Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  Or rather, Stalin thought it suited him.

  When the atomic warheads were finally delivered, the Slavic buffoon would be made to realize just how wrong he had been.

  4

  D-DAY + 5. 8 MAY 1944. 1833 HOURS.

  PARIS.

  Brasch had read somewhere that those who can eat well, and those who cannot, exist at all times on opposite sides of a gulf that can never be crossed.

  It had been more than three and a half years since pastries had been legally sold in Paris, and about the same interval since fish, meat, chocolates, tobacco, and wine had been rationed almost out of existence. Nonetheless, sitting by one of the large windows in Maxim’s Le Bar Imperial, Major General Paul Brasch found himself adrift on the odors of fine French cuisine. The Parisians in the street below might have been getting by on starvation rations, but when Reichsmarschall Gцring was in town looting the art treasures of the Republic, he loved to dine at Maxim’s, and so the wartime restrictions did not bite as heavily here.

  Brasch nursed his Kir Royale and wondered whether or not he would ever have set foot in this place-or any like it-had it not been for the war.

  Not likely, he mused. And truthfully, it wasn’t the war that had delivered him to this stool at the end of a dark wooden bar. No, it was the Emergence. Without the miracle of the time travelers’ arrival, he would probably be a frozen corpse somewhere in Russia by now. Instead he sipped at a cocktail, enjoyed the sour look on the face of his latest bodyguard, Hauptsturmfuhrer Neumann, and wondered whether his data package would arrive before his dinner guest.

  He would never know, really. The encryption software protecting his communications stripped off any identifying tags such as datelines. He alone would be able to read the file, and then for only ten minutes, before it disappeared from history altogether. And of course, he wouldn’t be cracking open his latest instructions from the British over a late supper with General Oberg, the SS commander in Paris.

  Dining with human filth like Oberg was a necessary sacrifice. Brasch was a very privileged Nazi nowadays, one of the trusted few. He had even been invited to share a table at the Palais Luxembourg with the morphine-addled Gцring, resplendent in his white Reichsmarschall uniform, encrusted with jewels and medals over which the fat criminal had vomited during the dessert course. The engineer had long ago learned to control the sensation of his balls crawling up into his belly, his flesh seeming to swarm with lice, whenever he mixed with the likes of Gцring and Oberg. Since he had received word that his wife and son had safely reached Canada, he had even begun to revel in the double life forced on him as the price of their deliverance. It was a wonderful thing, mixing with these pigs, conniving in their downfall, and all the time knowing that the only people in the world he cared about were beyond their reach.

  Indeed, as far as anyone in the Third Reich was concerned, Willie Brasch and little Manfred had been killed in a British bombing raid in November 1942. A tragic loss for a hero who had already given so much to the cause, and an explanation-as if any were needed-for his fanatical devotion to duty.

  “Ah! So good to see a smiling face at last. We can always depend on you, Herr General.”

  Brasch’s smile only grew wider as he turned on his bar stool and stood to salute Oberstgruppenfuhrer Karl Oberg, the man who would probably set Paris aflame in a couple of weeks to deny its liberation by the Americans. The room was crowded, and so thick with cigarette and cigar smoke that the patrons in the farthest corners were almost obscured. Oberg stood out, though. Even the Wehrmacht officers gave him a wide berth.

  “Inventing some new V-weapon while you wait for dinner, I imagine,” Oberg said. He resembled nothing so much as a squashed, fattened caricature of Heinrich Himmler. He had been a fruit seller before joining the party and the SS, and he was the embodiment of all the poisonous irony inherent to the term master race. Nevertheless, the smile never left Brasch’s face as he opened his mouth to reply.

  “No! No, don’t tell me,” Oberg interrupted, waving a hand. “I understand well that you cannot discuss such things.”

  In fact, Brasch was imagining what it would feel like to take Oberg’s close-cropped porcine head in his hands and twist it so violently that the spinal cord shattered instantly. How many of the people in this bar would applaud?

