Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “And the rest of you can fuck off right now, unless you’re hungry for some of this, too,” he’d growled, waving the steel picket around.

  They hadn’t argued.

  Mohr and Lloyd had been trying to rig up a litter to transport their patient when a black Packard Clipper, driven by a silver-haired gent called Max, pulled over and offered them a lift. Frankly, Max looked like he had the sort of old money that’d make Scrooge McDuck seem hard up for a buck, but he didn’t even take off his expensive suit jacket when he helped pick up the kid. He just mucked right in and got blood all over it.

  “I know a private clinic we can take him to,” Max said, almost swerving into the path of a fire engine as it shot past in a red blur. “The big emergency wards are all going to be stretched past what they can handle, anyway. This madness is all over the city. And you can take it from me, the police aren’t making it any better.”

  “You a doctor, Max?” Mohr called out over the muted roar of the Packard’s 356-cubic-inch straight-eight.

  “Hell, no. My family’s in oil. You boys are with the Zone, right? Your friend there, too.”

  “We are,” Mohr confirmed, “but we don’t know this guy. We just found him.”

  Max took them out of the city, driving hard past mobs of drunken servicemen and small groups of angry-looking Mexican kids in ridiculously oversized suits. Half of Bunker Hill looked like it had been set ablaze, and they saw a huge mob at war with itself a few blocks down Third Street, near the tunnel entrance.

  At times, Mohr was sure they reached a hundred miles per hour, an insane speed, but Max stayed hunched over the wheel, all the way up into the hills. A motorcycle cop seemed to think about giving chase at one point, but the dispatchers must have had something better for him to do, because he peeled away almost immediately.

  “Those assholes are just letting this happen,” said Max. “And you can bet there’s a reason behind it. Did you hear? The same thing’s happening in Chicago, with the blacks over there, of course. Mark my words, gentlemen, some baby-fascist like Anslinger or Hoover will get their grubby little mitts all over this.”

  “Jeez, Max, you sound more like a Wobbly than an oil man,” Mohr said, smiling for the first time since they’d left the theater.

  “Like I said, my family’s in oil, Chief. But I’m not. I had enough of that in the Great War. Drove a St. Chamond tank with the French at Laffaux Mill. Damn thing turned over in a ditch and caught fire. I swear, I could still smell burning Frenchmen a year later. Never again, Chief. This car is my one indulgence. The rest of my life I try to live according to the teachings of Henry Thoreau. You know him?’

  “Another French tanker?”

  Max burst out laughing, and nearly put himself into a ditch again. “Not likely. Okay, we’re here. Let’s get your friend seen to.”

  Max took them off the street and through a grand, gated entrance into what looked like a mansion.

  “It’s a private facility,” he said as they slid to a halt on the gravel driveway. “Half of Hollywood comes here to dry out, but they have a fully equipped emergency ward, too. You never know when Veronica Lake is going to turn up.”

  “Uhm, do you think they’ll let us in?” Flight Sergeant Lloyd asked doubtfully.

  “Don’t worry, son. The only color that counts here is money. My family’s probably built a whole wing onto this place over the years. They’ll let us in, all right. Let’s go.”

  Two white-suited orderlies carrying a stretcher were hurrying toward them, down a sweeping staircase that led up into a blindingly white building. They didn’t even break stride when Mohr and his motley band emerged from the car covered in blood.

  “Hello, Mr. Ambrose,” they called out simultaneously.

  “Hello, Louis. Mandy,” Max answered. “I wonder if you could see to my young friend here. He’s in some distress.”

  They relieved Mohr and Linthicum of their burden, placed the kid on the stretcher, and disappeared back up the stairs without another word. The chief didn’t know what to say. He had never, in his whole life, been witness to such a thing. He’d always thought it was compulsory to be a complete asshole once you got to be rich enough to get away with it.

  But Max was already climbing back into the car, saying there’d be other people downtown who needed his help. “Are you coming?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” said Eddie Mohr. His companions just nodded.

