The Nazis, with their pathetic attempt to deceive him with the Demidenko project, would have fainted dead away if they could see what Kaganovich and Zhdanov had built around the Vanguard. Well, they would know soon enough. His country might be poor, but it was still a giant, and vast amounts of her resources were now being directed to exploiting the windfall of the Vanguard. If he could just keep the fascists and the capitalist gangsters at war with each other, and away from his own jugular for a little while longer, he would soon be able to strike at them both, and set history right.
The Nazis dismal efforts at maskirovka would come back to haunt them, for while it was true that Demidenko was draining much-needed men and materiel from his real efforts, it was also costing Hitler and Himmler an unknowable amount of treasure to maintain the facade of rapprochement. And his Soviet engineers were ingenious enough to quietly learn enough from the "mistakes" at Demidenko to advance the Vanguard project all the much more quickly. If only they'd been able to take and keep more of the crew alive…
But as dialectical materialists, they would work with what was, not what he might wish to be.
"All right, Beria," said Stalin. "Your man is cleared to help the fascists, but there must be no way of tracing our involvement. Do you understand?"
"I will take all necessary measures," Beria replied.
HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
"They're coming," said Halabi.
The giant battlespace monitor, which covered two walls of the Trident's hexagonal-shaped Combat Information Center, swarmed with hostile contacts. Thousands of them. So many, in fact, that although Posh could track each individual enemy unit, her human operators had no chance of keeping up.
Thus most of the smaller contacts were simply tagged with a number and buried under layers of more pertinent data, such as the flight of hundreds of slow transports making their way across the air-sea gap between the eastern coast of the British Isles and a series of airfields in Norway.
The highest priority contact, however, was a formation of three blinking red triangles screaming across the French countryside from an originating point just north of a village called Donzenac.
They were hypersonic Laval GA cruise missiles, and the ship's Combat Intelligence had calculated that they would impact somewhere in the U.K. in approximately four minutes. They were even curving around through Belgium and the Netherlands to put themselves well out of reach of any possible countermeasures she might have deployed. Not that there was any need. The Trident could have dealt with them had they been aimed right at her. Her Metal Storm and laser pack weapons systems were specifically designed to neutralize such threats. But there was nothing they could do from hundreds of kilometers away.
"Weapons, can we get an intercept lock?"
"Negative, Captain."
That was the answer Halabi expected. "Mr. Howard, does Posh have an attack profile yet?'
"They're ground-attack variants, Skipper. Almost certainly taken off the Dessaix at some point, and transferred to a makeshift launch tube. They may have even dismantled part of her VLS and used that."
"Doubtful," she mused.
"No projections on likely targets yet, ma'am, but if it was me I'd hit the key sector stations-Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, Debden, and North Weald. Luftwaffe's been leaving them alone, concentrating their bombers on Croydon, Rochford, and the others. Those stations are near critical, and a lot of capacity's been shifted to the undamaged fields. A hammerhead run would knock the RAF out of southern England."
"Comms, you got that?" Halabi asked. Air Vice Marshal Caterson and a couple of the other tourists began to advance on her command station. She ignored them for the moment. "Better give them a heads-up on shore. They're about to get the shit kicked out of them."
"I think you'd best explain what the hell is going on," Caterson demanded.
"Three ground-attack missiles are heading toward England at over five thousand miles an hour," she said, without betraying any emotion. "We cannot stop them. We don't know where they're going to hit, but whatever the target is, it will be gone very soon. My intelligence chief has indicated that the most likely targets are your main sector stations. There's only three missiles, but they're carrying enough submunitions to destroy all four airfields, and then some."
"I see," Caterson said quietly. "And having brought this upon us, what are you going to do about it?"
Halabi ignored the baited hook. "We're going to do exactly as we planned and stay here, providing battlespace management data, waiting for the German surface assets to attempt the crossing."
"Damn you, and your crew," he spat. "What sort of a captain are you, anyway, Halabi? Get out there and do something. You've got this God-almighty ship of yours, but you're hiding behind those destroyers that're out there protecting your worthless black hide.
"Get-out-there-and-do something!"
The CIC crew maintained their stations. Nobody as much as turned in their direction. But the buzz of discussion dropped away, and Halabi could feel it as everybody in the room shifted their attention onto her.
"Mr. McTeale," she said, fighting to keep a quaver away from her voice. "Call Chief Waddington, and have him come up here with a security detachment. If the Air Vice Marshal Caterson opens his mouth again, have him removed."
"Very good, ma'am."
Before Caterson could do anything to get himself thrown out, her chief defensive sysop called out. "Captain! One of the Lavals has splashed. And another has just corkscrewed off course over the North Sea."
Halabi, McTeale, and all the 'temps searched the main viewscreens. Indeed, one of the red triangles had disappeared, and the other was moving erratically. The Trident's captain remained outwardly unmoved, but inside her a little cartoon Halabi was leaping up and down, punching a fist in the air. Kolhammer had reported that many of the missiles fired on Hawaii had malfunctioned, probably through sabotage. She'd been praying to a God she'd never really believed in, hoping beyond hope that whichever of the Dessaix's crew had been responsible for that sabotage may have been able to get to these missiles, too.
But there was still one French hammerhead streaking in toward London.
"What's happened, Captain?" asked an army brigadier named Beaumont. She didn't mind him as much as Caterson. An old India hand, he'd once or twice shown himself to be more accepting of her command, and of those members of her crew whose bloodlines didn't necessarily go all the way back to pre-Norman England.
"At first blush, sir," she said, pointedly paying respect to his rank, "it would seem as if somebody on the Dessaix doubled-crossed the Germans. Two of the missiles appear to have been sabotaged."
"Splash two, Captain."
"There," she said, pointing at the flashing red triangle before it blinked out. "The second Laval has gone down."
"But not the third?"
"No, sir. I'm afraid not. And if it hasn't shown any signs by now, it probably won't."
The ship's defensive sysop spoke up. "Posh has determined that Biggin Hill is the most likely target."