He shrugged off his pack and settled himself down next to the two French nationals who’d be going in with them, Captain Marcel Ronsard of the Free French First Army and Mademoiselle Anjela Claudel of the Bureau d’Opйrations Aйriennes, a Resistance group responsible for coordinating special ops in northern and, more recently, central France. His own French-workmanlike before the Transition-had improved to near fluency in the years since. He shook hands with both Ronsard and Claudel. The huge drooping four-bladed rotors began to turn faster, and Harry indicated that they should power up their tac sets if they wanted to speak in anything less than a bellow.

He was still wearing the powered helmet he’d brought through the wormhole. Unlike the Yanks, his British headgear didn’t make him look like a German paratrooper. Ronsard helped Claudel plug in and power up. She was unfamiliar with the comm rig, but the Frenchman had been training with the SAS for nearly twelve months and was as much a part of the regiment as Harry, or Viv, or any of the half a dozen Free French officers the prince had sought out to join him for the “Great Crusade.”

As they fiddled with the earphones Harry looked past them, out through the rear hatchway to the nameless airfield where another thirty Chinooks were spooling up, adding the thunder of their takeoff to that of his own. Two full squadrons of the Second-close to 240 men-were on their way to seize control of one of Hitler’s strategic jewels, the Missile Facility at Donzenac in south-central France on the western fringe of the Massif Central.

“I think you are to be congratulated, General,” said Winston Churchill. “This will be a victory for the ages.”

Eisenhower looked uncomfortable with the praise. His shoulders rolled around nervously under his jacket. “Our men…and women,” he replied after a pause, “are the ones who deserve congratulations, Prime Minister. They’re out there fighting for us.”

Churchill grinned wickedly. “I don’t know how you expect to become president if you refuse to take credit for others’ good work, General. You still have a lot to learn.”

Eisenhower didn’t so much as twitch a facial muscle in reply. Instead he focused on the drama of Europe’s liberation.

The map table in the war room was crowded with hundreds of wooden unit markers. Female RAF officers still pushed them around with long pointers, but most of the high-ranking staffers watched the video wall, where eight large flatscreens had been linked together to make one giant battlespace monitor, displaying the take from HMS Trident. The screens weren’t locally manufactured-that capability was still a few years away. Maybe even a decade. No, they had been borrowed from the Zone especially for this event. Churchill wondered how he might hold on to them afterward. British industry would benefit tremendously from being able to study them.

He caught himself, however, thinking as though the future were settled. They still had this grim business to be done with, of crushing the Nazis. It was entirely possible, he knew, that at any moment one of those screens would light up with the news of an atomic blast somewhere in France, probably directly over the Calais pocket occupied by growing numbers of Allied Forces.

Churchill rarely slept more than a few hours a night, as a habit, and the specter of a Nazi A-bomb prevented him from enjoying what little sleep he did get. He’d read thousands of pages of secret reports indicating that they simply did not have the resource base or industrial capacity to produce even one such device, and thousands more warning of an inevitable atomic attack some time in the next few weeks. Or even days.

An aide appeared, and the British prime minister nodded for another cup of coffee, with a shot of Bushmills. For the moment the operation was running as well as could be expected-better, in some ways. The Germans were still maintaining the bulk of their forces in the Normandy area, waiting for a blow that would never fall there. The Allies had established air superiority-if not total dominance-of the Calais battlespace. The Germans had put many more jet fighters into the fray than had been expected, and they had cut to ribbons whole wings of old prop-driven fighters, but they simply could not prevail against the huge numbers of Allied, mostly American, F-86 Sabers that confronted them. And the Germans didn’t have anything like the numbers of heavy and medium bombers that the RAF and USAAF could bring to bear. Nor had they invested in any kind of airborne warning and control systems like the Allies.

The great strategic surprise of the campaign, however, had been the airlift. The heavy, coordinated investment in just three types of helicopter by all of the Allies had paid handsome dividends. In just four days an extra six divisions had been lifted directly into the combat zone, including three artillery regiments with all of their howitzers and ammunition. It was a miracle.

“Prime Minister, Prince Harry and his regiment are en route.”

“Thank you,” he replied to the young army captain who had brought the news. Then he turned to Eisenhower. “And now we reach one of our trip wires, General. We shall see whether Donzenac is the bogey we all feared.”

Eisenhower nodded, pressing his lips together. “I sincerely hope not, Prime Minister.”

Fifteen silver darts shrieked over the evergreen forests of Correze, blue cones of superhot exhaust pushing them toward their target at a thousand kilometers an hour.

Squadron Leader Fiona Hobbins nudged the stick over slightly, shifting her heading two degrees to the south. The moonlit landscape blurred beneath her, the shimmering surface of a small lake rushing toward the nose of her fighter-bomber and vanishing beneath in just a couple of heartbeats. She paid it no heed, instead concentrating on the world she could see in the heads-up display of her powered goggles, a precious set of Oakleys on loan from the Clinton.

Behind her the other pilots wore identical sets, linked via the flexipads in their cockpits to one of the Trident’s high-altitude drones. It was a slipshod half-arsed arrangement, in Hobbins’s opinion, but there was no avoiding it. Until somebody built a plant capable of fabricating quantum chips, or even old Pentiums, they were stuck with these sorts of kludges.

Bottom line, though, they worked.

Mostly.

Her visuals resembled an old flight-sim game from the days before V3D, but that was enough to allow them to thread through the tangled mess of the air battle over France and into the target box, a short, shallow valley in the quiet south. As the squadron flashed over a small French hamlet, designated in light blue outline by the Trident’s Combat Intelligence, she craned her head to the left, where twenty-eight small green triangles were converging on her heading at about a quarter of her airspeed.

The Chinooks carrying Prince Harry and the SAS. Five minutes late and two choppers short. She quickly checked a status display and found that one of the big birds had been forced to turn back with hydraulic failures. Another had crashed in the channel.

Hobbins performed a few constrained isometric stretches to work out the kinks and some residual nervousness. If she fucked up, the men in those helicopters were all going to die. If not in battle, then soon thereafter. The Germans were still summarily executing any “Kommados” they captured.

A chime in her helmet sounded, and the voice of the Trident’s Combat Intelligence spoke up. “Five minutes to release point. Arm warheads.”