Designated Targets

“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 Göring’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.”

He pointed a control stick at the wide screen that had been affixed to the brick wall less than a week earlier. Everyone turned toward it as the display winked into life and a map of the British Isles and Western Europe appeared. It was always a marvel to see these things, but Churchill was frustrated by the size of the screen. He privately felt that he could get a much better appreciation of developments on the old plotting table.