Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  It was an SS researcher who had discovered an electronic magazine article about famous last lines. He had come across a report of Kaltenbrunner’s execution by the Allies, in October 1946. Just before the hangman’s noose took him, Kaltenbrunner showed a distinct sense of style, saying in a low, calm voice, “Germany, good luck.”

  That was the sort of Aryan contempt for death that the führer found reassuring in these uncertain of days. So Kaltenbrunner lived. For now.

  And his tenuous hold on life was driving him more fervently to prove his loyalty. He had accelerated the solution to the Jewish problem, despite the fact that the Allies had stepped up their efforts to bomb the rail lines that led to the camps. He had even taken over the Abwehr two years early and had placed it under the supervision of the Reich Central Security Office.

  That would have happened in 1944 but—

  “Pah!”

  Himmler chided himself and waved away these idle thoughts. Would have, could have, should have, may have . . . It was all so pointless. What mattered was that they strike a massive coordinated blow against the English-speaking world, to smash them so hard that they would be crippled, if not destroyed altogether.

  He knew that Stalin was using the current hiatus to desperately shore up his own defenses, but to no avail—it would never be enough. Russia would burn, and this time they wouldn’t make the mistake of sending millions of troops into the wasteland of the steppes.

  A thin, contemptuous smile twisted his features as he thought of the eagerness with which Stalin had accepted the terms of the cease-fire.

  The small procession of cars motored through the northern gates of the Wolfschanze, past a checkpoint manned by the finest of all German troops, the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler. Himmler nodded approvingly as the men snapped out an extra-crisp salute for his car when it glided past.

  The outer ring of the complex, which enclosed an area of two and a half square kilometers, was secured by minefields and a double-apron barbed-wire fence, although that was gradually being replaced with electrified razor wire as it became available. The main bunker was located in the north of the compound and sat within a secondary enclosure.

  Thousands of workmen still crawled over the eighty or so fortified structures, hardening them against possible Allied air or missile strikes. Almost no evidence remained of the original wooden buildings, which now formed the inner shell of triple-bunkered concrete blockhouses. Himmler missed the old-world charm of the original design. It had felt like visiting a hunting lodge out here in the woods. But such whimsy was for quieter times.

  His driver was forced to stop at the inner ring, as his identity was verified, although that did not take long.

  Himmler climbed out of the rear seat as a car pulled up from behind, and the Japanese ambassador arrived. The German waited for Lieutenant General Hiroshi Oshima, not really wanting to talk to Kaltenbrunner.

  “Reichsführer, a fine day, if a little chilly,” said Oshima. “It reminds me of the forests on Hokkaido.”

  “Herr General,” Himmler responded. “Let us hope that the first snows hold off a little while longer, eh?” They shook hands and entered the Lagebaracke, where the July Plot would have—

  Himmler sighed again.

  He really had to concentrate on what was, not on what would have been.

  Albert Speer was talking. Another survivor, even though the evidence against him was even more damning than it had been against Kaltenbrunner. The minister of armaments would have survived the war and not been executed, which Himmler found very suspicious. Unfortunately, the information available on him was even more sparse, and largely second- or even third-hand. There was one reference to a book about him called The Good Nazi, which infuriated Himmler because he couldn’t be sure whether the title was meant to be ironic or literal.

  But, the führer had intervened—one of the few times he’d done so. Thanking the Reichsführer-SS for his diligence, he had suggested that Speer was too valuable to condemn, at least for the moment, when they had already lost so many and faced the immense challenge of the coming months. He argued that Heydrich had been allowed to live, despite his Jewish blood, so Speer should be given a chance to redeem himself by bringing the special projects to fruition. He was on notice, the führer had said, and he’d seen what happened to the others. If he could not be trusted, he could at least be watched.

  Himmler privately thought the führer was still upset over the business with Rommel.

  So Speer was alive, although he never seemed to look Himmler in the eye. To the Reichsführer, he very much appeared to be a man with something to hide.

