Final impact

The Reichsfuhrer-SS grunted. It was pointless trying to second-guess one’s opponent, especially in wartime. The enemy rarely did what you wanted. You could study them, and plan for contingencies based on their capabilities, but once you began fantasizing that you actually knew their intentions…well, that was a folly for decadent novelists, not for statesmen.

The rough concrete walls of the underground bunker oozed with condensation. Here in the map room, it wasn’t so bad. Fans turned constantly to suck the stale atmosphere away and drag fresh air down from the surface. But there were places in this complex-as in all the subterranean hideouts in which they had been forced to take sanctuary-where he found himself close to passing out, so vile were the stench and the heat. Every breath tasted as though it had already been inhaled a hundred times over. Fastidious in his personal habits, Heinrich Himmler found the press of unwashed humanity one of the hardest burdens he had been forced to bear in this conflict.

Thirty or more people were crammed into the map room, an area not much bigger than a sizable parlor. The overcrowding was made worse by the huge map table, which dominated at least half the floor. A large, flat televiewing screen hung from the wall, displaying much the same information as the little wooden blocks that were being pushed around the table, but it wasn’t updated nearly as frequently. Even with the bounty they had taken off the Dessaix and the “Indonesian” ships, the Reich simply did not have the Allies’ ability to monitor the “battlespace,” as they called it.

Goebbels had come up with a suitably Teutonic alternative to the Anglo-Saxon phrase-Kriegsgebiet, the realm of battle. And standing by Hitler’s side as the fuhrer marshaled his response to this violation of the Reich, Himmler could appreciate the correctness of the phrase. Battle was not joined across a simple field, as it had been in the days of Bismarck. No, it was being fought on land, in the air, on and under the sea, where millions contested the future of the world, in blood and iron.

The mood in the room was tense. They had known this was coming, since their own lunge across the channel was foiled. The memory still gave him shudders. The fuhrer’s screaming. Gцring getting drunk and becoming more dangerous as his vaunted jet fighters were scythed out of the sky. Goebbels saying nothing, his eyes sinking back into those darkened pools. The military high command making one excuse after another. One fool of an admiral had even dared to question the wisdom of launching the operation in the first place. He, of course, was no longer numbered among the living. Indeed, a great many of the men who had been in the war room at Rastenburg had received their final rewards: a firing squad and an unmarked grave.

This would be different, however. He breathed slowly through his mouth, lest a sudden gulp give away how nervous he was. The fuhrer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.

Himmler let his eyes traverse the room, settling on anybody who seemed even half inclined to question their leader’s judgment. One Wehrmacht colonel blanched under his gaze.

“It is a ruse,” Hitler muttered, biting his lower lip. “I am sure of it.” He was staring at the table with such febrile intensity that it was a wonder the surface did not begin to smolder.

General Zeitzler, the army chief of staff-who looked about two decades older than his forty-nine years-seemed about to say something, jumping into the space left clear by the fuhrer’s uncertainty. But then Hitler folded his arms and jutted his chin.

“Yes. A ruse. This business in Calais is a feint, don’t you agree, Herr General? Just as it was with their Operation Fortitude in the Other Time. I saw through that one, too, you know. The historical documents make it quite clear. I knew they would come ashore at Normandy, and tried to get that traitor Rommel to reorder the defenses. But no! He would not listen. So it is here, at Normandy, that the real blow will fall.”

The fuhrer brought his pointer down with a sharp crack.

Himmler, along with everyone else in earshot, jumped slightly.

The tip of the pointer was resting on the stretch of shoreline the Allies referred to as Omaha Beach. It was the logical point of access, and much work had gone into luring them there. The defenses in the dune system had been allowed to degrade, to make Eisenhower think that the Wehrmacht’s center of gravity had shifted north of the Seine, just as it had in the Other Time, die Andere Zeit. Close study of the archives captured from the French ship and corroborated by the Japanese had taught them that fixed defenses were a death trap. No matter how much concrete was poured, no matter how many thousands of miles of razor wire were laid, in the end such defenses could be negated by high explosives.