Final impact

On the main battlespace display nearly two hundred white lines reached out from the blue triangles denoting the USAAF interceptors. They sped away from the launch point, tracking swiftly across the screen toward the red triangles of the Luftwaffe’s attack group. On screen the German 262s suddenly tried to scatter, their tight formation breaking up into a chaotic swarm of diving, twisting, climbing planes.

“CI reports the Germans have deployed chaff and flares, Captain.”

“Thank you, Ms. Burchill. Are they proving significant?”

“Posh calculates that about forty percent of the USAAF salvo appears to have been drawn off-target, ma’am.”

But small white circles started to bloom on the monitor as the other missiles, which had not been fooled by the German countermeasures, began to strike home. Just one or two at first, then five or six all at once. Dozens of tiny pixilated flashes marked where a missile had plowed into an exhaust vent, wing, or fuselage and detonated, punching the aircraft out of the sky and its pilot out of existence.

“CI confirms forty-eight kills, Captain.”

“Second launch detected.”

Dozens more missiles sped away from the blue triangles. Posh counted sixty-eight in total. Again the Trident’s Nemesis arrays detected the Luftwaffe pilots’ attempts to decoy the AT/AIM-7s, and again they were successful in about 40 percent of cases. But another twenty-six German jets were raked from the sky.

“Third salvo ma’am.”

“Thank you, Burchill.”

All but five of the surviving attackers were engulfed and destroyed. Halabi watched as the Sabers continued on the same heading for half a minute, suddenly breaking formation as they came within cannon range of the Germans. Less than a minute later every last attacking plane had been scythed down.

The Sabers broke off and made for their base back in northern France, while another two squadrons took up the holding pattern in their place, guarding against any follow-up attack. Halabi sipped at her tea.

“Very good work, everyone,” she said. “Mr. Leroy, my compliments to fighter command.”

“You betcha, ma’am. That was some fine shootin’.”

Halabi nodded quietly, wondering again how Leroy, a Texan just like her husband, had ended up in fighter command, an RAF show. She’d never had a chance to ask him. On most days, anywhere between thirty and forty ’temp liaison staffers were aboard. They came, they went. She’d given up trying to keep them straight in her head.

“Mr. McTeale,” she said to her executive officer, “I’ll be on the bridge for half an hour, then I’m turning in. Keep my chair warm here, would you?”

“Very good, ma’am,” the XO answered in his warm Scottish brogue. “And congratulations to you, too, Captain. You saved a lot of mams from losing their bairns tonight.”

“Traffic control, Mr. McTeale. It’s just traffic control.”

D-DAY + 26. 29 MAY 1944. 0231 HOURS.

THIRD ARMY MOBILE COMMAND, BELGIUM.

“That must have been it.”

Patton’s intelligence boss scanned the southern skies with a pair of Starlite binoculars, but there wasn’t much to be seen. The weather had closed in, and there was no telling whether the faint flashes came from the air battle Julia had just been told about, or from the sheet lightning that strobe-lit the countryside at irregular intervals.

“Damn shame,” Patton said as he looked longingly at his radar-controlled triple-A and SAM half-tracks. “I was looking forward to that.”

Julia Duffy rolled her eyes in the dark. These guys took their whole alpha-male routine way too seriously. The last thing you wanted was a bunch of German fast movers getting close enough for you to see the fireworks when they got swatted. They moved so fast, there was always a good chance some were going to slip through. She’d happily give that a miss.

For all of the combat she’d covered with the Times after the Murdoch takeover back up in twenty-one, she had never seen anything to match the world-ending violence of a big armor clash. Most of her work uptime had seen her embedded with small units of ground fighters, working jungle or mud brick environments in Asia and the Middle East. On those occasions when she had covered large-scale land battles, they tended to be very one-sided affairs, like the battles of Damascus or Aden, with American or British armored divisions rolling over the burned-out wrecks of late-Soviet-era antique tanks.

Patton was using air supremacy to make his campaign as one-sided as possible, but without an Eastern Front to fight on, the Germans had well over a hundred divisions to block the Allied path to Berlin, and they were learning not to mass their armor and artillery out in the open where it could be hammered from above.

Patton leaned over the hood of his jeep, peering at a map covered in a dense tangle of red and blue lines. They’d pulled up on a ridge overlooking the site of a fierce struggle that had taken place an hour earlier between the Black Panthers and what had turned out to be an SS armored regiment.