Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  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.

  Halabi briefly wondered where he was. But she had business in the here and now.

  Being the primary command, control, and electronic intelligence node for the Allied invasion of Europe, Trident had a huge number of tasks delegated to the quantum processors of her Combat Intelligence. One such job was to guard against the raid now taking shape to the south of General Patton’s Third Army. British intelligence had sent through a watching brief ten days ago, ordering that the highest priority be given to early detection and interdiction.

  Within an hour of the brief Captain Allan Leroy—the fighter command liaison officer stationed aboard Trident—knocked on her door, figuratively speaking, with an air tasking order for six squadrons of F-86 interceptors that would provide a standing combat air patrol. There would be two squadrons permanently on station at any given time.

  Halabi was impressed. The Sabers were the latest models, just out of the States, packed with all sorts of design tweaks and mouthwatering mods like AT/AIM-7 Sparrows, first-generation heat seekers, and beam-riding semi-active air-to-air missiles, nose-mounted continuous-wave radar sets, and the new Pratt & Whitney JT3C axial flow turbojets. Those babies could deliver nearly five thousand kilos of thrust, making them almost as fast as the Skyhawks Mike was taking to the Marianas. You didn’t put that sort of asset on standby for ten days without a very good reason.

  And the eight linked flat panels of her main battlespace display showed her the reason. A hundred and thirty of them, to be exact.

  One entire monitor had been given over to the feed from the Nemesis arrays that were focused on the airspace around the approaching Luftwaffe raid. Smaller pop-up windows ran enhanced imagery of the USAAF response and the disposition of ground forces in Belgium. As the Trident’s CI vectored the American jets onto their targets, Halabi wrestled with the irrational feeling that she had become something akin to a spectator in the Ladies’ Stand at the cricket.

  Save for a few suicidal air attacks, the Trident hadn’t directly engaged an enemy combatant in nearly a year. Having fired off the last of her offensive weapons to repel the German’s attempted invasion in 1942, she’d been “reduced” to playing the role of a floating radar station and comm hub. Her ship had been retrofitted with “new” antiship missiles, and a very useful Phalanx Close-In Weapons system to replace her Metal Storm pods and laser packs, but she was also surrounded by the equivalent of her own battle group.

  Two Royal Navy carriers and a small armada of battle cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers attended her every move. A squadron of RAF Sabers maintained a permanent combat air patrol seven thousand meters overhead.

  Everyone understood how important the Trident remained—not least the Germans, who had expended enormous numbers of men and machines trying to sink her. But Halabi and her largely unchanged 21C crew couldn’t help but be stung by the chiding they took from the “real navy,” as the ’temps sometimes referred to themselves.

  And here they were again, not really fighting, just directing traffic.

  “Interceptors closing to range, Captain.”

  “First missile locks.”

  “Multiple targets acquired.”

  “All hostiles now locked.”

  “Interceptors launching.”

  Halabi accepted a mug of Earl Grey tea from a young seaman, one of the few ’temps who’d come on board to perform nontechnical duties. “Thank you, Beazley,” she said.

  On the main battlespace display nearly two hundred white lines reached out from the blue triangles denoting the USAAF interceptors. They sped away from the launch point, tracking swiftly across the screen toward the red triangles of the Luftwaffe’s attack group. On screen the German 262s suddenly tried to scatter, their tight formation breaking up into a chaotic swarm of diving, twisting, climbing planes.

  “CI reports the Germans have deployed chaff and flares, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Burchill. Are they proving significant?”

  “Posh calculates that about forty percent of the USAAF salvo appears to have been drawn off-target, ma’am.”

  But small white circles started to bloom on the monitor as the other missiles, which had not been fooled by the German countermeasures, began to strike home. Just one or two at first, then five or six all at once. Dozens of tiny pixilated flashes marked where a missile had plowed into an exhaust vent, wing, or fuselage and detonated, punching the aircraft out of the sky and its pilot out of existence.

  “CI confirms forty-eight kills, Captain.”

  “Second launch detected.”

  Dozens more missiles sped away from the blue triangles. Posh counted sixty-eight in total. Again the Trident’s Nemesis arrays detected the Luftwaffe pilots’ attempts to decoy the AT/AIM-7s, and again they were successful in about 40 percent of cases. But another twenty-six German jets were raked from the sky.

  “Third salvo ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Burchill.”

  All but five of the surviving attackers were engulfed and destroyed. Halabi watched as the Sabers continued on the same heading for half a minute, suddenly breaking formation as they came within cannon range of the Germans. Less than a minute later every last attacking plane had been scythed down.

  The Sabers broke off and made for their base back in northern France, while another two squadrons took up the holding pattern in their place, guarding against any follow-up attack. Halabi sipped at her tea.

  “Very good work, everyone,” she said. “Mr. Leroy, my compliments to fighter command.”

  “You betcha, ma’am. That was some fine shootin’.”

  Halabi nodded quietly, wondering again how Leroy, a Texan just like her husband, had ended up in fighter command, an RAF show. She’d never had a chance to ask him. On most days, anywhere between thirty and forty ’temp liaison staffers were aboard. They came, they went. She’d given up trying to keep them straight in her head.

