True to form, the dumb bastard had failed to see what a gift the Emergence had been. It had put them in a place where they could ensure that Frenchmen would determine the future of France, not a cabal of mad mullahs and bearded nuts. And perhaps just as important, it meant that with bold action they could also check the rise of America, the nation most to blame for the ills of the world.

After all, who had created bin Laden, the first of so many Islamist heroes? And whose appetite for oil had funded the Saudis, who in turn funded the madrassas of so many of the Wahhabi lunatics who had overrun the slums of Paris? It was the United States, Le Roux mused, who had turned the Middle East into a sinkhole of violence and Islamist revolt thanks to its support of Israel, its occupation of Iraq, its bombing of Iran, and its wars against Syria and Yemen.

Le Roux ate the brioche slowly, enjoying it in spite of himself, and enjoying also the prospect that lay before him. The prospect of rewriting history.

It mattered little that most of the men on board the Dessaix had gone into the cells at Lyon rather than serve the Republic by seizing a chance to wipe out eighty years of mistakes and perfidy. Some of them were those traitorous bastards who'd only pretended to agree with him. But they'd got theirs, in the end.

Yes, it was his ship now. The Boche needed him.

He washed down his snack with a mouthful of black coffee and stared in distaste at the two Indonesians eating some foul-smelling rice dish across the room from him. They had no language in common, but even if they did, he would not have spoken to them. He knew from the wailing that filled the ship five times a day that they were Islamists. Not jihadi, to be sure-he would never have allowed them on the ship, no matter what the Germans said.

He dreamed of a day when he could go about his business as a Frenchman and not be assailed by some illiterate ditchdigger droning on about the Koran. The sooner they trained some of his countrymen to operate this ship, the better.

"Warrant Officer, your colleague, Danton, tells us we have moved beyond the range of the enemy's sensors, and that we may soon use our own arrays. Do you agree?"

Le Roux almost choked on the last piece of brioche. He hadn't noticed Hidaka approaching. He nodded and hastily stood up, brushing crumbs from his shirt, smearing it with a dollop of hot chocolate sauce in the process. "Oui," he coughed. "But let us be safe and say another hour before Danton can turn on the arrays. He can set them to look forward, so that there is less chance of their being detected. Then we make the rendezvous, non?"

The Asian shot him an irritated look, but nodded curtly.

Le Roux would be happy to see the back of him, too. Perhaps when the war was over he might return to the Pacific, as governor of all French Polynesia or something. But for now he would be glad to get away from it, and from madmen like Hidaka. He had that same blankness in his eyes as one of Mullah Zaheer's Horror Brigades. Fanatics, all of them.

"We shall be refueling soon, when we meet with the oiler," Hidaka continued.

Le Roux shrugged. "Assuming you have got the mix right, at last. If not, well then… the game is over, yes?"

The Japanese glowered in reply. "We have followed your instructions precisely. You had better hope you got it right."

"Oh, my instructions were precise," countered Le Roux. "But I cannot know whether you primitives were able to follow them at all. You never developed jet engines, did you? So it is safe to assume that a basic jet fuel mix is also beyond your abilities. Still, we shall see."

Hidaka looked as if he was about ready to pop a vein, which very much tickled the Frenchman's sense of humor. He smothered a snigger and turned away, calling back over his shoulder. "I shall be in my quarters. Wake me when I am needed."

He didn't bother to wait for Hidaka's reaction. The fucking savage didn't seem to understand what an achievement it was, just getting the heads to work on a complex ship like this, what with most of her crew locked up on the other side of the world. The Germans who'd come on board were good. He got on famously with them. Even the Indonesians, he could admit, were well trained. But really, if it weren't for Le Roux himself, they would all be completely fucked. The Dessaix would still be back in the Atlantic, floating around like an astronomically expensive bathtub toy. The Germans would certainly not have been able to remove all the equipment and weaponry they'd insisted on, before allowing Yamamoto access to her.

He pushed into the commander's quarters-which he had appropriated as his own-and fetched himself a cognac. Then he sat down at Capitaine Goscinny's desk. A giant Siemens display ran constant updates on ship status and mission progress, all controlled by the vessel's Combat Intelligence. Le Roux checked his watch. Soon it would be time to verify command ID again.

There was a DNA reader on the desktop, and he wiped it down with a cloth doused in methylated spirits. Then he powered it up.

In the corner of the cabin stood a small bar refrigerator from which he withdrew a sealed specimen jar. There were many more like it in there. He carefully unscrewed the lid and, using an eyedropper, extracted a few mils of the precious liquid. Then he squeezed a drop or two of the capitaine's blood onto the sensor. Carefully, but without showing too much concern.

After all, he still had plenty left in the fridge.

Le Roux wondered how the Gestapo were doing, trying to get the rest of the Dessaix's crew to cooperate.

Not very well, he imagined.

Apart from the six original crewmen still on this ship, and another twelve who were helping the Germans with the missile facility at Dozenac, the entire complement of the Dessaix had proved themselves to be quite fatally stupid and shortsighted.

The special-purposes camp lay a few kilometers away from the I. G. Farben Monovitz facilties, but Brasch fancied that he could still smell the scent of depravity that blanketed the place. Some nights he imagined that the three main camps and thirty-nine subcamps gave off a poisonous mist, a concentrated essence of the suffering and evil that took place here. It was invisible, but you could smell it as it sank into the pores of your skin, and eventually into your soul.

Nothing he had witnessed on the Russian Front had prepared him for it. Even Himmler seemed more subdued than usual when they were forced to attend one of Hess's demonstrations. Everybody knew the Reichsfuhrer was squeamish. He had vomited the first time he'd personally witnessed an execution, and that had been a good clean head shot: the Reich's version of merciful release.

Today Brasch kept the contempt from his face as he watched Himmler dab at his lips with a perfumed handkerchief while the subjects were led in.

"Oh, my," Skorzeny roared in mock amusement. "They are only stick men. I'm a good shot, Herr Reichsfuhrer, but I cannot promise to hit them for you first time. If they turn sideways, they will disappear!"

Himmler allowed a wan but dutiful grin at the large man's brutal jokes. Brasch suspected he'd rather not be there.

They were in a long subterranean bunker. The sweating cinder blocks receded at least two hundred meters away from them to a thick revetment of sandbags, in front of which stood three scarred wooden poles. The prisoners were actually much less skeletal than most of their fellow inmates. They were Sonderkommando, or Kapos, selected prisoners who acted as guards and enforcers in the death camp at Birkenau. They received special privileges: extra rations, the pick of the females, and so on. But eventually they, like all the others, went into the ovens.