  29

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  In many ways, Sea Dragon was a blessing in disguise for Captain Müller.

  The titanic effort required of the Nazi superstate to rise up and throw itself across the English Channel inevitably focused the energies of the Reich in northern France. The Gestapo and the SS were both kept busy trying to suppress the French resistance, which was sacrificing itself in a desperate assault on German preparations for the invasion of Great Britain.

  Thousands of Frenchmen and -women would die in the next few days to give their traditional enemies, the English, a fighting chance against Jürgen Müller’s countrymen. He pondered the ironies as he polished his great-grandfather’s war watch and wondered what role his forebear would play in the crusade of the coming days. In Müller’s universe, he’d been a company commander in the Gross Deutschland Division. His ancestor had been executed for holding a river crossing against the Red Army during the retreat from Moscow. Saving the lives of hundreds of his men was considered defeatist, and had cost Heinrich Müller his own life.

  His family had gone into the camps shortly after.

  This same watch still sat in his great-grandfather’s breast pocket somewhere. Probably in a forward depot near the French coastline, where the Gross Deutschland would await transport to Britain, should the airborne assault gain a foothold. Holding the watch gingerly in his “injured” hand—the one encased in a fake plaster cast—Müller rubbed at the glass face with a handkerchief. Apart from that glass face, which had been replaced sometime in the 1960s, this timepiece was the same one his ancestor carried, right down to the subatomic level.

  Müller could only wish that human nature could be as constant.

  He had volunteered for this mission, knowing that he would most likely not return from his personal journey into the darkness of Hitler’s Germany. But that didn’t concern him. If captured, he was wetwired, not just to resist the pain of torture, but to laugh in the face of his tormentors. However, there was no spinal insert that would dull the horror of seeing the children he had really come to save. He wasn’t supposed to seek them out—in fact, he had been specifically ordered to avoid them at all costs.

  But Müller had come fully intending to disobey his controllers. He would carry out his primary mission: the capture, hostile debriefing, and termination of Colonel Paul Brasch. But once that was done, he would be a free agent. And then he intended to save his family.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t turning out to be so simple. He wasn’t concerned about Brasch. No, that would run smoothly. But as he obsessively polished Heinrich Müller’s watch, sitting in the small park across from the apartment block of his prime target, he felt like a man who was slowly being drained of life by a succubus. His eyes were hollow and his soul withdrawn. He appeared haunted and lost, which was to his advantage, in one sense. It fit perfectly with his cover.

  But it wasn’t an act. For he had broken the one promise he’d made to himself—that he would execute the mission first.

  Müller had been unable to resist the urge to seek out his family, just to catch a glimpse of the children. Of Hans, who would be beaten to death protecting his little brother, Erwin, from a homosexual rapist. Of little Erwin, gunned down without reason by an SS guard. He had seen them with their sisters, Lotti and Ingrid, but it had been a terrible mistake.

  To his horror Hans was dressed in the uniform of the Hitler youth, and as Müller had stood there, completely numb, they had all skipped past, laughing merrily at the eldest boy’s story of having chased and kicked an old Jew, while away
at camp.

  Müller was so lost in his dark thoughts that he almost missed Brasch, exiting the door of his building and hurrying off to catch the tram to work.

  He hadn’t needed the overcoat. It was, unfortunately, an unseasonably warm day.

  Brasch had been praying for foul weather, for anything that might hinder the success of Sea Dragon. He had done what he could to, at great risk to his family’s survival. Now it was down to Providence, and the Allies.

  He still found it hard to believe that he—a winner of the Iron Cross—had actually betrayed his homeland to them. As he made his way into the foyer of the Armaments Ministry, through the hive of National Socialists and their Wehrmacht mercenaries, he wondered if any of the self-doubt and fear showed on his face. He knew it was a common conceit of the treacherous that they stood at the center of events, and thought themselves to be the object of everyone’s attention. But he was a rational man, with enough strength of will to be able to avoid that potentially fatal self-absorption.

