Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  Those foul, creeping, two-faced pigs in Moscow were…were…

  His brain locked up, unable to get past the impacted rage and violation.

  This was not supposed to happen. They were supposed to be plowed under by the Aryan race, led by his glorious SS. Instead a horde-a veritable Mongol horde of the beasts-was tearing across the steppes, threatening to break into the German heartland and plunge Western civilization into a new dark age. The fuhrer had been so overcome by his anger that he’d suffered some form of seizure and actually passed out in the bunker, stopping in midrant and smashing his head on the edge of the table as he collapsed. None of the trembling, whey-faced physicians had been able to revive him. He had simply remained there on the floor, his head resting on the balled-up jacket of a Luftwaffe officer, as grotesque spasms swept over his prostrate form.

  Finally Himmler had been unable to stand it any longer, calling for an SS medic to attend. The man had arrived ten minutes later, and unlike the sniveling civilian doctors he had acted, getting the fuhrer transferred to a cot in his private chambers and administering a sedative that noticeably calmed the tremors. He had re-dressed the ugly, swollen gash over Hitler’s left eye and sternly warned everyone not to disturb him. He had then taken Himmler aside and, in a low worried tone, had explained that it was possible the fuhrer had suffered a stroke and might well be impaired for some time. One arm was lifeless, and the whole right side of his face looked like that of a wax dummy exposed to an excess of heat. It…drooped was about the best word Himmler could come up with.

  At that moment a terrifying loneliness had seized the Reichsfuhrer. He felt like a child who loses sight of its parents in a crowd. What if the fuhrer was gone? What if he had been poisoned, or succumbed to the enormous strain of the past month? No one else in the world had to deal with the sort of pressure to which he had been subjected. Nobody else could possibly have withstood the physical and psychic torment like Adolf Hitler.

  But what if he was gone?

  Himmler had returned to the map room, where a heavy pall still hung, and explained that long hours had caught up with the fuhrer and he had simply passed out, in need of some rest. Yet his endurance was a beacon to all. The SS chief explained then that he would assume administrative responsibilities for the next few hours, until the fuhrer awoke, and told the assembled staff officers that he wasn’t going to meddle with their deliberations; they were to dispose of their forces as they saw fit to meet the challenges on both the Eastern and Western fronts.

  Then he had excused himself.

  Flanked by his bodyguards now, Himmler hastened up the narrow steps into the rear of the building for his meeting with Oshima. The Japanese envoy wasn’t due for another half an hour, and it was more than likely that he would be delayed anyway. Once inside, he was confronted with a narrow hallway that ended in a steel door, which was blocked by two more SS guards who came rigidly to attention when they saw him. As Himmler acknowledged their salutes, one of the guards spoke into a telephone. The door, which resembled a watertight hatch on a warship, clanked open and Himmler passed through. Bare concrete stairs led downward on the other side. He descended, holding tight to the steel handrail. The staircase was steep and the steps were quite narrow. It would be easy to slip and break his neck.

  Behind him the three-story block presented the faзade of a well-maintained baroque apartment building. Formerly owned by Jews, it had been converted to office space for use by the SS after the Kristallnacht pogrom. The uniformed Allgemeine-SS staffers in the aboveground offices were part of a unit charged with disposing of the worldly goods of Jews such as the former owners of this building, all of whom had gone into the ovens or died in forced labor camps.

  Deep below street level, however, a series of linked, reinforced-steel chambers provided safe working space for Himmler when he needed to be away from the bunkers where most of the activity took place. While the Waffen-SS played a pivotal role in the war effort, the greater SS was responsible for much, much more, and regardless of the demands the armed conflict made upon him the Reichsfuhrer could not afford to ignore his other duties. He was still the man responsible for attending to the Final Solution. The foreign and domestic security and intelligence services reported directly to him. And along with Albert Speer, the armaments minister, he was charged with delivering to the Reich the ultimate weapon-an atomic bomb.

