Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  No, it was mobility that had won the Reich all the prizes in the opening phase of this war, and it was mobility—the doctrine of blitzkrieg—that would win this next battle.

  Himmler mopped at his greasy brow with a gray handkerchief. It had once been white. The accursed “drones” sent out by the mud woman Halabi made everything much more difficult, but the Soviets had been unusually helpful in providing creative camouflage, what they called maskirovka. They were acknowledged masters of the field. Himmler shook his head. He was tired, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and his mind had a tendency to wander. He forced his attention back onto the map table.

  Four divisions of Allied infantry had come ashore at Calais. Two American, one British, and one Canadian. It appeared as if another two airborne divisions had leapfrogged the diversionary assault, one by helicopter attack, to infest a number of villages outside the port city. A division of Fallschirmjäger had been tasked with defending the area and had given a good account of themselves—much better than their pathetic showing during Operation Sea Dragon. Six enemy divisions, equipped with some quite amazing new weaponry, had been held up for two days. But six divisions were less than 4 percent of Eisenhower’s order of battle.

  No, the führer was right. The main blow would fall on Normandy.

  Wouldn’t it?

  D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2156 HOURS.

  CALAIS.

  The small living room looked liked something out of a crack-house nightmare. Every stick of furniture was broken. Fires had been set everywhere but in the fireplace, which was full of human excrement. And everything was covered in a thick dusting of plaster brought down from the ceiling and walls by the seismic shock of the Allied assault.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Julia turned away and covered her ears. The shaped charge went off with a head-splitting roar, temporarily smothering the sounds of gunfire from the street. The hammering of three or four Colt carbines on burst kicked in while her ears were still ringing from the detonation, followed by the flat whump of an M320 grenade launcher. Another crash and someone cried out.

  “Satchel charge! Fire in the hole!”

  Another explosion shook the house, perhaps the whole row of terraced houses, reminding her of the time a mud brick house in Damascus had come down on top her just like this.

  “Go, go, go!”

  The fire team rushed forward and leapt through the hole they’d blown in the wall dividing this house from the next. A brief burst of gunfire, and then the familiar call.

  “Clear!”

  She swung around the door frame where she’d been sheltering, automatically checking to make sure the battery indicator for her Sonycam was still showing blue. A time hack in the corner of her heads-up display told her there was just over an hour’s worth of storage left on this stick. Her last.

  Moving toward the smoking fissure, Julia forced herself not to look at the spot where Gil Amundson had bled out on the floor, waiting for evac. They’d covered him with a rug.

  She bent and stepped quickly through into the next house, the muzzle of her own Colt sweeping the room as she did.

  A three-round burst sounded upstairs, immediately followed by the thud of something heavy hitting the floor. Plaster chips and fine white dust floated down, coating her goggles.

  “Clear!”

  A windowpane shattered and sprayed her face with shards of glass. She felt the sting of lacerated flesh, and the warmth of blood that was beginning to flow freely. Julia whipped off her glove and ran her fingers over the skin of her neck. Nothing cut there. Just more facial scars to add to her collection. She cleaned herself up with a couple of medicated wipes and a small tube of spray-on skin.

  “You okay, Ms. Duffy?”

  It was Steve Murphy, the trooper who was now an acting corporal, in charge of twelve men from two other remnant platoons. With Amundson dead, nobody from their original chalk was left.

  “I’m fine, Murph,” she said, wiping the last of the blood away. “Just making myself beautiful.”

  A pair of boots came thundering down the stairwell in the narrow, darkened hallway outside what looked like a dining room.

  “Alcones coming through!”

  Another cav trooper, one of Murphy’s strays, came back into the room, being careful to stay out of the line of sight provided by the broken window.

  “There was a kraut upstairs, Corporal. He was saving this for company.”

  Alcones flipped a potato masher grenade in the air and caught it with the same hand.

  Murphy nodded. “Good work. Let’s take five and wait for the others to catch up. This is the last house in the row, if I’m not mistaken. Anyone think different? Alcones, could you see anything from up there?”

