Final Impact (21 page)

17

D-DAY + 32. 4 JUNE 1944. 0852 HOURS.
BERLIN.

He might have expected more panic. The fact that most Berliners appeared to be going about their business may have spoken to something commendable in the German spirit.

On the other hand, Ambassador Oshima thought it more likely that they simply didn’t know what had happened. Propaganda Minister Göbbels kept a very tight rein.

All that Oshima had
publicly
read or heard about the fighting in the east was that a poorly coordinated sneak attack on a Wehrmacht regiment at the edge of the Demilitarized Zone had been repulsed, with heavy enemy casualties. Some German newspapers were even speculating that the Ukrainian nationalists might be responsible. There were at least three feuding militias in the Ukraine, and they all had clashed with both Communist and German forces in the last year.

But Oshima knew better.

The Reich’s ruling elite was still stunned by the blow Stalin had delivered. They hadn’t yet settled upon a response, so no compelling story had been invented to explain away this strategic reversal. As he motored down the Unter den Linden on his way to meet with Himmler, he could not rid himself of the images he had seen of the city of Berlin, ravaged by the Red Army.

He well remembered the Nanking Incident, and it took little effort to imagine the same sort of thing played out here, or at home, once the Bolshevik hordes had arrived at the gates. The ambassador maintained an outward façade of calm, but unless he had good news to send back to Tokyo, he feared what the next few months might bring.

The Red Army would pay a heavy toll for every inch of Japanese soil they defiled, but unlike the blissfully ignorant Berliners, he had seen the raw reports and even some video coverage of the new Eastern Front, and he harbored no misconceptions about the enemy they faced. The Communists had been busy, and most shockingly they had obviously gained access to Emergence technology. They seemed almost as well equipped as the Americans and British, and their armies were much larger. The only way they could be stopped was with an atomic bomb. He hoped Himmler might have word of a breakthrough on that score, because to date the Axis had enjoyed very little success in their atomic endeavors.

As the limousine pulled up at an intersection near the Brandenburg Gate, Oshima watched a couple of SS officers browbeating a fat civilian. It wasn’t immediately apparent what crime he had committed, and of course it was entirely possible that the man was only guilty of attracting their attention in the first place. As much as
Reichsführer
Himmler had been a good ally to Imperial Japan, delivering on all of his promises to the letter, the sight of the two black-clad Nazis bullying the terrified Berliner reminded Oshima that his “allies” would just as soon treat him as the subhuman they thought him to be. And that if they did prevail against the Allies and the Communists, their very nature would lead them to seek dominion over the emperor’s realm, as well.

A part of him had suspected Himmler of hiding progress on the atomic bomb because he wanted the weapon exclusively for the Reich. But now, with Germany caught between two formidable enemies, it seemed more likely that the
Reichsführer
’s protests and lamentations were genuine. If Hitler had possessed the superweapon, he surely would have used it on Zhukov and Konev. Instead, everything that Oshima heard about the Soviet front led him to believe that an epic disaster was in the making.

His driver apologized for the delay in getting to the Wilhelmstrasse for Oshima’s meeting. The RAF had bombed the city the previous night for the first time in weeks, and the roads were still affected, even though the brunt of the raid had fallen a few miles away. A stray stick of bombs had landed on the transport hub of Potsdamer Platz, throwing the central traffic grid into chaos.

Oshima said nothing. He was a world away, in the old wooden streets of Tokyo, remembering his life before this madness. He doubted he would ever see home again.

That last time he had been aboveground for any length of time it was…

Well, in fact he couldn’t remember. It had been so long, and events had taken such a twisted and evil course since then, that Himmler seemed to have spent most of his waking life shuffling from one dank, stale-smelling underground bunker to another. The touch of morning sun on his face in the brief seconds between climbing out of his Mercedes and hurrying into the nondescript building on a small street running off Wilhelmstrasse had been like a week at a spa in the Alps. If only he could have lingered in the sooty, high-walled courtyard at the back of the building where his car had pulled up. He might have stood there all day, soaking in the warmth and the sweet, soft light. But such an indulgence was not for him. History was bearing on his shoulders, threatening to crush him.

