Final impact

Allied losses ran to two dozen bombers and fifteen helicopter gunships. The first press reports in London actually understated the scope of the victory, because nobody could bring themselves to believe it. Once the devastated corridor was secured by a highland regiment, Julia had hopped a flight over to see for herself the realities of what the tabloids had dubbed “the Great Turkey Shoot.”

When she’d finally escaped the corps-level traffic snarl, she’d recognized the first signs of destruction from twenty klicks out-a great burned-out scar on the face of the earth.

“Holy shit,” she muttered as her chopper bled off altitude and dropped down toward the ruined countryside. “Those boys really did do it their way. Anyone know how many Frenchies bought it?” she asked in a louder voice.

The pilot’s voice came back over the intercom. “Nobody’s saying, Miss Duffy. But I don’t see how anything could have survived inside the target box. I’ve flown twenty miles in, and all the way out to the horizon on both sides that’s all you see. Scorched earth. It’s fucking amazing.”

She nodded. The highway into Damascus had looked a bit like this when the air force had trashed the Syrian First Armored Corps. But at least that wreckage had maintained a sort of integrity, like a long drawn-out junkyard. You could see, as you flew over it, each cohesive unit that had been set upon and destroyed.

The devastation stretching across northern France was something entirely different, something she was only just getting used to, along with the ’temps. They might be a little backward in many ways, but when they put their minds to it they could do violence on an apocalyptic scale. It was funny, in a really dark way, thinking back to how horrified they’d been when the uptimers came spilling out of the wormhole with their detached, postmodernist, unemotional approach to warfare. There’d been quite a run of little books and magazine articles by the sniffier sort of contemporary intellectual about the “refined barbarism” of future morality and culture. Some days reading The New Yorker was like being trapped in a stalled elevator with Harold Bloom-and that had happened to her once, so she would know. As a genuine uptime celebrity Julia had even been dragged into the debate, arguing on radio with some idiot professor who wanted to ban television for fifty years to allow society time to “prepare” for its arrival. For all their initial squeamishness, however, the ’temps had proven themselves fast learners in the arts of savagery.

And when all that savagery was directed-as it had been over northern France-by twenty-first-century Combat Intelligence, the effect was exactly what she’d come to observe and report on: a genuinely biblical catastrophe.

“Holy shit,” she repeated.

“Yeah,” the pilot agreed, “that’s what everyone says.”

After they landed, Julia bivouacked with a British intelligence unit tasked with picking over the scrap metal and body parts, not that there was much of either to analyze. Over the next two days she shot a few megs of imagery that was eerily reminiscent of footage she’d seen from the First World War, then tried and failed to gain access to the handful of prisoners who’d been taken. There weren’t many, and she believed the Intel Division colonel who told her they weren’t speaking to anyone yet. Most were under sedation, he told her in confidence.

She filed a thousand words for the Times on her impressions of the Great Turkey Shoot, which were really no different from anything anybody else had to say. No matter how she tried to spin it, it all boiled down to “holy shit.”

She did a hometown puff piece on the crew of the Huey she’d ridden in with and filed a great bit on Private Franklin’s impromptu cover of Frank Sinatra on the road to Abbeville.

Then, while waiting for a lift back to Calais, she missed the opening shots of Patton’s breakout and drive toward Belgium.

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0411 HOURS.

BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

The fuhrer was screaming. The object of his rage, a poor Luftwaffe colonel with more bad news from the Western Front, looked gray, perhaps even feverish. Certainly he didn’t look healthy.

Rather than creating a pall over the crowded underground room, however, Hitler’s outburst actually lifted a few spirits, because it meant that the focus of his rage had shifted safely away from everyone else, at least for a brief moment. It had no effect whatsoever on Himmler, though, since he had long since stopped paying any attention to the fuhrer’s rants. They were like a constant background refrain, similar to the rumble of the British bombs during the night.