Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  All he could do was try to save some of the German people from enslavement and genocide at the hands of the Bolsheviks. The Reich was in general collapse on all sides. The Western Front was more an idea than a reality. In the east the Communist horde was being held at bay only by the profligate use of chemical weapons, which would probably poison the earth for so long that it could no longer be considered part of Greater Germany. It really was no-man’s-land now. To the south two of Stalin’s airborne armies had leapt into southern France and were driving toward the Atlantic. Perhaps they would crash into the Allies at some point and a new war would begin. But again, what did it matter? Heinrich Himmler knew that by then, it would be too late for him and his people.

  He rubbed at the stubbled beard that was itching so much in the hot sun. It might help, if and when he tried to make good his escape to South Africa, but he doubted it. The Boer Emergency Council had offered him covert sanctuary, but what would the British do when this war was over? He doubted they would allow their former colony to be governed by the new regime. It looked too much like his own. And even if the Allies lost interest in pursuing him, the Jews never would. What a cruel joke history had played on him. He well remembered his horror at reading the electronic archives from the Sutanto, and their revelation of a world without the Reich, a world in which a Jewish state was a—what did they call it?—a superpower. And now it seemed inevitable that that perverse result was going to come about anyway, despite his best efforts. The SD-Ausland had just this morning sent him a report of fighting in Jerusalem between Arabs and “Israelis,” as the hook-nosed scum now insisted on calling themselves. It was not going well for the Arabs.

  “Mein Führer, the car is ready.”

  Himmler acknowledged his bodyguard with a nod. It was a pity to be heading back to the bunker. He had spent so little time in the sun and fresh air during the last weeks that even a few minutes stolen in the open air were like a month at a spa. He replaced his hat, straightened his cuffs, and strode across the small garden to the armored Mercedes, wondering if he would ever return to this particular building.

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 1546 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). IN FLIGHT.

  Far beneath them to the south a convoy was tracking eastward, crawling across the Atlantic on the cusp of the horizon. Llewellyn gave them a cursory glance as the last of the jet fuel poured down the hose from the in-flight refueler. She tapped her copilot, Major Vallon Davies, on the arm.

  “I think I forgot my wallet, Val,” she said. “Can you pay for this tank? I’ll get the next one.”

  She heard Davies’s snort of laughter through the headset.

  A chime sounded, alerting them to the end of the fuel transfer.

  The drogue disengaged with a loud clunk, a few spots of JP-8 hitting the windscreen before disappearing. The tanker, a newly built analog of the old KC-135, banked away to top up the other two bombers in the flight. It was another custom-built system, designed especially for Strategic Air Command. In-fight refueling had become a common practice with all Western air forces, but converted DC-3s were the standard workhorse. The 135, known locally as a “Whale,” was smaller and less powerful than its uptime progenitor. And as best she knew there were only three of them in existence. But it was still a long way ahead of the nearest competition.

  Llewellyn watched it maneuvering into place for its next customer.

  “Okay, boys,” she announced through the intercom. “Let’s go make some history.”

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 2150 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). HMS TRIDENT, NORTH SEA.

  “Thanks for letting me watch this, Karen.”

  Julia spoke in a low voice that carried no farther than the captain of the stealth destroyer, who was standing right next to her in the chilly blue cave of the ship’s Combat Information Center.

  Halabi smiled, briefly. “General Patton is not the only one who understands the power of publicity.”

  She took her eyes off the main display and turned them directly on Duffy.

  “I would have let you come up here anyway, Jules. Old school tie and all that. But in fact I had orders from Downing Street. First, just to keep you on board, and then to make sure you got an A-reserve seat. I suppose the PM wants everyone to remember that England had her own role to play at the death.”

  Julia nodded slowly. Quick movements sent spasms of pain down her neck into her back. She was safely strapped into a chair in the old satellite warfare bay. She wasn’t allowed to shoot any video images in the CIC, and anyway the SS death squad back in the Ardennes had taken her flexipad and Sonycam. So for now she’d gone back to basics, writing shorthand notes with pen and paper. Halabi had promised her access to Fleetnet later on to file a report.

