Final impact

“Again!” Murphy called out.

The volley was a little more ragged this time, each man firing independently. Five staggered whumps, five more detonations.

Julia raised the camera to the window again, just before Corporal Murphy hoisted his rifle and squeezed off a three-round burst. A German soldier who had come running out of the house covered in blood and beating at flames on his arms was thrown back inside. Only the soles of his boots showed in the darkened doorway. They twitched for few seconds before going still. His burning uniform threw a guttering light on the shambles inside.

“Okay. All right. Stand down,” the corporal yelled.

“Well, that’s that, I figure,” Murphy went on a little more quietly, sliding down the wall to sit with his legs splayed out in front of him. “If Reynolds is alive, he should be able to get here now.”

Juarez, the paratrooper, kept watch.

Julia took a sip of chilled sports drink from the tube at her left shoulder. She was exhausted, too. They’d been fighting their way into Calais for two days, literally blasting a passage through the long rows of terraced houses. It was a murderous business, but marginally less dangerous than moving out in the open.

Amundson had explained that they’d trained for this scenario back in England, using a village that had been specially constructed by the army. She wondered idly whether some genius had picked up the details in an old soldier’s memoir, or whether the marines back in the Zone had passed on the lessons learned from twenty years of urban warfare in the Middle East and South Asia.

Didn’t matter, really. As long as the job got done.

She paused the Sonycam, saving lattice space, and pulled an energy bar out of one of the many pockets on her matrix armor. Before they’d embarked, she’d stuffed about a dozen of the things wherever she could find space. It was wrapped in waxed paper rather than foil, but other than that it was exactly like the energy bars she’d chewed through when running half marathons back up in the twenty-first. She chuckled at the thought.

“Something funny, Ms. Duffy?” Murphy asked.

She broke off a piece of the chewy snack and waved it at Murphy and Juarez. “I’ve got shares in this company, that’s all,” she said. “Eat up, boys. Make me rich.”

Her eyelids were twitching, the way they did when she went without sleep or stimulants for too long. There were uppers you could get, ripped off the formula for stims, but she didn’t like them much. The effects were crude, and the crash was brutal. With her inserts tapped dry she was better off going back to basics: sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and Hooah! bars.

The uproar increased again outside. Two huge bangs shook a broken mirror off the wall above Murphy’s head, and it shattered against the floor. She could hear animalistic screams under the sound of a brief but savage firefight.

“Heads up!” Murphy called out, hauling himself up from the litter on the floor.

Julia powered up her Sonycam again and flicked off the safety of her carbine.

They waited for some word from Reynolds’s guys on the far side of the street, to let them know who had won and who had lost that small, discrete encounter in a very long, strange war.

D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2354 HOURS.

BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

There were more than a hundred individual unit markers on the Kriegsgebiet display, and every one them jumped when the fuhrer pounded his fists down on the map table, hammering at Norway like a vengeful God.

“I say it is a diversion, and so it must be!”

“Yes, yes, of course, Mein Fuhrer, but they are still a worthy target,” Zeitzler babbled. “Just imagine the blow to their morale if they were to be wiped out. They are weak, the democracies. They cannot absorb the damage as we can. If we were to release the Panzer Lehr, they would annihilate-”

Hitler turned on him.

“Enough! You will execute my orders, or you yourself will be executed. Do you understand?”

Himmler thought the army chief might save them the cost of a bullet by falling dead with fright then, right in front of the assembled high command.

The lights in the room faded out for a second, causing them to glance around nervously. But a quick check confirmed that no Allied bombs were falling. Most likely it was just some problem with the wiring, a common enough occurrence in these hastily constructed bunkers.

As the exposed bulbs hanging over the map table flared again, Himmler regarded the situation in Calais with a dismal eye. He did not like to question the fuhrer, and would never do so publicly, of course. But uniquely among the Nazi elite, he prided himself on being able to broach unpleasant subjects, even with Adolf Hitler.