Second Chance

Chapter Thirty: Rommel

Chateau Lafayette

Nr Reims, France

12^th September 1940

The SAS team was bored. The Germans, admittedly, were more careful about perimeter security than the Jihadis that the SAS had been fighting in the early years of the new century, but they lacked any real comprehension of the SAS’s capabilities. France might be new and strange, but the SAS teams had little difficulty in inserting and moving through the country. It was far less dangerous than Poland, which was having its population steadily removed or killed, and now that the war had slowed down, they were bored.

Captain Dwynn checked the GPS system and smiled to himself. They no longer had the American or European satellites that had guided them in the deserts of Syria or Saudi Arabia, but they had transponders and navigation beacons on Britain itself. Finding their position was easy; making their way to their target was even easier. The Germans seemed to have missed the SAS teams altogether; laser-guided weapons were not part of their experiences. Dwynn had hidden near a German airbase, pointed the laser-targeting device on the location of the planes, and watched as a Tomahawk slammed into the base. As the stock of missiles had dwindled, Dwynn and his team had been given new orders; check suspicious locations for any of the missing passengers from the lost jumbo jet.

“Sergeant Yates, stay back with the team,” he subvocalised into his throat mike. The SAS had been re-equipped with the American-made devices just before the Transition and had been delighted with the results. There was little point in bothering this far from the target location – the Germans hadn’t invented directional mikes or remote sensors – but Dwynn knew better than to become complacent. “Benton, you’re with me.”

Yates signalled his assent with his hands, using sign language to acknowledge. Dwynn nodded and slipped through the woodland, wishing that he had the automatic chameleon uniforms that the Americans had been talking about. The rocky woods would become a holiday resort in the future, but for the moment there were only a handful of paths.

“That way,” he subvocalised, after checking his GPS again. A Eurofighter recon mission three days ago had spotted the isolated Chateau and the PJHQ analysts had noticed that an entire SS guard seemed to be keeping someone prisoner. As the most important prisoners in Germany were the airline passengers, the Oversight Committee had asked for the Chateau to be covertly examined.

Benton nodded and followed him, slipping low through the trees. Dwynn slipped through a small stream and reached a rocky knoll, pausing to check the GPS. The Chateau should be just over the knoll. Carefully, he slipped out the microcam and poked it over the knoll.

“Bugger me,” Benton subvocalised, as the image became clear. The Chateau, almost a small castle, sat squarely in the middle of a clearer region, surrounded by an iron fence and patrolled by armed SS guards with dogs. “All this for one little civilian?”

Dwynn ignored him, examining the defences. The Germans had done well, he supposed, there were armed guards everywhere, but as a defence it needed work. Half of the guards seemed to be living in a small barracks with a large heat signature; a single precision weapon would take out the entire barracks and its inhabitants. And then he saw the man being exercised by the guards, and he knew that it was not a little civilian after all.

“I know that man,” he breathed. He’d been briefed on famous Germans, including the ones who had dared to try to end the Nazi regime, and this one was still famous, one of the handful with no stain to his name. Light brown hair, thinning on top, sharp clear eyes and a carefully-worn uniform… there really was no mistaking him.

“Sir, that’s Erwin Rommel,” Benton muttered. He tapped at the communications system, sending the report to PJHQ. “What are they doing; keeping him as a prisoner?”

Dwynn nodded. Rommel wore a uniform, but no sidearm or rank tabs. The guns were not quite pointed at him, but he was clearly being escorted. The man who would become the Desert Fox was walking briskly around the building, followed by his guards.

“Tell PJHQ that we can get him out with a little help,” Dwynn said. “We can hit them this evening, if they agree.”

Generalmajor Erwin Rommel, former commander of the 7^th Panzer and very temporary commander of Operation Tempest, paced through the woods of France with his escort, wondering again what had happened. He’d been ordered to prepare the 7^th Panzer for the occupation of the Balkan states when the SS had turned up and arrested him at gunpoint, apparently on the Fuhrer’s orders. Since then, he’d been kept prisoner in the French house, wondering why he had been removed from command.

