Final impact

No, it was mobility that had won the Reich all the prizes in the opening phase of this war, and it was mobility-the doctrine of blitzkrieg-that would win this next battle.

Himmler mopped at his greasy brow with a gray handkerchief. It had once been white. The accursed “drones” sent out by the mud woman Halabi made everything much more difficult, but the Soviets had been unusually helpful in providing creative camouflage, what they called maskirovka. They were acknowledged masters of the field. Himmler shook his head. He was tired, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and his mind had a tendency to wander. He forced his attention back onto the map table.

Four divisions of Allied infantry had come ashore at Calais. Two American, one British, and one Canadian. It appeared as if another two airborne divisions had leapfrogged the diversionary assault, one by helicopter attack, to infest a number of villages outside the port city. A division of Fallschirmjдger had been tasked with defending the area and had given a good account of themselves-much better than their pathetic showing during Operation Sea Dragon. Six enemy divisions, equipped with some quite amazing new weaponry, had been held up for two days. But six divisions were less than 4 percent of Eisenhower’s order of battle.

No, the fuhrer was right. The main blow would fall on Normandy.

Wouldn’t it?

D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2156 HOURS.

CALAIS.

The small living room looked liked something out of a crack-house nightmare. Every stick of furniture was broken. Fires had been set everywhere but in the fireplace, which was full of human excrement. And everything was covered in a thick dusting of plaster brought down from the ceiling and walls by the seismic shock of the Allied assault.

“Fire in the hole!”

Julia turned away and covered her ears. The shaped charge went off with a head-splitting roar, temporarily smothering the sounds of gunfire from the street. The hammering of three or four Colt carbines on burst kicked in while her ears were still ringing from the detonation, followed by the flat whump of an M320 grenade launcher. Another crash and someone cried out.

“Satchel charge! Fire in the hole!”

Another explosion shook the house, perhaps the whole row of terraced houses, reminding her of the time a mud brick house in Damascus had come down on top her just like this.

“Go, go, go!”

The fire team rushed forward and leapt through the hole they’d blown in the wall dividing this house from the next. A brief burst of gunfire, and then the familiar call.

“Clear!”

She swung around the door frame where she’d been sheltering, automatically checking to make sure the battery indicator for her Sonycam was still showing blue. A time hack in the corner of her heads-up display told her there was just over an hour’s worth of storage left on this stick. Her last.

Moving toward the smoking fissure, Julia forced herself not to look at the spot where Gil Amundson had bled out on the floor, waiting for evac. They’d covered him with a rug.

She bent and stepped quickly through into the next house, the muzzle of her own Colt sweeping the room as she did.

A three-round burst sounded upstairs, immediately followed by the thud of something heavy hitting the floor. Plaster chips and fine white dust floated down, coating her goggles.

“Clear!”

A windowpane shattered and sprayed her face with shards of glass. She felt the sting of lacerated flesh, and the warmth of blood that was beginning to flow freely. Julia whipped off her glove and ran her fingers over the skin of her neck. Nothing cut there. Just more facial scars to add to her collection. She cleaned herself up with a couple of medicated wipes and a small tube of spray-on skin.

“You okay, Ms. Duffy?”

It was Steve Murphy, the trooper who was now an acting corporal, in charge of twelve men from two other remnant platoons. With Amundson dead, nobody from their original chalk was left.

“I’m fine, Murph,” she said, wiping the last of the blood away. “Just making myself beautiful.”

A pair of boots came thundering down the stairwell in the narrow, darkened hallway outside what looked like a dining room.

“Alcones coming through!”

Another cav trooper, one of Murphy’s strays, came back into the room, being careful to stay out of the line of sight provided by the broken window.

“There was a kraut upstairs, Corporal. He was saving this for company.”

Alcones flipped a potato masher grenade in the air and caught it with the same hand.

Murphy nodded. “Good work. Let’s take five and wait for the others to catch up. This is the last house in the row, if I’m not mistaken. Anyone think different? Alcones, could you see anything from up there?”

The trooper nodded. “We’re at the end of this block of houses, or what’s left of it. We got ruins on all three sides. The next stretch of buildings is a block to the west, maybe fifty yards or so to reach them.”