They hadn't even finished transferring their kit to the jeep when the copilot broke in over tac net.
"Excuse me, gentlemen. German air assault, gliders and Junkers, twenty-one minutes out. CI had confirmed this field as the likely DZ."
Harry told his men to finish up as quickly as they could. He climbed up into the jeep, standing in the rear with one boot on the spare tire. This airfield wasn't a major facility. It was a dispersal point, a place to hide precious fighters to protect them from bombing raids on the main centers like Biggin Hill. Mostly it consisted of a small control tower, a couple of Nissan huts, and a grass runway. There were no serviceable aircraft on the ground at the moment. Almost all the RAF and its Allied Air Forces were aloft.
That was probably why the Jerries were planning to use it as a landing field. Nice location, no resistance to speak of.
The aerodrome was set amongst farmland just over a hundred miles to the southwest of London. The nearest settlement was a village, which had grown up around a Norman-era church. There were no major military bases nearby. The full complement of the airfield came to 129 ground crew, air defense guards, and administrative staff. Some two dozen of them had gathered a short distance away to watch the helicopter land and disembark its passengers.
Harry called over his two demolition specialists. Bolt and Akerman.
"Andy, Piers, you've got fifteen minutes to turn that runway into a serious hazard to human life. Go!"
The troopers snatched up a couple of backpacks and dashed away enthusiastically.
The base commander was a one-legged Australian named Fitzsimons. He'd played test rugby in the 1930s before volunteering for the Empire Air Training Scheme. He'd taken a desk job after losing his leg, and that had turned a lot of his muscle to fat. But he still looked like a powerful man.
"Anything I should know, Major Windsor?" Fitzsimons asked as Bolt and Akerman moved ominously toward his runway.
"Yes," said Harry. "I'm afraid you're about to have some unwanted visitors. Jerry has decided he wants your lovely little airfield for his own. I'd put away the good silver, if I were you, Mr. Fitzsimons. German gliders and Junkers-probably with paratroops are on their way. Enough of them so that it looks like a battalion to me. They will probably have some fighters escorting them, too."
"Ah, I see. Well, then, what do you think we should do?"
"We shall tell them to keep their filthy fucking paws off the place, I imagine."
The remainder of the SAS squad was standing ready next to the jeeps.
"Okay, lads," he said, turning around to include them all. "Adolf wants this field as one end of an air bridge. That makes sense. There are no likely defenders around to see them off. It's a handy distance from London. But then, he doesn't know we're here, does he? Fitzsimons, you need to get your people together. Arm all of them, women and cooks included. Can you do that?"
"I can."
"Excellent. Did you play off the bench by the way, or did you run on for the Wallabies."
The base commander stood about three inches taller. "I ran on. Every game. Seven test matches. Could have been more. Plenty more actually, but-"
"Excellent. You know your own people. Leave me your airfield defenders. You take your bench players, divide them into three fire teams and get them up into that little copse of trees on the hill just off the north end of the runway. I think the gliders are going to put down over that way. Don't open fire until they're on the ground. Have each team concentrate on one glider at a time. Try to kill them inside, while they're all bunched up."
He turned back to his own troopers, finding his sniper, Corporal Fontaine, sitting on the bonnet of one of the jeeps.
"Angus. You go with these guys. Take Austin as your spotter. Take out the NCOs first, then the officers. Then anybody looks like they might be setting up a crew-served weapon."
"Come on, then, Stevo," said Fontaine, and they immediately began to unpack some of the kit they'd just finished stowing in the jeeps.
Fitzsimons was already bellowing orders, hurrying away on his wooden leg.
Harry walked over to the chopper to speak to the pilot. "Lieutenant Hay?"
"Sir."
"Ashley, wasn't it? Listen Ash, you need to get clear for the next twenty minutes. These characters will come in with fighter cover, if they're any good-"
"CI confirms that, Major."
"I thought as much," Harry said. "Do you have a full weapons load?"
"Autocannon is at a hundred percent. But only one rocket pod's working. We haven't had a chance to put the other into the shop."
"One will have to do. Can you bring up a holomap for me? The threat bubble out to fifty thousand meters."
He pulled his goggles down from where they'd been resting on his helmet. Flight Lieutenant Hay initiated a laser link to the Trident via the nearest low-orbit drone, then downloaded an edited V3D holomap of this part of the English countryside. Harry had to ignore much of the detail, such as eight-lane freeways, which simply hadn't been built yet. But he was betting that the landscape hadn't changed much.
"Lieutenant, can you park yourself in that blind river valley, about fifteen klicks to the north? We may have to call on you if we need close air support."
"Well, it's not in my job description, but I'll see what I can do."
"Best move out, then," Harry said.
The massive drooping composite blades of the NH 91 began to turn as Hay fed power from the Alfa Romeo/GE turbocells into the titanium rotor hub.
