Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  The impact of the shock wave hitting the ground was akin to the hammer of an old Norse god striking the earth. It set off a vibration that had the same effect as an earthquake as the energy waves spread outward. Near the blast center, with pressures at 200 psi, winds howled at up to two thousand kilometers an hour. These fell away with distance from the blast, but were still strong enough to demolish everything in their path out to ten kilometers.

  At a certain point the structural integrity of some objects was such that they did not disintegrate, but rather became missiles, propelled through the air at great speed. Even small, seemingly insignificant objects became lethal at that velocity. But much larger items were also affected. A Tiger tank, for instance, stranded at the intersection of Landowa and Startowa streets for three days because of a lack of fuel, was suddenly on the move again, flying through the air at three hundred kilometers an hour.

  Some of the missiles traveled faster than the blast wave, which lost energy as it sped away from ground zero. An SS colonel, standing on the steps of an apartment building on Dabroskiego Street, was killed when a helmet smashed into his head, popping it like a grape underfoot. The destruction did not discriminate. The innocent and the evil were burned, or crushed, or torn apart. Aryan supermen and residents of the Jewish ghetto all died, their ashes drawn up into the towering mushroom-shaped cloud that rose above the city.

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1849 HOURS.

  MOSCOW.

  The messenger arrived as Stalin was playing with his much-loved old gramophone, insisting that Molotov and the “gloomy demon” Lev Mekhlis, the political chief of the Red Army, entertain the room with a dance. Beria suspected that the supreme leader had been drinking wine diluted with mineral water for the past few hours. He seemed to be in much better shape than anyone save for Harriman and Clark-Kerr. He scratched the gramophone needle on the old record a couple of times, but Beria doubted whether he himself could have even picked up the disk without smashing it, so inebriated was he.

  It wasn’t just that Stalin insisted everyone obliterate themselves at these awful parties. Beria also drank to numb his fear that the bomb would not work. There had been no time to test the device after Stalin had ordered that it be used a month ahead of schedule. If it didn’t work, there was no question that he would pay. He’d tried to convince Stalin that a test-firing was the only sensible course, but the Vozhd had removed his unlit Dunhill pipe and placed it carefully on his desk. That was always a grave warning sign. He had simply stared at Beria until the NKVD chief had started to babble, and double back on his own rhetoric. Of course, of course the general secretary is right. It will be done, and done immediately, and without fail, and…

  Beria shuddered, and felt another spasm of explosive vomiting coming on. At least half of the Communist Party magnates in the room looked in even worse shape than he was. But nobody had passed out. As Khrushchev used to say when he was alive, those who fell asleep at Stalin’s table usually met a bad end. And so the debauch rolled on.

  Stalin managed to get some scratchy old dance tune playing. Molotov and Mekhlis stumbled around in a grotesque parody of a waltz. The Allied ambassadors could not keep the horror from their faces.

  And then, a Red Army messenger appeared at the door.

  21

  D-DAY + 35. 7 JUNE 1944. 1010 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “Sweet mother of God,” Kolhammer muttered.

  He could hear Spruance’s labored breathing beside him. Unlike Kolhammer, he’d never seen an atomic blast, never trained for a nuclear war, and in a way his ignorance protected him.

  “Looks like a mess,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Kolhammer grunted. “A hell of a mess.”

  They stood in front of the banked screens in the main room of the Clinton’s Intelligence Division. It looked like a smaller version of the ship’s Combat Information Center, though with space given over to desks, cubicles, and a large conference table at one end of the room. At least two dozen men and women worked feverishly at all of these stations, half of them on the data stream now coming out of Europe, while the others remained focused on the task force’s advanced surveillance elements as they closed with Yamamoto’s forces in the Marianas.

  For the moment, however, Kolhammer and Spruance were fully engaged with developments on the other side of the world.

