“It may not be in use for much longer,” said Brasch in a flat monotone. “I believe they may be moving in the direction of an assault rifle.”
Himmler took the hankie away from his thin lips. “Don’t be so glum, Herr Colonel. The SD tells me that is not yet a foregone conclusion. There is open disagreement in America over whether to retool for mass production of that weapon. At least outside of the Californian Zone.”
“So Kolhammer is going to build these Russian guns for his mud people, then?” Skorzeny said. “I hear they are a good weapon, too. But in the hands of half-castes and fairies, what would it matter?”
“The bullet would kill you just as dead, no matter who fired it,” Brasch replied. “I lost many comrades to rounds fired by untrained Untermenschen in Russia, Herr Colonel.”
“Well, let’s see if we can do something about that,” bellowed the SS man, refusing to be cast out of his usual high spirits. “You are ready for us now?” he asked the research director.
The civilian checked with an aide, who confirmed that the prisoners were firmly secured. A horn blared harshly, and behind them a red lightbulb shut off while a green one lit up.
“We are ready for the test,” he confirmed.
Brasch screwed in a pair of earplugs and hardened his heart to what was about to happen. He had personally killed dozens of men, some of them in hand-to-hand combat, but he had never murdered anybody in cold blood. And he was about to become complicit in three murders at once. It made him sick.
Skorzeny looked to Himmler, who had just finished fitting his own earplugs. The Reichsführer nodded, and Skorzeny hefted the American rifle as smoothly as if he’d been practicing since childhood. He sighted down the barrel and squeezed off three shots. All three prisoners jumped. Skorzeny then picked up a British Lee Enfield 303 rifle and performed the same action, this time taking a little longer, as he was forced to work the bolt after each shot.
Again, the prisoners jumped, but their heads whipped back in a way that told Brasch they were already dead or unconscious.
Skorzeny was much less impressed with the English weapon. “Pah! You could not get great accuracy with this. The chamber is too loose, and the two-part stock and these rear-locking lugs on the bolt are all very poor design . . . And now for my old friend.”
He scooped up a K98 Mauser and squeezed off three shots from the bolt-action weapon with as little thought as he would give to scratching his nose. Three dark puffs indicated where the 7.92 mm rounds hit.
“Shall we?” asked the director.
“They don’t look very well, Herr Director,” Himmler said as the small group made its way down the firing range. “Are you sure these vests are bulletproof?”
“Not as such, Herr Reichsführer,” the man said quickly. “The vests will stop a small-caliber handgun round, and all manner of shrapnel and flak, but we are not using what the Allies call nanotube technology. What we have done is to synthesize a lightweight but very strong polymer from alternating monomers of para-phenylenediamine and terephthalic acid. The resulting aromatic amide alternates benzene rings and amide groups. In a planar sheet structure, which is like a silk protein and—”
“But why do you call them ‘bulletproof vests’ if they do not stop bullets?” Himmler asked testily.
The researcher paled, and he hadn’t had much coloring to begin with. “The vests by themselves could not stop a high-velocity round,” he explained. “But we have augmented them with differing types of ballistic plate, and together they are enough to provide excellent protection.”
They reached the three men, each of whom looked quite dead to Brasch, until he saw that they were breathing. But only just. The director hurried on, lest Himmler decide the whole exercise was a waste of his time. A good idea—people had died for less.
“Now, Herr Reichsführer, these subjects were not in very good physical condition to begin with, certainly not as good as one of your storm troopers. And they have been hit three times with high-velocity rounds. It would still be an enormously traumatic event for the body. But I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.”
Paul Brasch often felt as if his capacity to feel anything had been burned away during his time in the Soviet Union. Now as the project director’s aides roughly stripped the bulky black vests away from the men’s bodies, he found himself thankful for the crust of scar tissue that had formed around his feelings. It allowed him to appear as inhuman as his colleagues.
