Final impact

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 struck 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.”