Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “Of course not. Do you think I’m insane? I took enough of a risk, just sending the information as I did.”

  Müller glanced at the wife. She must speak English, too, he guessed. He’d spoken to her only in German before. Her eyes registered a renewed shock—something beyond the trauma of being taken hostage.

  He tried to think it through as quickly as possible. If Brasch had sent such a burst, but hadn’t identified himself, there would be no immediate reason for the special ops executive to contact Müller. Particularly if there was any risk of compromising the source of such valuable new information.

  “Shit,” he muttered as he scooped up his own flexipad. He dropped the file transfer into the background and brought up the communicator, scribbling out a quick message.

  He needed to check out Brasch’s story.

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  The Trident’s defensive stocks had dropped to 13 percent of capacity. The previous day’s attack by ME 262s had sliced through the destroyer screen and pressed in on the ship, requiring her Close-In Weapons Systems to respond.

  The Metal Storm pods had chewed up the incoming fighters in less than four seconds, but all the defensive sysops in the ship’s Combat Information Center had red warning lights displayed on their screens. Ammunition for the pods had dropped past the critical line. Back home, the Trident would have been assigned protected status, and would have been shielded by other ships connected via the Cooperative Battle Link. Or she would have withdrawn from hostilities altogether.

  Neither of those options was available to Halabi now.

  She caught herself chewing at her bottom lip as she reviewed the situation. It wouldn’t do to look as though circumstance had the better of her. But she was growing concerned that that was exactly the case. News of the missile strike on Hawaii had jolted the ship’s complement, but not as much as the message from Kolhammer that arrived shortly afterwards, warning her that the Trident might come under attack from weapons stripped off the French cruiser. It was unlikely, but it forced her to revise down their chances of survival. How difficult could it be to remove a cruise missile from the Dessaix and rig it up for a land-based launch against her command? Very difficult, she supposed, but not impossible if a few key crew members had helped out.

  And the chances of that?

  She had no idea.

  She could feel the increased tension in her CIC. Nerves had been stretched to the breaking point. The first blows of Sea Dragon had already been struck. The two attempts by the Luftwaffe could no longer be seen as probes. They were hammering at Britain’s shield. The Wehrmacht was moving into position for an assault across the Channel.

  Thousands of men dueled and died in the skies above them as the RAF and the Luftwaffe clawed at each other for supremacy. Neither side had unleashed any additional jet fighters, since the ME 262s had been destroyed attacking her ship, but there had been some nasty surprises for everyone, nonetheless.

  Some of the conventional German fighters had been modified to allow them much more time to wreak havoc over England. ME 109s with modified propellers, drop tanks, and even a few with DKM-type rotary engines had been shot down and recovered. Some carried primitive radar-seeking missiles.

  In reply, Spitfires with mods designed by her own engineers had climbed into the air to meet them. Bomber Command sent waves of B-17s and Lancasters across the Channel to rain high explosives down on the staging ports and airfields of northern France. Radar-controlled triple-A raked them from the sky.

  Halabi had slept four hours in the last thirty-six. Thank God for stims. The Trident remained poised to deliver Prince Harry and his commandos to Norway, but they hadn’t moved away from the Solent, waiting while London tried to decide whether or not to scrub the mission.

  It seemed to her that the stealth cruiser was needed more right here, to help coordinate the immediate defense of the realm. Sixteen newcomers had invaded her CIC. Top brass from the Admiralty, the RAF, and General Staff, all of them blundering about, getting underfoot, and generally hampering the very effort they had come to “supervise.”

  She was just about to ask a knighted rear admiral to get his fat arse out of her way when the intel section reported incoming traffic, for her eyes only.

  “To my viewscreen, then, Mr. Howard.”

  “Right you are, ma’am.”

  It was a short text message from a skin job. Müller.

  Target Brasch acquired. Claims to have delivered data by encrypted subroutine in the last twenty-four hours. Please advise.

