Final impact

St. Clair roared from the front of the cabin, “We say cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

For just a second the cheers of his men overwhelmed the sound of the engines cycling up. Harry grinned hugely and hauled himself the rest of the way up the ramp, giving each man a pat on the shoulder, or a nod, or a wink. Like the Special Air Service of his day, nobody walked into a squadron straight out of the recruiting office. In this here and now, in the Second Regiment at least, they had to have at least five years in service already, and a proven combat record had been a big plus on any application.

There was still an original, contemporary SAS, still being run by David Stirling, and it operated under slightly different rules-their own. There was a good deal of interplay between the two outfits, and constant traffic in training cadre, but in the end they did what they did, and Harry got on with his own business.

He shrugged off his pack and settled himself down next to the two French nationals who’d be going in with them, Captain Marcel Ronsard of the Free French First Army and Mademoiselle Anjela Claudel of the Bureau d’Opйrations Aйriennes, a Resistance group responsible for coordinating special ops in northern and, more recently, central France. His own French-workmanlike before the Transition-had improved to near fluency in the years since. He shook hands with both Ronsard and Claudel. The huge drooping four-bladed rotors began to turn faster, and Harry indicated that they should power up their tac sets if they wanted to speak in anything less than a bellow.

He was still wearing the powered helmet he’d brought through the wormhole. Unlike the Yanks, his British headgear didn’t make him look like a German paratrooper. Ronsard helped Claudel plug in and power up. She was unfamiliar with the comm rig, but the Frenchman had been training with the SAS for nearly twelve months and was as much a part of the regiment as Harry, or Viv, or any of the half a dozen Free French officers the prince had sought out to join him for the “Great Crusade.”

As they fiddled with the earphones Harry looked past them, out through the rear hatchway to the nameless airfield where another thirty Chinooks were spooling up, adding the thunder of their takeoff to that of his own. Two full squadrons of the Second-close to 240 men-were on their way to seize control of one of Hitler’s strategic jewels, the Missile Facility at Donzenac in south-central France on the western fringe of the Massif Central.

D-DAY + 8. 11 MAY 1944. 0110 HOURS.

LONDON. CABINET WAR ROOMS.

“I think you are to be congratulated, General,” said Winston Churchill. “This will be a victory for the ages.”

Eisenhower looked uncomfortable with the praise. His shoulders rolled around nervously under his jacket. “Our men…and women,” he replied after a pause, “are the ones who deserve congratulations, Prime Minister. They’re out there fighting for us.”

Churchill grinned wickedly. “I don’t know how you expect to become president if you refuse to take credit for others’ good work, General. You still have a lot to learn.”

Eisenhower didn’t so much as twitch a facial muscle in reply. Instead he focused on the drama of Europe’s liberation.

The map table in the war room was crowded with hundreds of wooden unit markers. Female RAF officers still pushed them around with long pointers, but most of the high-ranking staffers watched the video wall, where eight large flatscreens had been linked together to make one giant battlespace monitor, displaying the take from HMS Trident. The screens weren’t locally manufactured-that capability was still a few years away. Maybe even a decade. No, they had been borrowed from the Zone especially for this event. Churchill wondered how he might hold on to them afterward. British industry would benefit tremendously from being able to study them.

He caught himself, however, thinking as though the future were settled. They still had this grim business to be done with, of crushing the Nazis. It was entirely possible, he knew, that at any moment one of those screens would light up with the news of an atomic blast somewhere in France, probably directly over the Calais pocket occupied by growing numbers of Allied Forces.

Churchill rarely slept more than a few hours a night, as a habit, and the specter of a Nazi A-bomb prevented him from enjoying what little sleep he did get. He’d read thousands of pages of secret reports indicating that they simply did not have the resource base or industrial capacity to produce even one such device, and thousands more warning of an inevitable atomic attack some time in the next few weeks. Or even days.