Axis of Evil

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Northern Offensive

Over Norway

25^th May 1941

“Ah, darling, I think I’d better pull out now,” Flying Officer Victor Abernathy said, as the Eurofighter’s fuel tanks completed their refuelling. “I don’t want to fill up too much.”

“Can’t keep it up, eh?” Flying Officer Sheila Dunbar asked dryly, holding station nearby. Her Eurofighter had been refuelled already; the RAF had deployed nearly thirty Eurofighters to the mission, along with a small fleet of Tornados. “ I knew there was a reason why you refused my offer.”

“Oh, shut up,” Abernathy sighed. The night before, Dunbar had invited him to bed with her; he’d declined. “Sierra-five, Charlie force is ready to go.”

“You are cleared for your mission,” the distant voice of the AWACS operator confirmed. “Godspeed.”

“Let’s take it deeper,” Dunbar said, and kicked her Eurofighter forward. There was no need to stay in formation, just to remain close together for mutual support. “Any target in particular?”

“The radar stations, then the troop barracks,” the AWACS operator said. “Targets have been sorted already by the SAS.”

“Spoilsports,” Dunbar groused, as the islands near Bergen drew closer at an awesome rate. The Eurofighters had been equipped with laser-guided weapons, as well as they standard load of ASRAAM missiles. “Anyone would think that they didn’t want us to have fun.”

“I don’t call this fun,” Abernathy said. “Hang on, look at that…”

“I read a German plane… probably a seaplane, rising from Bergen,” Dunbar said. “It’s not a serious nuisance.”

“Yes, it is,” Abernathy said. “It’s emitting a radar signal. It’s an AWACS.” He scowled; German experiments with airborne radar had been proceeding smoothly, despite the RAF’s interference.

“Charlie-two, cleared to engage,” Dunbar said. “Permission to open the umpteenth round of hostilities?”

“Granted,” Abernathy said wryly. Dunbar fired a single ASRAAM at the German plane, which didn’t manage to dodge in time. Seconds later, it vanished from the radars in a blast of fire.

“Take that, you Jerry bastard,” Dunbar cheered. “Any more of you out there?”

“I knew it was a mistake to have those war films shown in the common room,” Abernathy sighed. “It’s given you bad ideas.”

“Got me hot as well,” Dunbar said. “Perhaps combat will do it for you, eh?”

Abernathy flushed. “Target designator is reporting the first laser pinpoints,” he said. “Targets designated” – the laser sensor chimed as it locked onto the series of targets – “and weapons deployed.”

The Eurofighter shuddered as it released its cargo of small laser-guided bombs. Abernathy banked away over Bergen as the bombs fell down towards the German bases, exploding within the buildings the Germans had appropriated. Black puffs of smoke began to appear below the planes as German antiaircraft guns struggled to bring one down. With HARM missiles already having knocked down their radar, they could only hope for a lucky shot, a golden BB.

“We confirm all targets struck,” the AWACS said. “You are cleared to return to base.”

“Wilco,” Abernathy said, banking the Eurofighter into a western turn, heading back to Britain. “My God, Sheila, Look at that.”

Down below, against the water, the American fleet was moving, heading for Norway. Four carriers, their air compliment patrolling the air above the fleet, were hanging back, while the battleships were moving forward. Primitive radar pulsed out from the fleet, almost drowned out by the powerful radars from the single British carrier present, HMS Invincible.

“They don’t make them like that anymore,” Dunbar said, her voice hushed for once. “I wonder what landing on one of those beauties would be like.”

“Dangerous,” Abernathy said. “I want to fly the new SSTO craft.”

“You’ll be lucky,” Dunbar said, as the formation headed away from the American ships. “Besides, it’ll be at least five years before they get built, so you might have your ticket punched before you get up there.”

HMS Invincible

Norwegian Sea

25^th May 1941

Captain Barton was beginning to regret accepting command of the small carrier. Admittedly, it was the most powerful ship in the fleet, but its CIC was far more capable than anything the Americans had invented yet. That meant that the fleet command staff, including Admiral King, had to be onboard. Officially, USS Enterprise was the fleet flagship; unofficially, it was the Invincible.

