch recalled correctly.

Brasch nodded at the close-up screen. “Observe. Only one man in three has a weapon. They are making no attempt at concealment. They simply move into the contaminated area and…well, you can see.”

They could. The Soviets ran forward, only to stumble and collapse. Many regained their feet for a few moments, only to fall again. Almost none made it up a third time. They seemed to be afflicted with fits and dementia. Grotesque spasms twisted their bodies into fantastic shapes.

“I am afraid I am unfamiliar with effects of this nerve weapon,” he admitted. “I do not think there is much I can help you with. Other than to confirm that, yes, I know Himmler’s men were working on such projects.”

“Could you sit down with some chaps in London and work out what industrial capacities the Reich might have diverted to this project?” the army officer called Hart asked of him.

Brasch shrugged. “With the ministry files I sent you, and some help, yes, I could make an estimate.”

“Good,” Halabi said. “As soon as the weather permits, we’ll get you on a chopper. Thank you, General Brasch. Your country will thank you one day, too.”

Brasch looked at the red tide pushing toward Germany’s eastern border. He wasn’t sure his country would exist in a few weeks.

“I find it hard to imagine the führer would allow withdrawal on either front,” he said, genuinely perplexed at the story told by the giant electronic display.

“Oh, didn’t anyone tell you yet?” Halabi asked. “The führer is dead.”

27

D-DAY + 38. 11 JUNE 1944. 0833 HOURS.
RIVER ODER, THE EASTERN FRONT.

Lieutenant Filomenko clutched the Tokarev pistol so tightly he thought the grip might leave a scar on his palm that would last for the rest of his life. Not that he expected to live much past the next few minutes.

As an officer in a Soviet penal battalion, he had a very short life span anyway. He’d been attached to this particular “forward unit” for one month, when all of its other leaders had been killed in the advance through the Ukraine and across the Polish plains. The rules were straightforward. Survive the month, and he could “retire” back to a rifle company, his four weeks of service counting sixfold when it came to calculating his army pension.

At that he almost laughed. Climbing through piles of corpses torn asunder by German artillery, how could the prospect of old age be anything but a cruel joke.

“Move your fucking asses,”
he screamed at his men, firing off a couple of rounds from the handgun to encourage them forward. It was hard to think of them as “his men,” though. These were the walking dead. Criminals. Traitors. Cowards. The very bottom of the barrel.

Wearing blue tunics and black caps they ran forward, shoulder-to-shoulder, only the most trustworthy of them actually armed with imperial-era Mosin-Nagant rifles. Like Filomenko they would shoot down any who wavered. Many of them had no boots. Others had fashioned crude footwear from rags and even sheets of tree bark. If by some miracle they survived the poisoned ground, the swim across the Oder under heavy fire, and the scramble up the far bank, most of them would have to throw themselves onto the fascists with only their bare hands and their teeth to use as weapons.

Filomenko didn’t expect to get that far. Hopping quickly over the mounds of his slaughtered comrades, he recited a silent prayer. To be caught even whispering it would mean permanent exile to a penal battalion.

That thought brought forth another ironic chuckle.

“Hail Mary full of grace…”

The field sloped gently down toward the river. The ground in between was thick with the dead, but already he could tell the difference between the smashed and shattered remains through which he was currently forced to move—a Stygian field of severed limbs, shredded torsos, and spilled viscera—and the eerily peaceful scene that lay ahead. The soft ground was largely undisturbed, but was carpeted with hundreds of bodies, all of them twisted into hideous contortions. Filomenko expected to taste or smell something besides burned earth and scorched remains, but other than the usual stench of a battlefield, there was nothing.

Perhaps the poison had cleared.

“…the Lord is with thee…”

He had time enough to wonder why the Germans weren’t firing at them, and he noticed how dry his mouth had become. He was used to that, of course. Before a big push he routinely instructed his men to carry extra canteens. Although admittedly had hadn’t bothered with these animals.

“Blessed art thou among women…”

Oh no.

He saw the first man go down about thirty meters in front of him.

“Keep going, keep going,” he roared. “Speed is your only hope.
Push through.
”

He squeezed off a couple of shots in the air just above the bobbing heads of the front rank.

“And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus…”

The men pressed on, many of them screaming a guttural war cry. As Filomenko cleared the last of the bodies destroyed by artillery, he fumbled at his hip for a water flask. He was thirstier than he had ever known.