  His turn would come.

  “And so, I am afraid the jet program will not reach its maturity in time,” said Speer, never once looking up from his notes.

  Göring began to grumble, and curse under his breath as Speer carried on.

  “So I recommend that while we continue to invest in the development of these jets, there are other, much more pressing programs in need of our resources. The use of radar, to direct antiaircraft fire, has greatly limited the Allies’ ability to strike at our preparations for Sea Dragon. But we still lag in this area, and while the productive capacity exists, the program lacks the funding needed to achieve its goals.

  “I can add fifty percent to our coverage immediately, if the Chancellery will just release the funds. That extra capacity will be crucial. The RAF has changed its tactics, and has begun striking at our radar sites with these wooden Mosquitoes, flying low and fast and firing a new rocket specifically designed to home in on radar emissions. They, too, have accelerated their weapons-development programs. And they posses the Trident, which we do not—”

  “We would have such a ship, if it weren’t for our yellow friends,” Göring muttered, a little too volubly.

  “Enough,” Hitler commanded. “Let Speer continue.”

  Himmler glanced over at the Japanese ambassador but his face was a marble mask. For once, the SS chief agreed with Göring. He didn’t think they should have let the Dessaix out of their grasp, either. It would have been invaluable in the coming operation. But the führer had insisted. They would fight this war as a global conflict. The Japanese were closely coordinating their plans with the Reich, and Yamamoto insisted that those plans turned on the Dessaix. Besides, she had been stripped nearly bare before being sent to the Pacific. She might not play a direct role in Sea Dragon, but some of her weapons systems would.

  Himmler listened as Speer mumbled a thank-you to Hitler and pressed on. Still refusing to raise his head.

  “The Panzerfaust Two-fifty, a great improvement on the model Thirty, will be ready, but in limited numbers,” he said. “On current scheduling, twelve hundred will be available in the one-use format. There are also two hundred prototype reusable Panzerschrecken, available immediately, with a projected supply of eighteen to nineteen hundred warshots.”

  Himmler moved his cold gaze away from Speer for a moment to let it rest upon General Ramcke. The paratroop commander had designs on those weapons, along with the body armor and assault rifles under development at Monovitz. Himmler met the man’s gaze and held it, forcing the Fallschirmjäger to lower his eyes. The new SS special units would be receiving those items. They had been in training with the prototypes and mock-ups from the first day of the project.

  He went back to staring impassively at Speer. The armaments minister spoke for another quarter hour, outlining the state of all the accelerated programs for which he was responsible. When he was finished, the führer dismissed him, along with all the other minor functionaries.

  The room cleared quickly, until only four men remained besides Himmler and Oshima. The führer of course, Reichsmarshall Göring, Herr Doktor Göbbels, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who was one of the few people besides Himmler who had come to enjoy even greater prestige and power since the Emergence. He had negotiated the cease-fire with Stalin, and Hitler considered it to be a master stroke. And more important, like Kaltenbrunner, h
e had died well in the other history.

  Ribbentrop was the first Nazi to hang at Nuremberg, and he had gone out proclaiming his loyalty to the führer. Even Himmler could find no fault in that, although the man remained the most awful preening snob.

  With the meeting reduced to the inner core of the Reich, Himmler opened the manila folder that contained his notes. Although he had become comfortable using a flexipad, he still preferred to rely on paper and ink in situations such as this one. It wouldn’t do for his briefing to be marred by a misplaced data file or malfunctioning software. He didn’t understand how this “Microsoft Corporation” could have become so dominant in die andere Zeit. He found their products to be annoying, and entirely unreliable.

  “The Demidenko Project proceeds well,” he began. “The Bolsheviks have committed enormous resources, and state that they are satisfied with progress, which of course, remains far behind the joint research we are carrying out with the Japanese government. Demidenko has allowed us to test much of the secret theoretical work we have undertaken without the Soviets’ knowledge, and even the failures at the test site have proved invaluable in confirming the hypotheses of von Braun’s group. While we consider it inevitable that the Politburo will have established their own rocket research, in violation of the cease-fire agreement, we can be confident they possess neither the technical resources nor the skills needed to match our combined efforts.”

