“Heil Himmler,” the doctor echoed. “Bring her with you this way, if you please.”
Stewart felt tears trickling down her face; she fought hard to concentrate. “What is this place?” She asked desperately. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Should she have that thing with her?” The doctor asked, ignoring her. She was just another subject to him. “We don’t let them have toys here.”
“Yes, she should,” Kurt said. The SS man chortled. “This place, Englander bitch, is where we attempt to develop new drugs and you know that they need test subjects, don’t you? It produced the drug that was used on you earlier, and it will be producing painkillers that will keep the soldiers of the Reich going for hours, even with broken bones and internal bleeding.”
He leered down at her. “The Fuhrer’s orders were to ensure that you never went home,” he said, as he pulled her through the corridors. The doctor opened a door to a private cell. “This place is for the real trouble-makers; the people who would have betrayed the noble Hitler, and now you.”
He shoved her inside, onto the bed. She dropped the camera as he unlocked the handcuffs, before kicking her leg hard enough to make her scream in pain. “I think you’ll be very useful to the Reich, this way,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Doctor Josef Mengele?”
The door slammed shut. Stewart held herself together with an effort of will, picking up and examining the camera. Checking its display, she realised that it was on emergency mode, still broadcasting a signal to the orbiting satellites. She cursed as she checked the system; it wasn’t capable of doing anything else.
A small hatch opened in the door. “No one leaves here alive,” Doctor Mengele said, and closed it with a snap. She heard his laughing for hours afterwards, ricocheting around in her head.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she muttered, and realised that she was helpless. Unless someone came to help her, she would be trapped forever with the insane doctor.
Chapter Twenty-One: Surging Forward
Fort Powell
Nevada, USA
1st May 1942
The soldiers had been informed that there would be a special announcement at 1000hrs, once they were awake and completed their morning drills. Captain Jackie Robinson, who had been practicing small-group armoured tactics in the VR machine, was relieved; the Canadian officer had been winning the detailed computer contest, entitled Sudden Strike V.
“We call this a draw, right?” He asked, as Captain Pole and himself saved the game in the computer’s memory and headed off to the parade ground. It was 0950; the MPs would take special note of anyone who was late. Black or white, they had power over all the troopers, even a captain of an armoured unit. General Stillwell might be colour-blind – and he swore blind that they were easier to teach than Chinamen – but he wouldn’t overlook tardiness.
“Fuck you,” Captain Pole replied mockingly. “I had your forces bracketed, Captain; your forces would have died.”
“Maybe I had sappers working on laying mines under your forces,” Robinson joked back. “Maybe your tanks would have gone up in smoke.”
Captain Pole chuckled mockingly again. Robinson sighed; the good captain had a point. Learning to coordinate the tanks and the infantry, particularly when the Germans had their little rocket-launcher weapons, was important, but it was also tricky. The 5th American Armoured Division’s attempts to drill with the infantry and National Guard units nearby had been halting, at best.
“And it won’t be anything like as easy in the field,” he said. On the practice grounds, they had many advantages, but in the field they might have to face the enemy, who would have plans far more complex than those of an Artificial Intelligence Program, whatever that was. It had taken him nearly a week to understand that it wasn’t a genuine way of creating life, but a random program designed to react optimally to a given situation.
He smiled. Ironically, realising that the computer didn’t ‘cheat’ by learning when his forces were – where a human would have been certain to do so if he had the opportunity – had gone a long way towards convincing him that the computer wasn’t intelligent.
“Probably not,” Captain Pole agreed, as they entered the main field. Thousands of soldiers were already lining up, gathering into an undisciplined group, rather than by section. Tankers rubbed shoulders with infantry, who smiled at Marines and medical corpsmen.
“I’m surprised we haven’t had a riot,” he observed. Inter-service rivalry was a big thing at Camp Powell; the army men clashed constantly with the navy men, who were supposed to take the ground for the army to land on. They had had some of their best units pulled out for a mission, one that even Stillwell didn’t know anything about.
“Apparently, in the future, we are going to unite our forces into one military force,” Captain Pole said. “That sounds like a really bad idea to me.”
“Me too,” Robinson said. He would have said more, except that the bugle blew for attention. He stood to attention as General Stillwell stood on the small stage, designed for reviews. He smiled as he remembered clanking his Franks Tank past the stage, with two generals watching.
“We have received our orders,” Stillwell said. His parade-ground voice echoed out among the recruits. A rustle of excitement followed them. “Over this coming week, we will be loaded onboard ships and surged forward to Britain.”
The cheers overwhelmed his voice for a long few minutes. Robinson, who had seen combat, if not the combat in a tank, cheered as loudly as the others. “We will perform our final training exercises there, and then we will land in France and march to Berlin,” Stillwell shouted. There were more cheers. “We’ll hang Adolf Hitler from a sour apple tree!”
The song was picked up by the soldiers, who sang at great volume, if not tunefully. No one cared that Hitler was dead; they all knew that his evil lived on.
The White House
Washington DC, USA
1st May 1942
Ambassador King smiled at his famous namesake, Admiral King, as he took his seat. The Admiral, who was well known for hating everyone, scowled back at him. His sheaf of maps and diagrams – he didn’t trust emails – hung under his arm. He saluted President Truman, and began his presentation, regardless of the others in the room.
“We have prepared the Pacific Fleet for its sail,” he said bluntly. His voice chopped through sentences like a knife through carrots. He unrolled the map and gestured for an unfortunate ensign to roll it out on the big table. “As you are aware, the fleet is currently under the command of Admiral Halsey and concentrated at Pearl Harbour. Six aircraft carriers, six battleships and nearly two dozen smaller warships, and twenty of the new transports. The carrier Yorktown, by the way, is acting as a transport for the 1st Marine Division, which has been working with helicopters in Norway.
”The objective, of course, is Vladivostok,” he continued. “Now that we are seeing closer cooperation between the Axis powers, we can expect that Stalin will allow the Japanese to use their bases, if not send his submarines out to raid the Philippines. The plan is basically simple; the Marines will land and secure a beachhead, after which we will land the troops and march on the port.”
He pulled out a folder of orbital photographs. “British reconnaissance satellites” – his face twisted in a grimace of distaste – “and our own have confirmed the existence of several dozen slave labour camps, or gulags, as they’re called in the motherland. A number of them are close to the port; we believe they’re used for slave labour. The plan calls for liberating them at once and recruiting some of them for an advance across Russia.”