I’m loyal, he thought, and wondered. It had been Hitler who’d given him his command, Hitler who’d trusted him, and he’d repaid that trust. He’d expected to continue his career – he’d even been pushed into thinking about an invasion of Britain – but then the war had changed, and then the future British had attacked.

“They said that you would betray the Fuhrer,” the SS commander, Otto Skorzeny, had said. The elite group treated him with respect; according to Skorzeny Hitler hadn’t decided what to do about him. Simply purging him, as so many other officers had been purged, would have cast doubt on the Fuhrer’s infallibility, so he’d been simply left in France.

He shook his head sadly. His wife, son, and bastard daughter were still in Germany. Skorzeny didn’t know what had happened to his wife and son; no one knew about his daughter. France was warm, even in September, but he shivered; what had happened to the Reich? What future knowledge had scared the SS so much that they’d been ceded control over so much? How many other innocents had been purged?

“Time to go back in,” Skorzeny said. His voice was oddly respectful; Skorzeny respected men with military genius. Rommel had taken a Panzer division and used it as an oversized infantry formation, winning the battle of France. Of course, that had been against the French, who had some good tanks and fighting men, but their leaders…

Pah, Rommel thought, and followed the massive SS man back into the Chateau. He suspected that Skorzeny was as bored as he was, the man had been in Das Reich, one of the new SS divisions, before being transferred to guard one inconvenient prisoner. Inaction sat as well with him as it did with Rommel; not very well. Skorzeny wanted to be in the thick of battle, particularly with the war with the future British… not going as well as it should have been.

Darkness fell over the Chateau and the SAS men prepared themselves for battle. Dwynn had led them some distance away from the enemy, after leaving a small collection of microcams, so they could rest up without risking discovery by an enemy patrol. The data being fed freely through the air – the Germans being unable to detect it, let alone triangulate its source – was fed directly to Britain and then back to the SAS team.

“Here’s the plan,” Dwynn said, examining the chart of the Chateau. The PJHQ had finally managed to locate a plan of the Chateau, which had been destroyed by fire during the Uprising of 2010. It had once hosted a British Prime Minister. “Assuming that nothing changes, Sergeant Yates and his team will take up commanding positions around the Chateau, sniping any of the SS who move. In the meantime, Benton and I will take my team and snatch Rommel out of his rooms.”

He tapped the chart thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain which room he’s in,” he said. “I guess that he’s in the main room, here, but the guard commander might have taken that for himself. In that case, the five of us will sweep the entire Chateau for him, and kill any SS we meet, understand?”

They nodded. “Good,” he said. “The SS won’t have NVGs, so we’ll go in when its dark. Keep the automated settings on; the RAF is going to take out the barracks for us in” – he checked his watch quickly – “thirty minutes, and then hit several other targets nearby. Once the strike goes in, we follow, understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Yates said.

“Good,” Dwynn said. “Now, let’s get into position.”

The RAF had been getting used to making high attitude precision raids on German targets, once the air war over England had slowed down to just V1s and the occasional fighter raid. The pilot grapevine argued back and forth over the possible reasons, ranging from the Germans having run out of pilots, to them having decided on other missions. Now that the RAF was receiving a steady supply of ASRAAMs, many German pilots had been proving reluctant to engage the Eurofighters one on one; the RAF might well have crossed the hump.

For his part, Flying Officer Victor Abernathy was glad of the rest. He knew that it probably meant that the Germans were plotting something, but the RAF needed the rest. With the sudden need to send some aircraft to the Far East, the RAF was overstretched. If the Germans had ever managed to figure out where the RAF was based, the losses might have become appalling. As it was, the Germans were bombing cities, ports – and a handful of disused airfields from the last war.

We usually end up training for the last war, Abernathy thought absently, as the Eurofighter crossed the coast of France, already kicking up to Mach Three. The Germans had nothing that could hope to intercept it; the Eurofighter was outrunning the warning of its presence. Now we have a chance to fight it – and at least we’re doing better this time around.