He blinked away tears and snuffled up a runny nose. Still moving forward, he tried to raise the flask to his lips but missed, hitting himself in the cheekbone.

“Holy Mary mother of God…”

The front ranks were down now. Tangled up with the arms and legs of the men who had gone before, and died.

It was no use. They would not get through.

Another soldier in another army might have turned back. But not a Russian. One of the convicts turned around and jerkily attempted to retrace his steps. Filomenko shot him in the face.

“Forward!
Forward!
”

A dizzying wave of nausea enveloped him, and his chest felt so tight he thought he might be having a heart attack. It felt as if he’d run thirty kilometers, not the two and a half they had just covered. His legs buckled at the knees and he fell forward, landing with a bone-jarring thump next to a man who was shrieking and gurgling, clawing at his own eyes.

Filomenko’s bowels evacuated, massively and violently. He vomited with such force that surely he must have ejected a part of his own stomach. Great spasms began to convulse his body, and he found himself facedown, thrashing involuntarily, sucking up clods of dirt.

“Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…”

Lieutenant Filomenko wanted to cry out. But he couldn’t.

D-DAY + 38. 11 JUNE 1944. 1108 HOURS.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

It wasn’t a simple thing to make an atomic bomb. Not a simple thing at all. If only the
Vozhd
would realize that.

Beria had a piercing headache and was sick with worry precisely because Stalin refused to accept this fact. The general secretary sat across the desk from him, regarding the NKVD chief with a cold, implacable stare. It was a look as empty of human feeling as the expression on a bronze statue. Indeed, any sculptor who produced such a likeness would probably be shot. None of the other men in the room gave him the slightest hint of sympathy.

“I have been pushing and pushing, Comrade General Secretary,” Beria protested. “I even had a couple of laggards and their families removed from the program and transferred to a punishment camp, just to encourage the rest.”

“Really?” Stalin said. His expression didn’t change. No one else dared speak.

Beria was about to reiterate how stern and uncompromising he had been in pursuit of the business of state, but something in Stalin’s tone stopped him.

The supreme leader of the Soviet Union spoke again in a chillingly flat manner.

“Perhaps you should not have done that, Laventry Pavlovich. Your methods have been somewhat crude, yes? If you had not been so heavy-handed with those few British sailors who survived the Emergence, perhaps we would not be having this unpleasant conversation. Perhaps we would be toasting the victory of the workers in Berlin. Or London. Or Washington.”

This was intolerable! Stalin accusing
him
of being crude!

Beria was only too aware that every eye in the conference room was now resting on him. The chill in Stalin’s gaze was repeated a dozen times around the table as the other members of the
Stavka,
the supreme Soviet war council, weighed the risk of incurring his wrath should he survive this meeting.

Clearly they found his chances wanting. The military officers remained stone-faced, but he could see all too well the shameful joy in the eyes of the civilian ministers, especially Malenkov. That fat freak was practically wetting himself with suppressed mirth.

Standing in his place at the table, struggling to control the tremors that wanted to turn him inside out, Beria fought for his life.

“Comrade General Secretary, it was necessary to adopt the harshest measures with the captives. If I might be allowed to remind you, they attempted to destroy their own ship when apprised of its situation. And there was no way for us to know that they possessed the inserted devices that allowed them to withstand so much pain. Indeed, we did not even know we were killing them! Our methods seemed to yield few results until it was too late.”

Stalin did not shout. He didn’t respond at all. He played with his empty pipe, which Beria knew from long experience was infinitely more worrying.

Finally he spoke. “And the last of them, the Negro woman. You knew about
her
inserts. Did you not?”

“Yes, we knew,” he cried. “And we tried to remove them. I have written authorization from you, approving the procedure. Nevertheless, it was no easy thing to dig such a device out of a woman’s spine. Little wonder that she died on the table.”

“For which you jailed the doctors, if I remember correctly,” Stalin replied. “They failed and they were punished.

“
You
failed. So?”

A grin slithered across Malenkov’s ugly face, like an eel, but Beria concentrated on bargaining with the
Vozhd.
“The bomb we dropped on Lodz did not fail. It wiped the city from the map and sent the Germans into full retreat toward the Oder.”

“Yes. And where are the follow-up attacks?” Stalin asked. “I was assured that we would pave the way to Berlin with these weapons.”