  Colonel Brasch returned each of his colleagues’ greetings with an appropriately enthusiastic “Sieg Heil.” He maintained his facade of dour industry as he climbed up to his second-floor office. And he tried to brick off that small part of his mind that constantly screamed at him, expecting to open his marbled glass office door and find half a dozen Gestapo men waiting for him with guns and rubber truncheons.

  “Good morning, Herr Oberst.” His secretary smiled in her anteroom office.

  “Good morning, Frau Schlüter,” he replied. “No calls for an hour, please. I shall be very busy.”

  Brasch closed the door on her answer and collapsed into his chair, shaking and sweating. He recognized the scent of his own terror, a really foul, sour sort of rankness. He opened the windows as far they would go and sat on the ledge, hoping the slightly cooler air outside might clear his head and remove the fug of anxiety that seemed to hang in the room.

  On the desk, his flexipad beeped, causing his heart to skip. Then he calmed down. Only a few high officials had access to the devices, and Reichsführers didn’t ordinarily bother themselves with low-level administrative tasks such as calling traitors in for questioning.

  Brasch picked up the pad, expecting to find a small envelope, the standard icon of a text message. He was amazed to discover full-motion video on screen—the Reich did not have the bandwidth that would allow for such indulgences.

  His surprise was quickly supplanted by panic and confusion as he observed the content of the movie.

  His wife and son were gagged, and bound to kitchen chairs in the apartment, their eyes bulging in fear while a man he vaguely recognized stood behind them.

  The image disappeared, and was replaced by a text screen.

  i will kill them if you are not home in fifteen minutes. i will kill them if you come armed or with company.

  The connection dropped out—just as the world dropped out from under his feet. Brasch grabbed at the edge of his desk to stop himself collapsing to the floor. Gray spots bloomed in front of his eyes, threatening to join together and drag him down into unconsciousness.

  He had to tell himself to breathe, mechanically forcing his lungs to draw in air. He spun around and lunged for the open window, leaning on the sill and dragging in long drafts of fresh air.

  His eyes throbbed and tornadoes blew through his head.

  Who could it be? The Gestapo? Had they discovered his treason? But no, if that had happened, I would not be alive.

  Then who? Where had he seen that man before?

  Willie’s wide eyes and Little Manny’s white, terrified face loomed out of the gray spots that still lurked in his peripheral vision. When he was almost sure he could walk without getting tangled up in the wet spaghetti strands of his own legs, he grabbed the flexipad, attempted to compose himself, and headed out the door.

  “Herr Oberst?” said Frau Schlüter. “Is there anything—?”

  “No,” he croaked, waving the pad at her. “I simply forgot a meeting at OKH. I am late. I shall be back later today.”

  “But there is no meeting at—”

  “I got the message last night,” he called back over his shoulder, as he left the office. “It was too late to call you. Please carry on updating the Two Sixty-two files.”

  He broke into a trot in the corridor, almost knocking a Kriegsmarine officer off his feet as he hurtled around a corner.

  “Excuse me,” he called out as he dashed past the elevators, which were notoriously slow. He headed straight for the stairwell instead, trying to get out of the building as quickly as possible, without looking like a madman. Others were also hurrying about, no doubt on important state business, so no one paid him any mind.

  Brasch hit the street and ran for a tram that was pulling up a hundred yards away. As he struggled to put his flexipad away, he realized he had no change for the fare, but rushed on anyway, leaping onto the bottom step just as the streetcar began to move.

  A conductor began to amble toward him as he puffed and prepared to browbeat the man into letting him ride for free. But as he began the pantomime of searching his pockets for coins he knew weren’t there, the man nodded at the Iron Cross on his breast and turned away.

  Brasch examined the decoration somewhat dubiously. So it had a use after all.

  He rode the entire way home, bunching the muscles in his legs, silently urging the driver to hurry up. He checked his watch at least twice every minute, cursing himself for not noting what time the message had come in. Would he make it in fifteen minutes?

