“And where do you want my fighting 15th,” said General Randow, another new stand-in after Crüwell left the scene.
“Hold on this road south of Bismarck’s position. Wait for Funck to bring up 7th Panzer. That will give us a situation much like our defense at Gazala. I will have all three Panzer Divisions in hand on a tight leash until I deem it time to begin the counterattack. Before that happens, I will want the British testing our blocking position on the coast. It will hold, they will reinforce, and at that point, this O’Connor will look to take his armor in a typical flanking movement.”
“You intend to meet him with all three Panzer Divisions?”
“That would be a good attack, but an even better one would be to swing well outside his own envelopment, then come north and take him in the flank. So I may use 21st Panzer as the shield, and the remaining two divisions as my sword. Hauptmann László Almásy is already well to the south scouting out the ground. This terrain here labeled Abu As Shawk is open and flat, with good traction. The same for Alam Qarinah here, further east. But the objective of our envelopment will be these crossroads—Alam Hunjah. Look how all these tracks run parallel to the east and northeast, and note this difficult ground on the right. That protects your flank as you make your turning maneuver. See this hill? It was scouted yesterday, and gives a perfect view of all surrounding ground. We make this maneuver at night, and I want to be standing on that hill by noon the next day.”
“And the Italians?
“What of them? I have sent them to the Buerat line to prepare those defenses. If anything goes amiss, then our two infantry divisions fall back through Sirte to that position. Ah… Herr Ramcke. I forgot your brigade. I will want your men here, right along this wadi screening the location of the Korps Headquarters at Gasr bu Hadi, about ten kilometers due south of Sirte. Any more questions?”
“Suppose they don’t attack us,” said Bismarck. “It’s over 100 kilometers from El Agheila to this wadi where we make our stand. What if they dally about?”
“I am planning a ruse. I have sent a signal saying that fuel stocks are running dry, and we must wait for deliveries. We have long suspected that the British are reading our signals traffic—decoding it at will. I want this O’Connor to think he has me at a disadvantage, that we are desperate to retreat. I have even planned a little theater of a more personal nature. You know I am in the habit of corresponding with my wife back home. Well, I have prepared a phony letter, and I intend to see that it gets found by the British. O’Connor must believe we are a wounded animal, limping off to seek shelter. If I know this man, he will attack, and with the envelopment maneuver I expect.”
Von Thoma had been listening to all of this, and now he spoke up, remembering Rommel’s admonition to him upon his arrival. “And these heavy British tanks you spoke of earlier,” he said. “What if they appear in the midst of all of this?”
“The Luftwaffe has spotted them far to the east. It seems the British already believe we are beaten here. Now gentlemen, it’s time we showed them how very wrong they are.”
Chapter 21
A whisker over 370 miles due south of Tobruk, the wreckage of an American B-24D Liberator bomber still rests in its dusty grave, like a forsaken shipwreck on the seabed of an ocean that had dried up and vanished long ago. The nose and cockpit, and much of the fuselage still remain intact—even the window glass remained sound for the most part. A machinegun juts from a circular aperture just above the plane number 64, which vanished into the sand at the base of the crumpled fuselage. The broken tail was bent forward towards the nose, jutting into the stark sky above, and twisted propellers still hung from the remnants of the wrecked engines.
Her name was Lady Be Good, serial number 41-24301, out on April 4, 1943 for its maiden flight with the 376th Bombardment Group from Soluch field north of Benghazi, and with a fresh new crew. They were going to bomb Naples that day, but on the return leg, the plane’s direction finder failed, and it overflew the base and continued on, south into the endless wasteland called the Calanshio Sand Sea. None of the nine men aboard were ever seen alive again, though evidence of their plight and struggle for survival would be found in the desert decades later.
It was a bombing raid that had not yet been launched in the history writing itself anew in that desert. Whether it ever would be launched remained uncertain, one of those many unwoven strands of fate in the tapestry of Time. All around that wreckage, the sun beat down on leagues of high sand dunes rising like great waves in a tempestuous sea, some well over 100 feet high. Yet hidden beneath all that sand, beneath the bones of lost soldiers, animals, and the wreckage of a war that once was, new life was found at the edge of that sea in the year 1961.
A man named Nelson Bunker Hunt, an eccentric billionaire and oil man from Texas, had a nose for shady deals in the silver markets, fast horses, and light sweet crude. He had learned he might find oil in Libya, and picked up a concession plot designated C-65 in 1957 to do some survey work and exploratory drilling. Prospects did not immediately pan out, but four years later, high gas readings were detected, and additional work discovered oil stained sand in the samples extracted from the site. Five wells were soon drilled, about 150 miles south of the bottleneck O’Connor’s troops had just pushed through, and in time it was discovered that old Bunker Hunt had found what would end up being the Sarir Oil Field, the largest in all of Libya, with reserves estimated at around 12 gigabarrels. A 34-inch pipeline was constructed to move the oil to Tobruk, where a large terminal exists today, on the southern rim of the bay that forms the harbor.
