Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Brasch checked the two collaborators again at the end of the alleyway. The man remained stock still, but the woman continued dancing around in her nervous fashion. He could have sworn she’d glanced up at his window, then turned her head quickly at the last moment.

  He did not want to break cover. He had run out of bolt-holes, and he was so close to being safe.

  But what good would it serve staying here, if the Gestapo arrived ahead of his extraction team? He could hold them off for a few minutes at best. How long did he have?

  Not very long at all, to judge by the sick terror contorting the features of Madam Colbert. He had no faith in her ability to bluff it out. The Gestapo would see through her without even trying.

  “You are sure they are Gestapo? Coming this way?” he asked.

  “My little pigeons do not lie. They have been dodging the gendarmerie for years. They say it is certain, monsieur. Please. You must go.”

  Brasch checked the widow again. The woman in the helmet was staring straight at him now, smiling wolfishly.

  That sealed it.

  He brought his flexipad awake and opened a file stored on the desktop. An encrypted signal pulsed out of the handset, up through the roof, and away into the summer sky. At ten thousand meters it painted the smart-skin arrays of a Big Eye drone on station above the French capital. The drone’s Restricted Intelligence recognized the distress beacon from a high-value asset, consulted its daily protocol, and discovered an extraction team five kilometers from the asset, headed in its direction. It alerted both the team and the Combat Intelligence back on its home vessel, HMS Trident.

  “What is that?” Colbert asked, back in the cramped, musty bedroom.

  “A cry for help,” Brasch said as he fetched his Luger and checked the load.

  “But what shall we do? They will kill us, torture us,” Colbert protested.

  Brasch took a fat envelope from within his jacket and tossed it across to her. “American dollars,” he said. “Close enough to four thousand. I would get your girls out of here, and be quick about it.” He paused. “I cannot go any farther. I have to wait here. Go. Quickly.”

  Confusion, fear, and greed all played across the woman’s face. Greed and self-preservation won out. She nodded.

  “Thank you, monsieur, and thank you for saving my little Michelle. You are a good German.”

  Brasch shook his head. “Please don’t call me that. Now go, quickly, before it is too late.”

  Colbert fled, calling out to her girls as she thundered down the hallway. Brasch pushed aside the window curtain again, using the muzzle of his sidearm. The woman was clearly anxious that he not get away. He thought about shooting her but decided against it. It would only speed things up, and he needed all the time—and ammunition—he could get. Downstairs he could hear the squeals and cries of the whores as they exited. He probably had less than five minutes.

  It was probably too late.

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1351 HOURS.

  HMS TRIDENT, BAY OF BISCAY.

  The radar confirmed reports of a storm system building in the mid-Atlantic. History told them that one of the great storms of the decade was due to touch down on this side of the ocean in a few days, but then history had been an increasingly erratic guide of late, and Captain Karen Halabi didn’t fancy hanging around in the comparatively shallow Bay of Biscay with a force-nine gale bearing down on her. It’d be hellish enough in the CI-controlled trimaran, but she feared for the lives of the men—they were all men—on the ships of her escorting force. Some of them would founder for sure.

  “Keep me informed, Ms. Novak, and make sure your bulletins go out to group and back to London on Fleetnet. Everyone will want to know what’s happening.”

  “Everybody talks about the weather…,” mugged her chief forecaster.

  “…but nobody ever does anything about it,” Halabi finished. “Even so, Lieutenant, stay alert. Some of our escorts would roll in a duck pond.”

  Halabi turned to leave the small office devoted to the ship’s Meteorology Division, taking one last look at the radar. On the screen a deep red low-pressure cell was unquestionably forming. She could almost feel the ship beginning to move on the swell in response.

  The commander of the Trident continued her tour of the decks, stopping in at the air division, the sick bay, and the ops room one after the other. In the latter she found herself among more ’temps than she’d be likely to find anywhere outside the Combat Information Center, where they tended to be observers anyway. In operations, the ’temps ran the show.

