“It looks like a fine baby,” Irma Grese said. The teenage girl would have been gorgeous, to anyone who didn’t know her legend. She was – or would have been – the most merciless female concentration camp guard in the Third Reich. “I can’t wait to see it.”
Jasmine smiled tiredly. “It’s not due yet, Irma,” she said. She didn’t know; Horton hadn’t dared to tell her. She might have attacked Irma, rather than risk her near her children. Irma was a fine nursemaid, Horton admitted; Himmler had picked her out on the basis of the future knowledge.
“At least another two months,” Doctor Koch said. Horton had worried about Josef Mengele being assigned to them, but Koch didn’t seem to have had a history. “Other than that, a healthy pregnancy so far.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Horton said. Koch bowed, picked up his bag, and left the room. He hadn’t seemed to care about Horton’s colour, but Himmler had issued strict orders; as long as Horton continued to produce the goods, he was to be treated well. The one guard who had tried to feel Jasmine up had been executed by Himmler’s blue-eyed boy, Herman Roth.
“Now, I have to get back to work,” he said, and kissed Jasmine on the cheek.
“Take care,” Jasmine said. It was almost a domestic scene and it tore at Horton’s soul; were they getting used to living in Nazi Germany? He kissed his wife one last time, and then headed into his study, a well-fitted out room deep below the ground. The Germans had given him a supply of books they’d recovered from somewhere, all history texts; nothing technical. Himmler had refused to tell him where they came from, which suggested that the Germans had allies in Britain.
“One of the BNP?” He’d asked, and Himmler had refused to comment. Instead, he’d given him yet another set of exam questions – or so he’d come to think of them – on the invasion of Russia in the original timeline. It made a certain kind of sense, he supposed; Himmler and Hitler wouldn’t want knowledge of their future failure to get out to the general public, and if he did all the work, Himmler would receive the credit for it.
How can Stalin’s morale be weakened sufficiently, or his grip on power be weakened sufficiently, to enable the invasion to succeed? The question ran. Horton considered; the only decent thing about his position was that the Germans shared all of their information with him, such as genuine war information. They didn’t share the news about Rommel forming a resistance army with their public, but they shared it with him.
Now, what can I write? He asked himself, and chuckled. It was just like an exam question. It had been hard, hard to provide advice for the Middle East that sounded good, but had been anything, but. The invasion might have succeeded if they’d had more time to prepare, but they didn’t. Now, he had to do the same for Russia; he had to convince Hitler to send Germany down the path to destruction in the icy wastes of Russia.
The invasion needs to be focused on Moscow, he wrote finally. If Stalin had lost Moscow, it would disrupt the centralised planning bureaucracy enough to damage the Soviet Union…
Chapter Five: The King’s Navy
Crete/Malta
Mediterranean Sea
26th March 1941
HMS Warspite wasn’t his ship anymore.
Admiral Somerville paced his stateroom and scowled mightily. His face was grim; no rating, past or present, would have dared to disturb him. The massive battleship had been… outdated, certainly by the standards of the smaller ships that made up the 2015 Royal Navy, but it was needed. The Germans were growing better at swarming the 2015 ships with thousands of planes, and the older ships were still required.
He glared over at the computer screen on his desk. It had taken American yards – with a great deal of help from a Britain that no longer possessed a dry dock large enough for Warspite – four months to modify the battleship, then nearly another month to return to the Mediterranean. He’d hoped to serve in the Far East – he’d lost friends when Hong Kong had fallen almost without a fight – but the PJHQ had decided that his talents were better used in the Mediterranean.
Damn it, he snapped. It was coming to pass, as Lord Linlithgow had predicted; the 2015 British were using their comrades from 1940, without being willing to allow them to return to Britain. The wonderland of the future, or so 2015 Britain seemed, had no place for them. After the last riot, only small groups were given leave on the mainland; most of them had to go to Ireland, which was in a state of upheaval. Warspite had even escorted several shiploads of Irish Protestants, fleeing to South Africa. He supposed it made sense, after civil unrest had begun in Ireland, but it didn’t seem fair at all.
“I suppose that not all of this is bad,” he said, as Warspite nosed its way through the Mediterranean. The sea was calm and, since the rocket attacks seven months ago, free of Italian surface ships. The new radar and the sonar were picking up traces of German aircraft, or perhaps they were French aircraft, but they didn’t come out for a battle with the small fleet. They had learned hard lessons about tangling with the picket destroyers, to say nothing of Warspite, Resolution and Valiant.
He chuckled. Perhaps their technology wasn’t so bad; it was just their attitudes. Warspite now carried tons of extra-strong armour, made by a process none of the Contemporaries understood, which was capable of resisting even a direct strike by a kamikaze aircraft under the best circumstances. The radar and sonar now made Warspite the deadliest battleship on the surface of the sea – and she might even have been able to stand up to a missile attack. The guided torpedoes had destroyed the three Italian submarines that had dared to try to attack the ships on their long transit to their new home, when they had duelled with the German batteries mounted near Gibraltar.
And they don’t trust us, he thought. His mind returned again and again to that point. The British Army of 1940 had lost most of the crack troops when Churchill and Ironsides and all that was good about Britain had vanished forever; only the weakest units had remained, for they were all that could be spared from an invasion threat that now seemed like a joke. The men, not all of them happy with the newcomers, had responded with violence. The ensuring bar brawls, in a multitude of bars, had damaged relationships; not all of the Contemporaries had the mental flexibility to embrace change.
Still, there was the ever-present worry about Nazi Germany, and without the Nazis there might have been a civil war. Somerville shook his head; he was thinking nonsense, and he supposed that the Indians would be happier under their own government as well. He smiled grimly; even with the Japanese Army camped out on their borders, the Indians were still arguing about the form of their government. Would the Princely States maintain their unique status? Would there be constitutional provisions for minority rights?
“And it doesn’t matter without beating Germany,” Somerville said. The plan that Force H – they’d been allowed to keep the name – was about to execute was a step forward, although not a particularly dangerous one. His radio buzzed; the bridge was trying to call him.