  Oshima bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.

  “On current projections,” he continued, “we will have a V-Three rocket capable of striking at all of the main Soviet production and population centers by late nineteen forty-three. Within a year after that, we should be able to launch from land-based systems against the East Coast of the USA. Although, they will have achieved a similar level of development with their own missile programs, and of course, their Manhattan Project should also have come to fruition by then.”

  Nobody in the room looked comfortable with the idea of an America that would be able to obliterate entire cities in Europe with just a single warhead.

  “However,” Himmler added, “we do not think they will be able to fit an atomic device onto a missile for some time yet—”

  “What do you mean by some time?” Göring demanded. “Will it be nineteen forty-five, nineteen forty-six? When?”

  The führer didn’t slap down his Luftwaffe chief this time. Instead, he laid down the pencil with which he had been taking notes. “Yes, Heinrich. This is an important point,” he said. “If we allow them to achieve a lead on us, Truman will not make the same mistake twice, assuming that he still succeeds the cripple. If he can develop the same superiority of atomic forces he enjoyed over the Communists in the early days of their Cold War, he will strike us without hesitation. He may even trade one or two of his own cities for all of ours. And if that pig Churchill is still alive, skulking around in exile, he will probably bomb his own countrymen rather than allow us to hold England.”

  Himmler listened in respectful silence. It was a reasonable question, even if it had been inspired by a very unreasonable and slightly drunken oaf like Göring.

  “There are two things to note, mein führer. First, Churchill. I have a plan in hand to deal with him during Sea Dragon. I will come to that presently. Second, I must agree that the Americans will lead us in rocket technology. They gained a much greater bounty from the Emergence—thousands of personnel, many of them trained technicians, and a wealth of computing power within their ships that unfortunately we can but dream of. The files on the Sutanto and the Nuku are a very poor substitute. They had very restricted access to Kolhammer’s Fleetnet, much of it at the level of the mundane and ridiculous.

  “The French vessel has been a treasure trove, by comparison, but of course we have had her for less time, and the vast majority of her crew were uncooperative. Some of those who we’d thought cooperative at first, turned out to be working against us, and they even managed to accomplish quite significant acts of sabotage before they were caught and punished. I can only imagine what information has been lost to us because of that. Another saboteur nearly destroyed the entire vessel when we were removing the Lavals.

  “But in executing them, of course, we killed the very men best able to teach us how to use the infinitely more complex devices on that ship. It is the devil’s own dilemma.”

  He could see Göring twisting about like a man whose hide had shrunk in all the wrong places. The Reichsmarshall wore the burden of his failures heavily.

  He still controlled the Luftwaffe, in a sense, but he was no longer free to determine its destiny. Whereas the German Air Force had once been his personal plaything, it was now simply a tool of the state. He retained his position simply because, of the three services, only the Luftwaffe had shown no evidence that it was a nest of vipers. In Himmler’s eyes, loyalty without competence was hardly worth having, but he could understand the führer’s need to keep a few of the old comrades around him.

  And Göring was manageable, if increasingly irascible. As long as he had his wine and his estates, he could be tolerated. Nonetheless, Himmler spoke a little more forcefully to shut down whatever infantile protests were brewing in the fat toad’s skull.

  “The Americans have enjoyed other advantages. Their production and population base remains well beyond our reach, and they carry out their research without the handicap of having to do so in secret. We have been forced to maintain a false and deliberately impaired project at Demidenko to throw both the Soviets and the Allies off our trail.”

  Himmler was one of the few men in the Reich who could speak the blunt truth like this. The führer didn’t look happy, but he always appreciated the Reichsführer’s refusal to overstate good news or downplay the bad.

