Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  Julia stepped around a large pool of oily mud. “That was your argument, then.”

  Prather smiled. “Yeah, well, mine and others’. Nobody really listens to me, though. I’m just an engineer. Anyway, the M-Four, your classic Sherman, she had a few problems. Even I have to admit that. A low-velocity seventy-five-millimeter popgun, wafer-thin armor, and a gasoline engine that just loved bursting into flames. In the long run I would have recommended discontinuing some of the Sherman production and switching over to the M-Twenty-nine Pershing heavies, with a ninety-millimeter high-velocity main gun. And that’s just what’s happening with some outfits. But there are quite a few mods that can be put in place on the Shermans, since we’ve been churning them out so fast.”

  Julia wondered where he’d picked up the term mod. That was uptime gaming slang, as best she knew. But Prather was just a kid really-in a way he was a gamer, yet he was playing for life and death. She’d already decided she liked him.

  He pulled up in front of a tank with a crude painting on the turret of a big-busted woman. She took a few still shots with her Sonycam.

  “Check it out,” he enthused. “We got some slat armor. Simple, you know, but it really messes up the krauts’ RPG shots. We redesigned the turret to accommodate a high-velocity hundred-and-five-millimeter gun, and a lotta frame reinforcement went into that, but it means they can go toe-to-toe with old Fritz, although a lot of the time, you know, the Germans just use their tanks as pillboxes. They’re still a lot slower than the Easy Eights, even with all the changes we made, and we tend to get around in back of them, messing with the infantry, while the choppers hammer them with rocket fire.”

  “So you do a lot of combined ops now, with airborne?”

  “Been training for it from the day the first Cobras rolled off the line. Earlier, in fact, but that was just sandbox and theory.”

  A chill wind blew wet leaves onto her legs as she studied the tank. She lined Prather up in the pop-out display window of the video recorder.

  “What about armor? What happens if a shell gets through the cage? Those slats will stop shoulder-fired rockets-I saw that a lot in the Middle East-but I’m guessing they don’t stand up real well to an eighty-eight-millimeter round or worse.” She couldn’t help wondering what it’d be like, trapped in a big iron coffin with a shell bouncing around at the speed of sound, chopping everyone up into loose meat.

  Prather patted the glacis plate at the front. “Whole hull’s been revamped with appliquй armor,” he said proudly. “There’s a more sharply angled forward slope, side skirts to defend against RPGs, and some composite shielding beneath that and at the rear-which was a real problem area. We switched over to a diesel engine, too. Much safer. Doesn’t brew up the same way.”

  “I guess,” Julia conceded as they started walking again.

  They reached the end of a long street formed by the row of dormant tanks, and Prather took them around to the left. A small clutch of tents lay ahead. Battalion headquarters. Prather narrowed his eyes and smiled gently.

  “You don’t seem to be reassured, Ms. Duffy. What’s the matter? You’ve seen a lot more combat than me, after all. Doesn’t seem as if a ride in a tank would bother you at all.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but usually I go out with the infantry. I’ve never been in an armored battle before. Not a fair one, anyway. They just didn’t happen where I came from.”

  Prather nodded. “Oh well, if you don’t want to go…”

  “No-no, it’ll be cool. Can’t be a wuss, after all. So when do we head out?”

  “Tonight. Twenty-two hundred hours.”

  She’d been expecting a silver helmet and six-shooters, but Patton was dressed for the front. His fatigues were filthy, and he’d managed to acquire a prominent bloodstain on one trouser leg. Not his, though, apparently.

  He moved around on the makeshift stage like a prizefighter in the opening seconds of a long bout. Cocky, full of energy, ready for a brawl. He was taller than she’d imagined, and much more tightly wrapped. He seemed almost like a nineteenth-century figure to Julia. His voice, higher than George C. Scott’s and not nearly as gruff, still carried out over the hundreds of men gathered before him. A sea of black faces, with a solitary moon-white exception here and there. Their eyes all stayed fixed on the general.

