Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

“And?”

  “And so she leaned into him and told him they were going to boogie-oogie-oogie until they simply could not boogie no more.”

  Jones’s rich baritone laughter rolled out over the naval base.

  Kolhammer allowed himself a chuckle, too, now that they were out of earshot of the typing pool and any other ’temps who might be listening. They just wouldn’t understand.

  11

  D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 1954 HOURS.

  NORTHERN FRANCE.

  Julia had missed the first day of the offensive-she was stuck on the road from Dieppe to Abbeville, which, in her humble opinion, blew chunks. She didn’t like to stand still for very long these days. It gave her time to think about all the mistakes she’d made. It didn’t matter what anyone told her, she knew that she was to blame for Rosanna’s death. She could have gotten her off the island for sure if she’d really tried. God knew she’d wiggled out of tighter situations herself over the years. And as angry as she’d been with Dan over the whole pregnancy thing, in the end he’d been right. What had she married him for if not to start a family? She certainly hadn’t needed to walk down the aisle to get him into bed. And now he was dead because he’d had the shit-awful luck to fall in love with her.

  She shook her head in the back of the jeep and cursed softly.

  “Y’all okay there, Miss Duffy?” her driver asked. He was a pimply black kid from Detroit, name of Private Franklin, and he was still in awe of his unexpected passenger.

  She smiled kindly at him. They were stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Thousands of vehicles stretched away in front and behind them. GIs trudged alongside the road in an unceasing line. Some of them slowed down to talk every now and then, usually until some noncom bawled at them to haul ass again. It would have been an irresistible target for the Luftwaffe…had the Luftwaffe not ceased to exist in any real sense in this part of the world. High above them countless numbers of Allied fighter aircraft described long, lazy figure eights, “guarding the parking lot,” as Julia explained to her companion.

  “We’ll be out of this soon, ma’am. I’m sure of it,” Franklin promised.

  “S’okay,” she said, staring across the plowed fields that surrounded them on both sides. “Gives me a chance to tally up all my regrets.”

  “You, ma’am?” he gasped. “You couldn’t have any regrets! Damn, excuse me, ma’am. But damn, you’re famous and all. And rich. And pretty, too, if you don’t think me too forward for saying so, ma’am.”

  Her smile touched the corners of her eyes for the first time in many days. “Thanks, Franklin. But I’m not Sinatra. I’ve had more than a few regrets.”

  The jeep lunged forward a few feet as a pulse of movement crept along the jam.

  “Hey, you know, that’s my favorite song, Miss Duffy. You want me to sing it for you? I can sing it real well. My mom says so, anyway.”

  Before she could shrug and say Sure he was into the first verse, beating out a kickin’ version of the old tune, which had bounced around in the top ten for the last six months. She couldn’t help but laugh and join in the chorus. A couple of grounded paratroopers picked it up as they marched past, and within moments it had spread up and down the almost stationary line of traffic. Thousands of tired, bloodied men ripping out an a cappella power-ballad version of “My Way.”

  Julia quickly unpacked her Sonycam, blocking out a precious few minutes of lattice memory to record something other than blood and horror.

  There was more than enough of that waiting for her up ahead.

  For six days the combined air forces of Britain, Canada, and the United States had carpet-bombed a corridor 120 kilometers long and 30 wide. Within that target box lay twelve armored and motorized divisions the Nazis had released from the “defense” of Normandy to attack the Allied Forces around Calais.

  The first concerted air strikes had begun as the lead element of the German counterattack-the Panzer Lehr and the Panzer Korps Hermann Gцring- approached the town of Abbeville. The lead three tanks, Tiger IIs, rumbled onto a ridge to the east of town, but never even made it to the downslope. High above them, fifteen Lancaster bombers, protected by a squadron of Saber jet fighters, all of them controlled by the Nemesis battlespace arrays of HMS Trident three hundred kilometers away, released the first of tens of thousands of dumb iron bombs that would fall on the Germans over the next week.

