Final Impact (17 page)

He stopped and faced her, hands on his hips, one eye almost closed as he scowled at her.

“I meant what I said before. I’ve read all of your major reports. Read them many times, looking for any insights into the fighting methods you people have brought upon us. Like I said to those men back there, I don’t give a
damn
what other people think of you, all I care about is what you can do for my army. And I think you can do us a great deal of good in our never-goddamn-ending fight with the enemy.”

“Me, General? Come on now. How can I help you against the Nazis—”

“Not the Nazis, Duffy. Montgomery, woman! Bernard…Law…Montgomery. Didn’t you read any biographies of him? Did you see that movie about Arnhem? I saw it. If that man spent as much time on his job as he did on his goddamn public image, we’d be at the gates of Berlin by now. Which doesn’t mean a thing to me, except that he’s been gobbling up resources that should have been going to
my
army, to
my
men. And you’re going to see to it that we get our fair share in the future.” Patton leaned forward until he dominated her personal space, forcing her to stand uncomfortably close to the brim of his steel helmet, lest he think he’d managed to bully her in some way.

“No, you ride out with me. You watch those black boys fight tonight, and you tell the whole goddamn world what a magnificent fucking job they did of pounding the führer’s supermen into mincemeat. And they will do a magnificent fucking job, believe you me—and
I
will make sure your story gets run in every newspaper in the free world.”

Julia hardly knew what to say.

“I think,” she replied at last, in a calm low voice, “that my editor can handle placing the story, and—”

Patton held up a hand, smiling like a wolf. “He probably can. But like I said,
I
will make sure of it.”

“You just make sure I get to see what I’m supposed to see,” she said, “and I’ll take care of the rest.”

His smile softened some, becoming marginally less carnivorous.

“All right then,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

He turned to the small group of officers who’d gathered around them.

“Come on, boys. Let’s go get Miss Duffy a story.”

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 2302 HOURS.
LUFTWAFFE AIRBASE, WIESBADEN.

The airfield was a “masked” facility: two runways painted to look as if they were pockmarked with bomb craters, along with a minimum of buildings aboveground, again looking more like damaged shells than working struc tures. It had been carefully “neglected” to discourage prying eyes, both human and electronic.

An hour before midnight it was empty of aircraft, except for a couple of burned-out 110s at the end of one runway. Then at the witching hour, it burst into activity. Lines of light briefly flared along the tarmac. Fuel trucks came roaring in from the surrounding countryside as ground crew spilled out of the “abandoned” buildings.

They all peered into the darkness of the eastern sky. After a few minutes somebody called out that he could see the first plane. Everyone stood ready.

They had practiced this at other airfields in Poland, far beyond the reach of even the
Trident
’s sensors. The lead elements of the attack wing would land soon, running on fumes, laden with antitank rockets and bombs. For the next ninety minutes they would work at a feverish pace, refueling a constant relay of ME 262 jet fighters as they massed for a strike on the spearhead of Patton’s Third Army in Belgium.

D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0042 HOURS.
BUNKER 13, BERLIN.

For the first time in weeks they had something to look forward to.

The führer was tense, but restrained. His voice had given out a few days earlier and he wasn’t able to scream at them anymore, which seemed to have forced him to calm down somewhat.

Himmler, for one, was glad. He had been worried about the führer’s mental state. Very few people in the Reich had access to the twenty-first-century archival materials he had seen. Almost none knew of Adolf Hitler’s physical and psychological collapse at the end of the war in
die Andere Zeit,
of his suicide with Eva Braun and the burning of their bodies as the Red Army pillaged the ruins of Berlin. Exposure to such knowledge was almost always fatal, so only a handful of men knew how the last days of Nazi Germany had unfolded.

