Final Impact (7 page)

He blinked slowly and his head swam.

“What have we here. A spy? A Resistance pig playing dress-up. A traitor?”

An officer was speaking, advancing on him. Müller realized he was still holding the precious flexipad in his outstretched hand. He tried to get to his knees, but the Wehrmacht officer, a lieutenant, sailed in and launched a vicious snap kick at his ribs. His inserts protected him from the worst of the pain, but he felt at least three ribs break as he flew over onto his back and rolled another half a meter away, ending facedown in a puddle of mud.

The pad began to beep.

It had locked on to Brasch’s device and initiated a linkup. The file transfer began.

It was complete within half a second.

“What the hell is
that
?” the lieutenant demanded.

Müller coughed up a thick blood clot.

“
That
is the end of the world,” he said, rolling on top of the flexipad with the last of his energy and triggering the explosive weave vest he routinely wore under whatever disguise his mission required.

Everyone within thirty meters was atomized by the blast.

“What the hell was
that
?” Oberg asked as the rumble shook the crystalware on their table at Maxim’s.

Brasch had no idea, but he instantly assumed something had gone wrong with Müller. There was no reason to think so, really. Bombs were constantly going off in Paris. The Resistance had been tutored by instructors familiar with insurgencies from the far future that had paralyzed much more formidable opponents than the Nazis. It might be a truck bomb twenty-five kilometers away, or a suitcase bomb in a café or bistro favored by the Germans. It might even be one of the Existentialists, seeking vengeance for the murder of Sartre and de Beauvoir by blowing himself up in a brothel favored by the occupying forces. Everybody feared being caught up in one of their mad attacks. It was said that the last thing you ever heard was the crazed existentialist screaming “To do is to be!” before he triggered his suicide device.

Brasch stood up and pushed aside the drapes that covered the window nearest their table. He had to press his face right up to the glass, but in doing so he could make out the telltale signs of a detonation a few blocks away.

His stomach turned over.

“An existentialist,” he sighed, not believing it for a second.

Something
had
gone wrong. He could sense it down in his core.

“Madmen,” Oberg hissed. “Cowards, all of them. If only there were some way to stop them. To detect them before they set themselves off,” he complained.

“As I understand it, no foolproof solution was ever found in the future,” Brasch commented. “When a man is willing to die to harm his enemies, there is always a good chance of taking some of them with him.”

“Pah!” spat the SS commandant. “When will these bastards accept that they are
beaten
? You know the most frustrating thing about this, Brasch. It’s that we cannot identify the bombers postmortem. Believe me, if that were possible we’d thin out the ranks of their recruits. Execute every last one of their friends and relatives. Then they mightn’t be so enthusiastic about blowing themselves up.”

Brasch returned to his seat, itching with the desire to take out his flexipad and see whether his data burst had come through. He pushed at an unfinished plate of
boeuf bourguignon
with his heavy gilded fork. “A lot of money is going into DNA research.” He shrugged. “Eventually it will help, and then we will have the ability to trace back to the culprits and take the appropriate measures.”

“Yes, yes, so I have heard!” Oberg said approvingly. He had returned to his own meal without missing a beat. “It is a very exciting field, this genetic science. I understand you have been instrumental in pushing it forward.”

Brasch smiled abashedly. “It’s not really my field. I am a combat engineer. But any good German could see the importance of investing in such a thing. For starters, it will mean there is no hiding for the Jews. And the weaklings—the infirm, the cripples, and the mentally defective—will be detected before they have a chance to be born. Although I do not understand the science, I understand the opportunities for the Reich—”

“As do we all!” Oberg interrupted. “For me, personally, it is one of the most exciting developments to come from the Emergence.”

“
Reichsführer
Himmler shares your enthusiasm,” Brasch remarked, suppressing the death head grin that wanted to crawl over his face.

He had championed the cause of genetic research because it was an exact fit with the worst of the Nazis’ paranoid fantasies, and because it was the perfect sinkhole into which he could pour billions of Reichsmarks. Every pfennig spent on a wild goose chase—like the search for a homosexual gene—was money lost to the development of lighter body armor or improved jet turbines. Brasch had never received any explicit instructions from Müller’s controllers to sabotage the Nazi war effort in this way but, quietly, it was the work of which he most proud.

“There are, of course, those chattering fools who do not see the historic importance of such research,” he continued. “Admittedly, atomics are a more pressing concern at the moment, but even that research cannot be allowed to detract from our advances in the genetic realm.”