Those foul, creeping, two-faced pigs in Moscow were…were…

His brain locked up, unable to get past the impacted rage and violation.

This was not supposed to happen. They were supposed to be plowed under by the Aryan race, led by his glorious SS. Instead a horde—a veritable Mongol
horde
of the beasts—was tearing across the steppes, threatening to break into the German heartland and plunge Western civilization into a new dark age. The führer had been so overcome by his anger that he’d suffered some form of seizure and actually passed out in the bunker, stopping in midrant and smashing his head on the edge of the table as he collapsed. None of the trembling, whey-faced physicians had been able to revive him. He had simply remained there on the floor, his head resting on the balled-up jacket of a Luftwaffe officer, as grotesque spasms swept over his prostrate form.

Finally Himmler had been unable to stand it any longer, calling for an SS medic to attend. The man had arrived ten minutes later, and unlike the sniveling civilian doctors he had
acted,
getting the führer transferred to a cot in his private chambers and administering a sedative that noticeably calmed the tremors. He had re-dressed the ugly, swollen gash over Hitler’s left eye and sternly warned everyone not to disturb him. He had then taken Himmler aside and, in a low worried tone, had explained that it was possible the führer had suffered a stroke and might well be impaired for some time. One arm was lifeless, and the whole right side of his face looked like that of a wax dummy exposed to an excess of heat. It
…drooped
was about the best word Himmler could come up with.

At that moment a terrifying loneliness had seized the
Reichsführer.
He felt like a child who loses sight of its parents in a crowd. What if the führer was gone? What if he had been poisoned, or succumbed to the enormous strain of the past month? No one else in the world had to deal with the sort of pressure to which he had been subjected. Nobody else could possibly have withstood the physical and psychic torment like Adolf Hitler.

But what if he was gone?

Himmler had returned to the map room, where a heavy pall still hung, and explained that long hours had caught up with the führer and he had simply passed out, in need of some rest. Yet his endurance was a beacon to all. The SS chief explained then that he would assume administrative responsibilities for the next few hours, until the führer awoke, and told the assembled staff officers that he wasn’t going to meddle with their deliberations; they were to dispose of their forces as they saw fit to meet the challenges on both the Eastern and Western fronts.

Then he had excused himself.

Flanked by his bodyguards now, Himmler hastened up the narrow steps into the rear of the building for his meeting with Oshima. The Japanese envoy wasn’t due for another half an hour, and it was more than likely that he would be delayed anyway. Once inside, he was confronted with a narrow hallway that ended in a steel door, which was blocked by two more SS guards who came rigidly to attention when they saw him. As Himmler acknowledged their salutes, one of the guards spoke into a telephone. The door, which resembled a watertight hatch on a warship, clanked open and Himmler passed through. Bare concrete stairs led downward on the other side. He descended, holding tight to the steel handrail. The staircase was steep and the steps were quite narrow. It would be easy to slip and break his neck.

Behind him the three-story block presented the façade of a well-maintained baroque apartment building. Formerly owned by Jews, it had been converted to office space for use by the SS after the
Kristallnacht
pogrom. The uniformed Allgemeine-SS staffers in the aboveground offices were part of a unit charged with disposing of the worldly goods of Jews such as the former owners of this building, all of whom had gone into the ovens or died in forced labor camps.

Deep below street level, however, a series of linked, reinforced-steel chambers provided safe working space for Himmler when he needed to be away from the bunkers where most of the activity took place. While the Waffen-SS played a pivotal role in the war effort, the greater SS was responsible for much, much more, and regardless of the demands the armed conflict made upon him the
Reichsführer
could not afford to ignore his other duties. He was still the man responsible for attending to the Final Solution. The foreign and domestic security and intelligence services reported directly to him. And along with Albert Speer, the armaments minister, he was charged with delivering to the Reich the ultimate weapon—an atomic bomb.

Unfortunately, he was beginning to doubt that he could.

