Designated Targets

we have undertaken without the Soviets’ knowledge, and even the failures at the test site have proved invaluable in confirming the hypotheses of von Braun’s group. While we consider it inevitable that the Politburo will have established their own rocket research, in violation of the cease-fire agreement, we can be confident they possess neither the technical resources nor the skills needed to match our combined efforts.”

Oshima bowed his head slightly in acknowledgment.

“On current projections,” he continued, “we will have a V-Three rocket capable of striking at all of the main Soviet production and population centers by late nineteen forty-three. Within a year after that, we should be able to launch from land-based systems against the East Coast of the USA. Although, they will have achieved a similar level of development with their own missile programs, and of course, their Manhattan Project should also have come to fruition by then.”

Nobody in the room looked comfortable with the idea of an America that would be able to obliterate entire cities in Europe with just a single warhead.

“However,” Himmler added, “we do not think they will be able to fit an atomic device onto a missile for some time yet—”

“What do you mean by some time?” Goring demanded. “Will it be nineteen forty- five, nineteen forty-six? When?”

The fuhrer didn’t slap down his Luftwaffe chief this time. Instead, he laid down the pencil with which he had been taking notes. “Yes, Heinrich. This is an important point,” he said. “If we allow them to achieve a lead on us, Truman will not make the same mistake twice, assuming that he still succeeds the cripple. If he can develop the same superiority of atomic forces he enjoyed over the Communists in the early days of their Cold War, he will strike us without hesitation. He may even trade one or two of his own cities for all of ours. And if that pig Churchill is still alive, skulking around in exile, he will probably bomb his own countrymen rather than allow us to hold England.”

Himmler listened in respectful silence. It was a reasonable question, even if it had been inspired by a very unreasonable and slightly drunken oaf like Goring.

“There are two things to note, mein fuhrer. First, Churchill. I have a plan in hand to deal with him during Sea Dragon. I will come to that presently. Second, I must agree that the Americans will lead us in rocket technology. They gained a much greater bounty from the Emergence—thousands of personnel, many of them trained technicians, and a wealth of computing power within their ships that unfortunately we can but dream of. The files on the Sutanto and the Nuku are a very poor substitute. They had very restricted access to Kolhammer’s Fleetnet, much of it at the level of the mundane and ridiculous.

“The French vessel has been a treasure trove, by comparison, but of course we have had her for less time, and the vast majority of her crew were uncooperative. Some of those who we’d thought cooperative at first, turned out to be working against us, and they even managed to accomplish quite significant acts of sabotage before they were caught and punished. I can only imagine what information has been lost to us because of that. Another saboteur nearly destroyed the entire vessel when we were removing the Lavals.

“But in executing them, of course, we killed the very men best able to teach us how to use the infinitely more complex devices on that ship. It is the devil’s own dilemma.”

He could see Goring twisting about like a man whose hide had shrunk in all the wrong places. The Reichsmarshall wore the burden of his failures heavily.

He still controlled the Luftwaffe, in a sense, but he was no longer free to determine its destiny. Whereas the German Air Force had once been his personal plaything, it was now simply a tool of the state. He retained his position simply because, of the three services, only the Luftwaffe had shown no evidence that it was a nest of vipers. In Himmler’s eyes, loyalty without competence was hardly worth having, but he could understand the fuhrer’s need to keep a few of the old comrades around him.

And Goring was manageable, if increasingly irascible. As long as he had his wine and his estates, he could be tolerated. Nonetheless, Himmler spoke a little more forcefully to shut down whatever infantile protests were brewing in the fat toad’s skull.

“The Americans have enjoyed other advantages. Their production and population base remains well beyond our reach, and they carry out their research without the handicap of having to do so in secret. We have been forced to maintain a false and deliberately impaired project at Demidenko to throw both the Soviets and the Allies off our trail.”

Himmler was one of the few men in the Reich who could speak the blunt truth like this. The fuhrer didn’t look happy, but he always appreciated the Reichsfuhrer’s refusal to overstate good news or downplay the bad.

He stared up at Himmler, his chin resting mournfully on his chest, his eyes pools of still darkness. “And so, to the counterstroke,” said Hitler.

The SS chief nodded. “If we cannot yet defeat the Americans, we can delay the moment just long enough to secure our gains from them. They may well develop the means to destroy us a hundred times over, but we need only have the ability to destroy them once . . . and perhaps not even that. They remain a racially degenerate nation of criminals. They may be willing to lose Miami, for instance, in order to see us defeated. But would they be willing to see another five or six seaboard cities utterly destroyed? Can they live with the prospect of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all turned into melted glass? I doubt it.”

“You aren’t telling us anything we don’t already know,” said Goring. “We need time. Yamamoto said the same thing in June, when he presented his plan.”

Himmler smiled. “But now I can tell you with certainty that it will work.”

Only Oshima and Gobbels did not stir. Oshima already knew, of course, and the propaganda minister was a like a snake, which never moves until it is ready to strike.

“We have wasted a great deal of time and energy, because we did not believe it possible that slow neutron fission could cascade quickly enough to create an explosion,” Himmler explained. “We have since learned that this is untrue. We have maintained production at the heavy water plant in Norway, and we are shipping that to Demidenko simply to mislead our enemies.

“In fact, we have shifted the main focus of our efforts into fast fission. For this it has been necessary to secure a supply of graphite uncontaminated by the boron electrodes we have traditionally used in commercial production. We have now secured ongoing supplies from Pargas in Finland, and the Oshirabetsu mine on Hokkaido, but we also took a considerable delivery from the Zavalie deposit in the Ukraine before pulling our forces back to Poland.

“Following this new line of enquiry and using the much more capable undamaged computing systems we stripped from the Dessaix, I can promise you that the Reich will be in possession of its first nuclear weapon by nineteen forty-five. And that the Soviet Union will cease to exist sometime in nineteen forty-six.”

A buzz of excitement greeted the news. The fuhrer’s face lit up like the dawn of a new day. Even Goring looked happy.

“There is more to it, of course,” said Himmler. “We must now strike at Churchill and secure control of the British Isles. We must bar the Americans from Europe. And Japan must also secure herself in the east. I will have more to add about that, in a few minutes. But I believe General Oshima has a few points to make first.

“Ambassador?”

General Oshima thanked the Reichsfuhrer and stood to address the room.

They were a motley collection. Ever since the Emergence, these so-called supermen had indulged themselves in an orgy of self-doubt and preemptive revenge. There had been times since June when he thought that the Reich might just eat itself alive. Tokyo had seriously considered withholding some of the material that had been extracted from the Indonesian computers, simply because every newly translated historical file, no matter how anodyne, seemed to stoke the furnace of Nazi paranoia.

But the peculiar emergence of the Dessaix had made such considerations redundant. The French “stealth cruiser” had materialized off the northwestern coast of Africa near the Spanish naval base on the Canary Islands weeks after the appearance of Kolhammer’s fleet at Midway. A U-boat, which had been secretly refueling there, was quickly sent to investigate the strange reports by Spanish fishermen who’d seen the vessel. With at least a quarter of the crew dead—another unexplained