"Damn you, and your crew," he spat. "What sort of a captain are you, anyway, Halabi? Get out there and do something. You've got this God-almighty ship of yours, but you're hiding behind those destroyers that're out there protecting your worthless black hide.
"Get-out-there-and-do something!"
The CIC crew maintained their stations. Nobody as much as turned in their direction. But the buzz of discussion dropped away, and Halabi could feel it as everybody in the room shifted their attention onto her.
"Mr. McTeale," she said, fighting to keep a quaver away from her voice. "Call Chief Waddington, and have him come up here with a security detachment. If the Air Vice Marshal Caterson opens his mouth again, have him removed."
"Very good, ma'am."
Before Caterson could do anything to get himself thrown out, her chief defensive sysop called out. "Captain! One of the Lavals has splashed. And another has just corkscrewed off course over the North Sea."
Halabi, McTeale, and all the 'temps searched the main viewscreens. Indeed, one of the red triangles had disappeared, and the other was moving erratically. The Trident's captain remained outwardly unmoved, but inside her a little cartoon Halabi was leaping up and down, punching a fist in the air. Kolhammer had reported that many of the missiles fired on Hawaii had malfunctioned, probably through sabotage. She'd been praying to a God she'd never really believed in, hoping beyond hope that whichever of the Dessaix's crew had been responsible for that sabotage may have been able to get to these missiles, too.
But there was still one French hammerhead streaking in toward London.
"What's happened, Captain?" asked an army brigadier named Beaumont. She didn't mind him as much as Caterson. An old India hand, he'd once or twice shown himself to be more accepting of her command, and of those members of her crew whose bloodlines didn't necessarily go all the way back to pre-Norman England.
"At first blush, sir," she said, pointedly paying respect to his rank, "it would seem as if somebody on the Dessaix doubled-crossed the Germans. Two of the missiles appear to have been sabotaged."
"Splash two, Captain."
"There," she said, pointing at the flashing red triangle before it blinked out. "The second Laval has gone down."
"But not the third?"
"No, sir. I'm afraid not. And if it hasn't shown any signs by now, it probably won't."
The ship's defensive sysop spoke up. "Posh has determined that Biggin Hill is the most likely target."
"Captain, we have significant movement out of Calais, Dieppe, Cherbourg, and Rotterdam."
"Captain?" asked Beaumont.
Halabi took a few seconds to digest everything on the big screen: the developing airborne assault out of Norway, the strategic campaign against the islands' air defense net, the naval forces now surging out of the continent. It was cack-handed and primitive and barely coordinated, by the standards of her day, but she recognized the underlying principle.
"It's called a horizontal and vertical envelopment, Brigadier. Swarming, to use the vernacular. Although I believe the old-fashioned term invasion probably covers it all.
"Gentlemen," she said, raising her voice slightly to grab the attention of all the 'temps. "We're game-on. My intelligence division will monitor the assault as it develops, and keep you updated with the attack profile. We're already streaming data to London via laser relay. If you'll examine the big screen, you'll see the German capital ships swinging into the Channel from the north. I need to move out in order to engage this group with my remaining ship-killers.
"We will be offloading Major Windsor's men by helicopter. I suggest you take the opportunity to get back on shore, as well. You will be needed there."
Beaumont saluted, as did a couple of his fellow officers. Most however, did not.
"Mr. McTeale, please escort our guests to the hangars."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Comms, inform the destroyer screen that we'll deploy in forty minutes."
"Aye, Captain."
Halabi watched the dozen or so staff officers troop out after her exec. She walled off her personal feelings at the affront handed to both her and the crew by Caterson and his colleagues. It was lucky, she thought, that she knew what sort of enemy they were really fighting today. Otherwise she might have wondered whether their lives were worth it.
The Cabinet War Rooms lay deep under the streets of London, beyond the reach of Goring's bombers. Churchill remembered the many late nights they'd spent here during the blitz and the Battle of Britain. He recalled the way the shock waves from an especially close hit traveled up through the wooden frame of the chair he now sat in, in front of the old-fashioned world map, at the head of the Cabinet table. Almost everything was as it had been. Sweating brick walls the color of spoiled cream. The massive red steel girders running across the ceiling. The ashen gray faces of his advisers. The stale air. Only the rumble and deep, tectonic shudder of Nazi bombing was absent.
The Luftwaffe had been concentrating on the RAF's airfields, radar stations, and, of course, on the Trident for three months now. The city had been spared, but for what, he wondered. Was it now to be destroyed in a cataclysmic battle, street by street, a thousand years of history and culture reduced to rubble and ash?
Not if he could help it.
"Well, gentleman," the prime minister said after everyone had taken their seats. "The darkest of days is upon us, but if we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men the greater share of honor."
Shakespeare's words fell though four hundreds years into the taut silence of the room.
Churchill waited on somebody to speak. But his generals and admirals were silent. Before the moment could become uncomfortable, the PM continued. "Well, then, let's us stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Lieutenant Williams, if you will?"
The young officer, one of Captain Halabi's people, came to his feet. "Thank you, Prime Minister."
