Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  There was a sharp stab of pain in her mouth, followed by the rush of something warm and salty. She’d bitten her tongue. Pouring on the acceleration, weaving around to follow the yellow arrowhead designator that kept her away from the rapidly diminishing flak streams, she dialed up a feed from the Big Eye, an infrared view from ten thousand meters up.

  All fifteen jets were still flying, but one was trailing flames. It exploded as she watched, the detonation lost in a storm of much larger blasts as more Penetrators drilled deep into shattered concrete and went off, focusing their destructive energies down into the missile farm.

  Secondary explosions of rocket fuel and warheads tore up the valley, negating the attacks on smaller individual targets.

  “Shit,” muttered Hobbins. “That was a bit excessive.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Ronsard breathed.

  “Nope,” Harry corrected him. “Professor Barnes Wallis, and about twenty years’ of uptime experience digging reinforced bunkers out of the Hindu Kush.”

  Anjela Claudel’s voice, shocked and a little shaky, came in over his helmet systems. “But everyone will be dead. The scientists, too.”

  “Not everyone,” said Harry. “We’ll lose everybody in the silos, but three-quarters of von Braun’s team live off-site in Complex B. That’s still standing.”

  “How many of the Boche will be waiting for you, though?” asked Claudel.

  Harry smiled. “Enough for everyone. Now, if you’ll just excuse me a moment.”

  He pulled his combat goggles down over his eyes, the gelform seal molding itself to the contours of his face. He linked to the Big Eye and back to the Trident via flexipad. A dense, multicolored V3D representation appeared, showing the threat bubble out to eight kilometers. In smaller windows, live video ran of the blazing bunkers and the residential complex that was their objective. He was presented with immediate damage surveys, estimates of the number of enemy killed and incapacitated, the disposition of his own forces, and live intel from the Trident’s CIC. To the uninitiated it would seem an almost impenetrable mass of data, but it was as familiar to Harry as an old and much-loved children’s picture book.

  The second squadron, under Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, was already setting down in their Landing Zone away to the west. The first choppers had disgorged their troops, who’d formed up just below a ridgeline overlooking Complex B.

  Harry switched his view to a live feed of his squadron’s own LZ, overlaid with tactical and threat assessment data. They would be setting down another six hundred meters away, in a large field to the south.

  The copilot’s voice cut in. “Strobe sighted. Verifying.”

  An infrared strobe had just lit up, identifying the LZ, and Harry knew that the Big Eye had just focused at least half of its lenses and sensors on that area. All being well, one of Claudel’s Resistance cells would be down there, ready to lead them in. If that didn’t check out, and the Intel Division back on the Trident decided that the contact had been compromised, the area would be hosed down with autocannon and rocket fire, and they would move on to an alternative LZ.

  He could sense Claudel’s tension next to him. “It is okay?” she asked.

  Harry waited for the signal from the Trident.

  The strobe kept flashing.

  “It is okay?” she repeated. “Oui?”

  A green ALL CLEAR finally appeared in his HUD.

  “Oui,” he answered. “Lock and load, gentlemen. And mademoiselle, of course.”

  Claudel smiled brilliantly as she prepped her old Sten gun with a metallic kerrchunk. Her white teeth and bright green eyes were quite arresting, even in the red light of the cabin. Harry checked himself, grinding down on a spark of attraction. He normally didn’t feel like getting a leg over until well after an op. But this had been happening a lot since his inserts had run out of neurochem inhibitor.

  Oh well, perhaps if he lived…

  “One minute.”

  Suddenly they dipped and swooped to the right, leaving his stomach where it had been somewhere above them. The combat chief hit a switch, and the rear door of the Chinook opened with a slow, heavy whirring noise.

  Dozens of people back in England were watching the ground below, alert for the slightest hint of a trap, but even so Harry was glad to see the chief giving it a severe eyeballing himself. That sort of attention to detail was how you got to be an old veteran rather than one of the poor fucking glorious dead.

  A sick shudder ran through his body, a momentary aberration he recognized from the three or four times he’d experienced it before. It felt like a premonition of his death, but he suspected it was just a deep-body realization of his mortality.