The director was babbling on to Himmler about some production-line issue that would involve the use of concentrated sulfuric acid. Skorzeny was boasting of his marksmanship to another SS officer, who was laughing at the way one of the prisoners’ eyeballs had popped out onto his cheek. Brasch breathed in slowly and fought down the urge to draw his pistol and kill them all. Instead he watched with apparent detachment as SS orderlies finished removing the body armor and the men’s prison camp shirts.
Their torsos were massively bruised, and one man had a large concave depression just under his heart. But none of the rounds had actually penetrated. Their guide was holding one of the jackets, pointing out features such as the pivoting shoulder pads, grenade hangers, and rifle butt patches. Himmler wanted to know how many of the vests would be ready in time for Operation Sea Dragon, and he was unhappy to be told that four hundred was the limit of current production capacity.
As the director kept babbling about sulfuric acid, Himmler tuned him out and turned to face Brasch instead. “Well, Herr Colonel, another miracle for you to work in our behalf, yes? I don’t expect to be able to outfit every Waffen-SS Division, but I need at least two thousand of these vests by the time we are ready to go. Can you guarantee me that?”
Brasch shook his head emphatically. “No, Herr Reichsführer, but I shall increase production by whatever amount is possible. Based on my experience at Demidenko, I imagine we can get you at least fifty percent more than the director believes possible.”
Himmler, he had discovered, preferred realistic assessments from his underlings. He asked for superhuman efforts, but did not actually expect the impossible. “Good enough, then.” Himmler nodded. You shall stay here another week, supervising the operation, then join me back in the Fatherland. Göring wishes to discuss the jet project with you.”
Brasch did not roll his eyes, but he did not meekly accede to the order, either. “With all due respect to the Reichsmarshall, there is almost no chance of getting his fighters aloft in time for Sea Dragon. I would very much like to return home to see my family, but I would not wish to waste time in doing so.”
A smile played across Himmler’s rodentlike features. The Luftwaffe chief had already lost a great deal of influence after failing to destroy the RAF in 1941. The bombing of Germany’s cites by the Allies and the poor performance of the air force in the Russian campaigns had left him a much-reduced figure. Only his unquestionable loyalty to the führer was thought to have saved him in the bloodletting that had followed the Emergence.
“I agree that the Reichsmarshall is probably being overambitious,” purred Himmler. “But he is a Reichsmarshall, and you are not. Indulge him, Colonel. There is important work for you at home. And the führer himself would like to personally thank you for your efforts at Demidenko.”
Brasch snapped his heels together and saluted like a machine.
Himmler returned the salute crisply but without any flourish. He even managed a wry smile. “My word, these Wehrmacht types do know how to salute well, don’t they Skorzeny?” he said.
Brasch felt a meaty paw thunder into his shoulder as Skorzeny slapped him on the back. The report was almost as loud as the rifle shots of a few minutes earlier. “He’s a grand fellow, all right! Not Totenkopf material, but pretty damn good anyway.”
Brasch faked a hearty laugh as the three Jews were cut down and dragged away. He wondered if anyone would bother to finish them off before they were reduced to ashes and hot wax. He had never felt like less of a man in his whole life.
The trains were running east with much greater frequency now. Partly it had to do to with the shift of many heavy and special engineering projects into Poland and the Ukraine, beyond the easy reach of the Lancaster bombers and B-17s. But also he suspected, it had to do with a greatly accelerated program at Auschwitz.
Unlike most Germans, Brasch could not pretend he knew nothing of the massive series of camps that made up the Auschwitz facility. Some of them were labor camps, some were specialist research facilities—now hosting small teams of Japanese doctors—and some were simply designed for mass extermination.
As he stretched out in the first-class carriage and tried to rest, he was haunted by the idea that one day his son would be tossed into one of those fetid cattle cars that so frequently roared past rattling the windows of his train.