  “Men, you’re the first Negro tankers ever to fight in the American army,” he said, his voice booming out. “I would never have asked for you if I didn’t think you were good. I will have nothing but the best in my army. I don’t care what color you are, as long as you go up there and kill those kraut sons-a-bitches.

  “Everyone has their eyes on you, and they’re expecting great things from you. Most of all, your people are looking to you-and by that I mean the American people, people of all colors. Don’t let them down and damn you, don’t let me down!”

  “We won’t, General!” somebody called out.

  “That’s the goddamn spirit!” Patton cried back. “Give ’em hell, boys!”

  Julia was sure she saw the walls of the giant tent billow out as the assembly roared back. All that muscle mass and testosterone squeezed into a confined space. The heady brew of confidence, tribal bonding, and barely contained bloodlust. She might as well have been on the vehicle deck of the Kandahar again. No matter how much you leavened the mix with female personnel, there was something inherently masculine about the business of war. As fucked up and wasteful and pathetic as it was, men secretly loved it. And so did she.

  As Patton left the stage to the cheers of the 761st, Prather steered her over in his direction. She was well past her giggling-girl phase, and, having interviewed so many of the top players for the Times these last two years, she wasn’t at all intimidated by the general. But she wanted to grab a quick interview. He was a sure bet to give her a couple of profanely colorful quotes for the feature she was working up.

  Patton seemed to notice her as he was descending the stairs, brushing off the hand of his intelligence chief, a Colonel Black-reminding her of Dan again. He flashed a smile, sizing her up like a dangerous mount, and extended a gloved hand. He had no trouble speaking over the noise of the crowd.

  “I’ve read your work, Duffy. I like it,” he growled. “You get close to the fighting man and you tell his story like it is. Prather says you want to ride out with my boys tonight.”

  “If you’re okay with that, sir.”

  “Don’t sir me, girlie. I know you don’t mean it. And you’re a civilian, despite your uniform, which you’ll have to get scrubbed if you’re going to ‘embed’ with my army. Can’t have any sloppiness. Understand?”

  “Uh-huh,” she smirked. “I’ll be sure to touch up my lip gloss when I’m doing my camouflage paint.”

  “Excellent!” Patton cried. “Now you come with me, young lady, and I’ll make sure Colonel Black here briefs you in on tonight’s operation.”

  “You are cleared, aren’t you?” Black asked anxiously.

  Julia passed over her papers. Black wasn’t equipped with a flexipad. Indeed, she’d hardly met anyone in France who was. Even Patton seemed to do without one.

  “I’m clear to Top Secret Absolute,” she said. “Renewed a month ago.”

  Patton’s intelligence chief studied the paper as they walked through the crush of men, most of whom wanted to press forward and shake the general’s hand or pat him on the back. And Julia could see that that old dog was loving it. Black impatiently thrust the clearance forms back at her as they pushed out of the tent and into a starlit night.

  Faint flickers of light and a rumble beyond the edge of the world spoke of an engagement somewhere, but nobody paid much attention. The fighting had been constant since the landings.

  “Captain Prather said I’d be riding with D Company, General,” Julia said. “Don’t you think I should be heading over there soon?”

  “No,” he said somewhat abruptly. “You’ll come out with us.” When she started to protest he cut in, “No! I don’t want to hear a word of i
t, madam! You won’t see anything buttoned up in an armored troop carrier and you’ll probably get yourself killed. That’s your ass, not mine, of course, but damn it, I want the story of this battle to be told, and I want it told properly.”

  He stopped and faced her, hands on his hips, one eye almost closed as he scowled at her.

  “I meant what I said before. I’ve read all of your major reports. Read them many times, looking for any insights into the fighting methods you people have brought upon us. Like I said to those men back there, I don’t give a damn what other people think of you, all I care about is what you can do for my army. And I think you can do us a great deal of good in our never-goddamn-ending fight with the enemy.”

