Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  If he ever made it to Moscow, he was going to get a medal for this.

  A flight of American planes screamed overhead, wagging their wings just for him.

  Biggin Hill was unrecognizable.

  Actually, that was untrue. Harry had seen damage like this on many occasions. So many over the years that he’d lost count.

  “Hammerhead run,” said Sergeant St. Clair as the Eurocopter settled on its wheels.

  “Looks like,” the prince agreed. “Not well directed, though.”

  “Well enough, guv.”

  Harry’s face twisted as he allowed the point. There were buildings and hangars standing, untouched, and runways that had been excavated in cross section rather than along their entire length. But the damage was still massive and crippling. Twelve hundred dead, they’d told him on the way in, including two members of Halabi’s crew who’d died when their billet, a nearby village inn, had been destroyed by a wayward packet of submunitions.

  “Can you refuel, here?” asked Harry as the rotors began to wind down.

  The voice of Flight Lieutenant Ashley Hay responded in his earbud. “Our fuel stores weren’t touched, Major. We’ll top up and get back to Trident ASAP, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay. Thanks again for your help back there, Ash. Smashing effort.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  His half-troop, minus the casualties Akerman and Bolt, were already unloading kit from the NH91 into a couple of vintage jeeps with .50 cal. mounts for the drive north, where they would meet up with the regiment, which was prepping for a night assault into Aldringham, one of the Suffolk villages still held by the Fallschirmjäger.

  Harry waved off the chopper, bent over, and hurried to his men in the jeeps. Fires burned all around them, and as he was climbing into the lead vehicle, he noticed a disembodied human thumb lying by the rear wheel.

  “Your Highness,” said his driver, a whey-faced lad just as Harry had once been.

  “None of that, son. Major will do. You know where you’re going? You won’t get lost?”

  “Ipswich, sir, via the city. Done it a hundred times.”

  “Good lad.” Harry clapped him on the back, announcing with faux high humor, “And you shall know us by the trail of our dead.”

  “Excuse me, Major?” asked the ’temp, who now looked worried.

  “Nah, excuse the guvnor,” said St. Clair as he stowed his weapon in a gun rack on the dashboard. “He’s got a very sad weakness for postpunk allusions, and it comes out when he’s under pressure.”

  The wheels spun on grass, and they leapt away. Harry settled back and hauled out his flexipad, pulling down the latest sit rep from the Trident.

  As soon as the unit linked to Fleetnet, a Priority 1 e-mail unfolded itself on screen.

  “Trouble, guv?” St. Clair asked.

  “Not really,” Harry replied. “Good news, actually. The Aldringham job’s a blow out. Seems they love their new gunships so much, we’re all being pensioned off, and the rest of the war is going to be won by dicing up the krauts with miniguns.”

  “Fucking corker!” St. Clair grinned. “We still going to London, though?”

  “Yep. I’ve still got to meet the PM for tea and biscuits.”

  “You’ll want to make yourself beautiful, then, guv. You’re a right fuckin’ sight, you are.”

  He was, but there was nothing for it but a cat’s lick and promise, as grandma used to say. He wondered where she was right now. The firm had decided to stay in London, come what may. He couldn’t imagine that some precautions hadn’t been taken, however. Then again, last he’d heard, they pitched poor old granddad right into the thick of it in the Channel. Harry had no idea what ship he was on, or whether he’d even made it.

  What a fucking mess.

  He was going to drink an unhealthy number of lagers when this was all over.

  The prince settled back into the seat and caught up with the latest burst.

  Halabi had made it through without significant damage, although she was now bereft of any force-projection capability, having fired the last shots in her locker.

  The German invasion fleet was piled up on the French side of the Channel, unable to make any headway against the Allied air forces or Royal Navy. The Kriegsmarine had pretty much ceased to function as a blue-water surface fleet, with the destruction of the Tirpitz battle group, although that had been a close-run thing. The Germans had put up a reasonably effective antimissile screen simply by filling the air in front of them with a storm front of shrapnel and high explosives. A bit like the jihadi in his own day, Harry mused.