  After all, he was still alive, despite the previous visitations.

  He noticed Claudel making the sign of the cross and whispering what looked like a Hail Mary. Of his own men, he could see four who were making their own peace with God, but like the remainder of his troop-and Captain Ronsard-Harry drove away his demons with a last equipment check.

  “Thirty seconds,” the crew chief called out.

  The pilot wiped out almost all of their forward momentum, dropping them into a hover over the thick grass of the field. Harry could see cows gallumphing away in fear. A good sign. The chopper assumed its landing attitude, with the nose elevated so that the rear wheels would touch down first.

  The chief and his two offsiders stood at the rear door, scanning the ground closely.

  “Clear left!”

  “Clear right!”

  “Clear in the arse, guv!”

  They began the last few meters of their descent. Nobody was praying now. Everyone had their warrior’s mask firmly in place beneath the greasepaint and night vision goggles. Harry hooked an arm through his pack, getting ready to go. In his headphones, the copilot counted them in to touchdown.

  “…four, three, two, one, down.”

  The front wheels struck ground. The chopper jumped forward a meter or two, then came to rest.

  As soon as he felt the soft bump, Harry was up. They all rose as one, some more gracefully than others, who were caught off-balance and wobbled slightly as they hauled up their packs. Everyone dropped into an old-fashioned runner’s stance: legs bent, knees flexing, ready for the starter’s pistol. The chief pulled on a lever, dropping the tailgate onto the ground.

  “Go, go, go.”

  The members of the heavy-weapon team ran out first, dropping to the ground, ready to start laying fire on the enemy if he had somehow gone undetected. Two by two, the remainder of the troop charged out behind them.

  “Good luck, Your Highness,” Anjela Claudel said.

  “Vive la France,” Harry replied.

  They moved out into the night.

  6

  D-DAY + 8. 11 MAY 1944. 0341 HOURS.

  DONZENAC MISSILE FACILITY, SOUTH-CENTRAL FRANCE.

  No plan survives contact with the enemy. Harry was going to have that tattooed on his arse if he survived this right fucking teddy bear’s picnic.

  He had twelve men to protect thirty-four German rocket scientists from an estimated eighty or ninety SS troopers, all of whom seemed to have gone to Plan B: kill everyone in sight. Harry himself was holed up in some sort of canteen on the second floor of the residential complex, with Nazis above and below him, and the rest of the squadron cut off on the other side of the H-shaped building.

  The crash of small arms and Mills bombs did not let up. The scientists huddled together behind a makeshift barricade at the very rear of the mess hall, where Anjela Claudel and three of Harry’s men, who would have been better used up here on the firing line, guarded them. Harry crouched behind an upturned table, a solid oaken slab of cover that protected them from the German Mausers. For now. There was only so much damage it could take, however, before it was reduced to splinters.

  “Bit of a cock-up then, guv,” Sergeant Major St. Clair commented.

  “Just a fucking bit,” Harry agreed.

  Captain Ronsard shrugged theatri
cally. “Such is life, non?”

  There’d been no warning that two companies of SS Panzergrenadiers were posted at the residence, and before the two sides got themselves sorted out there were probably forty or fifty casualties in the mкlйe. Now Harry’s squadron was split over three floors, in a dozen different rooms. What looked like two full-strength platoons of Waffen-SS were blocking them from linking up with the other squadron, and tac net was blaring warnings of a battalion-sized enemy force racing toward Donzenac from Tulle. Gunships had peeled away to attack them, but there would be more to follow.

  Harry had already ordered six of the Chinooks to depart with his wounded troopers and those captured rocket scientists they had managed to get out. But he needed to see the remaining prisoners away, too, because numbered among them were two of the Reich’s foremost missile researchers, perhaps even their best: Wernher von Braun and Major General Walter Dornberger. Both had worked for the United States after the war, in his time. Since this was common knowledge now, the fact that they were still alive spoke volumes for their importance to the Third Reich. Harry was determined to get them out of here and back to England, no matter the cost.

  If that proved impossible, as a last resort he’d put a bullet into each of their brains.