At times he tried to work. He was one of the few men in all of Europe who had been allocated not only a flexipad, but a much larger data slate, as well. As a war hero, and the principal consulting engineer to so many high-priority projects, he was trusted—a rare thing these days. But even so, he noted that his drives and data sticks had been purged of a great deal of material he had been able to access freely back in Hashirajima, aboard the Sutanto. There was no trace of the Holocaust in his Web archive. No mention of a country called Israel. And only sketchy material relating to Germany after the year 1944.
He wondered that the vandals had left anything.
But there were still extensive technical files, and he was adding to the store all the time.
As the train shuddered to a halt at a siding in Poland, Brasch tried to concentrate on the file he’d created to contain all the material he had concerning Göring’s new pet project, the ME 262 jet fighter. The fat fool wanted hundreds of them in the air over Britain, slicing through Spitfires and Hurricanes like screaming hawks. The impossibility of doing so, and more seriously the waste of resources in even trying, meant nothing to Göring. He was determined to regain his former prominence in the führer’s affections, and he had become obsessed with this new fighter as the answer to his dilemma.
It was night, and as Brasch peered out the windows he could see nothing in the darkness. The reflection of his cabin in the cold frosted glass, and the steam drifting back from the engines, blocked his view entirely. He could hear shouting, vehicle traffic, a whistle, and even, he fancied, some distant gunfire. Partisans, perhaps? Many of them had turned against Stalin. There were the Poles, of course. And small, scattered renegade units of both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, which had been caught up in the internecine warfare of the post-Emergence period.
Again he found himself wishing for a quiet life, perhaps in a villa somewhere in the East Indies, where Ali Moertopo could help out. He marveled at how the little Indonesian sailor had managed not just to save his own hide, but also to arrange the governorship of a Javanese province for himself. The man was a survivor. There could be no doubt of that. Nor of the debt which Brasch now owed him.
He shook his head and returned to the file. It was his job to convince Göring to stop wasting time and money on a project that was never going to be ready in time for Operation Sea Dragon. Brasch had worked with engineers at Messerschmitt on CAD/CAM programs that employed early twenty-first-century propeller designs, to extend the range of an ME 109 and give it forty-five minutes over England, rather than twenty. He had dozens of minor suggestions for improving the “ergonomics” of current fighters and bombers—simple things like recessed switches that wouldn’t puncture a man’s skull in a crash, or quick-disconnect throat microphones so that a crewman desperate to get out of a doomed plane wouldn’t die trapped in a cord he forgot to unplug.
These were all simple changes with potentially massive effects, but Göring’s eyes glazed over whenever he raised them, and if Brasch persisted in arguing, those same porcine eyes would eventually cloud over with rage, and the Reichsmarshall would start to pound on the table screaming, “Nein, nein, nein!”
Brasch brought up the file in which he had compiled a list of all the 262’s problems in what he referred to as “original time.” The Junkers Jumo 004 engines were unreliable, being constructed of inferior alloys due to materials shortages. At any given time, the majority of those fighters could expect to be grounded. They were unstable, and generated less thrust at low speeds than prop-driven fighters. But worst of all, there would never be enough of them.
Brasch had read of a mission by thirty-seven of the jets on March 18, 1945, during which they had attacked an Allied force of 1,221 bombers and 632 escorting fighters. Using long, level approaches to compensate for their lack of dogfighting agility, they simply blurred in past the fighter screen and tore apart a dozen bombers and one escort with their 30 mm cannons, all for the loss of only three 262s—a four-to-one kill ratio.
But the important figure was the gargantuan size of the Allied raid. Nearly two thousand planes, against thirty-seven German jets. You would think that spoke volumes for the need to concentrate efforts on achievable goals. The productive capacities of the English-speaking world were simply beyond imagining.
But no. Göring had only last week authorized tens of millions of reichsmarks to be spent on changes to the 262’s swept wings, low drag canopy, and engine placement. And all this on his own initiative. Brasch would have been furious if it weren’t for one thing.
He himself was working to wreck the Nazi war machine.
