“I think it’s time we get out of here,” Deborah said. They climbed out of the root cellar into a wasteland. With the exception of a few timbers and bottommost structure of the fireplace, the blast demolished the farmhouse. The wooden structure of the barn had been replaced with foreign debris, including an upended car carried in from one of the main roadways. A pall of dust hovered like fog above the farmer’s decimated wheat field.
They found the railbike entangled in the branches of a fallen tree. Deborah struggled to part the bike from the thick limbs, careful not to inflict additional damage. Fifteen minutes later, Danette made her stop. With a broken axle, crushed controls, and an oozing power core, they deemed the bike a total loss.
“What do we do now?” Deborah said. “We can’t leave it here like this.”
“You’re right.” The bike’s improvised drivetrain might not have been as advanced as Hiram’s portals and nuclear weapons, but they couldn’t take the chance of the technology falling into the wrong hands. Danette unclipped a hand grenade from her combat vest, pulled the pin, checked to make sure the farmer and his family remained in the cellar, and dropped the grenade into the center of the broken power supply. Both women turned and ran, diving into a drainage ditch three seconds later, a full second before the grenade detonated.
Danette and Deborah headed south with their M22 rifles and four and a half magazines worth of ammo. They walked in silence. Danette searched for danger. Deborah searched for Hiram.
The earth around them had been abused by the blast. Crops that had yet to be reaped had been ripped out of the ground. Most of the nearby structures◦– mainly houses and barns◦– had been battered. Roof shingles and broken glass littered the ground in every direction. A few automobiles settled upside down in a field near a main roadway. A once beautiful writing desk had fallen in the middle of a dirt road, two legs reaching for the sky, nubs where the two others had been. A layer of dust coated everything from the leaves of the trees to the walls of the broken buildings they passed. She dared not imagine the severity of damage closer to ground zero.
They walked south in the direction of the Vosges Mountains, toward the rendezvous point Hiram had designated on their trip north. On foot, the fifty-kilometer journey would take days. The forest provided cover where possible. For a stretch of the journey, they passed through the town of Rouhling. As they hid behind a small feed store, a convoy of military vehicles raced through the town. French policemen, a handful of German soldiers, and civilian drivers filled every truck. The driver of one of the smaller vehicles at the front of the line came close to running over a little girl. Her father pulled her out of the way just in time. The driver did not slow. From their vantage point, Danette saw the man laughing as he passed. The convoy had been in a hurry, headed back toward Saarbrücken, she guessed.
27
1215 hours, Friday, Midday August 7, 1942, Gibraltar, United Kingdom
“Holy Mother of God,” whispered Beetle Smith. He stood next to Sarah at the map table in his subterranean office on Gibraltar. She’d been summoned from her isolation cell in the middle of lunch.
Sarah peered down at the aerial photos lined up on the table. At first, the images appeared to contain debris, piles and piles of it. A line of water cut through the mess. The Saar? She looked at photo after photo, the extent of the damage growing clearer. A crater had been punched into the city. A single building stood near the center, a mere shell. Spreading out from the impact zone, the destruction continued. Some buildings had fallen, some disintegrated, leaving behind rectangular stone and brick foundations etched into the earth. The damage reached out away from the crater for kilometers. Outside the city, the impact wave knocked down trees and blew away small homes, leaving discolored patches where they once rested. One shot captured a bull impaled by a wooden post near a farmhouse. Sarah’s hands shook and the images began to spin.
Smith took a pair of calipers from a drawer beneath the table and measured the width of the dark gray area in the center of one of the photos. He then measured the distance between the two points on the calipers with a ruler and whistled.
“The crater’s over a mile wide,” he said, looking at Sarah. “The radius of destruction extends almost three miles from ground zero. I guess you weren’t full of shit after all. My apologies, madam.”
Sarah wasn’t sure whether he was apologizing for his language or his earlier skepticism. But she thanked him anyway.
“And you say your comrades have six more?” Smith said, leaning over the table.
“Yes.” Her voice wavered and bile bubbled up into her throat. “I have to reestablish communications with my team.”
“Do you have any idea how to communicate with them?”
“I’ll need my C2ID2.” The device had been confiscated when she’d first come ashore.
Smith didn’t seem to understand.
“The communications device I had strapped to my forearm when I disembarked from the HMS Talisman.”
Smith still looked confused.
“I guess the British didn’t think you needed to know.”
“Wait here,” Smith said, and stormed out of the office.
Sarah looked at the pictures once more. Nothing prepared her for the level of destruction Hiram’s bomb inflicted. Horror crept up inside her, mingling with the bile in her throat. The whole city lay in ruins. How many people had they killed? Tens of thousands? More? The device was supposed to go off closer to the railroad bridges and junction, with a much smaller blast area. From the photos, the zone of destruction extended well past Saarbrücken, across the French border near Spicheren. Something must have forced Hiram’s hand, but what?
She looked at the wider-angle photos more carefully. One showed a train stopped on the tracks near Forbach, west of Spicheren. A few seconds later she found a magnifying glass in one of Smith’s drawers and took a closer look at the train. A line of boxcars. A Holocaust train, maybe. Is that what forced the change in plans?
Smith strode back into the office. “Your device… What did you call it?”
“Combat communication and information digital device. C2ID2 for short.”
“Your C2ID2 is at a lab in London. Hopefully the scientists haven’t started their dissection. Ike promises it’ll be waiting for us when we arrive at Camp Griffiss. We’re leaving as soon as adequate transportation and a fighter escort can be arranged. Have you eaten?”
“I don’t think I could keep anything down,” she said. “Perhaps some water or tea?”
1910 hours, Friday, August 7, 1942, London, England, United Kingdom
Sarah climbed down the ladder leading from the cargo plane’s rear door to the tarmac. The cool, overcast day brought about a shiver. A young uniformed man offered her a jacket, then directed her to a waiting car.
“APO 887,” Smith told the driver as he settled into the rear seat beside her. As the car pulled away, Smith clarified their destination for Sarah’s benefit. “Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, United States Army. It’s Ike’s headquarters at Camp Griffiss in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.”
Sarah, escorted by Smith, passed through several security checkpoints before being admitted to a nondescript conference room on the first floor of a nondescript building. In addition to General Eisenhower, four men waited in the room, only one of whom she recognized.