  The trooper nodded. “We’re at the end of this block of houses, or what’s left of it. We got ruins on all three sides. The next stretch of buildings is a block to the west, maybe fifty yards or so to reach them.”

  Murphy risked a quick glance across the cobbled street. It was coming up on midnight, but there were hundreds of fires burning all over this part of Calais, and they lit the night. Besides Duffy and himself, there were four others in the room. The rest of the platoon had taken up defensive positions throughout the ruined house.

  “Okay. Ammo check?”

  Prufrock checked his pouches. “Two mags, two frags, Corporal.”

  “Three mags and the LAW,” Chalese reported from his covering position by a door.

  Juarez, by the window, had “one mag and fuck-all else.”

  Murphy pulled one of his own magazines and tossed it to Juarez. “That leaves me with three. What about you, Al? Ms. Duffy?”

  Alcones had two and some spare change.

  Duffy didn’t need to check. “I got three full reloads and four grenades. Plus an hour’s worth of video left, if anyone’s planning on doing something dramatic.”

  Murphy sighed and took off his helmet. “Ms. Duffy, can you tell where we are or where Reynolds’s squad is? They should be across the street by now. But I can’t see shit with these goggles.”

  He tapped his Starlites with a bloodied fist.

  She shrugged. “Dunno. Let’s find out.”

  If they’d had a workable tac net, she could have just brought up the drone coverage and located her own biosensors in the battlespace display. Duffy was a popular embed for a lot of reasons, partly because she had access to the Fleetnet interface at a 21C level. Unfortunately, that only worked when she was near enough to a relay node to make the link. They were out on their own here, and she hadn’t had a tickle from Fleetnet for—she checked the counter—nearly thirteen hours.

  Julia bent low and crept over to the window, pushing aside the torn lace curtain with the muzzle of her carbine. She was the only one with a powered helmet and integrated tac set. It wasn’t her original rig—that had been based on a standard-issue Advanced Combat Helmet, which looked too much like the Nazi “bucket” for comfort. Wearing something like that, she was just asking to get shot in the ass, so she’d paid an engineer from the Eighty-second big dollars to build her a new mount that fit on a contemporary M1 helmet.

  She removed the Sonycam from its base and, holding it so that only her hand was exposed, focused it on the cottage across the way. The smart sensors adjusted to the light, and she concentrated on a small pop-up window in her goggles. The nearest house looked deserted.

  Then a flash of light drew her attention, and she shifted the camera.

  “All-righty then. Two doors down to the northwest, your two o’clock, Murph. Looks like a coupla Fallschirmjäger. And second floor, center window, an MG-Forty-two. Got good intersecting fields of fire. They’ll chop us to dog meat if we go out there.”

  She shook her head.

  “Man, I wish Fleetnet was up. I could tell you where your other squad is. But as it is, I got nada.”

  “Reynolds is going to run into those guys,” said Alcones. “They’ve got to know we’re here, Murph. With all the racket we
made getting in here.”

  “The kraut by the door is slumped. I’d say he is either sleeping, wounded, or both,” Julia said.

  Murphy pondered his options for the moment. Julia had enough confidence in him to shut up and wait. She’d seen way more combat than him, but he’d proved himself a natural the last few days. The corporal put his helmet back on.

  “Okay. Alcones, Chalese, get yourselves upstairs. Prufrock, get back out into the hall, give the rest of the guys a heads-up. Tell them to get a bead on that house Ms. Duffy just tagged. On my mark we’re going to put a world of hurt on that joint. Half-’n’-halfs. High explosive and flechette. Got it?”

  They nodded and dispersed.

  “Ms. Duffy, could you keep an eye on things, make sure no friendlies get into that place before we hit ’er up?”

  “Sure thing,” Julia said, checking her batteries and memory blocks again.