“The tomahawk strikes are inbound now,” Barton said, briefing the Americans. He tried to avoid King’s eye as much as possible. King hated everyone. “The air attack was a complete success.”

“And Jerry is just going to roll over and die?” Admiral King asked, as some of the Tomahawks vanished near Denmark, their flight paths terminating on top of German bases. The cold clinical display concealed thousands of dead or dying Germans. “How do we know that your missiles are working?”

Barton concealed a sigh. “The missiles are being tracked on radar,” he said. “They’re homing in on laser signals, or moving according to GPS signals from the new satellites. We delayed the operation slightly to allow them to get back into position, remember?”

Admiral King scowled. Being reminded of the satellites hadn’t pleased him. “And how can toy rockets help us now?”

Barton accessed the live feed from one of the satellites. “This is Denmark,” he said, zooming in on the image. A German base was burning brightly. “That was the home of a Luffwaffe anti-shipping squadron, but it isn’t any longer.”

“Well, what are we doing sitting around here?” Admiral King demanded. “Order the battleships to move in at once!”

“Yes, sir,” a harassed American rating said. He began to mutter instructions into his radio, sending the battleships into three different locations.

Bergen Region

Norway

25^th May 1941

The small fortress was completely destroyed. Hauptmann Horst examined it with a stunned air; if he’d been inside the gun placement, he would have been killed when the British missiles had struck it. To him, the attack meant only one thing; the British were invading Norway.

“Contact Oslo,” he snapped, before the wave of jamming signals swept over the field radios. He swore; if the landlines were taken out…”

“The landlines are down, Herr Hauptmann,” an officer called. “Sir, we have to stand on the defensive…”

Horst shook his head. Out of the early-morning mist, two massive ships were appearing. For a long moment, he thought that he’d made a mistake and seen islands, and then he realised that they were battleships – British battleships!

“Get the guns up,” he shouted, trying to avoid a panic. “Load armour-piecing rounds… fire!”

His men worked splendidly, preparing the handful of smaller guns, unaware of the futility. Those were battleships out there, not destroyers, and…

“Hit,” an enlisted man shouted, as blasts of fire appeared around the battleships. Horst scowled; there hadn’t been time to fire, and he hadn’t seen one of the other coastal batteries fire, which meant that those blasts were…

Horst’s body, mind and gun position disintegrated as the first shells exploded onto the island. A tidal wave of fury passed over the German position, detonating shells and slaughtering men with casual disdain. The blast was so powerful that it renovated the entire island; in later years there would be complaints about vandals in battleships. This would be regarded as the height of ingratitude.

“Not bad,” Captain Macchiarella said, as the USS Maryland hurled a second salvo of shells onto the German position. “Spotters?”

“Three more German guns up north needing silenced, sir,” the spotter said, holding one ear to the intership telephone. “Other than that, it looks as if we’re in the clear.”

“Excellent,” Macchiarella said, as Maryland rang with the impact of a German shell. All of the big German guns had been silenced; now all they had was small pounders designed to work against aircraft. They were useless against the thick battleship armour. “Fire.”

Maryland shuddered violently. Flames and smoke blasted out across the waters. “I think we got him, sir,” the spotter said. “The smoke makes it hard to see.”

“The Marines are going in,” the radio officer said. “We’re to fall back and stand by for fire support if necessary.”

“Signal that we understand,” Macchiarella ordered. “God bless those brave men.”

“Fuck me,” Captain Dwynn breathed. The smoke and flumes rising from the valleys and fjords was awesome. Even with the advanced equipment, the battleships could only be seen through infrared. Their observation position, high over an ill-made road, allowed them a fine view.

“I’d sooner not, if it’s all the same to you,” Chang said. “They do know we’re here, right?”