  Some, but not all. Neumann there would probably put a bullet into his head before Oberg hit the floor. And of the handful of Frenchmen and women who were taking an aperitif in the baroque splendor of the Imperial, how many would be pleased, and how many horrified?

  It was impossible to say. Only the most significant collaborators were given entrйe to these rarefied circles, and with the invasion under way, only they would care to be seen with the Germans.

  Even so, you couldn’t trust the waiters, or the prostitutes, or even the fascist leaders of the French Popular Party. Any of them might be secretly working for the Resistance. Dozens of collaborators and their German overlords had been killed in the last few weeks. Brasch himself was a target of great value, because of his role in the Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research, so the SS had assigned Neumann to protect him out of a genuine fear that he might be lost to such an attack.

  Yet none of this meant anything to Brasch-he had numbered himself among the dead back when he served on the Eastern Front. In truth, his secret life, and the knowledge of his family’s escape, made each day a gift from above.

  “Actually, Herr General,” he said, pumping Oberg’s arm in a firm two-handed grip, “you are entirely correct. You should consider a career in counterintelligence. Clearly you can see right through me.”

  “Of course, of course!” the SS commander replied. “So we must talk our way around such things, over dinner.

  “I understand you are leaving for Berlin tomorrow,” he continued. “I just wanted to thank you for all of the help you have given my staff while you were here and, if I might impose upon you, to pass along a personal note to the Reichsfuhrer.”

  Brasch clicked his heels. “Of course, Herr General. I shall be seeing Reichsfuhrer Himmler almost as soon as I return. I shall make certain he gets your letter.”

  He pocketed the slim envelope in his jacket, next to the flexipad that still waited for the signal from Muller.

  He had less than an hour to live. The blood leaking into his shoes made a squelching noise as he dragged himself up the street.

  There was no pain, thanks to an analgesic flush from his spinal syrettes, but Muller knew that the knives had struck deeply. As much blood as had flowed out of him to soak his clothes, he was losing even more to the internal bleeding that would surely end his life.

  A lamppost loomed, the glow of its light a soft sphere in the summer night, tempting him to stop for just a little while. But he pressed on. If he gave up now, even for a short rest, there was no guarantee he’d be able to get moving again.

  The three Frenchmen who had set upon him earlier had meant business. Whether they were Resistance fighters or simply street toughs did not matter. It had been a short, brutal encounter. He hadn’t hesitated to defend himself when they came at him out of the dark alleyway. Many people would have paused, and died on the spot, but when the oldest, most primitive parts of his brain began screaming at him that he was in danger, Muller acted. His fighting knife had appeared in his hand instantaneously, and without conscious thought he had decided which of the three was to die first, even before they had closed the short distance between them.

  If they were Resistance, there was no point trying to explain that they were all working toward the same end. He’d dispatched two of them with his knife and killed the third with an open-handed strike to the throat that had crushed the man’s larynx. However, he wasn’t fast enough. At least two of the stab wounds he’d suffered felt as if they had cut something deep and vital. As he fled the scene, gray space bloomed at the edge of his vision, and cold chills racked his upper body with increasing violence despite the warmth of the evening.

  Muller could n
ot be certain that he would get far enough to establish a point-to-point link with Brasch’s flexipad. He stopped in the doorway of a boarded-up tailor shop, a Jewish business, and automated the contact routines, just in case. He might not make it all the way to the dispatch point, but as long as the engineer passed within seven hundred meters the link would set itself up.

  Drawing breath felt like hauling a great weight up into himself at the end of a long rope. His feet dragged, and more than once they threatened to become tangled up with each other.

  People were beginning to stare.

  He tried to calculate the distance he had left to travel. Maybe another four hundred meters. Supercoagulants gathered at the site of his wounds, to slow the loss of blood. Another flush of stim coursed into his veins, pushing him on and clearing some of the gray from his vision.