  An ensign called the room to attention as she entered. The men—again, they were all men—snapped to with commendable promptness, and she bade them to carry on with their work. It was a different matter on shore, but after two years she’d at least established her right to command on this vessel, if no other.

  “How goes it, Mr. McTeale?” she asked. Halabi made sure at least one of her senior officers was always on hand in ops, and today she found her XO, the dour Scot, in attendance.

  “She goes well, Cap’n,” he answered. “Or as well as could be expected.”

  The others seemed grateful that she’d released them back to their screens and printouts. They were never going to be very comfortable in her presence. She had been to high tea at both Downing Street and the palace, but she’d never once been invited to anything other than briefings and conferences at the Admiralty or any of the clubs favored by the contemporary Royal Navy’s ruling elite.

  Strangely enough, she frequently got on best with the army’s old India hands, especially those who’d had anything to do with the subcontinent’s innumerable “princely states,” where local potentates ruled on behalf of the British Crown. The Raj veterans seemed to regard her as something akin to a minor warrior princess of some tiny Muslim principality on the Northwest Frontier. At least this meant that they treated her with some civility.

  “What do we have on the Soviet advance?” she asked McTeale. He threw the question to Colonel Charles Hart, one of her favorite Indiamen.

  “It’s looking rather grim for Jerry, I’d say,” Hart explained. “Ivan’s got the better part of a Wehrmacht army group trapped in a pocket outside Lodz. The Bolsheviks have detailed off a corps to maintain a siege there, and pressed on through Poland. They’re finally hitting stiffer resistance now that they’re at the borderlands, but there’s just so many of the buggers that the weight of numbers and firepower must tell in the end.”

  “Thank you, Charlie,” she said, her use of the informal noted by a couple of the less approachable ’temps. “How’s it affecting German dispositions on the Western Front?”

  Before he could answer, her intelligence chief—Lieutenant Commander Howard—appeared at the hatch. “Excuse me, skipper, but best you come see this.”

  Halabi excused herself with some relief. Visits to the ops room were always a trial.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s one of the HVAs we’ve been tracking for Baker Street, ma’am. Due for extraction today, but he’s got a problem. He’s hit the panic button, sent a message saying he’s going to get grabbed up by the villains if we don’t hurry. I think we might need to reassign some additional drone cover to his sector.”

  Halabi picked up her pace as they marched down the main passage of the trimaran’s portside hull, heading for the Intel Division.

  “Is he a skinjob?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. His skin was killed a short while ago. It seems to have ruptured his cover. No, this is an indigenous asset. His jacket says he was supposed to remain in place, but he’s been tumbled. We have independent verification of that by sigint. There are eight SS and Gestapo teams that we can confirm looking for him right now. One of them is closing in.”

  “Eight?” she said. “My word, they do want him back. Do we know who he is?”

  “Not yet, ma’am. You’ll have to authorize opening the jacket and reassigning the drone cover. There’s a lot of demand for Big Eye time in
France right now.”

  “Very well, let’s have at it, then. Who’s our liaison with the ’temps?”

  “Nobody on board, ma’am. We’re laser-linked back to Baker Street. Ms. Atkins is waiting for you.”

  “Very good then.”

  And it was. She got on well with Atkins, another child of two cultures and a woman working at the heart of what was often considered to be a man’s world. The intelligence officer for the French section of the Special Operations Executive, she was also assistant to the SOE’s chief, Maurice Buckmaster. Halabi swung into the cramped office that served as Lieutenant Commander Howard’s domain. Three monitors were live, but two had dimmed their screens, leaving the one on the far left—a video feed—as the primary display.

  Halabi smiled when she saw Atkins in the window. “Hello, Vera. A spot of bother, I understand?”