  He stared up at Himmler, his chin resting mournfully on his chest, his eyes pools of still darkness. “And so, to the counterstroke,” said Hitler.

  The SS chief nodded. “If we cannot yet defeat the Americans, we can delay the moment just long enough to secure our gains from them. They may well develop the means to destroy us a hundred times over, but we need only have the ability to destroy them once . . . and perhaps not even that. They remain a racially degenerate nation of criminals. They may be willing to lose Miami, for instance, in order to see us defeated. But would they be willing to see another five or six seaboard cities utterly destroyed? Can they live with the prospect of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all turned into melted glass? I doubt it.”

  “You aren’t telling us anything we don’t already know,” said Göring. “We need time. Yamamoto said the same thing in June, when he presented his plan.”

  Himmler smiled. “But now I can tell you with certainty that it will work.”

  Only Oshima and Göbbels did not stir. Oshima already knew, of course, and the propaganda minister was a like a snake, which never moves until it is ready to strike.

  “We have wasted a great deal of time and energy, because we did not believe it possible that slow neutron fission could cascade quickly enough to create an explosion,” Himmler explained. “We have since learned that this is untrue. We have maintained production at the heavy water plant in Norway, and we are shipping that to Demidenko simply to mislead our enemies.

  “In fact, we have shifted the main focus of our efforts into fast fission. For this it has been necessary to secure a supply of graphite uncontaminated by the boron electrodes we have traditionally used in commercial production. We have now secured ongoing supplies from Pargas in Finland, and the Oshirabetsu mine on Hokkaido, but we also took a considerable delivery from the Zavalie deposit in the Ukraine before pulling our forces back to Poland.

  “Following this new line of enquiry and using the much more capable undamaged computing systems we stripped from the Dessaix, I can promise you that the Reich will be in possession of its first nuclear weapon by nineteen forty-five. And that the Soviet Union will cease to exist sometime in nineteen forty-six.”

  A buzz of excitement greeted the new
s. The führer’s face lit up like the dawn of a new day. Even Göring looked happy.

  “There is more to it, of course,” said Himmler. “We must now strike at Churchill and secure control of the British Isles. We must bar the Americans from Europe. And Japan must also secure herself in the east. I will have more to add about that, in a few minutes. But I believe General Oshima has a few points to make first.

  “Ambassador?”

  General Oshima thanked the Reichsführer and stood to address the room.

  They were a motley collection. Ever since the Emergence, these so-called supermen had indulged themselves in an orgy of self-doubt and preemptive revenge. There had been times since June when he thought that the Reich might just eat itself alive. Tokyo had seriously considered withholding some of the material that had been extracted from the Indonesian computers, simply because every newly translated historical file, no matter how anodyne, seemed to stoke the furnace of Nazi paranoia.

  But the peculiar emergence of the Dessaix had made such considerations redundant. The French “stealth cruiser” had materialized off the northwestern coast of Africa near the Spanish naval base on the Canary Islands weeks after the appearance of Kolhammer’s fleet at Midway. A U-boat, which had been secretly refueling there, was quickly sent to investigate the strange reports by Spanish fishermen who’d seen the vessel. With at least a quarter of the crew dead—another unexplained difference—and the rest unconscious as had been the case on the Sutanto, the vessel was easily captured. It made Oshima wonder what else might have come through from the future and remained undiscovered, or what might yet arrive.

  The Dessaix had significantly altered the balance between the two principal Axis powers, leaving Japan reliant on the Reich to deal fairly with the changed circumstances. The ship was almost infinitely more powerful than the two Indonesian vessels that Japan had taken, but then her crew had proved to be much more difficult to manage. Only a handful had agreed to cooperate, and some of them had later been exposed as saboteurs and double-crossers. Removing the land-attack missiles from the ship and redeploying them to Donzenac had been difficult enough without their interference. The ambassador silently cursed the two-timing Frenchmen even as he stood to address the German leaders.