“I gather something happened to alter this situation?” Thorne halted the DVD once more in order to respond to Trumbull’s question.
“Damn right it did,” he nodded. “One night during August, a lost flight of Heinkel bombers unintentionally drop bombs on London, which at that stage had been declared off limits by The Führer himself. The bombing was a complete accident but it needless to say annoyed the Christ out of Whitehall and they immediately asked Bomber Command, who were also a tad pissed about it, to carry out a retaliation raid a Berlin. There was bugger all damage done, except perhaps for Göring’s pride, but it scared the shit out of a few people high up! Göring had stated categorically that this would never happen and the whole thing had made him and Hitler look foolish. Couldn’t have that, could we?” Thorne added with more than a little sarcasm. “Well, sometimes shit happens anyway…” He started the disc again.
“At the point where it seemed everything was lost, the focus of the Luftwaffe attacks switched from airfields to British cities.” The footage now showed more archival film, this time of The Blitz — the bombing of London — and the new images unnerved Trumbull even more. These were buildings he recognised clearly — he’d spent a large part of his life in London — but the scenes were of something that hadn’t yet happened. Fires raged against a darkened sky while firemen vainly tried to extinguish burning buildings and walls collapsed under the strain. Workmen sifted through rubble that had once been a church, a pub, a corner store, someone’s home.
“Suddenly, Luftwaffe bombers start hitting British cities instead and something soon to be called The Blitz began against London and other cities, the redirection of attacks to civilian targets rather than military that gave Fighter Command a desperately-needed opportunity to regroup. There were a number of factors contributing to the Luftwaffe losing the Battle of Britain, but they ultimately made one major mistake: they halted attacks on the airfields at a time when Fighter Command was on its knees and ready to crumble. They stopped attacking the controller stations and Command HQ units. They stopped attacking the radar installations. In combination with a few lesser problems at a tactical level, such as the fact that they had no effective ‘Fighter Command’-style ground control system, this ultimately cost them an entire world war. The RAF was never beaten, and Operation Sealion therefore never went ahead.
“After the Battle of Britain, Churchill told the world ‘Never before in the field of human conflict had so much been owed by so many to so few’. It’s only in hindsight that the real truth of those words is seen. In 1941, Germany launches Operation Barbarossa — the invasion of the Soviet Union. At first, the war goes very well but that doesn’t last. By 1944 the Wehrmacht is in retreat on all fronts. As the war in Russia is going badly and American and Allied forces are pushing up through Italy, a ‘Second Front’ is launched in France. From ports all over Southern England, invasion forces set forth in what becomes known as ‘D-Day’ — June 6, 1944. From this moment the Germans are doomed. Italy has already surrendered by this time and the Germans are now fighting alone on three fronts: there’s no way they can win.
“It used to be a moot point, but there’s a theory that proposes that without D-Day and the Western Front, the Axis might have been able to halt and possibly even defeat the Soviet Union. Without Great Britain as a staging base, there’d be no way an invasion of France could’ve been attempted. Of the number of major mistakes or errors made by Hitler and his staff — and there were more than a few — this was one of the greatest in my opinion. Although he had no real wish to invade England, his failure to do so was to be strategically and literally fatal.”
“But something’s gone wrong with that…” The DVD paused again as Trumbull made the observation. No matter how much he wanted to disbelieve what was going on, the arguments and what he was seeing was becoming undeniable.
“You’re not kidding!” Thorne passed the flask of scotch across once more. “As I said, most of the BEF should have got out of Dunkirk. History as I know it’s already changed in a major way! Remember I said I was working for the SIS on tracking down a group of Neo-Nazis…?” Trumbull nodded. “Well, the Europe of the Twenty-First Century has a revived Aryan movement that’s unfortunately quite alive and thriving…particularly throughout Western Europe.
“For a long time, this was restricted mostly to gangs of thugs calling themselves ‘skinheads’. A majority of them swore some kind of token allegiance to Adolf Hitler and the defunct Third Reich, but that was all bullshit really: most of ‘em were just violent turds who liked to wander about looking for vulnerable people to thump and blame their problems on, just like the Nazi thuggery of the late twenties and early thirties.” He took another breath. “Around the end of the Twentieth Century however, we realised something else had started to rear its ugly head. Out among the wankers, there really was an organised ‘movement’ of sorts coming together…”
“This is where our story begins as such…” The narrative began again as Thorne continued the video and the picture focussed once more on Thorne and Laurence Trumbull at the airbase. “…A true Neo-Nazi movement sprang up early in the Twenty-First Century — a Fourth Reich of sorts. It’s believed to have been financed by a group of very wealthy businessmen with the military and technical assistance of this man…” A picture of a hard-faced officer in a strange but obviously German uniform appeared.
“Reichsmarschall Reuters!” Trumbull exclaimed, recognition instantly lighting his expression. There wasn’t a well-educated officer live who wouldn’t know that enemy face, and it was Thorne’s turn to seem surprised as he halted the presentation.
“Reichsmarschall…?” He repeated in wonder.