  Murphy and the lost paratrooper from the 101st, Private Juarez, took up positions by the window, with Murphy loading a fat gray HEMP slug into his grenade launcher. Prufrock poked his head through the hole in the wall to indicate that the rest of the platoon was ready. Murphy nodded and poked his carbine through the shattered window.

  The M320 made a thumping sound. Julia followed the round as it crossed the forty or so meters until it sailed through the center of the open window. A flash followed by a crump signaled the start of the fight.

  “Open fire!” he yelled.

  A crash upstairs preceded long knives of glass falling past her into the street by half a second. Five dull thuds sent the 40mm grenades on their way. The underslung M320-type launchers some of them carried on their carbines weren’t a patch on the programmable 440s she was used to, but they still shot a variety of bomblets up to four hundred meters, with a muzzle velocity of seventy-six meters a second. The target building—no more than forty meters away—shuddered under the impact of the handheld artillery barrage.

  Five flashes and peals of thunder rolled into one as a dozen automatic rifles opened up.

  “Again!” Murphy called out.

  The volley was a little more ragged this time, each man firing independently. Five staggered whumps, five more detonations.

  Julia raised the camera to the window again, just before Corporal Murphy hoisted his rifle and squeezed off a three-round burst. A German soldier who had come running out of the house covered in blood and beating at flames on his arms was thrown back inside. Only the soles of his boots showed in the darkened doorway. They twitched for few seconds before going still. His burning uniform threw a guttering light on the shambles inside.

  “Okay. All right. Stand down,” the corporal yelled.

  “Well, that’s that, I figure,” Murphy went on a little more quietly, sliding down the wall to sit with his legs splayed out in front of him. “If Reynolds is alive, he should be able to get here now.”

  Juarez, the paratrooper, kept watch.

  Julia took a sip of chilled sports drink from the tube at her left shoulder. She was exhausted, too. They’d been fighting their way into Calais for two days, literally blasting a passage through the long rows of terraced houses. It was a murderous business, but marginally less dangerous than moving out in the open.

  Amundson had explained that they’d trained for this scenario back in England, using a village that had been specially constructed by the army. She wondered idly whether some genius had picked up the details in an old soldier’s memoir, or whether the marines back in the Zone had passed on the lessons learned from twenty years of urban warfare in the Middle East and South Asia.

  Didn’t matter, really. As long as the job got done.

  She paused the Sonycam, saving lattice space, and pulled an energy bar out of one of the many pockets on her matrix armor. Before they’d embarked, she’d stuffed about a dozen of the things wherever she could find space. It was wrapped in waxed paper rather than foil, but other than that it was exactly like the energy bars she’d chewed through when running half marathons back up in the twenty-first. She chuckled at the thought.

  “Something funny, Ms. Duffy?” Murphy asked.

  She broke off a piece of the chewy snack and waved it at Murphy and Juarez. “I’ve got shares in this company, that’s all,” she said. “Eat up, boys. Make me rich.”

  Her eyelids were twitching, the way they did when she went without sleep or stimulants for too long. There were uppers you could get, ripped off the formula for stims, but she didn’t like them much. The effects were crude, and the crash was brutal. With her inserts tapped dry she was better off going back to basics: sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and Hooah! bars.

  The uproar increased again outside. Two huge bangs shook a broken mirror off the wall above Murphy’s head, and it shattered against the floor. She could hear animalistic screams under the sound of a brief but savage firefight.

  “Heads up!” Murphy called out, hauling himself up from the litter on the floor.

  Julia powered up her Sonycam again and flicked off the safety of her carbine.

  They waited for some word from Reynolds’s guys on the far side of the street, to let them know who had won and who had lost that small, discrete encounter in a very long, strange war.

  D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2354 HOURS.

  BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

  There were more than a hundred individual unit markers on the Kriegsgebiet display, and every one them jumped when the führer pounded his fists down on the map table, hammering at Norway like a vengeful God.

