The ground shook, violently, as three aircraft roared overhead, splitting up as a couple of missiles lanced up towards them. Hennecke would have shaken his fist after them, if he hadn’t been trying to run; it would have been just about as effective as the antiaircraft missiles, perhaps more so. Ground to air missiles were one thing, he supposed, but what the Reich needed was ground-to-aircraft missiles.
“They’re coming,” another voice shouted. “Run, damn you!”
Hennecke ran as the sound of shooting grew louder, forgetting everything but the desperate need to survive. If they made it to the next set of defence lines…
…What then?
He almost stopped running. He knew what would happen when they reached the next set of lines, if they reached the next set of lines. The remaining penal soldiers would be put to work digging more trenches and foxholes, only to start running again when the enemy caught up with them. And it would happen, over and over again, until he died or the war came to an end. Part of him just wanted to give up, to sit down and wait for death…
…And yet, part of him still wanted to live.
Two more aircraft flashed overhead, flying west. He allowed himself a moment to hope they were friendly, although he knew it was unlikely. There hadn’t been a single friendly aircraft in the sky since the enemy counterattack at Berlin. But they were heading west…
Shaking his head, he forced himself to keep running. There was no other choice. If he sat down, he would be killed; if he deserted, he would be killed. The only hope for survival was to keep running…
…And, after everything he’d gone through, all he wanted to do was survive.
“The enemy spearheads are reaching Point Thor,” Weineck reported. “Their secondary units are advancing against our front lines…”
“Good,” Felix grunted.
He sucked in his breath, feeling a flicker of unwilling admiration for the Heer. They’d put together a full-scale offensive in a terrifyingly short space of time, then aimed it directly at the weakest point in his lines. Under other circumstances, it would have been a complete disaster, even if he did manage to extract most of his forces. Now…
“Send the signal to the special units,” he ordered. “Code Thor-Loki-Odin. I say again, Code Thor-Loki-Odin.”
Weineck nodded. “Jawohl.”
He didn’t understand, Felix knew; he didn’t know what was coming. But Felix did.
And so we change the world, he thought, grimly. It wasn’t something he’d ever expected to do. Who knows what will happen next?
Strumscharführer Ruediger Fondermann had never expected to be called upon to do his duty, even though he’d endured nearly a decade of intensive training and conditioning to make sure he could do his duty when — if — the time came. Everyone had thought that the special units would never be used, not after the last time the genie had been allowed to escape the bottle. But he had his orders and he would carry them out.
He took a long breath as he stood and walked over to the device. Countless books and movies had described them as monstrous bombs, no different from the gravity weapons deployed by the Luftwaffe, but it was really nothing more than a metal box. He flipped open the hatch and gazed down on the small keypad, his fingers carefully tapping in a code he’d been given an hour before he’d departed Germanica. A single mistake, he’d been warned, would trigger the bomb’s security features, rendering it useless. But there was no mistake…
“You’ll have half an hour, after you engage the arming sequence, to find shelter,” he’d been told. There was a secondary code for immediate detonation, but he’d been warned not to use it unless there was a very strong chance of falling into enemy hands. The rebels wouldn’t show him any mercy, if they realised what he’d been ordered to do. “Put the code in, then get moving.”
He braced himself, silently plotting out his path to relative safety, then tapped in the final code…
…And the world went white.
Chapter Eighteen
Front Lines, Germany Prime
3 November 1985
The enemy were in full retreat, Hauptmann Felix Malguth thought as he spotted a bunch of black-clad soldiers fleeing west. There was no point in strafing them, but he had no compunction about flying low over their heads and giving them a scare. Maybe they would be so terrified that they would be easy meat for the groundpounders, when they finally arrived. They seemed to be slowing down as the day wore on…
…And then there was a brilliant flash of white light.
Felix barely had a second to realise what had happened before the world went completely black. A nuke. He’d been looking directly towards a nuclear weapon as it detonated. And now he was blind… panic yammered at the back of his mind as he tried, desperately, to recall how he’d been flying before he’d been blinded. He might be heading straight towards the ground, or… he fumbled, desperately, for the ejector handle. It wasn’t safe, but it was the only way to survive… he’d just have to hope he landed on the right side of the line. Friendly troops might just get him to a medic in time to do something. The SS would probably watch and laugh as he struggled to find his way home.
The shockwave struck the aircraft a second later. Felix lost control completely, the aircraft flipping over as it started to disintegrate. There was a tearing sense of pain, a flicker of light even in the complete darkness…
…And then there was nothing.
Herman had been looking northwards when there was an unbelievably huge detonation, a flash of brilliant white light that — just for a second — sent everything into sharp relief. He threw himself to the ground automatically, not sure what had happened but completely sure it was bad. The ground shook violently a second later, so violently that a number of houses in the town collapsed into rubble, a couple exploding as emplaced booby traps were detonated by the near-earthquake.
He clung to the earth, praying desperately as the shaking went on and on. What had happened? Had the SS deployed nuclear weapons? He hated to imagine it, but he couldn’t think of anything else that could create such an effect. Stockpiling a vast number of conventional explosives might have been enough — he’d seen some immense stockpiles explode during his military service — but the SS was short on everything. Surely they wouldn’t have stockpiled so many explosives when there were so many other demands on their resources?
The shaking slowly came to an end, the thunderous noise fading into nothingness. It was suddenly very quiet… Herman rubbed his ears as he rolled over, half-convinced that he’d been completely deafened. But he could hear someone screaming in pain and shock… he forced himself to sit up and peer eastwards. A giant mushroom cloud, glowing an eerie red, was hanging in the air, mocking him. Just for a second, he fancied he saw a laughing face within the blaze before it vanished into the cloud. Another mushroom cloud could be seen further in the distance…
A nuke, he thought, numbly. They detonated a nuke — two nukes.
He pulled himself up and half-walked, half-stumbled towards the screaming man. He was rubbing his eyes desperately, as if he thought he could somehow massage them back to life. Herman realised, to his horror, that the man had been looking towards the blast when the warhead went off, that he’d been blinded… there was no way to give a blind man back his sight, he thought. The medics couldn’t do anything for the poor man, but try to make him comfortable…