Designated Targets

by John Birmingham

  “Sweet Jesus,” breathed the pilot.

  Three companies of SS Sonderaktiontruppe had been sheltering in the small forest, which was now just a smoking mound of shattered splinters, drifting leaves, and—he supposed—tiny bite-sized pieces of Aryan supermen.

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  There was no audio track, of course, for which Halabi was quietly grateful. Five or six hundred men being turned to offal was unlikely to make for easy listening. The top-down view, from a virtual height of five hundred meters, was more than graphic enough. The Cyclones began to turn for home. As if in counterpoint to silent carnage, the ship’s CIWS fired again, a couple of long, growling bursts.

  “Metal Storm down to three-point-nine percent, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Lieutenant Davis, how’s our air cover?”

  “Changing over now, Captain. But Squadron Leader Zumbach’s men are refusing to withdraw. They’re staying until they run out of fuel. One of them has just tried to ram a One-oh-nine.”

  Halabi rolled her eyes skyward, but could see only ducts, composite paneling, and fiber-optic cable. She could still wonder at what it must be like up there, in primitive planes that probably wouldn’t even get a safety clearance in her day. If this were a movie or a cheap, particularly stupid novel, it was the point at which she would call up Jan Zumbach and order him to get his crazy-arse Poles back to base.

  But the readout on her personal display told her that she would soon be completely vulnerable to the scores of Luftwaffe planes that continued to press in on her, no matter what losses they sustained.

  Metal Storm barked twice more.

  “Very good, Ms. Davis,” said Captain Halabi.

  The main display reformatted as the volley of missiles closed with their prey. One giant window was filled with the image of the Tirptiz; two smaller pop-ups, with the pocket battleships Admiral Scheer and Lützow. Fighter escorts buzzed around them like insects, and a dozen smaller vessels raced along in attendance.

  “What on earth are they doing, Marc?” Halabi asked as the entire battle group began to swing around.

  Her intelligence boss, Lieutenant Commander Howard, leaned forward, as if to study the screen more closely. “I—I think they’re coming around to present a broadside, Skipper?”

  “To the missiles?”

  “I think so. They’ve probably had radio reports, by now.”

  He called out across the CIC to the sigint station. “Do we have any breakdown of the radio traffic to the Tirpitz?”

  “Working on it now, sir,” replied a striking black woman with a thick Glaswegian accent.

  “They’re firing blind,” said Halabi, and it seemed as if every gun on the port side of the Tirpitz and her escorts opened up. The missiles were still a hundred miles away, but moving so swiftly that they would close the distance to impact in less than one minute.

  As she watched, the fighter escorts broke away and began to race into the west, sparkling points of light on their wings indicating that they, too, were attempting to throw a wall of lead into the path of her missiles.

  “Weapons. What chance do they have of intercepting our—?”

  “Splash one already, Captain. Attack reformatting.”

  One of the missiles had been destroyed when it flew into a cloud of shrapnel thrown out by the massive main guns of the Tirpitz, which was firing time-fused shells. With the missiles moving at hypersonic speed, there was nothing she could do. Everything happened so quickly that only the Combat Intelligence had time to respond, as another two precious missiles died in midair.

  The CI flashed out instructions to the surviving weapons, reassigning one each to the German capital ships. The maces dipped down to wave height and separated. Before Halabi could say another word, could draw breath, or even feel her next heartbeat, three silent white blooms of light consumed the ironclads. The missiles were carrying subfusion plasma-yield warheads that detonated like miniature supernovae deep inside their targets.

  Admiral Scheer and Lützow exploded and broke up an instant later. Halabi’s stomach did a slow backflip as she watched the Tirpitz emerge from the plasma effect. The mace had done a huge amount of damage amidships, but the great warship continued on as though shrugging off a peashooter.

  “Damn,” she cursed, just as the bow of the Tirpitz suddenly bent back on itself and began to dig into the North Sea like a plow.

  A few of the CIC crew swore at the amazing sight, and then it was gone. A rapid series of secondary explosions ripped her apart, destroying a couple of escorts that had raced in to help.

  “Message to the Admiralty, Ms. Davis. All targets serviced. No survivors anticipated.”