  Flight ops hadn’t resumed from Biggin Hill, and probably wouldn’t for a few weeks, given the extent of the damage. But the sky was still crowded with aircraft from other airfields. As they drove away from the ruined sector station, Harry stretched his cramped neck muscles by craning his head right back and scanning the dull gray skies. The traffic was all one way, heading out. Whereas a few hours earlier, it had been an unholy mess up there, with incredible numbers of aircraft twisting and turning in massive dogfights, now the skies looked more like a superhighway delivering massed columns of fighters and bombers over the Channel.

  “What were they fuckin’ thinkin’, d’you reckon, guv?” asked St. Clair as Harry read a couple more E-mails, which came in as flash traffic.

  “The Nazis? They weren’t thinking at all, Viv. That’s the problem with leadership cults. They’re red hot on getting shit done, once the big man has spoken, but not so good at weighing up whether that shit should have been done in the first place.”

  He had an e-mail from the War Ministry with details of the briefing he was to attend at Whitehall, before continuing on to Ipswich. And a quick personal note from Churchill, personally thanking him and his men for their efforts at Alresford.

  Harry checked his watch. They’d be another hour or two getting there, and probably an hour delayed while he was at the briefing. “Viv,” he said, leaning forward, “you and the lads should chase up some hot nosh when we’re in the city. It’s going to be a while before they get another sit-down feed.”

  Their driver piped up. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I know a good chippy near Whitehall, if your lads wouldn’t mind.”

  Harry smiled. “How do you think the lads would feel about some fish and chips, Sergeant Major?”

  “I suspect they could murder a feed, guv.”

  “What’s your name, son?” asked Harry, shouting over the engine noise and the rush of air.

  “Corporal Draper, sir. Peter Draper.”

  “Well, young Pete. I like the cut of your jib. That’s the sort of initiative which built the British Empire. Drop me at the Ministry, and get my boys some hot tucker—my shout.”

  Harry passed over a ten-pound note.

  “And keep the change.”

  They almost ran off the road. He’d forgotten that Corporal Draper had probably never seen so much money in one place.

  Philby maintained a safe house in London that hadn’t been discovered following the Transition. A professor of economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, owned it—a man he had recruited as a talent-spotter for the Russians just before the war began.

  He was now in the Pacific, working as a Naval attaché in Melbourne, and Philby presumed upon their relationship to borrow the house as a hideout. Built in the 1700s, it had a coach house around the rear, large enough to conceal the truck they had stolen; London was in such a state of upheaval, with the streets full of military vehicles, the emergency services, and commandeered civilian transport, that one wayward truck was unlikely to arouse much suspicion, if they moved quickly.

  Only Philby and the two fluent speakers raised their voices as the squad disembarked from the truck, still pretending to be wounded soldiers. Philby ordered them into the house and loudly announced that they’d be staying there until beds could be found for them at a military hospital.

  Once inside, the men stripped off their bandages and bloodied rags, resum
ing their counterfeit roles as soldiers from Holland and Denmark. They unpacked their kit, checked weapons, and waited for the call.

  It came within two hours.

  Draper’s chippy was a short walk from old Scotland Yard, off the northeastern end of Whitehall, and it proved more convenient to drop Viv and the others there before he and Harry continued on to the Ministry alone.

  Hundreds of barrage balloons floated on tethers above the city, over which lay a dense blanket of smoke from the fires started by German bombing raids. Sirens still blared constantly, although the conflict’s center of gravity was well away from the city, south in the Channel and northeast in Suffolk. Harry was just indulging in a moment of self-pity that he wouldn’t get to sit down with a nice chip butty and a cup of tea when a sixth sense began to scream at him.

  He snapped out of his reverie and took a sight picture of the scene in front of them. Draper was motoring down Whitehall at about thirty miles an hour. They’d just passed the Admiralty and the headquarters of the Horse Guards, and were coming up on the War Ministry. A black Bentley was parked in front of the Ministry, its driver moving around to open the back door.

