Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Nothing he had witnessed on the Russian Front had prepared him for it. Even Himmler seemed more subdued than usual when they were forced to attend one of Hess’s demonstrations. Everybody knew the Reichsführer was squeamish. He had vomited the first time he’d personally witnessed an execution, and that had been a good clean head shot: the Reich’s version of merciful release.

  Today Brasch kept the contempt from his face as he watched Himmler dab at his lips with a perfumed handkerchief while the subjects were led in.

  “Oh, my,” Skorzeny roared in mock amusement. “They are only stick men. I’m a good shot, Herr Reichsführer, but I cannot promise to hit them for you first time. If they turn sideways, they will disappear!”

  Himmler allowed a wan but dutiful grin at the large man’s brutal jokes. Brasch suspected he’d rather not be there.

  They were in a long subterranean bunker. The sweating cinder blocks receded at least two hundred meters away from them to a thick revetment of sandbags, in front of which stood three scarred wooden poles. The prisoners were actually much less skeletal than most of their fellow inmates. They were Sonderkommando, or Kapos, selected prisoners who acted as guards and enforcers in the death camp at Birkenau. They received special privileges: extra rations, the pick of the females, and so on. But eventually they, like all the others, went into the ovens.

  These three, however, were to complete their service to the Reich as experimental subjects. Over their gray striped camp uniform each wore a bulky vest of a slightly differing size. The project director, whose name Brasch had forgotten, spoke excitedly of the leaps in development they’d achieved since being given access to a calculating machine and a trained operator.

  “What we have now are three options,” he enthused. “Each is a trade-off, in its own way, Herr Reichsführer. More protection still means greater bulk and weight, unfortunately, but the Farben engineers have made great strides the last two months. The material samples you delivered us have proved invaluable in answering a number of . . .”

  Brasch was hardly listening. He was focused on the three men being tied to the poles at the other end of the bunker. Not one of them was struggling. He fancied he saw one of them sob, but that was about the extent of their reaction. As a man who had spent the better part of the last three years involved in mortal combat, often against the most overwhelming odds, he found it depressing that these men could go to their doom so meekly. Even more depressing, however, was the path his life had taken to deliver him to this place as a witness to their deaths. Since he’d arrived at Monovitz, the black wolf of his depression was stalking him again. He felt again as he had during the battles at Belgorod, like a bug about to be crushed under the tracks of a tiger tank.

  “A good rifle, this Garand, yes?” Skorzeny said, interrupting his train of thought. The giant Nazi was turning a captured weapon over in his hands. “Better than the Tommy’s Lee Enfield piece of shit. Semiautomatic, gas actuated. A good tool, although I do not like the way it makes so much noise when the clip ejects. That will get a few cowboys killed, I think.”

  “It may not be in use for much longer,” said Brasch in a flat monotone. “I believe they may be moving in the direction of an assault rifle.”

  Himmler took the hankie away from his thin lips. “Don’t be so glum, Herr Colonel. The SD tells me that is not yet a foregone conclusion. There is open disagreement in America over whether to retool for mass production of that weapon. At least outside of the Californian Zone.”

  “So Kolhammer is going to build these Russian guns for his mud people, then?” Skorzeny said. “I hear they are a good weapon, too. But in the hands of half-castes and fairies, what would it matter?”

  “The bullet would kill you just as dead, no matter who fired it,” Brasch replied. “I lost many comrades to rounds fired by untrained Untermenschen in Russia, Herr Colonel.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can do something about that,” bellowed the SS man, refusing to be cast out of his usual high spirits. “You are ready for us now?” he asked the research director.

  The civilian checked with an aide, who confirmed that the prisoners were firmly secured. A horn blared harshly, and behind them a red lightbulb shut off while a green one lit up.

  “We are ready for the test,” he confirmed.

  Brasch screwed in a pair of earplugs and hardened his heart to what was about to happen. He had personally killed dozens of men, some of them in hand-to-hand combat, but he had never murdered anybody in cold blood. And he was about to become complicit in three murders at once. It made him sick.