And nobody but the
Reichsführer-SS
himself was aware of how an “alternative” Heinrich Himmler had been declared a traitor, for contacting Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to negotiate a surrender in the West. Anyone with any link to that particular data, discovered in the electronic files of the
Dessaix,
had gone into the ovens—even those who had hacked the files to introduce a “new” history, wherein Himmler died fighting in the streets of Berlin.

Sometimes the fear of discovery kept him awake for days at a time, until his flesh began to crawl with invisible insects and time itself would jump forward in shudders and leaps. Himmler could feel his head swimming, and a wave of nausea would come upon him as he tried to blink the hot grit of sleeplessness from his eyes.

But for the next hour, at least, he had something to think about other than desolation and despair. The Luftwaffe was about to carve a bloodied chunk out of Patton’s extended flank. The atmosphere in the map room was subdued, expectant. Nobody spoke above a murmur, perhaps in deference to the führer’s lost voice.

“The attack is aloft and proceeding to target,” a Luftwaffe colonel announced.

The führer, standing across the table from Himmler, nodded with evident satisfaction. He was in command of this operation, having taken it away from the drug-addled Göring. He had seen to the planning and execution himself. It guaranteed an exceptional level of commitment from all concerned when the supreme leader of the Third Reich suddenly turned up in person, or on the phone, demanding results.

In fact, it wasn’t a bad plan, Himmler mused.

Given the oppressive gaze of the
Trident
’s all-seeing sensors, the führer had ordered that most of the preparation take place in Poland, where even the mud woman Halabi could not see. A special air group of 130 advanced jet fighters, E-3 variants on the ME 262, had been given the highest priority. They each loaded out with forty-eighty of the deadly R4M rockets: forty with PB2 antitank warheads, the rest with PB3 antiaircraft shots. Their MK 108 cannons could rip open a Sherman tank with just two hits, and flying from Wiesbaden at top speed they could be over Patton’s forces within minutes, while remaining almost fully fueled.

The “masked” airfields were the key. They allowed the attack wing to strike before the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority could come into play. Yes, this strategy was likely to succeed, but what then? Even with a great rent torn in the flank of the Allied advance, how was it to be exploited? Every time they moved a force of any significance to engage the enemy, the skies quickly filled with thousands of aircraft—jet fighters, helicopters, medium bombers, Typhoons, Spitfires, Mustangs, and Skyraiders, all of them carrying some hellish mix of explosive cannons, antitank rockets, napalm, and “guided” bombs.

Himmler peered furtively over the rim of his wire-framed glasses and wondered again if the führer really knew what he was doing. The V3 bases were gone, destroyed by the damnable SAS, the scientists kidnapped and spirited away. The
Kriegsmarine
was almost nonexistent, its ships and submarines sunk, its leadership disgraced and executed for their treachery. The finest divisions of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS had been annihilated before they could get within 150 kilometers of the enemy. Now everything turned on the
Kernphysik
Program.

If they could get just one working bomb, it would be enough to force a stalemate.

Himmler desperately wanted to excuse himself from the room so that he might contact Heisenberg yet again, to harangue him about progress. He knew it was not going as well as it should. Every day it seemed that the Allies struck with an almost magical ability to damage the project. He often lay awake at night, feeling the great pressure that now rested squarely on his shoulders to deliver this weapon to the German people, and the people from annihilation. But he could not leave with the first shots in the führer’s personal attack about to be fired.

13

D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0045 HOURS.
HMS
TRIDENT,
NORTH SEA.

“Contacts hostile, Captain. Targets confirmed.”

“Designate them for USAAF intercept, Ms. Burchill. Slave to the Intelligence.”

“Aye, Captain. Targets designated. Intercept squadrons Thirty-five and Thirty-nine moving to engage. Posh has control.”

Captain Karen Halabi thanked her EWAC boss, Lieutenant Burchill, and watched as two squadrons of F-86 Sabers peeled out of the holding pattern they’d been describing over the channel and kicked in the thrust to head off the massed air attack forming up over Luxembourg. Lady Beckham, the
Trident
’s Combat Intelligence, had detected 130 E-type 262s as they entered the edge of her threat bubble, at exactly the point she’d been told to watch for them.