  The SOE staffer looked very worried. On every occasion that Halabi had dealt with her, she’d presented herself as a model of Continental refinement and poise. Born in Romania, she’d moved to England with her family in the early 1930s, but returned to the Continent to study languages at the Sorbonne. Her frequently severe demeanor could be softened by a deceptively innocent smile, and she rarely appeared with a hair out of place. This morning, however, she was showing the strain of a night’s sleeplessness. Dark half-moons had risen under her eyes.

  “Captain Halabi,” she said, nodding from the screen. “One of my sources needs immediate protection and extraction. He has lost his controller.” Halabi had never known her to use the term skinjob, which was considered slightly obscene by the ’temps. “There is an exfiltration team heading toward his location now, but they need more drone coverage. I am requesting authorization and a sysop to control the operation.”

  Halabi didn’t bother nitpicking the details. She trusted Atkins. “Consider it done.”

  The captain nodded at Howard to begin the process.

  “As this is a terminal run, I will need to open his jacket, Miss Atkins. Do you concur?”

  “I concur,” she answered.

  A black file icon turned white on the screen and opened into a separate window. The man staring out at Halabi was a stranger.

  “Who is he?”

  “Major General Paul Brasch,” Atkins said. “Second in charge at the Reich Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research. He is one of our crown jewels, Captain. We need him alive.”

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1417 HOURS.

  PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

  There was a good chance, thought Harry, that Ronsard might blow the whole thing. Not by taking a potshot at some lingering German outside a requisitioned hotel, but by unloading on one of his own compatriots, most of whom seemed to regard their former overlords with little actual malice. Instead a detached irony defined the Parisian response to the end of the Occupation.

  For Harry, this was nothing new. He’d seen more than his fair share of captive cities as they changed hands, and knew that it often took a couple of days for the realization of their freedom to sink in. A certain degree of circumspection was generally prudent.

  But as they jogged up the Rue de Clichy, dressed in tatty civilian clothes, past the red windmill of the Moulin Rouge, Ronsard kept up a stream of Gallic profanity aimed at his feckless compatriots for their less-than-delighted response to the end of Nazi rule. They’d been in the city less than twenty-four hours, moving from one safe house to another, waiting for the call from London, and the experience had worn on the Frenchman.

  Anjela Claudel was much more sanguine, but then, unlike Ronsard, she had spent most of the past two years in-country and understood the compromises inherent to her own survival. Ronsard had left for England from Dunkirk, and had been there ever since.

  “Steady on,” Harry cautioned as his companion began to curse at the sight of a local man bartering with a Wehrmacht officer for a sack of what looked like potatoes. They were standing on the steps in front of a small hotel, and at least half a dozen other men and women were languidly watching the exchange. Harry wondered what the Frenchman could possibly have that the German would want at this particular juncture, but human nature was a strange, protean thing; it was entirely possible the man was risking his life for a last-minute splurge on pornography or black-market cigars.

  A Kübelwagen was idling at the side of the road and obviously intended to make a quick getaway, but the last major convoy had left the city long ago and Harry didn’t fancy his chances. Perhaps he’d been ordered by some general—or even a Reichsmarshall—to secure whatever it was he was bargaining for.

  Harry placed a firm guiding hand in the small of Ronsard’s back and gave him a gentle push to keep him hurrying along. A dedicated link to the Big Eye had opened up, feeding threat data and nav aids into the powered sunglasses he was sporting, a pair of retro Ray-Bans that wouldn’t look too much out of place. This part of Paris wasn’t much different from his own day, and he needed little help in finding his way to the target, but even a few seconds’ delay for a wrong turn might mean failure, and London had emphasized in the strongest terms that failure was not an option today. The fact that he and Ronsard had been pulled off the transport for Scotland, and sent into the city without notice or preparation, evidenced not just the urgency of their mission but its unforeseen nature, as well.