He pointed a control stick at the wide screen that had been affixed to the brick wall less than a week earlier. Everyone turned toward it as the display winked into life and a map of the British Isles and Western Europe appeared. It was always a marvel to see these things, but Churchill was frustrated by the size of the screen. He privately felt that he could get a much better appreciation of developments on the old plotting table.
"Real-time drone surveillance and signals intercepts indicate that German forces are moving rapidly into final position for an assault on the British Isles. Army Group Central is on the move out of Tours, Orleans, and Lemours. Army Group North is consolidating rapidly in Caen, Dieppe, and Calais."
As Lieutenant Williams spoke, icons depicting the various units began to move north toward the Channel.
"The Luftwaffe has ninety percent of its five operational air fleets either up or in preflight. Some formations are already moving into position for raids on all air-defense-sector assets. Allied air units are being vectored on to the incoming hostiles by Fighter Command via Trident's battlespace management system."
Churchill saw Air Chief Marshal Portal nod vigorously.
"Kriegsmarine capital ships are moving out of Norwegian waters at full steam. At least sixty U-boats are converging on the Channel from the North Sea ahead of them, taking up a position between the Tirpitz battle group and the Royal Navy's Home Fleet."
The lieutenant flicked his controller at the screen again. As Churchill watched, a mosaic of smaller windows filled the screen. They seemed to show movies of airfields with transport planes banked up.
"The first German forces we can expect to directly engage will be airborne units. The Fallschirmjager which dropped onto Crete. They have regrouped and will most likely be joined by specialist Waffen-SS airborne units which have been hastily put together in the last few months. At this stage, we cannot provide a projected drop zone with any certainty. But there are a limited number of options. It appears the assault will go ahead without the Luftwaffe establishing air superiority…"
/> A chorus of mumbled astonishment greeted that statement of the obvious. It was a measure of Hitler's desperation that he would persist in the face of such odds. A measure of his criminal insanity, too, thought Churchill.
"Taken in concert with the capture of multinational elements and technology by the Axis powers, it does raise the prospect that the Germans have rushed the development of some weapons systems with which they hope to tip the balance in their favor. As of this moment, however, none of our sigint or Elint scans have returned data which would help clarify that issue."
"Thank you, Lieutenant," said Churchill, who did not wish the meeting to descend into an undergraduate bull session about the specter of Nazi superweapons. "And so to our reply, General?"
General Wavell, recently returned from North Africa with General Montgomery to coordinate the defense of the British Isles, got to his feet.
He turned to an old-fashioned map at the opposite end of the room to the PM.
"We expect a seaborne assault across the narrowest section of the Channel, landing at Dover, probably near Ramsgate and Margate. Army Group Central is expected to make their attempt between Weymouth and Sidmouth, placing immediate pressure on the defensive position to the south of Birmingham and Wolverhampton. These are the logical avenues of German advance and we have prepared our response accordingly…"
Wavell frowned and seemed to lose himself in the map for a moment.
"Of course," he resumed, "it is entirely possible that the attack will not follow a logical course. Many of the Wehrmacht's better commanders have been lost to the purges since the Transition. We shall not have to face Rommel on our own turf, but Field Marshal Kesselring will probably do just as well. And while the Germans do not have our advantage in drone technology, they have had enough old-fashioned planes flying overhead to make a reasonable guess about our preparations. With this in mind, and given that they can probably only get four divisions ashore in the first wave-"
Churchill sighed audibly at that. Only four divisions!
"— we will hold in reserve the Canadian First Army, Free French Second Armored, and American infantry divisions on the GHQ Line, with our XXX Corps armored and infantry units advanced to engage the enemy at the bridgehead, wherever that may be."
Wavell swept his hand across the breadth of the map covering all of the southern counties.
"The imponderable question is where General Ramcke's paratroopers will land. Here I think we find the hinge of victory or defeat. Without control of the air or the sea-lanes, the Germans must plan on massive losses for their seaborne forces. We know they have made a massive investment in rebuilding the Fallschirmjager, and Himmler has personally overseen the creation of a Waffen-SS air-assault division. Wherever they land, we must fix them and destroy them. To this end, I am holding in reserve the Guards Armored and the First Infantry Divisions."
Wavell, who had been reading from a paper on the table in front of him, looked up from his eyebrows at Lieutenant Williams.
"For what it's worth, the SAS Regiment has been attached to the First Infantry and will do whatever it is they do when we know where Ramcke has set down."
Churchill ignored Wavell's bad grace. He had faith in the young prince and his merry men. They seemed just the right sort of bastards to turn loose on the Nazis.
31
LONDON, ENGLAND
RAF Biggin Hill in the London borough of Bromley was one of the most important airfields in the defense of London during the Battle of Britain. Built at the end of the First World War, it sat on high ground above the village of the same name. The first RAF flights controlled by radio flew out of there, and the first kill of the Second World War was credited to a fighter from Biggin Hill. It had been the object of endless attacks during the Battle of Britain, suffering massive damage, which almost but never quite closed down its operations.