  “Me, General? Come on now. How can I help you against the Nazis-”

  “Not the Nazis, Duffy. Montgomery, woman! Bernard…Law…Montgomery. Didn’t you read any biographies of him? Did you see that movie about Arnhem? I saw it. If that man spent as much time on his job as he did on his goddamn public image, we’d be at the gates of Berlin by now. Which doesn’t mean a thing to me, except that he’s been gobbling up resources that should have been going to my army, to my men. And you’re going to see to it that we get our fair share in the future.” Patton leaned forward until he dominated her personal space, forcing her to stand uncomfortably close to the brim of his steel helmet, lest he think he’d managed to bully her in some way.

  “No, you ride out with me. You watch those black boys fight tonight, and you tell the whole goddamn world what a magnificent fucking job they did of pounding the fuhrer’s supermen into mincemeat. And they will do a magnificent fucking job, believe you me-and I will make sure your story gets run in every newspaper in the free world.”

  Julia hardly knew what to say.

  “I think,” she replied at last, in a calm low voice, “that my editor can handle placing the story, and-”

  Patton held up a hand, smiling like a wolf. “He probably can. But like I said, I will make sure of it.”

  “You just make sure I get to see what I’m supposed to see,” she said, “and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  His smile softened some, becoming marginally less carnivorous.

  “All right then,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

  He turned to the small group of officers who’d gathered around them.

  “Come on, boys. Let’s go get Miss Duffy a story.”

  D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 2302 HOURS.

  LUFTWAFFE AIRBASE, WIESBADEN.

  The airfield was a “masked” facility: two runways painted to look as if they were pockmarked with bomb craters, along with a minimum of buildings aboveground, again looking more like damaged shells than working struc tures. It had been carefully “neglected” to discourage prying eyes, both human and electronic.

  An hour before midnight it was empty of aircraft, except for a couple of burned-out 110s at the end of one runway. Then at the witching hour, it burst into activity. Lines of light briefly flared along the tarmac. Fuel trucks came roaring in from the surrounding countryside as ground crew spilled out of the “abandoned” buildings.

  They all peered into the darkness of the eastern sky. After a few minutes somebody called out that he could see the first plane. Everyone stood ready.

  They had practiced this at other airfields in Poland, far beyond the reach of even the Trident’s sensors. The lead elements of the attack wing would land soon, running on fumes, laden with antitank rockets and bombs. For the next ninety minutes they would work at a feverish pace, refueling a constant relay of ME 262 jet fighters as they massed for a strike on the spearhead of Patton’s Third Army in Belgium.

  D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0042 HOURS.

  BUNKER 13, BERLIN.

  For the first time in weeks they had something to look forward to.

  The fuhrer was tense, but restrained. His voice had given out a few days earlier and he wasn’t able to scream at them anymore, which seemed to have forced him to calm down somewhat.

  Himmler, for one, was glad. He had been worried about the fuhrer’s mental state. Very few people in the Reich had access to the twenty-first-century archival materials he had seen. Almost none knew of Adolf Hitler’s physical and psychological collapse at the end of the war in die Andere Zeit, of his suicide with Eva Braun and the burning of their bodies as the Red Army pillaged the ruins of Berlin. Exposure to such knowledge was almost always fatal, so only a handful of men knew how the last days of Nazi Germany had unfolded.

  And nobody but the Reichsfuhrer-SS himself was aware of how an “alternative” Heinrich Himmler had been declared a traitor, for contacting Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to negotiate a surrender in the West. Anyone with any link to that particular data, discovered in the electronic files of the Dessaix, had gone into the ovens-even those who had hacked the files to introduce a “new” history, wherein Himmler died fighting in the streets of Berlin.

  Sometimes the fear of discovery kept him awake for days at a time, until his flesh began to crawl with invisible insects and time itself would jump forward in shudders and leaps. Himmler could feel his head swimming, and a wave of nausea would come upon him as he tried to blink the hot grit of sleeplessness from his eyes.

  But for the next hour, at least, he had something to think about other than desolation and despair. The Luftwaffe was about to carve a bloodied chunk out of Patton’s extended flank. The atmosphere in the map room was subdued, expectant. Nobody spoke above a murmur, perhaps in deference to the fuhrer’s lost voice.

  “The attack is aloft and proceeding to target,” a Luftwaffe colonel announced.

