Final Impact (6 page)

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 would 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.

Then, with the democracies checkmated in the West, they could turn their attention back to Stalin.

The map table did not extend beyond Poland, yet the vast steppes and the brooding Communist giant were never far from anyone’s mind. The cease-fire with Moscow was still holding, but it was beyond argument that the Red Army was using this time to prepare its defenses against another Wehrmacht attack, at the same time that the two states “cooperated” on a number of technical projects—all in the name of facing the “common enemy.” It was all horseshit, but the pause in hostilities suited them both.

Or rather, Stalin
thought
it suited him.

When the atomic warheads were finally delivered, the Slavic buffoon would be made to realize just how wrong he had been.

4

D-DAY + 5. 8 MAY 1944. 1833 HOURS.
PARIS.

Brasch had read somewhere that those who can eat well, and those who cannot, exist at all times on opposite sides of a gulf that can never be crossed.

It had been more than three and a half years since pastries had been legally sold in Paris, and about the same interval since fish, meat, chocolates, tobacco, and wine had been rationed almost out of existence. Nonetheless, sitting by one of the large windows in Maxim’s Le Bar Imperial, Major General Paul Brasch found himself adrift on the odors of fine French cuisine. The Parisians in the street below might have been getting by on starvation rations, but when
Reichsmarschall
Göring was in town looting the art treasures of the Republic, he loved to dine at Maxim’s, and so the wartime restrictions did not bite as heavily here.

Brasch nursed his Kir Royale and wondered whether or not he would ever have set foot in this place—or any like it—had it not been for the war.

Not likely, he mused. And truthfully, it wasn’t the war that had delivered him to this stool at the end of a dark wooden bar. No, it was the Emergence. Without the miracle of the time travelers’ arrival, he would probably be a frozen corpse somewhere in Russia by now. Instead he sipped at a cocktail, enjoyed the sour look on the face of his latest bodyguard,
Hauptsturmführer
Neumann, and wondered whether his data package would arrive before his dinner guest.

He would never know, really. The encryption software protecting his communications stripped off any identifying tags such as datelines. He alone would be able to read the file, and then for only ten minutes, before it disappeared from history altogether. And of course, he wouldn’t be cracking open his latest instructions from the British over a late supper with General Oberg, the SS commander in Paris.

Dining with human filth like Oberg was a necessary sacrifice. Brasch was a very privileged Nazi nowadays, one of the trusted few. He had even been invited to share a table at the Palais Luxembourg with the morphine-addled Göring, resplendent in his white
Reichsmarschall
uniform, encrusted with jewels and medals over which the fat criminal had vomited during the dessert course. The engineer had long ago learned to control the sensation of his balls crawling up into his belly, his flesh seeming to swarm with lice, whenever he mixed with the likes of Göring and Oberg. Since he had received word that his wife and son had safely reached Canada, he had even begun to
revel
in the double life forced on him as the price of their deliverance. It was a wonderful thing, mixing with these pigs, conniving in their downfall, and all the time knowing that the only people in the world he cared about were beyond their reach.

Indeed, as far as anyone in the Third Reich was concerned, Willie Brasch and little Manfred had been killed in a British bombing raid in November 1942. A tragic loss for a hero who had already given so much to the cause, and an explanation—as if any were needed—for his fanatical devotion to duty.

“Ah! So good to see a smiling face at last. We can always depend on you, Herr General.”

Brasch’s smile only grew wider as he turned on his bar stool and stood to salute
Oberstgruppenführer
Karl Oberg, the man who would probably set Paris aflame in a couple of weeks to deny its liberation by the Americans. The room was crowded, and so thick with cigarette and cigar smoke that the patrons in the farthest corners were almost obscured. Oberg stood out, though. Even the
Wehrmacht
officers gave him a wide berth.

“Inventing some new V-weapon while you wait for dinner, I imagine,” Oberg said. He resembled nothing so much as a squashed, fattened caricature of Heinrich Himmler. He had been a fruit seller before joining the party and the SS, and he was the embodiment of all the poisonous irony inherent to the term
master race.
Nevertheless, the smile never left Brasch’s face as he opened his mouth to reply.

“No! No, don’t tell me,” Oberg interrupted, waving a hand. “I understand well that you cannot discuss such things.”

