Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  It was still night when they left; at dawn, they swept down on the invasion fleet being readied at Cherbourg.

  They had caught the Germans napping, and in short order the landing craft, the stockpiles of ammunition and spare parts, the rank on rank of Tiger tanks parked and waiting for the landings Hitler had planned for September were in flames.

  Britain was saved—for now. And with the P-100s, though she would continue to take a pounding, she could fight on. Moreover, there was an excellent chance that Russia would come in on the British side the next spring, for Stalin had finally realized that his deal with Hitler couldn’t last.

  Jaffy slowed down, turned up an old gravel driveway, and stopped the engine. “Patrol ahead,” he called back to us. “They’ve got headlights on—I think it’s just routine.”

  We sat with our hands on our guns and watched two German-built squad cars roll by, their machine guns hanging idle. We waited a long time there in the icy dark of the mountains, and a great field of stars danced above us. There was no sound at all when Jaffy restarted the motor.

  “Keep going, Al,” somebody said.

  Spring held more surprises. President Lindbergh, too late and too little, offered aid to Britain, and not only brought the American Army home, but warned Cedillo to stay out of the European war.

  But Congress was in a different mood, and many of them seemed to feel that if the Consortium was arming the British, Congress did not need to do anything for the USA. Lindbergh couldn’t even get the weapons expended in Mexico replaced.

  Hider popped three surprises, one after another, in the summer of 1941. Under persuasion of his agents, and with the offer of German help, Franco joined the Axis, swept down the Tagus Valley into Portugal, and took Lisbon in a week; a week after that, Nazi guns were pounding Gibraltar, and the guided V-1 had closed off the western entrance to the Mediterranean.

  Simultaneously, the Turkish government was overthrown by a Nazi-backed coup, and suddenly Greece and Yugoslavia were under a two-front attack. It was over quickly; in less than a month Hitler’s control extended from the Atlantic to Iran, and in a short time after that the attack was under way to close Suez. Unable to supply Egypt and Palestine by any means except around the Cape, Britain was forced to evacuate forces to India and Australia, and by July, Hitler had gathered up everything in the region, including the Persian Gulf.

  The drive into Russia was nothing like what happened in our timeline. The attack was announced by Stalin’s assassination; it was only six weeks till Moscow fell, and in the peace treaty the USSR gave up the Ukraine and the Baltics to Hitler. The German troops were not merely home, as they had been promised, by Christmas; they were home before the leaves turned.

  President Lindbergh must have been sincere, and not a German agent, for he moved more and more to actively resist the Nazi onslaught. Al’s poem called him that “poor, poor, well-meaning man, not a good mind, not even a good heart, but not bad, not evil, not yet captured, driven mad hysterical naked by the drum drum drum of evil.” He proclaimed the Lindbergh Doctrine: The United States would fight to prevent any of the Atlantic islands, from which our shipping and Britain’s lifeline might be threatened, from falling into German hands.

  On November 8, 1941, German parachute and glider troops landed in force on the Azores, in a complete and total violation of the Lindbergh Doctrine. They were under command of Air Marshal Manfred von Richthofen; I was a little startled, since in my own timeline the “Red Baron” had been shot down and killed in WWI. Clearly the Closers had been working pretty hard for a long time in this timeline.

  The Battle of the Azores is about half of Al’s poem; he goes ship by ship, blow by blow. The story is grim from one end to the other; Admiral King’s Atlantic Fleet was far from ready, but they linked up with the troop ships and set out anyway. It was clear the force was too small—King had only three operational carriers, all carrying planes that were worse than obsolete—and so Admiral Kimmel and the Pacific Fleet were supposed to run around to link up with him, through Panama.

  But as the fleets were readying, a shipload full of fertilizer blew up in the Canal, and it was out of action. German or Japanese actions were suspected, but it hardly mattered now—Lindbergh had already declared war. And in any case, the Pacific Carrier Battle Group would have had to round the Horn—the ships were too big for the locks.

