Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  The Trident flashed an alert to all her shore-based personnel, twenty-nine officers and others of various rank, as soon as the threat of the incoming missile strike was detected. When Hobbins’s flexipad began screeching, she was lying on a gurney under one of the Spitfires. She didn’t even bother to look at the screen—she’d been through hundreds of drills, and five actual alerts. She just spun off the gurney and started yelling as loudly as she could.

  “Incoming! Get out. Get out! Move! Move! Move!”

  Five seconds later, sirens began to wail all over the base.

  Twenty-two men and women had been working in the hardened hangar when the alert came through. That had surprised Petty Officer Hobbins at first. She’d come to Biggin Hill expecting to find an exclusively male domain, but had been chuffed to discover a large number of women “auxiliaries.” Equal opportunity debates were by the by now, though.

  Everyone was running for their lives.

  Hobbins hammered out of the aircraft shelter, overtaking a couple of lead-footed ’temps who’d spent a few too many quid on the real ale down at the Black Horse in the village.

  “Move your fat arses,” she yelled at them.

  Hundreds of ground crew, technicians, and even pilots who’d been enjoying the warm autumn day were hurrying for slit trenches and sandbagged antiair mounts. Hobbins felt rather than saw it when the tarmac changed to grass beneath her pounding boots. A zigzag trench line beckoned, and some finely honed instinct made her dive for it rather than running and climbing in. That jump saved her life.

  A grotesquely loud shriek, whoosh, and roar signaled the arrival of the hypersonic Laval over the base. The shock wave burst the eardrums of everyone within eight or nine hundred meters, including Hobbins, who screamed as it felt like long metal skewers were being driven into her head.

  Unlike the American hammerhead-type missiles, the French weapon didn’t need to open a bay door on its underside. Two hundred mini-silos were built into the fuselage, and those spat out submunitions of fused DU and SRDX accelerant. Rendered deaf, Hobbins was unable to register the impact of the first bomblets as they went tearing into the hardened concrete bunker, shredding it like crepe paper.

  The rolling percussion of primary and secondary explosions registered as dull mallet blows somewhere outside her head. The Laval screamed past, far enough away that she survived the impact of the small front of violently compressed air that was trailing the rocket at five thousand kilometers an hour. Unprotected, the two crewmen she’d passed earlier flew apart as though hit by a speeding locomotive when the wave struck them.

  A blizzard of offal poured into the slit trench, which threatened to collapse as the rest of RAF Biggin Hill was destroyed.

  Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins curled up at the foot of the trench and waited to die. But the final eruption never came.

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  There was no live video feed available, for which Harry was grateful. He didn’t need to see what happened when you unleashed a Multipurpose Augmented Ground Attack device on a target that wasn’t prepared for it. He’d been amongst the first troops into Algiers after the French Mediterranean Fleet “reduced” the city in retaliation for the radiological attack on Marseilles. Biggin Hill was a little sturdier than the mud brick capital of Algeria, but not so much as made any difference.

  The SAS men and their Norwegian colleagues had cheered when the screen in the Trident’s main hangar had shown the first two Lavals veering off course. But the cheering had died out as it became obvious there’d be no reprieve from the third missile. Harry had turned away from the screen, and was busying himself checking their gear for the short hop back to Portsmouth when Sergeant St. Clair called out.

  “Look, guv, the primary didn’t go off.”

  Harry looked up and was amazed to discover that his RSM was right. The Combat Intelligence indicated that the submunitions had fired, but not the main warhead. That would have excavated about three quarters of Biggin Hill down to a depth of thirty meters in less than one second.

  “Has it moved on to a secondary target?” he asked. A part of him was afraid that the Germans had figured out how to program the missile to strike at multiple points, as it was meant to do.

  But no. A flashing dialog box indicted that the ship’s Nemesis arrays were no longer tracking the weapon, and hadn’t registered any primary detonation of the Laval’s subfusion plasma yield warhead.