Three of Halabi's crew were quartered there, coordinating battlespace management with the 'temps, and supervising a number of experimental programs, such as the Super Spitfire night fighter squadron. Those twelve prototype planes were located in hardened bunkers at the eastern end of the airfield, protected by radar-controlled Bofors guns. They weren't specifically targeted, but they were amongst the first casualties of the incoming strike.
Of the Trident crew on station at Biggin Hill that morning, only Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins was on duty. The others, a flight sergeant and a pilot officer with an advanced electrical engineering degree, were both asleep in their billets down in the village. Both had worked through the previous thirty-six hours.
The Trident flashed an alert to all her shore-based personnel, twenty-nine officers and others of various rank, as soon as the threat of the incoming missile strike was detected. When Hobbins's flexipad began screeching, she was lying on a gurney under one of the Spitfires. She didn't even bother to look at the screen-she'd been through hundreds of drills, and five actual alerts. She just spun off the gurney and started yelling as loudly as she could.
"Incoming! Get out. Get out! Move! Move! Move!"
Five seconds later, sirens began to wail all over the base.
Twenty-two men and women had been working in the hardened hangar when the alert came through. That had surprised Petty Officer Hobbins at first. She'd come to Biggin Hill expecting to find an exclusively male domain, but had been chuffed to discover a large number of women "auxiliaries." Equal opportunity debates were by the by now, though.
Everyone was running for their lives.
Hobbins hammered out of the aircraft shelter, overtaking a couple of lead-footed 'temps who'd spent a few too many quid on the real ale down at the Black Horse in the village.
"Move your fat arses," she yelled at them.
Hundreds of ground crew, technicians, and even pilots who'd been enjoying the warm autumn day were hurrying for slit trenches and sandbagged antiair mounts. Hobbins felt rather than saw it when the tarmac changed to grass beneath her pounding boots. A zigzag trench line beckoned, and some finely honed instinct made her dive for it rather than running and climbing in. That jump saved her life.
A grotesquely loud shriek, whoosh, and roar signaled the arrival of the hypersonic Laval over the base. The shock wave burst the eardrums of everyone within eight or nine hundred meters, including Hobbins, who screamed as it felt like long metal skewers were being driven into her head.
Unlike the American hammerhead-type missiles, the French weapon didn't need to open a bay door on its underside. Two hundred mini-silos were built into the fuselage, and those spat out submunitions of fused DU and SRDX accelerant. Rendered deaf, Hobbins was unable to register the impact of the first bomblets as they went tearing into the hardened concrete bunker, shredding it like crepe paper.
The rolling percussion of primary and secondary explosions registered as dull mallet blows somewhere outside her head. The Laval screamed past, far enough away that she survived the impact of the small front of violently compressed air that was trailing the rocket at five thousand kilometers an hour. Unprotected, the two crewmen she'd passed earlier flew apart as though hit by a speeding locomotive when the wave struck them.
A blizzard of offal poured into the slit trench, which threatened to collapse as the rest of RAF Biggin Hill was destroyed.
Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins curled up at the foot of the trench and waited to die. But the final eruption never came.
HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
There was no live video feed available, for which Harry was grateful. He didn't need to see what happened when you unleashed a Multipurpose Augmented Ground Attack device on a target that wasn't prepared for it. He'd been amongst the first troops into Algiers after the French Mediterranean Fleet "reduced" the city in retaliation for the radiological attack on Marseilles. Biggin Hill was a little sturdier than the mud brick capital of Algeria, but not so much as made any difference.
The SAS men and their Norwegian colleagues had cheered when the screen in the Trident's main hangar had shown the first two
Lavals veering off course. But the cheering had died out as it became obvious there'd be no reprieve from the third missile. Harry had turned away from the screen, and was busying himself checking their gear for the short hop back to Portsmouth when Sergeant St. Clair called out.
"Look, guv, the primary didn't go off."
Harry looked up and was amazed to discover that his RSM was right. The Combat Intelligence indicated that the submunitions had fired, but not the main warhead. That would have excavated about three quarters of Biggin Hill down to a depth of thirty meters in less than one second.
"Has it moved on to a secondary target?" he asked. A part of him was afraid that the Germans had figured out how to program the missile to strike at multiple points, as it was meant to do.
But no. A flashing dialog box indicted that the ship's Nemesis arrays were no longer tracking the weapon, and hadn't registered any primary detonation of the Laval's subfusion plasma yield warhead.
Most likely it had simply crashed somewhere.
"Vive la France," Harry murmured. Whoever had been able to dicker with the first two shots, he must have been interrupted before he could finish with number three. The SAS commander wished him-or her-good luck, wherever they were.
Even so, Biggin Hill was a write-off. But he wondered if the Germans knew what had happened.
THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA
"We shall have crushed the life out of them by the time nightfall arrives," boasted Goring.
Himmler thought the fuhrer seemed less sanguine, having been here before with his Luftwaffe chief, but the reports were good.
In war, it was always advisable to discount the best and the worst of everything one heard. But the news coming out of the firestorm they'd unleashed over England was encouraging. Three experienced pilots had radioed back reports of a catastrophe engulfing the RAF station called Biggin Hill, a name they had all come to loathe back in late 1940.
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