  It was hard to believe she was watching this happen.

  The eight linked flat panels of the main display were still largely given over to theaterwide coverage of the European battlespace, which now reached as far east as the Ukraine. But one screen was devoted to tracking the progress of the B-52 flight out of New Mexico. That was a hell of a shock right there, the idea of those monsters climbing back into the air again. In a way it was almost reassuring. They were such a part of her life back up in twenty-one that it was like hearing of an old friend from the future who’d suddenly popped into existence in the next room. Granted, there were only six planes, and she wondered how many of them were carrying atomic weapons. Perhaps all of them, perhaps only one. That information had not yet been released. But it was great to know they were back. They’d saved her ass more than once back home, and now, who knew? Maybe they were going to save the world.

  Not much was happening at the moment, however. Dozens of tags indicated the presence of long-range fighter escorts. Sabers, according to Halabi. They were scheduled to top up their tanks in forty minutes, the last time they’d refuel before reaching Germany.

  Julia had already filled pages of her notebook with color detail of the ship, the crew, the mix of ’temps and uptimers who were standing watch over this epochal moment. Both she and Halabi had lived long enough in the next century to see two Western cities reduced to atomic slag heaps, but she found herself anxious and increasingly restless as the moment drew near in this reality.

  “Any misgivings?” she asked Halabi.

  “Are you going to quote me?”

  “Only if you want me to.”

  The captain of the Trident stared at the big screen for a moment. The business of war went on without pause. Sysops constantly scanned the threat bubble around the destroyer’s battle group. Intelligence officers analyzed the vast flow of data from ship sensors, drones, Nemesis arrays, and ’temp assets. Junior officers came and went, whispering urgent messages into the ears of their masters before carrying off replies whence they had come. On the battlespace display flashing black tags tracked the lead elements of the Soviet air assault into southern France, and the progress of Free French and U.S. armor rushing down to “link up” with them—in reality, to block them from any further encroachment. Many more data hacks crept over the western reaches of Germany as Patton and Montgomery raced each other toward Berlin. Three screens were entirely concerned with monitoring the stalled Russian advance on the Eastern Front, one of them showing new and ever more gruesome video coverage of the chemical warfare raging there.

  It was all so horribly enthralling that Julia was a little surprised when Halabi spoke up again. She’d been lost in her own thoughts. She raised her pen inquiringly, and the commander of the Trident nodded.

  “I have been fighting for nearly twenty years,” said Halabi. “And I have taken many lives. I have burned men alive in their aircraft. I have drowned them by sinking their boats and ships. Some I have crushed at the bottom of the sea. Others have been atomized by the weapons I fired at them. I never once hesitated to take their lives, whether they wore a uniform or not. If they intended harm toward my crew, my ship, or the realm we protect, their lives were forfeit…”

  Julia had some trouble keeping up with her. It ha
d been a long time since she’d been forced to take shorthand, and she wasn’t very comfortable in her bandages and strapping. Halabi seemed to sense her struggling and paused for a moment. Some of the men and women nearby were looking on, trying not to be too obvious about it, but failing. Karen Halabi waited until the reporter had stopped scribbling and then spoke again.

  “Of course, not everyone I killed was armed. Not everyone had evil intentions. Some were innocents. And I can only imagine the ocean of blood on my hands. How many thousands have I killed by directing bombers onto their cities and towns? I have no idea. None at all. But the dead are many. And tonight, in a few hours, I will add to that toll. I regret that. When I allow myself to think about it, about babies burned in their mothers’ arms, about children irradiated and dying over the course of days and weeks, I feel physically ill. Tonight I will help to kill hundreds of thousands of people, old and young, innocent and guilty. I will not sort them, I will just kill them one and all. And I will regret that through all of my days. But it is my duty. War is an unmitigated evil, and so tonight I will do great evil. But I will do it hoping that something even worse is brought to an end because of it.”

