Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  But it was important that he maintain the facade of neutrality, and that meant detaining the combatants. The matériel in the holds of the ships had always been meant for his country, so he kept the hundreds of tanks and bombers, the thousands of trucks and other cargo. The trucks, in particular, had been very useful, when it became obvious that the Vanguard could not be moved. He stroked the model of the trihulled warship.

  The Nazis, with their pathetic attempt to deceive him with the Demidenko project, would have fainted dead away if they could see what Kaganovich and Zhdanov had built around the Vanguard. Well, they would know soon enough. His country might be poor, but it was still a giant, and vast amounts of her resources were now being directed to exploiting the windfall of the Vanguard. If he could just keep the fascists and the capitalist gangsters at war with each other, and away from his own jugular for a little while longer, he would soon be able to strike at them both, and set history right.

  The Nazis dismal efforts at maskirovka would come back to haunt them, for while it was true that Demidenko was draining much-needed men and matériel from his real efforts, it was also costing Hitler and Himmler an unknowable amount of treasure to maintain the facade of rapprochement. And his Soviet engineers were ingenious enough to quietly learn enough from the “mistakes” at Demidenko to advance the Vanguard project all the much more quickly. If only they’d been able to take and keep more of the crew alive . . .

  But as dialectical materialists, they would work with what was, not what he might wish to be.

  “All right, Beria,” said Stalin. “Your man is cleared to help the fascists, but there must be no way of tracing our involvement. Do you understand?”

  “I will take all necessary measures,” Beria replied.

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  “They’re coming,” said Halabi.

  The giant battlespace monitor, which covered two walls of the Trident’s hexagonal-shaped Combat Information Center, swarmed with hostile contacts. Thousands of them. So many, in fact, that although Posh could track each individual enemy unit, her human operators had no chance of keeping up.

  Thus most of the smaller contacts were simply tagged with a number and buried under layers of more pertinent data, such as the flight of hundreds of slow transports making their way across the air–sea gap between the eastern coast of the British Isles and a series of airfields in Norway.

  The highest priority contact, however, was a formation of three blinking red triangles screaming across the French countryside from an originating point just north of a village called Donzenac.

  They were hypersonic Laval GA cruise missiles, and the ship’s Combat Intelligence had calculated that they would impact somewhere in the U.K. in approximately four minutes. They were even curving around through Belgium and the Netherlands to put themselves well out of reach of any possible countermeasures she might have deployed. Not that there was any need. The Trident could have dealt with them had they been aimed right at her. Her Metal Storm and laser pack weapons systems were specifically designed to neutralize such threats. But there was nothing they could do from hundreds of kilometers away.

  “Weapons, can we get an intercept lock?”

  “Negative, Captain.”

  That was the answer Halabi expected. “Mr. Howard, does Posh have an attack profile yet?’

  “They’re ground-attack variants, Skipper. Almost certainly taken off the Dessaix at some point, and transferred to a makeshift launch tube. They may have even dismantled part of her VLS and used that.”

  “Doubtful,” she mused.

  “No projections on likely targets yet, ma’am, but if it was me I’d hit the key sector stations—Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, Debden, and North Weald. Luftwaffe’s been leaving them alone, concentrating their bombers on Croydon, Rochford, and the others. Those stations are near critical, and a lot of capacity’s been shifted to the undamaged fields. A hammerhead run would knock the RAF out of southern England.”

  “Comms, you got that?” Halabi asked. Air Vice Marshal Caterson and a couple of the other tourists began to advance on her command station. She ignored them for the moment. “Better give them a heads-up on shore. They’re about to get the shit kicked out of them.”

  “I think you’d best explain what the hell is going on,” Caterson demanded.

  “Three ground-attack missiles are heading toward England at over five thousand miles an hour,” she said, without betraying any emotion. “We cannot stop them. We don’t know where they’re going to hit, but whatever the target is, it will be gone very soon. My intelligence chief has indicated that the most likely targets are your main sector stations. There’s only three missiles, but they’re carrying enough submunitions to destroy all four airfields, and then some.”

  “I see,” Caterson said quietly. “And having brought this upon us, what are you going to do about it?”

  Halabi ignored the baited hook. “We’re going to do exactly as we planned and stay here, providing battlespace management data, waiting for the German surface assets to attempt the crossing.”

  “Damn you, and your crew,” he spat. “What sort of a captain are you, anyway, Halabi? Get out there and do something. You’ve got this God-almighty ship of yours, but you’re hiding behind those destroyers that’re out there protecting your worthless black hide.

  “Get—out—there—and—do something!”

  The CIC crew maintained their stations. Nobody as much as turned in their direction. But the buzz of discussion dropped away, and Halabi could feel it as everybody in the room shifted their attention onto her.

  “Mr. McTeale,” she said, fighting to keep a quaver away from her voice. “Call Chief Waddington, and have him come up here with a security detachment. If the Air Vice Marshal Caterson opens his mouth again, have him removed.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  Before Caterson could do anything to get himself thrown out, her chief defensive sysop called out. “Captain! One of the Lavals has splashed. And another has just corkscrewed off course over the North Sea.”