Oberg nodded sagely, like the fat, bigoted fruit seller he was, trying to prove himself the intellectual equal of his esteemed dinner guest. “Yes, yes, I understand,” he replied. “I’ve even heard that the atomic bomb itself will cause terrible damage to the breeding line of anyone who is exposed to it.”

“Exactly!” Brasch agreed. “So while we must push on with the atomic program, the purity of the race can only be guaranteed by a genetics program that proceeds apace with our nuclear research. There is no point to winning an atomic war if we all turn into mutants afterward.”

“My point precisely.” Oberg nodded, sloshing some of his wine onto the white damask tablecloth.

They continued like this for another two hours, with Brasch encouraging the wildest flights of lunacy to which he found most high-ranking Nazis more than a little prone. The entire time, however, he could feel the flexipad digging into his hip. The urge to haul it out and see whether he had received a secure transmission from Müller was nigh on intolerable.

What had happened out there?

Was Müller involved?

Was he dead? Or perhaps captured and already being tortured?

What would Brasch find waiting when he finally broke free of this odious little man?

5

D-DAY +7. 10 MAY 1944. 2355 HOURS.
DORSET.

The airfield lay ten miles outside of Bournemouth, on the coast of southern England, almost directly across the channel from Cherbourg. Thousands of aircraft flew overhead, all of them heading out and on to targets in France.

Hundreds of thousands of men and incredible tonnages of heavy tanks and trucks and other vehicles were on the move through the countryside down to the ports at Southampton, Portsmouth, and Bournemouth itself. But nothing moved out of the airfield for three days after the invasion commenced.

Then, on D-Day plus seven, the dull, bass thudding of a massed helicopter flight drifted across the green-and-brown patchwork of tilled fields and green pasture that surrounded the base. Two extended V-formations of heavy-lift choppers swept in from the northeast and set down on the makeshift helipad, which had been a village cricket pitch before the war.

“All right,” Prince Harry said to himself. “Game on.” He hadn’t thought it possible to find a more uncomfortable form of transport than a Chinook heavy-lift chopper, yet here it was: a reinvented 1940s analog of a Chinook.

Pounding up the rear ramp into the dimly lit interior at five minutes to midnight, Colonel Harry Windsor envied his ’temp troopers their lack of familiarity with the uptime version of the helicopter. To him, these facsimile CH-47As felt smaller, slower, and altogether more likely to fall apart in midair.

He’d studied the aircraft specs before the first operational squadron arrived at the regimental HQ in Kinlochmoidart, and it had made for unpleasant bedtime reading. The engines, although a significant advance on anything available locally just twelve months ago, were still underpowered. The craft could carry only twelve men, as opposed to sixteen. But there was an upside to that, he mused wryly—it meant there would be fewer casualties when the things fell out of the sky like fat, broken-backed dragons.

He cast around looking for the crew chief. Yes, there he was checking a galvanized-steel drip pan. The big helos were notorious for hydraulic leaks, and it was standard procedure for the chief to check the level of fluid in the drip pan before takeoff. If you didn’t see any leakage, the lines were probably bone dry and you were all going to die.

Harry adjusted his Bergen pack and automatically checked the safety of his personal weapon, just to get his mind off the hydraulic problems. The AK-47 copy was designated the AW/GLS—for “Automatic Weapon/ Grenade Launching System”—by the Royal Ordnance Factory where it was manufactured, but the popular tag
Ivan gun
had caught on, in recognition of its Russian heritage. The stamped-metal version of the infamous Kalashnikov was now standard issue throughout most of the British and commonwealth forces. They were much easier to build than the Americans’ more glamorous Colt carbine. His sported an underslung M320-style launcher.

Every other SAS trooper was likewise equipped. The launchers were harder to find outside the Special Forces. For the time being they tended to be restricted to squad and section leaders in the Main Force infantry units.

The chopper’s interior was bathed in a soft red light. His half troop of eight men were seated with their backs against the fuselage, packs between their legs, guns pointed down so that a misfire couldn’t damage the rotors or engines above. Of these men, only the Jamaican giant Sergeant Major Vivian Richards St. Clair, his senior NCO, had come through the wormhole with him. The others were all ’temps, but they were every bit as good as the troopers he’d left behind in the twenty-first. They’d have to be—he’d trained them himself.

“Evenin’, lads,” he called out over the whine of the Rolls-Royce Osprey engines. “So, anyone fancy a trip to France? I thought we might pick up a bit of duty-free, maybe catch a show at the Follies, and then pop down to Donzenac to kick the living shitter out of a couple of fuckin’ Nazis. What do you say?”

