Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  The skipper swore and smacked the helmsman on the back as two shells crashed into the wave top they had just vacated, raising evil green eruptions of seawater. Gelder’s stomach knotted, and he dry-heaved repeatedly, bracing himself into a corner of the wheelhouse.

  “Don’t worry, Herr Untersturmführer, we shall get you there alive, yes. Maybe nobody else will survive this fucking crossing, but you’re with the best fucking crew in the Kriegsmarine.” The man sounded genuinely crazy.

  How could anyone survive this? Another barge was destroyed, this time a hundred yards in front of them. It didn’t go up in a spectacular detonation like the last one. A diving Spitfire poured hundreds of rounds of tracer into the luckless men trapped in the slow-moving, bucket. Iron splinters and hot flakes of metal erupted from stem to stern, but they were mostly lost in a storm of body parts and bloody ruin that had been an infantry company a few seconds earlier.

  Gelder squeezed his eyes shut and tried to focus on his own purpose in being here. He mechanically ran through the mission brief.

  He would set down on the coast of Kent. He would make contact with the agent Blair. Blair would take him to a safe house, where he would meet with others sympathetic to the National Socialist cause. Gelder would liaise between them and the SS Sonderaktiontruppen to liberate the leadership cadre of the British Union of Fascists from Holloway Prison.

  Falling shells bracketed the speeding Schnellboot, slamming Gelder into a bulkhead and then throwing him to the floor.

  He would set down on the coast of Kent. He would make contact . . .

  A flash.

  A roar.

  And then.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Nothing.

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  “My God,” said Halabi. “It’s a slaughter. The purest sort of slaughter.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” said McTeale, her XO, as they sped back toward the relative safety of the English coast.

  It was impossible to make any sense of the main display in the CIC. There were thousands of individual contacts throughout the battlespace. The ship’s Combat Intelligence was still tracking and analyzing every return. Her human operators were still assigning targets to the defenders forces’ as quickly as they could. But to have any chance of understanding what was happening on a human scale, you had to turn away from the electronic version of the battle—a vast, hypercomplex simulacrum of cascading data tags—and attend to the simple things.

  The drone footage of a Heinkel breaking up in midair, punched apart by a four-inch shell.

  The vision of a parachute half-deployed, trailing fire behind a plummeting body, spearing down into the pebbles and limestone scree at the base of the White Cliffs of Dover.

  The distant bump and thump of floating corpses as they struck the carbon composite sheath armor of the Trident at 120 knots.

  “Metal Storm at one-point-three percent, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Mr. McTeale. Advise the Admiralty that we shall be withdrawing toward Plymouth and will need extra air cover, I think.”

  “Fighter Command has already assigned three USAAF squadrons to cover us, ma’am. They’ll relieve the Canadians in eight minutes.”

  “Very good, then. I think we’re past the worst of it, don’t you?”

  Halabi and her executive officer stared at the main display. The red icons denoting German surface units were beginning to pile up in the southern half of the Channel. More and more blue triangles, marking Allied air units were streaming down from the northern airfields.

  “For now, Captain,” said McTeale. “For now.”

  BERLIN

  “Tell me, Brasch, would you have turned traitor if it were not for your son?”

  “Ha! You’re a fine one to talk, Müller. If I am a traitor, what are you? Skulking about in your stupid disguise. An assassin, that’s all.”

  Müller sipped from the fine bone china cup. Coffee with real cream. Because of his trusted position, Brasch would enjoy many privileges denied to ordinary Germans. The full pound of Italian roasted coffee beans his wife had produced from a cupboard was undoubtedly one. The dollops of rich cream another. Manfred, the engineer’s boy, was no longer with them. He’d been put to bed an hour earlier. The three adults—Müller, Brasch, and his plump, pretty hausfrau Willie—all hunkered over the kitchen table, like card players protecting a hand.

  They heard the muffled crump of far-off bombs only as an echo of thunder.

  “So, Brasch. What say you?”

