Ragnarok

Chapter Nineteen

Washington DC/London, USA/UK

3 November 1985

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

President John Anderson kept his face impassive as he strode to the top of the table and sat down. He’d never liked the underground bunker, even though he knew it would keep him, his family and his staff alive if the Reich ever did start launching nuclear weapons at the United States. And he’d never really believed, despite the warnings of his predecessor, that the Third Reich was crazy enough to start a nuclear war. They would be completely annihilated by the American response…

Hell, he thought, sitting down. They’d be crippled if they started a nuclear exchange with Britain.

“There’s little time for formality,” he said. The Secret Service had yanked him out of the Oval Office as soon as the warning had come in from Cheyenne Mountain. “Did we have a genuine nuclear detonation?”

“Two of them,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said. “One north of Warsaw, one south; both precisely in place to blunt Berlin’s offensive against Germanica.”

“Preliminary analysis indicates that the devices were prepositioned,” NSA added. “They must have kept it a closely-guarded secret. We didn’t pick up any indications they were about to use nuclear weapons until the first detonation.”

John nodded, curtly. “Can they fire the ballistic missiles?”

“I think we have to assume they can,” NSA said. Beside him, the CIA Director nodded in grim agreement. “They certainly managed to detonate a pair of tactical nuclear warheads.”

And Edward was right, John thought. They are crazy.

He studied the world map for a long moment, thinking hard. He’d been in his early twenties when Japan had bombed Pearl Harbour; he’d served in the army during the advance on Japan, then the long march to Tokyo that had ended the war. The Japanese had been odd… their soldiers had been fanatical, but many of their civilians had surrendered, once they realised it was safe to surrender. He still recalled, with a smile, a pretty young Japanese girl who had been his mistress during the occupation…

But the Germans? He’d thought they were fundamentally rational. They might be evil little shits — he loathed their government with a passion — but they weren’t stupid. He’d assumed he’d be dealing with the Third Reich until his term ended, then his successor would be in the same boat. Instead, the Reich was tearing itself apart and threatening to drag the entire world into the fire.

From a coldly logical point of view, he’d been assured, there was something to be said for encouraging the Nazi Civil War to continue as long as possible. Whichever side won would be weakened — considerably weakened — by the fighting, allowing the various subject nations to slip out of their grasp without a fight. The world would be a safer place if the Third Reich was badly weakened. And yet, a nuclear exchange — even a relatively small nuclear exchange — would be devastating. Hell, two nukes had already been devastating.

“Right,” he said, feeling out of his depth. “Do we know how much damage they did?”

“Nothing certain,” CIA admitted, after a glance at NSA. “All we really have to go on is orbital imagery and radio intercepts.”

“And very few of the latter,” NSA warned. “We badly underestimated the effects of an EMP on their radio sets.”

John nodded, curtly. There would be time for gloating — later — over just how far America had advanced over her mortal rival. Now, he needed to contain the situation and decide what to do before something worse happened.

“Understood,” he said. “What do you know?”

“Basically, we think two of their panzer divisions — and infantry support — were destroyed,” CIA said. “Other units probably took a beating too. We don’t know — yet — just how badly they were hit, but I would be astonished if they can retake the offensive anytime soon.”

“Particularly given how many corners they had to cut to launch the offensive before winter,” the Chairman put in. “We should be worried by how quickly they threw the operation together.”

CIA nodded. “Long-term, there will be major consequences,” he added. “Anyone close to the blast zones would be at risk of radiation poisoning. Our weather forecasts suggest that the fallout might well be blown towards Berlin, threatening the entire population. There’s no way to minimise the risk beyond what the Germans are already doing.”

“Telling the entire population to stay indoors and keep all doors and windows closed,” NSA said. “It might be enough to save them from the deadliest isotopes in the fallout.”

“I hope so,” John said.

He pressed his fingertips together. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“We can ship supplies of medicine and protective gear to Berlin,” CIA said. “But that will cause… problems.”

John scowled. The risk of nuclear war hadn’t been so high since the Missile Crisis. He hated to think what his political enemies would say, if they discovered that he’d shipped vast quantities of expensive medicine to the Reich. If a single warhead detonated on American soil, the medicine — and protective garb — would be needed at home. And even if it didn’t, there were vast numbers of American voters who would be against providing any help to the Third Reich.

“Let me worry about that,” he said, finally. “Is there anything else we can do?”

“Not unless we commit American forces directly,” CIA said. “And that would be a nightmare.”

“It would certainly be chancy,” the Chairman agreed. “Mr. President, even getting a rapid reaction force over to Berlin would be tricky.”

John met his eyes. “Is there anything we can do about the ballistic missiles?”

