Designated Targets

Hundreds of ground crew, technicians, and even pilots who’d been enjoying the warm autumn day were hurrying for slit trenches and sandbagged antiair mounts. Hobbins felt rather than saw it when the tarmac changed to grass beneath her pounding boots. A zigzag trench line beckoned, and some finely honed instinct made her dive for it rather than running and climbing in. That jump saved her life.

A grotesquely loud shriek, whoosh, and roar signaled the arrival of the hypersonic Laval over the base. The shock wave burst the eardrums of everyone within eight or nine hundred meters, including Hobbins, who screamed as it felt like long metal skewers were being driven into her head.

Unlike the American hammerhead-type missiles, the French weapon didn’t need to open a bay door on its underside. Two hundred mini-silos were built into the fuselage, and those spat out submunitions of fused DU and SRDX accelerant. Rendered deaf, Hobbins was unable to register the impact of the first bomblets as they went tearing into the hardened concrete bunker, shredding it like crepe paper.

The rolling percussion of primary and secondary explosions registered as dull mallet blows somewhere outside her head. The Laval screamed past, far enough away that she survived the impact of the small front of violently compressed air that was trailing the rocket at five thousand kilometers an hour. Unprotected, the two crewmen she’d passed earlier flew apart as though hit by a speeding locomotive when the wave struck them.

A blizzard of offal poured into the slit trench, which threatened to collapse as the rest of RAF Biggin Hill was destroyed.

Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins curled up at the foot of the trench and waited to die. But the final eruption never came.

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

There was no live video feed available, for which Harry was grateful. He didn’t need to see what happened when you unleashed a Multipurpose Augmented Ground Attack device on a target that wasn’t prepared for it. He’d been amongst the first troops into Algiers after the French Mediterranean Fleet “reduced” the city in retaliation for the radiological attack on Marseilles. Biggin Hill was a little sturdier than the mud brick capital of Algeria, but not so much as made any difference.

The SAS men and their Norwegian colleagues had cheered when the screen in the Trident’s main hangar had shown the first two Lavals veering off course. But the cheering had died out as it became obvious there’d be no reprieve from the third missile. Harry had turned away from the screen, and was busying himself checking their gear for the short hop back to Portsmouth when Sergeant St. Clair called out.

“Look, guv, the primary didn’t go off.”

Harry looked up and was amazed to discover that his RSM was right. The Combat Intelligence indicated that the submunitions had fired, but not the main warhead. That would have excavated about three quarters of Biggin Hill down to a depth of thirty meters in less than one second.

“Has it moved on to a secondary target?” he asked. A part of him was afraid that the Germans had figured out how to program the missile to strike at multiple points, as it was meant to do.

But no. A flashing dialog box indicted that the ship’s Nemesis arrays were no longer tracking the weapon, and hadn’t registered any primary detonation of the Laval’s subfusion plasma yield warhead.

Most likely it had simply crashed somewhere.

“Vive la France,” Harry murmured. Whoever had been able to dicker with the first two shots, he must have been interrupted before he could finish with number three. The SAS commander wished him—or her—good luck, wherever they were.

Even so, Biggin Hill was a write-off. But he wondered if the Germans knew what had happened.

THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA

“We shall have crushed the life out of them by the time nightfall arrives,” boasted Goring.

Himmler thought the fuhrer seemed less sanguine, having been here before with his Luftwaffe chief, but the reports were good.

In war, it was always advisable to discount the best and the worst of everything one heard. But the news coming out of the firestorm they’d unleashed over England was encouraging. Three experienced pilots had radioed back reports of a catastrophe engulfing the RAF station called Biggin Hill, a name they had all come to loathe back in late 1940.

Two others reported identical results over Croydon and Hornchurch.

It was frustrating that they couldn’t duplicate the surveillance the British enjoyed thanks to the Trident. They would all have been much happier, seeing the results of the missile attack for themselves. But as the fuhrer rightly pointed out, what did it matter if the British had a perfect view of their doom as it came rushing at them? It was still their doom.

The Reichsfuhrer-SS had flown straight back to the Wolfschanze, having watched Skorzeny depart, and he had been quietly amazed to see how far and how rapidly the situation had developed.

Defeatists and cowards within the High Command had balked at Operation Sea Dragon, even questioning the fuhrer’s judgment. But their craven attitude was no longer a consideration. There was a phrase from the future that Himmler quite liked, and which described them perfectly. Oxygen thieves. Well, they weren’t stealing any of the fuhrer’s oxygen now. The only pity was that they weren’t alive to see how wrong they’d been.

The Operations Room was crowded with personnel. The large central table, inlaid with a huge map of western Europe, was covered with hundreds of small wooden markers. These were constantly being pushed toward their objective by junior staff members carrying long, thin poles.

A young female Oberleutnant moved several little wooden blocks, signifying the Tirpitz’s battle group, a few miles farther down the Norwegian coastline. A Luftwaffe Hauptmann needed two long pointers to reposition all the airborne forces that were now winging their way toward the east coast of England. Dozens of markers showed Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS divisions converging on the embarkation ports, while dozens more denoted the thousands of Luftwaffe planes that engaged the Royal Air Force over the Channel, or bombed airfields in the southern counties. These measures protected the invasion fleet as it set out from France, and harassed the Royal Navy’s squadrons as they moved to intervene.

“Savor this moment, gentlemen,” the fuhrer declared as he slowly circled the Ops Room, followed by his entourage. “There has never been a greater force assembled in the history of human conflict. And there has never been a heavier blow landed on that little island. We are not just remaking history today. We are smashing it into a thousand pieces.”

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

“Good luck, Major Windsor.”

“Thank you, Captain Halabi. Better luck next time, eh?”

The commander of the Trident and the SAS officer saluted each other. Harry’s was the last group to be lifted off the destroyer. The observer group, for the most part, had been put ashore, with just two liaison officers remaining. Harry was lifting with his squad and their equipment for a fast, nap of the Earth flight to London, from where he was to link up with the regiment. Nobody yet knew where that might be. It would depend on the Germans to a large extent.

Weak gray sunlight poured in through the hangar roof. The sky was a shroud, the color of dirty washing water. It was a high ceiling, however, and it seemed as if hundreds of planes dueled beneath the clouds. Here and there, puffs of smoke and flame marked the end of the fight for somebody. Parachutes billowed occasionally, but not always, and once or twice he heard the crackle of laser fire burning the air around the ship as a Stuka or a Heinkel pressed home a suicidal attack.

No jets had as yet reappeared. Halabi had told him she expected they’d be back when her antiair stocks were demonstrably empty.

She didn’t even wait for the elevator to lift them clear of the hangar, returning to her station as soon as they began the ascent. A couple of the Air Div crew waved him off, and Harry replied with a thumbs-up. But he felt a lot less jaunty than the gesture implied.