  Julia looked up from her notepad and expected to find a tear tracking down Halabi’s cheek. But there was none. Her eyes were hard and clear and utterly devoid of sorrow.

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 2310 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). OVER BERLIN.

  They came in on a heading determined by the quantum arrays of HMS Trident, their progress tracked by two of the stealth destroyer’s Big Eye drones.

  “One minute to release, Colonel Llewellyn.”

  Well, that was a surprise.

  The voice of the air controller on the British trimaran was American. A Texan to be sure. Llewellyn could only wonder how he’d ended up there.

  “Warheads armed.”

  “The Sabers have reached a safe distance, Colonel.”

  She grunted. The fighters had to put a lot of space between themselves and the blast, lest they get swatted from the sky like bugs.

  “Looks like we’re on our own, boys. Let’s light ’em up.”

  She tried to keep her tone light, but the enormity of what they were about to do could not be denied. The German capital was blacked out, but was everywhere lit by fire. Pathfinders had ringed the center of the metropolis with incendiaries. Not that she needed it, with the Trident guiding her in. But if that link failed for whatever reason, it was good to know that they could still find the target with their own eyes.

  “Twenty seconds to release.”

  Llewellyn held the giant bomber steady at it operational ceiling of fifteen thousand meters. It took a surprising amount of physical strength to control a B-52, and she’d had to put a lot of extra time in at the gym. Her arms looked much bigger than they had been a year ago. German flak arced up out of the conflagration below, long golden lines of fire seeming to leap away from the open furnace over which they flew. Shells burst harmlessly far below her. The decoy planes had not been needed. There were no German fighters aloft.

  The bomb bay door whirred open.

  “Trident has us dead on course,” her navigator reported.

  “Ten seconds.”

  “All systems check out green.”

  “Eight, seven, six…”

  How many people slept beneath her wings tonight? How many were good? And how many evil? Would God protect the virtuous and the meek?

  “Three, two, one. Release.”

  No. God would not.

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 2310 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). BERLIN.

  It was a quiet night, as far as these things went nowadays. The RAF and their American cousins seemed to be giving the citizens of Berlin a brief rest from the terrors of all night bombing. A medium-sized raid had dropped incendiaries a short time ago but the Allies had not followed up like they had at Dresden.

  Riding in the back of his Mercedes, feverish with lack of sleep, Himmler had no doubt they were already thinking of the next war, against Stalin. By way of contrast he could only contemplate the end of this war, which was surely days away. Or weeks at best. The briefing had not gone well. His instructions to speak the truth had liberated the high command to be completely frank about the utter impossibility of effecting any kind of reverse to the Reich’s military situation. One by one, his generals explained why defeat was inevitable. He had not screamed at them. He had not accused them of defeatism or threatened anyone with execution for bearing unwanted news. He had ordered all the nonexistent units in Western Europe removed from the map table, a task that could have been accomplished with one dramatic sweep of his hand. Instead General Zeitzler had plucked the little wooden blocks off one by one. There was nothing left between them and the Allies in the west.

  Why had they not listened to his offer? Why had they been so stupid in the face of the obvious? Now they would have to face the Bolsheviks alone, having done their utmost to cripple the best defense Western civilization had against the subhuman armies massing at the gates of Europe.

  As his limousine motored slowly down Unter den Linden the last führer imagined the city occupied by enemy troops. It was all too easy to envision on the dark canvas of a blackout, punctured by the eldritch light of an incendiary blaze a few blocks away. The streets here, once teeming with life, were empty save for a few fire crews rushing to their work. He could not help but see them filled with Slavic berserkers mad with plunder and rape.

  His feelings surged between despair and a sort of frenetic psychosis, a desire to throw himself into the last lines of defense, even while knowing that the only hope was that Berlin would fall to Montgomery or Patton before the arrival of the Red Army.

