"You'd want to hope not," said Gelder, with what sounded like genuine sympathy. "The Reichsfuhrer does not like to be disappointed."
They walked in silence the rest of the way through the long, half-painted corridor, passing no other human beings. Just bloodied handprints.
"Excellent work, Brasch, just excellent. Those idiots were completely taken in."
"Thank you, Reichsfuhrer. It was simply a matter of not doing my job."
Himmler smiled at the weak joke.
They met in a secure room, in the German section of the command compound. It was swept for listening devices every two hours, but none had ever been found. The Russians weren't all that sophisticated. Their own command buildings, however, were thoroughly covered by German surveillance. Listening devices built into the very fabric of the Soviets' command center had never been detected, and provided a wealth of intelligence for the SS to rake through.
The room in which Himmler and Brasch met was small and bare, just a few hard wooden chairs, a table, and a notice board on which was pinned a single yellow piece of paper, displaying the times at which the room had been cleared by the technical services section of the SS. They had been through ten minutes before Brasch was ushered in. The two men drank real coffee and nibbled at Dutch honey biscuits.
"You've done good work out here, Colonel. I shudder to think of the resources we've put into this place. But we must show our willingness, yes?"
"The Russians still don't trust us," said Brasch.
"No reason why they should," Himmler replied. "We will destroy them in good time, and they know it. I doubt this is the only investment they've made as a hedge against the future. But as long as we control their access to the technology, they remain beholden to us. We took our boot from Stalin's throat when we could have crushed the life out of him."
Brasch said nothing. Both of them knew that as awful as were the Red Army's losses in 1942, it had been the beginning of the end for the German conquest.
Before the silence could become uncomfortable, though, Brasch filled the void. "The fuhrer is well? We do not have much news out here. Just rumors."
Himmler arched one eyebrow. "Really? And what might those be?"
"Terrible rumors, Herr Reichsfuhrer," said Brasch. "I have heard of treachery at the highest levels of the Wehrmacht and the Kreigsmarine. Not so much with the Luftwaffe. I'm not sure why. And of course, not at all with the SS. At any rate, if even a fraction of the talk is true, it is a crime how some have abandoned their duty to the Fatherland."
Himmler appeared to regard him as a teacher might size up a dim pupil who had just said something profound, but quite by accident. Brasch worked hard at maintaining a slightly worried, somewhat bovine look on his face. Eventually Himmler took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. Brasch recognized the gesture as a sign that the man had relaxed just a little.
"We have had a terrible time of it," Himmler admitted. "It has been a shock to us all, but naturally the greatest burden has fallen upon the fuhrer himself. I have done what I can to protect him, but…"
He trailed off for a moment.
"A regiment of the Afrika Korps revolted when Rommel was recalled. Actually turned their guns on the men sent to collect him."
"The whole regiment!" Brasch gasped. "How?"
"No, not the entire regiment," said Himmler, somewhat exasperated. "Just a few men in a headquarters company at first. But then it spread through the ranks. The defense of El Alamein was thrown into chaos, and that pervert Montgomery took advantage-it was a disaster, Herr Oberst. Not at all like the spirit of Belgorod, eh?"
Brasch allowed himself a confused shake of the head. "No, not at all like Belgorod."
"There was a similar uprising when Canaris was exposed. Rebellion in both the Abwehr and the Kreigsmarine. An entire Waffen SS Division was required to put that one down."
"Good God!" said Brasch, who was genuinely surprised that the rumors he'd heard turned out to be true.
Himmler finished polishing his glasses and replaced them on his small, ratlike nose. "You understand these are state secrets, Brasch. They are not matters for idle chitchat."
"Indeed Herr Reichsfuhrer. Of course, but why…" He trailed off.
"Why do I tell you? Because you need to know, Brasch. The Fatherland needs men it can trust. I am afraid the counterattacks on the criminal gangs who would undermine our leader have rather drastically thinned out our upper ranks. They have not weakened us, mind you!" he hastened to add. "But some of those swine held important positions. They must be replaced."
