Designated Targets

Council.

The journey up had been uneventful, if more than a little interesting. As was the case with most of her crew, Halabi had duties that kept her on station almost permanently. She rarely left the Trident. On the few occasions she did get away, the trip to London was always fascinating. Not just for the opportunity to examine the historic city and its surrounds firsthand, but also to see the human face of a war that had featured so prominently in her studies at Staff College. There were almost no private cars on the roads, and those very few she did see were gas conversions—preposterous contraptions with a small barrage balloon on the roof or trailing a gas burner in a sort of chariot arrangement. Cyclists were numerous and just as hazardous to life and limb as bicycle couriers in her day. Teams of horses drew post office vans. What few taxis were available tended to be monopolized by GIs with a lot more money than the locals. The open wounds of zigzag trenches defaced parks and playing fields. Women cooked over open fires in bomb sites and hauled buckets of water from who knew where. Occasionally she would spy somebody trying to pee in private behind a bush, often enough to suggest that the Nazis had some mad plan to destroy British morale by bombing all the country’s public conveniences out of existence. It was a feast for someone like her, with a first in social history from Oxford, and Halabi had allowed herself to become lost in her observations as she motored toward the War Room meeting.

That had gone well enough. Churchill was there, and she’d come to appreciate his presence when dealing with the contemporary military hierarchy. The PM was a famous curmudgeon with absolutely no tolerance for any nonsense that might interfere with the important business of making war on the enemies of the realm. The Defense Committee had reviewed the contingency plans for whatever Hitler might throw at them in the coming weeks. Halabi had explained, yet again, the capabilities and limitations of her ship, and brought everyone up to date on the latest intel take from her drones and ship sensors. The meeting had concluded on a somber note, with all agreeing that the storm was about to break over the island. But there was also some confidence that the Allies would weather it, however savage it might be. England was not defenseless, as she very nearly had been in 1941. Huge numbers of troops from the U.S. and the British Commonwealth were already in country, preparing to repel the assault. The Trident provided them with nearly total coverage of the enemy’s movements. And although the Advanced Weapons programs of Professor Wallis would not begin to deliver in strength for a few months, they still had a few unpleasant surprises in store for the Germans right now.

Halabi had left the meeting satisfied, and even a little more optimistic than when she’d arrived. The battle was unavoidable, but by no means unwinnable. There would be a terrible bloodletting, perhaps every bit as bad as the horrors of the First World War. But she thought the opposition had the bigger task. For all the firepower Hitler was bringing to bear, he was still faced with having to leap the Channel in less than perfect conditions, against a well-prepared opponent. It was not just a river crossing, whatever his loopier generals said.

Perhaps if she had been a little less sanguine, she wouldn’t have been so badly upset by what had happened next. Halabi was climbing the stairwell back up to King Charles Street. It was a long climb, the Cabinet War Rooms being buried so deeply underground. She was juggling her briefcase and flexipad, attempting to link back to the Trident for a situation report, when she suddenly made out her own name in the low burble of voices ahead of her on the stairwell.

Some part of her said, stop. She could just wait and let whoever it was get farther ahead of her. But her feet kept climbing, and she found herself unable to tune out the conversation.

“. . . unbelievable, really. That Winston would allow everything to turn on someone like that.”

“Well, he’s been hitting the bottle rather more enthusiastically of late.”

“Well, who hasn’t? It’s no excuse. A bloody darky and a woman. It’s a wonder the RAF lads haven’t jacked up, the losses they’ve taken saving her arse time and again.”

As she climbed the steps, Halabi was wrenched back to the tortures of her childhood. She suddenly felt, without having to distinctly recall each and every incident, the accumulated torment of a thousand cruel, unthinking petty insults. She felt the rising heat of free-floating shame and a prickle of panic sweat under her thick, hot clothing.

“I tell you what, if I had that ship of hers, old Raeder would know he’d been in a fight. There wouldn’t even be a bloody Kriegsmarine to worry about beyond a few e-boats. But she just sits there on the Motherbank doing her bloody knitting.”