  Skorzeny looked to Himmler, who had just finished fitting his own earplugs. The Reichsführer nodded, and Skorzeny hefted the American rifle as smoothly as if he’d been practicing since childhood. He sighted down the barrel and squeezed off three shots. All three prisoners jumped. Skorzeny then picked up a British Lee Enfield 303 rifle and performed the same action, this time taking a little longer, as he was forced to work the bolt after each shot.

  Again, the prisoners jumped, but their heads whipped back in a way that told Brasch they were already dead or unconscious.

  Skorzeny was much less impressed with the English weapon. “Pah! You could not get great accuracy with this. The chamber is too loose, and the two-part stock and these rear-locking lugs on the bolt are all very poor design . . . And now for my old friend.”

  He scooped up a K98 Mauser and squeezed off three shots from the bolt-action weapon with as little thought as he would give to scratching his nose. Three dark puffs indicated where the 7.92 mm rounds hit.

  “Shall we?” asked the director.

  “They don’t look very well, Herr Director,” Himmler said as the small group made its way down the firing range. “Are you sure these vests are bulletproof?”

  “Not as such, Herr Reichsführer,” the man said quickly. “The vests will stop a small-caliber handgun round, and all manner of shrapnel and flak, but we are not using what the Allies call nanotube technology. What we have done is to synthesize a lightweight but very strong polymer from alternating monomers of para-phenylenediamine and terephthalic acid. The resulting aromatic amide alternates benzene rings and amide groups. In a planar sheet structure, which is like a silk protein and—”

  “But why do you call them ‘bulletproof vests’ if they do not stop bullets?” Himmler asked testily.

  The researcher paled, and he hadn’t had much coloring to begin with. “The vests by themselves could not stop a high-velocity round,” he explained. “But we have augmented them with differing types of ballistic plate, and together they are enough to provide excellent protection.”

  They reached the three men, each of whom looked quite dead to Brasch, until he saw that they were breathing. But only just. The director hurried on, lest Himmler decide the whole exercise was a waste of his time. A good idea—people had died for less.

  “Now, Herr Reichsführer, these subjects were not in very good physical condition to begin with, certainly not as good as one of your storm troopers. And they have been hit three times with high-velocity rounds. It would still be an enormously traumatic event for the body. But I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.”

  Paul Brasch often felt as if his capacity to feel anything had been burned away during his time in the Soviet Union. Now as the project director’s aides roughly stripped the bulky black vests away from the men’s bodies, he found himself thankful for the crust of scar tissue that had formed around his feelings. It allowed him to appear as inhuman as his colleagues.

  The director was babbling on to Himmler about some production-line issue that would involve the use of concentrated sulfuric acid. Skorzeny was boasting of his marksmanship to another SS officer, who was laughing at the way one of the prisoners’ eyeballs had popped out onto his cheek. Brasch breathed in slowly and fought down the urge to draw his pistol and kill them all. Instead he watched with apparent detachment as SS orderlies finished removing the body armor and the men’s prison camp shi
rts.

  Their torsos were massively bruised, and one man had a large concave depression just under his heart. But none of the rounds had actually penetrated. Their guide was holding one of the jackets, pointing out features such as the pivoting shoulder pads, grenade hangers, and rifle butt patches. Himmler wanted to know how many of the vests would be ready in time for Operation Sea Dragon, and he was unhappy to be told that four hundred was the limit of current production capacity.

  As the director kept babbling about sulfuric acid, Himmler tuned him out and turned to face Brasch instead. “Well, Herr Colonel, another miracle for you to work in our behalf, yes? I don’t expect to be able to outfit every Waffen-SS Division, but I need at least two thousand of these vests by the time we are ready to go. Can you guarantee me that?”