  A truck marked as a medical transport was pulling up on the other side of the street, and British soldiers were jumping down from the rear.

  They were all bandaged as though badly wounded, but they were still armed, and judging from the way they moved, they weren’t injured at all.

  “Speed up, speed up now,” ordered Harry as he reached for his M12.

  Corporal Draper stepped on the gas, but not without asking what was up.

  The rattle of small-arms fire reached them.

  The Bentley’s driver fell to the cobblestones, and Harry could hear the telltale impact of bullets on metal and armored glass. He flicked the power switch on the rifle’s underslung grenade launcher and dialed up a firing sequence. Three fragmentation rounds and two incendiary. Bracing the gun on his knee he sent the five fat 20 mm programmable grenades on their way.

  “Hey! That’s Mr. Churchill’s car, that is,” protested Draper.

  “I know,” said Harry as the tiny bomblets dropped in pattern, the frags bursting on the blind side of the truck, to protect the Bentley from their blast effect. The incendiaries dropped onto the lorry and in amongst the knot of men. They were grouped at the rear of the vehicle to fire on Churchill’s car and the guards rushing out of the Ministry.

  The deuce-and-a-half rocked on its axle as the HE rounds went off, scattering most of the assassins like bowling pins. Two bright, white flashes followed immediately, setting alight the truck’s canvas tarpaulin and the uniforms of the men Harry had targeted.

  The jeep was bouncing so roughly that he couldn’t be sure of hitting anything with his carbine, so he leapt into the rear of the vehicle and unsafed the .50-caliber mount. For an antique, the big gun was still an awesome piece of fighting machinery.

  Harry had to fire in short bursts, lest he demolish the Bentley with a badly aimed volley. They’d begun to take fire now, bullets pinging off the metalwork and cracking the windshield. Draper simply sped up, hunching over the wheel and pointing the car directly at the screaming, burning troops. Harry squeezed out two more bursts, chopping a couple of his targets in half, before he snatched up his carbine again as they drew too close to depress the barrel of the huge machine gun any further.

  Time stretched and pulled. They hit a chunk of road excavated by the grenades he had fired, and the jeep lifted off for a short flight through clean air, slamming into the bodies of four burning Germans—at least he hoped they were Germans. One of them flew apart into half a dozen flaming chunks of roadkill.

  Then he was down, in amongst them, the rifle firing single shots. Return fire zipped and whistled past his head.

  He heard the deep boom of a Webley revolver and saw Draper out of the corner of his eye, dueling with two men. One was missing an arm below the elbow, and both were singed and smoking. The driver killed them and hurried over to the Bentley.

  Harry smashed the butt of his M12 into the blackened face of a man dressed in a contemporary British sergeant’s uniform, who was swearing at him in low German.

  And then nothing for a few seconds.

  Silence.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  His spinal inserts began to feed beta-blockers into his central nervous system, forestalling the tremors and shock that might otherwise have attended such an unexpected and violent incident.

  Everything was rendered into hard clarity: the taste of the scorched air; the hundreds of pockmarks in the body of the prime minister’s car; the sizzle and spitting of burning rubber as the truck settled on the steel rims of its wheels; the sound of Corporal Draper, retching in the gutter; the flat, hollow crack of another pistol.

  Harry spun and saw a slant scar-faced man advancing on them, firing a Luger. He whipped up his M12, but the trigger pulled back without response. It was empty.

  Another bullet cracked past his head. His fighting knife was in his hands as though he had wished it there. Without conscious thought, he threw the dagger as he had so many thousands of times in practice. It embedded itself in the shoulder of the last attacker. The man’s face registered the pain as he attempted to wrench it out, but the serrated teeth on the inside of the blade stopped him.

  And then he and Harry were on each other.

  Iron knuckle-dusters slammed into Harry’s chest, breaking a couple of ribs that had already taken some terrible punishment in the fight at Alresford. He spun with the direction of the blow anyway, looping his hand around the other man’s forearm and pivoting quickly to bring force to bear on the vulnerable elbow. He heard the man gasp, but he was well trained, and accelerated his own movement in the same direction, speeding up to break free of the hold.