“Wretched woman.”

“Well, we’ll see what happens when the real fighting starts, won’t we.”

Back on the Solent as the small boat swung around an old Halcyon-class minesweeper, her flexipad buzzed on her hip, jolting Halabi out of her reverie. She lifted the hem of her oilskin coat, unhooked the device, and powered up in one fluid movement, despite the rough conditions.

Her XO, a severe looking Scot named McTeale, appeared on screen. “We’ve got another big raid coming, Skipper,” he said. “About a hundred and thirty. All for us again, by the look of things.”

As McTeale spoke, she looked around and, sure enough, the ships of her antiair screen were coming to life. Thick smoke began pouring from the funnels, water churned as they maneuvered to best place themselves between the Luftwaffe’s attack and their priceless charge, the Trident.

The irony had long since faded, of her futuristic supership being guarded by a pack of creaking antiques. Three ’temp destroyers had already gone to the bottom protecting her.

As the ships picked up the pace, positioning themselves to counter the approaching enemy aircraft, McTeale continued to bring her up to speed. “They won’t be here for thirty-five minutes yet, ma’am. And two of Mallory’s big wings have already scrambled to meet them. They’ll be considerably thinned out even before they reach us.”

As he finished, Halabi thanked him and signed off, slapping the lighter’s helmsman on the back and shouting over the engine noise and brisk wind. “Get a move on, Bumpy. Company’s calling. Tie up, and cross deck with me. You’ll want to be out of the way if any of Goring’s boys get through.”

“Aye, ma’am,” the sailor called back, opening up the throttles and making the ride even more challenging. Halabi scanned the gray, dismal skies, but she already knew she’d be unlikely to catch sight of the RAF as it headed out to do battle. Her own CIC would vector the Spitfires and Hurricanes onto the incoming raid well before it reached the Channel. The Trident’s Nemesis arrays would provide a detailed picture of three-dimensional battlespace out to five hundred kilometers. It made the country’s contemporary air defense radar network—which had done so well in the Battle of Britain—utterly formidable. By the time the stealth destroyer had deployed its small fleet of drones, the UK had real-time surveillance cover deep into Germany itself.

It still doesn’t stop them coming, though, she thought.

The Luftwaffe was sending hundreds of German airmen to their deaths every day, attempting to destroy the RAF. And despite the losses, it was having an effect. The strain on the Royal Air Force was beginning to tell. If they cracked, invasion was inevitable.

It certainly appeared imminent. The buildup of Axis forces across the Channel had nearly reached critical mass, despite the best efforts of Bomber Command to disrupt Nazi preparations. Halabi’s best guess was that they had another fortnight to prepare, although if any of the continuous Luftwaffe raids actually broke through and took out the Trident, the attack would begin almost immediately. Because even with all her ground-attack cruise missiles gone, and her antiair missiles too precious to launch against flying crates like Stukas and Heinkel 110s, she remained the keystone of Britain’s defense.

Admiral Raeder couldn’t be sure how many ship killers remained in her vertical launch tubes—in fact, there were six. But he could be certain that her sensors kept London aware of every move made by anything bigger than a kubelwagen on his side of the Channel. Meanwhile, the ship’s combat intelligence and human sysops could coordinate Britain’s defensive efforts in a way that was far more effective than pushing wooden blocks around on a big table.

Yet still they were coming.

As the lighter moved to within a hundred meters of the Trident, Halabi linked her flexipad to the ship’s CIC and brought up a display of the dogfight that was unfolding to the south. The screen wasn’t big enough to show a real-time video feed from the high-altitude drones on station above the Channel, but the CGI schematic showed her enough. The raid had formed out of three airfields near Lille, St. Lo, and Rouen. Fighter cover, which was just peeling away to engage the RAF defenders, accounted for thirty hostiles. The rest were the bombers.

She doubted many would get through. Radar-controlled triple-A on the Isle of Wight and the destroyer screen would most likely deal with any planes that evaded the interceptors.