  Halabi, McTeale, and all the ’temps searched the main viewscreens. Indeed, one of the red triangles had disappeared, and the other was moving erratically. The Trident’s captain remained outwardly unmoved, but inside her a little cartoon Halabi was leaping up and down, punching a fist in the air. Kolhammer had reported that many of the missiles fired on Hawaii had malfunctioned, probably through sabotage. She’d been praying to a God she’d never really believed in, hoping beyond hope that whichever of the Dessaix’s crew had been responsible for that sabotage may have been able to get to these missiles, too.

  But there was still one French hammerhead streaking in toward London.

  “What’s happened, Captain?” asked an army brigadier named Beaumont. She didn’t mind him as much as Caterson. An old India hand, he’d once or twice shown himself to be more accepting of her command, and of those members of her crew whose bloodlines didn’t necessarily go all the way back to pre-Norman England.

  “At first blush, sir,” she said, pointedly paying respect to his rank, “it would seem as if somebody on the Dessaix doubled-crossed the Germans. Two of the missiles appear to have been sabotaged.”

  “Splash two, Captain.”

  “There,” she said, pointing at the flashing red triangle before it blinked out. “The second Laval has gone down.”

  “But not the third?”

  “No, sir. I’m afraid not. And if it hasn’t shown any signs by now, it probably won’t.”

  The ship’s defensive sysop spoke up. “Posh has determined that Biggin Hill is the most likely target.”

  “Captain, we have significant movement out of Calais, Dieppe, Cherbourg, and Rotterdam.”

  “Captain?” asked Beaumont.

  Halabi took a few seconds to digest everything on the big screen: the developing airborne assault out of Norway, the strategic campaign against the islands’ air defense net, the naval forces now surging out of the continent.
It was cack-handed and primitive and barely coordinated, by the standards of her day, but she recognized the underlying principle.

  “It’s called a horizontal and vertical envelopment, Brigadier. Swarming, to use the vernacular. Although I believe the old-fashioned term invasion probably covers it all.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, raising her voice slightly to grab the attention of all the ’temps. “We’re game-on. My intelligence division will monitor the assault as it develops, and keep you updated with the attack profile. We’re already streaming data to London via laser relay. If you’ll examine the big screen, you’ll see the German capital ships swinging into the Channel from the north. I need to move out in order to engage this group with my remaining ship-killers.

  “We will be offloading Major Windsor’s men by helicopter. I suggest you take the opportunity to get back on shore, as well. You will be needed there.”

  Beaumont saluted, as did a couple of his fellow officers. Most however, did not.

  “Mr. McTeale, please escort our guests to the hangars.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Comms, inform the destroyer screen that we’ll deploy in forty minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Halabi watched the dozen or so staff officers troop out after her exec. She walled off her personal feelings at the affront handed to both her and the crew by Caterson and his colleagues. It was lucky, she thought, that she knew what sort of enemy they were really fighting today. Otherwise she might have wondered whether their lives were worth it.

  The Cabinet War Rooms lay deep under the streets of London, beyond the reach of Göring’s bombers. Churchill remembered the many late nights they’d spent here during the blitz and the Battle of Britain. He recalled the way the shock waves from an especially close hit traveled up through the wooden frame of the chair he now sat in, in front of the old-fashioned world map, at the head of the Cabinet table. Almost everything was as it had been. Sweating brick walls the color of spoiled cream. The massive red steel girders running across the ceiling. The ashen gray faces of his advisers. The stale air. Only the rumble and deep, tectonic shudder of Nazi bombing was absent.

  The Luftwaffe had been concentrating on the RAF’s airfields, radar stations, and, of course, on the Trident for three months now. The city had been spared, but for what, he wondered. Was it now to be destroyed in a cataclysmic battle, street by street, a thousand years of history and culture reduced to rubble and ash?

  Not if he could help it.

  “Well, gentleman,” the prime minister said after everyone had taken their seats. “The darkest of days is upon us, but if we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men the greater share of honor.”

  Shakespeare’s words fell though four hundreds years into the taut silence of the room.

  Churchill waited on somebody to speak. But his generals and admirals were silent. Before the moment could become uncomfortable, the PM continued. “Well, then, let’s us stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Lieutenant Williams, if you will?”

  The young officer, one of Captain Halabi’s people, came to his feet. “Thank you, Prime Minister.”

  He pointed a control stick at the wide screen that had been affixed to the brick wall less than a week earlier. Everyone turned toward it as the display winked into life and a map of the British Isles and Western Europe appeared. It was always a marvel to see these things, but Churchill was frustrated by the size of the screen. He privately felt that he could get a much better appreciation of developments on the old plotting table.

  “Real-time drone surveillance and signals intercepts indicate that German forces are moving rapidly into final position for an assault on the British Isles. Army Group Central is on the move out of Tours, Orleans, and Lemours. Army Group North is consolidating rapidly in Caen, Dieppe, and Calais.”