St. Clair roared from the front of the cabin,
“We say cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

For just a second the cheers of his men overwhelmed the sound of the engines cycling up. Harry grinned hugely and hauled himself the rest of the way up the ramp, giving each man a pat on the shoulder, or a nod, or a wink. Like the Special Air Service of his day, nobody walked into a squadron straight out of the recruiting office. In this here and now, in the Second Regiment at least, they had to have at least five years in service already, and a proven combat record had been a big plus on any application.

There was still an original, contemporary SAS, still being run by David Stirling, and it operated under slightly different rules—their own. There was a good deal of interplay between the two outfits, and constant traffic in training cadre, but in the end they did what they did, and Harry got on with his own business.

He shrugged off his pack and settled himself down next to the two French nationals who’d be going in with them, Captain Marcel Ronsard of the Free French First Army and Mademoiselle Anjela Claudel of the Bureau d’Opérations Aériennes, a Resistance group responsible for coordinating special ops in northern and, more recently, central France. His own French—workmanlike before the Transition—had improved to near fluency in the years since. He shook hands with both Ronsard and Claudel. The huge drooping four-bladed rotors began to turn faster, and Harry indicated that they should power up their tac sets if they wanted to speak in anything less than a bellow.

He was still wearing the powered helmet he’d brought through the wormhole. Unlike the Yanks, his British headgear didn’t make him look like a German paratrooper. Ronsard helped Claudel plug in and power up. She was unfamiliar with the comm rig, but the Frenchman had been training with the SAS for nearly twelve months and was as much a part of the regiment as Harry, or Viv, or any of the half a dozen Free French officers the prince had sought out to join him for the “Great Crusade.”

As they fiddled with the earphones Harry looked past them, out through the rear hatchway to the nameless airfield where another thirty Chinooks were spooling up, adding the thunder of their takeoff to that of his own. Two full squadrons of the Second—close to 240 men—were on their way to seize control of one of Hitler’s strategic jewels, the Missile Facility at Donzenac in south-central France on the western fringe of the Massif Central.

D-DAY + 8. 11 MAY 1944. 0110 HOURS.
LONDON. CABINET WAR ROOMS.

“I think you are to be congratulated, General,” said Winston Churchill. “This will be a victory for the ages.”

Eisenhower looked uncomfortable with the praise. His shoulders rolled around nervously under his jacket. “Our men…and women,” he replied after a pause, “are the ones who deserve congratulations, Prime Minister. They’re out there fighting for us.”

Churchill grinned wickedly. “I don’t know how you expect to become president if you refuse to take credit for others’ good work, General. You still have a lot to learn.”

Eisenhower didn’t so much as twitch a facial muscle in reply. Instead he focused on the drama of Europe’s liberation.

The map table in the war room was crowded with hundreds of wooden unit markers. Female RAF officers still pushed them around with long pointers, but most of the high-ranking staffers watched the video wall, where eight large flatscreens had been linked together to make one giant battlespace monitor, displaying the take from HMS
Trident.
The screens weren’t locally manufactured—that capability was still a few years away. Maybe even a decade. No, they had been borrowed from the Zone especially for this event. Churchill wondered how he might hold on to them afterward. British industry would benefit tremendously from being able to study them.

He caught himself, however, thinking as though the future were settled. They still had this grim business to be done with, of crushing the Nazis. It was entirely possible, he knew, that at any moment one of those screens would light up with the news of an atomic blast somewhere in France, probably directly over the Calais pocket occupied by growing numbers of Allied Forces.

Churchill rarely slept more than a few hours a night, as a habit, and the specter of a Nazi A-bomb prevented him from enjoying what little sleep he
did
get. He’d read thousands of pages of secret reports indicating that they simply did not have the resource base or industrial capacity to produce even one such device, and thousands more warning of an inevitable atomic attack some time in the next few weeks. Or even days.

An aide appeared, and the British prime minister nodded for another cup of coffee, with a shot of Bushmills. For the moment the operation was running as well as could be expected—better, in some ways. The Germans were still maintaining the bulk of their forces in the Normandy area, waiting for a blow that would never fall there. The Allies had established air superiority—if not total dominance—of the Calais battlespace. The Germans had put many more jet fighters into the fray than had been expected, and they had cut to ribbons whole wings of old prop-driven fighters, but they simply could not prevail against the huge numbers of Allied, mostly American, F-86 Sabers that confronted them. And the Germans didn’t have anything like the numbers of heavy and medium bombers that the RAF and USAAF could bring to bear. Nor had they invested in any kind of airborne warning and control systems like the Allies.