In fact, Brasch was imagining what it would feel like to take Oberg’s close-cropped porcine head in his hands and twist it so violently that the spinal cord shattered instantly. How many of the people in this bar would applaud?

Some, but not all. Neumann there would probably put a bullet into his head before Oberg hit the floor. And of the handful of Frenchmen and women who were taking an aperitif in the baroque splendor of the Imperial, how many would be pleased, and how many horrified?

It was impossible to say. Only the most significant collaborators were given entrée to these rarefied circles, and with the invasion under way, only they would care to be seen with the Germans.

Even so, you couldn’t trust the waiters, or the prostitutes, or even the fascist leaders of the French Popular Party. Any of them might be secretly working for the Resistance. Dozens of collaborators and their German overlords had been killed in the last few weeks. Brasch himself was a target of great value, because of his role in the Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research, so the SS had assigned Neumann to protect him out of a genuine fear that he might be lost to such an attack.

Yet none of this meant anything to Brasch—he had numbered himself among the dead back when he served on the Eastern Front. In truth, his secret life, and the knowledge of his family’s escape, made each day a gift from above.

“Actually, Herr General,” he said, pumping Oberg’s arm in a firm two-handed grip, “you are entirely correct. You should consider a career in counterintelligence. Clearly you can see right through me.”

“Of course, of course!” the SS commander replied. “So we must talk our way around such things, over dinner.

“I understand you are leaving for Berlin tomorrow,” he continued. “I just wanted to thank you for all of the help you have given my staff while you were here and, if I might impose upon you, to pass along a personal note to the
Reichsführer.
”

Brasch clicked his heels. “Of course, Herr General. I shall be seeing
Reichsführer
Himmler almost as soon as I return. I shall make certain he gets your letter.”

He pocketed the slim envelope in his jacket, next to the flexipad that still waited for the signal from Müller.

He had less than an hour to live. The blood leaking into his shoes made a squelching noise as he dragged himself up the street.

There was no pain, thanks to an analgesic flush from his spinal syrettes, but Müller knew that the knives had struck deeply. As much blood as had flowed out of him to soak his clothes, he was losing even more to the internal bleeding that would surely end his life.

A lamppost loomed, the glow of its light a soft sphere in the summer night, tempting him to stop for just a little while. But he pressed on. If he gave up now, even for a short rest, there was no guarantee he’d be able to get moving again.

The three Frenchmen who had set upon him earlier had meant business. Whether they were Resistance fighters or simply street toughs did not matter. It had been a short, brutal encounter. He hadn’t hesitated to defend himself when they came at him out of the dark alleyway. Many people would have paused, and died on the spot, but when the oldest, most primitive parts of his brain began screaming at him that he was in danger, Müller
acted.
His fighting knife had appeared in his hand instantaneously, and without conscious thought he had decided which of the three was to die first, even before they had closed the short distance between them.

If they were Resistance, there was no point trying to explain that they were all working toward the same end. He’d dispatched two of them with his knife and killed the third with an open-handed strike to the throat that had crushed the man’s larynx. However, he wasn’t fast enough. At least two of the stab wounds he’d suffered felt as if they had cut something deep and vital. As he fled the scene, gray space bloomed at the edge of his vision, and cold chills racked his upper body with increasing violence despite the warmth of the evening.

Müller could not be certain that he would get far enough to establish a point-to-point link with Brasch’s flexipad. He stopped in the doorway of a boarded-up tailor shop, a Jewish business, and automated the contact routines, just in case. He might not make it all the way to the dispatch point, but as long as the engineer passed within seven hundred meters the link would set itself up.

Drawing breath felt like hauling a great weight up into himself at the end of a long rope. His feet dragged, and more than once they threatened to become tangled up with each other.

People were beginning to stare.

He tried to calculate the distance he had left to travel. Maybe another four hundred meters. Supercoagulants gathered at the site of his wounds, to slow the loss of blood. Another flush of stim coursed into his veins, pushing him on and clearing some of the gray from his vision.

But blood was beginning to show through the coat he had taken from the body of the man he’d killed with the blow to the throat. As the stain spread, and his discomfort became obvious, the reactions of those passing by became more pronounced. In short, they avoided him. There were many Parisians about, but none approached him to help, for which he was grateful. The last thing he needed right now was some Gallic busybody complicating matters further.

