Final impact

There were six of them in the ad hoc extraction team. Harry, Ronsard, Claudel, and three Resistance fighters-a woman called Veronique and two men, Alain and Pietr, whose names he kept confusing. They weren’t sprinting down Clichy with their guns drawn. Even now that would attract too much attention. But they were moving at a fast clip, almost running in fact, and while the locals were lightly armed with pistols and a few Mills bombs, Harry and Ronsard were packing Metal Storm VLe 24 handguns and two dozen strips each of ultralight caseless ceramic, close to 860 rounds.

Harry didn’t turn off the nav aids that filled so much of his visual field with transparent arrowheads, flashing circles, and red squares. The Resistance crew invariably led him where he was supposed to be, and on the one or two occasions that they hadn’t it was only to take a shortcut that the Trident’s human sysop and Combat Intelligence were unaware of. As they passed the intersection with the Citй du Midi, a narrow dead-end street lined with much smaller, two-and three-story buildings that seemed to lean over the cobbled roadway, at least eight or nine women burst from the next street along. Dressed for the boudoir, they flew down the Rue de Clichy with their robes and ribbons streaming behind them.

A voice spoke into his earpiece. “Trident here, Colonel. Those women just ran out of the target building. Hostiles approaching from the Rue d’Orsel. Estimate two minutes until contact with asset.”

“Acknowledged,” Harry said, a vibe wire in the frame of his powered glasses picking up his speech and converting it to a quantum signal for relay back to the stealth destroyer. “Right,” he said in a much louder voice to the others, “let’s go kick some fucking arse.”

Still jogging along, they all hauled out weapons and began to run harder.

Harry could hear the first gunshots ahead.

His first shot took the woman in the neck. As the Gestapo approached she’d briefly disappeared around the corner, and when she came back Brasch took it as a sign that the game was on. He aimed at the center of her chest but shot high. He was never that good a marksman. The collaborator spun into the wall as blood sprayed from a severed artery.

Brasch then put two rounds into the broad back of her cohort, who moved for the first time in an hour as the pistol barked. Brasch heard two dull thuds under the Luger’s report, then the metal clang of the woman’s helmet striking the brick wall. Kinetic energy drove the man into the sandbag revetment, collapsing it into the Rue Houdon. The engineer wondered if he had time to dash down and retrieve a couple of the potato mashers. Those grenades would turn the alleyway into a killing jar.

Then he remembered that he could check. He had access to Fleetnet. He needed only to make the request, and the sysop on the Trident would send him a live video feed from the drone above. In response to his signal, they’d told him they had the area under constant surveillance now.

Just as he was about to call the ship, a British voice spoke from his flexipad. “Trident here, Herr General. Remain where you are. Hostiles are fifty meters away and closing quickly. Extraction team is two hundred meters to the southwest. Do you copy?”

“Acknowledged.”

Brasch moved away from the window frame and into the hallway.

The small screen on his handheld device reformatted with a top-down view of the streets immediately outside. He could see nine black-clad figures moving quickly; then they stopped momentarily on the Rue Houdon before pressing on with even greater urgency, running toward his building, brandishing automatic weapons. Red triangles shadowed them on the display.

Around the corner he could see six individuals charging around the corner of Clichy and Guelma. A blue circle surrounded one. The leader, perhaps?

He could see that the Gestapo were going to beat them.

19

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1341 HOURS.

PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

Prince Harry enjoyed more than a passing familiarity with the Rue de Clichy.

In 2007 while at the Royal Military Academy, he’d spent a couple of days’ leave in France for the Rugby World Cup. Between matches he and a couple of mates from “Alamein” company at Sandhurst would hit the bars around Montmartre. It was a last taste of freedom before joining the Household Cavalry and, later on, the Special Air Service.

Charging along the beautiful sun-dappled street was a little like running through a V3D memory stick. The war had spared Paris, for the most part, and this area of the old city was almost identical to what he had encountered in his day, architecturally at least. In 1944, of course, there was no sign of the Intifada. Poplar trees still threw their shade onto the narrow footpath, and the length of the street presented an unbroken wall of elegant nineteenth-century apartments and offices, most them standing between five and six stories high.