  Harry grabbed the hilt of his fighting knife and reefed it free with a wet, tearing sound as they separated. The German grunted in pain, but no more. A shortened bayonet had appeared in his hand.

  Both of them were breathing heavily, circling each other like caged wolves.

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and he smiled. “Prince Harold, if I am right? Not wearing your swastika today, then, Your Highness? Oh, dear? Have I missed the party season?”

  Harry didn’t respond. He was concentrating on the man’s defenses, looking for an avenue of attack.

  “My name is Skorzeny. Colonel Otto Skorzeny,” he said. “And you are in my way.”

  Skorzeny struck out with a quick slash at Harry’s knife hand, but the SAS officer was ready for that and withdrew the arm, which he’d hung out as a lure. He snapped a kick out, aiming for the colonel’s knee, but the German, too, was ready, and he rotated just far enough to allow the blow to glance off.

  They slashed at each other three or four times, close enough now to drive in a killing blow, except that neither could penetrate the other’s defenses.

  “Major Windsor, get out of the way, sir. Give me a clear shot.”

  It was Draper, nursing an arm shattered by a bullet from Skorzeny’s pistol, aiming the Webley uncertainly with his other hand.

  Harry heard a car door open behind him, and the thunder of boots on the steps of the Ministry.

  Skorzeny smiled and plucked two grenades from his webbing, pulling the pin with his teeth, and dropping them on the ground. “Until next time,” he said, spinning around as rifle fire snapped past Harry’s head again.

  “Grenade!” he yelled, turning to find Churchill emerging from the car without so much as a scratch on him yet.

  Harry dived at the prime minister, slamming into him like the champion rugby player he’d once been, and driving the portly old man back into the relative safety of the armored car. A curse, a tangle of arms and legs, and then two explosions that shook the Bentley and peppered the interior with shrapnel through the still-open door. Harry felt some of it hit his body armor, and a hot shooting pain in his calf told him at least one piece had struck home.

  Church
ill heaved him off, and Harry backed out of the car, looking for Skorzeny.

  A platoon or more of real British troops had arrived from within the Ministry building, and more were running up from the Horse Guards.

  “He got away,” said Draper, appearing from around the other side of the Bentley.

  The familiar voice of the British prime minister rode in over the top of him. “You know, Your Highness, we once had a civil war in this country to put the royal family in its place, and that place was not on top of the prime minister . . . but thank you, anyway.”

  Harry took the PM’s outstretched hand, still looking for Skorzeny.

  But he was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  The Quiet Room had no physical presence. There was no room, as such. The Quiet Room was a set of protocols, a number of agents, and an expression of will.

  Admiral Phillip Kolhammer’s will.

  He was not an autocrat. He consulted with those he trusted. Men like Captain Judge and Colonel Jones, or women such as Karen Halabi. But when it came time to make a call, the responsibility fell on him alone.

  Kolhammer scanned the read-once-only report from one of his best agents. They sat in a nondescript conference room on campus in the Zone. The woman was dressed in civilian clothes. An expensive suit, cut in a twenty-first style by a local tailor who was becoming rich because of his ability to reproduce the designs of Zegna, Armani, and their contemporaries from magazine photographs that came through the Transition.

  The woman was wealthy in her own right now. She worked for herself, but she answered to a higher purpose.

  “You’ve done excellent work, Ms. O’Brien,” said Kolhammer. And he was impressed. She effectively ran a dozen large and rapidly growing enterprises on behalf of her clients. They’d come to trust her advice without reservation, so successful had she been in advancing their interests. Some of the clients were complex entities, corporate concerns with claims over intellectual property not yet existent in this universe. Some were individuals, such as Slim Jim Davidson.

  As long as their wealth continued to grow at a staggering pace, Maria O’Brien’s clients asked her very few questions about the vast and ever-growing discretionary funds she invested on their behalf.