“It was on the newsreels a few weeks ago…he was given the rank by Hitler after the success of the campaign in France. He’s the military head of the entire Wehrmacht.”
“Nick didn’t mention that, the cheeky sod! Göring will be pissed off: that promotion should’ve been his after the fall of France. My God, they’ve really been making an impact over there if he’s got that far!” He started the picture again.
“He’s known as Kurt Reuters, an ex-German staff officer with well-known pro-Nazi sympathies. He, more than any other planned the strategic aspects of what’s now going on. Businessmen and industrialists with a lot of money behind them, most of them not old enough to remember the war but able to remember what Germany went through after it, were putting up cash to fund something big.” The picture went back to Thorne again. “For a while, the SIS and everyone else regarded it rather hopefully as a ‘flash in the pan’…something that would dissipate of its own accord. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be the case.
“We realised this midway through the year 2009… at that point a group calling themselves ‘New Eagles’ kidnapped a Jewish-English physicist by the name of Samuel Lowenstein. He and his partner, Hal Markowicz, had been working on a project researching what we called ‘Temporal Displacement’…” he added sourly, “…a project that was top secret…or so we thought at the time… In layman’s terms we’re talking about building a working ‘time machine’. If you’ve read it, this was broadly similar to the device in the H. G. Wells novel, and although Markowicz was assisting, it was really Lowenstein’s project. When he disappeared at the point it looked like it might actually produce results, most of the people that knew about the project went mad with concern!
“Within a month or so we’d confirmed it was the New Eagles who’d kidnapped him but we were unable to track either Lowenstein or his notes down. Without his help, Markowicz was unable to proceed much further with the research, although he gave us a damned good idea what they’d be able to do if they could make Lowenstein finish his work: they were going to try and change history…” Thorne stopped the video completely at that moment and the screen went dark.
“That should do of that for the moment,” the Australian decided.
“Could they do this?” Trumbull was enthralled. “Is it possible?”
&n
bsp; “Looks like they already have, mate…” Thorne shrugged. “Markowicz reckoned it was very possible, although no one wanted to believe it at first. It’s apparently almost impossible to alter relatively recent events, but the further you go back in time, ironically, the easier it becomes. The technical aspects and the physics of the whole thing are a bit beyond me to be quite honest, but I can give you an overview of the general principles behind it. What happens is basically this: if you send someone back in time and they do something or say something at some point that alters the correct flow of history as you know it, something is created that’s called a Temporal Distortion Wave, and it can be either a large or small wave depending on what’s been done. At first, very little changes and it theoretically takes months for any major alterations to occur, but they are possible and reactions to this distortion wave grow exponentially as further changes are made, particularly as more alterations occur and the effect becomes cumulative.
“The New Eagles weren’t looking to so anything small, of course: they were working on creating a Temporal Distortion Wave the size of a friggin’ tsunami! We found out they’d set up a base somewhere in the former Soviet Union, but we couldn’t initially lock down exactly where it was, and with the amount of bribe money they were throwing about, none of the local authorities in the area they were hiding that did know about them were talking. We did however discover they’d been buying up on arms and equipment from various sources and something else started to dawn on us at that point.” Thorne paused for another breath and shrugged in a matter-of-fact fashion.
“We at first thought all they were going to do was go back and show Hitler what he did wrong. One of the most incredible things about the Second World War from a historical point of view is that the Krauts almost did it: one nation effectively took on the whole of Europe and nearly got away with it with just a handful of bad decisions, mainly on Hitler’s part, prevented them from pulling it off. With the right kind of tactical and strategic information and guidance, they could’ve easily walked right through the whole of Europe, North Africa and maybe even Russia…
“Once we discovered they were stocking up on hardware though, we realised something else…something that in hindsight should’ve been painfully obvious: they were collecting technology. There was no way they could take back enough stuff from the future to fight an advanced war effectively, but what they could do was take back enough technology to accelerate the Wehrmacht streets ahead of everyone else. Even if they only supplied an equivalent technology to that available by the end of the war, they’d still be unbeatable, and there was no reason to stop there!”
“I saw the capabilities of the aircraft that attacked us and of that F-35 out there, and I can’t imagine what that thing out there you call a ‘Raptor’ is capable of! Just one air wing of any of those aircraft could make an impact of tremendous proportions!” Trumbull was aghast at the idea Thorne had put forward.
“I wouldn’t count on that kind of technological leap, fortunately enough. It’d take a couple of decades to get an organised industrial base up to that standard even with inside information, and that’s not taking into account that we’re talking about a national economy crippled by fighting a world war into the bargain. Unfortunately, it won’t take that much: there were weapons, aircraft and armoured vehicles being developed at the end of the war — or within a few years after that — that are easily within reach of existing technological capabilities. Any of them could give the Wehrmacht a killer punch.
“The most glaring example of this is a single, devastating weapon developed in 1945, toward the very end of the war. The weapon was perfected by the United States and was intended to end the war against Japan in one fell swoop. Single examples of these bombs, called ‘atomic bombs’, were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th of that year respectively and basically obliterated both cities entirely.”