  But blood was beginning to show through the coat he had taken from the body of the man he’d killed with the blow to the throat. As the stain spread, and his discomfort became obvious, the reactions of those passing by became more pronounced. In short, they avoided him. There were many Parisians about, but none approached him to help, for which he was grateful. The last thing he needed right now was some Gallic busybody complicating matters further.

  Actually, the last thing he needed was for another German to do so, but as he staggered down the way, that was exactly what occurred.

  Someone hurried across the street toward him. “Hey! Wait there. I’ll help you.”

  The figure swam in and out of focus, but the black uniform of an SS officer was unmistakable.

  Fuck it.

  Muller cursed his bad luck. He was wearing a civilian jacket over his gore-stained Luftwaffe captain’s uniform. In his breast pocket was a British flexipad, and he was heading toward the most valuable spy the Allies had in Nazi Germany. This was not going to end well.

  “Resistance,” he coughed as the SS man ran up and grabbed his arms to steady him. He had been very close to toppling over.

  “What happened?” the man demanded. Muller recognized him as a Hauptsturmfuhrer. A captain. A definite buffer existed around them now, a circle about twenty meters in diameter into which none of the locals would dare step. They all found some reason to cross to the other side of the street.

  “Resistance,” Muller repeated. “Three of them. Back at the Rue la Bruyere. I killed them.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” his would-be savior said, supporting most of his weight. “We must get you to an aid station. Quickly, come this way.”

  The man began to force Muller back the way he had just come. There was an aid station two blocks down. He attempted to resist, but his helper was too strong.

  “No, this way, Herr Kapitдn,” he insisted. “You are in shock. You need to come with me-let me carry you.”

  Finally Muller allowed himself to fall over the other’s shoulder, his arm around the man’s neck. He let his body go limp, allowing his full weight to burden the SS officer, who grunted a little with the effort. Muller let himself be carried away from his objective, acting in character, cursing the Resistance, vowing revenge, demanding that that SS hunt down those who were responsible.

  “But you said you killed them,” his rescuer grunted.

  A wet, wounded chuckle bubbled up out of Muller’s throat. “So I did.”

  Then he drove his fighting knife deep into the man’s sternum, twisting and ripping up and out. The screech of pain became confused with the cries of onlookers, who could not believe what they were seeing as Muller suddenly locked up his victim’s head, using the arm he had draped over the shoulders, before slitting his throat from ear to ear. The man’s screams were cut off as Muller severed the windpipe. The body dropped with a sick thud as the head hit the pavement.

  Muller’s world tilted then, and threatened to fall out from under him. He let his momentum carry him into the road, where he stopped a velo-taxi, one of the faintly ridiculous three-wheeled, pedal-powered cabs that had taken over the city during the Occupation. The driver attempted to swerve around him, but a shot from Muller’s pistol pulled him up.

  A shrill whistle sounded in the distance, and he thought he could hear hobnailed boots hammering toward him. He half lunged, half fell into the passenger’s seat.

  “Just get me up the road,” he croaked in his passable French.

  “B-but…” The driver tried to stammer out some excuse, but a wave of the pistol set him to his job. They lurched away just as rifle fire cracked past them.

  “They will kill me,” the driver protested.

  “No, I will kill you if you don’t hurry up. Just to the next corner, and then you can get out. I’ll shoot you in the ass if you like, to prove that you were hijacked.”

  “To prove I was what?”

  “Just fucking pedal.”

  More bullets whistled past, some of them sparking off the cobblestones and shattering shop windows, sending the native Parisians scurrying for cover. More bullets chewed great chunks out of the little wooden passenger’s cabin. Muller painfully forced himself to twist around in the seat.

  About two hundred meters back a detachment of German soldiers had outrun a couple of gendarmes and were taking aim.

  They weren’t going to make it.

  Crack!

  The top of the velo-taxi driver’s head flew off in a fantail of blood and gray matter. Immediately they decelerated, and Muller allowed himself to roll out of the cab onto the hard stone roadway. A bullet struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder, knocking him forward. He managed to scramble a few more meters as he hauled out the flexipad.