  The Soviets had restricted all access to the ruins of Lodz, ostensibly because of the danger of radiation poisoning, although they had been more than accommodating when it came to requests from London and Washington for briefings on the atomic raid. While the Red Army liaison officers who flew into England especially for these meetings would not discuss details of the USSR’s atomic program, they were more than happy to provide reams of evidence from Poland about the destructive power unleashed by the workers’ state.

  “I guess the message is clear enough,” Spruance muttered as footage restarted on the main screen, showing a superfire that had destroyed even more of Lodz than the initial blast.

  “Yeah, Don’t fuck with the revolution,” Kolhammer said. “Jesus, what a shambles. I wonder how close we are to lighting off our first one.”

  “A lot closer now, I’ll wager,” Spruance said.

  Kolhammer didn’t bother to reply. It was a laydown that whatever capacity existed, it would be used to accelerate the Allied atomic program. But it wasn’t his business to know about the progress of the Manhattan Project, even though so many of its resources had come from his original Multinational Force. Nearly a thousand personnel from the Clinton had been allocated to Groves.

  He wasn’t completely out of the loop, of course. The decision he’d made two years ago to dispatch Ivanov to the Soviet Union had taken on an entirely new character. Far from being considered “dangerous and stupid”-in the well-chosen words of Admiral King-it was looking like a remarkable act of foresight. Ivanov’s little group was about the only card they had to play.

  “Admiral Spruance, Admiral Kolhammer, excuse me, sirs. We’ll have the link in two minutes.”

  Both men straightened and turned away from the video display. A young woman, a ’temp, was standing behind them.

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Spruance said. “We’ll be right along.”

  Kolhammer shook his head as he took one last look at a loop captured by a Big Eye drone that had been moved over Lodz by the Trident. The Soviets had protested that, of course, but not too energetically. They were more than happy for the West to see exactly what they were capable of accomplishing.

  “Let’s go,” Spruance said.

  They left Intel and walked a short way down the corridor to a comm shack, a much smaller room with three screens, glowing blue and displaying a countdown.

  …0056

  0055

  0054…

  Kolhammer and Spruance settled themselves in front of the flat panels as the female ensign checked the videoconferencing connections.

  “How long till the Havoc gets back to us?” Spruance asked.

  “Willet will be on station in about two hours,” Kolhammer said. “She’ll deploy drones and start taking the feed immediately. Raw data should arrive in the first burst by thirteen hundred hours. Her intelligence boss will give it a cover note, but we have a lot more analysts than she does, so a full picture will probably be another few hours.”

  “Until then I suppose we can take the Soviets at their word.”

  “Yes. If they say they’re going to attack the Home Islands, they undoubtedly will.”

  “Do you think they’ll use another atomic bomb?”

  Kolhammer shrugged. “We’ll know when we know. Lodz might have been their one shot in the locker. Even assuming they grabbed the Vanguard, and I think that’s a safe assumption now, you can’t build a nuclear weapon out of box tops and rubber bands. It’s a very difficult task, and it chews up tremendous resources.”

  “Ten seconds,” the ensign announced.

  “I hope to God
you’re right, Admiral,” Spruance said. “I wouldn’t like to think of old Joe Stalin with a locker full of those things.”

  “That’s why I doubt he has many yet,” said Kolhammer. “If he did, he’d have used them on everyone. Including us.”

  The three blue screens flickered into life, with each displaying a different video window.

  “Links verified secure,” a sysop announced through the speakers. “Level One encryption.” He had a British accent. Probably one of Halabi’s people.

  In the screen on the far left sat Churchill, Eisenhower, and a clutch of American and British staff officers. They seemed to be in an underground bunker, and Kolhammer assumed it was the war rooms in London, which had been fitted out with some of the Trident’s communications gear. In the center screen he found the president and the Joint Chiefs, back in Washington, and on the right-hand display was General MacArthur, beaming in from the South West Pacific Area Command in Brisbane. In the top left-hand corner of each screen a small separate window displayed the local time.