Up to 4 million barrels of crude could be stored there, where the bones of soldiers from so many armies lay buried in the sand. Tankers called from all over the world, hauling the valuable crude of China, Europe and the United States. That was what put Tobruk on the map in 2021, not the history of a war fought 80 years past. Yet all that oil would drag the storied port into the next war, painting a nice fat target on the dry desert sand around Tobruk. In the year 2021, a missile would be launched to strike that target, and blight the land with its terrible power.
The battlements and bunkers where the Rats of Tobruk once fought and fell, where Rommel’s troops huddled outside the wire, straining to push through, where artillery and machine gun fire once rattled and shook the dark desert night, would now be completely devastated. In 2021, all it would take is a single missile, but the blow struck that day was so powerful that it would have dramatic effects that no one ever anticipated. The Russian 15A18 Missile, dubbed the SS-18 “Satan” by the west, had a very heavy throw weight. It could lift and deploy up to ten 500 kiloton warheads, and one would target a place in the sky above that harbor, where a ship lay berthed that carried a most unusual gift.
The USS Destroyer Knight had been slated to support the Torch landings, but in this history it was put on convoy duty and sent round the cape to Alexandria to help keep an eye on all the tanks bound to fill O’Connor’s ranks. Its commander, Lieutenant Commander Levin, had been eager to see the famous port, and even more pleased when he learned that he was to be sent out to Tobruk on a milk run to deliver mail and other effects.
So it was, by chance or design, that the Knight was in port that day, while nearly 80 years on, Satan came calling in the skies above. The little gift that had been delivered to the ship by the daughter of the Admiral it was named for, had sat in a box on the Commander’s wardroom shelf, a useless bit of trivia, forgotten, unnoticed, overlooked—until that day. No one aboard saw it begin to glimmer and glow, the sheen of phosphorescent green surrounding it, the temperature rising as the light burned hotter. Then the skies above Tobruk opened with raging fire of another kind, for the hand of Satan had reached all the way back to that embattled year, guided there by that strange talisman, and perhaps the vengeful, jealous and hungry arm of Time itself.
It wasn’t reaching for the ship, which had every good reason for being exactly where it was that day. But there were things in the desert close by, men and machin
es, with no license to move on those sands. They were intruders, trespassers, an aberration in the careful scheme Time sought to play out, and now they would pay the price.
* * *
Reeves’ Squadron was the first to approach Nofilia as his unit probed north. He came in from the south, Scimitars leading, and Sergeant Williams had the lead section up front, his eyes scanning the infrared detection screens to look for residual heat of other vehicles. He had just reported what he thought was a small contact, three vehicles ahead on a low hill overlooking the wadi. Reese was in the Squadron command vehicle, a Dragon AFV with special communications and data-link equipment.
“Looks like a couple of light flak guns to my eye,” came the voice of Sergeant Williams. “I could pop them from here with the APSE rounds.”
“Save your breath,” said Reeves back again. “That British division up front is right there on the coast. They’ll have troops up to sweep that area soon enough. If they move, let me know, but otherwise just lay low and save the ammunition.”
At that moment there came a brief flutter in the electronics, and the engine stopped. Reeves saw his screens wink off, the vehicle’s internal emergency lighting kicking in from the battery. He looked over at Cobb, his driver, his eyes scanning his panel. Those screens were dark as well.
“What’s up, Cobber? I thought you said you went over the vehicle from top to bottom.”
“I did sir, didn’t find anything to fuss about.”
“You topped us off with the fuel?”
“Full tank. Checked it a moment ago sir. We’ve got plenty of range.”
“Well then, turn the engine over again, and it bloody well better start.”
Cobb hit the ignition, and got the reassuring sound of the engine restarting. He was all business now, his eyes playing over the readings on his panels. “Hello…?” He leaned in, and tapped one screen. “Here’s a wild one,” he said over his shoulder. “Got a reading on the NBC module. It says we just had a mild EMP pulse.”
“What? EMP? Not bloody likely. Nobody throws around the Hammer of God out here, except the Russians on that bloody ship, and it’s in the Pacific.”
“Just reading the screen sir. Says right here that—”
“Well enough,” Reeves cut him off. “Let me check the main data link to Brigade.”
Every unit was normally wirelessly linked into the FVS command vehicles in Kinlan’s Brigade HQ troop. When they had GPS, they could use that network to see the real-time position of each vehicle and tank on a digital map. Now, with GPS long gone, they had rigged the system out to home off the direction and range of a radio signal, almost like the Huff Duff receivers that would triangulate. Every vehicle had a broadcast code, and when it was picked up, multiple vehicles in the receiving unit would be able to triangulate and determine its approximate position. At the very least, Kinlan would be able to know that Reeves and his Squadron were X miles away on a given heading, and then that position could be represented on a digital map display. It wasn’t as accurate as the GPS finding, but it was still an order of magnitude better than the paper maps and reckoning that the locals worked with.
Reeves checked his link when their systems rebooted with the engine start, but he got a “NO SIGNAL” error message. He tapped the diagnostic button, watching his screen roll through some test displays until it finished with the reassuring message “PASS: NO FAULT DETECTED.”