  “Mr. McTeale,” she said to her executive officer, “I’ll be on the bridge for half an hour, then I’m turning in. Keep my chair warm here, would you?”

  “Very good, ma’am,” the XO answered in his warm Scottish brogue. “And congratulations to you, too, Captain. You saved a lot of mams from losing their bairns tonight.”

  “Traffic control, Mr. McTeale. It’s just traffic control.”

  D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0231 HOURS.

  THIRD ARMY MOBILE COMMAND, BELGIUM.

  “That must have been it.”

  Patton’s intelligence boss scanned the southern skies with a pair of Starlite binoculars, but there wasn’t much to be seen. The weather had closed in, and there was no telling whether the faint flashes came from the air battle Julia had just been told about, or from the sheet lightning that strobe-lit the countryside at irregular intervals.

  “Damn shame,” Patton said as he looked longingly at his radar-controlled triple-A and SAM half-tracks. “I was looking forward to that.”

  Julia Duffy rolled her eyes in the dark. These guys took their whole alpha-male routine way too seriously. The last thing you wanted was a bunch of German fast movers getting close enough for you to see the fireworks when they got swatted. They moved so fast, there was always a good chance some were going to slip through. She’d happily give that a miss.

  For all of the combat she’d covered with the Times after the Murdoch takeover back up in twenty-one, she had never seen anything to match the world-ending violence of a big armor clash. Most of her work uptime had seen her embedded with small units of ground fighters, working jungle or mud brick environments in Asia and the Middle East. On those occasions when she had covered large-scale land battles, they tended to be very one-sided affairs, like the battles of Damascus or Aden, with American or British armored divisions rolling over the burn
ed-out wrecks of late-Soviet-era antique tanks.

  Patton was using air supremacy to make his campaign as one-sided as possible, but without an Eastern Front to fight on, the Germans had well over a hundred divisions to block the Allied path to Berlin, and they were learning not to mass their armor and artillery out in the open where it could be hammered from above.

  Patton leaned over the hood of his jeep, peering at a map covered in a dense tangle of red and blue lines. They’d pulled up on a ridge overlooking the site of a fierce struggle that had taken place an hour earlier between the Black Panthers and what had turned out to be an SS armored regiment.

  “Krauts aren’t gathering like they used to,” he grunted. “They’ve broken up into these much smaller task groups, some of them with organic air support. It’s a lot harder to beat them this way, and a lot less neat.”

  Julia looked up from the map and scanned the field that stretched away about a kilometer below them. There certainly wasn’t anything neat in the aftermath of the battle down there. With her powered goggles she could make out hundreds of torn-up bodies and shattered, burning vehicles. She was glad to have witnessed it from a distance. When the firefight had reached its insane peak, it had looked like some kind of satanic foundry, a place where nothing was created, only destroyed. The crescendo of gunfire, rockets, and clashing armor had only been drowned out by the ear-shredding scream of low-flying aircraft as they ripped overhead to loose whole racks of missiles and hundreds of cannon shells.

  Cobra gunships had thudded in and out of the holocaust, hosing down concentrations of German soldiers with miniguns and rocket fire, sometimes dueling with the few Luftwaffe choppers that dared to show up.

  Through it all, however, Patton tore across the countryside in his jeep, barking orders at his staff, yelling at radio operators, slapping his hands down on maps, and ordering units to reinforce this battalion or that regiment. In the darkness and violence, he alone seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

  Julia did what she could to capture the essence of what was happening where the two armies met, but she kept returning to the figure of the tall, raspy-voiced general consigning some of his men to their doom, and others to glory.

  “Do you want to go see your black boys now, Miss Duffy?”

  “Sorry?”

  She jumped, then looked up, jolted out of her reverie.

  Patton pointed down at the field where she had been staring.

  “The Seven Sixty-first broke through down there, and they’ve pushed on to Oostakker, with the Ninetieth Infantry. Those boys made the breach and I’m sending my army through it. I’m proud of ’em, Miss Duffy, they fought like fucking champions. So, you want to follow ’em?”

  “Okay,” Julia said. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  Patton’s command post consisted of four jeeps and a light armored vehicle that looked like it might have come off the Kandahar. But according to Chris Prather, it was only six months old. She’d taken a peek inside, and the electronics were all contemporary.

  The small group mounted up, and the jeeps and the LAV bounced down the hillside, through smashed dry-stone walls and over deep furrows dug into the soil by the tracks of the Easy Eight Shermans. Patton’s driver, Sergeant Mims, had a bulky pair of night vision goggles, but he’d pushed them up out of the way. Burning tanks and APCs provided more than enough light to navigate the slope. Even Julia took off her Oakleys. They were capable of dealing with the hot spots, but like Mims she found she could see just fine with her own eyes.

  As hardened as she was, it was still an overwhelming experience. She wondered how anyone could have survived the maelstrom of high explosives and speeding metal. Dust-off choppers were carrying the first loads of wounded away as medics ran back and forth, providing first aid. The heat coming from so many burning vehicles made the skin on her face feel tight. The screams of the dying sounded no different from what she’d heard before, but Julia had never seen a general hop down from his transport, as Patton did at that moment.

