Designated Targets

The Soviet–German cease-fire remained intact, for now. Stalin was still refusing to return any of the Allied ships or personnel that had been trapped at Murmansk when he unilaterally withdrew from hostilities against the Reich. The German buildup continued, but there had been no obvious surge to indicate that an attempted channel crossing was likely to being immediately.

There was nothing, really, that justified dragging her away from Portsmouth and the Trident without notice.

She heard the pilot’s voice through her earpiece. “ETA twelve minutes, Skipper. We’ll be setting down at Biggin Hill. There’s a car waiting there for you.”

“Thanks, Andy,” she said. “Don’t hang around if there’s a raid inbound while I’m gone. I wouldn’t trust that hardened shelter to stand up in a sun shower.”

“Righto, Skipper.”

They passed over a convoy of American trucks on a road heading south. The line of vehicles stretched out for well over a mile, and at least half of them seemed to be towing artillery pieces. Troops in the open trucks waved as they roared over.

A thunderhead far away to the west dropped sheets of gray rain on rolling farmland, while beneath them she could see dozens of schoolboys in uniform, digging with spades to widen a stream into a makeshift antitank ditch. Fields and pasture were marred by the sprouting spikes of sharpened stakes to prevent gliders landing. The sight reminded her of Branagh’s Henry V, which was immensely popular in the movie theaters at the moment. The BBC had telerecorded a master copy to film from her own ship’s video library. Here and there, crossroads were marked by barrel-like blocks of concrete, or piles of wrecked cars, rusty plows and mounds of rubble, ready to be pushed on the road surface to form another small obstacle to any possible German advance. Sometimes she saw trees that had been cut down by the roadside, ready to be dragged across as further obstacles.

The open countryside gave way to more roads and buildings. As they swooped over a village, her pilot pointed out the firing slits that had been knocked into the upper floors of two whitewashed houses that had probably been built when Shakespeare was a boy. Concrete cubes lay scattered around a radar station, even though it had been made entirely redundant by her ship’s Nemesis arrays. It made sense to keep the contemporary facilities active. They’d be needed if the Trident was ever successfully attacked and disabled.

The airfield at Biggin Hill drew closer, a broad area of clear ground, crisscrossed with tarmac, dotted with hangars, protected by bristling nests of antiaircraft artillery, some of it now radar controlled. The pockmarks of previous Luftwaffe bombing raids were clearly visible as discolored patches of grass and runway, damaged buildings, and piles of wreckage.

They set down alongside a specially constructed hangar, which was supposedly designed to withstand a direct bomb strike. The chopper settled onto its wheels a hundred meters from the bunker as ground crew made ready to run in and secure the propeller blades against any gusts coming from the storms to the west.

Halabi jumped out, crouching, and hurried over to a waiting jeep.

“Putting her in under cover, Captain?” asked the ground crew chief with a hopeful tone. Judging from the look on his face, he’d never had the chance to get a really good look at the exotic warcraft.

“Only if that storm comes over, Sergeant. And if we get a head’s-up that Jerry is on his way, my lads are out of here. Sorry.”

“Right you are, ma’am,” he said, disappointment echoing in his voice.

With the omniscient arrays of the Trident on hand to warn of developing air attacks long before they could even form up over France, a curious dissonance had come over the British high command. They lived under the sword of Damocles, knowing that it must fall. An attempt at invasion was imminent. Yet the power of those early-warning systems meant that a degree of relaxation now existed in London, even as preparations to meet the Nazi blitzkrieg accelerated. Halabi saw no street signs as she drove through the city, no locale indications of any kind. Even war memorials had been defaced to remove the names of local boroughs. There were no milestones to be seen. They had all been pulled up.