  Brasch shook his head emphatically. “No, Herr Reichsführer, but I shall increase production by whatever amount is possible. Based on my experience at Demidenko, I imagine we can get you at least fifty percent more than the director believes possible.”

  Himmler, he had discovered, preferred realistic assessments from his underlings. He asked for superhuman efforts, but did not actually expect the impossible. “Good enough, then.” Himmler nodded. You shall stay here another week, supervising the operation, then join me back in the Fatherland. Göring wishes to discuss the jet project with you.”

  Brasch did not roll his eyes, but he did not meekly accede to the order, either. “With all due respect to the Reichsmarshall, there is almost no chance of getting his fighters aloft in time for Sea Dragon. I would very much like to return home to see my family, but I would not wish to waste time in doing so.”

  A smile played across Himmler’s rodentlike features. The Luftwaffe chief had already lost a great deal of influence after failing to destroy the RAF in 1941. The bombing of Germany’s cites by the Allies and the poor performance of the air force in the Russian campaigns had left him a much-reduced figure. Only his unquestionable loyalty to the führer was thought to have saved him in the bloodletting that had followed the Emergence.

  “I agree that the Reichsmarshall is probably being overambitious,” purred Himmler. “But he is a Reichsmarshall, and you are not. Indulge him, Colonel. There is important work for you at home. And the führer himself would like to personally thank you for your efforts at Demidenko.”

  Brasch snapped his heels together and saluted like a machine.

  Himmler returned the salute crisply but without any flourish. He even managed a wry smile. “My word, these Wehrmacht types do know how to salute well, don’t they Skorzeny?” he said.

  Brasch felt a meaty paw thunder into his shoulder as Skorzeny slapped him on the back. The report was almost as loud as the rifle shots of a few minutes earlier. “He’s a grand fellow, all right! Not Totenkopf material, but pretty damn good anyway.”

  Brasch faked a hearty laugh as the three Jews were cut down and dragged away. He wondered if anyone would bother to finish them off before they were reduced to ashes and hot wax. He had never felt like less of a man in his whole life.

  He took a train from Monovitz a week later and tried to relax on the journey, but every time they passed carriages heading in the other direction, it jolted him awake, or out of whatever semiconscious state he’d managed to drift into.

  The trains were running east with much greater frequency now. Partly it had to do to with the shift of many heavy and special engineering projects into Poland and the Ukraine, beyond the easy reach of the Lancaster bombers and B-17s. But also he suspected, it had to do with a greatly accelerated program at Auschwitz.

  Unlike most Germans, Brasch could not pretend he knew nothing of the massive series of camps that made up the Auschwitz facility. Some of them were labor camps, some were specialist research facilities—now hosting small teams of Japanese doctors—and some were simply designed for mass extermination.

  As he stretched out in the first-class carriage and tried to rest, he was haunted by the idea that one day his son would be tossed into one of those fetid cattle cars that so frequently roared past rattling the windows of his train.

  At times he tried to work. He was one of the few men in all of Europe who had been allocated not only a flexipad, but a much larger data slate, as well. As a war hero, and the principal consulting engineer to so many high-priority projects, he was trusted—a rare thing these days. But even so, he noted that his drives and data sticks had been purged of a great deal of material he had been able to access freely back in Hashirajima, aboard the Sutanto. There was no trace of the Holocaust in his Web archive. No mention of a country called Israel. And only sketchy material relating to Germany after the year 1944.

  He wondered that the vandals had left anything.

  But there were still extensive technical files, and he was adding to the store all the time.

  As the train shuddered to a halt at a siding in Poland, Brasch tried to concentrate on the file he’d created to contain all the material he had concerning Göring’s new pet project, the ME 262 jet fighter. The fat fool wanted hundreds of them in the air over Britain, slicing through Spitfires and Hurricanes like screaming hawks. The impossibility of doing so, and more seriously the waste of resources in even trying, meant nothing to Göring. He was determined to regain his former prominence in the führer’s affections, and he had become obsessed with this new fighter as the answer to his dilemma.