  Would a delay of a minute or two cause the man to kill his wife and child?

  Behind of all this lay the bigger question: Who was their captor? Which master had sent him?

  The more he thought about it, Brasch didn’t think the man was an SD agent. The state had no need to play games like this. If they had wanted him, they would have marched a squad of goons into the office and simply taken him. So, too, with his family.

  He realized with a flutter of his already churning stomach that he still wore his Luger. The instructions had been quite explicit. He was to come alone—and unarmed.

  Thus as he jumped from the trolley at the stop nearest his home, and half walked, half jogged the rest of the way, Brasch unbuttoned the clasp on his holster. His soldier’s training tried to assert itself, pushing him toward action. But his rational mind checked the warrior spirit.

  This bastard wanted him, for whatever reason. If he had been an assassin, he wouldn’t have bothered with Willie and Manfred. No, the prize was Brasch, not his corpse.

  He fumbled with his keys at the building entrance, and again at the door to their rooms. “It’s me,” he called out, closing the door behind him. The kitchen was at the end of a long corridor. He unloaded the Luger and slid it along the carpeted floor with an underarm throw.

  “There,” he called out, “it is as you wished. And I am alone.”

  A German voice replied. “I know. I can see. Come into the kitchen, slowly.”

  When he was halfway down the hall, the voice spoke again. “Turn around, place your hands on your head, and walk the rest of the way backwards.”

  Brasch did as he was told.

  Müller watched the engineer as he felt his way into the small kitchen. When Brasch was a few feet from the table, Müller told him to stop and turn around.

  “Bind your hands to the table leg with those plasteel cuffs,” he ordered, pointing to the objects on the table. “I’m sure you know what I mean, so don’t fuck around or I will put a bullet into your son. This pistol is silenced. Nobody will hear.”

  He spoke in English, to spare the boy any more distress than was necessary. Even so, he fought to keep the disgust off his face and out of his voice. This wasn’t how he had imagined himself when he had enlisted, twelve years earlier. No, this was the moral equivalent of the evil he had volunteered to fight, although he had no real intention of murdering the boy or the woman.

  Brasch however, could well be spending his l
ast day on earth. When the engineer had cuffed himself to the table, Müller moved around to a spot where he could see the man’s hands.

  “You have brought your flexipad, I see. Good, Herr Oberst. I will remove it now and place it on the table. My gun will be at your head the entire time. I doubt you will want your son to watch as his papa’s brains are blown out.”

  Brasch was shaking with coiled tension as Müller removed the device, powered it up, and laid it next to his own on the table. He keyed in the command set that would effect a laser link transfer of all the data.

  “What are you doing?” asked Brasch. “You’re not Gestapo, are you? You’re one of them. From the future?”

  “Yes,” Müller admitted. “And I’m saving Germany from herself.”

  “You idiot!” Brasch spat. “Why did you have to do this to my family? Look at little Manny—he is shaking with terror. You have tortured him, and all for nothing. I sent you everything I know. Everything! And this is my reward? What sort of a barbarian are you?”

  Müller had no idea what the man was talking about. His mission brief had been simple. Brasch was one of the critical players in the Nazi’s accelerated weapons program. So Müller had been sent in to determine how much they had accomplished, and to liquidate Brasch once he had the information. The engineer’s outburst made no sense.

  “Where do you think the data burst came from, on the Demidenko Center, the fast-fission project, the SS special-weapons directorate,” Brasch hissed, glancing around as if afraid they might be overheard.

  “Just shut up, and slow down,” Müller barked when he finally recovered his wits. “What are you talking about? What burst?”

  “It was yesterday! I sent a compressed, encrypted burst to the British ship, the Trident. It took me months to work out how to do so, without being caught. I sent everything I had on the special projects, and on Sea Dragon. Have they told you nothing?”

  “Did you identify yourself?” asked Müller as he tried to understand what was happening. It was like wrestling with blocks of smoke.