  The sound came on with a crackle a few seconds after the video.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.” It was President Roosevelt. “By now you’ll all have been properly informed about the Soviets’ atomic attack on the Germans in Lodz.”

  Not just the Germans, Kolhammer thought.

  “I believe General Eisenhower is going to update us on the situation in Western Europe.”

  Everyone on screen shifted slightly as they switched their attention to a different screen. Neither he nor Spruance had to, as an experienced operator down in the Clinton’s communications center reformatted their display to bring Eisenhower to the middle screen.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” the general said before launching into his delivery. “As of six hours ago, the two main German army groups in Western Europe were in total disarray. They were already suffering badly from our coordinated air campaign, but had begun to adapt to that by breaking down into smaller units and moving to enmesh themselves with forward elements of the Allied advance, making it difficult to target large formations for strategic interdiction.

  “Following the attack on Lodz, however, such mobile forces as remained intact have begun to redeploy east, back into Germany, leaving comparatively modest blocking forces to delay any pursuit on our part. General Patton’s Third Army continues to make deep thrusts into the enemy’s northern flank. Patton’s lead elements are now threatening the German city of Bonn. In France, Paris has fallen to the Free French Armored Division, but street fighting has broken out among Resistance factions.”

  Eisenhower paused at this point to look up into the web-cam.

  “The French Communist Party has called for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the people of the Soviet Union, and invited the Red Army to help them liberate the French masses. Moscow has denied any such intention, but they also haven’t asked their French comrades to lay down their arms. For the moment, the city remains under curfew and Free French forces are attempting to put down the insurgency.

  “Fighting in Italy continues, although the Germans have begun to evacuate their forces from Rome as ours approach from the south. Negotiations are under way to declare Rome an open city, though our intelligence sources within the capital indicate that fighting has broken out between Communist cells and the interim administration. The Italian Communists are also calling for the Red Army to move south and liberate them. The Germans are reinforcing the Gothic Line along the Apennines with some of their troops from the south, but most appear to be headed for Germany.”

  Eisenhower finished reading from his notes and turned to Churchill, who was sitting beside him. “Mr. Prime Minister?”

  The famous voice filled the small communications room where Kolhammer and Spruance sat. “General Eisenhower’s briefing runs up to six hours ago, because at that time we received a direct communication from the German foreign minister asking for a cease-fire, as a preliminary step to opening peace negotiations on the Western Front.”

  Kolhammer heard Spruance curse softly beside him. For his own part, he merely lifted his eyebrows. He’d been expecting something like this. He noted that only Roosevelt and General Marshall seemed to take the news in stride. They’d obviously been briefed before the linkup.

  “As significant as this development might be,” Churchill continued, “it is just as important that Herr Ribbentrop was acting on the orders of Reichsfuhrer Himmler, not Herr Hitler. It appears that some ill fortune may have befallen the Nazi leader, but at this stage we don’t know the nature of his situation. We do know, however, what they are offering: a complete cessation of hostilities, withdrawal of all German forces to their 1939 positions, and, most risibly, an alliance against what Foreign Minister Ribbentrop is calling the Bolshevik menace to civilization.

  “The Foreign Office has made no reply as of yet.”

  Roosevelt spoke up again, replacing the British prime minister on the main screen. “Before we deal with these developments, I’d like to ask General MacArthur and Admiral Spruance to quickly bring us up to date on the Pacific theater.”

  MacArthur nodded inside a pop-up window that suddenly appeared directly in front of Kolhammer.

  “I am continuing to consolidate my hold on Java, and to press forward in New Guinea where General Blamey is preparing an attack on Rabaul. I am planning to return to the Philippines in two months, assuming Admiral Spruance gains control of the Marianas.”

  MacArthur looked like he had a lot more to say, but his audio cut out and a small green light came on atop the middle of the three screens they were watching. Kolhammer worked hard at keeping his face straight. He could see MacArthur fuming back in the small pop-up at the edge of the right-hand display.

