Final Impact (5 page)

The Eighty-second MEU had fought as part of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Division of the United States Marine Corps, since it was raised for the Second Afghan War in 2012. They had earned the right to be who they were.

He noticed that his speed had increased when he’d become angry again, stirring up a small storm of gravel as he double-timed it over to the First Battalion ops room. Jones screwed a lid on his temper. He reminded himself that for every dumbass he’d encountered, there were old-fashioned Americans like Mary Hiers and Nikki Christa, or Master Chief Eddie Mohr, or even Dan Black, God rest his soul, who were good people. As good as people ever got, really. He slowed his breathing and dropped back to a normal pace. It wouldn’t do to go charging into battalion in such a foul mood. Somebody was liable to get an ass chewed off for nothing.

D-DAY + 2. 5 MAY 1944.
LOS ANGELES.

The view from the top floor of the Davidson Building—which had, until recently, been the Oviatt Building—was nothing compared with his New York base. Back east the company had leased about twenty floors of the Empire State, and on a clear day Slim Jim could stand at the window of his personal office suite and almost see his own power as it pulsed outward across Manhattan, racing away toward the horizon like a blast wave. That was what real wealth and power were like. A force of fucking nature that swept everything in front of them. He’d always known that, of course. But only because for most of his life he’d been the one getting blown away. By cops. By judges. By bigger, tougher, meaner crooks. By wardens. By parole officers. By the whole fucking system.

“Now I am the fucking system,” he said with a grin.

“What was that, Mr. Davidson?”

“Sorry,” he said, turning away from the window in his LA headquarters. The place was on Olive, near Sixth, and afforded him a good view of Bunker Hill, which looked like a natural rampart laid across the western edge of the old pueblo. Downtown Los Angeles lay at his feet, but it was obvious that his building was going to be dwarfed before too long by the skyscrapers rising around her. Not that he cared much. He owned a couple of construction companies now, and he loved looking out at all the cranes soaring over the city’s rooftops. It was sorta like they were there to scoop money up off the streets and dump it into his pockets.

“Sorry,” he said again. “What were we talking about?”

His lawyer, Ms. O’Brien, looked exasperated, as usual. He often thought that uptight was her natural state of being. Their relationship had changed some since the early days, though, when she’d acted more like his drill sergeant than his employee. O’Brien was a player in her own right now. Probably one of the richest women in America, if you didn’t count heiresses. And he didn’t. They tended to be stuck-up bitches who wouldn’t give him the time of day. But as his business got bigger and he grew more and more powerful, she came to…what? Admire him, he guessed. She was only a little more deferential than she had been, but if he didn’t know any better he’d say she almost respected him for the way he’d handled the last few years.

“We were discussing your testimony in the Rockefeller suit, Mr. Davidson,” she said. “It’s important. You can’t slide through this one on a boyish grin and southern charm. These guys are out to snap you like a twig.”

He shrugged. “Assholes like this been beating on me since—”

“Oh please. Let’s not do your E! channel bio today. Let’s work through the brief I zapped over. You did read it, didn’t you? They’re not going to let you wear your Oakleys in court, so I can’t send you notes up on the stand.”

“Yeah, yeah, I read it,” he grumbled. Most of what he did nowadays seemed to be reading and signing big piles of paper. Most of it he didn’t understand. He preferred sitting down with a couple of guys over a beer and talking shit through like men. He was a good listener. You had to be when you’d made your living as a grifter.

Ms. O’Brien started in on him like a prosecutor going after an ax murderer. It’d been a little scary the first time she’d done it, but she explained it was just like in the navy when he’d trained for war. The courtroom was no different. He had an enemy that was coming after him, trying to destroy him. He had to be ready. She kept firing questions at him. Real curly ones, too, and he practiced saying as little as possible that’d get him in trouble. The only real joy of it was contemplating what a bloody pulp Ms. O’Brien was going to reduce those Rockefeller assholes to when they got onto the stand. She had a well-earned reputation for brutality in the courtroom. It was partly why he expected this bullshit case to settle, and why only part of his mind was really on it. Another part, the old Slim Jim, was thinking about the party he was gonna throw in his penthouse over the weekend. He had half of Hollywood coming over to rip it up in his rooftop pool and artificial beach. They were the only original features he’d kept when he bought the Oviatt Building. Everything else—the Lalique chandeliers, the art deco bar, the exotic woods in the floors and walls—he’d had torn out and replaced with the closest facsimiles of twenty-first materials his personal designers could find. Ms. O’Brien had been aghast and argued vehemently against the “vandalism,” as she called it, but Slim Jim wasn’t having a bar of it. The next century had been very kind to him, whereas this one had done nothin’ but kick his ass from the moment he’d crawled out of the cradle.