  Halabi had to call up his mission profile, and that required her DNA key for access. She placed her palm on the reader and waited for the ship’s Combat Intelligence to unlock the data.

  “Access granted,” said Posh.

  “What the hell’s going on here,” asked an air vice marshal.

  Halabi couldn’t remember his name. She held up one hand to silence him while she skimmed the mission brief.

  “Don’t you wave me away, young lady!” he blustered. “I’ve got every fighter wing in the country up there right now. If the fat’s in the fire, I need to know.”

  “Mr. McTeale,” she called out, trying to concentrate on the screen in front of her.

  Her executive officer appeared at the shoulder of the RAF man. “The captain is extremely busy, sir. Please step away from her station.”

  Halabi typed out a quick reply to Müller.

  Transmission confirmed. Stand by.

  “Mr. Howard, to the ops room, please.”

  As her intelligence boss left his station, McTeale struggled briefly with the RAF officer. Air Vice Marshal Simon Caterson, she now recalled—a bit of a prat with an irritating habit of holding forth on all manner of topics, whether he knew anything about them or not.

  “Air Vice Marshal, you will restrain yourself, or I will have Mr. McTeale turn you over to the SAS lads, to use as a practice dummy. They broke their last one.”

  With that, she headed for ops. She was certain she heard Caterson say, “Wretched woman,” as she left.

  Howard joined her there, a few steps down the corridor in the central hull. It was a smaller version of the CIC, with backups for many of the same systems. It was also mercifully free of ’temps.

  “You’re familiar with the Müller jacket, Mr. Howard?”

  He nodded. Howard was responsible for tracking all the skin jobs on their bionet. Thirteen in all. “He was going after an engineer. One of the brighter kiddies.”

  “Well, he found him,” said Halabi. “And this guy claims to be our secret admirer from yesterday. Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Brasch?” The lieutenant commander thought it over. “It’s definitely possible. The project data we received matches up with his AOR. But it matches a couple of others, too.”

  “How many?”

  “Two. An admiral in the Kriegsmarine, and a Luftwaffe colonel.”

  “What’re Müller’s mission specs?” she asked.

  “Quick and dirty. A hostile debrief, followed by Sanction Two.”

  “Really?” said Halabi. “I thought Müller was a pilot. He’s not really trained for that sort of business, is he?”

  “Jacket says he volunteered. He’s a Jerry. Figured he’d fit right in.”

  Halabi, who had an intimate understanding of cultural dislocation, doubted that, but she didn’t have time to debate the point.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the comm operator called over, interrupting the discussion. “Eyes only again, for you.”

  Halabi took the message on the nearest screen. She had a feeling it was Müller again.

  She was right. It was a one-line message, but it cut through the Rubik’s Cube of possibilities she’d just been playing with.

  Brasch requests extraction.

  “Better get the War Ministry for me,” she told her comm officer.

  “Captain! We have incoming. Sorry, no, we don’t. London does.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. �
�More jets.”

  “No, ma’am. Missiles. Cruise missiles.”

  30

  NORWAY

  These were the finest men Aryan blood had to offer, and he was immensely proud of them. There were only eight of them, two units of four men each, something they had learned from England’s much-vaunted Special Air Service. The SS wasn’t so arrogant as its opponents imagined. It was more than willing to adapt and improve upon their ideas. But if they wanted to think of his troops as mindless automatons, then let them.

  He would laugh on their graves.

  It felt strange, however, to be standing in front of an American aeroplane—a Douglas Dakota, they called it, captured in North Africa. Stranger still to be addressing men dressed in the uniforms of the enemy.

  As the moment finally arrived, and Operation Sea Dragon began to unfold, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler could have been at the missile base in Donzenac, or with his new airborne regiment at Zaandam. These eight men, however, were about to embark on a personal odyssey entirely of his own design. They were going to drive a dagger into the heart of England, and so he had chosen to join them on a small, nameless airfield at the edge of the North Sea.

