Final impact

Excellent, thought Harry. “Private Haigh, it’s Colonel Windsor,” he said as softly as he could while still being heard. “Stay right there, and try very hard not to get killed. You’re coming with me.”

“With you? Where, sir?”

“On an adventure, my boy. Just keep your fucking head down.”

Harry wormed his away over to St. Clair. Guns still barked all around them, and a shower of hot splinters pattered down on his helmet.

“I’m going up into the ceiling with Haigh,” he said. “He used to be a coal miner, so the confined space shouldn’t bother him. We’ll try to work our way over behind the krauts and drop down on them. You’ll have a second or two before they recover, more if they don’t kill us right off the bat. You need to clean them out, Sergeant Major, and quickly. The old-fashioned way. Like we did in Surabaya.”

Harry couldn’t see St. Clair’s eyes behind his combat goggles, but the grim set of his jaw was enough to confirm that he understood. Ronsard glanced up dubiously.

“Be ready in…twelve minutes,” the prince said.

“Yes, sir. Good luck, Colonel.”

“Cheers,” Harry replied with more verve than he felt. He pressed himself down as low as he could and began to crawl across the debris-strewn floor. St. Clair tapped the shoulder of the man next to him and, with a series of hand gestures, told him to be ready to fix bayonets in ten. The trooper nodded and repeated the order back. When St. Clair gave him the thumbs-up, he turned to the next in line and passed it on.

Bullets snapped through the air just above Harry’s head, some hitting stainless steel or chrome with a metallic ring, but most just thudding into plaster and woodwork. The German scientists all lay prone on the tiled floor, twitching and flinching when a round cracked close by, attempting to burrow under one another as they forgot themselves in the extremity of their terror. Two of them were dead, their throats cut as a punishment for trying to help the SS. Anjela Claudel was bathed in their blood. Harry had to pass through them all to get to Haigh, who was one of the few Englishmen actually standing, protected as he was by the mass of an industrial-sized refrigerator in the farthest corner of the hall.

The SAS troopers keeping watch over the scientists trained the muzzles of their Ivan guns on the men immediately around their commanding officer as he forced his way through. If any of them tried to interfere, they’d be shot without warning.

Harry checked his watch.

He’d used up two minutes twenty seconds covering the short distance. Haigh loosed off one more round before backing into the cramped V-shaped nook he’d made for himself by pushing the fridge away from the wall. Harry crawled in as far as he could, then hauled himself up like a rock climber, so as not to expose his back to the direct fire of the Panzergrenadiers. The uproar of the gunfight never once abated.

“Sorry to be so forward, Private, but I can’t leave my arse hanging out. Some cheeky fucker would shoot it off.”

“Very good, sir,” Haigh responded. He was a tall, thin young man from the north of England who’d ended up in a Welsh coal mine before he was old enough to get into the army.

“No time to piss about then, Private. We’re going up into the crawl space-” He pointed at the roof. “-at least there should be a crawl space. There’s an access hole over by the servery. They probably use it for storage. We’re going to get ourselves over behind those bastards and drop in on them for a bit of sport.”

“Right you are, sir,” Haigh replied, surprising Harry, who’d expected him to protest it as a damn fool idea-which it was. Instead he clicked the safety on his weapon and began to crawl up the exposed piping at the back of the refrigerator.

There was a fifteen-centimeter gap between the top of the unit and the roof, which exposed them to stray rounds, but Harry was pretty sure that in the chaos they wouldn’t be noticed through the small break. Haigh took out his bayonet and carved through the roof tiles without much trouble.

They were probably made of asbestos, Harry thought as the dust drifted down on him. Well, that was the least of their worries. When he had an opening large enough to crawl through, Haigh disappeared inside the black hole like a snake into a rat’s nest. Harry followed him, amazed at how easy the young miner had made it seem. It was really quite difficult just getting up there. He had no sure footholds. No room to maneuver. The din of pitched battle was painfully loud. He could feel every bullet that smacked into the fridge, and just before his head popped into the gap between the unit top and the ceiling, at least two rounds caromed through and punched into the plaster wall a few inches from his face.

He scrambled up through the hole, expecting to be hit.

He hadn’t known what they’d find in the crawl space. In fact he hadn’t been entirely sure there would be a crawl space up here, despite what he’d told Haigh. But there was, about half a meter of it.