Designated Targets

illiterate ditchdigger droning on about the Koran. The sooner they trained some of his countrymen to operate this ship, the better.

“Warrant Officer, your colleague, Danton, tells us we have moved beyond the range of the enemy’s sensors, and that we may soon use our own arrays. Do you agree?”

Le Roux almost choked on the last piece of brioche. He hadn’t noticed Hidaka approaching. He nodded and hastily stood up, brushing crumbs from his shirt, smearing it with a dollop of hot chocolate sauce in the process. “Oui,” he coughed. “But let us be safe and say another hour before Danton can turn on the arrays. He can set them to look forward, so that there is less chance of their being detected. Then we make the rendezvous, non?”

The Asian shot him an irritated look, but nodded curtly.

Le Roux would be happy to see the back of him, too. Perhaps when the war was over he might return to the Pacific, as governor of all French Polynesia or something. But for now he would be glad to get away from it, and from madmen like Hidaka. He had that same blankness in his eyes as one of Mullah Zaheer’s Horror Brigades. Fanatics, all of them.

“We shall be refueling soon, when we meet with the oiler,” Hidaka continued.

Le Roux shrugged. “Assuming you have got the mix right, at last. If not, well then . . . the game is over, yes?”

The Japanese glowered in reply. “We have followed your instructions precisely. You had better hope you got it right.”

“Oh, my instructions were precise,” countered Le Roux. “But I cannot know whether you primitives were able to follow them at all. You never developed jet engines, did you? So it is safe to assume that a basic jet fuel mix is also beyond your abilities. Still, we shall see.”

Hidaka looked as if he was about ready to pop a vein, which very much tickled the Frenchman’s sense of humor. He smothered a snigger and turned away, calling back over his shoulder. “I shall be in my quarters. Wake me when I am needed.”

He didn’t bother to wait for Hidaka’s reaction. The fucking savage didn’t seem to understand what an achievement it was, just getting the heads to work on a complex ship like this, what with most of her crew locked up on the other side of the world. The Germans who’d come on board were good. He got on famously with them. Even the Indonesians, he could admit, were well trained. But really, if it weren’t for Le Roux himself, they would all be completely fucked. The Dessaix would still be back in the Atlantic, floating around like an astronomically expensive bathtub toy. The Germans would certainly not have been able to remove all the equipment and weaponry they’d insisted on, before allowing Yamamoto access to her.

He pushed into the commander’s quarters—which he had appropriated as his own—and fetched himself a cognac. Then he sat down at Capitaine Goscinny’s desk. A giant Siemens display ran constant updates on ship status and mission progress, all controlled by the vessel’s Combat Intelligence. Le Roux checked his watch. Soon it would be time to verify command ID again.

There was a DNA reader on the desktop, and he wiped it down with a cloth doused in methylated spirits. Then he powered it up.

In the corner of the cabin stood a small bar refrigerator from which he withdrew a sealed specimen jar. There were many more like it in there. He carefully unscrewed the lid and, using an eyedropper, extracted a few mils of the precious liquid. Then he squeezed a drop or two of the capitaine’s blood onto the sensor. Carefully, but without showing too much concern.

After all, he still had plenty left in the fridge.

Le Roux wondered how the Gestapo were doing, trying to get the rest of the Dessaix’s crew to cooperate.

Not very well, he imagined.

Apart from the six original crewmen still on this ship, and another twelve who were helping the Germans with the missile facility at Dozenac, the entire complement of the Dessaix had proved themselves to be quite fatally stupid and shortsighted.

13

AUSCHWITZ, POLAND

The special-purposes camp lay a few kilometers away from the I. G. Farben Monovitz facilties, but Brasch fancied that he could still smell the scent of depravity that blanketed the place. Some nights he imagined that the three main camps and thirty-nine subcamps gave off a poisonous mist, a concentrated essence of the suffering and evil that took place here. It was invisible, but you could smell it as it sank into the pores of your skin, and eventually into your soul.

Nothing he had witnessed on the Russian Front had prepared him for it. Even Himmler seemed more subdued than usual when they were forced to attend one of Hess’s demonstrations. Everybody knew the Reichsfuhrer was squeamish. He had vomited the first time he’d personally witnessed an execution, and that had been a good clean head shot: the Reich’s version of merciful release.

Today Brasch kept the contempt from his face as he watched Himmler dab at his lips with a perfumed handkerchief while the subjects were led in.

“Oh, my,” Skorzeny roared in mock amusement. “They are only stick men. I’m a good shot, Herr Reichsfuhrer, but I cannot promise to hit them for you first time. If they turn sideways, they will disappear!”

Himmler allowed a wan but dutiful grin at the large man’s brutal jokes. Brasch suspected he’d rather not be there.

They were in a long subterranean bunker. The sweating cinder blocks receded at least two hundred meters away from them to a thick revetment of sandbags, in front of which stood three scarred wooden poles. The prisoners were actually much less skeletal than most of their fellow inmates. They were Sonderkommando, or Kapos, selected prisoners who acted as guards and enforcers in the death camp at Birkenau. They received special privileges: extra rations, the pick of the females, and so on. But eventually they, like all the others, went into the ovens.

These three, however, were to complete their service to the Reich as experimental subjects. Over their gray striped camp uniform each wore a bulky vest of a slightly differing size. The project director, whose name Brasch had forgotten, spoke excitedly of the leaps in development they’d achieved since being given access to a calculating machine and a trained operator.

“What we have now are three options,” he enthused. “Each is a trade-off, in its own way, Herr Reichsfuhrer. More protection still means greater bulk and weight, unfortunately, but the Farben engineers have made great strides the last two months. The material samples you delivered us have proved invaluable in answering a number of . . .”

Brasch was hardly listening. He was focused on the three men being tied to the poles at the other end of the bunker. Not one of them was struggling. He fancied he saw one of them sob, but that was about the extent of their reaction. As a man who had spent the better part of the last three years involved in mortal combat, often against the most overwhelming odds, he found it depressing that these men could go to their doom so meekly. Even more depressing, however, was the path his life had taken to deliver him to this place as a witness to their deaths. Since he’d arrived at Monovitz, the black wolf of his depression was stalking him again. He felt again as he had during the battles at Belgorod, like a bug about to be crushed under the tracks of a tiger tank.

“A good rifle, this Garand, yes?” Skorzeny said, interrupting his train of thought. The giant Nazi was turning a captured weapon over in his hands. “Better than the Tommy’s Lee Enfield piece of shit. Semiautomatic, gas actuated. A good tool, although I do not like the way it makes so much noise when the clip ejects. That will get a few cowboys killed, I think.”

“It may not be in use for much longer,” said Brasch in a flat monotone. “I believe they may be moving in the direction of an assault rifle.”

Himmler took the hankie away from his thin lips. “Don’t be so glum, Herr Colonel. The SD tells me that is not yet a foregone conclusion. There is open disagreement in America over whether to retool for mass production of that weapon. At least outside of the Californian Zone.”