  As Lieutenant Williams spoke, icons depicting the various units began to move north toward the Channel.

  “The Luftwaffe has ninety percent of its five operational air fleets either up or in preflight. Some formations are already moving into position for raids on all air-defense-sector assets. Allied air units are being vectored on to the incoming hostiles by Fighter Command via Trident’s battlespace management system.”

  Churchill saw Air Chief Marshal Portal nod vigorously.

  “Kriegsmarine capital ships are moving out of Norwegian waters at full steam. At least sixty U-boats are converging on the Channel from the North Sea ahead of them, taking up a position between the Tirpitz battle group and the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet.”

  The lieutenant flicked his controller at the screen again. As Churchill watched, a mosaic of smaller windows filled the screen. They seemed to show movies of airfields with transport planes banked up.

  “The first German forces we can expect to directly engage will be airborne units. The Fallschirmjäger which dropped onto Crete. They have regrouped and will most likely be joined by specialist Waffen-SS airborne units which have been hastily put together in the last few months. At this stage, we cannot provide a projected drop zone with any certainty. But there are a limited number of options. It appears the assault will go ahead without the Luftwaffe establishing air superiority . . .”

  A chorus of mumbled astonishment greeted that statement of the obvious. It was a measure of Hitler’s desperation that he would persist in the face of such odds. A measure of his criminal insanity, too, thought Churchill.

  “Taken in concert with the capture of multinational elements and technology by the Axis powers, it does raise the prospect that the Germans have rushed the development of some weapons systems with which they hope to tip the balance in their favor. As of this moment, however, none of our sigint or Elint scans have returned data which would help clarify that issue.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Churchill, who did not wish the meeting to descend into an undergraduate bull session about the specter of Nazi superweapons. “And so to our reply, General?”

  General Wavell, recently returned from North Africa with General Montgomery to coordinate the defense of the British Isles, got to his feet.

  He turned to an old-fashioned map at the opposite end of the room to the PM.

  “We expect a seaborne assault across the narrowest section of the Channel, landing at Dover, probably near Ramsgate and Margate. Army Group Central is expected to make their attempt between Weymouth and Sidmouth, placing immediate pressure on the defensive position to the south of Birmingham and Wolverhampton. These are the logical avenues of German advance and we have prepared our response accordingly . . .”

  Wavell frowned and seemed to lose himself in the map for a moment.

  “Of course,” he resumed, “it is entirely possible that the attack will not follow a logical course. Many of the Wehrmacht’s better commanders have been lost to the purges since the Transition. We shall not have to face Rommel on our own turf, but Field Marshal Kesselring will probably do just as well. And while the Germans do not have our advantage in drone technology, they have had enough old-fashioned planes flying overhead to make a reasonable guess about our preparations. With this in mind, and given that they can probably only get four divisions ashore in the first wave—”

  Churchill sighed audibly at that. Only four divisions!

  “—we will hold in reserve the Canadian First Army, Free French Second Armored, and American infantry divisions on the GHQ Line, with our XXX Corps armored and infantry units advanced to engage the enemy at the bridgehead, wherever that may be.”

  Wavell swept his hand across the breadth of the map covering all of the southern counties.

  “The imponderable question is where General Ramcke’s paratroopers will land. Here I think we find the hinge of victory or defeat. Without control of the air or the sea-lanes, the Germans must plan on massive losses for their seaborne forces. We know they have made a massive investment in rebuilding the Fallschirmjäger, and Himmler has personally overseen the creati
on of a Waffen-SS air-assault division. Wherever they land, we must fix them and destroy them. To this end, I am holding in reserve the Guards Armored and the First Infantry Divisions.”

  Wavell, who had been reading from a paper on the table in front of him, looked up from his eyebrows at Lieutenant Williams.

  “For what it’s worth, the SAS Regiment has been attached to the First Infantry and will do whatever it is they do when we know where Ramcke has set down.”

  Churchill ignored Wavell’s bad grace. He had faith in the young prince and his merry men. They seemed just the right sort of bastards to turn loose on the Nazis.

  31

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  RAF Biggin Hill in the London borough of Bromley was one of the most important airfields in the defense of London during the Battle of Britain. Built at the end of the First World War, it sat on high ground above the village of the same name. The first RAF flights controlled by radio flew out of there, and the first kill of the Second World War was credited to a fighter from Biggin Hill. It had been the object of endless attacks during the Battle of Britain, suffering massive damage, which almost but never quite closed down its operations.

  Three of Halabi’s crew were quartered there, coordinating battlespace management with the ’temps, and supervising a number of experimental programs, such as the Super Spitfire night fighter squadron. Those twelve prototype planes were located in hardened bunkers at the eastern end of the airfield, protected by radar-controlled Bofors guns. They weren’t specifically targeted, but they were amongst the first casualties of the incoming strike.

  Of the Trident crew on station at Biggin Hill that morning, only Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins was on duty. The others, a flight sergeant and a pilot officer with an advanced electrical engineering degree, were both asleep in their billets down in the village. Both had worked through the previous thirty-six hours.