  The battle plan was foolish but politically necessary. Both King and Kimmel protested, but without effect—King was to sit out in the Atlantic, at the outer edge of where the P-100s could guard his fleet, and wait for Kimmel; Kimmel was going to have to race ten thousand miles as fast as his fleet could go.

  But another player was about to enter the war. Argentina had secret agreements with Hitler. Just off the Falkland Islands—part of Juan Perón’s reward for stabbing los norteamericanos in the back was to get those islands—German JU-88s, effectively outdated but more than able to carry the new air-launched guided V-1, jumped Kimmel’s fleet. In less than ten minutes on that dark night, the carriers Enterprise and Hornet were ablaze, and before the remainder of the fleet escaped north they had to run a gauntlet of more than two thousand miles of air attacks, covered only by planes from the Lexington.

  Brazil, already technically at war with the Axis because of the invasion of her mother country, Portugal, struck south into Argentina; it was a measure of how desperate the Allies were that the addition of Brazil seemed like a big gain. It was immediately counterbalanced by the entry of Vichy France on the German side.

  As Kimmel desperately raced north to join King, word reached Washington of the terrible losses at the Falklands, and it became clear that Japan was about to attack Hawaii. President Lindbergh recalled the Pacific Fleet to San Diego and ordered King to press the attack without waiting for Kimmel.

  There is no doubt the Germans were reading American codes. As the Atlantic Fleet pressed into striking range, now out of reach of all but the briefest support from jets out of Britain, JU-88s and heavy bombers closed in, and, in a hail of V-1 cruise missiles, the carriers went up like tinder. Some of them launched planes; some of the planes got through, and a few of the German allied ships, from the Italian and French navies, took some damage. But it was the end of American naval power in the Atlantic. Kimmel and the survivors of the fleet that had run the gauntlet of the Falklands turned back and put in at Rio, losing three destroyers and a cruiser to the new high-speed efficient U-boats on the way. Al’s poem ended with Kimmel’s fleet limping into Rio, and with the ominous note that worse things were brewing far to the north.

  The truck pulled over to the side and all but skidded to a stop; Jaffy was out and running around in a second, and we all jumped out to join him before we quite knew what was up.

  “Something moving without lights on the road up ahead,” he breathed to us. “No place near here to pull the truck over out of sight, so we’re going to have to tough it out.”

  It was very quiet, but in those mountains sometimes you can see things a long way off. We sat and waited, and finally the low thunder of engines came to us. “Heavy haulers,” Al breathed, “and a lot of them. I’d say we’re going to see a parade …”

  A few minutes later they came into sight. They were moving a lot faster than I would have dared, right down the centerline, big heavy tractor-trailer rigs each carrying a tank or an APC. I counted twenty-eight of them.

  We waited a long time, and then Al said, “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of the city to go back to. Somebody is really after Mark, or us, or something.”

  “Roll on?” Jaffy asked.

  “Roll on,” Al said. “Nowhere behind us to go, and I’m not optimistic about in front of us. But I know there’s nowhere behind us to go.”

  Al’s second poem was called “The Gathering of Nations,” and it was the story of how the Free Zone got put together. I never got much of a chance to look into the history between when “The Fall” ended and “The Gathering of Nations” began, so there were gaps i
n it. Briefly, it told how Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery dueled with Rommel in the Shenandoah Valley, after the “great ships of ice in the Chesapeake.”

  That much, I found out, referred to the secret German weapon no one had any idea of. They had had the fiords of Norway, secure against prying eyes, for long enough to build two dozen immense artificial rafts of ice, big as small islands, onto which they moved whole air and submarine bases and divisions. When the ice islands grounded in the Chesapeake early the next spring, they carried most of the Wehrmacht.

  There was another reference to Patton and the American Expeditionary Force coming home to Boston on the Royal Navy—and to the RAF coming with them—but exactly what happened, I never learned.