Brasch hadn’t told anybody, of course. Not even his wife. He knew that he could trust Willie with his life, but he also knew that the SS regarded him with reserve at best. Now that he was away from Demidenko, he didn’t have Gelder shadowing his every move, but the specter of the SS was a constant. His son’s disorder—easily fixed in the future—would be more than enough to see the boy fed into the camps under the Nazis’ T-4 program, to ensure the purity of the race.
No, Colonel Paul Brasch understood the nature of the regime he served. Like most of his countrymen, he had always understood it. Unlike most of them, he had witnessed the evidence firsthand, and he had decided to resist.
The irony of his current position was that he hadn’t been snatched up in the post-Emergence sweeps of “future and prospective traitors” that had gutted the Reich, and yet he was probably one of most dangerous men in Germany. Fate had thrust him into the center of events as they spun out of control. His character determined that he would not allow himself simply to coast along in the wake of that turbulence.
As his train lurched into motion again, and began to pick up speed for the long run home, he worked on the 262 file—multitasking, as the phrase had it, a series of files on automatic assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and prototype helicopters for the newly formed SS Special Forces. He was the very model of a loyal and tireless worker laboring in the service of his führer. In a small, very private part of his mind, however, Brasch, turned over the problem of how best to strike a fatal blow against the Nazis.
14
KINLOCHMOIDART HOUSE, SCOTLAND
The Special Air Service began life as a deception. It had very little to do with airborne raids. It was a small, somewhat irregular unit of the British Army in the North African campaign, established in late 1941 by a mere Lieutenant, David Stirling. He put together a group of irredeemably unusual soldiers—specialists, loners, virtual pirates of the desert. He threw them in with the New Zealanders of the Long Range Desert Group and set them loose behind Rommel’s lines, attacking fuel and ammo dumps, destroying aircraft on the ground, and generally spreading mayhem and confusion.
Breaking things and hurting people, thought Harry as he marched across the gravel. A cracking fuckin’ way for a bloke to earn a quid. Better than being chased around by those paparazzi cunts, at any rate.
He clamped do
wn on the surge of rage that always threatened to get the better of him when he thought of the misery those vultures had made of his life. Killed his mother. Ruined his father. And wrecked any chance he had of getting a bit of innocent leg-over without having to explain himself to the whole fucking world. He’d only worn that stupid swastika armband because the silly twit he was dating got all lathered up when she saw it. And how was he to know that Paris bloody Hilton wasn’t wearing any knickers when he took her to Royal Ascot? That’s not the sort of thing a bloke would find out until after cocktail hour. In many ways, he was happier here. Fewer twits and no tabloids. Now all he had to do was stop the Nazis from taking over the place. He forced his thoughts back onto the task at hand.
The SAS in this period had become such a thorn in the side of the Afrika Korps that they were partly responsible for Hitler’s infamous “Kommandobefehl” order, stating that all captured Allied commandos were to be summarily executed. That order would have been issued on October 18, 1942. After the Transition—or “Emergence,” as it became known in the Axis states—Hitler issued the Kommandobefehl in the first week of October. British Signals Intelligence picked up the order as it was transmitted quite openly around the Reich, without the use of quantum encryption, and passed news of it on to the relevant parties: the Commando Regiment; the Special Operations Executive; the American Office of Strategic Services; and the SAS, both in Africa and at Kinlochmoidart House, the new Regimental HQ in Scotland, an hour outside of Fort William.
Prince Harry, with freshly minted major’s pips still gleaming on his shoulders, called the regiment to parade on the lawn in front of the manor to tell them the good news. Kinlochmoidart was a baronial mansion set within two thousand acres of private gardens and woodland, which had been given over to the Special Air Service for the duration of the war. Having an heir to the throne make the request had smoothed the process considerably. The secluded location was perfect, with easy access to Loch Shiel and Loch Sunart for the boat troop, and to the highlands and the Grampians for the mountain troop. Parachute training could be done out of Fort William, where Harry’s celebrated ancestor General Lord Lovett of the commandos was ready to provide every assistance. The forests of the estate were also well suited to honing the field craft of the trainees.
Designated Targets Page 18