  The sounds of close-quarter battle were so loud they penetrated his helmet’s gel seal, making it difficult for him to communicate with his men, even using the throat mikes. The upturned table shuddered under the impact of concentrated rifle fire. At first he’d wondered why the Panzergrenadiers hadn’t just tossed a couple of potato mashers over and finished off all the white coats he’d put in the bag. They’d done just that on the floor below, killing half a troop of his men and the six technicians they’d been shepherding.

  But then, von Braun and Dornberger hadn’t been part of that group. The Germans must have had orders to keep them alive no matter the cost. A mirror image of Harry’s own mission brief.

  For the moment, then, they had arrived at a stalemate.

  The frenzy of small-arms fire and hand-to-hand fighting that had marked the opening minutes of the encounter had settled down into a more measured exchange, with each side trying to pick off the other, man by man. Harry couldn’t even rely on his lads’ night vision to give them an advantage. The SS were kitted out with their own Gen2-type goggles. He and St. Clair could have blinded them with flash-bangs, which their 21C optics were smart enough to blot out. But the rest of his men were equipped with NVGs no more advanced than the Germans’-perhaps a little less so.

  An SAS trooper next to Ronsard who’d raised himself up to take a shot suddenly flew backward, a gout of dark fluid jetting from his splattered skull.

  “Merde,” grunted the Frenchman.

  “Who was that?” Harry asked St. Clair.

  The giant noncom glanced over. “Looks like Asher, guv.”

  “Bugger. I’ve had enough of this, Viv. They just have to keep us here long enough, and they win. That’s why they’re not pressing the issue.”

  St. Clair nodded. “Fair enough.”

  Captain Ronsard lifted his Ivan gun above the table and squeezed off a three-round burst. “You have a plan?”

  “It’s a bear hunt. We can’t go through them. Can’t get around them. We’ll have to go over them.”

  “Sorry, guv,” said St. Clair. “Left me jet-powered backpack at ’ome.”

  “Not to worry. I have a cunning plan. Is Private Haigh still in the land of the living?”

  It was a bugger of a thing not being able to call up his men’s biosigns. It meant he was never quite sure at any given moment who was drawing breath and who wasn’t.

  “Gideon!” St. Clair cried in a harsh whisper. “What are you up to, you nasty little man? Not ’aving another wank, I ’ope.”

  “No, Sergeant Major,” came the reply over the tac net. “I’m down by the big fridge at the back of the room.”

  Excellent, thought Harry. “Private Haigh, it’s Colonel Windsor,” he said as softly as he could while still being heard. “Stay right there, and try very hard not to get killed. You’re coming with me.”

  “With you? Where, sir?”

  “On an adventure, my boy. Just keep your fucking head down.”

  Harry wormed his away over to St. Clair. Guns still barked all around them, and a shower of hot splinters pattered down on his helmet.

  “I’m going up into the ceiling with Haigh,” he said. “He used to be a coal miner, so the confined space shouldn’t bother him. We’ll try to work our way over behind the krauts and drop down on them. You’ll have a second or two before they recover, more if they don’t kill us right off the bat. You need to clean them out, Sergeant Major, and quickly. The old-fashioned way. Like we did in Surabaya.”

  Harry couldn’t see St. Clair’s eyes behind his combat goggles, but the grim set of his jaw was enough to confirm that he understood. Ronsard glanced up dubiously.

  “Be ready in…twelve minutes,” the prince said.

  “Yes, sir. Good luck, Colonel.”

  “Cheers,” Harry replied with more verve than he felt. He pressed himself down as low as he could and began to crawl across the debris-strewn floor. St. Clair tapped the shoulder of the man next to him and, with a series of hand gestures, told him to be ready to fix bayonets in ten. The trooper nodded and repeated the order back. When St. Clair gave him the thumbs-up, he turned to the next in line and passed it on.