  At any rate, “The Gathering of Nations” began with Patton’s Army driven west out of Gettysburg, toward Pittsburgh, and Montgomery retreating northeast toward New York. What was in the poem after that might fill many volumes—Bradley’s defense of the bridges at Wheeling, which allowed Patton’s forces to escape in their epic retreat, which was eventually to take them to San Diego, to their rendezvous with Nimitz, and to the escape across the Pacific to Auckland. That was exciting enough—but the Royal Navy had gone them several better, picking up Montgomery’s army from Long Island and the New Jersey shore, running past the German strongholds in Delaware and Maryland. (Al’s poem has a passage that brings tears to my eyes when I think about it, describing the grim decision of fifty P-100 pilots to hold the air above the Royal Navy long enough for them to get through, grabbing Marines and some of the American Navy from Guantanamo Bay, skirting down the South American coast with dozens of tankers of Texas fuel oil that had managed to sneak unescorted out of Galveston …)

  The rendezvous with Kimmel and the attack, with the Brazilians, that led to the revenge sacking and burning of Buenos Aires—and the long voyage to Perth, Australia, straight across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans … all that was in there. There were moments of comedy in it as well; the meeting of Patton and Montgomery, again, in Sydney, seemed to make everyone chuckle. (“Of course you got here sooner, Monty, you rode the whole way!”)

  A few more verses sketched in references to other groups and outfits that had found their way there. Soviet divisions that fled over the Khyber Pass and slugged their way across Japanese-occupied India rather than be disbanded as ordered. General Chennault’s Flying Tigers. MacArthur and much of the Philippines garrison. Anyone who could find a ship and get clear of the Axis navies seemed to find a way there, often against terrible odds.

  I’m no judge of poetry, but from the way people responded to it, I’d say that the English-speaking nations had gained their equivalent of the Odyssey or the Aeneid.

  The ending, with the litany of all the forces that were now in the Free Zone—everything from the First Marines to the French Foreign Legion to the Reconstituted Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Irgun—left me feeling better than I had in days. I was in with good people. If courage and goodwill could bring you victory, it ought to work for these people if it worked for anyone.

  There was a long silence afterward; by now we were winding down from the crest of the mountains that run like a stegosaurus spine up the peninsula. The truck thudded and shuddered regularly, and once the box of dynamite actually rose a bit under me; people were sometimes thrown together in heaps. Jaffy was being careful, but the road wasn’t much more than a track anymore, and there was no light at all among the trees and in the deeper ravines; he had a couple of tiny carbide lights with red glass in front of them burning on the hood, but whenever he got to a place where he could drive by moonlight, he would stop, run around, and blow them out.

  At last the winding mountain road gave way to something a little smoother and easier to handle, and then to something that was merely a badly maintained country road. We were coming up on Half Moon Bay.

  Jaffy knew a couple of ways to sneak around the town itself; Al, next to me, whispered that the town had sort of a vogue among the younger elite of the West Coast German expat community, because they had all gone crazy with surfing, and this place was sufficiently isolated so that they could slip off and do some not-quite-proper sex on the side. People who worked in the guest houses in the little, turn-of-the-century port town had become invaluable to the underground, because they could pick up so much blackmail material for the scandal files.

  Half Moon Bay was also a great place to bring a sub in close to shore; they could paddle out in rubber rafts without much problem, because though the surf was reliable, it wasn’t the sort of spectacular stuff that is also dangerous.

  Jaffy was driving us around on back roads and sometimes through private farm roads where the underground had some arrangement; the idea was to get to the beach on the north side of town without being seen. As a result we did some backtracking and often went very slowly. It was too dangerous to talk now, so most of us just got caught up on our napping.

  Finally he killed the motor. I could just smell a little bit of sea breeze. He came around and squatted in the back of the truck with us.

  “We’re still a long way off,” Al said. “Did you see trouble?”

  “Lots of it. Two groves of trees with men moving in them. Couple of guys keeping an eye on the road; one of them had a pair of binoculars. Stuff like that. I think they have the beach completely staked out.”

