Final Impact (42 page)

“Any misgivings?” she asked Halabi.

“Are you going to quote me?”

“Only if you want me to.”

The captain of the
Trident
stared at the big screen for a moment. The business of war went on without pause. Sysops constantly scanned the threat bubble around the destroyer’s battle group. Intelligence officers analyzed the vast flow of data from ship sensors, drones, Nemesis arrays, and ’temp assets. Junior officers came and went, whispering urgent messages into the ears of their masters before carrying off replies whence they had come. On the battlespace display flashing black tags tracked the lead elements of the Soviet air assault into southern France, and the progress of Free French and U.S. armor rushing down to “link up” with them—in reality, to block them from any further encroachment. Many more data hacks crept over the western reaches of Germany as Patton and Montgomery raced each other toward Berlin. Three screens were entirely concerned with monitoring the stalled Russian advance on the Eastern Front, one of them showing new and ever more gruesome video coverage of the chemical warfare raging there.

It was all so horribly enthralling that Julia was a little surprised when Halabi spoke up again. She’d been lost in her own thoughts. She raised her pen inquiringly, and the commander of the
Trident
nodded.

“I have been fighting for nearly twenty years,” said Halabi. “And I have taken many lives. I have burned men alive in their aircraft. I have drowned them by sinking their boats and ships. Some I have crushed at the bottom of the sea. Others have been atomized by the weapons I fired at them. I never once hesitated to take their lives, whether they wore a uniform or not. If they intended harm toward my crew, my ship, or the realm we protect, their lives were forfeit…”

Julia had some trouble keeping up with her. It had been a long time since she’d been forced to take shorthand, and she wasn’t very comfortable in her bandages and strapping. Halabi seemed to sense her struggling and paused for a moment. Some of the men and women nearby were looking on, trying not to be too obvious about it, but failing. Karen Halabi waited until the reporter had stopped scribbling and then spoke again.

“Of course, not everyone I killed was armed. Not everyone had evil intentions. Some were innocents. And I can only imagine the ocean of blood on my hands. How many thousands have I killed by directing bombers onto their cities and towns? I have no idea. None at all. But the dead are many. And tonight, in a few hours, I will add to that toll. I regret that. When I allow myself to think about it, about babies burned in their mothers’ arms, about children irradiated and dying over the course of days and weeks, I feel physically ill. Tonight I will help to kill hundreds of thousands of people, old and young, innocent and guilty. I will not sort them, I will just kill them one and all. And I will regret that through all of my days. But it is my duty. War is an unmitigated evil, and so tonight I will do great evil. But I will do it hoping that something even worse is brought to an end because of it.”

Julia looked up from her notepad and expected to find a tear tracking down Halabi’s cheek. But there was none. Her eyes were hard and clear and utterly devoid of sorrow.

D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 2310 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). OVER BERLIN.

They came in on a heading determined by the quantum arrays of HMS
Trident,
their progress tracked by two of the stealth destroyer’s Big Eye drones.

“One minute to release, Colonel Llewellyn.”

Well, that was a surprise.

The voice of the air controller on the British trimaran was American. A Texan to be sure. Llewellyn could only wonder how he’d ended up there.

“Warheads armed.”

“The Sabers have reached a safe distance, Colonel.”

She grunted. The fighters had to put a lot of space between themselves and the blast, lest they get swatted from the sky like bugs.

“Looks like we’re on our own, boys. Let’s light ’em up.”

She tried to keep her tone light, but the enormity of what they were about to do could not be denied. The German capital was blacked out, but was everywhere lit by fire. Pathfinders had ringed the center of the metropolis with incendiaries. Not that she needed it, with the
Trident
guiding her in. But if that link failed for whatever reason, it was good to know that they could still find the target with their own eyes.

“Twenty seconds to release.”

Llewellyn held the giant bomber steady at it operational ceiling of fifteen thousand meters. It took a surprising amount of physical strength to control a B-52, and she’d had to put a lot of extra time in at the gym. Her arms looked much bigger than they had been a year ago. German flak arced up out of the conflagration below, long golden lines of fire seeming to leap away from the open furnace over which they flew. Shells burst harmlessly far below her. The decoy planes had not been needed. There were no German fighters aloft.

The bomb bay door whirred open.

“
Trident
has us dead on course,” her navigator reported.

“Ten seconds.”

“All systems check out green.”

“Eight, seven, six…”

How many people slept beneath her wings tonight? How many were good? And how many evil? Would God protect the virtuous and the meek?

“Three, two, one.
Release.
”

No. God would not.

D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 2310 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). BERLIN.

It was a quiet night, as far as these things went nowadays. The RAF and their American cousins seemed to be giving the citizens of Berlin a brief rest from the terrors of all night bombing. A medium-sized raid had dropped incendiaries a short time ago but the Allies had not followed up like they had at Dresden.

