“This is to be a mission for just one aircraft?” Ritter ventured, speaking for the first time since the current discussion had started.
“Yes… just me,” Thorne agreed after a short silence, as some pointed glances were passed around. Even some of the Hindsight members weren’t completely at ease with the concept of discussing matters of that nature in front of a German, regardless of how much Thorne trusted him.
“Yet you talk of the deaths of a million people? This sounds more as if it were a raid of a thousand aircraft…” After another pause, he added: “No… not even a thousand bombers could create such devastation. I do not understand…”
“Should we really be discussing this in this kind of ‘environment’?” Kowalski cut in nervously, not happy with providing the man with an answer.
“Its okay, Mike,” Thorne reassured, raising a hand to halt the marine’s speech. He addressed his next words to Ritter. “Carl, we have a device with us that has a destructive power equal to more than one million tons of high explosive.”
Ritter’s returned expression was sceptical at best. “Although this has been a time of some patience for me in accepting the unbelievable, this is still hard to believe.”
“Well, it exists nevertheless, and we intend to use this weapon on a collected meeting of the OKW in France in a few days, with the intention of in one stroke disabling the Wehrmacht and establishing the fact that we have such a weapon. We’re hoping this revelation of what could next be done to a city such as Berlin or Munich will be enough to dissuade Hitler from carrying out the invasion of Great Britain, which must be very close now.”
Ritter nodded. “It is definitely close: although no dates had been provided before I was stranded here, rumours were strong and plentiful, and the planning for the invasion of England has been going ahead for some time now.” Another thought occurred to him. “If the OKW is destroyed — and Reichsmarschall Reuters along with it, I presume — how will this affect the task you have set for me?”
“It’d probably be more difficult,” Thorne answered honestly, “but the mission should still be possible. You’d also in any case be able to provide us with essential information on many other matters in the interim.”
“And will this work… this threat to exact devastation on Germany if an invasion is launched?” That was a much harder question, and in the silence that followed, Eileen eventually provided the best answer anyone could’ve given.
“We don’t know, Carl… in all truth, we just don’t know. In our time, nuclear weapons forced the two superpowers of our world — the United States and the Soviet Union — to maintain an uneasy peace for the better part of fifty years. The strategy was rather ironically called ‘MAD’ — Mutually Assured Destruction — and each side knew the other could wipe them out many times over, therefore leaving neither confident enough to launch an attack. With anyone other than Adolf Hitler, I’d almost guarantee success… but with the German Chancellor involved, we can only hope it works. Either way, this is really the only option we have at all — nothing else will have a chance of stopping anything now.”
Ritter shook his head sadly after a long moment of consideration. “Wars should not be fought this way,” he observed with a soft, resigned voice. “Waging war on the innocent and defenceless is unjust… is this what the future holds… what the Führer has given us all?”
“If there’d been a few more like you in the Wehrmacht Officer Corps a little earlier,” Markowicz began kindly beside Ritter, resting a hand on the man’s shoulder, “perhaps a few more of my people might’ve survived.”
“Yeah, well that’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in the end, unpleasant as the options are,” Thorne pointed out with little humour.
“Thin edge of the wedge, mate,” Bob Green shrugged sadly. “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
As his sentence ended, Eileen unexpectedly broke into a into a short burst of coughing: the mess was filled with cigar and cigarette smoke, with a cloud hanging as a visible layer above the many men present that night. That cloud was also hanging over and around the Hindsight table, although only Green and Ritter were actually smoking in their group.
“Bit rough, isn’t it…!” Green agreed with a wry grin, trying to lighten the mood a little. “I’m a bloody smoker and I’m not used to this kind of atmosphere!” He took a drag on the cigarette he held, then held it up as an example before them. “These filterless bastards are savage! I used to smoke ‘fours’ back in Realtime… these buggers taste like they’re bloody twenty-eights or something.”
“What do you expect, smokin’ friggin’ Camels?” Thorne shot back, smiling for the first time as a few of the others gave a chuckle or two. “Why don’t you try a bloody cigarette holder to ease the strength back a bit or something?”
“I looked into that,” Green admitted, leaning back in his chair and holding up his cigarette as if it were the holder instead, pinkie finger extended with melodramatic daintiness. “Apparently, cigarette holders are only for women and poofs!” In truth, that statement had a lot more to do with his personal take on the subject than any current trend of opinion.
“Hardly very politically correct there, Captain Green,” Eileen observed with a wry smile and a mock-lecturing tone.
“And thank Christ for that…!” Thorne burst out with a laugh. “How refreshing it is to be once more in an era where a man can call a mate a ‘poof’ with impunity…!”
“Call me a ‘poof’, and it won’t be with impunity… mate…!” Green shot back with a wry smile and pointing a warning finger.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that…!” Davies chipped in with perfect timing, and the rest of the original Hindsight group broke down into much needed laughter at the famous old Seinfeld reference, with only Trumbull, Kransky and Ritter left unable to get the joke.
Wehrmacht Western Theatre Forward HQ
Amiens, Northern France
Saturday
September 7, 1940
Samuel Lowenstein was in a poor mood that evening as he stood at the barred window of the small stable room that was his cell, staring out through the night at the lights of the nearby mansion. He’d been visited many times by Joachim Müller since their talk on temporal issues at the beginning of July, and it’d been difficult during the passing two months for him to continue the façade of civility as he desperately waited for some sign that might’ve confirmed his desperate hopes: that Hal or someone else from his future had finally managed to return to save him, and to right the course of history into the bargain.
He turned his head for a moment to stare nervously at the bookshelf near the door, knowing that no one other than himself could possibly understand the significance of the shred of newspaper he kept hidden there, yet he was frightened all the same. The feelings of elation and resolve he’d been filled with initially had slowly but surely been replaced by the overbearing weight of depression and despondency that had been the scientist’s constant companion throughout almost a decade of imprisonment. No one had come… there’d been no sign of the help he’d been so certain was coming… and Lowenstein had come to doubt himself seriously.