“I don’t think they’ll take pot-shots at us,” Dwynn assured him. “We’re a bit below their notice at the moment.” He picked up his rifle and checked the equipment. “Come on,” he said, as the noise of a German convoy could be heard. “Time to go hunting.”

“The mines are set,” Chang assured him, checking the display. Dwynn nodded grimly, examining the road as it zigzagged along the sides of rocky mountains and lakes. There were twenty-five German vehicles, mainly troop trucks and one tank.

“Wait until most of them are on the mined bit,” Dwynn ordered, as the noise of vehicles came closer. “Stand by… now!”

Chang hit the detonation command. The explosion was deafening as it shattered the road, tipping most of the German vehicles into the fjord. The secondary explosions destroyed the German vehicles that remained; Dwynn sprayed bullets madly across the few survivors.

“Send in the contact report,” he snapped, as Chang hastened to clear up the equipment. “As of now, Bergen is cut off from German reinforcements!”

Brigade-Fuhrer Statler was panicking. The sudden appearance of the American battleships – now that their flags could be made out among the smoke – could only mean one thing; invasion. His radios were being jammed and he had only one landline leading back to Oslo, where reinforcements were supposed to be on call. Instead, the reports suggested that almost all of the roads had been destroyed, trapping his force in Bergen.

“Everyone into the shelters,” he shouted, as a new hail of shells came crashing down on Bergen. The Norwegians, he hoped, were cowering in their shelters; the Germans had built themselves shelters as well, but who had thought that they would have been needed?

“They’re moving in the troops,” a harassed officer said, trying desperately to coordinate the reports from three spotters who had taken field telephones and climbed to higher ground. “They’re going to land troops.”

Statler took a breath. “We’ll meet them in the town,” he said. “Everyone, get ready; if we can crush them quickly, we might throw them back into the sea!”

Swiftly he considered a counterattack and dismissed the possibility. Even if his formations had survived intact – which he was fairly certain they hadn’t – they would be seen to be moving into position and shelled to death. As he began to issue orders for a fight to the death in Bergen, he began to consider surrender.

The air was cold and smelled bad, as far as the Marines were concerned. Their little powerboats, as the British called them, were heading up the fjord towards the first island, a large island between the Americans and Bergen harbour. Private Max Shepherd smoked incessantly, waiting for something to happen. The sounds of war could be heard, but no one was shooting at them.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Private Buckman groused. “The higher-ups probably got the map reading wrong and sent us to the wrong side of Norway.”

“Land ho,” Captain Caddell shouted. The eerie atmosphere only grew; the Germans were making no attempt to stop the Marines. “Stand by to land!”

Shepherd checked his rifle and other items, including his bit of hair from a girl. It had been supposed to bring him luck. The boat shuddered as it hit an underwater rock, before they hit the… well, he supposed it was a beach. Rocky and desolate, the landing site was inhospitable enough even without Germans defending it.

A blast of profanity made him jump round, weapon lifted. Sergeant Pike had stepped onto an underwater rock, and then stepped off it and landed in the drink. The landing bay was treacherous enough as it was; several other privates were struggling to get ashore.

“Forward,” Captain Caddell bellowed, saving several enlisted men from the Sergeant’s rage. “Everyone who can, get up there!”

Shepherd finished pulling a fellow private out of the water and gaped at the cliff. It was sheer… except for a few handholds and a jagged path blasted by the battleships. He went for the path, pulling himself up with considerable effort, and finally made it to the top. A shot rang out and he fired back, grateful for the first time for the pack on his back. The German had heard him coming, but he’d fired into the pack side on.

He threw himself to the ground as a burst of American fire blasted over the ridge. “What’s going on up there?” Captain Caddell bellowed. “Private, what’s happening?”

Idiot, Shepherd thought. “Captain, there was a German here… and a lot of dead bodies.”

He cast his eyes over the German position as the remainder of the Marines pulled themselves up onto the island. It wasn’t as big as it had looked on the map, but the battleships had made a real mess of the position, destroying almost everything that had looked like it could be dangerous.