Riding in the back of his Mercedes, feverish with lack of sleep, Himmler had no doubt they were already thinking of the next war, against Stalin. By way of contrast he could only contemplate the end of this war, which was surely days away. Or weeks at best. The briefing had not gone well. His instructions to speak the truth had liberated the high command to be completely frank about the utter impossibility of effecting any kind of reverse to the Reich’s military situation. One by one, his generals explained why defeat was inevitable. He had not screamed at them. He had not accused them of defeatism or threatened anyone with execution for bearing unwanted news. He had ordered all the nonexistent units in Western Europe removed from the map table, a task that could have been accomplished with one dramatic sweep of his hand. Instead General Zeitzler had plucked the little wooden blocks off one by one. There was nothing left between them and the Allies in the west.

Why had they not listened to his offer? Why had they been so stupid in the face of the obvious? Now they would have to face the Bolsheviks alone, having done their utmost to cripple the best defense Western civilization had against the subhuman armies massing at the gates of Europe.

As his limousine motored slowly down Unter den Linden the last führer imagined the city occupied by enemy troops. It was all too easy to envision on the dark canvas of a blackout, punctured by the eldritch light of an incendiary blaze a few blocks away. The streets here, once teeming with life, were empty save for a few fire crews rushing to their work. He could not help but see them filled with Slavic berserkers mad with plunder and rape.

His feelings surged between despair and a sort of frenetic psychosis, a desire to throw himself into the last lines of defense, even while knowing that the only hope was that Berlin would fall to Montgomery or Patton before the arrival of the Red Army.

He looked at the small scrap of paper crumpled in his left hand. A piece of history, no less. His order to the high command—issued at the end of the dismal meeting an hour ago, and effective immediately—to cease all hostilities in the west and to allow the Americans and their allies unimpeded access to the Fatherland.

Churchill and Roosevelt might not have accepted his offer of an alliance, but they would not be able to ignore an unconditional surrender.

He smiled wanly.

It was a masterstroke really. He was going to make
them
responsible for the defense of Germany, and beyond that of civilization itself. If he weren’t so exhausted he could have laughed. When one stared defeat and annihilation in the face and accepted them, it clarified everything.

He could not win, but he could save his
Volk.

Not that he would be around to see it, of course. Would he spend the rest of his life in hiding? Or would he be dragged before some sham court to…

The question was redundant.

At eighteen minutes past the hour three spheres of brilliant white light bloomed overhead, and Heinrich Himmler, Berlin, and the Third Reich all passed into history.

35

D-DAY + 42. 14 JUNE 1944. 0800 HOURS.
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Before speaking into the microphone on his desk, the president of the United States of America coughed lightly to clear his throat. The Oval Office was crowded. His press people had tried to convince him to do this broadcast from the dedicated studio that had been built in the previous year, but Roosevelt had insisted. There were three cameras in the office, recording the event for posterity, and when Americans watched this speech hundreds of years from now, he didn’t want them to see him hunched into a sound booth in the basement of the building.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were seated in the lounge chairs looking somewhat uncomfortable, as were the secretary of war, the secretary of state, the Speaker of the House, and the British ambassador. His wife was perched on another chair near the door. The cameras were all twenty-first technology, and it would be at least a day before the images they captured would be tele-recorded onto film for national distribution to the various news services. The microphone in front of him, however, was the same one he had been speaking into for years. He’d never been comfortable with the teeny-weeny clip-on things the uptimers made him wear.

A producer counted down for him. “Mr. President, we’re on in three, two, one…”

Roosevelt leaned forward just fractionally and addressed himself to the millions of his fellow citizens who would be gathered around their radios, listening at home, in their workplaces, in coffee shops or train stations, on ships, and in the field around the world.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “At eighteen minutes after eleven o’clock local time last night, our planes dropped three atomic bombs on the capital of Nazi Germany. Berlin has been destroyed, and the heart of our enemy torn out. All organized German forces in Western Europe have laid down their arms. They continue to fight in the east, and on our best information to date they will do so until the Red Army observes a cease-fire. I call on our allies in Moscow to do just that and to avoid any further wasteful destruction.”

He paused for a full second, emphasizing the import of his last statement—and the next.

“The three bombs detonated over Germany last night were not the only atomic weapons in our arsenal. We have
many
more and we now have the means to deliver them
anywhere
on earth. I say to the Japanese war cabinet, you have only two choices. Surrender immediately and unconditionally or I will order the United States Army Air Force to begin reducing your cities, until there is nothing left of your nation and its ancient culture.”

Roosevelt turned the page of his speech. A technical person had offered him an electronic version on one of those teleprompter things, but he felt much more comfortable reading from a real document. And of course, it would become part of the national archive in a way that an electrical document never could. Not in his mind, anyway.