  Müller did not mean the question to be insulting. He was genuinely interested, and Brasch seemed to be genuinely sincere in trying to answer. The play of emotions across his haggard face gave away his conflicted feelings. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think so. Perhaps I would not have been so quick in my betrayal. Perhaps I was ready to throw it in after the Eastern Front. I don’t know, Müller. I did not have the luxury of growing up in your world.”

  Willie patted his arm. “You were very sick, when you returned from Belgorod. That medal they pinned on you was supposed to make everything better. Men are full of such foolishness, Herr Müller. But not my Paul. He is a good man. We are good Germans.”

  Müller controlled the sick sneer that threatened to crawl across his lips at the old phrase. “You are.” He nodded and waved his flexipad in their direction. “I have convinced my controllers of that. Although, it was the information you sent, Brasch, which has saved your hides.”

  The engineer flushed with anger. “That is not why I sent it, as you well know. I have saved the hides of my enemy, and condemned thousands of my comrades. I did so without knowing that you were coming for me. I did so knowing that it probably meant the deaths of my wife and child when—not if, but when I was found out. So you can cram your insinuations back into your arse, where they came from, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Paul, please,” Willie pleaded.

  Müller smiled and shook his head. “No, Frau Brasch, your husband is right. I should not pick at this scab. He has done a great service, not just for the world, but Germany herself.”

  “And so my reward is to be abandoned here,” said Brasch.

  “Left, not abandoned,” Müller corrected. “Your wife and son will be smuggled out, and their disappearance covered up by the bombing raid in two days’ time. You, however, must stay. Like me. There is more work to be done.”

  Brasch’s wife gripped her husband’s arm tightly. “But they will know, Paul. They will search the rubble and find we are not here, and they will think we have escaped.”

  “There will be bodies to find,” said Müller, pushing on over the woman’s objections. “Don’t concern yourself with details. The Reich is full of bodies.”

  “But our neighbors. They will all be killed.”

  Müller shrugged. “This area of Berlin was taken by the Soviets at the end of my war. They are better off dead. And anyway, I have observed your neighbors these last few weeks. Some of them deserve everything they get.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and Müller regretted his harsh words, but he did not soften them. If this woman and her son were to survive, they would need to toughen up.

  “So two days,” said Brasch, bringing them back to business.

  Müller scanned the latest data burst from Fleetnet. Sea Dragon was failing, the assault collapsing in on itself. Some German units had successfully landed on British soil, but the follow-on forces had been blocked. Raeder’s most powerful ships were scrap metal. And the Luftwaffe was being pounded out of the sky.

  “Two days will mark the point of maximum confusion,” said Müller. “As the two army groups are forced to pull back from the French coast or be annihilated by the Allied air forces. In two days, a thousand British and American heavy bombers will strike at Berlin, to emphasize the scale of Hitler’s failure. A few of them, specially adapted for the mission, will bomb this neighborhood into rubble, to cover your escape.”

  Müller let his eyes free
ze on Willie Brasch.

  “Do not warn anyone. You are already traitors to the Reich. Like me.”

  “But there are children . . . ,” cried Willie.

  “I know,” Müller shot back, suddenly giving vent to his own suppressed rage. “Some of them are my family.”

  HMS TRIDENT, ENGLISH CHANNEL

  “Outstanding work, Captain Halabi.”

  “Thank you, Admiral. I’ll make sure to pass your compliments on to my crew. What would really make them happy, though, are some more Metal Storm loads.”

  Kolhammer disappeared inside a cloud of white noise for a moment before his image winked back into clarity. The encrypted vidlink to Washington was very shaky.

  “I’m sorry,” Kolhammer said. “I think you were asking for MS reloads. There’s a seaplane on its way now, should be there in seventeen hours. It’s carrying a pallet of ammo from the Clinton. That should take you back to twelve percent. After that, I’m afraid we’re tapped out. We’re going to need everything we’ve got for Hawaii. But the first hand-tooled Vulcans should be ready for air shipment to you in a fortnight. It’s not Metal Storm, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a couple of goddamned pom-poms.”