The night sky was empty. The Germans hadn’t even begun to develop a proper nightfighter, and their experiments with AWACS aircraft had become targets for the RAF as soon as they realised what the Germans were trying to do. In the dark, the RAF’s advanced radars made it as clear as day, and the Germans blinder than bats. After a handful of quick and sharp defeats, the Germans had conceded the night sky to the RAF.

“This is Charlie-one, heading for new target,” he said, and brought the Eurofighter into a tight turn. His ECM was reporting the existence of German radars, trying to track the supersonic aircraft, but they would do the Germans no good. The Germans had been experimenting with slaving their anti-aircraft guns to radar, but as yet they hadn’t developed a proper proximity fuse.

“Acknowledged, Charlie-one,” the AWACS said. “Your targeting should pick up the laser point at any second.”

Abernathy smiled, and pulled the Eurofighter up into a tight climb, wondering if the Germans were still trying to track him. The AWACS was pumping out jamming signals now, crippling the entire network by providing thousands of false returns. If the Germans could still see him, they had other problems to worry about as the Eurofighter topped out at nearly its maximum height.

“Beginning run,” he said, and set course. The targeting sensor picked up the pinpoint of laser light with ease – 1940s France didn’t have the thousands of possible sources that had so confused the USAF over Syria – and provided a lock-on at once. “Releasing weapon now.”

The Eurofighter shuddered as the bomb fell from its wings, falling down towards the ground, its tiny rockets guiding it towards the pinpoint of laser light on the ground. Abernathy watched as a pinprick of light blossomed for a long moment, a tiny flash of light that meant hellfire for the men and women on the ground, and shrugged. The RAF intranet was overflowing with complaints about the targeting restrictions from the MOD; the Germans dams had been left untouched despite the fact that destroying them would cripple Germany’s power supply.

“Mission accomplished,” Abernathy said. “Requesting permission to return to the barn.”

“Negative, Charlie-one,” the AWACS said. “Remain on station; your support might be needed again.”

Slowly, like ghosts in the night, the SAS men spread out around the Chateau and waited. Their watches provided them with the time, but time always seemed to slow down when they were on patrol. Half the team split up, targeting the German guards with their sniper rifles, the other half waited in position to charge the gates.

We should do one of the stunts that rat bastard put us on film doing, Dwynn thought grimly. Abseiling ninja-style into the compound and kidnapping him without anyone any the wiser. Against stoned-out ragheads I might have tried, but the SS is way too disciplined for that to…

Even the SAS team was stunned by the sudden and violent explosion as the barracks blew apart. A hail of shots rang out in the night as the snipers fired, hunting down the SS men in the open and slaughtering them before they could react. Dwynn picked up the Stinger missile and fired; directly at the gates. A second explosion blossomed in the night, the five team members ran forward, covered by the snipers. A German jumped up and aimed his rifle; he was dead before he could squeeze the trigger.

“Now,” Dwynn subvocalised, as they quickly checked the grounds. Yates launched a second Stinger, targeted on the main door. The explosion shattered the door and Dwynn ran up, pausing only to toss a tear gas grenade through the hole. An SS man stumbled, coughing in sudden panic, and Dwynn shot him quickly, before running in.

“Secure the door,” he snapped, and ran down the corridor, trusting Benton to follow him. A form leapt up in front of him and he fired without thinking; a pyjama-clad SS man fell over backwards, missing half of his head. He kicked down the door to the main bedroom and jumped through, scanning the room. It seemed to be empty, but an infrared scan revealed the form hiding at the end of the room, in the shadows.

“We’ve come to get you out,” he called, in his bad German. Before beginning his SAS training, it had been worse. “Field Marshall, stand up please.”

The condemned man gets a good bed, Rommel thought wryly, as he turned in for the night. It was a good bed, nice and soft in all the right places, designed subtly to roll to bodies together in the night. He missed his wife, or even his temporary mistress; the room was just made for romance. Skorzeny had thought that it was soft, but until the Fuhrer passed judgement on him it would be well to avoid cold cells and torture.