  Bullets snapped through the air just above Harry’s head, some hitting stainless steel or chrome with a metallic ring, but most just thudding into plaster and woodwork. The German scientists all lay prone on the tiled floor, twitching and flinching when a round cracked close by, attempting to burrow under one another as they forgot themselves in the extremity of their terror. Two of them were dead, their throats cut as a punishment for trying to help the SS. Anjela Claudel was bathed in their blood. Harry had to pass through them all to get to Haigh, who was one of the few Englishmen actually standing, protected as he was by the mass of an industrial-sized refrigerator in the farthest corner of the hall.

  The SAS troopers keeping watch over the scientists trained the muzzles of their Ivan guns on the men immediately around their commanding officer as he forced his way through. If any of them tried to interfere, they’d be shot without warning.

  Harry checked his watch.

  He’d used up two minutes twenty seconds covering the short distance. Haigh loosed off one more round before backing into the cramped V-shaped nook he’d made for himself by pushing the fridge away from the wall. Harry crawled in as far as he could, then hauled himself up like a rock climber, so as not to expose his back to the direct fire of the Panzergrenadiers. The uproar of the gunfight never once abated.

  “Sorry to be so forward, Private, but I can’t leave my arse hanging out. Some cheeky fucker would shoot it off.”

  “Very good, sir,” Haigh responded. He was a tall, thin young man from the north of England who’d ended up in a Welsh coal mine before he was old enough to get into the army.

  “No time to piss about then, Private. We’re going up into the crawl space-” He pointed at the roof. “-at least there should be a crawl space. There’s an access hole over by the servery. They probably use it for storage. We’re going to get ourselves over behind those bastards and drop in on them for a bit of sport.”

  “Right you are, sir,” Haigh replied, surprising Harry, who’d expected him to protest it as a damn fool idea-which it was. Instead he clicked the safety on his weapon and began to crawl up the exposed piping at the back of the refrigerator.

  There was a fifteen-centimeter gap between the top of the unit and the roof, which exposed them to stray rounds, but Harry was pretty sure that in the chaos they wouldn’t be noticed through the small break. Haigh took out his bayonet and carved through the roof tiles without much trouble.

  They were probably made of asbestos, Harry thought as the dust drifted down on him. Well, that was the least of their worries. When he had an ope
ning large enough to crawl through, Haigh disappeared inside the black hole like a snake into a rat’s nest. Harry followed him, amazed at how easy the young miner had made it seem. It was really quite difficult just getting up there. He had no sure footholds. No room to maneuver. The din of pitched battle was painfully loud. He could feel every bullet that smacked into the fridge, and just before his head popped into the gap between the unit top and the ceiling, at least two rounds caromed through and punched into the plaster wall a few inches from his face.

  He scrambled up through the hole, expecting to be hit.

  He hadn’t known what they’d find in the crawl space. In fact he hadn’t been entirely sure there would be a crawl space up here, despite what he’d told Haigh. But there was, about half a meter of it.

  His goggles rendered everything bottle green. Hundreds of bullet holes appeared as faint jade circles. The roof, which was now supporting him, felt very insecure, as if it might collapse under his weight as soon as he shifted position. He felt a light tap on his arm.

  Private Haigh was lying along a thin wooden beam, beckoning him over. Very carefully, but with as much haste as he dared, Harry inched across while the trooper moved forward to give him room.

  Haigh gestured Forward and Harry nodded, checking his watch. They had six minutes. The private wriggled along the narrow beam without any apparent effort, snaking around the joists that blocked their advance every ten meters or so. Bigger, older, and less flexible, the heir to the throne had slightly more trouble, almost rolling off the beam more times than he’d care to remember. He could imagine himself crashing down through the ceiling and dropping with a bone-cracking thud into no-man’s-land. Just before the Germans blew him apart.

  The crawl space was a deadly, surreal environment, jammed with plumbing, duct work, and electrical wiring, the last of which sparked and fizzed as ricochets and misdirected bullets sliced through live circuits. Harry felt as though he were sneaking between tectonic plates that might shift at any moment and crush the life out of him. He switched from low-light to infrared, to better keep track of exposed electrical wires, which could kill him just as quickly as the gunfire. Creeping around the joists slowed him even further, and, checking the time hack in the corner of his goggles, he cursed softly.