Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  They had a minute and a half left.

  Three rounds punched through the ceiling next to his head and he tensed, assuming he’d been spotted and was about to get stitched up. The heat of the gun battle below produced eerie cones of infrared illumination, including the spot where the burst had punctured the roof. But nothing further happened.

  He scurried forward to catch up with Haigh, who was waiting for him a few meters ahead. The youngster had even managed to spin himself around so that he was facing his commander.

  “I reckon this is it, Colonel.”

  Harry risked leaning out from the beam and pressing the lens of his NVGs up to a couple of closely spaced bullet holes. He discovered that if he shifted uncomfortably-and precariously-to his left, he could just make out what might be the camouflaged back of a German below them.

  The time hack counted down.

  04

  03

  02

  01

  00

  “Go! Go! Go!” Harry cried. They both rolled off the beam and let their full weight collapse the flimsy roof tiles.

  Sergeant Major St. Clair gathered what men he could at the upturned table: eight in all, including Ronsard, leaving the French bird and three troopers to watch over the prisoners. They had orders to make sure von Braun and Dornberger did not survive if the colonel’s plan didn’t come off.

  As the tac-net time hack flashed a two-minute warning, he pressed his throat mike and whispered, “Fix bayonets.”

  The men all quietly drew out their new standard-issue sawback blades. Captain Ronsard fitted his with commendable alacrity-for a Frog. Must be all that time in England. Nobody loved a bayonet charge like the British army.

  St. Clair unsheathed his own custom-made 21C Dark Ops fighting knife. It felt like an old mate’s handshake. The double-thickness blade was forged from a hybrid alloy of five high-tensile metals and a surgical-grade monobonded carbon, nanonically hardened to give it a superfine edge without any brittleness. Back up in twenty-one it had been his habit to polish the blade in pig fat, a practice he’d given away shortly after the Transition. Only ragheaded nutjobs cared about getting stuck by “Ol’ Porky,” as he’d christened the evil-looking weapon. The boxheads, on the other hand, just didn’t like it up ’em at all. For a supposedly warlike super-race, they turned into a bunch of fuckin’ girly-men when things got up close and sticky.

  The time hack counted down.

  03

  02

  01

  00

  They held fire, lest they hit their own men. St. Clair heard a loud crash as Private Haigh and the colonel suddenly dropped out of the roof about three meters behind the German barricade. The rough staccato trip-hammer of two Ivan guns, pounding out six hundred rounds a minute each, started up as the Germans’ own rate of fire trailed off in confusion and panic.

  A war scream, a bellow, and St. Clair was up, leaping the barrier. Ronsard and the other men were right there with him. It was a potentially suicidal attack. The Germans were now caught in a rough crossfire, but that meant that his men were firing in the direction of Windsor and Haigh. He couldn’t locate them in LLAMPS view, and hoped they’d dropped into cover of some sort, but for now his job was simple.

  Close with the enemy, and destroy them.

  Harry stayed low, shooting up, angling his fire across the Panzergrenadiers and hopefully not into St. Clair and the lads. Haigh had dropped to the floor beside him and cried out as he snapped a bone. He seemed a game type, though, and he’d started firing almost immediately.

  The prince had been a bit luckier, landing on a couple of dead krauts who broke his fall quite nicely. He could hear the approaching bayonet charge as he slashed at the legs of the SS goons with a stream of automatic fire. The mкlйe played itself out in a series of jump-cuts and jerky, disjointed images. A glimpse of a German half turning toward them. His head flying apart as Haigh took him under fire. A leg cut in two by tracers. Blood splatters. Chunks of flesh blown free and flying up to stick on the ceiling. Guttural screams. Panic. Outrage.

  The next shock came as his men arrived, crashing into the SS line. He took his own fighting knife in his hands, the ground-quartz grip inserts cutting into his palms, a flash of light on the laser-tooled blood grooves. He smelled the foul exhalation of somebody’s dying breath as he slashed through their throat. His gun, swung like a club, caved in a skull. Then there were fingers clawing at his goggles, hands at his throat. A clearing sweep of his arm and two short elbow jabs into his attacker’s nose.