  The fuhrer, standing across the table from Himmler, nodded with evident satisfaction. He was in command of this operation, having taken it away from the drug-addled Gцring. He had seen to the planning and execution himself. It guaranteed an exceptional level of commitment from all concerned when the supreme leader of the Third Reich suddenly turned up in person, or on the phone, demanding results.

  In fact, it wasn’t a bad plan, Himmler mused.

  Given the oppressive gaze of the Trident’s all-seeing sensors, the fuhrer had ordered that most of the preparation take place in Poland, where even the mud woman Halabi could not see. A special air group of 130 advanced jet fighters, E-3 variants on the ME 262, had been given the highest priority. They each loaded out with forty-eighty of the deadly R4M rockets: forty with PB2 antitank warheads, the rest with PB3 antiaircraft shots. Their MK 108 cannons could rip open a Sherman tank with just two hits, and flying from Wiesbaden at top speed they could be over Patton’s forces within minutes, while remaining almost fully fueled.

  The “masked” airfields were the key. They allowed the attack wing to strike before the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority could come into play. Yes, this strategy was likely to succeed, but what then? Even with a great rent torn in the flank of the Allied advance, how was it to be exploited? Every time they moved a force of any significance to engage the enemy, the skies quickly filled with thousands of aircraft-jet fighters, helicopters, medium bombers, Typhoons, Spitfires, Mustangs, and Skyraiders, all of them carrying some hellish mix of explosive cannons, antitank rockets, napalm, and “guided” bombs.

  Himmler peered furtively over the rim of his wire-framed glasses and wondered again if the fuhrer really knew what he was doing. The V3 bases were gone, destroyed by the damnable SAS, the scientists kidnapped and spirited away. The Kriegsmarine was almost nonexistent, its ships and submarines sunk, its leadership disgraced and executed for their treachery. The finest divisions of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS had been annihilated before they could get within 150 kilometers of the enemy. Now everything turned on the Kernphysik Program.

  If they could get just one working bomb, it would be enough to force a stalemate.

  Himmler desperately wanted to excuse himself from the room so that he might contact Heisenberg yet again, to harangue him about progress. He knew it was not going as well as it should. Every day it seemed that the Allies st
ruck with an almost magical ability to damage the project. He often lay awake at night, feeling the great pressure that now rested squarely on his shoulders to deliver this weapon to the German people, and the people from annihilation. But he could not leave with the first shots in the fuhrer’s personal attack about to be fired.

  13

  D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0045 HOURS.

  HMS TRIDENT, NORTH SEA.

  “Contacts hostile, Captain. Targets confirmed.”

  “Designate them for USAAF intercept, Ms. Burchill. Slave to the Intelligence.”

  “Aye, Captain. Targets designated. Intercept squadrons Thirty-five and Thirty-nine moving to engage. Posh has control.”

  Captain Karen Halabi thanked her EWAC boss, Lieutenant Burchill, and watched as two squadrons of F-86 Sabers peeled out of the holding pattern they’d been describing over the channel and kicked in the thrust to head off the massed air attack forming up over Luxembourg. Lady Beckham, the Trident’s Combat Intelligence, had detected 130 E-type 262s as they entered the edge of her threat bubble, at exactly the point she’d been told to watch for them.

  Such a timely warning smacked of a skinjob, one of the Germans from the original Multinational Force who’d been trained up and sent into the Reich as deep-cover agents. Halabi had no idea which of them it might be, but they were doing the good Lord’s work today.

  The phrase brought her up, just momentarily. That was one of her husband’s favorite sayings. She’d picked it up hanging around Mike on her last bit of rec leave in the States. As a lapsed Muslim-well, not that lapsed, because she’d never been that observant-Karen Halabi tended to steer well clear of any biblical or Koranic allusions in her everyday speech. She found it put people on edge. Or it had back in the Old World.

  But Mike was an unreconstructed Vatican III Catholic, and his private conversations were peppered with references to the good Lord, appeals to the good Lord, and occasionally, when things turned to poo, some gutter-mouthed Texan abuse of the good Lord.