“One bomb destroyed an entire city…?” Trumbull was sceptical. “…An ‘atomic’ bomb?”
Thorne nodded. “Power equivalent to somewhere between ten and twenty thousand tons of high explosive depending on who you talk to or which book you read. They work through the collision and subsequent fission of radioactive uranium as it passes beyond critical mass.”
“I’ll take your word on that,” Trumbull said dubiously, having no clue as to the scientific procedures Thorne had just mentioned. “You think they’ll give Jerry this bomb to use on England?”
“Probably not…not straight away, anyway…” Thorne replied, shaking his head slowly. “Quite frankly, if they utilise their resources correctly they’ll have quite enough conventional hardware to take Britain rather comfortably. I also don’t think Reuters is quite that stupid. He grew up under the threat of a Cold War ‘peace’ sustained by two great superpowers armed with nuclear weapons — atomic bombs. Giving Hitler this weapon now without credible competition would totally destabilise the planet. One of the greatest ‘strengths’ of atomic weapons was one of deterrence — they held the peace between the world powers for close to fifty years following World War Two because neither side would use them for fear of massive retaliation. In the same way, conventional wars also couldn’t be risked between these ‘Superpowers’ because there was always the real danger of any war escalating to a nuclear exchange. With what I know of Hitler, I’d lay money on him not being stable enough not to use atomic weapons at a whim.”
“And you’re going to stop them — your group here is going to put things right again?”
“The short answer to that question…?” Thorne gave a thin, rueful smile. “Yes and no. As far as an invasion of Great Britain is concerned, we hope to stop it, but it all really depends on the strength of our enemy’s will. If Germany’s truly determined to take Britain regardless of any cost then — and they should be — there’s probably nothing we can do about that.” The answer, although unpleasant, was at least an honest one and as Trumbull made a move to protest he continued, cutting the pilot off before he could speak. “At least, not immediately…when Lowenstein disappeared and we found out what was going on, we set up a contingency plan of sorts. The time travelling devices they’ve developed — they’re called Temporal Displacement Units — take approximately twenty-four hours of actual passing time — what we’ve been calling ‘Realtime’ — to carry the traveller from one time period to another, although it seems instantaneous to the person travelling. What that means is that if any part of history is changed, it takes roughly a day before its effect is felt in the world.
“We eventually tracked the New Eagles to a decommissioned Russian military base east of the Urals, but they managed to launch most of their air group before we could field a force to stop them. We were able to prevent the last two transport aircraft from taking off however, capturing the crew.”
“They sent back aircraft, just as you have?” Trumbull this time required no urging or offer to take the hip flask from Thorne’s left hand and took a swig that finally drained it entirely.
“Yeah, for some reason the TDUs only work in aircraft that are ideally flying at high altitude and at high speed. Don’t ask me why — Markowicz couldn’t work it out and I doubt even the guys that developed them even know, really. Checking the TDUs inside the transports we captured got us nowhere — the settings had been scrambled by the time we got to the aircraft — so we had no real way of confirming exactly what date they’d arrived in the past. Some fairly speedy interrogation of the crew however did give us a date we’d hoped was accurate: noon on July the First, 1940. We didn’t have much time once the New Eagles had disappeared — only 24 hours — so we prepped the task force we’d gathered together as best we could and set the TDUs we recovered from their captured aircraft for a time and date a few days before that. The idea was that we could intercept and shoot down their aircraft as they arrived — destroy them utterly before they could make full contact with the Nazis of this era and alter history to any great extent.”
“Judging by what you’ve said, the date those prisoners gave you must’ve been a ruse as it appears they’re already here. I’d say they’ve been here for some time: Kurt Reuters has been a well-known figure in the German military right through the last half of the Thirties”
“As I said, we only had a day to get moving so we didn’t really have as much latitude in grilling the transports crews as we’d have liked, and it does definitely look like gave us incorrect dates to throw us off the track. We got two units out of each aircraft we captured — one main unit and one secondary — and we used those in the four aircraft you see here today. As a preparation to yesterday’s arrival, we dropped Nick Alpert into mid-1939 by parachute prior to the bulk of us arriving yesterday. He’s been here since before the start of the war and was sent back first to try and get this particular airfield prepared the way we required. Fortunately enough, he succeeded — aircraft like the one we’re in need long, hardened runways for landing and, more importantly, for take off.
“I was sent next with the F-35 in case Nick failed and I was required to make initial contact. That would’ve made things extremely difficult but we probably would’ve been able to get the Extender and Galaxy onto the ground somewhere in an emergency. I doubt either would’ve then been in any condition to fly again though, or at least take off anywhere until we’d had a couple of miles of runway built. We weren’t expecting to find these kind of facilities easily without preparation and we only obtained that through some serious ‘wheeling and dealing’ with the appropriate advisers in the Chamberlain and Churchill cabinets. That’s one of the reasons it was ‘requested’ that I come to your aid yesterday evening…”
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