“That’s odd,” he said. “No link into Brigade. Hey Gunny,” he called up to Corporal Holmes, who manned the 90mm main gun in the turret. “Everything squared away up there?”
“Locked and loaded, sir,” said Holmes. No problems here.”
Reeves normally took out one of the standard Dragon 300s with the Bushmaster 25mm gun, but this one was the up-gunned 90mm variant, and he decided to make it his ACV for this mission. The Corporal had aspiration of making Gunnery Sergeant when they shipped over, and so after a few months in the saddle here, Reeves waved his right hand in the sign of the cross over the man and pronounced him the new Gunnery Sergeant, saying no one would care a lick about his unsanctioned field promotion.
“Put the main turret on strike mode,” he said.
That would send a signal pulse back to Brigade indicating that his vehicle was armed and ready to fire. They would receive back one of three lights: green to authorize the action with a weapons free signal, yellow to hold fire and stand by, red for weapons tight. Reeves wanted to see if that signal link was operating.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked.
“The jury is still out, sir. I get no signal return, not even an indication the message was received.”
Reeves didn’t like that. What was going on with Brigade? His next option would be to break radio silence and send a direct call back to the HQ troop on the HF system. It would annoy one of the Colonels, but it was all encrypted and secure nonetheless. He reached for his communications handset, adjusting the fit of his earphones.
“1/12 Lancer to Brigade HQ. Lieutenant Reeves here. Please respond, over.”
There was no answer back, and after repeating his hail three times he began to get a bad feeling about the situation. What was going on here? Could there have been an incident he was not aware of, involving special weapons? Was Cobb right with that reading off the NBC module advising on the threat of EMP? Electromagnetic pulse was always a danger in the modern day warfighting environment. Their vehicles were hardened, but that was not entirely foolproof. He had seen his own vehicle flutter and die. Maybe they had the same trouble and were booting everything back up again. The weather wasn’t a factor, even though Tobruk was 375 miles east. Might they have a sand storm or some other complication affecting reception?
Reeves could think of no other reason why they should fail to get through, and the real reason was far from his awareness or comprehension—the presence of the USS Knight in Tobruk Bay.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Time was balancing her books. It was not able to simply pull the collective mass of Kinlan’s Brigade forward and put it back where it belonged. That was beyond her means. Things often fell backwards in time when a hole opened, almost as if a strange kind of Time Gravity was pulling at them—but they did not move forward easily in the same manner.
What Mother Time could do, however, was push open the door between the time of that detonation in 2021, and the place where that strange teardrop object sat shuddering and glowing in the wardroom of the USS Knight. Time could not pull Kinlan and his machines out, but it could let Satan through the hole that opened, made bigger and more yawning by the awesome explosive power of that 500 kiloton warhead.
If Reeves had been looking out the hatch and over his shoulder, he might have seen that strange flash on the horizon, almost too far off to be noticed. But there at Tobruk the effects were more than noticed—they were catastrophic. A warhead that size was 25 times bigger than Little Boy and Fat Man, the weapons that had flattened Hiroshima and leveled Nagasaki. It was the size of the US Ivy King bomb test, which was the most powerful pure fission bomb ever detonated, though even that was dwarfed by the Russian Tsar Bomba detonation, a different kind of bomb that was a hundred times more powerful.
The entire force of Satan’s wrath did not come through that gaping hole in time, but the penetration was enough to wreak havoc. Tobruk, as it was known to all those who had fought and passed through that port town, no longer existed. Kinlan’s Brigade, all cuddled up to the southern shore of Tobruk Bay to receive the fuel O’Connor had promised, no longer existed either. The lower jaw of the harbor was broken, smashed, and a massive crater formed from the very low altitude detonation. A sea of earth and sand was first blown in all directions, then the raging cascading waters of the sea swept into the crater, and beyond into the desert. When those waters receded, they clawed back thousands of tons of sand, shattered earth and debris, eventually covering all that remained.
The Brigade was now scattered about the floor of that undersea crater, the heavy armor of th
ose blasted Challenger IIs buried under tons of collapsing earth, silt, and soot. In places, the twisted barrel of an artillery piece jutted through the debris deep beneath the sea, its broken remains a testament to the folly of those who think to wield power. It was as if a star had fallen here, and no man survived its searing wrath.
Lieutenant Reeves would never again make contact with the HQ Troop. His single Dragon 300-L90 was now the sole remaining nerve center of the mighty 7th. It was ironic that the Brigade had made its storied entry into this war at the edge of the Sultan Apache oil production center in the deep desert to the south, and now it would make its unhappy departure because it was waiting right at the location of the main oil terminal at Tobruk in 2021.
They were all gone, the Mercians, the Highlanders, the Scots Dragoons. Reeves did not know it then, but he and his men were now the last of the Mohicans, he and the single battalion of Gurkhas that had shipped out to the Pacific long ago. He had that Dragon 300-L90, nine more Scimitars, three Warriors, a pair of FVS Tracked mortar carriers, three Challenger IIs, two fuel trucks, and one ammo truck.
Churchill’s magic wand was suddenly gone.
Part VIII
Ozymandias
“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies…
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Tigers East (Kirov Series Book 25) Page 18