Final impact

Still, the SS leader felt nearly as sick as the Luftwaffe officer looked. It was he who’d convinced Hitler to release the forces from Normandy for a strike against the Allied foothold. He had even committed his own prized Waffen-SS divisions to act as the vanguard for the assault: Das Reich, Totenkopf, and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. The finest units in the whole world.

And now they no longer existed. It wasn’t that they had been broken or suffered crippling damage. They had simply ceased to exist. Men and machines, they were all gone. Erased by a rain of bombs that fell with inhuman accuracy.

Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it.

Inhuman accuracy.

The British press had gone on at great lengths concerning the role played in the wreck of his elite forces by that half-caste mud creature, Halabi. Their arrogance was unbelievable, the way they openly boasted that the so-called Combat Intelligence on board the Trident had controlled every air strike.

He scowled over at Gцring, drunk and probably insensible with morphine again. He was slumped in the corner of the map room. If that fat fool had only done his job and sunk the damn ship two years ago, this disaster would not have come to pass.

His attention returned to the map table that stretched out in front of him. It was a sorry sight. They were still pushing around little wooden blocks denoting tens of thousands of men who were already dead. Whole armies of ghosts haunted central and northern France. The display was so disconnected from reality as to be worse than useless.

Now the fuhrer was blaming him-him! — for the failure to contain Patton and Montgomery in Calais. It was intolerable. He couldn’t exactly wave a magic wand and conjure up the Reich’s equivalent to the Allied surveillance drones and computer technology. There simply wasn’t time to develop such things. And hadn’t he delivered a treasure trove of other advances to the German war industries anyway? Didn’t that count for anything?

Apparently it did not.

He came out of his self-pitying fugue with a shock when he realized that everyone was staring at him now. The fuhrer was still screeching, but the tone had changed somehow. It was more threatening, more…

Direct.

With some alarm, he understood. Hitler was yelling at him again.

“I am sorry, Mein Fuhrer,” he mumbled. “I was distracted by the map.”

A terrible stillness came over the supreme leader of Nazi Germany. “Distracted, you say?” he sneered.

“Yes,” Himmler answered uncertainly. “I, ah-”

“Perhaps if you had been paying attention, we would not be losing this fucking war!” Hitler smashed his fist down on the table, upsetting a handful of unit markers. Then he gathered himself and resumed in a quiet, cracked voice. “I asked you what happened to my missiles. I ordered the strike on London two hours ago. Everyone in that city should be dead by now. But they are not. I…want…to…know…why.”

“Yes, Mein Fuhrer, of course. But I…but I did tell you that the Donzenac facility was destroyed by British commandos. Do you not remember?”

The fuhrer’s already strained eyes seemed to bulge inhumanly, as if they might pop out of their sockets and roll across the map table.

A shudder passed over him.

“Of course,” he said in a small, cracked voice. “I lost my train of thought. The air in here, it is…”

The release of tension in the room was palpable. Himmler could feel others’ muscles loosening just like his own.

“Just go, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” said Hitler. “Find out what is happening to my atom bombs. I need them. German civilization needs them.”

Himmler used the opportunity to meekly bow and back out of the room, his ears and face burning with embarrassment. He had exposed the fuhrer to potential ridicule, correcting him like that. But what was he to do? He had stood at the exact same spot one day ago and explained why there would be no V3 strike on London. He remembered the ashen faces of the assembled staff as he explained how Prince Harry had escaped with so many of the Reich’s top scientists after the RAF had destroyed the missile silos. How could the fuhrer have forgotten that?

He scurried out of the bunker, with its foul air of stale sweat and rising fear, glad to get away from it all. If only for a little while.

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 0205 HOURS.

CALAIS.

Julia made it back to Calais at two in the morning. Dismounting from the jeep, she thanked the driver, a garrulous Pole, and looked around for her next ride toward the front. Her status as an official embed of the Seventh Cav wasn’t of much use. They’d been pulled from the line and were already headed back to England to take on replacements. The regiment had suffered close to 40 percent casualties and wouldn’t be rated to fight again for months.