“There will be no escape from justice for those responsible for starting this war,” he continued. “Or for those who have committed crimes in its prosecution. But your people do not need to share in that punishment. The invasion of your Home Islands for which you are preparing will not come. No American soldier will set foot there while we remain at war. There is now no reason for them to do so. Lay down your arms, and we will come peacefully, to help you rebuild and to take your place in the community of civilized nations. Resist us and you will be destroyed. There will be no glory, no honor in such resistance. Only the most abject folly. Your warrior spirit will count for nothing inside the fireball of an atomic explosion. Such human or spiritual considerations are irrelevant. You have twenty-four hours to reply.”

Again, he allowed a small pause to add gravity to his words. The faces of the military men in the room were somber, and largely unreadable. Henry Stimson, his secretary of war, was nodding grimly, but with noticeable enthusiasm. It was Stimson who had argued strongly—and in the end, effectively—for delaying their first atomic strike until they had a sufficient store of weapons to launch equally devastating follow-up strikes and, just as important, enough planes to deliver them as far as Moscow if need be. It was the only way to dissuade the Soviet Union from any misadventures. Truth was, Roosevelt could have ordered the destruction of Berlin at any time in the last three months, and he knew that years from now there were going to be historians damning him for not having done so. If he had been planning to run in the next election, there would doubtless have been some dunderheads who accused him of letting Americans die needlessly while he built up a stockpile of A-bombs that could have saved their lives.

But in his heart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew that they did not die needlessly. Stimson was right. With no knowledge of how far any Communist atomic program had advanced, there was no alternative to building a deterrent that was immediately available and credible. When Lodz had disappeared inside a mushroom cloud, that debate had ended.

In the brief moment while he drew his breath he glanced over to his wife, who smiled at him with such understanding and kindness that it nearly broke his heart. He pressed on.

“And finally to you, my fellow citizens of this great republic, and to our friends and allies throughout the free world, I can only say, thank you. In our history books it is presidents, prime ministers, and generals who are credited with winning wars, but those books are wrong. It is you, all of you, who have worked and fought and sacrificed so much these last years, to whom victory belongs. Unfortunately I cannot promise you that peace is with us just yet. I cannot force our enemies to see reason if they are intent on blinding themselves to it. But I can promise you that we will not spend one life more than necessary to bring them to account. And if that means burning them from the face of the planet, then so be it.

“Thank you for listening, and good-bye.”

He held the blank gaze of the middle camera lens until the producer signaled that they were done. It was a weird unnatural thing, sitting there with a silly grin on your face, and not something he saw himself ever growing used to. Harry S was welcome to it.

Polite applause broke out among the civilians as he relaxed.

“Well, do you think they’ll get the message, Henry?” he asked Stimson.

“Who, Mr. President? The Japanese or the Russians?”

“Both of them.”

D-DAY + 42. 14 JUNE 1944. 1705 HOURS.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW.

“You! You are responsible. This is your fault!”

Beria could feel his bowels turning loose and watery as Stalin pounded the table and shouted at him in front of the whole Politburo. The fact that they were meeting at such an unusual hour was evidence enough of a crisis. Stalin’s dark, knitted brows, and the pipe lying broken on the empty table in front of him, confirmed the worst. He was in a killing fury of such unbridled intensity that nobody dared speak, or even look sideways at the object of his anger, lest the supreme leader of the workers’ state suddenly transfer his wrath. Even Malenkov kept his eyes studiously downcast, and he could always be counted on to revel in any misfortune that befell Laventry Beria.

“But I am not responsible for the Americans’ atomic program,” the NKVD chief protested. “I am responsible for our own, and that has delivered more than I was asked.”

“Three bombs!” thundered Stalin. “Three puny little bombs to their, what, dozens? Hundreds? Does anybody have any idea? Any idea at all? No! And these planes they have flown from the middle of their deserts to the middle of Germany. What do we know about them? How many do they have? Can we shoot them down? Or does the
Rodina
now lie open before them like some drunken washerwoman with her ankles up around her ears? Nothing! You know nothing!”

Beria had to protest that. His life depended on it. “But we do know about these planes. They are called B-52s. Stratofortresses. They fly at over a thousand kilometers an hour, not much more than our Tupolevs. Perhaps even less. At best they have a maximum range of thirteen thousand kilometers, not much more than our bombers. We have always assumed they would build these things, and they have. It is not a surprise at all!”

Stalin hammered the desk with his fist, once, making a water jug jump two centimeters off the polished walnut surface. “You looked very fucking surprised when the Americans sent over a copy of Roosevelt’s speech. And anyone can read a computer file. I do not want to be quoted old Wikipedia articles about this new bomber. I want to know how many they have. How many they can produce. And how many atomic bombs can they put on them this very day.”