  Most likely it had simply crashed somewhere.

  “Vive la France,” Harry murmured. Whoever had been able to dicker with the first two shots, he must have been interrupted before he could finish with number three. The SAS commander wished him—or her—good luck, wherever they were.

  Even so, Biggin Hill was a write-off. But he wondered if the Germans knew what had happened.

  THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA

  “We shall have crushed the life out of them by the time nightfall arrives,” boasted Göring.

  Himmler thought the führer seemed less sanguine, having been here before with his Luftwaffe chief, but the reports were good.

  In war, it was always advisable to discount the best and the worst of everything one heard. But the news coming out of the firestorm they’d unleashed over England was encouraging. Three experienced pilots had radioed back reports of a catastrophe engulfing the RAF station called Biggin Hill, a name they had all come to loathe back in late 1940.

  Two others reported identical results over Croydon and Hornchurch.

  It was frustrating that they couldn’t duplicate the surveillance the British enjoyed thanks to the Trident. They would all have been much happier, seeing the results of the missile attack for themselves. But as the führer rightly pointed out, what did it matter if the British had a perfect view of their doom as it came rushing at them? It was still their doom.

  The Reichsführer-SS had flown straight back to the Wolfschanze, having watched Skorzeny depart, and he had been quietly amazed to see how far and how rapidly the situation had developed.

  Defeatists and cowards within the High Command had balked at Operation Sea Dragon, even questioning the führer’s judgment. But their craven attitude was no longer a consideration. There was a phrase from the future that Himmler quite liked, and which described them perfectly. Oxygen thieves. Well, they weren’t stealing any of the führer’s oxygen now. The only pity was that they weren’t alive to see how wrong they’d been.

  The Operations Room was crowded with personnel. The large central table, inlaid with a huge map of western Europe, was covered with hundreds of small wooden markers. These were constantly being pushed toward their objective by junior staff members carrying long, thin poles.

  A young female Oberleutnant moved several little wooden blocks, signifying the Tirpitz’s battle group, a few miles farther down the Norwegian coastline. A Luftwaffe Hauptmann needed two long pointers to reposition all the airborne forces that were now winging their way toward the east coast of England. Dozens of markers showed Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions converging on the embarkation ports, while dozens more denoted the thousands of Luftwaffe planes that engaged the Royal Air Force over the Channel, or bombed airfields in the southern counties. These measures protected the invasion fleet as it set out from France, and harassed the Royal Navy’s squadrons as they moved to intervene.

  “Savor this moment, gentlemen,” the führer declared as he slowly circled the Ops Room, followed by his entourage. “There has never been a greater force assembled in the history of human conflict. And there has never been a heavier blow landed on that little island. We are not just remaking history today. We are smashing it into a thousand pieces.”

  HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

  “Good luck, Major Windsor.”

  “Thank you, Captain Halabi. Better luck next time, eh?”

  The commander of the Trident and the SAS officer saluted each other. Harry’s was the last group to be lifted off the destroyer. The observer group, for the most part, ha
d been put ashore, with just two liaison officers remaining. Harry was lifting with his squad and their equipment for a fast, nap of the Earth flight to London, from where he was to link up with the regiment. Nobody yet knew where that might be. It would depend on the Germans to a large extent.

  Weak gray sunlight poured in through the hangar roof. The sky was a shroud, the color of dirty washing water. It was a high ceiling, however, and it seemed as if hundreds of planes dueled beneath the clouds. Here and there, puffs of smoke and flame marked the end of the fight for somebody. Parachutes billowed occasionally, but not always, and once or twice he heard the crackle of laser fire burning the air around the ship as a Stuka or a Heinkel pressed home a suicidal attack.

  No jets had as yet reappeared. Halabi had told him she expected they’d be back when her antiair stocks were demonstrably empty.