  It was night, and as Brasch peered out the windows he could see nothing in the darkness. The reflection of his cabin in the cold frosted glass, and the steam drifting back from the engines, blocked his view entirely. He could hear shouting, vehicle traffic, a whistle, and even, he fancied, some distant gunfire. Partisans, perhaps? Many of them had turned against Stalin. There were the Poles, of course. And small, scattered renegade units of both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, which had been caught up in the internecine warfare of the post-Emergence period.

  Again he found himself wishing for a quiet life, perhaps in a villa somewhere in the East Indies, where Ali Moertopo could help out. He marveled at how the little Indonesian sailor had managed not just to save his own hide, but also to arrange the governorship of a Javanese province for himself. The man was a survivor. There could be no doubt of that. Nor of the debt which Brasch now owed him.

  He shook his head and returned to the file. It was his job to convince Göring to stop wasting time and money on a project that was never going to be ready in time for Operation Sea Dragon. Brasch had worked with engineers at Messerschmitt on CAD/CAM programs that employed early twenty-first-century propeller designs, to extend the range of an ME 109 and give it forty-five minutes over England, rather than twenty. He had dozens of minor suggestions for improving the “ergonomics” of current fighters and bombers—simple things like recessed switches that wouldn’t puncture a man’s skull in a crash, or quick-disconnect throat microphones so that a crewman desperate to get out of a doomed plane wouldn’t die trapped in a cord he forgot to unplug.

  These were all simple changes with potentially massive effects, but Göring’s eyes glazed over whenever he raised them, and if Brasch persisted in arguing, those same porcine eyes would eventually cloud over with rage, and the Reichsmarshall would start to pound on the table screaming, “Nein, nein, nein!”

  Brasch brought up the file in which he had compiled a list of all the 262’s problems in what he referred to as “original time.” The Junkers Jumo 004 engines were unreliable, being constructed of inferior alloys due to materials shortages. At any given time, the majority of those fighters could expect to be grounded. They were unstable, and generated less thrust at low speeds than prop-driven fighters. But worst of all, there would never be enough of them.

  Brasch had read of a mission by thirty-seven of the jets on March 18, 1945, during which they had attacked an Allied force of 1,221 bombers and 632 escorting fighters. Using long, level approaches to compensate for their lack of dogfighting agility, they simply blurred in past the fighter screen and tore apart a dozen bom
bers and one escort with their 30 mm cannons, all for the loss of only three 262s—a four-to-one kill ratio.

  But the important figure was the gargantuan size of the Allied raid. Nearly two thousand planes, against thirty-seven German jets. You would think that spoke volumes for the need to concentrate efforts on achievable goals. The productive capacities of the English-speaking world were simply beyond imagining.

  But no. Göring had only last week authorized tens of millions of reichsmarks to be spent on changes to the 262’s swept wings, low drag canopy, and engine placement. And all this on his own initiative. Brasch would have been furious if it weren’t for one thing.

  He himself was working to wreck the Nazi war machine.

  Brasch hadn’t told anybody, of course. Not even his wife. He knew that he could trust Willie with his life, but he also knew that the SS regarded him with reserve at best. Now that he was away from Demidenko, he didn’t have Gelder shadowing his every move, but the specter of the SS was a constant. His son’s disorder—easily fixed in the future—would be more than enough to see the boy fed into the camps under the Nazis’ T-4 program, to ensure the purity of the race.

  No, Colonel Paul Brasch understood the nature of the regime he served. Like most of his countrymen, he had always understood it. Unlike most of them, he had witnessed the evidence firsthand, and he had decided to resist.

  The irony of his current position was that he hadn’t been snatched up in the post-Emergence sweeps of “future and prospective traitors” that had gutted the Reich, and yet he was probably one of most dangerous men in Germany. Fate had thrust him into the center of events as they spun out of control. His character determined that he would not allow himself simply to coast along in the wake of that turbulence.