Such a timely warning smacked of a skinjob, one of the Germans from the original Multinational Force who’d been trained up and sent into the Reich as deep-cover agents. Halabi had no idea which of them it might be, but they were doing the good Lord’s work today.

The phrase brought her up, just momentarily. That was one of her husband’s favorite sayings. She’d picked it up hanging around Mike on her last bit of rec leave in the States. As a lapsed Muslim—well, not that lapsed, because she’d never been that observant—Karen Halabi tended to steer well clear of any biblical or Koranic allusions in her everyday speech. She found it put people on edge. Or it had back in the Old World.

But Mike was an unreconstructed Vatican III Catholic, and his private conversations were peppered with references to the good Lord, appeals to the good Lord, and occasionally, when things turned to poo, some gutter-mouthed Texan abuse of the good Lord.

Halabi briefly wondered where he was. But she had business in the here and now.

Being the primary command, control, and electronic intelligence node for the Allied invasion of Europe,
Trident
had a huge number of tasks delegated to the quantum processors of her Combat Intelligence. One such job was to guard against the raid now taking shape to the south of General Patton’s Third Army. British intelligence had sent through a watching brief ten days ago, ordering that the highest priority be given to early detection and interdiction.

Within an hour of the brief Captain Allan Leroy—the fighter command liaison officer stationed aboard
Trident
—knocked on her door, figuratively speaking, with an air tasking order for six squadrons of F-86 interceptors that would provide a standing combat air patrol. There would be two squadrons permanently on station at any given time.

Halabi was impressed. The Sabers were the latest models, just out of the States, packed with all sorts of design tweaks and mouthwatering mods like AT/AIM-7 Sparrows, first-generation heat seekers, and beam-riding semi-active air-to-air missiles, nose-mounted continuous-wave radar sets, and the new Pratt & Whitney JT3C axial flow turbojets. Those babies could deliver nearly five thousand kilos of thrust, making them almost as fast as the Skyhawks Mike was taking to the Marianas. You didn’t put that sort of asset on standby for ten days without a very good reason.

And the eight linked flat panels of her main battlespace display showed her the reason. A hundred and thirty of them, to be exact.

One entire monitor had been given over to the feed from the Nemesis arrays that were focused on the airspace around the approaching Luftwaffe raid. Smaller pop-up windows ran enhanced imagery of the USAAF response and the disposition of ground forces in Belgium. As the
Trident
’s CI vectored the American jets onto their targets, Halabi wrestled with the irrational feeling that she had become something akin to a spectator in the Ladies’ Stand at the cricket.

Save for a few suicidal air attacks, the
Trident
hadn’t directly engaged an enemy combatant in nearly a year. Having fired off the last of her offensive weapons to repel the German’s attempted invasion in 1942, she’d been “reduced” to playing the role of a floating radar station and comm hub. Her ship had been retrofitted with “new” antiship missiles, and a very useful Phalanx Close-In Weapons system to replace her Metal Storm pods and laser packs, but she was also surrounded by the equivalent of her own battle group.

Two Royal Navy carriers and a small armada of battle cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers attended her every move. A squadron of RAF Sabers maintained a permanent combat air patrol seven thousand meters overhead.

Everyone understood how important the
Trident
remained—not least the Germans, who had expended enormous numbers of men and machines trying to sink her. But Halabi and her largely unchanged 21C crew couldn’t help but be stung by the chiding they took from the “real navy,” as the ’temps sometimes referred to themselves.

And here they were again, not really fighting, just directing traffic.

“Interceptors closing to range, Captain.”

“First missile locks.”

“Multiple targets acquired.”

“All hostiles now locked.”

“Interceptors launching.”

Halabi accepted a mug of Earl Grey tea from a young seaman, one of the few ’temps who’d come on board to perform nontechnical duties. “Thank you, Beazley,” she said.