  She didn’t even wait for the elevator to lift them clear of the hangar, returning to her station as soon as they began the ascent. A couple of the Air Div crew waved him off, and Harry replied with a thumbs-up. But he felt a lot less jaunty than the gesture implied.

  The Germans were attempting a multidimensional assault right out of the twenty-first-century playbook. Their coordination was hopeless, and a lot of the technology they needed simply did not exist yet. A couple of hastily built, poorly flown ME 262s just didn’t count.

  But having secured their eastern flank, they seemed to be bringing the entire weight of their continental war machine to bear on the south of England.

  Every now and then, when the pounding of the five-inch guns and ack-ack mounts abated, he could hear the much deeper, more sonorous bass note rumble of ten thousand engines. Of twenty thousand guns, and high-explosive shells, and dumb iron bombs detonating for hundreds of miles around. It was the sound of two worlds grinding against each other, and even with his years of service, he’d never known anything like it.

  St. Clair sat across from him, sphinxlike and withdrawn. His sergeant major was always like that, on the edge of battle.

  The chopper’s engines hummed into life as the elevator lifted them clear of the hangars and into the daylight. His six troopers reacted in character. Some simply adjusted their Bergens and checked their weapons. Some leaned forward in their seats to catch whatever glimpse they could of the world outside, a slate gray tableau of small, antique warships tossed on heaving seas.

  One man, Gibbs, slept with his head cushioned by a life jacket.

  “Sergeant Major, what’s our current strength at Kinlochmoidart?”

  “One hundred and twenty-five officers and other ranks, sir. Captain Fraser’s already got them turned out and kitted up. They’re waiting for movement orders.”

  “Very good.”

  The Eurocopter cycled up to full power as Harry felt the Trident come around. They began to dip and rise on the confused swell and crosscurrents where the waters of the Solent met those of the Channel. The rotor’s down blast tugged at his battle dress and made it difficult to communicate without shouting. He signaled to St. Clair to engage tac net. Everyone who hadn’t already done so fitted combat goggles and earbuds before powering up their helmets.

  Over the years, Harry had trained his software to the point where it was virtually an extension of his own psyche. Without being instructed, it brought up eight separate windows, biofeedback from his men and himself. Instinctively he scanned the squad, looking for signs of combat fatigue, developing psychoses, exhaustion, or any of the myriad symptoms that stalked everyone who did this sort of work for too long.

  They all checked out.

  A link to the helicopter’s on-board systems provided a V3D holomap of their flight plan, while an outside link to the Trident added relevant battlespace data. Harry hummed quietly as he took in the information. In truth, there was no safe route they could take to the drop-off. Hundreds of 109s and 110s infested the airspace around them. It was going to be like flying through a hailstorm, trying to avoid the stones.

  They lifted off, and he acknowledged a couple of crew on the deck of the cruiser who paused to wave them away.

  “Right, everyone, I’ll keep this short.”

  Halabi’s voice was broadcast throughout the vessel via shipnet, emerging from speakers and screens on all the decks, from bow to stern.

  “The Admiralty have assigned us two objectives. First, a strategic strike on the Tirpitz group, which is now sortieing into the Channel to cover the invasion fleet. And second, battlespace management for sectors One through Four.

  “We will need to move west to bring the Tirpitz within range. We shall be doing so without the company of our destroyer screen. They simply can’t move as quickly as we can. Posh calculates that we have enough antiair stocks to return with a three percent reserve. The RAF will provide continuous cover during the run. We will need the reserve, given the new threat of missile strike from the continent. I don’t want to overstate the danger. Even if a number of missiles have been removed from the Dessaix for use against us, the ship herself is not here and the enemy will thus be striking blind. Nonetheless we need to be aware of the risk and ready to respond.”

  The Trident’s captain paused. The CIC crew watched her in person. The rest of her men and women craned upward to follow the speech on screen, or listened over shipnet speakers where no screens were available.