  Three of them spoke English perfectly; most of the others with a slight accent, hence the uniforms, which identified them as Free Polish forces. Englanders thought of all Europeans as essentially the same. Wogs or wops or some such insulting nonsense. That ill-considered sense of superiority would cost them dearly over the next few days.

  Only Colonel Skorzeny, the commander of the group, would proceed without a thorough mastery of English. But he was the one man Himmler knew he could trust with a job like this. Given the need, he would walk through mountains if they stood in his way. The Reichsführer’s only regret was that he wouldn’t personally get to watch as Skorzeny completed his mission. But if the colonel survived, he would entertain everyone at the Wolfschanze with his vivid tales of the adventure.

  The giant storm trooper, who was dressed as a simple corporal, stomped up and down in front of his men as they stood in line like carven marble statues. “So who amongst you will slaughter this fat pig for the führer?” he roared at them.

  “I will, sir!” they all chorused in return.

  “No,” he boomed back, laughing like an elder God. “I will choke the life out of him, and you shall do nothing more than gather around to slap me on the back, and tell me what a fine fellow I am. Are we understood?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Korporal!”

  Skorzeny seemed to find that immensely funny, and another gale of his rich laughter peeled away into the night sky. It was uncomfortably chilly on the runway, which had been carved out of an ancient birch forest high above the waters of the Skagerrak, and Himmler wrapped himself more deeply into his greatcoat. He would never share the bond Skorzeny had with these men, the easy familiarity they had with each other and with the likelihood of their own deaths. But he could appreciate their camaraderie, and even Skorzeny’s high spirits.

  He coughed loudly, and the colonel yelled at the men to attend to his words.

  “Please, please, stand at ease,” said Himmler.

  They unbent just a fraction.

  “You men make me proud to be German,” he said. “You have all volunteered for this most dangerous mission, and it will take you into the deepest recesses of the enemy’s lair. You are few in number, but the effect of your actions will be unmeasurable. To me, you personify all that is great in our party. You are supermen, and my best wishes go with you. Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!”

  Himmler bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment, and Skorzeny yelled at the pilots to spool up the Dakota’s two engines. As they coughed into life, thick smoke and blue flame belched from the cowlings. Skorzeny slapped the first man in line on the shoulder and he turned with mechanical precision to climb into the cabin. The others followed, until only Skorzeny was left.

  “The führer has much to occupy him right now,” said Himmler, “but he wanted me to tell you that he will be thinking of you and your men especially.”

  An uncharacteristic solemnity came over the SS colonel. “Thank you. That is most gracious, Herr Reichsführer. We shall earn that honor, or die to a man in trying.”

  They saluted, and Skorzeny disappeared in through the darkened door of the plane.

  MOSCOW, USSR

  The lights hadn’t been put out in the Little Corner for nearly a week. Even with Hitler’s attention elsewhere, this was a very dangerous time for the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin had napped only fitfully during the last three days, although physically he felt fine, thanks to the medicines his physician had been given from the British ship named Vanguard.

  Sitting in his office, the Soviet leader allowed himself a rare moment of relaxation, sipping from a long glass of hot tea, as he contemplated a world remade in his own image. It might take another ten years, and it would without a doubt be a bloody business. But at the end of it, the revolution would be safe from fascists like Hitler, traitors like Khrushchev, and imperialists like Churchill and Roosevelt.

  There would never come a day when his statues were tipped over and melted down for scrap. Indeed, he amused himself by imagining a statue large enough to replace the Washington Monument. A great towering Comrade Stalin to keep a stern watch over the liberated workers of the United Soviet States of Amerika.

  “More tea, Comrade?” asked Poskrebyshev. “Before the others arrive?”

  “No, I will need a bucket under the desk, if I drink any more.”

  Stalin stretched his tired frame. A light dusting of snow lay on the cold stone laneways of the Kremlin, outside his window. He knew he would feel more secure once that white blanket was properly draped over the Motherland. Zhukov was doing wonders with the Red Army, now that he had time to train and equip his divisions properly. When the thaw came, no matter what the correlation of forces in the West, the Soviet Union would be safe behind an Iron Curtain.