  Halabi smiled. “It will be, sir. About Hawaii, sir—will you be needing me to prepare for redeployment? It’s going to be a very unpleasant business taking those islands back. Especially with the Dessaix on the loose.”

  Kolhammer must have worked through his plans for the campaign already. He shook his head emphatically. “We’ll deal with the Dessaix first,” he said. “And we’ll need to redouble our efforts to determine whether any Task Force assets have fallen into enemy hands. The Soviets, for instance. But for now, you’re best off staying right where you are. The Hawaiian mission will be run by the locals, with input from us. But it’s their show, and they’ve agreed to leave the Trident in place.”

  Halabi found herself in two minds. She agreed that the best role for the Trident was as a floating early-warning center. But she felt isolated here in her own country, and the brief prospect of rejoining the community of Multinational Force ships was quietly appealing.

  She had retired to her ready room and suddenly realized it was the first time in over a day and a half she’d been alone. Kolhammer looked tired, but not as tired as she felt.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Excuse me,” she said, stifling a yawn.

  “That’s all right, Captain. You’ve earned some rack time.”

  “Soon enough, Admiral. The Germans are in retreat. The bulk of their invasion fleet didn’t make it past the halfway point. And they’re not reinforcing the airborne forces that did land.”

  “I read the last burst,” said Kolhammer. “There’s some hard fighting around Ipswich. But infantry against armor? It won’t last.”

  Halabi frowned. “Your burst is a bit out of date, I’m afraid, sir. The British First Armored had to pull back. The Germans were a mix of Fallschirmjäger and SS Special Forces. They were pretty well equipped with portable antiarmor systems. Panzerfaust Two-fifties, I think. Or a variation on that theme, anyway. A lot of them had good, basic body armor and they were all packing assault rifles with an over-under grenade launcher. They chewed up a lot of our men.”

  Kolhammer’s mouth was set in a grim line. “So what’s happening? Do they have any kind of squad-level antiair systems?”

  Halabi shook her head. “No, sir. So that’s what’s happening. The RAF have regained tactical control of our airspace, and those Cyclone gunships are near permanent fixtures above the German strongpoints.”

  “I see. How’s their ammunition holding up?”

  “I think we’ll run out of Germans before we run out of ammo, sir.”

  Kolhammer sighed. “Well, we can’t do much better than that.”

  The link dropped out.

  Halabi stared at the wall of static for a full minute, wondering if the admiral might reconnect, but he didn’t.

  She rubbed her eyes, which felt as though they’d been baking inside a pizza oven. She sent a quick note to McTeale, updating him on the schedule for Metal Storm reloads. The Trident hummed under her feet. They’d withdrawn into the comparatively safer waters south of Ireland. It meant that the ship’s own sensors weren’t available to directly monitor the main battlespace over the Channel and the southern counties, but the Admiralty had decided that with the German attack effectively broken, they could afford to downgrade to drone cover only.

  Halabi chuckled: a dry, mirthless sound.

  A few months ago, the ’temps wouldn’t have thought of drone coverage as a “downgrade.” It would have been a bloody miracle.

  Indeed, it was a bloody miracle, in the literal sense of the phrase, and it had saved her homeland.

  As she slumped into her bunk, she refused to think about the fact that some people didn’t agree it was her home at all.

  COMMAND BUNKER, RASTENBURG, EAST PRUSSIA

  It took many hours for the true state of affairs to emerge, but the Reichsführer had begun to suspect that Sea Dragon might fail when his own contribution, the Sonderaktiontruppen, were shattered before they had even reached the British Isles.

  Reports had to be filed via landline, because of the Allies’ ability to read and decode all the Reich’s radio traffic. When Himmler finally got word that over half his own airborne regiment had been annihilated in transit, the magnitude of the disaster was already coming into focus.