  He walked over to a litter, kneeling down and, she was certain, kissing the forehead of the soldier who lay there. Patton’s body blocked her view, so she couldn’t tell whether the man was a black tanker or a white infantryman, and in the end, what did it matter? With her camera she took in as much as she could of the ruined, burning tanks and the smashed-up bodies of the men who’d fought in them, even though she knew that much of it would be censored outside the Zone. The ’temps were still very touchy about showing their own casualties.

  She ducked without thinking as a German Tiger cooked off a hundred yards away, its ammunition bay lighting up and blowing off the turret, which rose about three meters in the air before falling back onto the body of the wrecked vehicle with an almighty clang. Patton didn’t even look up. He made his way down a long line of wounded men who were waiting to be choppered back to a MASH, kneeling down and speaking a few words to each, smoothing the hair of one, patting another on the shoulder. She could see now that the wounded men were black and white, tankers and infantry.

  “Hey, Sergeant,” she said, spotting someone she’d met earlier, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stone wall. “Remember me?”

  The man tilted his head and squinted in the dark as firelight played over his features. “Sure,” he said. “You’re Miss Duffy. Captain Prather’s reporter. You gonna write about this?”

  Julia racked her mind trying to recall his name.

  Turley, that was it.

  “You bet I am, Sergeant Turley. Are you wounded?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I just lost my tank. We took a whole bunch of RPG rounds. Lost the tracks first, then one punched in through the upper deck. Guy who fired it must have been sitting up in a tree or something.”

  “Was Lieutenant Robinson in your tank? Jackie Robinson?”

  “He was, ma’am. They casevaced him out on the first flight to the aid station. He saved us all, Miss Duffy. Hopped out of the turret with a machine gun. Held off a whole bunch of Germans who were fixing to kill us. Shot most of ’em. Then he ran out of ammo, clubbed a few who got through and tried to climb up, stab him with their bayonets. I guess they’d run out of bullets, too. Or lost their guns. It was confusing, ma’am. I’ve never been so confused in my life.”

  “It’s okay, Sergeant. Everyone gets confused in combat, all the time. So is Lieutenant Robinson okay?”

  Turley gestured helplessly.

  “Don’t rightly know, ma’am. He got hit twice and jumped off the tank. I got a few of the Germans trying to do him in. And then some white boys come through and cut them down. Three of them was from Georgia. I tell you, Miss Duffy, never in my whole life have I been so happy to see three white boys from Georgia with murder their eyes.”

  Julia smiled gently. “Do you mind if I quote you on that?”

  “No, ma’am. I wish you would.”

  Turley looked up over her shoulder, and Julia turned to find Patton standing there.

  The general dropped to one knee beside her.

  “You going to lie there all night, soldier?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” said Turley. “Soon as you get me a new tank, I’m headed that-away.” He nodded in the direction of the advance.

  “Good job, son. You get yourself up, go see Captain Mackay over there, and tell him I said to find you a new Sherman. Are you wounded, by the way? Do you need any attention?”

  Turley’s head and one arm were heavily bandaged, but he pushed himself up off the ground. “I’m fine, General.”

  “Good man. I’m proud of you, son. You did a great job here tonight.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  As Turley hobbled away to get himself reassigned, Julia saw Patton wipe a tear from his eye. “Absolutely fucking magnificent,” he muttered, before seeming to realize that Julia was there. “Come on, Miss Duffy. I won’t have my men lying around, and I won’t have my correspondents lying around, either. Let’s get back to the jeeps. There’s a hell of a fight brewing up
just along the road.”

  D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0422 HOURS.

  BUNKER 13, BERLIN.

  The führer had lost his voice, and he’d lost something else, too. Himmler was certain that was why he spoke with such melancholy.

  The change had come over him a few hours ago. He’d stormed off in a rage to sleep for a few hours, but returned after only thirty minutes, uncannily subdued. The bunker had come to a halt when he appeared at the doorway. Nobody knew what to say.

  The air attack on Patton’s flank had been brushed aside. All the hard work and crippling expense that had gone into the plan had counted for nothing. The best planes in the Luftwaffe were gone, and along with them some of the best pilots.

  And now the Americans were on the verge of taking the strategic hub at Oostakker.

  Himmler’s stomach rolled over when he saw the führer reappear. This was going to be very unpleasant. The SS chief stood silently as Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge stepped forward. A sickly green tint colored his face.

  The records from the future had revealed von Kluge’s disgraceful ineptitude, as he had failed to expose the German plot against Hitler, and Himmler had made use of the information. The field marshal had survived simply because Himmler found it convenient to keep a few of the weaker, more corrupt army officers in his debt. But von Kluge had never fully recovered from his encounter with the SS chief.

  Now he stammered his way through a report on the failed air attack, then drew in a deep breath and plunged on.

  “After my d-discussion with the commanders in the Belgian sector—those whom I could reach—I…I regret to report that, in the face of the enemy’s complete c-command of the air, and their omniscient gathering of intelligence, there is no possibility that we will find a strategy to counterbalance their overwhelming capabilities…unless we give up the current field of battle.