  “Aye, Captain. Allied armored units are moving to encircle the main German airborne assault at Wickham Market, ma’am, and Lieutenant Hay reports that Major Windsor’s troops have secured the airfield at Alresford.”

  “Thank you, Comms.”

  Halabi could see that another two squadrons of Allied planes were now swarming the German aircraft that had been attempting to kill her. Americans this time, some of them flying prototype Mustangs that hadn’t even been painted yet. She didn’t presume to retake the helm from Posh, however. Hundreds of vessels still fought in the narrows of the English Channel, and it was beyond her abilities to safely navigate a passage home, particularly at their current speed.

  A Metal Storm pod erupted briefly, to emphasize the point that she wasn’t yet out of trouble.

  HMS JAVELIN, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  Sub-Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten did not have a chance to meet his famous grandson. After fighting her back from Alexandria, HMS Javelin, his latest berth, had gone straight into the Trident’s air defense screen. With a pair of the ship’s two-pounder poms-poms to run, Mountbatten had barely had time to sleep or eat. Socializing wasn’t an issue.

  “Stukas, sir! Three of them at ten o’clock,” cried Seaman Bob Nicklin.

  “Good work, Nicklin,” Mountbatten yelled over the roar of battle. “On my mark, wait for it—Fire!”

  The guns began their furious drumbeat, throwing up to 140 high-explosive rounds a minute at the screaming dive-bombers. Dirty, roiling balls of smoke and flame boxed in the lead aircraft. Mountbatten fancied that he could see the single bomb beneath the undercarriage. Two small, stuttering starbursts of light erupted on the inverted gull wings as the German lashed at them with his machine guns.

  The sea all around them was a vast enraged cauldron on which thousands of men fought and died. Beyond the deafening sound of every gun on board the Javelin firing at once, there lay a deeper, infinitely more savage uproar as hundreds of ships and possibly thousands of planes raked at each other in mortal combat.

  “Look out!” yelled Nicklin as the bomb detached itself from the underside of the Stuka like a fat black pearl, an instant before two distinct explosions punched the aircraft into three pieces. The wings twirled away like falling leaves caught on a gusting wind, while the nose of the aircraft, trailing a long tail of flame and smoke, described a fatal arc, which carried it over their heads to explode in the Channel somewhere on the far side of the ship.

  Mountbatten watched, in thrall to his own fate as the bomb seemed not so much to drop toward them as to simply get bigger and bigger. The gun was still hammering away at the other bombers, just like every other mount on the destroyer. But Mountbatten’s men knew that unlike the other men, they had no chance of surviving beyond the next few seconds.

  So completely had the young officer given himself over to the end that he didn’t notice the radical tilt of the deck as the helm laid hard a-port and the engine room poured every ounce of power into the ship’s geared turbines, pushing her out to her top speed of thirty-six knots and slewing the stern around so violently that tons of cold brine piled up against the armor plating and then spilled over the rear deck, threatening to wash away half a dozen sailors.

  The ear-piercing whistle of the Stuka’s single 500 kg bomb, the last sound he�
��d thought he would ever hear, abruptly vanished inside a rolling thunderclap as an enormous geyser of gray-green seawater erupted from the churning waves and climbed high above them. Mountbatten and his men were drenched as the fountain spent its energy and collapsed on top of them.

  He heard cheering, and thought it was his own men, celebrating their survival but it came from farther astern, where the Javelin’s other Bofors mount had accounted for another plane. The third pulled away, having missed, and was raked by streams of tracer fire not just from his ship’s machine guns but by the AA fire of at least two other destroyers in the Trident’s screen.

  The Trident!

  With his life and his ship in no immediate danger again, Mountbatten cast around for her. He’d heard a rumor that the prince was on board and could only wonder what that might mean.

  It was phenomenally queer for a chap to have a grandson who was already nearly twice his own age, but that wasn’t the weirdest thing to have come out of the last few months. There was his own future, of course, or possible future. It had been judged too indiscreet to allow him to meet his wife-to-be just yet. After all she was still only—what?—sixteen years old? And who was to say she would still be his? And that he would still become the consort of Elizabeth II. It was all too horribly vexing.

  Shooting down the bloody Hun was much simpler.

  “There she is, sir. Over there. Cor! Look at ’er fuckin’ go!”

