Himmler considered it. “How interesting,” he said. “Now, I have one final piece of information for you.” He leered again. “As you know, your existence within the bunker has been watched.”
“Yes,” Horton said, with a sinking feeling.
“The assistant matron, Irma Grese, brought it to my attention,” Himmler said. Horton shuddered; the sixteen-year-old girl combined a devotion to Nazism with a devotion to the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls. The name had sounded familiar, but it had taken a week to remember where he’d heard it. Irma Grese had, or would have, been an Oberaufseherin at Auschwitz. Himmler, he suspected, had combed the files for loyal people and snapped them up earlier.
I knew there was a reason why Jasmine doesn’t like her, he thought, even though Irma had taken good care of the children.
“Your wife… ah, has not had her… ah, period for two months,” Himmler said. Horton realised with a sudden flicker of amusement, and then cold horror, that Himmler was actually blushing. “You know what that means?”
Horton felt his blood run cold, but he pasted a smile on his face. “I’m going to be a father again,” he said, and knew that Himmler now had another hold on him.
Chapter Thirty: Rommel
Chateau Lafayette
Nr Reims, France
12th September 1940
The SAS team was bored. The Germans, admittedly, were more careful about perimeter security than the Jihadis that the SAS had been fighting in the early years of the new century, but they lacked any real comprehension of the SAS’s capabilities. France might be new and strange, but the SAS teams had little difficulty in inserting and moving through the country. It was far less dangerous than Poland, which was having its population steadily removed or killed, and now that the war had slowed down, they were bored.
Captain Dwynn checked the GPS system and smiled to himself. They no longer had the American or European satellites that had guided them in the deserts of Syria or Saudi Arabia, but they had transponders and navigation beacons on Britain itself. Finding their position was easy; making their way to their target was even easier. The Germans seemed to have missed the SAS teams altogether; laser-guided weapons were not part of their experiences. Dwynn had hidden near a German airbase, pointed the laser-targeting device on the location of the planes, and watched as a Tomahawk slammed into the base. As the stock of missiles had dwindled, Dwynn and his team had been given new orders; check suspicious locations for any of the missing passengers from the lost jumbo jet.
“Sergeant Yates, stay back with the team,” he subvocalised into his throat mike. The SAS had been re-equipped with the American-made devices just before the Transition and had been delighted with the results. There was little point in bothering this far from the target location – the Germans hadn’t invented directional mikes or remote sensors – but Dwynn knew better than to become complacent. “Benton, you’re with me.”
Yates signalled his assent with his hands, using sign language to acknowledge. Dwynn nodded and slipped through the woodland, wishing that he had the automatic chameleon uniforms that the Americans had been talking about. The rocky woods would become a holiday resort in the future, but for the moment there were only a handful of paths.
“That way,” he subvocalised, after checking his GPS again. A Eurofighter recon mission three days ago had spotted the isolated Chateau and the PJHQ analysts had noticed that an entire SS guard seemed to be keeping someone prisoner. As the most important prisoners in Germany were the airline passengers, the Oversight Committee had asked for the Chateau to be covertly examined.
Benton nodded and followed him, slipping low through the trees. Dwynn slipped through a small stream and reached a rocky knoll, pausing to check the GPS. The Chateau should be just over the knoll. Carefully, he slipped out the microcam and poked it over the knoll.
“Bugger me,” Benton subvocalised, as the image became clear. The Chateau, almost a small castle, sat squarely in the middle of a clearer region, surrounded by an iron fence and patrolled by armed SS guards with dogs. “All this for one little civilian?”
Dwynn ignored him, examining the defences. The Germans had done well, he supposed, there were armed guards everywhere, but as a defence it needed work. Half of the guards seemed to be living in a small barracks with a large heat signature; a single precision weapon would take out the entire barracks and its inhabitants. And then he saw the man being exercised by the guards, and he knew that it was not a little civilian after all.
“I know that man,” he breathed. He’d been briefed on famous Germans, including the ones who had dared to try to end the Nazi regime, and this one was still famous, one of the handful with no stain to his name. Light brown hair, thinning on top, sharp clear eyes and a carefully-worn uniform… there really was no mistaking him.
“Sir, that’s Erwin Rommel,” Benton muttered. He tapped at the communications system, sending the report to PJHQ. “What are they doing; keeping him as a prisoner?”
Dwynn nodded. Rommel wore a uniform, but no sidearm or rank tabs. The guns were not quite pointed at him, but he was clearly being escorted. The man who would become the Desert Fox was walking briskly around the building, followed by his guards.
“Tell PJHQ that we can get him out with a little help,” Dwynn said. “We can hit them this evening, if they agree.”
Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, former commander of the 7th Panzer and very temporary commander of Operation Tempest, paced through the woods of France with his escort, wondering again what had happened. He’d been ordered to prepare the 7th Panzer for the occupation of the Balkan states when the SS had turned up and arrested him at gunpoint, apparently on the Fuhrer’s orders. Since then, he’d been kept prisoner in the French house, wondering why he had been removed from command.
I’m loyal, he thought, and wondered. It had been Hitler who’d given him his command, Hitler who’d trusted him, and he’d repaid that trust. He’d expected to continue his career – he’d even been pushed into thinking about an invasion of Britain – but then the war had changed, and then the future British had attacked.
“They said that you would betray the Fuhrer,” the SS commander, Otto Skorzeny, had said. The elite group treated him with respect; according to Skorzeny Hitler hadn’t decided what to do about him. Simply purging him, as so many other officers had been purged, would have cast doubt on the Fuhrer’s infallibility, so he’d been simply left in France.
He shook his head sadly. His wife, son, and bastard daughter were still in Germany. Skorzeny didn’t know what had happened to his wife and son; no one knew about his daughter. France was warm, even in September, but he shivered; what had happened to the Reich? What future knowledge had scared the SS so much that they’d been ceded control over so much? How many other innocents had been purged?
“Time to go back in,” Skorzeny said. His voice was oddly respectful; Skorzeny respected men with military genius. Rommel had taken a Panzer division and used it as an oversized infantry formation, winning the battle of France. Of course, that had been against the French, who had some good tanks and fighting men, but their leaders…