  There were six of them in the ad hoc extraction team. Harry, Ronsard, Claudel, and three Resistance fighters—a woman called Veronique and two men, Alain and Pietr, whose names he kept confusing. They weren’t sprinting down Clichy with their guns drawn. Even now that would attract too much attention. But they were moving at a fast clip, almost running in fact, and while the locals were lightly armed with pistols and a few Mills bombs, Harry and Ronsard were packing Metal Storm VLe 24 handguns and two dozen strips each of ultralight caseless ceramic, close to 860 rounds.

  Harry didn’t turn off the nav aids that filled so much of his visual field with transparent arrowheads, flashing circles, and red squares. The Resistance crew invariably led him where he was supposed to be, and on the one or two occasions that they hadn’t it was only to take a shortcut that the Trident’s human sysop and Combat Intelligence were unaware of. As they passed the intersection with the Cité du Midi, a narrow dead-end street lined with much smaller, two-and three-story buildings that seemed to lean over the cobbled roadway, at least eight or nine women burst from the next street along. Dressed for the boudoir, they flew down the Rue de Clichy with their robes and ribbons streaming behind them.

  A voice spoke into his earpiece. “Trident here, Colonel. Those women just ran out of the target building. Hostiles approaching from the Rue d’Orsel. Estimate two minutes until contact with asset.”

  “Acknowledged,” Harry said, a vibe wire in the frame of his powered glasses picking up his speech and converting it to a quantum signal for relay back to the stealth destroyer. “Right,” he said in a much louder voice to the others, “let’s go kick some fucking arse.”

  Still jogging along, they all hauled out weapons and began to run harder.

  Harry could hear the first gunshots ahead.

  His first shot took the woman in the neck. As the Gestapo approached she’d briefly disappeared around the corner, and when she came back Brasch took it as a sign that the game was on. He aimed at the center of her chest but shot high. He was never that good a marksman. The collaborator spun into the wall as blood sprayed from a severed artery.

  Brasch then put two rounds into the broad back of her cohort, who moved for the first time in an hour as the pistol barked. Brasch heard two dull thuds under the Luger’s report, then the metal clang of the woman’s helmet striking the brick wall. Kinetic energy drove the man into the sandbag revetment, collapsing it into the Rue Houdon. The engineer wondered if he had time to dash down and retrieve a couple of the potato mashers. Those grenades would turn the alleyway into a killing jar.

  Then he remembered that he could check. He had access to Fleetnet. He needed only to make the request, and the syso
p on the Trident would send him a live video feed from the drone above. In response to his signal, they’d told him they had the area under constant surveillance now.

  Just as he was about to call the ship, a British voice spoke from his flexipad. “Trident here, Herr General. Remain where you are. Hostiles are fifty meters away and closing quickly. Extraction team is two hundred meters to the southwest. Do you copy?”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Brasch moved away from the window frame and into the hallway.

  The small screen on his handheld device reformatted with a top-down view of the streets immediately outside. He could see nine black-clad figures moving quickly; then they stopped momentarily on the Rue Houdon before pressing on with even greater urgency, running toward his building, brandishing automatic weapons. Red triangles shadowed them on the display.

  Around the corner he could see six individuals charging around the corner of Clichy and Guelma. A blue circle surrounded one. The leader, perhaps?

  He could see that the Gestapo were going to beat them.

  19

  D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1341 HOURS.

  PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

  Prince Harry enjoyed more than a passing familiarity with the Rue de Clichy.

  In 2007 while at the Royal Military Academy, he’d spent a couple of days’ leave in France for the Rugby World Cup. Between matches he and a couple of mates from “Alamein” company at Sandhurst would hit the bars around Montmartre. It was a last taste of freedom before joining the Household Cavalry and, later on, the Special Air Service.

  Charging along the beautiful sun-dappled street was a little like running through a V3D memory stick. The war had spared Paris, for the most part, and this area of the old city was almost identical to what he had encountered in his day, architecturally at least. In 1944, of course, there was no sign of the Intifada. Poplar trees still threw their shade onto the narrow footpath, and the length of the street presented an unbroken wall of elegant nineteenth-century apartments and offices, most them standing between five and six stories high.