The great strategic surprise of the campaign, however, had been the airlift. The heavy, coordinated investment in just three types of helicopter by all of the Allies had paid handsome dividends. In just four days an extra six divisions had been lifted directly into the combat zone, including three artillery regiments with all of their howitzers and ammunition. It was a miracle.

“Prime Minister, Prince Harry and his regiment are en route.”

“Thank you,” he replied to the young army captain who had brought the news. Then he turned to Eisenhower. “And now we reach one of our trip wires, General. We shall see whether Donzenac is the bogey we all feared.”

Eisenhower nodded, pressing his lips together. “I sincerely hope not, Prime Minister.”

D-DAY + 8. 11 MAY 1944. 0232 HOURS.
SOUTH-CENTRAL FRANCE.

Fifteen silver darts shrieked over the evergreen forests of Correze, blue cones of superhot exhaust pushing them toward their target at a thousand kilometers an hour.

Squadron Leader Fiona Hobbins nudged the stick over slightly, shifting her heading two degrees to the south. The moonlit landscape blurred beneath her, the shimmering surface of a small lake rushing toward the nose of her fighter-bomber and vanishing beneath in just a couple of heartbeats. She paid it no heed, instead concentrating on the world she could see in the heads-up display of her powered goggles, a precious set of Oakleys on loan from the
Clinton.

Behind her the other pilots wore identical sets, linked via the flexipads in their cockpits to one of the
Trident
’s high-altitude drones. It was a slipshod half-arsed arrangement, in Hobbins’s opinion, but there was no avoiding it. Until somebody built a plant capable of fabricating quantum chips, or even old Pentiums, they were stuck with these sorts of kludges.

Bottom line, though, they worked.

Mostly.

Her visuals resembled an old flight-sim game from the days before V3D, but that was enough to allow them to thread through the tangled mess of the air battle over France and into the target box, a short, shallow valley in the quiet south. As the squadron flashed over a small French hamlet, designated in light blue outline by the
Trident
’s Combat Intelligence, she craned her head to the left, where twenty-eight small green triangles were converging on her heading at about a quarter of her airspeed.

The Chinooks carrying Prince Harry and the SAS. Five minutes late and two choppers short. She quickly checked a status display and found that one of the big birds had been forced to turn back with hydraulic failures. Another had crashed in the channel.

Hobbins performed a few constrained isometric stretches to work out the kinks and some residual nervousness. If she fucked up, the men in those helicopters were all going to die. If not in battle, then soon thereafter. The Germans were still summarily executing any “Kommados” they captured.

A chime in her helmet sounded, and the voice of the
Trident
’s Combat Intelligence spoke up. “Five minutes to release point. Arm warheads.”

A small flashing red box appeared just above the virtual horizon in her HUD. She nudged the stick again, lining up the yellow arrowhead with the target designator. Back up in the twenty-first, a CI would have handled all of this, with the pilot riding along just in case something went wrong. Of course, back up in the twenty-first she wouldn’t have been on a mission like this. She wasn’t a jet jockey—or hadn’t been, anyway. But thousands of hours flying light transport planes in and out of Third World death traps like Damascus and Addis Ababa had marked her out when the talent scouts had come calling. So now she flew jets.

Specifically she flew the contemporary version of the F-86F Saber jet.

“Three minutes to release. Slaving mission package to CI.”

The
Trident
’s CI, still speaking in the voice of an as-yet-unborn Lady Beckham, informed the squadron that she had taken over the bomb release. Hobbins wanted to grip the stick harder, but she forced herself to breathe out, to relax her hold on the plane, and let herself flow through the moment.

A quick check of the heads-up confirmed that all fifteen Sabers were in formation and lined up for the final run in. High above them, the
Trident
’s Big Eye tracked the jets feeding the data back to the stealth destroyer’s CI, which measured their progress against position fix emitters set in place by the Resistance, and calculated the time left to release while keeping the squadron on the correct heading.

The Chinooks had fallen well behind now. Hobbins would need a top-down view of the battlespace if she wanted to track their progress. Instead, she concentrated on the darkened world that was rushing past her bubble canopy, and the objective that lay just ahead. It was a cloudless night; the stars were pinpoint emeralds in her LLAMPS vision, the Central Massif a wall of lime-green negative space, blotting out the heavens to the southeast. Tactical readouts and rendered terrain display overlaid the soft luminous French countryside, where every human-made structure was drawn on her goggles in hard schematic outline. A dry stone wall. A tumbledown barn. A burned-out church.