  The Tigers, their crews, and the armored personnel carriers traveling behind them were obliterated. The quantum arrays of the Trident delivered the weapons package in such a focused manner that most of the initial target mass was atomized, so tightly compressed was the storm of high explosives.

  The strategic bombers hammered the centerline of the advance, all 120 kilometers of it, while hundreds of Cobra gunships and ground attack aircraft buzzed viciously on the flanks, chewing over any smaller formations that escaped the crucible. Nearly twelve hundred Tiger and Leopard tanks were destroyed in the first hour. By the end of the engagement two thousand more had been reduced to scrap metal, and approximately forty thousand German soldiers were dead.

  Allied losses ran to two dozen bombers and fifteen helicopter gunships. The first press reports in London actually understated the scope of the victory, because nobody could bring themselves to believe it. Once the devastated corridor was secured by a highland regiment, Julia had hopped a flight over to see for herself the realities of what the tabloids had dubbed “the Great Turkey Shoot.”

  When she’d finally escaped the corps-level traffic snarl, she’d recognized the first signs of destruction from twenty klicks out-a great burned-out scar on the face of the earth.

  “Holy shit,” she muttered as her chopper bled off altitude and dropped down toward the ruined countryside. “Those boys really did do it their way. Anyone know how many Frenchies bought it?” she asked in a louder voice.

  The pilot’s voice came back over the intercom. “Nobody’s saying, Miss Duffy. But I don’t see how anything could have survived inside the target box. I’ve flown twenty miles in, and all the way out to the horizon on both sides that’s all you see. Scorched earth. It’s fucking amazing.”

  She nodded. The highway into Damascus had looked a bit like this when the air force had trashed the Syrian First Armored Corps. But at least that wreckage had maintained a sort of integrity, like a long drawn-out junkyard. You could see, as you flew over it, each cohesive unit that had been set upon and destroyed.

  The devastation stretching across northern France was something entirely different, something she was only just getting used to, along with the ’temps. They might be a little backward in many ways, but when they put their minds to it they could do violence on an apocalyptic scale. It was funny, in a really dark way, thinking back to how horrified they’d been when the uptimers came spilling out of the wormhole with their detached, postmodernist, unemotional approach to warfare. There’d been quite a run of little books and magazine articles by the sniffier sort of contemporary intellectual about the “refined barbarism” of future morality and culture. Some days reading The New Yorker was like being trapped in a stalled elevator with Harold Bloom-and that had happened to her once, so she would know. As a genuine uptime celebrity Julia had even been dragged into the debate, arguing on radio with some idiot professor who wanted to ban television for fifty years to allow society time to “prepare” for its arrival. For all their initial squeamishness, however, the ’temps had proven themselves fast learners in the arts of savagery.

  And when all that savagery was directed-as it had been over northern France-by twenty-first-century Combat Intelligence, the effect was exactly what she’d come to observe and report on: a genuinely biblical catastrophe.

  “Holy shit,” she repeated.

  “Yeah,” the pilot agreed, “that’s what everyone says.”

  After they landed, Julia bivouacked with a British intelligence unit tasked with picking over the scrap metal and body parts, not that there was much of either to analyze. Over the next tw
o days she shot a few megs of imagery that was eerily reminiscent of footage she’d seen from the First World War, then tried and failed to gain access to the handful of prisoners who’d been taken. There weren’t many, and she believed the Intel Division colonel who told her they weren’t speaking to anyone yet. Most were under sedation, he told her in confidence.

  She filed a thousand words for the Times on her impressions of the Great Turkey Shoot, which were really no different from anything anybody else had to say. No matter how she tried to spin it, it all boiled down to “holy shit.”

  She did a hometown puff piece on the crew of the Huey she’d ridden in with and filed a great bit on Private Franklin’s impromptu cover of Frank Sinatra on the road to Abbeville.

  Then, while waiting for a lift back to Calais, she missed the opening shots of Patton’s breakout and drive toward Belgium.

  D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0411 HOURS.

  BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

  The fuhrer was screaming. The object of his rage, a poor Luftwaffe colonel with more bad news from the Western Front, looked gray, perhaps even feverish. Certainly he didn’t look healthy.

  Rather than creating a pall over the crowded underground room, however, Hitler’s outburst actually lifted a few spirits, because it meant that the focus of his rage had shifted safely away from everyone else, at least for a brief moment. It had no effect whatsoever on Himmler, though, since he had long since stopped paying any attention to the fuhrer’s rants. They were like a constant background refrain, similar to the rumble of the British bombs during the night.

  Still, the SS leader felt nearly as sick as the Luftwaffe officer looked. It was he who’d convinced Hitler to release the forces from Normandy for a strike against the Allied foothold. He had even committed his own prized Waffen-SS divisions to act as the vanguard for the assault: Das Reich, Totenkopf, and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. The finest units in the whole world.

  And now they no longer existed. It wasn’t that they had been broken or suffered crippling damage. They had simply ceased to exist. Men and machines, they were all gone. Erased by a rain of bombs that fell with inhuman accuracy.

  Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it.

  Inhuman accuracy.

  The British press had gone on at great lengths concerning the role played in the wreck of his elite forces by that half-caste mud creature, Halabi. Their arrogance was unbelievable, the way they openly boasted that the so-called Combat Intelligence on board the Trident had controlled every air strike.

  He scowled over at Gцring, drunk and probably insensible with morphine again. He was slumped in the corner of the map room. If that fat fool had only done his job and sunk the damn ship two years ago, this disaster would not have come to pass.

  His attention returned to the map table that stretched out in front of him. It was a sorry sight. They were still pushing around little wooden blocks denoting tens of thousands of men who were already dead. Whole armies of ghosts haunted central and northern France. The display was so disconnected from reality as to be worse than useless.

  Now the fuhrer was blaming him-him! — for the failure to contain Patton and Montgomery in Calais. It was intolerable. He couldn’t exactly wave a magic wand and conjure up the Reich’s equivalent to the Allied surveillance drones and computer technology. There simply wasn’t time to develop such things. And hadn’t he delivered a treasure trove of other advances to the German war industries anyway? Didn’t that count for anything?

  Apparently it did not.

  He came out of his self-pitying fugue with a shock when he realized that everyone was staring at him now. The fuhrer was still screeching, but the tone had changed somehow. It was more threatening, more…

  Direct.

  With some alarm, he understood. Hitler was yelling at him again.

  “I am sorry, Mein Fuhrer,” he mumbled. “I was distracted by the map.”

  A terrible stillness came over the supreme leader of Nazi Germany. “Distracted, you say?” he sneered.

  “Yes,” Himmler answered uncertainly. “I, ah-”

  “Perhaps if you had been paying attention, we would not be losing this fucking war!” Hitler smashed his fist down on the table, upsetting a handful of unit markers. Then he gathered himself and resumed in a quiet, cracked voice. “I asked you what happened to my missiles. I ordered the strike on London two hours ago. Everyone in that city should be dead by now. But they are not. I…want…to…know…why.”

  “Yes, Mein Fuhrer, of course. But I…but I did tell you that the Donzenac facility was destroyed by British commandos. Do you not remember?”

  The fuhrer’s already strained eyes seemed to bulge inhumanly, as if they might pop out of their sockets and roll across the map table.

  A shudder passed over him.

  “Of course,” he said in a small, cracked voice. “I lost my train of thought. The air in here, it is…”

  The release of tension in the room was palpable. Himmler could feel others’ muscles loosening just like his own.

  “Just go, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” said Hitler. “Find out what is happening to my atom bombs. I need them. German civilization needs them.”

  Himmler used the opportunity to meekly bow and back out of the room, his ears and face burning with embarrassment. He had exposed the fuhrer to potential ridicule, correcting him like that. But what was he to do? He had stood at the exact same spot one day ago and explained why there would be no V3 strike on London. He remembered the ashen faces of the assembled staff as he explained how Prince Harry had escaped with so many of the Reich’s top scientists after the RAF had destroyed the missile silos. How could the fuhrer have forgotten that?