  Unfortunately, he was beginning to doubt that he could.

  After an initial period of euphoria and accelerated progress following the capture of the Dessaix and her informational systems, further successes had proved elusive. The Allies were largely to blame. At times it seemed as if they had devoted entire armies to destroying every facility even remotely connected with the project. And he had begun to acknowledge, with intense frustration, that he hadn’t understood two years ago just what a Herculean task he had taken on. This project consumed resources on a scale he hadn’t imagined possible.

  For once the shelter did not reek of kerosene. They were plugged into the city’s power grid and it was running, despite the RAF’s best efforts. In contrast with the bunker he had just left, this one was clean, well lit, un-crowded, and calm. Blond secretaries and square-faced SS men saluted him as he passed through the antechamber into the first of the buried steel tanks. It was at least sixty meters long and twenty across, an open space with dozens of small work pens separated by particleboard dividers. The pens grew larger as they progressed down the body of the tubular structure, until they terminated in two relatively spacious work areas in front of another watertight door. He marched down the room, nodding and smiling to his personal staff, calling a few favored individuals by their first names, stopping to chat briefly with a secretary called Helga who was beginning to show her pregnancy. Her husband had been involved in the doom-struck assault on Calais, and nothing had been heard from him since. Helga was a good German, and she was holding up bravely. Himmler told her he was proud of her forbearance, and said that she must soon rest up and save her strength for the birth. After that, if she wished, he could suggest a number of fine young SS men who were looking for wives.

  He dismissed her tears of gratitude and carried on to his private rooms. He feared what would become of women like that if the Bolsheviks ever set foot inside Berlin. He was one of the few people in Germany who’d read anything of the city’s fate in the other world. Some extracts from a book called Armageddon had been found on the Dessaix and translated from French. It made for harrowing reading.

  Himmler asked one of the guards to see to a pot of herbal tea as his personal assistant, Hauptsturmfuhrer Buhle, presented him with two sets of papers.

  “The files have also been loaded onto your computer, Reichsfuhrer,” Buhle said. “They are the only files on the desktop.”

  “Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment. And they accuse me of crimes against humanity, he thought as he settled himself in at his desk. Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay.

  His tea arrived and he sipped the infusion as he read the latest report by Professor Bothe. The work of the Army Weapons Office was not going well. Bothe complained of shortages and disruptions caused by Allied attacks, and staffing problems that he rather boldly laid at the feet of the Gestapo, which had arrested so many of his best scientists, including Heisenberg, Hahn, and Diebner. The last of his gaseous uranium centrifuges had been destroyed by a British commando raid on the Tirana complex, and at any rate he was running short of the yellow cake supplied by Japan. He did not think it possible that a weapon would be ready within twelve months, let alone a week.

  Under other circumstances, Himmler would have punished such insolence with a cold fury. But Professor Bothe was beyond his reach now. A few hours after he had dispatched his report, Bothe had been killed in a Soviet air attack.

  There was little point in reading through the rest of the message. Much of it was couched in opaque jargon, and the crucial point was in
the first paragraph anyway. There would be no bomb.

  Himmler bit down on the sense of despair that was threatening to engulf him. He put the Bothe paper aside and picked up a briefing note from Gruppenfuhrer Stangl on the renewed effort to root out fifth columnists, saboteurs, and traitors within the highest offices of the Reich. Normally he skimmed Stangl’s briefings. There was rarely anything of note; an admiral here, a general there. But today his eyes bulged as he read the first name on the list.

  General Paul Brasch.

  Stangl wrote that the Gestapo had been covertly observing Brasch for six months, on suspicion that he had made contact with some enemy agents. One man in particular had been of interest to them, but had evaded capture on a number of occasions. He had been killed in Paris on May 8, just a few streets away from where Brasch had been dining with Oberstgruppenfuhrer Oberg. General Brasch had been observed loitering in the area afterward, and approached a number of Wehrmacht personnel who survived a blast they presumed had been triggered by the unnamed spy. He showed great interest in the details of the incident in which the man and many others had perished.

