He didn’t think it was possible that a place even more fearful than the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse might exist, but perhaps he had found it here in this surprisingly shabby waiting room. He knew that if the next hour didn’t go well he would not live to see this room again. It was entirely possible he’d simply be shot dead behind the heavy oak doors that led into the inner sanctum of the Central Committee. Perhaps there would be a secret trapdoor through which they would spirit him away to the cells. He thought that was very much their style. There would doubtless be many cells in this building.

He did his best to appear relaxed despite the hard, uncomfortable chair on which he sat. Nobody had offered him even a simple refreshment or shaken his hand. The minor functionaries who staffed this chamber treated him with cold formality, for which he supposed he could not blame them. His country was still exterminating their people like millions of rats. Perhaps by morning that might be behind them. For the sake of the Fatherland he could only hope.

He still did not quite believe the case he would have to argue in there. If it had just been a suggestion from the Japanese alone he would have laughed it off, but the führer himself was adamant that Yamamoto’s plan was worth the risk. Of course it was not the führer’s risk to take. It was his.

It was all madness really. But the whole world was alive with talk of the insanity. The führer was obsessed with reading translated stories from the Allied press about events in the Pacific. For once it had driven news of the war from the front pages around the globe. And now he was here, at the very center of the storm, on a mission that would assuredly make an irrelevance of these “time travelers.” He was here and they were listening to him. That was enough to justify the risk.

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop brushed a piece of lint from his sleeve as he waited for Joseph Stalin to admit him to the Soviet Politburo, to argue the case for a cease-fire and a new alliance with the Axis against the liberal democracies.

Footnotes

*1Destroyed or lost.

*2Destroyed or lost.

*3Destroyed or lost.

*4Destroyed or lost.

*5Destroyed or lost.

*6Destroyed or lost.

*7Destroyed or lost.

Preview

Advance praise for

WEAPONS OF CHOICE

Book One of The Axis of Time by John Birmingham

“Birmingham hits the ground running and accelerates through the first half of the novel, before slowing down enough to let the reader and characters consider the implications of what’s going on. Quick-paced and very clever alternate history.”

—DAVID DRAKE, acclaimed author of The Far side of the Stars and Redliners

“An excellent combination of near future military SF and alternate history, and a riveting story to boot.”