The room seemed to become hotter, and closer. Brasch tried not to let his hopes get the better of him. "I'm afraid I don't understand. Am I to be transferred? My work here-"
Himmler held up one, thin, pallid hand to cut him off. "Your work here is done. Stalin is convinced that our cooperation is sincere, at least in the short term. And your efforts here have played a large part in that. He knows there must come a final settlement between us, and we know he is frantically building his forces in the Far East, where he thinks himself beyond our gaze. It doesn't matter. When we have dealt with the immediate threat of the Allies, we shall turn on him with weapons he has never dreamed of. The trinkets we let him play with here will not save him, nor will those fleets of antique tanks he is building."
"I understand that, Herr Reichsfuhrer. My mission briefing was quite specific. But what now?"
"Now," said Himmler, leaning forward. "You are going home. These idiots will think you have been transferred in disgrace, after today's failure. But you have proved yourself adept at working under extreme pressure, and there are projects that require your attention back in the civilized world.
"We are going to take the British Isles, Colonel Brasch. And you are going to help us."
6
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, CORAL SEA
It was as if they were counting her shots. Captain Jane Willet knew Yamamoto was lurking off to the north of New Guinea, well beyond the range of her Nemesis arrays. The Havoc had been out on point duty, hundreds of miles ahead of Admiral Spruance's diminished Task Force for nearly six weeks now. No Japanese ships had made it past them. Spruance may have had just the Enterprise and USS Wasp to call on for carrier-borne strike missions, but with the submarine's advanced sensor suites and battle management systems to act as a force multiplier, he could deploy his precious aircraft to devastating effect. Yamamoto, meanwhile, could not move directly against him, for fear of losing his capital ships to the Havoc.
The Japanese grand admiral seemed to be waiting her out. Sending a long line of tempting targets her way, hoping she would run down her stocks of torpedoes and cruise missiles. Willet assumed he knew what she was packing. Some of the basic specs for the Havoc were available online, and the Indonesian tubs had been linked into Fleetnet. God only knew how many pages they had cached before the Transition, but it would be prudent to assume that the Japanese were somewhere with an abacus, or a flexipad, ticking off every kill she made.
"Five contacts, Captain," reported her intel chief, Lieutenant Lohrey. "Good returns from the drone. We can have visual in ten if you want me to reposition."
The commander of HMAS Havoc leaned over her shipmate's shoulder to check out the data for herself. "You make them out to be transports, Amanda?"
"At least three, with a couple of destroyers for escort. No air screen, again."
Willet chewed her lower lip, but in the end the decision was easy. "Well, I'm not wasting any taxpayers' money on this. Especially as the taxpayers haven't even been born yet. Squirt a position fix to Spruance, see if they can vector a couple of those American subs on them."
Lohrey turned in her chair. "Begging your pardon, Captain, but the 'temps still haven't completed the changeover of their torpedoes. If they're packing Type Fourteens, they might as well shoot spitballs at 'em."
Willet nodded ruefully. The sub-launched torpedoes carried by American boats from this time had major problems with their
running depth and warheads. Depression-era budgets hadn't allowed for proper testing, and the training shots ran with significantly lighter dummy warheads. This meant that in a real shoot-out, the torpedoes tended to "sink" a little, and could actually run right under the keel of their targets. The magnetic exploders that might have compensated for this didn't work properly, because they were designed to function in far northern latitudes, and they went a little haywire south of the equator.
Even if, by some chance, the captain got lucky and actually hit his target, the contact detonator often failed because they'd been designed for an earlier, slower type of fish. The 'temps' Mark 14 hit with enough speed that the firing pin often missed the exploder cap altogether. It was logical to assume that once this had been pointed out, it would have been attended to with all dispatch. But no, she'd just read an e-mail that morning from Kolhammer complaining that the civilian manufacturer, NTS Newport and the responsible navy office, ComSubSWPac, were still resisting a total refit.
"You're right," sighed Willet. "They could shoot their whole wad and still not hit anything."