  Nearly two hundred Allied fighter planes had drilled right through the insane confusion of the air battle over the seas around England to attack the transports carrying the SS regiment. It was as though a vengeful God had lead them there. But he knew better. The Trident had guided them onto the target. He’d known the ship had that capability. But how had it known which flight, out of the many thousands of sorties flown today, had been the crucial one? There was only one answer to that. A very old-fashioned answer.

  Treachery.

  “It is just not possible. How dare they, how dare they?” the führer raged.

  The atmosphere in the command bunker was bleak, tending toward ominous. There would be many, many people to punish for this calamitous failure. Himmler’s unforgiving gaze fell upon Göring. He was drunk and blustering about the large numbers of Spitfires and Hurricanes his men had shot down. That may well be, but the RAF’s air defense net was nowhere near as badly degraded as the Luftwaffe chief had insisted. And the Trident had survived every attack thrown against it with apparent ease.

  Yes, it was the führer himself who had downplayed the importance of the ship’s electronic senses. What had he said?

  What did it matter if the British had a perfect view of their doom as it came rushing at them? It was still their doom.

  Well, that was hardly his fault. The führer had repeatedly stated that he had no feel for naval combat. It had been Raeder’s job to advise him on those matters. The senior Kriegsmarine officer hadn’t spoken since news of the Tirpitz had come in via safe-hand courier. Preparing his excuses, thought Himmler.

  Hitler alternated between screaming at his subordinates—ordering them to deploy units already confirmed as lost—and muttering to himself about the depth of betrayal he had been forced to endure.

  Himmler kept to himself, wondering what could be salvaged.

  All his hopes now lay with Skorzeny.

  37

  CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ENGLAND

  Stealing the truck had been remarkably simple. Tens of thousands of military vehicles were on the move, and contrary to the comic book school of war, not everything ran smoothly. Vehicles broke down. Drivers didn’t know which turn to take. Whole divisions got lost. Convoys were attacked and shot up from the air. Many trucks were abandoned, pushed off the road, simply because their drivers knew nothing about them beyond how to start the ignition.

  Harold Philby wasn’t much of a mechanic himself, but two of Skorzeny’s men were. They had the broken down deuce-and-a-half running again within fifteen minutes. As a bonus, it was fitted out as a m
edical transport, with a red cross painted prominently on the canvas tarpaulin that covered the rear bed. After a hurried conference with the German commander, it was agreed that this would provide even better cover than a normal military truck, in which they ran the risk of being commandeered and attached to any combat unit they might run into.

  Skorzeny had his men wrap themselves in the bloodied uniforms and bandages of the previous, missing occupants. Then they all piled into litters in the back. One of the most fluent English speakers was nominated as their “medic” to attend the wounded.

  “Let’s go then, tovarich.” Skorzeny grinned.

  He reminded Philby of a fox licking shit from a wire brush. The traitor put aside his visceral dislike of the fascist and gunned the engine. It kicked over after two attempts, and he pulled back onto the road.

  They were well north of London, with at least half a day’s travel in front of them and absolutely no guarantee of surviving it. He doubted that he would survive, even if they made the objective. Number Five had been quite explicit about the steps he should take to escape when he’d delivered Skorzeny, but after six months on the run, the rogue spy knew just how hard it was going to be to avoid detection once he’d put his head up. Unlike Burgess and Maclean, he’d gone to ground immediately upon learning of the Transition, and he was still alive because of it. The others, he had no idea. They could be dead, or more likely they were being detained somewhere by the SIS, tortured with the drugs and interrogation machines that were said to have arrived with the dark woman and the Trident.

  “What is this marshland, tovarich?” Skorzeny asked as they rumbled along. “I thought Cambridge was a university, not a swamp.”

  “This is Cambridgeshire,” Philby explained. “Specifically we’re in the Ouse Washes, a floodplain between the Old and New Bedford rivers, drained by the Fourth Earl of Bedford in the sixteen—”

  “A swamp, then, as I said.”

  Philby exhaled slowly.