  Mountbatten followed the man’s pointed finger.

  Sure enough, three giant fantails of sea spray marked the passage of the supership.

  “She must be going a hundred!” yelled Nicklin over the din.

  “A hundred and thirty knots at top speed, I hear,” said Mountbatten, and that settled the question for everyone.

  The three fans of water at the stern of the magnificent arrow-shaped vessel pivoted as she came hard a-port to avoid some unseen obstacle. Her destroyer screen, the Javelin included, had kept up for less than a minute. She was already drawing away from their protective umbrella—although it was astonishing to think that such a powerful craft needed looking after. Even as he watched, five German planes disintegrated as they pressed in on her. It was as if they had passed through some threshold that marked the point at which the Trident could no longer tolerate their existence. And so they had ceased to exist.

  Mountbatten could not pick out which of the hundreds of fighters dueling above her were specifically assigned to her air screen, but he’d heard that three full squadrons attended her every move. At least they would be able to keep up, wherever she was going.

  Probably to engage the Tirpitz, he thought, and instantly wished he could’ve seen that battle. Although again, from all he’d heard, she would probably strike the German capital ships from hundreds of miles away.

  A hand smacked down on his shoulder, and he turned to find Lieutenant Jeffers, who yelled in his ear. “Check your loads, Phil! We’re moving into the Channel. Hunting e-boats and troop barges. You’re going to get busy.”

  “Thanks, Bruce,” he called back.

  As Jeffers moved on, Sub-Lieutenant Mountbatten patted each of his men on the back. “Well done, lads. Well done. No time for a lie-down yet, though. We’re getting out of this backwater and into the real fighting.”

  36

  THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  Untersturmführer Gelder was beginning to wish that he was still playing wet nurse to that broken-down cot case of an engineer. Brasch was quite unpleasant company at the best of times, with his mood swings and a dangerous habit of speaking his mind. But shadowing the engineer around Demidenko to ensure that he was never exposed to the attentions of the NKVD was an altogether more agreeable experience than bouncing across the English Channel in the cramped hold of a Schnellboot while all hell raged around him.

  They had to be making well over forty knots. The torpedo boat’s three diesel engines howled like Valkyrie gone mad, not so much driving them through the rough swell and cross-chop as flinging the one-hundred-ton vessel from the crest of one wave to the next. Each leap ended with a terrifying boom as the hull slammed into the water, the impact compressing Gelder’s spine, and once causing him to bite down painfully on his tongue. He was wretched with seasickness and tried to climb up, out into the fresh air.

  The passage of the boat was so violent, he wrenched his shoulder and nearly broke an arm just getting up the stairwell. When he finally made the wheelhouse, he cursed himself for having been so stupid. The sea was not his natural realm. Just as the führer once admitted of himself, Gelder was a lion on land, but not so much on water. The sight that greeted him as he hauled himself into the tiny enclosed bridge space was enough to rob any man of his courage.

  The Channel was nearly dammed up with shipping, all of it charging about at top speed, either making for the English coast like his boat, or dashing into the body of the German invasion fleet. Like the two British destroyers he could see bearing down on them. The thunder of battle was beyond deafening. It did not just hurt his ears. It pressed in hard upon his mind with such a crushing weight that he thought his sanity might just give out under the barrage. The sea was a maelstrom, seemingly whipped into a storm-tossed frenzy not by the weather, which was only mildly gray and unsettled, but by the violent action of so many men and ships locked in bloody contention.

  Not two hundred yards away, a shell or a torpedo or perhaps even a rocket struck a barge, packed with soldiers. It suddenly leapt out of the water, flying apart as the warhead detonated, sending men flying everywhere like the flaming fragments of a Chinese firecracker.

  “God help us,” Gelder cried as one torn-up, smoking corpse twisted through the air and onto the deck of their boat, where the dead man—surely he must be dead—slammed into the metal vent that scooped clean air down into their lower decks. Despite the awful roar and pandemonium, Gelder distinctly heard the dull thud of impact, which all but crushed the vent. The body, which was missing a leg and most of everything else above the shoulders rolled to the deck—and then mercifully disappeared over the side as they pitched into a turn and slewed down the side of a rogue wave.

  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?”