  The word TRANSMITTING flashed on screen in front of them. Spruance spoke up.

  “The Combined Task Force is proceeding as directed to engage Yamamoto’s forces in the Marianas chain. We expect to be within strike range tomorrow, and have deployed surveillance assets well in advance of our main force. The information we have received back from them indicates that at least half the ground forces the Japanese had intended to employ in the defense of the Marianas have been or are being withdrawn to the Home Islands, accompanied by most of the major surface combatants that Yamamoto had planned to meet us with. Admiral Kolhammer tells me that the submarine Havoc will be in position off the Home Islands in two hours, and we should have a data feed from her in about four hours. Until then we cannot say anything definitive about the size or type of forces the Soviets appear to have committed to their attack on Japan.”

  Spruance shot Kolhammer a questioning glance, but the admiral had nothing to add.

  Roosevelt appeared on screen again. “Well, then, let us move on. Prime Minister Churchill and I have already conferred over the Nazis’ peace offer, and our answer is simple. We reject any offer other than unconditional surrender. I think we all agree that, no matter how circumstances may change, it would be completely unacceptable to leave the Nazis in power, or to remove them but allow their leaders to go unpunished. As long as they remain, there can be no peace with Germany.

  “A military question arises, however, because of the withdrawal of so many German army units to the east. We have to consider the worst possible circumstances, gentleman, a war with the Soviet Union following the fall of the Third Reich. On this Mr. Churchill and I cannot find common ground. He believes that we should allow the Germans to withdraw to meet the Communists on the Eastern Front. Certainly I can understand his point. Anything we do to blunt the advance of the Red Army can only serve to make easier the job of keeping them away from Western Europe months or even weeks from now. But I fear that doing so merely invites Stalin to reinforce his armies and push all the harder. It also gives him a ready-made excuse to declare hostilities against us when he has finished with the Germans. Prime Minister?”

  Churchill reappeared in the center of the screen. “And I am afraid that I don’t believe the Bolsheviks will nee
d an excuse. They are quite obviously coming upon us with full force. The destruction of Lodz had less to do with damaging the Germans than it did with bullying us. I believe we need to prepare for armed conflict with the USSR in the very near future, and, as part of that, any damage we can do to marshals Konev and Zhukov-via the agency of the Wehrmacht-is all to the good.

  “I do not propose an alliance with them. I merely suggest that we arrange our strategy to allow those German units to move east. They are not escaping. The Red Army will destroy them, but they will keep Stalin’s hordes away from our throats and, of course, avoid those losses we would have sustained in fighting them. This will make us stronger for the conflagration that I believe is now inevitable. Mr. President?”

  Kolhammer, like the other military officers, said nothing, although he couldn’t help but agree with the British leader. He had warned Roosevelt often enough that this showdown was coming. The Soviets under Stalin were every bit as vile as the Nazis, with their sole redeeming grace being that their ideology didn’t adhere to any crazed notions of racial destiny. Nevertheless, their goals were almost identical. Now that Stalin knew the destiny of his beloved revolution and his own reviled place in history, he simply could not-would not-accept his fate. It wasn’t in his nature, nor that of his regime. He might talk of a grand alliance today, but Kolhammer would lay money on the barrelhead that he fully intended to supplant the Nazis as the masters of Europe.

  It wasn’t surprising that Churchill saw things in slightly starker terms than the Americans. His little island was probably about to become the front line again. And of course, if the Soviets took Japan, with China falling to Mao, the only powers that mattered in postwar Asia would line up with the Politburo.

  He exhaled slowly as Roosevelt spoke again.

  “Gentlemen, as I said, this is a political decision, but Mr. Churchill and I now need your advice on prosecuting a war against the Red Army, if that should become necessary. I believe General Marshall has something to say.”