Final Impact
John Birmingham
 Picking up two years onwards from the end of Designated Targets, Final Impact is the last novel in the Axis of Time trilogy. The supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton has been refurbished with more conventional steam catapults which replaced her less reliable fuel air explosive catapults. Her carrier air group is replenished with A-4 Skyhawk jet-powered attack aircraft, many of which are flown by 'temps, contemporary pilots. Admiral Kolhammer returns to sea at the head of a new Task Force with the Clinton at its core after two years of administering the Special Administrative Zone-California. Many characters have died in the intervening time period, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, by his own hand to Commander Dan Black, one of the main characters of the story who asks for a return to combat and dies during the retakeover of Hawaii, when his plane crashed during take-off from Muroc Airfield, California. D-Day has begun a month early and the Third Reich is crumbling as the Allies invade France. They invade Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy, using Normandy as the subject of the dis-information campaign. Paul Brasch's (who is now a Major General) cover is blown and he is extracted by the British. Hitler has a seizure and suffers permanent brain and muscle damage; with the T4 program in mind and believing it is for the good of the Reich, Himmler suffocates him. The USSR re-enters the war on the Allied side and surges through the Western Front and the Eastern, having used the intervening two years to train huge armies as well as outfit their troops with advanced technology, including AK-47s and MiG-15s. However, before a full scale invasion of the Home Islands of Japan can begin, the Soviets drop an atomic bomb on Litzmannstadt (that is, Łódź, Poland which in reality was colonised by the Nazis in 1939, ethnically-cleansed and renamed.) The Axis Powers react as much as they can: Himmler authorizes the use of anthrax in an unsynthesized form which will hang around for months halting a Russian advance. The USSR takes two more blows when a massive kamikaze strike cripples their Pacific Fleet, and the A-bomb building facility in Kamchatka is destroyed - both hits scored by the Japanese. The U.S., having secretly completed the Manhattan Project a few months before and built up - with a large amount of help by thousands of people from the future Multi-National force - a large enough stockpile of bombs to take on Germany, Japan and the USSR at the same time, if necessary, obliterate Berlin using three nuclear weapons. In response to the U.S. blast on Berlin and the Japanese destroying the Soviet Pacific fleet at Kamchatka, the Soviets nuke Tokyo, killing the Emperor. The Axis Powers give in to unconditional surrender, ending the war in July 1944, but the damage has been done. The USSR has pushed into Asia securing gains in Persia, Afghanistan, Korea, Indochina and is probably going to share occupation of Japan with U.S. and Australia; in Europe the USSR has gone around Germany and has taken all of Eastern Europe including Greece, plus Northern Italy and chunks of Vichy France and Austria. With the war over, most of the main characters move into the private sector and start anew.