The explosions shattered the peace of the night and Rommel was instantly awake. He was no longer a young man, but his body remembered the lessons from the trenches of the Great War; in event of attack, get down and stay down. Reaching instinctively for his weapon – he’d been denied a personal sidearm – he rolled out of bed and crouched at the side of the bed as the entire building shook. Dimly, he heard shouts in German; the SS team attempting to repel the attack. From the screams, it didn’t sound as if they were succeeding; a thousand orders came to his lips.

He thrust them down as the door was kicked in. He lay still as… someone, a man dressed in a strange black outfit and weird helmet entered, swinging a rifle that was of a very strange design around the room. He listened as the man called for him, rifle not quite pointed in his direction.

“I surrender,” he said wryly, rising to his feet. Up close, he could see closely; the man wasn’t one of the 7^th Panzer attempting a rescue, as he’d half-hoped and half-feared. “Who are you?”

“Captain Dwynn, SAS A Troop, Field Marshall,” the man said. Rommel blinked; he wasn’t a Field Marshall and didn’t seem ever likely to become one. “It’s a honour to make your acquaintance, sir, but we must be going before the bastard SS react.”

Rommel was used to making quick decisions, but this one stunned him. The monumental feeling of relief was… new, to say the least. “I’m coming,” he said.

“Good,” Dwynn said. “Follow me and stay low.”

Rommel said nothing as they retraced their steps and left the Chateau. Dead bodies, dressed in black, lay around the ruins; the barracks were a burning mess. There was something… unwholesome about such destruction; the entire SS force had been slaughtered without a care in the world. He didn’t see Skorzeny; the big SS man seemed to have vanished. He didn’t think that he had been killed; the big man was too mean to die.

“Excuse me,” Dwynn muttered, and lifted an earphone to his head. Three more men, dressed in the same black outfit, materialised out of the darkness, their weapons on alert. A shot rang out; Rommel spun around to see an SS man falling over backwards, half of his head missing.

“They’re going to pick us up from here,” he said. “The SS regiment nearby, ah…”

“SS Deutschland,” Rommel murmured. Skorzeny had hoped for a transfer to the combat formation, one slated to move into the Balkans.

“Has been diverted,” Dwynn said. “The RAF struck it several times and then took out a bridge. They’ll be rather late for the party.”

Rommel blinked. “There’s no airstrip here.”

Dwynn grinned. “We don’t need one,” he said, and pointed. Rommel could hear a throbbing in the air, and then a strange black autogiro floated into view and down to the ground. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who want to talk to you.”

“My wife,” Rommel said. “What about her.”

Dwynn ignored him. “I’m calling the RAF,” he said. “They’ll destroy the remains of the Chateau. Hopefully, the SS will think you were assassinated directly.”

Rommel doubted it, but climbed into the strange aircraft anyway. Already, his mind could see interesting possibilities for employing them in the service of 7^th Panzer, before his mind reminded him that there would never be another combat command. The strange aircraft shuddered and lifted off the ground into the darkness, and Rommel closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do, so he slept. There would be time for action later.

Skorzeny pulled himself up from the ground, feeling once again the pain of the broken leg. Only his dogged determination not to faint had kept him conscious against the pain, dragging himself along the ground. He looked up as the aircraft landed and saw Rommel step into it, and then a stream of other men flowing into the aircraft. Skorzeny felt envy; he wanted to be like them.

Himmler said I would be, he thought absently. Himmler had called him into his office and shown him documents of the future, proving that he would become a commando leader. He’d been promised a chance to form his own unit, but first he had to guard Rommel. Now, there was no doubt; the man he’d admired was nothing, but a traitor. He reached for his sidearm with his damaged hand, his rifle having long since vanished, and cursed; the weapon had been crushed by something.

He giggled, trying to find some method for standing up as the aircraft took over, and then a scream split the sky as one of the super-fast aircraft swooped overhead. He looked up, trying to see it, and then the remains of the Chateau exploded in a blast of fire. The blast picked him up and tossed him into the woods; Skorzeny screamed and passed out, hoping that reinforcements would arrive before he died. The Fuhrer had to be warned; the SS had to take action.

Darkness…