  He kept firing his sidearm, firing and firing until the hammer clicked on a dry chamber. Then he was struck by the sudden realization that quiet had descended and that, for a few seconds at least, nobody was trying to kill him, and he didn’t need to take anyone else’s life.

  St. Clair appeared. Breathing heavily, grinning like a cannibal. “Nice one, guv.”

  “Thanks, Viv,” he gulped, taking in the full extent of the carnage for the first time. “Best we get a move on before they regroup outside. How many did we lose?”

  “Three, sir. Robbins, Jezza, and Haigh, I’m afraid, guv’nor. He copped one in the throat.”

  “Bugger!” Harry grunted. “Okay. Make a note, Sergeant Major. We’re putting Private Haigh up for a DCM.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Harry picked his way across the killing floor, his boots beginning to stick on the blood and gore that were already congealing. Two of his troopers were guarding the doorway, making sure the krauts didn’t get another look in. Ronsard and Claudel were smoking and chattering away quietly. They were both covered in blood.

  He still had to get his charges up to the roof, and he had a squadron scattered all over the shop, but for the first time since they’d blundered into this five-star cock-up, he felt as if they might have a reasonable chance of pulling it off. He wished he could bring up a schematic of the building, not to mention the bio-indicators of everyone in his command, but he’d left that sort of convenience behind on the other side of the wormhole. He’d have to gather his forces piece by piece.

  “Round them up,” he ordered, pointing to the German scientists.

  “I’m afraid we had to neck a couple more of ’em, guv,” said St. Clair. “They got a bit uppity.”

  “Fair enough. What about the principles?”

  “Dornberger’s unconscious. Trooper Watson had to give him a smack. Von Braun is fine.”

  “Okay,” Harry said. “Let’s go.”

  7

  D-DAY + 9. 12 MAY 1944. 1410 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON.

  As the California coastline slipped below the horizon, a freshening breeze built out of the southwest, tugging at the overalls and colored vests of the crew while they wrestled with the never-ending traffic down on the flight deck.

  A Seahawk chopper, one of the few remaining aircraft from the Clinton’s original complement, was disappearing down the number one elevator, while a pair of Skyhawks waited in front of the jet blast deflectors of catapults three and four on the angled runway. Another twelve of the fighter-bombers were chained down along the starboard rows. Kolhammer had a full-time job just keeping track of the technology mix on board these days. The FAX catapult systems damaged at Midway had been completely replaced by steam catapults, and he was only too glad to admit that they were more reliable than the skittish, high-maintenance beasts with which the Clinton had first been outfitted. And they weren’t exactly contemporary technology, having been redesigned by a specialist R D shop back in the Zone to handle much greater stresses than the “old” launchers on a ship like the Enterprise, which was plowing into the swell three and a half thousand meters to port.

  The “Big E” was still throwing old-fashioned Corsairs into the sky, too, not heavier, more powerful jets like the Skyhawks. And like most of the U.S. Navy’s principal combatants, even the venerable Enterprise had been refitted with a suite of AT upgrades, such as simple rolling airframe missiles and radar-controlled Close-In Wea
pons Systems to protect her against the kamikaze attacks that had become a problem in the Pacific.

  Kolhammer crossed his legs and eased back into his old command chair as he took in the scene. The Combined Task Force consisted of three carrier battle groups, two that were contemporary and his own “retrofitted” group, now rebadged as Task Group Twenty-one. The USS Hillary Clinton was the beating heart of Twenty-one, with the Nemesis cruiser JDS Siranui and the three original ships of the Eighty-second MEU-the Kandahar, Kennebunkport, and Providence-making up her twenty-first component.

  Four brand-new Halsey-class multimission guided missile destroyers rode shotgun on the group, their classic lines a close match with Kolhammer’s boyhood memories of the old Charles F. Adams-class destroyers on which they were based. All four threw back fans of white water from their bows as they charged about, shepherding their flock and generally showing off.