And anyway, 21C was the hottest style in modern architecture. Nobody built old anymore.

“Are you concentrating, Mr. Davidson?”

“Nope,” he admitted.

“Are you thinking about your party this weekend?” she asked, putting down the flexipad she’d been holding.

“Uh-huh.”

“You thinking about copping a blow job from Hedy Lamarr again?”

He grinned. “No, but now that you mention it—”

“Well, knock it off!” she barked. “Because if you can’t, the only blow jobs you’re gonna be getting will be from the jailhouse cat in a federal pen.”

Chastened, he apologized and tried to focus on the questions. But before long he was daydreaming about Hedy Lamarr again. And splitting beers with Ernest Hemingway. And sailing with Errol Flynn. And playing poker with Artie Snider, the war hero he’d met at a Kennedy fund-raiser. They were all great fucking guys. And unlike those society snobs, they didn’t look down on him for what he’d once been.

3

D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2045 HOURS.
BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

It was no longer safe at the Wolfschanze.

Indeed, there
was
no Wolfschanze to speak of—not now. Allied bombers had struck there in a massive raid just three months ago. Had the führer not been delayed in Berlin, he might even have been killed. More than a thousand men of the SS had died on that day.

Himmler rubbed the hot, grainy feeling from his eyes. This bunker offered none of the comforts of Rastenburg, but it had one major advantage. The British and Americans did not know of its existence. Or at least he thought they didn’t. One could never be sure these days…

The
Reichsführer-SS
grunted. It was pointless trying to second-guess one’s opponent, especially in wartime. The enemy rarely did what you wanted. You could study them, and plan for contingencies based on their capabilities, but once you began fantasizing that you actually knew their intentions…well, that was a folly for decadent novelists, not for statesmen.

The rough concrete walls of the underground bunker oozed with condensation. Here in the map room, it wasn’t so bad. Fans turned constantly to suck the stale atmosphere away and drag fresh air down from the surface. But there were places in this complex—as in all the subterranean hideouts in which they had been forced to take sanctuary—where he found himself close to passing out, so vile were the stench and the heat. Every breath tasted as though it had already been inhaled a hundred times over. Fastidious in his personal habits, Heinrich Himmler found the press of unwashed humanity one of the hardest burdens he had been forced to bear in this conflict.

Thirty or more people were crammed into the map room, an area not much bigger than a sizable parlor. The overcrowding was made worse by the huge map table, which dominated at least half the floor. A large, flat televiewing screen hung from the wall, displaying much the same information as the little wooden blocks that were being pushed around the table, but it wasn’t updated nearly as frequently. Even with the bounty they had taken off the
Dessaix
and the “Indonesian” ships, the Reich simply did not have the Allies’ ability to monitor the “battlespace,” as they called it.

Göbbels had come up with a suitably Teutonic alternative to the Anglo-Saxon phrase—
Kriegsgebiet,
the realm of battle. And standing by Hitler’s side as the führer marshaled his response to this violation of the Reich, Himmler could appreciate the correctness of the phrase. Battle was not joined across a simple field, as it had been in the days of Bismarck. No, it was being fought on land, in the air, on and under the sea, where millions contested the future of the world, in blood and iron.

The mood in the room was tense. They had known this was coming, since their own lunge across the channel was foiled. The memory still gave him shudders. The führer’s screaming. Göring getting drunk and becoming more dangerous as his vaunted jet fighters were scythed out of the sky. Göbbels saying nothing, his eyes sinking back into those darkened pools. The military high command making one excuse after another. One fool of an admiral had even dared to question the wisdom of launching the operation in the first place. He, of course, was no longer numbered among the living. Indeed, a great many of the men who had been in the war room at Rastenburg had received their final rewards: a firing squad and an unmarked grave.

This would be different, however. He breathed slowly through his mouth, lest a sudden gulp give away how nervous he was. The führer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.

Himmler let his eyes traverse the room, settling on anybody who seemed even half inclined to question their leader’s judgment. One Wehrmacht colonel blanched under his gaze.

“It is a ruse,” Hitler muttered, biting his lower lip. “I am sure of it.” He was staring at the table with such febrile intensity that it was a wonder the surface did not begin to smolder.