"What about these guys here?" She tapped the screen with a light pen, instantly drawing a box around two blue contacts floating within a sheltered cove on the mainland, less than a hundred klicks to her east and 250 south of the advancing Japanese reinforcements. Lieutenant Lohrey worked her station quickly; a window opened and began scrolling text.
"That's a couple of PT boats, ma'am. Fifty-nine and One-oh-one. They're tasked for harassment and interdiction of Japanese supply barges coming down through the Whitsundays. If they're carrying the old Mark Thirteen's, they'd have a better chance than the subs."
Willet stood back from the screen and thought it over. She couldn't risk a radio transmission, and the PT boats didn't have the equipment to receive a compressed data burst. But she didn't want to use up any more of her precious store of weapons taking out a troop ship. She had worthier targets.
"Okay," she concluded. "Let's make some new friends. Helm, I want a fast run across to those torpedo boats. I'll talk to the skippers myself. Leave the drones up; we'll grab the take from them on the way."
She ordered the comms boss to send a compressed encrypted burst back to Spruance, explaining why they were moving off station.
Turning back to the flatscreen, she tapped her pursed lips with the light pen.
"The One-oh-one?" she said softly. "Do you think he's still driving it, Amanda?"
The intel boss shrugged. "Could be, Skipper. Who can tell, nowadays?"
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, NORTH QUEENSLAND COAST
Riding at anchor, the pair of contemporary American torpedo boats were invisible from the main shipping channels, and nestled in under a thick, tropical mangrove canopy, they had reasonably good topside cover as well. His men thought it would have been nice if they'd had a beach to relax on, and maybe some sweet-lookin' dolls to while away the long, hot afternoons, but you couldn't have everything.
Unless you were on one of those superships, of course. They came with their own dolls, and chilled air, and movies like you wouldn't believe. Word was they had comfier bunks than the swishiest hotels.
Lieutenant John F. Kennedy had stayed in a few swish joints before he'd signed up for the navy, but he hadn't had the pleasure of a visit to the Clinton or the Kandahar, or even the British or Aussie ships, which were rumored to have heads where the toilet water swirled down the opposite way. At least that's what Leading Seaman Molloy said, and he'd been on the Astoria at Midway, so he was the closest they had to an expert on all things related to the time travelers.
Kennedy mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck with an old gray cloth and tried to tune out the drone of the crew's voices. It was only late spring in this part of the world, but the days were already oppressively hot under the canvas shade they'd rigged up. He was working through an attack plan with Lieutenant George "Barney" Ross, and although he could appreciate the crew's endless conversation about the sexual practices of women in the twenty-first century U.S. Navy, it was becoming distracting.
"They've been slipping small barges through the passage, here and here, usually after midnight," Ross said, roughly circling an area on the map that lay between the two officers on the flying bridge. "We're going to have to move on from here tonight, anyhow. So why not try our luck where the reefs get nice and tight for them?"
Kennedy slapped idly at a mosquito that was buzzing around his ear. "Our turn to lead off, Barney?"
His friend smiled. "Sure you won't get run over in the dark?"
"Eyes like a cat, my friend. Like a cat!"
"The morals, too," Ross replied, grinning. "Okay, you take us out. We'll-"
Kennedy could never be sure, but he thought the crew reacted even before the alarm sounded. They'd been training so hard that their ability to anticipate one another was almost spooky. Before he consciously understood what was happening, men were charging to their battle stations. The ship's twin 50s were manned and ready, all the canons were tracking, including the 40 mm Bofors mounted aft, and a 37 mm antitank gun way up on the bow, flanked by a set of 30 cal machine guns and a deck-mounted mortar. The boat's supercharged V-12 engine, a Packard 4M-2500, was snarling furiously even before Kennedy got his helmet on, which was about the same time the boat's chief came stomping up, yelling at everybody to calm down and stow their peckers away.
"Over there, Mr. Kennedy," said Chief Rollins, pointing to a low, black shape that was heading toward them like a speedboat. It was flying an outsized Australian ensign.