  For the moment the USS Curtis and her sisters the Garrett, the Chandler, and the Reilly were listed as Auxiliary Force vessels, which meant their crews were mixed and they operated under 21C laws and customs. Kolhammer used a pair of powered binoculars to follow the Curtis as she took up station a few hundred meters forward of the Damascus, one of Lonesome’s new littoral assault ships. He could have dialed up battle-cam vision from the ship herself, but he preferred the glasses. They felt more intimate, even though they couldn’t pull in as tightly as a camera. The great bulk of the Clinton meant that the relatively gentle swell had little effect on her, but the Curtis was already beginning to climb and plunge through the long, rolling waves. He watched as some of her crew ran through a simulated bomb strike on the ship’s stern. He could just make out that a few of the sailors were black, and perhaps a couple were women. It was hard to tell at that distance. They all seemed to be working well together, but he worried that without inserts to dampen the sex drive, and given that they were crewed almost entirely by ’temps, there would inevitably be some trouble.

  Hell, he’d had trouble with his own people when their spinal syrettes all ran dry, and everyone had to go back to being on their best behavior without neurochemical support.

  “Admiral,” said a young freckle-faced sailor, whose nervousness at approaching him for the first time seemed to be causing some violent gulping on her part. “A m-message from the Enterprise, sir. Admiral Mitchell sends his regards, and reminds you that owe him a…a…”

  “A six-pack, yes, thank you, Petty Officer Maguire.” He smiled, trying to appear as harmless as possible. There seemed a very real chance that the young woman would pass out if he startled her. “Tell Admiral Mitchell that I’ll…” He paused as her eyes bulged with a low-grade horror at the prospect of having to tell Mark Mitchell anything other than what he wanted. “Tell you what, I’ll call him myself. You’re dismissed.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She gulped again before making her exit as quickly as she could.

  “And Ms. Maguire?”

  “Yes, Admiral?” she squeaked, turning so quickly that she almost fell into a bank of flatscreens.

  “Relax, at least for now.” Kolhammer smiled. “Nobody’s shooting at you just yet.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She scurried off the flag bridge.

  Mike Judge grinned after her, tugging the brim of his baseball cap down over his shades as he turned back to the blast windows. “And she was never seen or heard of again,” he said.

  Kolhammer suppressed a smirk, but a few of the bridge crew grinned. Judge was becoming well known as a captain who appreciated his own wit. It was a trait Kolhammer had noticed almost as soon as he’d met the Clinton’s former executive officer back in the twenty-first. That sort of thing could be very annoying, but Judge somehow managed to pull it off with a dash of Texan charm.

  “I remember the first time I had to speak to an admiral,” Kolhammer said. “I was twenty years old, fresh out of Boat School. I’d been an ensign for all of three minutes, and I do believe I may have wet my pants just a little bit.”

  Mike Judge’s shoulders moved as he chuckled to himself while watching the great armada form up for their trip west. “Met me a lord admiral in London when I was wooing my good lady wife,” he said. “Had a castle and everything.”

  “And did you wet your pants just a little bit, Captain Judge?” Kolhammer asked with a commendably straight face.

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “Good for you, son.”

  A screaming roar of jet engines announced the launch of the two Skyhawks on combat air patrol. They peeled up and away from the flight deck, two AT Sidewinder missiles hanging from hard points under their delta wings.

  Kolhammer watched them enviously. They were the undisputed kings of the air, at least for the next little while. He doubted the Germans would ever build anything more advanced than the 262s they were desperately throwing into the skies over France, but it was a righteous certainty that old Joe Stalin would have armies of engineers playing catch-up with the West. The intelligence reports he’d read implied that the Commies had done a great job so far.