  “While we are fighting to achieve our goals, the enemy will fight just as hard to destroy us. There are hundreds of pilots aloft now, with even more climbing into their cockpits. Their only goal today is to sink this ship. There are commanders of U-boats and torpedo boats, destroyers, cruisers, and even a few battleships who have probably been personally ordered by Adolf Hitler to ensure that we do not see out this day. Some of them are good men. Some are evil. They are almost all brave and well trained, and they will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to win this battle, and enslave our countrymen.”

  She paused again, to let her words sink in.

  “That doesn’t really matter,” she continued, “Because we are going to kill them all.”

  At that, a rousing, full-throated cheer filled the Combat Information Center, and sounded more distantly throughout the rest of the ship.

  Halabi looked over to the antisat station, where the two contemporary navy men had been corralled. They were cheering along with the rest, and every bit as enthusiastically.

  “Thank you, I expect you will all do your best.”

  She switched off the shipnet and turned to her executive officer.

  “Mr. McTeale, all ahead full. Engage the S-Cav system. Assign Autonomy Level One to the Combat Intelligence for defensive measures.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Comms, signal Stanmore that we are guns free and running west.”

  “Fighter Command report that Three-oh-three Squadron have scrambled and will rendezvous with us in six minutes.”

  “Excellent,” said Halabi. “Let’s test their VHF sets now.”

  The 303 was a Polish squadron, and she had specifically requested them for this operation. Certain pinheaded elements within Fighter Command at Stanmore were dismissive of the Polish pilots, ignoring the fact that pilot training had been extensive and advanced in that country before the war. And, of course, that the Poles had more experience than anyone in scrapping with the Luftwaffe.

  Even though they hadn’t joined the Battle of Britain until a few months after it started, 303 Squadron was responsible for downing more of Göring’s precious aircraft than any other single squadron. Flying augmented Spitfires with the new VHF radio sets, they had been training for this operation since shortly after the Trident’s arrival.

  “Three-oh-three on line, Captain. Squadron Leader Zumbach sends his compliments.”

  “My greetings to Jan,” she said. “Put them in holding, and slave them to air control. We’ll vector them down as needed.”

  Halabi rolled her shoulders and settled into her command seat. She had never seen the battlespace display so densely filled with information. I
t was an almost impenetrable wall of data and imagery that was beyond the ability of one individual to fully comprehend. It wasn’t beyond Posh, however. The ship’s Combat Intelligence tracked every return from her Nemesis arrays and low-orbit drones, sorting the raw intelligence into a coherent narrative that her human controllers might have some hope of understanding.

  “Helm, Captain. Course plotted. Supercavitating systems engaged.”

  As the trimaran’s aquajets began to shoot out enormous volumes of seawater, pressurised to 60,000 psi, billions of microscopic pores in the nanotube-sheathing of her three hulls opened to vent a fine mist of compressed air bubbles into the surrounding water. With the drag on her keel reduced to a small percentage of its normal coefficient of viscosity, the ship began to accelerate to speeds that left her escorts standing still by comparison.

  “CI has the helm, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Halabi acknowledged.

  With her speed leaping up to well over 140 knots, it wasn’t feasible for a human being to steer the Trident through the labyrinth of hazards that lay ahead of her in the Channel. They were now in the hands of the Combat Intelligence they called Posh.

  32

  TOWNSVILLE, SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA

  It didn’t look like a weapon of mass destruction, but that’s how Colonel J. “Lonesome” Jones thought of it. He hefted the gun, which was still slightly oily from the packing grease. It looked and felt pretty much as he remembered.

  The AK-47, he thought. Killed more people than the atom bomb and the automobile put together.

  They weren’t calling it a Kalashnikov or an AK down here, though. In Australia it was known as a Lysaght submachine gun, after the firm that had the contract to turn them out. He knew that in the U.S. it had been designated the MK-1. And in Canada and the UK, the prototypes were called, rather unimaginatively, AW/GLs, for Automatic Weapon and Grenade Launching system.