  “I say it is a diversion, and so it must be!”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Mein Führer, but they are still a worthy target,” Zeitzler babbled. “Just imagine the blow to their morale if they were to be wiped out. They are weak, the democracies. They cannot absorb the damage as we can. If we were to release the Panzer Lehr, they would annihilate—”

  Hitler turned on him.

  “Enough! You will execute my orders, or you yourself will be executed. Do you understand?”

  Himmler thought the army chief might save them the cost of a bullet by falling dead with fright then, right in front of the assembled high command.

  The lights in the room faded out for a second, causing them to glance around nervously. But a quick check confirmed that no Allied bombs were falling. Most likely it was just some problem with the wiring, a common enough occurrence in these hastily constructed bunkers.

  As the exposed bulbs hanging over the map table flared again, Himmler regarded the situation in Calais with a dismal eye. He did not like to question the führer, and would never do so publicly, of course. But uniquely among the Nazi elite, he prided himself on being able to broach unpleasant subjects, even with Adolf Hitler.

  Indeed, it was he who had suggested the temporary cease-fire with the Bolsheviks, allowing them to secure themselves in the West. And it was he who had first admitted that the Allied air strikes on the rail lines leading to the Jewish processing facilities in Poland were appreciably slowing the Final Solution. He had led the counteroffensive against their enemies within, revealed by the electrical archives on the Dessaix. And he had been the first to recognize that, to preserve the forces they had moved into northern France, they would need to withdraw beyond the range of the Trident’s sensors and Churchill’s Bomber Command.

  Hitler had not enjoyed hearing any of it, but he had to be told. Was it the same now?

  The Reichsführer-SS examined the map table, comparing it with the televiewing screen. He wasn’t a military genius—he knew that only too well. But he would not shy from doing whatever was necessary. Around him the business of the war continued. The führer curtailed his diatribe against Zeitzler and started in on Göring, demanding to know why the Luftwaffe was making so little headway in cracking open the Allied air defense network.

  “They are in our Kriegsgebiet now, Herr Reichsmarschall. But where are your jet fighters? Where are the dive-bombers?”

  Himmler didn’t even bother attending to the fat fool’s reply. It w
ould be a waste of time. Göring had no operational control of the air force anymore. He was only here because he had survived the purges. Himmler shut him out now, along with the dozens of war room staffers who scurried about. Instead, he concentrated on the situation unfolding in front of them.

  The Abwehr reported that Allied preparations for a massive assault on Normandy continued unabated. A real army was gathering in the hinterland of Falmouth and Dartmouth, ready for the channel crossing. There would be no repeat of the Fortitude deception—not in this war. The Reich would not be caught unawares or misled into thinking the invasion would fall in one place, when all along it had been meant for another. The crushing weight of the greatest military machine the world had ever known was poised to fall on Eisenhower as soon as he commenced his main thrust.

  Still, Zeitzler had a point. To destroy the landing at Calais might prove a crippling blow to Allied morale.

  But then, the führer was right, as well. Thousands of Allied warplanes infested the sky above Calais and Dover, just waiting to pounce. To commit the best of their armored and heavy divisions into Calais meant feeding them to the sharks of the RAF and the USAAF.

  If only they could match the Allies’ surveillance cover. Unfortunately, while providence had delivered the Dessaix into their hands, only a handful of the crew had proved cooperative, and some of those had turned out to be saboteurs. As a result, they had not been able to fully exploit the ship’s capabilities, and now she was lost to them forever. Sunk by that criminal whore on the submarine Havoc.

  One could go mad thinking about the squandered opportunities. With just a few “surveillance drones,” and the men trained to use them, they could have logged every ship and aircraft movement out of southern England.

  Himmler sighed.

  The führer had calmed down and was standing at the table again, arms folded, chin on his chest as he bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet and pondered the diabolical strategic problems of the hour. The Allies must be kept from the Fatherland a little while longer. Soon the Reich would have its first atomic weapon, and there would be no more talk of unconditional surrender. Churchill and Roosevelt would be the ones groveling, begging for an accommodation.