Designated Targets

“Weapons, can we get an intercept lock?”

“Negative, Captain.”

That was the answer Halabi expected. “Mr. Howard, does Posh have an attack profile yet?’

“They’re ground-attack variants, Skipper. Almost certainly taken off the Dessaix at some point, and transferred to a makeshift launch tube. They may have even dismantled part of her VLS and used that.”

“Doubtful,” she mused.

“No projections on likely targets yet, ma’am, but if it was me I’d hit the key sector stations—Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, Debden, and North Weald. Luftwaffe’s been leaving them alone, concentrating their bombers on Croydon, Rochford, and the others. Those stations are near critical, and a lot of capacity’s been shifted to the undamaged fields. A hammerhead run would knock the RAF out of southern England.”

“Comms, you got that?” Halabi asked. Air Vice Marshal Caterson and a couple of the other tourists began to advance on her command station. She ignored them for the moment. “Better give them a heads-up on shore. They’re about to get the shit kicked out of them.”

“I think you’d best explain what the hell is going on,” Caterson demanded.

“Three ground-attack missiles are heading toward England at over five thousand miles an hour,” she said, without betraying any emotion. “We cannot stop them. We don’t know where they’re going to hit, but whatever the target is, it will be gone very soon. My intelligence chief has indicated that the most likely targets are your main sector stations. There’s only three missiles, but they’re carrying enough submunitions to destroy all four airfields, and then some.”

“I see,” Caterson said quietly. “And having brought this upon us, what are you going to do about it?”

Halabi ignored the baited hook. “We’re going to do exactly as we planned and stay here, providing battlespace management data, waiting for the German surface assets to attempt the crossing.”

“Damn you, and your crew,” he spat. “What sort of a captain are you, anyway, Halabi? Get out there and do something. You’ve got this God-almighty ship of yours, but you’re hiding behind those destroyers that’re out there protecting your worthless black hide.

“Get—out—there—and—do something!”

The CIC crew maintained their stations. Nobody as much as turned in their direction. But the buzz of discussion dropped away, and Halabi could feel it as everybody in the room shifted their attention onto her.

“Mr. McTeale,” she said, fighting to keep a quaver away from her voice. “Call Chief Waddington, and have him come up here with a security detachment. If the Air Vice Marshal Caterson opens his mouth again, have him removed.”

“Very good, ma’am.”

Before Caterson could do anything to get himself thrown out, her chief defensive sysop called out. “Captain! One of the Lavals has splashed. And another has just corkscrewed off course over the North Sea.”

Halabi, McTeale, and all the ’temps searched the main viewscreens. Indeed, one of the red triangles had disappeared, and the other was moving erratically. The Trident’s captain remained outwardly unmoved, but inside her a little cartoon Halabi was leaping up and down, punching a fist in the air. Kolhammer had reported that many of the missiles fired on Hawaii had malfunctioned, probably through sabotage. She’d been praying to a God she’d never really believed in, hoping beyond hope that whichever of the Dessaix’s crew had been responsible for that sabotage may have been able to get to these missiles, too.

But there was still one French hammerhead streaking in toward London.

“What’s happened, Captain?” asked an army brigadier named Beaumont. She didn’t mind him as much as Caterson. An old India hand, he’d once or twice shown himself to be more accepting of her command, and of those members of her crew whose bloodlines didn’t necessarily go all the way back to pre-Norman England.

“At first blush, sir,” she said, pointedly paying respect to his rank, “it would seem as if somebody on the Dessaix doubled-crossed the Germans. Two of the missiles appear to have been sabotaged.”

“Splash two, Captain.”

“There,” she said, pointing at the flashing red triangle before it blinked out. “The second Laval has gone down.”

“But not the third?”

“No, sir. I’m afraid not. And if it hasn’t shown any signs by now, it probably won’t.”

The ship’s defensive sysop spoke up. “Posh has determined that Biggin Hill is the most likely target.”

“Captain, we have significant movement out of Calais, Dieppe, Cherbourg, and Rotterdam.”

“Captain?” asked Beaumont.

Halabi took a few seconds to digest everything on the big screen: the developing airborne assault out of Norway, the strategic campaign against the islands’ air defense net, the naval forces now surging out of the continent. It was cack-handed and primitive and barely coordinated, by the standards of her day, but she recognized the underlying principle.

“It’s called a horizontal and vertical envelopment, Brigadier. Swarming, to use the vernacular. Although I believe the old-fashioned term invasion probably covers it all.

“Gentlemen,” she said, raising her voice slightly to grab the attention of all the ’temps. “We’re game-on. My intelligence division will monitor the assault as it develops, and keep you updated with the attack profile. We’re already streaming data to London via laser relay. If you’ll examine the big screen, you’ll see the German capital ships swinging into the Channel from the north. I need to move out in order to engage this group with my remaining ship-killers.

“We will be offloading Major Windsor’s men by helicopter. I suggest you take the opportunity to get back on shore, as well. You will be needed there.”

Beaumont saluted, as did a couple of his fellow officers. Most however, did not.

“Mr. McTeale, please escort our guests to the hangars.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Comms, inform the destroyer screen that we’ll deploy in forty minutes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Halabi watched the dozen or so staff officers troop out after her exec. She walled off her personal feelings at the affront handed to both her and the crew by Caterson and his colleagues. It was lucky, she thought, that she knew what sort of enemy they were really fighting today. Otherwise she might have wondered whether their lives were worth it.

The Cabinet War Rooms lay deep under the streets of London, beyond the reach of Goring’s bombers. Churchill remembered the many late nights they’d spent here during the blitz and the Battle of Britain. He recalled the way the shock waves from an especially close hit traveled up through the wooden frame of the chair he now sat in, in front of the old-fashioned world map, at the head of the Cabinet table. Almost everything was as it had been. Sweating brick walls the color of spoiled cream. The massive red steel girders running across the ceiling. The ashen gray faces of his advisers. The stale air. Only the rumble and deep, tectonic shudder of Nazi bombing was absent.

The Luftwaffe had been concentrating on the RAF’s airfields, radar stations, and, of course, on the Trident for three months now. The city had been spared, but for what, he wondered. Was it now to be destroyed in a cataclysmic battle, street by street, a thousand years of history and culture reduced to rubble and ash?

Not if he could help it.

“Well, gentleman,” the prime minister said after everyone had taken their seats. “The darkest of days is upon us, but if we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men the greater share of honor.”

Shakespeare’s words fell though four hundreds years into the taut silence of the room.

Churchill waited on somebody to speak. But his generals and admirals were silent. Before the moment could become uncomfortable, the PM continued. “Well, then, let’s us stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood. Lieutenant Williams, if you will?”

The young officer, one of Captain Halabi’s people, came to his feet. “Thank you, Prime Minister.”