Designated Targets

He heard Akerman grunt and drop. A flashing red icon on his HUD told him the trooper had fallen off the tac net. He was dead. Harry didn’t have time to check on why. A lucky shot, perhaps.

He held the M12 level now, the point of his bayonet leading him into the no-man’s land of the ruined airstrip, the screams of berserkers all around.

They’d done it.

Albrechtson wanted to hug the men who’d risked all to capture that antiaircraft gun and turn it on the Tommies. They raked the tree line on the little hill where the enemy had deployed at least three of four separate sections to pour fire down on his men.

The Bofors mount had a direct line of sight that allowed them to target only half the ridgeline, being partially blocked by a crashed glider and a burning British truck. But the explosive ordnance had a dramatic and immediate effect, anyway, shredding the cover and chewing up huge gouts of soil and turf on that part of the hill that it could engage.

The volume of fire from that area dropped away almost completely.

Three more gliders touched down in the safety of the next field, and with only a handful of casualties, most probably from a sniper. Those men disembarked at a run.

A perimeter was established, and they began to work on the British flank, targeting those defenders who were protected from the ack-ack gun. He recognized the sweet sound of an MG42, so much like ripping cloth.

A second Spandau opened up.

A sergeant rolled into the small crater where Albrechtson had taken shelter. He had six other paratroopers with him, to add to the five the colonel had gathered together. Almost the makings of a platoon. If they could just—

“Get up!” he barked at them. “Now!”

A second German came at Harry as he struggled to withdraw his bayonet from the first, who was still thrashing about like a speared trout. He squeezed off a round, using the recoil and the hydrostatic shock to help him wrench free the blade.

But it was too late. He couldn’t possibly turn around in time. His attacker was crazed. Eyes rolled back in his head, frothing at the mouth, tendrils of ragged flesh and khaki swinging from the bloodied spike that was attached to his Mauser.

Harry turned his hips, taking himself out of the line of attack and simultaneously parrying the bayonet thrust with the muzzle of his M12. He summoned a kiai from deep within his gut. The focused war shout directed his energies and disrupted the flow of his would-be killer. Without thought, without aim, he snapped out a side kick, driving his boot into and through the most vulnerable point, the German’s kneecap, with all the force he could muster, pivoting on his other leg to deliver extra torque.

He felt and heard the joint disintegrate with a sickeningly wet crunch.

The man dropped, screaming, until the butt of Harry’s carbine smashed into the bridge of his nose with such power that it destroyed the sinus cavities and caved in the frontal lobes. He was dead before he’d fallen all the way to the ground.

Men tore at each other like animals. So closely enmeshed were attackers and defenders that Harry couldn’t fire his weapon normally, for fear of killing one of his own. Combatants shrieked and howled and sank their teeth into each other’s throats. In the midst of this psychotic delirium, he and the other SAS man stood out for their economy of movement, and the efficiency with which they dispatched their victims. A knife-hand strike to the throat, a twisting lock that snapped the head free of the spine, the thumb driven into an eye socket, to distract before a fighting knife severed the carotid artery and windpipe.

With two decades of the close-quarter fighting between them, from the Tora Bora Mountains to the alleyways of Surabaya, they drew on a wealth of memory and experience about how best to kill a man when he’s close enough to exhale his last ragged breath into your face.

A sledgehammer hit him in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. He thought he heard the rifle shot a second later, but of course that couldn’t be so.

Harry hit the ground and rolled. The pain of the impact was enormous and crippling, even though he’d been saved by the reactive matrix weave of his body armor. Burnt earth, coppery with blood, filled his mouth. When the world stopped spiraling about him, he rolled onto his back, his pistol in hand. A German officer was standing ten feet away, frantically working the bolt on his rifle.

The Prince’s arm was numb with shock. He had to tell his fingers to squeeze the trigger, cursing them as they refused to obey him.

The German raised the rifle.

Harry felt like his teeth might shatter, so hard was he biting down with the effort of just trying to pull the damned trigger.

The gun jumped, and the German spun into the ground.

Harry felt the familiar tingle of spinal inserts as they began squirting their contents into his nervous system. Some feeling returned to the arm; renewed energy coursed through his body. He levered himself up.