In the end, the rush to finish fitting out the Cyclones had become so frenzied that there'd been no chance to test them properly. McGregor had no idea whether the airframe would even hold together when they triggered the "miniguns." The whole fucking thing might just fall to pieces in midair. If they even made it to the target.
The skies were alive with thousands of aircraft, friendly and hostile, all of them seemingly twisting and turning and roaring in chaotic dogfights around his flight of slow, lumbering transporters.
His headphones crackled with the voice of his copilot. Tight, strangled words gave away how scared his copilot Barry Divola was. They were all frightened. Flight Lieutenant Philip McGregor felt like his balls had crawled up somewhere inside his rib cage.
"Pathfinders dropping smoke. Green smoke," said Divola.
"I see green smoke," McGregor confirmed.
He began to haul the C-47 around, pitting his strength against the machine. He'd heard that you just had to nudge the stick in one of those twenty-first planes and the thing would dance all over the sky. That must be why women could fly them. He had to move this flying pig the old-fashioned way, by wrestling it through every turn and dip.
He gripped the controls and felt the flaps bite into the slipstream as he brought them around for the payload run. The other three converted Dakotas followed his lead. There was no flak, thank God, but his jaws and teeth hurt anyway because he'd been grinding them together so hard. German fighters had attacked them three times since they'd taken off, and three times they been beaten back by their escorts, a squadron of the new Super Spitfires, sooled on the Messerschmitts by some talking box on the Trident.
Or at least, he vaguely assumed that's what had happened. He was too busy keeping them alive and on course to think about anything other than the immediate demands of the situation.
"Guns hot," came a voice in his phones.
"Guns hot," he acknowledged. "Commencing final approach."
The engines howled a little louder as the props bit into the air and the Dakota tilted along its axis. McGregor was glad he wasn't responsible for lining up the weapons, the crew chief who'd come aboard back at Debden was using some magic box to do that. The first he'd know about it would be when-
"Firing in three, two, one-"
"Shit!"
McGregor had been prepared for a surprise. After all, they'd told him the electronically powered guns could put a bullet into every square inch of a footy field in just a few seconds. Intellectually, he could appreciate that meant a lot of bullets leaving his plane very quickly, but the reality of it was still a shock. The whole aircraft seemed to lurch sideways through space as though it had been slapped. A terrible, head-splitting metallic ripping sound filled the world, and McGregor felt as though he was on the receiving end of the strafing run, so violently did the C-47 rattle and shake.
"Fuck me blind!" cried Divola. "Did you see that, Skipper?"
McGregor risked a quick glance down at the target area, a densely wooded copse of trees a few hundred yards from a smoking, shell-damaged church. All four Cyclones were pouring solid rivers of fire into the woods, which were literally disintegrating under the effects. A few small, dark black-clad figures emerged at a run from the disappearing cover. Most escaped, but two burst into pink mist.
"Sweet Jesus," breathed the pilot.
Three companies of SS Sonderaktiontruppe had been sheltering in the small forest, which was now just a smoking mound of shattered splinters, drifting leaves, and-he supposed-tiny bite-sized pieces of Aryan supermen.