Designated Targets

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 Göring.

Himmler thought the führer 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 führer 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 Reichsführer-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 führer’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 führer’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.