  Thus it was decided to pick him up for routine questioning, but when he was approached by two Gestapo men, Brasch had killed one and crippled the other. He was now on the run, somewhere in Paris.

  Brasch! Of all people. Could this day get any worse? Brasch had been intimately involved in some of the most critical research-and-development programs that had grown out of the Emergence. Indeed, he was there from the very first moments, having been sent to Japan on what was first assumed to be a wild goose chase. He had been vetted and vetted again by the SS. His family had been killed in a British bombing raid. The fuhrer had personally decorated him!

  It could not be.

  As he held the sheaf of paper with a bloodless, shaking hand, however, the Reichsfuhrer-SS began to see the outlines of a conspiracy. Brasch’s dead son had been T4, a deformed child who would have been put down were it not for his father’s prominence. Brasch had enjoyed unrestricted access to the Sutanto’s files in Hashirajima and presumably could have learned of the T4 program. But then again, these suspicions had all been voiced early on, and Brasch had been attended for weeks by both covert and overt SS minders. They had never seen any evidence to suggest that he was anything but a patriot.

  Himmler pulled out a pad of paper. He began to jot down notes furiously, instructing Stangl to continue the search for Brasch, even if it meant leaving agents behind in Paris to look for him after the city fell to the Allies. Then he scratched out “after” and wrote “should the city fall to the Allies.” It would not do to be seen as a defeatist.

  He further instructed the Gestapo chief to cross-reference with Brasch’s work history all major incidents of unexplained sabotage, equipment failure, or even apparent Allied intelligence successes-such as the counterambush of the Luftwaffe raid on Patton’s Third Army. His writing grew spiky as his heart beat faster. In a way he hoped this was a misunderstanding. A coincidence. Because if Brasch had sold them out, they were in even worse trouble than he’d thought. The Allies would know details of some of the most sensitive weapons programs in the Third Reich.

  They would even have inside information on the broad outlines of the German atomic program.

  Oh, this was very, very bad.

  18

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1324 HOURS.

  PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

  The crackle and pop of gunfire was a constant across the city, like traffic noise or birdsong in happier times. As the sporadic clashes grew into one long battle, Brasch began to think the French might do themselves more harm in the Liberation than the Germans had done during the Occupation.

  He twitched aside the stiff, sun-faded curtain and risked a peek outside. He was hiding, for the moment, in a hotel off the Rue Houdon, although to call it a hotel invested the establishment with more dignity than it really deserved. It was the sort of flophouse where tight-fisted Austrian noncoms or petit bureaucrat collaborators might have rented a room by the hour, paying a few francs for a sagging, crusty mattress and an even saggier, crustier companion. The whores were still here, but the trade had dried up, so to speak. The Wehrmacht and the SS seemed to be in general retreat; all that remained were a few thousand of the hardier, dumber Frenchmen who had thrown in their lot with the fascists.

  He watched a couple of them who were hiding at the end of the pinched, cobblestone alley that ran between Rue Houdon and the Villa de Guelma, beneath his window. A man and woman, both wearing German helmets but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. Some sort of fascist militia, he supposed. They nervously checked their weapons and ammunition at a small sandbag barricade. They had just one rifle between them, an 1898 vintage Mauser, but had somehow managed to find a whole box of Stielhandgranate, long-handled grenades. The man was sitting on a chair he’d obviously stolen from a nearby cafй or strip club, his head resting in his hands, his body completely still. The woman, clothed incongruously in a thin cotton dress, odd socks, tennis shoes, and a black bucket helmet, seemed animated by all the energy that had left his body. She held the rifle, checking the load every few minutes, poking her head around the corner into the main street, whipping it back like a frightened deer, and spinning around nervously as though someone had just snuck up behind her. She would start to crouch, then stand bolt upright, back away from the sandbags, then shuffle toward them again. The only sign that her companion was still alive was an occasional shake of the head.