  He looked at the small scrap of paper crumpled in his left hand. A piece of history, no less. His order to the high command—issued at the end of the dismal meeting an hour ago, and effective immediately—to cease all hostilities in the west and to allow the Americans and their allies unimpeded access to the Fatherland.

  Churchill and Roosevelt might not have accepted his offer of an alliance, but they would not be able to ignore an unconditional surrender.

  He smiled wanly.

  It was a masterstroke really. He was going to make them responsible for the defense of Germany, and beyond that of civilization itself. If he weren’t so exhausted he could have laughed. When one stared defeat and annihilation in the face and accepted them, it clarified everything.

  He could not win, but he could save his Volk.

  Not that he would be around to see it, of course. Would he spend the rest of his life in hiding? Or would he be dragged before some sham court to…

  The question was redundant.

  At eighteen minutes past the hour three spheres of brilliant white light bloomed overhead, and Heinrich Himmler, Berlin, and the Third Reich all passed into history.

  35

  D-DAY + 42. 14 JUNE 1944. 0800 HOURS.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Before speaking into the microphone on his desk, the president of the United States of America coughed lightly to clear his throat. The Oval Office was crowded. His press people had tried to convince him to do this broadcast from the dedicated studio that had been built in the previous year, but Roosevelt had insisted. There were three cameras in the office, recording the event for posterity, and when Americans watched this speech hundreds of years from now, he didn’t want them to see him hunched into a sound booth in the basement of the building.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff were seated in the lounge chairs looking somewhat uncomfortable, as were the secretary of war, the secretary of state, the Speaker of the House, and the British ambassador. His wife was perched on another chair near the door. The cameras were all twenty-first technology, and it would be at least a day before the images they captured would be tele-recorded onto film for national distribution to the various news services. The microphone in front of him, however, was the same one he had been speaking into for years. He’d never been comfortable with t
he teeny-weeny clip-on things the uptimers made him wear.

  A producer counted down for him. “Mr. President, we’re on in three, two, one…”

  Roosevelt leaned forward just fractionally and addressed himself to the millions of his fellow citizens who would be gathered around their radios, listening at home, in their workplaces, in coffee shops or train stations, on ships, and in the field around the world.

  “My fellow Americans,” he began. “At eighteen minutes after eleven o’clock local time last night, our planes dropped three atomic bombs on the capital of Nazi Germany. Berlin has been destroyed, and the heart of our enemy torn out. All organized German forces in Western Europe have laid down their arms. They continue to fight in the east, and on our best information to date they will do so until the Red Army observes a cease-fire. I call on our allies in Moscow to do just that and to avoid any further wasteful destruction.”

  He paused for a full second, emphasizing the import of his last statement—and the next.

  “The three bombs detonated over Germany last night were not the only atomic weapons in our arsenal. We have many more and we now have the means to deliver them anywhere on earth. I say to the Japanese war cabinet, you have only two choices. Surrender immediately and unconditionally or I will order the United States Army Air Force to begin reducing your cities, until there is nothing left of your nation and its ancient culture.”

  Roosevelt turned the page of his speech. A technical person had offered him an electronic version on one of those teleprompter things, but he felt much more comfortable reading from a real document. And of course, it would become part of the national archive in a way that an electrical document never could. Not in his mind, anyway.

  “There will be no escape from justice for those responsible for starting this war,” he continued. “Or for those who have committed crimes in its prosecution. But your people do not need to share in that punishment. The invasion of your Home Islands for which you are preparing will not come. No American soldier will set foot there while we remain at war. There is now no reason for them to do so. Lay down your arms, and we will come peacefully, to help you rebuild and to take your place in the community of civilized nations. Resist us and you will be destroyed. There will be no glory, no honor in such resistance. Only the most abject folly. Your warrior spirit will count for nothing inside the fireball of an atomic explosion. Such human or spiritual considerations are irrelevant. You have twenty-four hours to reply.”