Final Impact (22 page)

Thus it was decided to pick him up for routine questioning, but when he was approached by two Gestapo men, Brasch had killed one and crippled the other. He was now on the run, somewhere in Paris.

Brasch! Of all people. Could this day get any worse? Brasch had been intimately involved in some of the most critical research-and-development programs that had grown out of the Emergence. Indeed, he was there from the very first moments, having been sent to Japan on what was first assumed to be a wild goose chase. He had been vetted and vetted again by the SS. His family had been killed in a British bombing raid. The führer had personally decorated him!

It could not be.

As he held the sheaf of paper with a bloodless, shaking hand, however, the
Reichsführer-SS
began to see the outlines of a conspiracy. Brasch’s dead son had been T4, a deformed child who would have been put down were it not for his father’s prominence. Brasch had enjoyed unrestricted access to the
Sutanto
’s files in Hashirajima and presumably could have learned of the T4 program. But then again, these suspicions had all been voiced early on, and Brasch had been attended for weeks by both covert and overt SS minders. They had never seen any evidence to suggest that he was anything but a patriot.

Himmler pulled out a pad of paper. He began to jot down notes furiously, instructing Stangl to continue the search for Brasch, even if it meant leaving agents behind in Paris to look for him after the city fell to the Allies. Then he scratched out “after” and wrote “
should
the city fall to the Allies.” It would not do to be seen as a defeatist.

He further instructed the Gestapo chief to cross-reference with Brasch’s work history all major incidents of unexplained sabotage, equipment failure, or even apparent Allied intelligence successes—such as the counterambush of the Luftwaffe raid on Patton’s Third Army. His writing grew spiky as his heart beat faster. In a way he hoped this was a misunderstanding. A coincidence. Because if Brasch had sold them out, they were in even worse trouble than he’d thought. The Allies would know details of some of the most sensitive weapons programs in the Third Reich.

They would even have inside information on the broad outlines of the German atomic program.

Oh, this was very, very bad.

18

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1324 HOURS.
PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

The crackle and pop of gunfire was a constant across the city, like traffic noise or birdsong in happier times. As the sporadic clashes grew into one long battle, Brasch began to think the French might do themselves more harm in the Liberation than the Germans had done during the Occupation.

He twitched aside the stiff, sun-faded curtain and risked a peek outside. He was hiding, for the moment, in a hotel off the Rue Houdon, although to call it a hotel invested the establishment with more dignity than it really deserved. It was the sort of flophouse where tight-fisted Austrian noncoms or
petit
bureaucrat collaborators might have rented a room by the hour, paying a few francs for a sagging, crusty mattress and an even saggier, crustier companion. The whores were still here, but the trade had dried up, so to speak. The Wehrmacht and the SS seemed to be in general retreat; all that remained were a few thousand of the hardier, dumber Frenchmen who had thrown in their lot with the fascists.

He watched a couple of them who were hiding at the end of the pinched, cobblestone alley that ran between Rue Houdon and the Villa de Guelma, beneath his window. A man and woman, both wearing German helmets but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. Some sort of fascist militia, he supposed. They nervously checked their weapons and ammunition at a small sandbag barricade. They had just one rifle between them, an 1898 vintage Mauser, but had somehow managed to find a whole box of
Stielhandgranate,
long-handled grenades. The man was sitting on a chair he’d obviously stolen from a nearby café or strip club, his head resting in his hands, his body completely still. The woman, clothed incongruously in a thin cotton dress, odd socks, tennis shoes, and a black bucket helmet, seemed animated by all the energy that had left his body. She held the rifle, checking the load every few minutes, poking her head around the corner into the main street, whipping it back like a frightened deer, and spinning around nervously as though someone had just snuck up behind her. She would start to crouch, then stand bolt upright, back away from the sandbags, then shuffle toward them again. The only sign that her companion was still alive was an occasional shake of the head.

Brasch was sure they would both be dead by the end of the week, if not the day.

The cease-fire among the Resistance, the few functioning elements of the French state, and the German rear guard had frayed as the Allies pushed toward the city. Some fighting had flared as individual units of SS engineers had tried to set off demolition charges at selected sites around the city. The Louvre was a smoking ruin, its artworks looted before the building had been destroyed. Gone, too, the Arc de Triomphe. But attempts to bring down the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame had failed when the engineers were attacked by an odd alliance of Communist guerrillas and paramilitary gendarmes. Most of the city’s police force was on strike, probably working on their excuses for having cooperated so closely with the Germans, and the Communists were in a frenzy of excitement at word of the return of the Soviet Union to the fray. As Brasch had slipped through city, just ahead of his pursuers, he had seen dozens of posters calling for a workers’ uprising in solidarity with the approaching Red Army.

As far as he could tell, most Parisians were only too glad that the Americans and their own Free French forces would arrive long before the Reds.

The whores in the sitting room downstairs swapped rumors concerning the advance, some of them insisting that the Americans were already at the edge of the suburbs. But Brasch knew far more than they did. He could hear the percussion of artillery and heavy bombing in the distance. Probably around Chartres, an hour away. And he’d been able to access Fleetnet via his flexipad for most of the past twenty-four hours. Drones had taken up station above the city, probably in support of Special Forces already inside, some of whom were coming to extract him. He could follow the battle quite closely, and he knew for certain that the Free French First Armored under Leclerc was punching through the last line of defense, and should enter Paris within hours.

His problem was that he might not have hours left. Even though the occupying German troops were almost gone, he’d been chased across half the city by at least six separate squads of Gestapo. They must be desperate to capture him, he reasoned, because the tipping point was fast approaching when the Parisians’ fear would give way to a savage hunger for revenge. It would be made all the worse by self-loathing as the French came to terms with the last two years. Time could not be reversed like a vid file. Many had not just served the interests of Nazi Germany but done so with great zeal, especially in the prosecution of the Reich’s genocidal Final Solution. There would come a heavy reckoning for that.

“Monsieur Brasch. Monsieur!”

Brasch turned away from his vantage point. The room behind him was dark. The few hours a day of unreliable electricity the city had recently enjoyed were over. The lights had been out for two days now.

Madam Colbert stood in the doorway, her modesty protected only by a moth-eaten bathrobe.

“Do you think it will be long before your friends come?” she asked. “They
will
come won’t they? It is just that…well…”

She trailed off, unable to speak the truth of it. She owed him. He had saved her daughter from rape at the hands of two drunken Wehrmacht men a month earlier. She didn’t need to know that he had done so on purpose, to establish a connection with a suitable local and a safe house for the flight he’d always known was coming. As far as Colbert was concerned, he was simply a man on the run from the Boche who had done her a great service.

But he was still a German, and no matter that he needed to hide out while waiting to “defect”—a new word, much in use these days—he remained a German, and so his presence here might bring any number of evil consequences down upon her house.

“It shouldn’t be long,” he promised her, holding up his flexipad. “I have had word. They are very close. In the next
arrondissement,
in fact. Coming up the Boulevarde Haussman.”

Madam Colbert worked the greasy belt of her old bathrobe into a huge Gordian knot. “It is just that I have word, too, monsieur. My lookouts, they tell me there are Germans coming. They are two streets away now. Gestapo. They
must
be looking for you. They are checking all the bordellos in Place Pigalle.”

Damn.

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.”