Final impact

Julia had missed the first day of the offensive-she was stuck on the road from Dieppe to Abbeville, which, in her humble opinion, blew chunks. She didn’t like to stand still for very long these days. It gave her time to think about all the mistakes she’d made. It didn’t matter what anyone told her, she knew that she was to blame for Rosanna’s death. She could have gotten her off the island for sure if she’d really tried. God knew she’d wiggled out of tighter situations herself over the years. And as angry as she’d been with Dan over the whole pregnancy thing, in the end he’d been right. What had she married him for if not to start a family? She certainly hadn’t needed to walk down the aisle to get him into bed. And now he was dead because he’d had the shit-awful luck to fall in love with her.

She shook her head in the back of the jeep and cursed softly.

“Y’all okay there, Miss Duffy?” her driver asked. He was a pimply black kid from Detroit, name of Private Franklin, and he was still in awe of his unexpected passenger.

She smiled kindly at him. They were stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Thousands of vehicles stretched away in front and behind them. GIs trudged alongside the road in an unceasing line. Some of them slowed down to talk every now and then, usually until some noncom bawled at them to haul ass again. It would have been an irresistible target for the Luftwaffe…had the Luftwaffe not ceased to exist in any real sense in this part of the world. High above them countless numbers of Allied fighter aircraft described long, lazy figure eights, “guarding the parking lot,” as Julia explained to her companion.

“We’ll be out of this soon, ma’am. I’m sure of it,” Franklin promised.

“S’okay,” she said, staring across the plowed fields that surrounded them on both sides. “Gives me a chance to tally up all my regrets.”

“You, ma’am?” he gasped. “You couldn’t have any regrets! Damn, excuse me, ma’am. But damn, you’re famous and all. And rich. And pretty, too, if you don’t think me too forward for saying so, ma’am.”

Her smile touched the corners of her eyes for the first time in many days. “Thanks, Franklin. But I’m not Sinatra. I’ve had more than a few regrets.”

The jeep lunged forward a few feet as a pulse of movement crept along the jam.

“Hey, you know, that’s my favorite song, Miss Duffy. You want me to sing it for you? I can sing it real well. My mom says so, anyway.”

Before she could shrug and say Sure he was into the first verse, beating out a kickin’ version of the old tune, which had bounced around in the top ten for the last six months. She couldn’t help but laugh and join in the chorus. A couple of grounded paratroopers picked it up as they marched past, and within moments it had spread up and down the almost stationary line of traffic. Thousands of tired, bloodied men ripping out an a cappella power-ballad version of “My Way.”

Julia quickly unpacked her Sonycam, blocking out a precious few minutes of lattice memory to record something other than blood and horror.

There was more than enough of that waiting for her up ahead.

For six days the combined air forces of Britain, Canada, and the United States had carpet-bombed a corridor 120 kilometers long and 30 wide. Within that target box lay twelve armored and motorized divisions the Nazis had released from the “defense” of Normandy to attack the Allied Forces around Calais.

The first concerted air strikes had begun as the lead element of the German counterattack-the Panzer Lehr and the Panzer Korps Hermann Gцring- approached the town of Abbeville. The lead three tanks, Tiger IIs, rumbled onto a ridge to the east of town, but never even made it to the downslope. High above them, fifteen Lancaster bombers, protected by a squadron of Saber jet fighters, all of them controlled by the Nemesis battlespace arrays of HMS Trident three hundred kilometers away, released the first of tens of thousands of dumb iron bombs that would fall on the Germans over the next week.

The Tigers, their crews, and the armored personnel carriers traveling behind them were obliterated. The quantum arrays of the Trident delivered the weapons package in such a focused manner that most of the initial target mass was atomized, so tightly compressed was the storm of high explosives.

The strategic bombers hammered the centerline of the advance, all 120 kilometers of it, while hundreds of Cobra gunships and ground attack aircraft buzzed viciously on the flanks, chewing over any smaller formations that escaped the crucible. Nearly twelve hundred Tiger and Leopard tanks were destroyed in the first hour. By the end of the engagement two thousand more had been reduced to scrap metal, and approximately forty thousand German soldiers were dead.