"Viv!" Harry shouted over the strengthening roar of the chopper, as he bent over and hurried back to the jeep. "I want you to take Chris and Frank down to the village. Set yourselves up with the Scorpions. Take out the fighter cover first. If you have any shots left when that's done, knock off the Junkers. They'll be a little ways behind. Then haul it back up here in the jeep. I'll need help."
"Right you are, guv," St. Clair replied. "Trooper Pearson, you silly old poof, you heard the heir to the throne, didn't you? Well, what are you fuckin' waiting for, then? Trooper Devine, let's go. Or should I get you a fucking walking frame, too?"
The towering Jamaican and his two off-siders quickly repacked one of the jeeps and lit out toward the sound of pealing church bells.
The Eurocopter lifted off and banked away to the north.
As the rotorwash died down, Harry found himself alone for a moment. Several soldiers dressed in khaki were double-timing his way. The airfield-defense unit. Men and a few women in RAF blue were emerging from the Nissan huts and control tower, under Fitzsimons's supervision. All of them were carrying old-fashioned rifles.
Harry looked at his watch.
Fourteen minutes.
The battalion had suffered nearly 12 percent casualties before they'd even crossed the Channel. RAF Hurricanes had ripped into them, diving out of the sun and slashing through the tight formation of transports and the gliders they were towing.
Their escorts, a squadron of standard 109s, had finally beaten off the defenders, but not before six Junkers had dropped away, trailing smoke and flame. Colonel Albrechtson tried not to imagine what it would be like, dying in such a fashion.
His men all wore the same expression. Thin lipped, gray faced, but resolute. The fucking SS with their pantomime costumes and superior bullshit-they liked to think of themselves as the elite. But Albrechtson knew that the best soldiers in the world were here in these planes with him. The Fallschirmjager. Germany's airborne warriors.
The hollow bass notes of exploding flak reached him through the corrugated metal skin of the JU-52, but it was distant. The entire coastline of southern Britain was ablaze with gunfire. Thousands of planes dueled in the sky, and hundreds of ships pounded away at each other down below. It was a titanic struggle, but for the moment, it was a contest of machines.
In a few minutes he and his men would contend in blood. Their strength and their will against their offspring of this failed, bankrupt empire. Albrechtson didn't know if he would survive. But he was certain that Germany herself would triumph.
The drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything but shouts, so there was no point saying any last words to the men. They didn't need speeches, anyway. All they needed was the jump light. He took a sip of water from his canteen and stroked the wooden stock of his trusty Mauser. It wasn't as fancy as the new automatic assault rifles issued to the SS, but it had served him well on Crete and in the Ukraine. He was happy to have it along, as an old friend.
He took the last few minutes to inspect his men. They looked magnificent, but he wasn't so foolish as to imagine that would last. He'd fought the British on Crete. Although that had been a victory, it was a bloodbath, as well. There had been talk that the fuhrer would never allow an airborne assault again, yet here they were. At least a third of these men had jumped into Crete with him, falling amongst the savages of the Maori Battalion and their New Zealand slavers. It had been a slaughter from which normal soldiers would not have recovered.
But his Fallschirmjager had regrouped after crippling losses, and in the end they had taken the island.
They would take this island, too.
Harry instructed his makeshift platoon to take up positions in a series of slit trenches that offered fire lanes that converged with Fitzsimons's fire teams on the hill at the end of the runway. He had no illusions about the kind of fire support he could expect from them, but you have to cut the cloth to suit your budget, as his grandfather used to say.
He heard Sergeant St. Clair's thick East End accent, booming through the speakers of his helmet. "Target lock, guvnor. Confirmed as eight ME One-oh-nines. Five thousand meters out. Launching."
"Acknowledged," said Harry before he muted the channel back to his antiair team.
"Listen up," he called down the trench line. "Escort fighters are coming in. Eight Messerschmitts. They're about three miles away now, but I want you to watch what happens. Keep watching in the direction of the village."
The men-they were all men-studied the tree line behind him.
"Cor blimey, wozzat!" cried one of them.
Eight thin tendrils of white exhaust smoke shot up from the hollow and rocketed away.
"Those are Scorpion ground-to-air missiles," Harry informed them. "They will destroy every Messerschmitt that's currently heading toward this airfield, hoping to shoot the crapper out of you."
He watched as their heads turned to track the flight path of the missiles. A few began pointing in excitement. A cluster of small black dots, the fighters, had become visible to the south. The Scorpions ate up the distance to their targets at a phenomenal rate.
Eight balls of fire filled the sky where the aircraft had been.
Lusty shouts of approval arose from the trenches, and Harry was sure he could hear something similar coming from Fitzsimons's hill. His demo specialists, Bolt and Akerman, dropped into the shelter beside him, having just finished a rush job of mining the runway.
