It would be weeks yet before the entire French Army would be completely disarmed, all airfields occupied, units taken under guard. As Kesselring had commented to Kurt Student, many wanted nothing more to do with the war, others were so determined that they fled into the countryside, hiding in the hopes of one day making contact with Allied forces. Some would again join the Free French under Giraud and De Gaulle, but most would simply become irrelevant, just as Darlan was in the end.
Hitler had made the fateful decision to make certain that France would not become a problem. One Korps of the 7th Army under General Freidrich Dollmann was now in Vichy Controlled territory, and it was joined by the 334th Infantry Division arriving from Germany. Marshall Petain was given an ultimatum—he must either order all French units to stand down, or Germany would rescind the armistice and resume immediate hostilities in France.
With Admiral Darlan already dead at the hands of Juan Alfonso’s diligence, and with Laborde in custody aboard the commandeered French Flagship, the plan to scuttle the French Fleet at Toulon failed. This time, the Germans had simply moved too swiftly, forewarned of this threat by Ivan Volkov. While several destroyer, a cruiser and three submarines were scuttled at Toulon, the bulk of the ships there were captured, and soon the Normandie would have a new name: Friedrich de Gross, and Axel Faust would have a new job.
Case Anton and Operation Lila to seize the French Fleet had been a great success, but it did have one very negative impact on Kesselring. The French troops he had relied upon to help in the defense of Morocco would also go through the catharsis of choosing sides. Most all of them would simply cease resistance as Patton’s troops advanced. Some would join Free French Forces forming behind Allied lines, others would remain disgruntled and oppose to the Allied cause throughout the war, with some even fighting for Germany in Russia in Infantry Regiment 638. Yet for the most part, a transformation was now underway that would see the entire French Administration of their colonies in Africa collapse.
In the chaos of those hours, Kesselring found that he had no choice but to cede Morocco to the Americans. He would blame it all on the French, say they sabotaged the defense, but in reality, his primary intention was to extricate Student’s precious Falschirmjaeger battalions from the sure trap they would be in if they tried to defend Tangier, and instead get them east to the Algerian border on the rail line from Fez. It seemed that the entire Western front had been thrown into chaos, and the whirlwind of change was sweeping over the desolate reaches of North Africa.
If the Germans had waited another two weeks to put this plan in motion, it might have failed as the French came to see the fate that awaited them for their collaboration with Germany. Yet now, with their war just a few days old, the plan caught them by complete surprise. When he heard the news of what the Germans had done, Patton could not help a grin.
“Audacity,” he said. “War is simple, direct, and ruthless. A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. This time it was a German plan. Tomorrow it will be an American plan. I intend to take every advantage of the confusion this is likely to cause. The French out there won’t know which way to point their goddamned rifles! Now’s the time to move. Montgomery is already 40 kilometers from Gibraltar, so I’m going to take Tangier in the next 48 hours, come hell or high water.”
Half a world away, it seemed to Anton Fedorov that he could feel that foreboding wind on the downwash from the rotors of a KA-40 as he boarded with a handful of other men. Soon that helo was rising up into the grey dawn, chopping its way west over Sakhalin Island and bound for a rendezvous with the airship Irkutsk, and soon after, Fedorov would meet with another version of the man he had been plotting with, Captain Vladimir Karpov, now filling the Siberian’s boots as Admiral of the Siberian Aerocorps.
Part X
Amok Time
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Chapter 28
Fedorov was deeply worried. It wasn’t the sudden appearance of the Takami, which should have been enough to rattle him given all he knew. What else might the eruption of Krakatoa have shaken loose? Was Takami the only aberration that may have resulted from that massive explosive event? Beyond that, what further damage did it do to the integrity of the continuum as a whole? Time was very fragile now, he knew, though he also knew he was speaking metaphorically to think this.
Time was a dimension, like length, height or depth in the three dimensions that defined space. How does one fracture depth, or length? The answer, of course, was that such a thing could not fracture in the normal sense of the word, but it could change. The length of something could be shortened, depth could be made greater or lessened. These dimensions were not simply concepts, they were physical realities, measurable, and subject to a creed of arcane laws that came to be called physics.
Yet time did not sit apart from those other three dimensions. It was intimately woven together with them to produce what Einstein came to call “Spacetime.” While it still seemed strange for him to consider it, Einstein had theorized that spacetime could be warped, bent, curved, and in events like black holes, it might even break to the extent where movement from one point in spacetime to another was possible, vast distances covered with only minimal movement in time. Physics had proven all of this to be true, if anything mankind knew of the universe could ever be said to be a definitive truth.
So it was that the location of a process in spacetime could also change, or so his presence here in 1942 seemed to declare. It could move forward, or slip backwards along the continuum of the line of causality, something conveniently perceived by humans with their predilection for order. For men, one thing led to another, one moment to the next, even if that was merely a convention of thought, and the notion of future and past were only ways to describe what the universe was doing at a point relative to what it was doing now, in the “moment” anyone might choose to call their present. Words did not easily describe any of this, nor could the mind clinging to words and logic easily grasp it, but there it was.
All Fedorov knew was, that for the whole of his life, this progression from now, to now plus one, had been the slow sedate passing of the days… tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Nothing had ever disturbed it, but that was no longer the case. Now things were sliding all over the continuum, and the stability of their place in any given “moment” was no longer certain. Nothing was solid or predictable, and so he thought of time as being cracked, broken, fragile, and tending to even greater fragility with every slip.
The moment Fedorov was calling his present was now 1942, and he was deeply concerned over something. It wasn’t Takami, or the war, but time itself that he was musing on now. He looked about him, seeing a world that was clearly the result of actions he, himself, and others had taken in the past. Yes, there was Ivan Volkov and his Orenburg Federation, and here he was aboard Kirov fighting the Japanese in the Pacific—Japanese that now still occupied all of Primorskiy Province, including Vladivostok itself!