There’s always Ploesti, he thought, and scowled. Wrecking the place with a nuclear warhead would short-circuit the German war machine, at least for a while, but it would unbalance the balance of power, tipping it firmly in Stalin’s direction. Hanover shook his head; for the moment the war had to go on.
There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Hanover snapped, and stood up. Major Stirling came in, leading a man who was taller than Hanover had expected. Rommel was impressive, Hanover supposed; he walked with a genuine aristocratic bearing that so many of the House of Lords had forgotten in the years since the war. Too busy scrogng off the NHS, Hanover thought. Damn Blair for hacking away without leaving anything to take the weight.
“Erwin Rommel, Prime Minister,” Major Stirling said, and left the room. Hanover considered Rommel; Rommel considered him back.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Hanover said, aware that conversational inanities would be useless with this man. “I assume that you have been briefed on the situation?”
“As unbelievable as it is,” Rommel said. “How did you come back in time?”
Hanover shook his head, waving Rommel to a chair. “I wish I knew,” he said. “We’ve been hunting for a solution, and there are people who think it happened deliberately, but… hell, we might as well blame God! We don’t know and we can’t go back!”
“I think a lot of people will be grateful,” Rommel said. “Your major and the ambassador told me about what would have happened.”
Hanover snorted, recognising Rommel’s expression. “My dear fellow, it’s already happening.”
“I know,” Rommel said. “What do you intend to do about it?”
Hanover waved a hand at the map on the wall. “I have problems,” he said. “Yes, as you may have heard, as a final resort we can burn Germany off the face of the Earth, slaughtering the entire population.” He met Rommel’s eyes. “As God is my witness, if Hitler develops nuclear weapons, I will do that.”
Rommel paled. “At the same time, devastating Germany would invite Stalin to invade, and force us to force him out,” Hanover continued. He scowled. “I have to hold a balance; build up our own forces to invade Germany – and incidentally to destroy the Vichy Government – and at the same time permitting Hitler to continue to rule Germany.”
“You can’t,” Rommel said. “You have to stop him.”
Hanover smiled. “Until now, I didn’t have an alternative,” he said. “Tell me, would you be interested in leading a new Germany?”
Rommel narrowed his eyes. “You want me to be Chancellor?”
Hanover nodded. “You see, we want a strong Germany, one that will resist the economic policies that nearly destroyed the European Union, but we want – must have – a democratic state. We need an ally, General Rommel, one that will be strong and democratic, one that will assist us in rolling back communism. Stalin is just as great a threat to us as Hitler, perhaps greater in the long term.”
Rommel hesitated. “I have conditions,” he said finally. “I have no intention of running a puppet state. If I agree to do this, I want freedom of action.”
Hanover considered. “As long as you stick with the democracy, then fine; I agree. There is one cavort; no nuclear weapons, not now, not for a long time. The fewer there are of them, the better.”
“And if you have them, you make certain that no one else has them,” Rommel said wryly. “Secondly, you recruit a German army, one to take the field against Hitler’s legions. This has to be done by Germans; we have to burn the monsters out of our nation.”
Hanover nodded slowly. “I agree in principle,” he said. “However, we don’t have many German prisoners, and we don’t have a large German population. We could try to recruit from the states, but…”
“There’ll be enough in German for a battalion or two,” Rommel said. “So, what now?”
“At the moment, we’re preparing to fend off an attack on Gibraltar,” Hanover said. “Unfortunately, we will fail; I don’t suppose that you have a miracle tactic up your sleeve?”
Rommel shook his head. “The problems of attacking a fortress are well understood now,” he said.
Hanover smiled wryly. This Rommel, of course, had never heard of Tobruk. “Thanks anyway,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, Ambassador Schulze will help you become accustomed to the new Britain, and then we can give you a medical check.”
“One final matter,” Rommel said. “My family.”
Hanover hesitated. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “I won’t lie to you; Hitler will lose no sleep over turning them into dogmeat. We’ll see what the SAS can do, if we can find them, but most of our ways of gathering information are useless in the new situation.”
Undisclosed Location
Berlin, Germany
13th September 1940
Himmler studied the report from the SS team with mounting dissatisfaction. The loss of Skorzany – his dead body having been discovered by the investigators – was annoying; the files had talked about him as some kind of superman, the sort of person whom Himmler needed for his long-term plans. More annoying was the attack itself; the British had attacked a SS-held location and had wiped out a fifty-man team, without suffering any losses at all. Himmler clicked his teeth; or, of course, they’d taken away any bodies. If it hadn’t been for the bullets in the dead bodies, now being moved to the SS burial ground, they would never have known that there’d been a ground attack at all.
What were you doing? Himmler asked himself, turning a recovered bullet over and over in his hands. Why did you attack the building holding the Fuhrer’s former favourite? Why? What did you think you were doing?
Himmler’s lips opened wide in a smile that would have sickened any onlooker. It was obvious; they had to have thought that they were recovering one of the handful of people from the crashed jet, back at the beginning. It made sense, with only one exception; why destroy the building? Had they taken Rommel? If not, had he escaped or had he been killed when the building itself had been destroyed? Himmler shook his head; there was no way to be certain, the handful of SS agents who’d been sent into the future Britain had just disappeared, and the Irish were much less obliging these days.
He pounded on the table, careful not to dialogue the laptop, and his secretary ran in. A tall thin man with a face like a pinched grape, his servility would have been sickening to anyone with any sense of fairness. Himmler, who knew he was loyal, kept him around because of that loyalty; the man would be completely alone if anything happened to Himmler.
“Pieter,” he snapped, and the secretary saluted. “You are to go at once to the troop headquarters and arrange extra protection around all of the prisoners,” he said. “I want them surrounded by another ring of armed guards, living in the same buildings as them.”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichsführer,” Pieter snapped, saluting again. His weak eyes blinked at Himmler. “I will do as you command.”
“Oh, and you had better see to it that Herr Rommel’s family get tossed into one of the worker camps,” Himmler said. “One way or the other, now that he’s dead, they won’t be needed any longer, will they?”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichsführer,” Pieter snapped. “Should we give him a state funeral?”
Himmler considered. Rommel had been given one in the first history, the Jewish one. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll give him a proper funeral and make him into a martyr.”