“And we shall. We shall,” he declared, using a cuff to wipe away the sweat that was leaking from the top of his head, plastering down what was left of his hair. It was a warm summer’s day outside, but the heavy purple drapes in the room remained drawn, on his own recommendation. He had read about sound guns that could be pointed at a window to pick up the conversations being conducted within. Presumably the heavy drapes would act as a baffle.

“
How
shall we?” Stalin asked. “How shall we press the advantage, when you tell us you cannot deliver the weapons?”

“That is not what I am saying,” Beria replied. “We have three more warheads under construction right now, as we speak. But these are not gasoline bombs. They are horribly complicated devices. One slip and the entire facility could be destroyed. And where would we be then? At the mercy of Churchill, who wants to use his own bombs on us. At the mercy of Truman, soon enough, who has proven in the other world that he will act with utter ruthlessness, when the occasion calls for it.

“We already know that the Allies are planning war with the Soviet Union. They will not allow history to take its course. If we strike, and our assault is a failure, they will sense weakness and they will act. Have no doubt about it. They…will…
act.

“We must have enough warheads to smash the Nazis with one blow,
and
to hold what gains we make in the next few weeks.” With that he stopped and glanced around the room to see if his words had had any effect.

He couldn’t believe it. They were actually listening. Stalin’s frozen glare had thawed, just slightly, as a hint of real interest entered his expression.

Beria, desperate to save his hide, summoned all his energies.

“The struggle against the fascists will not be the end of this war, comrades. Do we want the imperialists, the bankers and merchants, back in this room a hundred years from now? Because that is exactly what will happen if we miscalculate. We know the Allies are not capable of absorbing punishment of the sort we have endured. Can they live with ten million, twenty million dead? Can they shrug off thirty million bodies and continue to fight? No! We know they cannot. They are weak and squeamish about the true nature of conflict. They are not
meant
to succeed.

“But they will succeed, through pure chance, if we do not execute our next moves perfectly. The shock of Lodz has paralyzed them—for a moment. Another single warhead will not frighten them. But three, or four, or five delivered in one mighty blow? That will be too much for them to endure. They will collapse before us.”

As he paused to draw breath, Marshal Timoshenko, the defense minister, interrupted. “Comrade, you sound as if you are already making war on the Allies. But we are not at war with them. We fight the Nazis.”

“For now. For
now
!” Beria replied, exasperated. “But only for now. I am not talking about an atomic strike against the Allies, Marshal. They will have their own bomb program, and if we hit them they will strike back at us. But a coordinated atomic assault on the Germans, a wall of atomic fire along the Oder, to open the way for Konev and Zhukov,
that
will stun the Allies, paralyzing them with fear.”

He turned back to Stalin, whom he noted was filling his pipe.

“We have always understood that the ends of this war are political, not military,” Beria said, more calmly now. “The destruction of the Wehrmacht is a precondition for final victory, but it is not the victory itself. How many times have you yourself said that, Comrade General Secretary?”

Stalin shrugged, but a grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. His arbitrary nature could be fatal, but it might save a man’s life, too.

Beria was still sweating, but it was with excitement now, as he sensed his escape. Perhaps even victory. The sour odor of panic was abating, just a little.

Malenkov looked ill again.

“Kurchatov has thousands of technicians working on production at the
Vanguard
site. Thousands more are racing to stay abreast of him at Kamchatka. I cannot say that he will have four or five warheads available at the stroke of three this afternoon. But he assures me we are close. Very close.”

Stalin leaned back and lit his pipe. Puffing on it, he raised a thick cloud of gray, acrid smoke. “Marshal Timoshenko,” he said, pointing the stem at his defense minister. “Do you need Beria’s bombs to break through at the Oder? What latest news have you from there?”

The cavalryman’s bald head shone in the lamplight. His hooded, slightly Asiatic eyes remained dark pools. He had been surpassed in Stalin’s affection by Zhukov, but he remained a formidable figure. The purges of the late 1930s and the post-Emergence period had come nowhere near him. Nothing in the electronic files incriminated him, and Beria had to admit that he had done sterling work mechanizing the Red Army in preparation for its return to combat. When he spoke he betrayed no fear of the secret policeman. All the more reason for Beria to be wary of him.

“Zhukov reports that the Nazis are increasingly using the nerve agent to seal their eastern borders. At first we thought it was simply gas, but the British and Americans have relayed to us their suspicions that some Emergence weapon is more likely. It is being delivered by artillery shell and aircraft, and once contaminated, a piece of ground remains impassable for an indeterminate length of time.”