Final impact

An aide appeared, and the British prime minister nodded for another cup of coffee, with a shot of Bushmills. For the moment the operation was running as well as could be expected-better, in some ways. The Germans were still maintaining the bulk of their forces in the Normandy area, waiting for a blow that would never fall there. The Allies had established air superiority-if not total dominance-of the Calais battlespace. The Germans had put many more jet fighters into the fray than had been expected, and they had cut to ribbons whole wings of old prop-driven fighters, but they simply could not prevail against the huge numbers of Allied, mostly American, F-86 Sabers that confronted them. And the Germans didn’t have anything like the numbers of heavy and medium bombers that the RAF and USAAF could bring to bear. Nor had they invested in any kind of airborne warning and control systems like the Allies.

The great strategic surprise of the campaign, however, had been the airlift. The heavy, coordinated investment in just three types of helicopter by all of the Allies had paid handsome dividends. In just four days an extra six divisions had been lifted directly into the combat zone, including three artillery regiments with all of their howitzers and ammunition. It was a miracle.

“Prime Minister, Prince Harry and his regiment are en route.”

“Thank you,” he replied to the young army captain who had brought the news. Then he turned to Eisenhower. “And now we reach one of our trip wires, General. We shall see whether Donzenac is the bogey we all feared.”

Eisenhower nodded, pressing his lips together. “I sincerely hope not, Prime Minister.”

D-DAY + 8. 11 MAY 1944. 0232 HOURS.

SOUTH-CENTRAL FRANCE.

Fifteen silver darts shrieked over the evergreen forests of Correze, blue cones of superhot exhaust pushing them toward their target at a thousand kilometers an hour.

Squadron Leader Fiona Hobbins nudged the stick over slightly, shifting her heading two degrees to the south. The moonlit landscape blurred beneath her, the shimmering surface of a small lake rushing toward the nose of her fighter-bomber and vanishing beneath in just a couple of heartbeats. She paid it no heed, instead concentrating on the world she could see in the heads-up display of her powered goggles, a precious set of Oakleys on loan from the Clinton.

Behind her the other pilots wore identical sets, linked via the flexipads in their cockpits to one of the Trident’s high-altitude drones. It was a slipshod half-arsed arrangement, in Hobbins’s opinion, but there was no avoiding it. Until somebody built a plant capable of fabricating quantum chips, or even old Pentiums, they were stuck with these sorts of kludges.

Bottom line, though, they worked.

Mostly.

Her visuals resembled an old flight-sim game from the days before V3D, but that was enough to allow them to thread through the tangled mess of the air battle over France and into the target box, a short, shallow valley in the quiet south. As the squadron flashed over a small French hamlet, designated in light blue outline by the Trident’s Combat Intelligence, she craned her head to the left, where twenty-eight small green triangles were converging on her heading at about a quarter of her airspeed.

The Chinooks carrying Prince Harry and the SAS. Five minutes late and two choppers short. She quickly checked a status display and found that one of the big birds had been forced to turn back with hydraulic failures. Another had crashed in the channel.

Hobbins performed a few constrained isometric stretches to work out the kinks and some residual nervousness. If she fucked up, the men in those helicopters were all going to die. If not in battle, then soon thereafter. The Germans were still summarily executing any “Kommados” they captured.

A chime in her helmet sounded, and the voice of the Trident’s Combat Intelligence spoke up. “Five minutes to release point. Arm warheads.”

A small flashing red box appeared just above the virtual horizon in her HUD. She nudged the stick again, lining up the yellow arrowhead with the target designator. Back up in the twenty-first, a CI would have handled all of this, with the pilot riding along just in case something went wrong. Of course, back up in the twenty-first she wouldn’t have been on a mission like this. She wasn’t a jet jockey-or hadn’t been, anyway. But thousands of hours flying light transport planes in and out of Third World death traps like Damascus and Addis Ababa had marked her out when the talent scouts had come calling. So now she flew jets.

Specifically she flew the contemporary version of the F-86F Saber jet.

“Three minutes to release. Slaving mission package to CI.”