After an initial period of euphoria and accelerated progress following the capture of the
Dessaix
and her informational systems, further successes had proved elusive. The Allies were largely to blame. At times it seemed as if they had devoted entire armies to destroying every facility even remotely connected with the project. And he had begun to acknowledge, with intense frustration, that he hadn’t understood two years ago just what a Herculean task he had taken on. This project consumed resources on a scale he hadn’t imagined possible.

For once the shelter did not reek of kerosene. They were plugged into the city’s power grid and it was running, despite the RAF’s best efforts. In contrast with the bunker he had just left,
this
one was clean, well lit, un-crowded, and calm. Blond secretaries and square-faced SS men saluted him as he passed through the antechamber into the first of the buried steel tanks. It was at least sixty meters long and twenty across, an open space with dozens of small work pens separated by particleboard dividers. The pens grew larger as they progressed down the body of the tubular structure, until they terminated in two relatively spacious work areas in front of another watertight door. He marched down the room, nodding and smiling to his personal staff, calling a few favored individuals by their first names, stopping to chat briefly with a secretary called Helga who was beginning to show her pregnancy. Her husband had been involved in the doom-struck assault on Calais, and nothing had been heard from him since. Helga was a good German, and she was holding up bravely. Himmler told her he was proud of her forbearance, and said that she must soon rest up and save her strength for the birth. After that, if she wished, he could suggest a number of fine young SS men who were looking for wives.

He dismissed her tears of gratitude and carried on to his private rooms. He feared what would become of women like that if the Bolsheviks ever set foot inside Berlin. He was one of the few people in Germany who’d read anything of the city’s fate in the other world. Some extracts from a book called
Armageddon
had been found on the
Dessaix
and translated from French. It made for harrowing reading.

Himmler asked one of the guards to see to a pot of herbal tea as his personal assistant,
Hauptsturmführer
Buhle, presented him with two sets of papers.

“The files have also been loaded onto your computer,
Reichsführer,
” Buhle said. “They are the only files on the desktop.”

“Thank you,” said Himmler, who found the Windows file management system a diabolical confoundment.
And they accuse
me
of crimes against humanity,
he thought as he settled himself in at his desk.
Wilhelm Gates, you are a beast, and your family will pay.

His tea arrived and he sipped the infusion as he read the latest report by Professor Bothe. The work of the Army Weapons Office was not going well. Bothe complained of shortages and disruptions caused by Allied attacks, and staffing problems that he rather boldly laid at the feet of the Gestapo, which had arrested so many of his best scientists, including Heisenberg, Hahn, and Diebner. The last of his gaseous uranium centrifuges had been destroyed by a British commando raid on the Tirana complex, and at any rate he was running short of the yellow cake supplied by Japan. He did not think it possible that a weapon would be ready within twelve months, let alone a week.

Under other circumstances, Himmler would have punished such insolence with a cold fury. But Professor Bothe was beyond his reach now. A few hours after he had dispatched his report, Bothe had been killed in a Soviet air attack.

There was little point in reading through the rest of the message. Much of it was couched in opaque jargon, and the crucial point was in the first paragraph anyway. There would be no bomb.

Himmler bit down on the sense of despair that was threatening to engulf him. He put the Bothe paper aside and picked up a briefing note from
Gruppenführer
Stangl on the renewed effort to root out fifth columnists, saboteurs, and traitors within the highest offices of the Reich. Normally he skimmed Stangl’s briefings. There was rarely anything of note; an admiral here, a general there. But today his eyes bulged as he read the first name on the list.

General Paul Brasch.

Stangl wrote that the Gestapo had been covertly observing Brasch for six months, on suspicion that he had made contact with some enemy agents. One man in particular had been of interest to them, but had evaded capture on a number of occasions. He had been killed in Paris on May 8, just a few streets away from where Brasch had been dining with
Oberstgruppenführer
Oberg. General Brasch had been observed loitering in the area afterward, and approached a number of Wehrmacht personnel who survived a blast they presumed had been triggered by the unnamed spy. He showed great interest in the details of the incident in which the man and many others had perished.