  He scurried out of the bunker, with its foul air of stale sweat and rising fear, glad to get away from it all. If only for a little while.

  D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 0205 HOURS.

  CALAIS.

  Julia made it back to Calais at two in the morning. Dismounting from the jeep, she thanked the driver, a garrulous Pole, and looked around for her next ride toward the front. Her status as an official embed of the Seventh Cav wasn’t of much use. They’d been pulled from the line and were already headed back to England to take on replacements. The regiment had suffered close to 40 percent casualties and wouldn’t be rated to fight again for months.

  She hadn’t been able to find her old minder, Sergeant Murphy, who’d apparently come through without any major injuries and was due some serious leave time. It might have been nice, she thought, to have split a few brews with Murph and Gadsden, but then she remembered someone had told her that Gadsden had caught an RPG round in the chest at Guines. No more brews for him, and no more barmaid sandwiches back in London.

  She stretched, shook her head to clear the cobwebs, and looked around. The driver had dropped her in a small square on the outskirts of Calais. She thought she recalled it from the street fighting early in May. The war ran 24/7, so even at this hour the place was alive with jeeps and trucks, with hundreds of soldiers in different uniforms: American, British, and Free French mostly. Or maybe Canadians. Quebecois. They had a couple of battalions nearby.

  A good number of civilians were also about, shopkeepers for the most part, doing business from wooden carts and stalls even if their stores had been destroyed. Trading by candlelight in windowless, pockmarked shop-fronts if they were comparatively lucky. The night sky was clear, but lit by the persistent flickering of artillery barrages, bombing raids, and a massive tank battle to the east. The rumble was constant, occasionally flaring into something even deeper and more profound, sounding like a quake down in the very core of the world.

  She was eager to get back to work, but she also realized that she was starving. Her last energy bars were gone, shared with the Pole on the long, uncomfortable drive back. She hadn’t eaten a hot meal in days, and her eyes were watery with lack of sleep. A sit-down meal, some wine, a cup of coffee? She’d sell her fucking soul for less.

  Julia hauled out her flexipad
and checked for a Fleetnet link. Two small green lights in the rubberized casing told her she had power, and even a local connection. Her eyes flicked up, but she was too tired to actually gaze skyward for a drone. She’d never spot it, anyway.

  The square was surprisingly festive for a place that had so recently hosted open combat. The tinkling of pianos came at her from two different directions. Somebody else was doing something cruel to an accordion, and rather than the harsh, hoarse bark of orders, or the animal screams of mortal combat, she could actually hear laughter and conversation. It was almost normal. A shifting breeze brought with it the smell of hot mulled wine and some sort of meat roasted with garlic and rosemary. Saliva filled her mouth, and her stomach growled as she smelled bread baking, too.

  All right! I can take a fuckin’ hint.

  It was such a mild night she decided to take advantage of the lull, track down some food, eat well, and see if a bed might be had somewhere in town. Or a couch. Or a pile of straw. A hundred meters or so from where she stood, a relatively well-lit stone cottage was rocking and rolling, with all sorts of officers coming and going. Some clearly were rear-echelon motherfuckers, and others were just as obviously back from the fight of their lives. Two knots of men and a few local women were gathered around a couple of steaming cauldrons sitting atop open fires on the flagstones in front of the building. That would be the mulled wine, if her sense of smell was right.

  So Julia picked up her pack, shouldered her carbine, and wandered over.

  The women were French girls, probably not in their twenties yet. She wondered idly whether they’d had German boyfriends a few weeks ago, but dismissed the thought as uncharitable. The collaborators would have all been shaved bald and run out of town by now. A fucking travesty in her opinion. These mademoiselles were staying close to the Americans they’d picked up. A couple of Rangers by the look of them. A smart move.

  They stopped giggling abruptly as she approached, huddling in closer to their protectors.