Designated Targets

These were all simple changes with potentially massive effects, but Göring’s eyes glazed over whenever he raised them, and if Brasch persisted in arguing, those same porcine eyes would eventually cloud over with rage, and the Reichsmarshall would start to pound on the table screaming, “Nein, nein, nein!”

Brasch brought up the file in which he had compiled a list of all the 262’s problems in what he referred to as “original time.” The Junkers Jumo 004 engines were unreliable, being constructed of inferior alloys due to materials shortages. At any given time, the majority of those fighters could expect to be grounded. They were unstable, and generated less thrust at low speeds than prop-driven fighters. But worst of all, there would never be enough of them.

Brasch had read of a mission by thirty-seven of the jets on March 18, 1945, during which they had attacked an Allied force of 1,221 bombers and 632 escorting fighters. Using long, level approaches to compensate for their lack of dogfighting agility, they simply blurred in past the fighter screen and tore apart a dozen bombers and one escort with their 30 mm cannons, all for the loss of only three 262s—a four-to-one kill ratio.

But the important figure was the gargantuan size of the Allied raid. Nearly two thousand planes, against thirty-seven German jets. You would think that spoke volumes for the need to concentrate efforts on achievable goals. The productive capacities of the English-speaking world were simply beyond imagining.

But no. Göring had only last week authorized tens of millions of reichsmarks to be spent on changes to the 262’s swept wings, low drag canopy, and engine placement. And all this on his own initiative. Brasch would have been furious if it weren’t for one thing.

He himself was working to wreck the Nazi war machine.

Brasch hadn’t told anybody, of course. Not even his wife. He knew that he could trust Willie with his life, but he also knew that the SS regarded him with reserve at best. Now that he was away from Demidenko, he didn’t have Gelder shadowing his every move, but the specter of the SS was a constant. His son’s disorder—easily fixed in the future—would be more than enough to see the boy fed into the camps under the Nazis’ T-4 program, to ensure the purity of the race.

No, Colonel Paul Brasch understood the nature of the regime he served. Like most of his countrymen, he had always understood it. Unlike most of them, he had witnessed the evidence firsthand, and he had decided to resist.

The irony of his current position was that he hadn’t been snatched up in the post-Emergence sweeps of “future and prospective traitors” that had gutted the Reich, and yet he was probably one of most dangerous men in Germany. Fate had thrust him into the center of events as they spun out of control. His character determined that he would not allow himself simply to coast along in the wake of that turbulence.

As his train lurched into motion again, and began to pick up speed for the long run home, he worked on the 262 file—multitasking, as the phrase had it, a series of files on automatic assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and prototype helicopters for the newly formed SS Special Forces. He was the very model of a loyal and tireless worker laboring in the service of his führer. In a small, very private part of his mind, however, Brasch, turned over the problem of how best to strike a fatal blow against the Nazis.

14

KINLOCHMOIDART HOUSE, SCOTLAND

The Special Air Service began life as a deception. It had very little to do with airborne raids. It was a small, somewhat irregular unit of the British Army in the North African campaign, established in late 1941 by a mere Lieutenant, David Stirling. He put together a group of irredeemably unusual soldiers—specialists, loners, virtual pirates of the desert. He threw them in with the New Zealanders of the Long Range Desert Group and set them loose behind Rommel’s lines, attacking fuel and ammo dumps, destroying aircraft on the ground, and generally spreading mayhem and confusion.

Breaking things and hurting people, thought Harry as he marched across the gravel. A cracking fuckin’ way for a bloke to earn a quid. Better than being chased around by those paparazzi cunts, at any rate.