  “Shit,” Al said. “Suggestions, anyone?”

  What we had in the truck was more than enough to hang all of us if we were caught with it. In the aggregate it was far too heavy to move by foot. Thus we couldn’t abandon the truck … but any hope of getting down to the beach depended on being silent.

  “Well,” I said, “I imagine most of you have the skills for a bare-hands night attack—”

  They all nodded. “Everyone here has done a German or two, and more American quislings than you can count,” Al said.

  “Then why don’t we each pick a direction, scout it, come back at a prearranged time, and see if we can figure out what’s up? We’ve got hours till our friends come by.”

  Greg grunted. “Good as any other idea, and it won’t be boring. Let’s.”

  My target was one of the ridges where we’d seen some bored idiot lighting a cigarette; I worked my way forward carefully. This was a lot like playing Army as a kid; stay low, show no shadow, move as fast as you can without making noise. It helped that what I was going across was a huge field of pumpkins—there’s a risk of tripping over a pumpkin or a vine, of course, but on the other hand it’s all so damp that there’s nothing to rustle, and it’s so blotchy in dim light that there aren’t very many shapes that show up well against it.

  There were trees as I came out of the pumpkin patch. I was able to move just a little more quickly and ascend just a little faster.

  There were two of them, both wearing the Good Neighbor Patrol uniform. It occurred to me that the Good Neighbors, and the local idiotic version of the Boy Scouts, probably appealed to a certain kind of personality that loved to wear uniforms and do violence but wasn’t much into running any real risks to their hides.

  I crawled up closer and discovered what I had was that perfect conversational pair, the Whiner and the Sympathizer. Whiner thought it was cold and damp out and he was going to get something and he had to have the cigarette to steady his nerves but if the fucking captain saw that he’d be in deep shit. Sympathizer agreed with all that and said it was really a shame that Whiner wasn’t an officer himself. Whiner said, well, it was all political, what do you expect, and Sympathizer agreed.

  I figured as soon as they were apart, Sympathizer was going to turn Whiner in.

  Unfortunately, after I counted the thousand heartbeats I had estimated, all I knew was that they were generally watching toward the sea, when they weren’t looking at each other, and that their organizational politics were like any other organizational politics; Whiner felt shafted, Sympathizer agreed, and I wondered why Whiner’s shoulder blades were not itching right between them, where I figured Sympathize
r’s knife would go.

  It was also pretty clear that these were not the last of the red-hot guards.

  I came back down the hill quietly and slipped across the pumpkin patch, feeling pretty discouraged. I hadn’t learned a thing, it seemed to me.

  That was what everyone had found; a few younger members had been very spit-and-polish but no more effective, and mostly it looked like a bunch of disgruntled small-town back-slapping good-fellas, stuck out in the cold woods.

  “They’re more than enough to sound an alarm, though,” Al said. “We probably ought to do something about them, so we can get the truck through. And I don’t like the fact that they seem to be facing the landing point. That sort of suggests we’ve got big trouble.”

  Sandy spoke up. “I think I have an idea. Help me out with it. If you were using those guys as a guard, all you’d be doing is using them as a tripwire, right? I mean, if they run into something, they aren’t going to stop it effectively, and they aren’t going to do anything but run in circles and scream, right? So they’re expecting to chase something that landed on the coast, and they want to make sure they don’t lose it.”

  “Got you,” Al said. “They aren’t looking for anything from this side, for some reason. Well, hell, why don’t we just drive the truck right into town and park by the fisherman’s market? That will put us less than a mile from the rendezvous point, and at least we won’t look as conspicuous as we do sneaking around in the pumpkin fields. And it will leave us a lot of time to send in a deep reconnoiter.”

  Driving into town was downright dull; there was a row of trucks sitting by the fisherman’s market, and we just joined it. Sandy, Al, and I crept out; something made me take the SHAKK along, and Al brought the precious notebook. “We’ll be back for all of you for sure,” he said, “but this is because—”