Actually, the
last
thing he needed was for another German to do so, but as he staggered down the way, that was exactly what occurred.

Someone hurried across the street toward him. “Hey! Wait there. I’ll help you.”

The figure swam in and out of focus, but the black uniform of an SS officer was unmistakable.

Fuck it.

Müller cursed his bad luck. He was wearing a civilian jacket over his gore-stained Luftwaffe captain’s uniform. In his breast pocket was a British flexipad, and he was heading toward the most valuable spy the Allies had in Nazi Germany. This was not going to end well.

“Resistance,” he coughed as the SS man ran up and grabbed his arms to steady him. He had been very close to toppling over.

“What happened?” the man demanded. Müller recognized him as a
Hauptsturmführer.
A captain. A definite buffer existed around them now, a circle about twenty meters in diameter into which none of the locals would dare step. They all found some reason to cross to the other side of the street.

“Resistance,” Müller repeated. “Three of them. Back at the Rue la Bruyere. I killed them.”

“I don’t doubt it,” his would-be savior said, supporting most of his weight. “We must get you to an aid station. Quickly, come this way.”

The man began to force Müller back the way he had just come. There was an aid station two blocks down. He attempted to resist, but his helper was too strong.

“No, this way,
Herr Kapitän,
” he insisted. “You are in shock. You need to come with me—let me carry you.”

Finally Müller allowed himself to fall over the other’s shoulder, his arm around the man’s neck. He let his body go limp, allowing his full weight to burden the SS officer, who grunted a little with the effort. Müller let himself be carried away from his objective, acting in character, cursing the Resistance, vowing revenge, demanding that that SS hunt down those who were responsible.

“But you said you killed them,” his rescuer grunted.

A wet, wounded chuckle bubbled up out of Müller’s throat. “So I did.”

Then he drove his fighting knife deep into the man’s sternum, twisting and ripping up and out. The screech of pain became confused with the cries of onlookers, who could not believe what they were seeing as Müller suddenly locked up his victim’s head, using the arm he had draped over the shoulders, before slitting his throat from ear to ear. The man’s screams were cut off as Müller severed the windpipe. The body dropped with a sick
thud
as the head hit the pavement.

Müller’s world tilted then, and threatened to fall out from under him. He let his momentum carry him into the road, where he stopped a velo-taxi, one of the faintly ridiculous three-wheeled, pedal-powered cabs that had taken over the city during the Occupation. The driver attempted to swerve around him, but a shot from Müller’s pistol pulled him up.

A shrill whistle sounded in the distance, and he thought he could hear hobnailed boots hammering toward him. He half lunged, half fell into the passenger’s seat.

“Just get me up the road,” he croaked in his passable French.

“B-but…” The driver tried to stammer out some excuse, but a wave of the pistol set him to his job. They lurched away just as rifle fire cracked past them.

“They will kill me,” the driver protested.

“No,
I
will kill you if you don’t hurry up. Just to the next corner, and then you can get out. I’ll shoot you in the ass if you like, to prove that you were hijacked.”

“To prove I was
what
?”

“Just fucking pedal.”

More bullets whistled past, some of them sparking off the cobblestones and shattering shop windows, sending the native Parisians scurrying for cover. More bullets chewed great chunks out of the little wooden passenger’s cabin. Müller painfully forced himself to twist around in the seat.

About two hundred meters back a detachment of German soldiers had outrun a couple of gendarmes and were taking aim.

They weren’t going to make it.

Crack!

The top of the velo-taxi driver’s head flew off in a fantail of blood and gray matter. Immediately they decelerated, and Müller allowed himself to roll out of the cab onto the hard stone roadway. A bullet struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder, knocking him forward. He managed to scramble a few more meters as he hauled out the flexipad.

No signal lock.

Crack!

An enormous iron fist slammed into him, bringing darkness.

He came to, expecting to find himself in a Gestapo cell.

But he was still in Paris, on the street. The pedicab driver’s body was just a few feet away, gushing blood like a ruptured pipeline. A squad of German infantry had surrounded him, their guns leveled at his head.