  Brasch was sure they would both be dead by the end of the week, if not the day.

  The cease-fire among the Resistance, the few functioning elements of the French state, and the German rear guard had frayed as the Allies pushed toward the city. Some fighting had flared as individual units of SS engineers had tried to set off demolition charges at selected sites around the city. The Louvre was a smoking ruin, its artworks looted before the building had been destroyed. Gone, too, the Arc de Triomphe. But attempts to bring down the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame had failed when the engineers were attacked by an odd alliance of Communist guerrillas and paramilitary gendarmes. Most of the city’s police force was on strike, probably working on their excuses for having cooperated so closely with the Germans, and the Communists were in a frenzy of excitement at word of the return of the Soviet Union to the fray. As Brasch had slipped through city, just ahead of his pursuers, he had seen dozens of posters calling for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the approaching Red Army.

  As far as he could tell, most Parisians were only too glad that the Americans and their own Free French forces would arrive long before the Reds.

  The whores in the sitting room downstairs swapped rumors concerning the advance, some of them insisting that the Americans were already at the edge of the suburbs. But Brasch knew far more than they did. He could hear the percussion of artillery and heavy bombing in the distance. Probably around Chartres, an hour away. And he’d been able to access Fleetnet via his flexipad for most of the past twenty-four hours. Drones had taken up station above the city, probably in support of Special Forces already inside, some of whom were coming to extract him. He could follow the battle quite closely, and he knew for certain that the Free French First Armored under Leclerc was punching through the last line of defense, and should enter Paris within hours.

  His problem was that he might not have hours left. Even though the occupying German troops were almost gone, he’d been chased across half the city by at least six separate squads of Gestapo. They must be desperate to capture him, he reasoned, because the tipping point was fast approaching when the Parisians’ fear would give way to a savage hunger for revenge. It would be made all the worse by self-loathing as the French came to terms with the last two years. Time could not be reversed like a vid file. Many had not just served the interests of Nazi Germany but done so with great zeal, especially in the prosecution of the Reich’s genocidal Final Solution. There would come a heavy reckoning for that.

  “Monsieur
Brasch. Monsieur!”

  Brasch turned away from his vantage point. The room behind him was dark. The few hours a day of unreliable electricity the city had recently enjoyed were over. The lights had been out for two days now.

  Madam Colbert stood in the doorway, her modesty protected only by a moth-eaten bathrobe.

  “Do you think it will be long before your friends come?” she asked. “They will come won’t they? It is just that…well…”

  She trailed off, unable to speak the truth of it. She owed him. He had saved her daughter from rape at the hands of two drunken Wehrmacht men a month earlier. She didn’t need to know that he had done so on purpose, to establish a connection with a suitable local and a safe house for the flight he’d always known was coming. As far as Colbert was concerned, he was simply a man on the run from the Boche who had done her a great service.

  But he was still a German, and no matter that he needed to hide out while waiting to “defect”-a new word, much in use these days-he remained a German, and so his presence here might bring any number of evil consequences down upon her house.

  “It shouldn’t be long,” he promised her, holding up his flexipad. “I have had word. They are very close. In the next arrondissement, in fact. Coming up the Boulevarde Haussman.”

  Madam Colbert worked the greasy belt of her old bathrobe into a huge Gordian knot. “It is just that I have word, too, monsieur. My lookouts, they tell me there are Germans coming. They are two streets away now. Gestapo. They must be looking for you. They are checking all the bordellos in Place Pigalle.”

  Damn.

  Brasch checked the two collaborators again at the end of the alleyway. The man remained stock still, but the woman continued dancing around in her nervous fashion. He could have sworn she’d glanced up at his window, then turned her head quickly at the last moment.

  He did not want to break cover. He had run out of bolt-holes, and he was so close to being safe.