Final impact

Four Sabers roared overhead, and Julia looked up. They were high, but she thought she could make out the bombs and rockets positioned under their wings. Ground attack craft.

“Do you think I could write up the story of what happened down at Donzenac?” she asked.

All she got was a sly, furtive grin.

“Well?”

“I know nothing about this Donzenac,” Ronsard answered. Then he finished the last of his roll and washed it down with a mouthful of coffee.

“Spare me, Marcel. Everyone knows about Donzenac. Or they think they know about it. There was a piece in the Times, but it was small, and they couldn’t get any details.”

As she spoke, she leaned over the cramped breakfast table, and he leaned back as much as was possible on the tiny balcony. He closed his eyes and seemed to enjoy taking his time, soaking up the rays.

“I am sure there would be no trouble in getting you to Scotland,” he said. “His Royal Highness has allowed one or two other reporters through before, and you are an embed, yes? So you have been cleared. What young Harry agrees to discuss with you once you are there, however, that would really be his business, would it not?”

Julia nodded, satisfied with half an answer. “Okay,” she said. “You get me into the regiment, and we can spend a bit of time together up there. But first I have this job with Prather. They’ve blocked out half a page for me back in New York. Can you work with that?”

Ronsard’s sleepy eyes opened slowly.

“But you do not have to meet this Prather until this afternoon, right?”

“Right,” Julia said, uncurling herself from her chair and walking back into the room.

12

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 1533 HOURS.

761ST TANK BATTALION, BRUGGE, BELGIUM.

Captain Prather was a believer.

Julia had met a lot of them, both here and uptime. There was a USAF major in Syria who wanted to air-drop billions of genetically engineered “attack” scorpions on Damascus, to paralyze the entire population before a coded gene sequence killed all the stingers two days later.

There was the CIA contractor who wanted to raise a private army of orphaned Arab children, to run as deep-penetration agents when they were old enough to send back into their parent societies. He thought that eleven or twelve years old would be just about right.

There was Manning Pope, of course, the scientist who’d marooned them all here. And there was an armored division colonel named MacMasters who came up with the idea of sewing jihadi insurgents into pigskins before burying them. Actually, he’d borrowed the idea from “Black Jack” Pershing, who’d done the same thing to Islamic guerrillas in the Philippines back in the 1900s.

She had no idea what happened to the scorpion guy, or the spook, or even to Pope. The colonel, however, had gone on to become the Republican senator for Kansas, where he’d made certain that his favorite tactic became a “sanctioned field punishment” available to U.S. commanders when dealing with Islamic extremists. Last Julia knew of him, he was still confounding the liberal press with his boyish enthusiasm for the never-ending war, back up in twenty-one.

Captain Chris Prather still had his boyish enthusiasms, too. She found him atop the reinforced turret of one of “his” Easy Eight Super Shermans, in a holding area about fifteen klicks back from the front-although the way Patton kept driving forward, “the front” wasn’t a stable concept. When she located him, after slopping through a muddy parking lot full of tanks, jeeps, and deuce-and-a-halves, he was bent over with his head buried inside the turret, talking to the crew. This gave her a wide-screen view of his butt.

“Hey,” she called out. “Does that big ass up yonder belong to a Captain Prather?”

Two African American tankers, members of the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion, were standing by the treads. They favored her with flashing white smiles.

“Well picked, madam,” the taller one said with an incongruously polished Bostonian accent. “You clearly know your asses.”

He stepped forward and extended his hand. She returned the firm grip as Prather extracted himself from the turret. Snatching up an old rag, he called down to somebody inside the tank. “Take five, Robinson. We got company.”

Prather was a good-looking white boy with a southern accent. Kentucky, perhaps. He stood about five-eight with black hair and hazel eyes. He had broad shoulders and looked like he punched in around 180 pounds. He was a ’temp but seemed perfectly at ease surrounded by his black comrades. Not for the first time Julia had to remind herself to stop thinking of the ’temps as a nation of rednecked buttheads. You’d have thought she might have learned that from Dan, if nothing else.

“Miss Duffy, I guess?” Prather used the rag to wipe grease from his powerful hands.

“Ms. Duffy,” she replied, “but Julia or Jules will do.”