"Whizzbangs are ready, Captain," Bolt announced.
"We set a few claymores, too. Had 'em for securing the lay-up point in Norway. They're about halfway out to the runway."
Another six contrails whooshed away from the village.
"Is that more fighters, sir?" asked a private with an amazingly shiny hairdo.
Brylcreem, thought Harry.
"No, Private," he answered, checking the heads-up display in his goggles. "My sergeant is aiming for some troop transports. You can't see them yet, but he can. They'll all be shot down long before they get here."
There was no cheering this time. Some nodding, a few murmurs of appreciation, but no cheering.
"Are there going to be any left for us to get, Major?" asked the Brylcreem boy.
"Oh, yes," replied Harry. "I'm afraid so."
Something had gone wrong.
The pilots were shouting. The aircraft swooped and climbed and dropped down violently, throwing Albrechtson and men around the cabin. One man had already broken his arm, and the colonel himself would have been knocked out had he not been wearing a helmet.
Six loud flak bursts had gone off all around them, and it sounded as if every single shot had scored a hit. There was a terrible sound when a plane took a direct hit-all that metal and fuel and ammunition going up simultaneously. It was a much denser report than the slightly empty boom of a near miss.
He began to feel just how painfully slow the JU-52 was-that was why they stopped using them as bombers in the first place. Fighters and ack-ack guns picked them off too easily.
Every muscle in his body was clenched, urging them on to the drop point just that little bit faster. The rapid pom-pom-pom sound of Bofors shells going off all around them told him that their fighter escorts hadn't dealt with the enemy's antiaircraft emplacements. The transport bucked and jolted alarmingly as near misses buffeted them. Some of his men began exchanging worried glances. A young paratrooper at the far end of the cabin vomited over his boots. Another man, two places down from him, was suddenly thrown forward and dropped to floor, his parachute shredded and smoking, blood leaking out of his tunic.
The jump light turned red. The men all held up their hooks for the static line.
"Up!" he called out, checking his helmet strap.
The men arose as one, even the kid who had been puking his guts out.
"Hook up!"
Standing by the open door, Albrechtson felt the tug of the slipstream. The rushing air added a constant roar to the crash of exploding shells as his seventeen surviving men hooked their chutes onto the line. Some tumbled over, cursing, as a volley exploded over the wing, punching the plane down and to the left. Albrechtson saw three lines of tracer converge on another Junkers two hundreds away. The portside engine blew up and sheared off the wing.
"Equipment check," he yelled over the noise.
Each paratrooper patted and pulled at the man in front him, checking for faults that might kill a man before he had a chance to fight.
"Sound off!"
They counted themselves down, halting temporarily at the ninth man, as two windows shattered and somebody screamed.
"It's Dietz. He's gone."
The puking kid was dead.
The count continued, as the men on either side of Dietz cleared his body from the lineup.
Albrechtson called out that he was clear as the red light turned green.
He grabbed the frame of the exit and thrust himself out. He felt the shock of hitting the airstream at speed and heard the zip-zip-zip of bullets passing by his head. His chute deployed, and his boots swung up with the jerk of interrupted momentum.
It was peaceful then, dropping through the autumnal sky, no longer trapped in the corrugated metal coffin. He could see the airfield below, and the gliders dropping gracefully toward their landing zone.
But his stomach lurched as he searched the sky for the transports that were carrying his Fallschirmjager. There were so few left. He knew they'd taken casualties before the escorts had driven off or-more likely-destroyed their attackers. But it seemed as though only a handful of 52s had made it through.
As he glided down, Albrechtson frantically searched for his binoculars, a small pair of Zeiss glasses he kept in a breast pocket. He found them, then nearly dropped them, before finally managing to turn them toward the target. He expected to find massed flak batteries down there. Or evidence of a squadron that had been missed by the Abwehr. There was no sign of either. Yet half his command had already been destroyed.
This was going to be like Crete all over again.
Prince Harry calculated that about 210 paratroopers had popped chutes overhead. Trooper Akerman said 220. Bolt put his money on around two hundred.
"We'll count them afterwards," Harry decided as he fixed a microlight targeting dot on the chest of a descending paratrooper.
"A fiver on the result." Bolt just wouldn't let it go.
The German appeared at a virtual distance of ten meters in Harry's goggles, although he was actually a good four hundred meters away. Harry exhaled slowly and applied smooth, even pressure to the trigger, until his rifle kicked back with a loud, flat bang.
In one of those post-Transition ironies, the venerable German firm of Heckler and Koch had manufactured his weapon, an M12 carbine. Made entirely of composites, it was a lightweight assault rifle of the old school. It didn't electronically fire caseless ceramic ammunition, instead feeding 5.56 mm augmented bullets from a thirty-six-round magazine, and 20 mm programmable grenades from an in-line stacker.