Mercifully, Stalin allowed his fearsome gaze to widen, encompassing the entire Politburo.

“I want to know if we can beat them now. Timoshenko, what say you?”

The Soviet defense minister, the formidable peasant warrior from the Ukraine, jutted his chin upward. He at least would not be cowed. “If they have no more bombs, yes. We can roll over them. If they have three to five, a parity of atomic force with us, it will still be possible. But if Roosevelt is speaking truthfully and they have ‘many’ more bombs, even double or triple our number, we cannot hope to prevail.”

The
Vozhd
turned his malign glare back toward Beria. “And does the NKVD have even the slightest idea of what remains in their atomic arsenal?”

Beria’s heart, already racing, lurched in his chest. Keeping his voice as calm as possible, he spoke quietly but forcefully. “We have all known that the reactionaries gained a great intelligence gift, the value of hindsight, from the libraries of Kolhammer’s ships. Dozens of our operations were instantly compromised. Our British networks with few exceptions were wrenched out root and branch. We lost our best sources who could have answered that question, and we have known that for years.”

Fear was giving his argument some impetus now. He had managed to stop gulping and stammering, and a sense of genuine indignation animated his speech.

“But we can still use our brains. Look at the Berlin raid. Three warheads used on one target, completely annihilating it. They would not have been so wasteful if they had no other weapons. And this demand of Roosevelt’s, that the Japanese surrender and submit to immediate occupation or face the systematic destruction of their cities. It is meant for us as much as them. But it cannot be a bluff because if a day passes and they cannot deliver on the ultimatum, we will know them to be lying. No. I suspect they have enough bombs to destroy at least three or four major Japanese cities, with still enough in reserve to employ on the battlefield against us if they have to.”

Timoshenko nodded his shaven head, lending Beria some unexpected support. “That is logical, Comrade General Secretary. The three bombs that hit Berlin convince me. It would be madness to have wasted them so if they did not have more. Yes, it sends a message to us. But I cannot see it as a bluff.”

Stalin appeared to hang on the edge of a precipice. He could have gone one way or another; exploding again, or taking the answer in calmly and reasonably. To Beria’s great relief, reason won out.

“So why, if they had some many bombs, did they wait until now to use them? They could have annihilated the fascists with one big raid.”

“And that would have left an empty Europe at our feet,” said Beria. “They needed forces on the ground to contest that ground with us. Plus, they have no stomach for anything that gets too hard. Would we send six million men to fight in a radioactive battlefield? Of course, if it meant victory. Would they? No. They could not. They are beholden to their bourgeois classes. They simply cannot act with our freedom. Plus, we must remember first principles. They are
capitalists.
To destroy a host of French and German cities is to destroy a vast storehouse of capital that they would otherwise seize for their own use. Like Timoshenko, I do not think they are bluffing. I believe they have many more atomic warheads.”

Stalin drummed his fingers on the table. “It is a poor correlation of forces we face—”

Beria was bold enough now to interrupt him. “But it is not, Comrade Secretary. We control so much more of Europe than we did at the end of the war in the Other Time. Our forces are largely unopposed in China and much of continental Asia. We have the men in place to demand a division of Japan. If we can consolidate our hold over these gains, we will control much of the world in five years. An excellent correlation of forces.”

The spymaster risked a glance around the long table. He quickly surmised that well over half the assembled ministers and military officers were in agreement with him. Others, like Malenkov, maintained a studied neutrality.

“Timoshenko,” said Stalin, “I want the truth. Can Zhukov and Konev break through the German defenses where they have deployed their chemical weapons?”

The defense minister shook his head. “Not without using our atomics. And once they have gone, we will stand naked before the Americans. We need those weapons to stop them from attacking us. We know that Churchill and some American generals are in favor of doing just that. And Kolhammer has spoken openly of the need to do away with us.”

At the mention of the infamous naval commander a ripple of anger and disgust traveled around the table. Beria had a whole section of his intelligence services devoted to the top commanders of the former Multinational Force, but by far the greatest number of analysts was assigned to Kolhammer. His every public utterance, and some of his private ones, was studied with great intensity. More than once Foreign Minister Molotov had called on the U.S. ambassador to protest yet another insulting and dangerous statement by the commandant of the Special Administrative Zone. It was infuriating, the way he was allowed to run wild. He was worse even than MacArthur or Patton.

Before Stalin could speak again, there was a knock on the huge double doors that sealed them into the committee room. An NKVD colonel appeared, seeking permission to enter. Stalin nodded, and he hurried over to Beria. Bending forward and whispering into his ear. As he listened, the spymaster’s balls contracted right into his body. His throat tightened with fear. He had to pour a glass of ice water with a shaking hand to compose himself before relaying the message.