“I’ve had people considering possible options ever since the civil war broke out,” the Chairman said. “They’ve looked at a number of ideas, but none of them guarantee success when there are just too many variables.”

“I remember the briefing,” John said. Getting American Special Forces to the Siberian Missile Fields would be hard enough, but destroying all the missiles before they could be launched would be harder. “We might wind up giving the ABM system its first real test.”

He frowned. “What about stealth bombers? We could go nuclear ourselves.”

“I don’t know how Berlin would react,” CIA said, “but we couldn’t guarantee taking out all the warheads.”

“Berlin would not be pleased,” NSA warned. “And neither would London.”

John nodded, shortly. The Third Reich had only a limited supply of missiles capable of reaching America, but literally thousands of missiles capable of reaching Britain. London would be less than pleased if John’s decision unleashed a holocaust on Great Britain. And the Germanica Government could unleash hell on Berlin too… they’d just proved that they had no compunctions about deploying tactical atomic bombs against their fellow countrymen. John doubted that he could order a nuclear release if America split into two and started a second civil war…

But the Easterners have been moving away from the Westerners for a long time, John reminded himself. They may not see each other as fellow countrymen any longer.

It was a sobering thought. He’d just been entering politics when Truman had decided to smash racial segregation, once and for all. It hadn’t been easy, even though Truman had been tough and he’d had a majority of the country behind him. Even now, there were parts of America that were purely white — and Japan, an American territory, had been used to resettle countless blacks. The political fight over Japanese statehood had been nasty; he dreaded to think what it would be like in the Third Reich, where the gulf between east and west had grown into an unbridgeable chasm…

A problem for my successor, he thought, dismissing the issue. Right now, we need to contain the problem.

“Assemble a collection of medicines and protective gear,” he said. “We’ll have to talk directly to Berlin.”

“They may wish to retaliate,” CIA warned. “Berlin does have atomic bombs too.”

“They will retaliate,” NSA said. “But against what?”

“They can decide that for themselves,” John said. He doubted there was anything the US could offer to dissuade Berlin from retaliating. “But we do need to find a way to cripple the Germanica Government.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” CIA said. “However, our options are very limited.”

“Short of nuking them and hoping they can’t retaliate,” the Chairman said. He gave CIA a challenging look. “I take it there’s no reasonable hope of a covert operation?”

CIA reddened. “We never had very good sources in the east,” he said. “Even before the civil war, Germany East always had much higher levels of security than Germany Prime. I don’t think we can reasonably hope to do much of anything, Mr. President.”

“Of course,” the Chairman said.

John held up a hand. The constant rivalry between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA served a purpose, but right now it was a distraction. And a distraction was the last thing he needed.

“So we try to talk to Berlin,” he said. “And otherwise… there’s nothing we can do without an unacceptable level of risk? Does that sound accurate?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the Chairman said.

John scowled. “From a military point of view, what is likely to happen now?”

“I can’t see the offensive being resumed until spring at the very earliest,” the Chairman said, after a moment. “They’ll need time to recover, time to decontaminate, time to rejuvenate and rebuild their forces. Winter is coming, after all. And that will give the SS time to rejuvenate its own forces.”

“If it can,” CIA said. “There are plenty of question marks over their industrial capability.”

John sighed. He’d seen the projections — really, he’d seen too many projections. One set of analysts claimed that Germany East was well on its way to overtaking Germany Prime as the Reich’s industrial heartland; a second, rather more pessimistically, had concluded that Germany East was likely to lose most of its industrial base if the civil war ground on for several more months. But none of them could be taken for granted. Too much about Germany East remained a mystery.

Even to the Germans themselves, John thought. The US Government was bloated and had a tendency towards stupidity, but the Third Reich far outdid it on both counts. Their right hand didn’t always know what the left was doing.

“It has nukes,” he said, tiredly. “And they might be enough to tip the balance in its favour once and for all.”

Without false modesty, Prime Minister Margaret Hilda Thatcher knew she was an unusual woman. She’d actually been told, more than once, that she wasn’t a woman, a charge hurled at her by Labour backbenchers who suspected she was letting down her gender during her term in office. But she was a woman and she took a certain pride in being the first female Head of Government in the modern world. And if the Nazis didn’t take her seriously — and some of the backbenchers doubted her — she didn’t care. Britain wasn’t Nazi Germany — it had made her laugh when she found out that it had been a young girl who had founded the protest movement — but any woman in high office needed to be tougher than the men.

And she was tough, Margaret knew. She’d fought and won the Falklands War over the advice of some of her cabinet members, members who had been moved on shortly after that conflict had come to its bloody end; she’d taken on the might of the unions and crushed them so thoroughly that it would be decades before organised labour could undermine the country again. She regretted some of what she’d done, but she’d known there was no choice. The Third Reich lay on the far side of the English Channel, watching and waiting for an opportunity to launch a full-scale invasion. Britain could not afford to be weak when such a powerful foe was far too close to her borders.

