The jeep was bouncing so roughly that he couldn’t be sure of hitting anything with his carbine, so he leapt into the rear of the vehicle and unsafed the .50-caliber mount. For an antique, the big gun was still an awesome piece of fighting machinery.
Harry had to fire in short bursts, lest he demolish the Bentley with a badly aimed volley. They’d begun to take fire now, bullets pinging off the metalwork and cracking the windshield. Draper simply sped up, hunching over the wheel and pointing the car directly at the screaming, burning troops. Harry squeezed out two more bursts, chopping a couple of his targets in half, before he snatched up his carbine again as they drew too close to depress the barrel of the huge machine gun any further.
Time stretched and pulled. They hit a chunk of road excavated by the grenades he had fired, and the jeep lifted off for a short flight through clean air, slamming into the bodies of four burning Germans—at least he hoped they were Germans. One of them flew apart into half a dozen flaming chunks of roadkill.
Then he was down, in amongst them, the rifle firing single shots. Return fire zipped and whistled past his head.
He heard the deep boom of a Webley revolver and saw Draper out of the corner of his eye, dueling with two men. One was missing an arm below the elbow, and both were singed and smoking. The driver killed them and hurried over to the Bentley.
Harry smashed the butt of his M12 into the blackened face of a man dressed in a contemporary British sergeant’s uniform, who was swearing at him in low German.
And then nothing for a few seconds.
Silence.
. . .
. . .
. . .
His spinal inserts began to feed beta-blockers into his central nervous system, forestalling the tremors and shock that might otherwise have attended such an unexpected and violent incident.
Everything was rendered into hard clarity: the taste of the scorched air; the hundreds of pockmarks in the body of the prime minister’s car; the sizzle and spitting of burning rubber as the truck settled on the steel rims of its wheels; the sound of Corporal Draper, retching in the gutter; the flat, hollow crack of another pistol.
Harry spun and saw a slant scar-faced man advancing on them, firing a Luger. He whipped up his M12, but the trigger pulled back without response. It was empty.
Another bullet cracked past his head. His fighting knife was in his hands as though he had wished it there. Without conscious thought, he threw the dagger as he had so many thousands of times in practice. It embedded itself in the shoulder of the last attacker. The man’s face registered the pain as he attempted to wrench it out, but the serrated teeth on the inside of the blade stopped him.
And then he and Harry were on each other.
Iron knuckle-dusters slammed into Harry’s chest, breaking a couple of ribs that had already taken some terrible punishment in the fight at Alresford. He spun with the direction of the blow anyway, looping his hand around the other man’s forearm and pivoting quickly to bring force to bear on the vulnerable elbow. He heard the man gasp, but he was well trained, and accelerated his own movement in the same direction, speeding up to break free of the hold.
Harry grabbed the hilt of his fighting knife and reefed it free with a wet, tearing sound as they separated. The German grunted in pain, but no more. A shortened bayonet had appeared in his hand.
Both of them were breathing heavily, circling each other like caged wolves.
The man’s eyes narrowed, and he smiled. “Prince Harold, if I am right? Not wearing your swastika today, then, Your Highness? Oh, dear? Have I missed the party season?”
Harry didn’t respond. He was concentrating on the man’s defenses, looking for an avenue of attack.
“My name is Skorzeny. Colonel Otto Skorzeny,” he said. “And you are in my way.”
Skorzeny struck out with a quick slash at Harry’s knife hand, but the SAS officer was ready for that and withdrew the arm, which he’d hung out as a lure. He snapped a kick out, aiming for the colonel’s knee, but the German, too, was ready, and he rotated just far enough to allow the blow to glance off.
They slashed at each other three or four times, close enough now to drive in a killing blow, except that neither could penetrate the other’s defenses.
“Major Windsor, get out of the way, sir. Give me a clear shot.”
It was Draper, nursing an arm shattered by a bullet from Skorzeny’s pistol, aiming the Webley uncertainly with his other hand.
Harry heard a car door open behind him, and the thunder of boots on the steps of the Ministry.
Skorzeny smiled and plucked two grenades from his webbing, pulling the pin with his teeth, and dropping them on the ground. “Until next time,” he said, spinning around as rifle fire snapped past Harry’s head again.
“Grenade!” he yelled, turning to find Churchill emerging from the car without so much as a scratch on him yet.
Harry dived at the prime minister, slamming into him like the champion rugby player he’d once been, and driving the portly old man back into the relative safety of the armored car. A curse, a tangle of arms and legs, and then two explosions that shook the Bentley and peppered the interior with shrapnel through the still-open door. Harry felt some of it hit his body armor, and a hot shooting pain in his calf told him at least one piece had struck home.
Churchill heaved him off, and Harry backed out of the car, looking for Skorzeny.
A platoon or more of real British troops had arrived from within the Ministry building, and more were running up from the Horse Guards.
“He got away,” said Draper, appearing from around the other side of the Bentley.
The familiar voice of the British prime minister rode in over the top of him. “You know, Your Highness, we once had a civil war in this country to put the royal family in its place, and that place was
Harry took the PM’s outstretched hand, still looking for Skorzeny.
But he was gone.
EPILOGUE
The Quiet Room had no physical presence. There was no room, as such. The Quiet Room was a set of protocols, a number of agents, and an expression of will.
Admiral Phillip Kolhammer’s will.
He was not an autocrat. He consulted with those he trusted. Men like Captain Judge and Colonel Jones, or women such as Karen Halabi. But when it came time to make a call, the responsibility fell on him alone.
Kolhammer scanned the read-once-only report from one of his best agents. They sat in a nondescript conference room on campus in the Zone. The woman was dressed in civilian clothes. An expensive suit, cut in a twenty-first style by a local tailor who was becoming rich because of his ability to reproduce the designs of Zegna, Armani, and their contemporaries from magazine photographs that came through the Transition.
The woman was wealthy in her own right now. She worked for herself, but she answered to a higher purpose.
“You’ve done excellent work, Ms. O’Brien,” said Kolhammer. And he was impressed. She effectively ran a dozen large and rapidly growing enterprises on behalf of her clients. They’d come to trust her advice without reservation, so successful had she been in advancing their interests. Some of the clients were complex entities, corporate concerns with claims over intellectual property not yet existent in this universe. Some were individuals, such as Slim Jim Davidson.
As long as their wealth continued to grow at a staggering pace, Maria O’Brien’s clients asked her very few questions about the vast and ever-growing discretionary funds she invested on their behalf.
Kolhammer grinned at the thought of what an asshole like Davidson would think of his ill-gotten gains being channeled into something like the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference fifteen years before its time. Not much, he supposed, unless he could see a dollar in it—in which case, he probably couldn’t care