General Zeitzler, the army chief of staff—who looked about two decades older than his forty-nine years—seemed about to say something, jumping into the space left clear by the führer’s uncertainty. But then Hitler folded his arms and jutted his chin.

“Yes. A ruse. This business in Calais is a feint, don’t you agree, Herr General? Just as it was with their Operation Fortitude in the Other Time. I saw through that one, too, you know. The historical documents make it quite clear. I knew they would come ashore at Normandy, and tried to get that traitor Rommel to reorder the defenses. But no! He would not listen. So it is here, at Normandy, that the real blow will fall.”

The führer brought his pointer down with a sharp crack.

Himmler, along with everyone else in earshot, jumped slightly.

The tip of the pointer was resting on the stretch of shoreline the Allies referred to as Omaha Beach. It was the logical point of access, and much work had gone into luring them there. The defenses in the dune system had been allowed to degrade, to make Eisenhower think that the Wehrmacht’s center of gravity had shifted north of the Seine, just as it had in the Other Time,
die Andere Zeit.
Close study of the archives captured from the French ship and corroborated by the Japanese had taught them that fixed defenses were a death trap. No matter how much concrete was poured, no matter how many thousands of miles of razor wire were laid, in the end such defenses could be negated by high explosives.

No, it was mobility that had won the Reich all the prizes in the opening phase of this war, and it was mobility—the doctrine of blitzkrieg—that would win this next battle.

Himmler mopped at his greasy brow with a gray handkerchief. It had once been white. The accursed “drones” sent out by the mud woman Halabi made everything much more difficult, but the Soviets had been unusually helpful in providing creative camouflage, what they called
maskirovka.
They were acknowledged masters of the field. Himmler shook his head. He was tired, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and his mind had a tendency to wander. He forced his attention back onto the map table.

Four divisions of Allied infantry had come ashore at Calais. Two American, one British, and one Canadian. It appeared as if another two airborne divisions had leapfrogged the diversionary assault, one by helicopter attack, to infest a number of villages outside the port city. A division of
Fallschirmjäger
had been tasked with defending the area and had given a good account of themselves—much better than their pathetic showing during Operation Sea Dragon. Six enemy divisions, equipped with some quite amazing new weaponry, had been held up for two days. But six divisions were less than 4 percent of Eisenhower’s order of battle.

No, the führer was right. The main blow would fall on Normandy.

Wouldn’t it?

D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2156 HOURS.
CALAIS.

The small living room looked liked something out of a crack-house nightmare. Every stick of furniture was broken. Fires had been set everywhere but in the fireplace, which was full of human excrement. And everything was covered in a thick dusting of plaster brought down from the ceiling and walls by the seismic shock of the Allied assault.

“Fire in the hole!”

Julia turned away and covered her ears. The shaped charge went off with a head-splitting roar, temporarily smothering the sounds of gunfire from the street. The hammering of three or four Colt carbines on burst kicked in while her ears were still ringing from the detonation, followed by the flat
whump
of an M320 grenade launcher. Another crash and someone cried out.

“Satchel charge! Fire in the hole!”

Another explosion shook the house, perhaps the whole row of terraced houses, reminding her of the time a mud brick house in Damascus had come down on top her just like this.

“Go, go, go!”

The fire team rushed forward and leapt through the hole they’d blown in the wall dividing this house from the next. A brief burst of gunfire, and then the familiar call.

“Clear!”

She swung around the door frame where she’d been sheltering, automatically checking to make sure the battery indicator for her Sonycam was still showing blue. A time hack in the corner of her heads-up display told her there was just over an hour’s worth of storage left on this stick. Her last.

Moving toward the smoking fissure, Julia forced herself not to look at the spot where Gil Amundson had bled out on the floor, waiting for evac. They’d covered him with a rug.

She bent and stepped quickly through into the next house, the muzzle of her own Colt sweeping the room as she did.

A three-round burst sounded upstairs, immediately followed by the
thud
of something heavy hitting the floor. Plaster chips and fine white dust floated down, coating her goggles.

“Clear!”

A windowpane shattered and sprayed her face with shards of glass. She felt the sting of lacerated flesh, and the warmth of blood that was beginning to flow freely. Julia whipped off her glove and ran her fingers over the skin of her neck. Nothing cut there. Just more facial scars to add to her collection. She cleaned herself up with a couple of medicated wipes and a small tube of spray-on skin.

