Designated Targets

“Is that more fighters, sir?” asked a private with an amazingly shiny hairdo.

Brylcreem, thought Harry.

“No, Private,” he answered, checking the heads-up display in his goggles. “My sergeant is aiming for some troop transports. You can’t see them yet, but he can. They’ll all be shot down long before they get here.”

There was no cheering this time. Some nodding, a few murmurs of appreciation, but no cheering.

“Are there going to be any left for us to get, Major?” asked the Brylcreem boy.

“Oh, yes,” replied Harry. “I’m afraid so.”

Something had gone wrong.

The pilots were shouting. The aircraft swooped and climbed and dropped down violently, throwing Albrechtson and men around the cabin. One man had already broken his arm, and the colonel himself would have been knocked out had he not been wearing a helmet.

Six loud flak bursts had gone off all around them, and it sounded as if every single shot had scored a hit. There was a terrible sound when a plane took a direct hit—all that metal and fuel and ammunition going up simultaneously. It was a much denser report than the slightly empty boom of a near miss.

He began to feel just how painfully slow the JU-52 was—that was why they stopped using them as bombers in the first place. Fighters and ack-ack guns picked them off too easily.

Every muscle in his body was clenched, urging them on to the drop point just that little bit faster. The rapid pom-pom-pom sound of Bofors shells going off all around them told him that their fighter escorts hadn’t dealt with the enemy’s antiaircraft emplacements. The transport bucked and jolted alarmingly as near misses buffeted them. Some of his men began exchanging worried glances. A young paratrooper at the far end of the cabin vomited over his boots. Another man, two places down from him, was suddenly thrown forward and dropped to floor, his parachute shredded and smoking, blood leaking out of his tunic.

The jump light turned red. The men all held up their hooks for the static line.

“Up!” he called out, checking his helmet strap.

The men arose as one, even the kid who had been puking his guts out.

“Hook up!”

Standing by the open door, Albrechtson felt the tug of the slipstream. The rushing air added a constant roar to the crash of exploding shells as his seventeen surviving men hooked their chutes onto the line. Some tumbled over, cursing, as a volley exploded over the wing, punching the plane down and to the left. Albrechtson saw three lines of tracer converge on another Junkers two hundreds away. The portside engine blew up and sheared off the wing.

“Equipment check,” he yelled over the noise.

Each paratrooper patted and pulled at the man in front him, checking for faults that might kill a man before he had a chance to fight.

“Sound off!”

They counted themselves down, halting temporarily at the ninth man, as two windows shattered and somebody screamed.

“It’s Dietz. He’s gone.”

The puking kid was dead.

The count continued, as the men on either side of Dietz cleared his body from the lineup.

Albrechtson called out that he was clear as the red light turned green.

He grabbed the frame of the exit and thrust himself out. He felt the shock of hitting the airstream at speed and heard the zip-zip-zip of bullets passing by his head. His chute deployed, and his boots swung up with the jerk of interrupted momentum.

It was peaceful then, dropping through the autumnal sky, no longer trapped in the corrugated metal coffin. He could see the airfield below, and the gliders dropping gracefully toward their landing zone.

But his stomach lurched as he searched the sky for the transports that were carrying his Fallschirmjäger. There were so few left. He knew they’d taken casualties before the escorts had driven off or—more likely—destroyed their attackers. But it seemed as though only a handful of 52s had made it through.

As he glided down, Albrechtson frantically searched for his binoculars, a small pair of Zeiss glasses he kept in a breast pocket. He found them, then nearly dropped them, before finally managing to turn them toward the target. He expected to find massed flak batteries down there. Or evidence of a squadron that had been missed by the Abwehr. There was no sign of either. Yet half his command had already been destroyed.

This was going to be like Crete all over again.

Prince Harry calculated that about 210 paratroopers had popped chutes overhead. Trooper Akerman said 220. Bolt put his money on around two hundred.

“We’ll count them afterwards,” Harry decided as he fixed a microlight targeting dot on the chest of a descending paratrooper.

“A fiver on the result.” Bolt just wouldn’t let it go.

The German appeared at a virtual distance of ten meters in Harry’s goggles, although he was actually a good four hundred meters away. Harry exhaled slowly and applied smooth, even pressure to the trigger, until his rifle kicked back with a loud, flat bang.