On the main battlespace display nearly two hundred white lines reached out from the blue triangles denoting the USAAF interceptors. They sped away from the launch point, tracking swiftly across the screen toward the red triangles of the Luftwaffe’s attack group. On screen the German 262s suddenly tried to scatter, their tight formation breaking up into a chaotic swarm of diving, twisting, climbing planes.

“CI reports the Germans have deployed chaff and flares, Captain.”

“Thank you, Ms. Burchill. Are they proving significant?”

“Posh calculates that about forty percent of the USAAF salvo appears to have been drawn off-target, ma’am.”

But small white circles started to bloom on the monitor as the other missiles, which had not been fooled by the German countermeasures, began to strike home. Just one or two at first, then five or six all at once. Dozens of tiny pixilated flashes marked where a missile had plowed into an exhaust vent, wing, or fuselage and detonated, punching the aircraft out of the sky and its pilot out of existence.

“CI confirms forty-eight kills, Captain.”

“Second launch detected.”

Dozens more missiles sped away from the blue triangles. Posh counted sixty-eight in total. Again the
Trident
’s Nemesis arrays detected the Luftwaffe pilots’ attempts to decoy the AT/AIM-7s, and again they were successful in about 40 percent of cases. But another twenty-six German jets were raked from the sky.

“Third salvo ma’am.”

“Thank you, Burchill.”

All but five of the surviving attackers were engulfed and destroyed. Halabi watched as the Sabers continued on the same heading for half a minute, suddenly breaking formation as they came within cannon range of the Germans. Less than a minute later every last attacking plane had been scythed down.

The Sabers broke off and made for their base back in northern France, while another two squadrons took up the holding pattern in their place, guarding against any follow-up attack. Halabi sipped at her tea.

“Very good work, everyone,” she said. “Mr. Leroy, my compliments to fighter command.”

“You betcha, ma’am. That was some fine shootin’.”

Halabi nodded quietly, wondering again how Leroy, a Texan just like her husband, had ended up in fighter command, an RAF show. She’d never had a chance to ask him. On most days, anywhere between thirty and forty ’temp liaison staffers were aboard. They came, they went. She’d given up trying to keep them straight in her head.

“Mr. McTeale,” she said to her executive officer, “I’ll be on the bridge for half an hour, then I’m turning in. Keep my chair warm here, would you?”

“Very good, ma’am,” the XO answered in his warm Scottish brogue. “And congratulations to you, too, Captain. You saved a lot of mams from losing their bairns tonight.”

“Traffic control, Mr. McTeale. It’s just traffic control.”

D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0231 HOURS.
THIRD ARMY MOBILE COMMAND, BELGIUM.

“That must have been it.”

Patton’s intelligence boss scanned the southern skies with a pair of Starlite binoculars, but there wasn’t much to be seen. The weather had closed in, and there was no telling whether the faint flashes came from the air battle Julia had just been told about, or from the sheet lightning that strobe-lit the countryside at irregular intervals.

“Damn shame,” Patton said as he looked longingly at his radar-controlled triple-A and SAM half-tracks. “I was looking forward to that.”

Julia Duffy rolled her eyes in the dark. These guys took their whole alpha-male routine way too seriously. The last thing you wanted was a bunch of German fast movers getting close enough for you to see the fireworks when they got swatted. They moved
so
fast, there was always a good chance some were going to slip through. She’d happily give that a miss.

For all of the combat she’d covered with the
Times
after the Murdoch takeover back up in twenty-one, she had never seen anything to match the world-ending violence of a big armor clash. Most of her work uptime had seen her embedded with small units of ground fighters, working jungle or mud brick environments in Asia and the Middle East. On those occasions when she had covered large-scale land battles, they tended to be very one-sided affairs, like the battles of Damascus or Aden, with American or British armored divisions rolling over the burned-out wrecks of late-Soviet-era antique tanks.