“Secure the place,” Captain Caddell bellowed. Shepherd threw himself into the search as the Marines poked around, looking for German survivors. He glanced up as he worked; the harbour of Bergen could be seen now, almost a ruin after the battleships had done their work.

“Take five,” Sergeant Pike said. Shepherd blinked at such unusual benevolence, before realising the point; the sappers had to go to work on the German mines. Shots ran out as snipers picked off floating mines, while British-built MSVs made their way through the waters. Great plumes of water rose up as mine after mine was detonated.

“We’re doing well so far,” Private Manlito observed. “You think we’ll get a chance to score with Norwegian dames?”

Shepherd snorted. “It’s not as if we’ve had great shakes with foreign dames so far,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “The French girls have been putting out for the Germans for two years now, you know.”

Private Manlito chuckled. “I’m sure that they’ll put out for you,” he said. “Put you out the door, perhaps.”

“Bastard,” Shepherd said. “You know, wouldn’t it be nice to spend the rest of the war here?”

“Assemble,” Sergeant Pike shouted, blowing a whistle as the boats landed to pick them up and ship them to Bergen.

Manlito snickered. “You’ll have to be shot for that,” he said. “That son of a bitch isn’t going to let you stay here.”

“This is the best goddamned day of my life,” General George Patton exclaimed, watching events from the Maryland. He had wanted to go ashore with the troops, but Eisenhower had forbidden it. “What’s progress?”

Captain Jorge Nevin consulted his clipboard. He didn’t like the new PDAs. “We have troops on the ground and surrounding Bergen,” he said. “The aircraft report German movements among the town, but we don’t know how many are in there. The other landing zones report similar success.”

“There’s one in the eye for the old women, some of them young men,” Patton chuckled delightedly. “Order them to reduce the Germans and take over the towns, then we can start the real work of mounting an offensive against Oslo.”

Nevin bowed. He’d worked for Patton long enough to know that little details like logistics meant nothing to him. “I will send the command at once,” he said.

“And have my helicopter prepared,” Patton said. “I will go to the town in person.”

Brigade-Fuhrer Statler took a breath as the first Marines appeared at the docks, trying to land directly onto the Bergen harbour. An American destroyer – he’d been hoping for one of the irreplaceable British ships – was moving in behind them to provide fire support, unaware of his hidden guns, carefully concealed in the rubble. He might have lost touch with Oslo, but he was confident that a rescue mission would be mounted. The Fuhrer himself had promised.

“Closer, closer,” he muttered, as the Marines started to swarm up the beaches. They weren’t very experienced, even compared to the old-man battalions that were being raised from veterans of the Great War. They were acting like inexperienced troops; he had to remind himself that that was what they were. “Fire!”

Seventeen smaller field guns fired as one, accompanied by several machine guns. The marines fell to the ground as the machine guns swept across them, slaughtering them, while the destroyer was hit several times. On fire, it tried to escape from the fjord, but it was too late. With a thunderous explosion, the destroyer sank in the fjord.

Cheers rose up from the Germans, but Statler heard a noise and his heart sank as a strange black aircraft roared up the fjord. A single bomb fell… and Statler’s life vanished in tearing fire.

The wave of heat from the FAE bomb could be felt from half a mile away, or perhaps they were imagining it. The pile-up of shipping had saved their lives; Private Max Shepherd gasped as he saw the inferno. The flames had spread out over a good portion of an already ruined town.

“Burn, baby, burn,” someone shouted. Shepherd chuckled; their exposure to British culture, though its movies, had only confused everyone because half of the movies were American from the future.

“Bet they hate us in the future,” Private Manlito said wryly, as Bergen burned down. “Between us and Jerry, we’ve made one hell of a mess of their town.”

“Advance,” Captain Caddell shouted, leading the charge. Shepherd let out a rebel yell and ran behind him, ducking and turning sharply to avoid being shot. German resistance was furious, but uncoordinated; dimly, he realised that their commander must have been killed. He plunged into a maelstrom of fire and blood and sweat… and then there was no time left at all, for anything, but killing.