The German, who had been holding tightly to his risers, scanning the ground as it rushed toward him, jerked as the round hit. Harry didn't bother to put another shot in. He was firing shredders, which disassembled themselves inside the target before emerging at 940 meters per second, dragging about a kilogram of human tissue behind them.
He squeezed off another three shots as the troopers on either side of him did the same. The airfield defenders banged away enthusiastically with a variety of weapons, mostly Lee Enfield rifles and Tommy guns.
The crackle of small arms from Fitzsimons's three squads reached them. A glider broke up as a Bofors crew took it under direct fire.
"Nasty," hissed Bolt.
But the sheer weight of the German assault began to tell. Paratroopers made it to the ground and disengaged their chutes, running for cover. Some tumbled and spun, as the snipers began to pick them off. Even so, small groups of three and four, then larger parties of eight or nine survivors banded together and went to work.
"Over there, sir," Bolt cried as an antiaircraft redoubt came under assault. Five Germans charged it, firing rapidly, one of them hosing down the position with a Schmeisser.
"Bugger," Harry said as the volume of incoming fire stepped up a notch. Rounds whistled close by, kicked up clods of dirt, and occasionally thumped into the chest or splattered the head of a 'temp in the slit trench. He tried to draw a bead on the paratroopers who'd taken over the big gun, but they were at least seven hundreds meters away. His first shot burst a sandbag; the next caromed off the gun itself. He dialed up his sniper team on tac net.
"Angus, Stevo. You need to get busy, or you're going to get chopped into dog meat."
"Sorry, Skip," came Fontaine's reply. "I can't get a clear shot at them."
Harry examined the AAA site again. Pulling in as much as he could. The Germans zoomed in to fill his visual field. But it was difficult to stay focused, since every movement of his head was amplified a hundredfold. Bullets chewed up the sandbags, and one struck a paratrooper in the shoulder, but they stuck to the job of trying to get the gun depressed far enough to use it as a weapon against his people.
Harry was turning that over in his mind when Trooper Bolt suddenly pushed him down.
The ground seemed to shake with a volcanic eruption.
"The runway charges!" he cried.
Harry peeped up in time to see tons of dirt and broken bodies and the smashed up remains of a couple of gliders dropping back to earth. Four more gliders tried to avoid the crater, but it was too late. They went in nosefirst, with a bone-jarring crack and the crunch of splintered wood.
The Prince made a few quick calculations. "Fire the claymores, Andy."
Bolt did as he was ordered, even though no Germans were approaching. Two of the antipersonnel mines had been set close to the runway and had gone up with the demolition charges. The other six fired with a thunderclap and instantly peppered three of the wrecked gliders with thousands of steel balls.
"Fix bayonets!" yelled Harry.
He heard the rasp and click of nearly two dozen old-fashioned bayonets, as his own men quickly fitted their sawback fighting knifes.
"Follow me, gentlemen. Let's clean them out."
The war cry started amongst the 'temps, a guttural sound building into a full-throated highland scream as they charged across the grass toward the shattered gliders and deep, smoking holes excavated by Bolt and Akerman's shaped charges. Harry flipped his selector to three round bursts as he ran, snapping the M12 up to finish off a few lonesome parachutists who were still wafting down to the ground.
He heard the muffled whump of a grenade launcher. It was Bolt, sending a frag into the shallow pit where the glider with the least amount of damage had finished up. A German soldier had been emerging shakily from a huge tear in the rear of the plane, and he was blown back inside.
Whump. Whump.
Twin explosions split the glider into three sections, and Harry flipped his weapon to full auto, sending a stream of 5.56 mm into the crippled airframe. The industrial hammering of the other M12 assault rifles, the crash of grenades and small arms, all served to isolate Harry, almost cocooning him from the wider battle. But he had to press on, to get close enough to that Bofors pit to bring it under fire by grenade launcher.
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.
Two shots sounded nearby, then silence. Or at least relative silence. The Bofors gun still pounded away over the compressed roar of the German machine guns, which reminded him a lot of the old American M60. As he got to his feet, he saw the cost of the ground they had taken. There were no Germans left alive, but only six of his men remained, including Bolt, who had taken a bullet in the mouth and was now missing half his jaw. He was down, feet splayed, his back leaned up against the severed tail section of a German glider. His eyes had the far-away look that told of a massive drug dose washing through his system.
Harry was still stunned and trying to gather his wits when he realized he could hear the dull thud of rotor blades. Two contrails whooshed directly overhead, followed by the crump of detonation as a pair of Hellfire missiles stuck home.
The chopper was back, the earsplitting mechanical stammer of its autocannon a symphony of deliverance.