  No signal lock.

  Crack!

  An enormous iron fist slammed into him, bringing darkness.

  He came to, expecting to find himself in a Gestapo cell.

  But he was still in Paris, on the street. The pedicab driver’s body was just a few feet away, gushing blood like a ruptured pipeline. A squad of German infantry had surrounded him, their guns leveled at his head.

  He blinked slowly and his head swam.

  “What have we here. A spy? A Resistance pig playing dress-up. A traitor?”

  An officer was speaking, advancing on him. Muller realized he was still holding the precious flexipad in his outstretched hand. He tried to get to his knees, but the Wehrmacht officer, a lieutenant, sailed in and launched a vicious snap kick at his ribs. His inserts protected him from the worst of the pain, but he felt at least three ribs break as he flew over onto his back and rolled another half a meter away, ending facedown in a puddle of mud.

  The pad began to beep.

  It had locked on to Brasch’s device and initiated a linkup. The file transfer began.

  It was complete within half a second.

  “What the hell is that?” the lieutenant demanded.

  Muller coughed up a thick blood clot.

  “That is the end of the world,” he said, rolling on top of the flexipad with the last of his energy and triggering the explosive weave vest he routinely wore under whatever disguise his mission required.

  Everyone within thirty meters was atomized by the blast.

  “What the hell was that?” Oberg asked as the rumble shook the crystalware on their table at Maxim’s.

  Brasch had no idea, but he instantly assumed something had gone wrong with Muller. There was no reason to think so, really. Bombs were constantly going off in Paris. The Resistance had been tutored by instructors familiar with insurgencies from the far future that had paralyzed much more formidable opponents than the Nazis. It might be a truck bomb twenty-five kilometers away, or a suitcase bomb in a cafй or bistro favored by the Germans. It might even be one of the Existentialists, seeking vengeance for the murder of Sartre and de Beauvoir by blowing himself up in a brothel favored by the occupying forces. Everybody feared being caught up in one of their mad attacks. It was said that the last thing you ever heard was the crazed existentialist screaming “To do is to be!” before he triggered his suicide device.

  Brasch stood
up and pushed aside the drapes that covered the window nearest their table. He had to press his face right up to the glass, but in doing so he could make out the telltale signs of a detonation a few blocks away.

  His stomach turned over.

  “An existentialist,” he sighed, not believing it for a second.

  Something had gone wrong. He could sense it down in his core.

  “Madmen,” Oberg hissed. “Cowards, all of them. If only there were some way to stop them. To detect them before they set themselves off,” he complained.

  “As I understand it, no foolproof solution was ever found in the future,” Brasch commented. “When a man is willing to die to harm his enemies, there is always a good chance of taking some of them with him.”

  “Pah!” spat the SS commandant. “When will these bastards accept that they are beaten? You know the most frustrating thing about this, Brasch. It’s that we cannot identify the bombers postmortem. Believe me, if that were possible we’d thin out the ranks of their recruits. Execute every last one of their friends and relatives. Then they mightn’t be so enthusiastic about blowing themselves up.”

  Brasch returned to his seat, itching with the desire to take out his flexipad and see whether his data burst had come through. He pushed at an unfinished plate of boeuf bourguignon with his heavy gilded fork. “A lot of money is going into DNA research.” He shrugged. “Eventually it will help, and then we will have the ability to trace back to the culprits and take the appropriate measures.”

  “Yes, yes, so I have heard!” Oberg said approvingly. He had returned to his own meal without missing a beat. “It is a very exciting field, this genetic science. I understand you have been instrumental in pushing it forward.”

  Brasch smiled abashedly. “It’s not really my field. I am a combat engineer. But any good German could see the importance of investing in such a thing. For starters, it will mean there is no hiding for the Jews. And the weaklings-the infirm, the cripples, and the mentally defective-will be detected before they have a chance to be born. Although I do not understand the science, I understand the opportunities for the Reich-”