The Nazis were monsters. Margaret had known that ever since she was a child, ever since she’d devoured the books written by men, women and children who’d managed to smuggle themselves out of Occupied Europe before it was too late. And nothing she’d seen since had managed to change her mind. Individual Germans could be good people, but collectively the Nazis were monsters. They had committed huge crimes, wiping out millions of people, in their rise to power; even now, with their power secure, they were still brutal, cruel and utterly untrustworthy. There was no one in Berlin, she’d thought a year ago, with whom she could do business. And there was certainly no hope of a genuine peace, only cold war.

She sat in her office, studying the wall-mounted display. It was a genuine marvel of technology, allowing her to see live reports from military bases around the country, but right now it underlined the dilemma facing Britain. The Luftwaffe wouldn’t need more than a few minutes to launch from their bases in Occupied France and attack British airspace, if war broke out all of a sudden. And if the Germans decided to unleash their arsenal of cruise missiles, it would be even worse. Margaret couldn’t escape the simple fact that nuclear war would be utterly unwinnable, with or without the Americans. A full-scale exchange would devastate Britain, even if Germany was thoroughly devastated in return.

And yet we have no choice, but to gamble, she thought, sourly. To try to ensure that the next government in Germany is friendly to us.

It was an unpleasant thought, but she faced it squarely. Britain had always had problems when one power dominated the European mainland, from Philip of Spain to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. A single bloc dominating Europe would always be a threat, even if relations were superficially friendly. But there was no way to break up the Reich, not without risking nuclear war. She doubted the French or any of the other subject nations could break free on their own…

…And even if they did, it would be decades before they could serve as counterbalances to German power.

She turned her head, gazing up towards the portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. The artist had depicted him in Ten Downing Street, although he’d clearly not bothered to look at any photographs of the office that might have been taken when Churchill had actually been Prime Minister. But that was of no account. Churchill had been forced out of office for wanting to continue the fight, after Russia fell; he’d warned, desperately, that it wouldn’t be long before Hitler would seek to jump across the English Channel and take London. But no invasion had ever materialised.

What would you do, she asked the image silently, if you faced the same choice as I?

It was a conundrum, she admitted privately. Britain — and America — could support the Berlin Government, yet the Berlin Government might prove to be a menace in its own right. She had no illusions about the sheer power of the German military, although reports from the front lines suggested that some long-held beliefs had been grossly overstated. But a victory for the government in Germanica would unleash a nightmare. She’d never actually met Karl Holliston, but she’d heard enough about him to be sure that he was planning to purge everyone on the other side.

At best, Germany will be badly weakened, she thought, dryly. It wasn’t much, but it was something. She intended to cling to it if she was ever called upon to justify her decisions. But at worst, we’ll unleash a nuclear holocaust.

It had not been easy for her to send the Royal Navy to the Falklands or to use the police and security services to break the miners. She’d known that people would get hurt — and while she was disinclined to care about enemy soldiers and communist subversives, she did worry about her own people. It was nearly seventy years since the Great War, but the British Government still remembered just how many young men had been killed. No government could hope to survive a callous approach to British casualties…

…And with nuclear weapons involved, the prospect of millions of people being killed was terrifyingly high.

But Holliston had stepped right across the line. He hadn’t launched nuclear missiles at America or blown up a French city for defying him. He’d killed thousands of German soldiers and risked the lives of untold numbers of soldiers and civilians. Margaret had seen the projections. There was a very good chance that nuclear material would be blown over Berlin, sentencing the population to long lingering deaths. And Warsaw was even closer to the blasts…

And Warsaw was on his side, Margaret thought. He sentenced thousands of his supporters to a hellish doom.

She sighed as she stood. Something would have to be done, despite the risk. Karl Holliston had to be stopped. But what could they do? She’d already authorised the dispatch of antiaircraft missiles and other weapons to the Berlin Government, but even that was pushing the limits. Hell, what were the limits? SOE had long-since given up shipping weapons and supplies to Occupied France; now, all they could do was watch from the sidelines and hope.

We can offer help, she thought. But it won’t be enough to tip the balance. The Germans will have to do it for themselves.

Churchill would not have understood, she suspected. He had been a man of action, always looking for ways to take the fight to the enemy. But Churchill — and Hitler — had lived during the last great period of conquest. She — and Karl Holliston — lived in a world overshadowed by atomic bombs. And those bombs had kept the peace for over forty years.

But now the genie is out of the bottle, she thought. And who knows what will happen next?