Patton was using air supremacy to make his campaign as one-sided as possible, but without an Eastern Front to fight on, the Germans had well over a hundred divisions to block the Allied path to Berlin, and they were learning not to mass their armor and artillery out in the open where it could be hammered from above.

Patton leaned over the hood of his jeep, peering at a map covered in a dense tangle of red and blue lines. They’d pulled up on a ridge overlooking the site of a fierce struggle that had taken place an hour earlier between the Black Panthers and what had turned out to be an SS armored regiment.

“Krauts aren’t gathering like they used to,” he grunted. “They’ve broken up into these much smaller task groups, some of them with organic air support. It’s a lot harder to beat them this way, and a lot less neat.”

Julia looked up from the map and scanned the field that stretched away about a kilometer below them. There certainly wasn’t anything neat in the aftermath of the battle down there. With her powered goggles she could make out hundreds of torn-up bodies and shattered, burning vehicles. She was glad to have witnessed it from a distance. When the firefight had reached its insane peak, it had looked like some kind of satanic foundry, a place where nothing was created, only destroyed. The crescendo of gunfire, rockets, and clashing armor had only been drowned out by the ear-shredding scream of low-flying aircraft as they ripped overhead to loose whole racks of missiles and hundreds of cannon shells.

Cobra gunships had thudded in and out of the holocaust, hosing down concentrations of German soldiers with miniguns and rocket fire, sometimes dueling with the few Luftwaffe choppers that dared to show up.

Through it all, however, Patton tore across the countryside in his jeep, barking orders at his staff, yelling at radio operators, slapping his hands down on maps, and ordering units to reinforce this battalion or that regiment. In the darkness and violence, he alone seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Julia did what she could to capture the essence of what was happening where the two armies met, but she kept returning to the figure of the tall, raspy-voiced general consigning some of his men to their doom, and others to glory.

“Do you want to go see your black boys now, Miss Duffy?”

“Sorry?”

She jumped, then looked up, jolted out of her reverie.

Patton pointed down at the field where she had been staring.

“The Seven Sixty-first broke through down there, and they’ve pushed on to Oostakker, with the Ninetieth Infantry. Those boys made the breach and I’m sending my army through it. I’m proud of ’em, Miss Duffy, they fought like fucking champions. So, you want to follow ’em?”

“Okay,” Julia said. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

Patton’s command post consisted of four jeeps and a light armored vehicle that looked like it might have come off the
Kandahar.
But according to Chris Prather, it was only six months old. She’d taken a peek inside, and the electronics were all contemporary.

The small group mounted up, and the jeeps and the LAV bounced down the hillside, through smashed dry-stone walls and over deep furrows dug into the soil by the tracks of the Easy Eight Shermans. Patton’s driver, Sergeant Mims, had a bulky pair of night vision goggles, but he’d pushed them up out of the way. Burning tanks and APCs provided more than enough light to navigate the slope. Even Julia took off her Oakleys. They were capable of dealing with the hot spots, but like Mims she found she could see just fine with her own eyes.

As hardened as she was, it was still an overwhelming experience. She wondered how anyone could have survived the maelstrom of high explosives and speeding metal. Dust-off choppers were carrying the first loads of wounded away as medics ran back and forth, providing first aid. The heat coming from so many burning vehicles made the skin on her face feel tight. The screams of the dying sounded no different from what she’d heard before, but Julia had never seen a general hop down from his transport, as Patton did at that moment.

He walked over to a litter, kneeling down and, she was certain, kissing the forehead of the soldier who lay there. Patton’s body blocked her view, so she couldn’t tell whether the man was a black tanker or a white infantryman, and in the end, what did it matter? With her camera she took in as much as she could of the ruined, burning tanks and the smashed-up bodies of the men who’d fought in them, even though she knew that much of it would be censored outside the Zone. The ’temps were still very touchy about showing their own casualties.