Kennedy grabbed a pair of binoculars. Through the glasses, his first impression firmed up. It was about the size of a speedboat and powered by an outboard, but a very quiet one. He still couldn't hear it, in fact. There were five figures seated inboard, two of them women, for sure, and all of them carrying rifles of some kind-although he'd be damned if he knew what type. They looked big enough to stop an elephant.
"Goddamn," he muttered. "Chief, better tell the men to put their pants back on. Looks like we have polite company for a change."
George Ross was nearly dancing from foot to foot beside him. "Are they-?"
"Yup," said Kennedy, "they are."
The sound of the outboard reached them only when the boat was about twenty-five feet away. Chief Rollins whistled in admiration as it bumped up against the side of the torpedo boat. "She's a beauty," he said.
"Thank you, Chief," one of the women said as she effortlessly hauled herself up over the side. "I take it you mean the boat, right?"
Rollins hardly knew where to look, and Kennedy could see why. The woman was handsome, even striking, and her eyes sparked with a mischievous humor. She was dressed in some sort of dark blue coverall that did cover all, but still gave the men of both PT boats plenty to think about.
"Captain Jane Willet, commanding HMAS Havoc," she declared, and snapped a salute directly at Kennedy without having to enquire which of them was the captain. Even without a shirt, and with his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, she seemed to recognize him-But of course she would, he thought. Kennedy felt the strangeness of the moment, meeting someone who seemed to know all about him-who probably knew more about him than he did himself, in some ways. He'd been able to avoid some of the personal ramifications of the Transition hiding away and fighting down here in the mangroves inside the Great Barrier Reef. After Midway, and the attacks on New Guinea and Australia, there'd been no time to indulge in undergrad fantasies of "what-if." He'd been promoted; then his boat and his men had been thrown into the firestorm and ordered to make the best of it. Now, he felt like his mind was stretching and twisting in a completely unnatural fashion. He hadn't felt it so strongly in months.
"I'm Lieutenant Kennedy," he said, returning the woman's salute. "And this is Lieutenant Ross, the skipper of the other boat." Kennedy searched his memories of the chaos after the Transition. "The Havoc, eh?" he said. "I guess you'd be the ones launched those rockets at Yamamoto's home base? Sank two carriers and a bunc
h of cruisers?"
"We are," said Willet, squinting in the fierce tropical sun. Kennedy had noticed that most Australians seemed to walk around with a permanent squint.
Lieutenant Ross stepped forward eagerly, cutting his friend off. "It's an honor, Captain Willet. And a privilege."
"Thank you, Lieutenant," replied the submariner. She appeared somewhat taken aback by his earnestness. Kennedy smiled to himself. He doubted there was a man anywhere in the navy who believed in this war as much as his friend.
Ropes dropped down to secure Willet's launch as another pair of her shipmates came over the side of the 101: a second woman, smaller and a few years younger than Willet, and an old salt who wouldn't have looked out of place on Kennedy's boat. The captain introduced the woman as her "intel boss," Lieutenant Lohrey, and the guy as her own chief, Chief Petty Officer Roy Flemming. He was grinning hugely, and paying almost no attention to Kennedy or Ross. He only had eyes for the boat.
"If you'll excuse me, this doesn't look like a standard early-series Elco, Lieutenant. You got a lot of mods here."
Kennedy smiled again. "You mean the armaments? Yeah, well, the welds on some of them are still warm."
Willet's boat chief walked over to the nearest cannon, the forward-mounted 37 mm can opener, and stroked it with a loving air that Kennedy recognized only too well. His own chief had been inordinately proud of the refit, which the squadron had done on their own initiative back in Pearl, using a bare minimum of information cribbed from a copy of Jane's Fighting Ships of World War II that had arrived with Kolhammer's Taskforce. They didn't have any superrockets or death beams to play with, but every man on the 101 was certain they'd turned the old girl into a really formidable fighting ship.
"You didn't really see this sort of configuration until late forty-three, forty-four," said Chief Flemming. "You know, pound for pound, the old PT boats were just about the heaviest hitters of the war."
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