  That phrase, which Beria had taught him, was most appealing. Having faced annihilation at the hands of the fascists a few short months ago, Josef Stalin was much taken with the image of an iron curtain falling across the frontier with Germany, no matter who controlled it.

  He suspected that it would be the Allies. Their industrial capacity supplied them with an advantage that would be nearly impossible to overcome. And now, augmented with the wonders of the next century, they would surely triumph over the fascists.

  But he would not be helping them. Not if that support meant the eventual collapse of the revolution. Or the conquest of the Rodina by a— What was Beria’s phrase? A digital Hitler. The situation had been so finely balanced that when that mincing dandy Ribbentrop had offered a cease-fire, he had not dared let the opportunity slip by. Not when the reports from the Pacific illustrated how powerful the weapons were that the fascists had obtained. For one very tense week, he’d actually expected Himmler’s storm troopers to crash in through his windows at any moment, cocooned in armor that made them virtually invulnerable.

  Of course, he’d been wrong about that. As it had turned out, those bastards had only picked up the table scraps, while the bulk of the windfall had gone to Roosevelt and his allies.

  But that didn’t matter now.

  Stalin placed his empty drinking glass on a silver coaster and leaned forward to pick up the model again.

  The NKVD had retrieved it from the Vanguard. It was a model of the ship that had materialized at the edge of the Siberian ice pack. A beautiful weapon; unusual, with its three hulls and featureless deck, but deadly looking nonetheless. Like an assassin’s dagger. How strange that it had arrived a whole day before the Pacific Emergence.

  Stalin wished for just a moment that the burdens of state didn’t have to lie so heavily on his shoulders. He would have loved to make the journey to the special facilities that were being constructed around the ship, just to see it with his own eyes. But such things were not possible.

  Then he snorted in amusement.
Was there anything that could be called impossible nowadays?

  “Vozhd?” his secretary asked. “Something amuses you?”

  “Life amuses me, Poskrebyshev. Life, and everything about it. Tell me, are they here yet?”

  “Yes. They are waiting outside.”

  “Well, bring them in, bring them in.”

  Poskrebyshev carried his narrow-shouldered, slightly hunched frame out of the room. He’d never really been the same since the NKVD had executed his wife. He had an impressively ugly countenance, which Stalin admired because it frightened visitors who came to the Little Corner. That countenance wore a perpetual scowl.

  He reappeared, with Beria and Molotov in tow. The secret policeman seemed as chipper as ever, which was to say not at all, but at least relentless morbidity was his natural state of being. Molotov, like everyone in high office these days, looked as though the executioner stalked his every move.

  They sat in hard wooden chairs in front of Stalin’s desk. He spoke first to Molotov. “So, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich, we have acceded to the fascists’ request for assistance on this one little matter, and I can see that you are still not happy.”

  “I doubt the British will see it as such a trifle,” said Molotov. “They are rather fond of Churchill, and will not appreciate the fact that we have helped the fascists to kill him.”

  “Yet our involvement is quite deniable,” said Beria. “Our man should be able to get himself out to Ireland, and then home when he is done.”

  Stalin, like his foreign minister, still was not sure.

  Britain had come close to declaring war on Russia when he’d impounded the ships of convoy PQ 17 at Murmansk, just before signing the cease-fire with Germany. Their anger was quite reasonable, he admitted. With one backhanded sweep, he had done more to damage the Royal Navy than Hitler’s oafish admirals had managed in two and a half years.

  The vessels were still there: thirty-five merchantmen and their escorts, including four destroyers, ten corvettes, two antiaircraft auxiliaries, and four cruisers. He had been scrupulously fair, refusing every German entreaty to turn the ships over to the Kriegsmarine. And the crews were being held in relative comfort, given the deprivations of wartime Russia.