Julia looked up from her notepad and expected to find a tear tracking down Halabi’s cheek. But there was none. Her eyes were hard and clear and utterly devoid of sorrow.

They came in on a heading determined by the quantum arrays of HMS Trident, their progress tracked by two of the stealth destroyer’s Big Eye drones.

“One minute to release, Colonel Llewellyn.”

Well, that was a surprise.

The voice of the air controller on the British trimaran was American. A Texan to be sure. Llewellyn could only wonder how he’d ended up there.

“Warheads armed.”

“The Sabers have reached a safe distance, Colonel.”

She grunted. The fighters had to put a lot of space between themselves and the blast, lest they get swatted from the sky like bugs.

“Looks like we’re on our own, boys. Let’s light ’em up.”

She tried to keep her tone light, but the enormity of what they were about to do could not be denied. The German capital was blacked out, but was everywhere lit by fire. Pathfinders had ringed the center of the metropolis with incendiaries. Not that she needed it, with the Trident guiding her in. But if that link failed for whatever reason, it was good to know that they could still find the target with their own eyes.

“Twenty seconds to release.”

Llewellyn held the giant bomber steady at it operational ceiling of fifteen thousand meters. It took a surprising amount of physical strength to control a B-52, and she’d had to put a lot of extra time in at the gym. Her arms looked much bigger than they had been a year ago. German flak arced up out of the conflagration below, long golden lines of fire seeming to leap away from the open furnace over which they flew. Shells burst harmlessly far below her. The decoy planes had not been needed. There were no German fighters aloft.

The bomb bay door whirred open.

“Trident has us dead on course,” her navigator reported.

“Ten seconds.”

“All systems check out green.”

“Eight, seven, six…”

How many people slept beneath her wings tonight? How many were good? And how many evil? Would God protect the virtuous and the meek?

“Three, two, one. Release.”

No. God would not.

It was a quiet night, as far as these things went nowadays. The RAF and their American cousins seemed to be giving the citizens of Berlin a brief rest from the terrors of all night bombing. A medium-sized raid had dropped incendiaries a short time ago but the Allies had not followed up like they had at Dresden.

Riding in the back of his Mercedes, feverish with lack of sleep, Himmler had no doubt they were already thinking of the next war, against Stalin. By way of contrast he could only contemplate the end of this war, which was surely days away. Or weeks at best. The briefing had not gone well. His instructions to speak the truth had liberated the high command to be completely frank about the utter impossibility of effecting any kind of reverse to the Reich’s military situation. One by one, his generals explained why defeat was inevitable. He had not screamed at them. He had not accused them of defeatism or threatened anyone with execution for bearing unwanted news. He had ordered all the nonexistent units in Western Europe removed from the map table, a task that could have been accomplished with one dramatic sweep of his hand. Instead General Zeitzler had plucked the little wooden blocks off one by one. There was nothing left between them and the Allies in the west.

Why had they not listened to his offer? Why had they been so stupid in the face of the obvious? Now they would have to face the Bolsheviks alone, having done their utmost to cripple the best defense Western civilization had against the subhuman armies massing at the gates of Europe.

As his limousine motored slowly down Unter den Linden the last fьhrer imagined the city occupied by enemy troops. It was all too easy to envision on the dark canvas of a blackout, punctured by the eldritch light of an incendiary blaze a few blocks away. The streets here, once teeming with life, were empty save for a few fire crews rushing to their work. He could not help but see them filled with Slavic berserkers mad with plunder and rape.

His feelings surged between despair and a sort of frenetic psychosis, a desire to throw himself into the last lines of defense, even while knowing that the only hope was that Berlin would fall to Montgomery or Patton before the arrival of the Red Army.

He looked at the small scrap of paper crumpled in his left hand. A piece of history, no less. His order to the high command-issued at the end of the dismal meeting an hour ago, and effective immediately-to cease all hostilities in the west and to allow the Americans and their allies unimpeded access to the Fatherland.

Churchill and Roosevelt might not have accepted his offer of an alliance, but they would not be able to ignore an unconditional surrender.

He smiled wanly.

It was a masterstroke really. He was going to make them responsible for the defense of Germany, and beyond that of civilization itself. If he weren’t so exhausted he could have laughed. When one stared defeat and annihilation in the face and accepted them, it clarified everything.

He could not win, but he could save his Volk.

Not that he would be around to see it, of course. Would he spend the rest of his life in hiding? Or would he be dragged before some sham court to…

The question was redundant.

At eighteen minutes past the hour three spheres of brilliant white light bloomed overhead, and Heinrich Himmler, Berlin, and the Third Reich all passed into history.

Before speaking into the microphone on his desk, the president of the United States of America coughed lightly to clear his throat. The Oval Office was crowded. His press people had tried to convince him to do this broadcast from the dedicated studio that had been built in the previous year, but Roosevelt had insisted. There were three cameras in the office, recording the event for posterity, and when Americans watched this speech hundreds of years from now, he didn’t want them to see him hunched into a sound booth in the basement of the building.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were seated in the lounge chairs looking somewhat uncomfortable, as were the secretary of war, the secretary of state, the Speaker of the House, and the British ambassador. His wife was perched on another chair near the door. The cameras were all twenty-first technology, and it would be at least a day before the images they captured would be tele-recorded onto film for national distribution to the various news services. The microphone in front of him, however, was the same one he had been speaking into for years. He’d never been comfortable with the teeny-weeny clip-on things the uptimers made him wear.

A producer counted down for him. “Mr. President, we’re on in three, two, one…”

Roosevelt leaned forward just fractionally and addressed himself to the millions of his fellow citizens who would be gathered around their radios, listening at home, in their workplaces, in coffee shops or train stations, on ships, and in the field around the world.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “At eighteen minutes after eleven o’clock local time last night, our planes dropped three atomic bombs on the capital of Nazi Germany. Berlin has been destroyed, and the heart of our enemy torn out. All organized German forces in Western Europe have laid down their arms. They continue to fight in the east, and on our best information to date they will do so until the Red Army observes a cease-fire. I call on our allies in Moscow to do just that and to avoid any further wasteful destruction.”