“You okay, Ms. Duffy?”

It was Steve Murphy, the trooper who was now an acting corporal, in charge of twelve men from two other remnant platoons. With Amundson dead, nobody from their original chalk was left.

“I’m fine, Murph,” she said, wiping the last of the blood away. “Just making myself beautiful.”

A pair of boots came thundering down the stairwell in the narrow, darkened hallway outside what looked like a dining room.

“Alcones coming through!”

Another cav trooper, one of Murphy’s strays, came back into the room, being careful to stay out of the line of sight provided by the broken window.

“There was a kraut upstairs, Corporal. He was saving this for company.”

Alcones flipped a potato masher grenade in the air and caught it with the same hand.

Murphy nodded. “Good work. Let’s take five and wait for the others to catch up. This is the last house in the row, if I’m not mistaken. Anyone think different? Alcones, could you see anything from up there?”

The trooper nodded. “We’re at the end of this block of houses, or what’s left of it. We got ruins on all three sides. The next stretch of buildings is a block to the west, maybe fifty yards or so to reach them.”

Murphy risked a quick glance across the cobbled street. It was coming up on midnight, but there were hundreds of fires burning all over this part of Calais, and they lit the night. Besides Duffy and himself, there were four others in the room. The rest of the platoon had taken up defensive positions throughout the ruined house.

“Okay. Ammo check?”

Prufrock checked his pouches. “Two mags, two frags, Corporal.”

“Three mags and the LAW,” Chalese reported from his covering position by a door.

Juarez, by the window, had “one mag and fuck-all else.”

Murphy pulled one of his own magazines and tossed it to Juarez. “That leaves me with three. What about you, Al? Ms. Duffy?”

Alcones had two and some spare change.

Duffy didn’t need to check. “I got three full reloads and four grenades. Plus an hour’s worth of video left, if anyone’s planning on doing something dramatic.”

Murphy sighed and took off his helmet. “Ms. Duffy, can you tell where we are or where Reynolds’s squad is? They should be across the street by now. But I can’t see shit with these goggles.”

He tapped his Starlites with a bloodied fist.

She shrugged. “Dunno. Let’s find out.”

If they’d had a workable tac net, she could have just brought up the drone coverage and located her own biosensors in the battlespace display. Duffy was a popular embed for a lot of reasons, partly because she had access to the Fleetnet interface at a 21C level. Unfortunately, that only worked when she was near enough to a relay node to make the link. They were out on their own here, and she hadn’t had a tickle from Fleetnet for—she checked the counter—nearly thirteen hours.

Julia bent low and crept over to the window, pushing aside the torn lace curtain with the muzzle of her carbine. She was the only one with a powered helmet and integrated tac set. It wasn’t her original rig—that had been based on a standard-issue Advanced Combat Helmet, which looked too much like the Nazi “bucket” for comfort. Wearing something like that, she was just asking to get shot in the ass, so she’d paid an engineer from the Eighty-second big dollars to build her a new mount that fit on a contemporary M1 helmet.

She removed the Sonycam from its base and, holding it so that only her hand was exposed, focused it on the cottage across the way. The smart sensors adjusted to the light, and she concentrated on a small pop-up window in her goggles. The nearest house looked deserted.

Then a flash of light drew her attention, and she shifted the camera.

“All-righty then. Two doors down to the northwest, your two o’clock, Murph. Looks like a coupla
Fallschirmjäger.
And second floor, center window, an MG-Forty-two. Got good intersecting fields of fire. They’ll chop us to dog meat if we go out there.”

She shook her head.

“Man, I wish Fleetnet was up. I could tell you where your other squad is. But as it is, I got nada.”

“Reynolds is going to run into those guys,” said Alcones. “They’ve got to know we’re here, Murph. With all the racket we made getting in here.”

“The kraut by the door is slumped. I’d say he is either sleeping, wounded, or both,” Julia said.

Murphy pondered his options for the moment. Julia had enough confidence in him to shut up and wait. She’d seen way more combat than him, but he’d proved himself a natural the last few days. The corporal put his helmet back on.

“Okay. Alcones, Chalese, get yourselves upstairs. Prufrock, get back out into the hall, give the rest of the guys a heads-up. Tell them to get a bead on that house Ms. Duffy just tagged. On my mark we’re going to put a world of hurt on that joint. Half-’n’-halfs. High explosive and flechette. Got it?”