  Before long-range bombers flying out of Tabriz in northern Persia had destroyed it, the Demidenko facility had apparently delivered a huge boost to the USSR’s research base. It was another of the enduring mysteries they faced. What the hell had the Germans been doing there when everyone-even the Russians-knew the Reich was going to turn on them at first opportunity? Kolhammer had lost count of the number of theories he’d heard. He might have been better placed to answer such questions if he’d been able to keep his own covert teams in place in Russia, but he’d ordered Ivanov’s people out eighteen months ago on the direct orders of President Roosevelt.

  What a dark fucking day that’d been. The admiral shook his head as he recalled the meeting.

  FDR was furious.

  The president had dismissed all of his aides from the Oval Office as soon as Kolhammer arrived. It was the first week of the new year, and Washington was very quiet, with snow lying heavy on the lawns of the White House, deadening the sounds of the city. The heavy blanket of white powder was a given at this time of year, but the exact snowfall and temperature weren’t predictable in the way they had been immediately after the Transition. Meteorologists had been left to twiddle their thumbs for at least six months back then, because archival weather data proved to be more accurate than their forecasts.

  And then, in December 1942, a typhoon had blown through the New Hebrides during a week that had originally been recorded as having been “sunny and warm.” Global warming had nothing to do with it, but the Transition must have. After that, the archives were of less use than the various weather sensors on the ships of the onetime Multinational Force, and the division of those assets became something of a political cage-wrestling match.

  Roosevelt didn’t smile when Kolhammer entered. He didn’t return his salute or bid him to sit down. There was nowhere to sit. The president remained in the chair behind his heavy wooden desk, his legs kept warm by an old three-bar heater pointed through the well in the center.

  Kolhammer waited.

  Roosevelt said nothing for a long time after the door closed behind his secretary. His lips were pressed so tightly together that all the color was forced from them. Muscles knotted along his jawline, and he repeatedly clenched his fingers with such slow deliberation that Kolhammer wondered if he was in pain.

  “You did not tell me, Admiral Kolhammer, that you were running a black operation within the Soviet Union.”

  “Ah,” Kolhammer said, understanding at last. “No, I did not, sir.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because then you would have known.”

  If possible, the president looked even angrier. “Is that your idea of a joke, Admiral?”

  Kolhammer shook his head. “No, sir. But it has been my experience in dealing with the executive level of government that they prefer to remain ignorant of operational details when such knowledge might prove unworkable.”

  “Unworkable, or uncomfo
rtable?”

  “Both. Sir.”

  President Roosevelt looked no less irate, but at least he didn’t appear to be getting any angrier. He was still clutching at an imaginary stress ball with his left hand. He seemed to notice the unconscious gesture, and deliberately placed both of his palms on the top of his desk, which was clear of any papers.

  He sighed.

  “Tell me what you were doing in Siberia, Admiral. I can’t imagine you’ll have a good explanation.”

  Kolhammer resisted the urge to look around for a chair. It would have been an expression of weakness. He stood foursquare in front of the president and delivered his bad news straight, as he had twice in his own time, in this very room.

  “When we discovered that the Dessaix had arrived here, out of sync with the rest of the task force, it became necessary to ascertain whether any other twenty-first assets might have come through in a similar fashion, and fallen into enemy hands. So I authorized a small covert team to enter the Soviet Union and begin searching.”

  A noticeable tremor ran through Roosevelt’s upper body.

  “You authorized a hostile act, against a friendly power, which could easily have led them into declaring war on us? When we already had our backs to the wall because of your arrival?”

  “I did, sir. Although I respectfully submit that you should probably stop thinking of the Soviet Union as a friendly power, and accept that there is a war coming. Sooner, rather than later.”

  Roosevelt’s nostrils flared as he sucked in air to control the flash of anger that showed in his eyes.

  “If I wanted to bring a crazy man in here to start yet another war I’d have called up General Patton,” he barked. “I expect better of you, Admiral. And I’m not getting it. I know all about your little mission, more than you’re letting on. Because Major Ivanov wasn’t just looking for lost ships out on the tundra, was he? He was actively building a resistance network, opposed to Soviet rule.”