Final Impact (23 page)

“Eight?” she said. “My word, they
do
want him back. Do we know who he is?”

“Not yet, ma’am. You’ll have to authorize opening the jacket and reassigning the drone cover. There’s a lot of demand for Big Eye time in France right now.”

“Very well, let’s have at it, then. Who’s our liaison with the ’temps?”

“Nobody on board, ma’am. We’re laser-linked back to Baker Street. Ms. Atkins is waiting for you.”

“Very good then.”

And it was. She got on well with Atkins, another child of two cultures and a woman working at the heart of what was often considered to be a man’s world. The intelligence officer for the French section of the Special Operations Executive, she was also assistant to the SOE’s chief, Maurice Buckmaster. Halabi swung into the cramped office that served as Lieutenant Commander Howard’s domain. Three monitors were live, but two had dimmed their screens, leaving the one on the far left—a video feed—as the primary display.

Halabi smiled when she saw Atkins in the window. “Hello, Vera. A spot of bother, I understand?”

The SOE staffer looked very worried. On every occasion that Halabi had dealt with her, she’d presented herself as a model of Continental refinement and poise. Born in Romania, she’d moved to England with her family in the early 1930s, but returned to the Continent to study languages at the Sorbonne. Her frequently severe demeanor could be softened by a deceptively innocent smile, and she rarely appeared with a hair out of place. This morning, however, she was showing the strain of a night’s sleeplessness. Dark half-moons had risen under her eyes.

“Captain Halabi,” she said, nodding from the screen. “One of my sources needs immediate protection and extraction. He has lost his controller.” Halabi had never known her to use the term
skinjob,
which was considered slightly obscene by the ’temps. “There is an exfiltration team heading toward his location now, but they need more drone coverage. I am requesting authorization and a sysop to control the operation.”

Halabi didn’t bother nitpicking the details. She trusted Atkins. “Consider it done.”

The captain nodded at Howard to begin the process.

“As this is a terminal run, I will need to open his jacket, Miss Atkins. Do you concur?”

“I concur,” she answered.

A black file icon turned white on the screen and opened into a separate window. The man staring out at Halabi was a stranger.

“Who is he?”

“Major General Paul Brasch,” Atkins said. “Second in charge at the Reich Ministry of Advanced Armaments Research. He is one of our crown jewels, Captain. We need him alive.”

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1417 HOURS.
PLACE PIGALLE, PARIS.

There was a good chance, thought Harry, that Ronsard might blow the whole thing. Not by taking a potshot at some lingering German outside a requisitioned hotel, but by unloading on one of his own compatriots, most of whom seemed to regard their former overlords with little actual malice. Instead a detached irony defined the Parisian response to the end of the Occupation.

For Harry, this was nothing new. He’d seen more than his fair share of captive cities as they changed hands, and knew that it often took a couple of days for the realization of their freedom to sink in. A certain degree of circumspection was generally prudent.

But as they jogged up the Rue de Clichy, dressed in tatty civilian clothes, past the red windmill of the Moulin Rouge, Ronsard kept up a stream of Gallic profanity aimed at his feckless compatriots for their less-than-delighted response to the end of Nazi rule. They’d been in the city less than twenty-four hours, moving from one safe house to another, waiting for the call from London, and the experience had worn on the Frenchman.

Anjela Claudel was much more sanguine, but then, unlike Ronsard, she had spent most of the past two years in-country and understood the compromises inherent to her own survival. Ronsard had left for England from Dunkirk, and had been there ever since.

“Steady on,” Harry cautioned as his companion began to curse at the sight of a local man bartering with a Wehrmacht officer for a sack of what looked like potatoes. They were standing on the steps in front of a small hotel, and at least half a dozen other men and women were languidly watching the exchange. Harry wondered what the Frenchman could possibly have that the German would want at this particular juncture, but human nature was a strange, protean thing; it was entirely possible the man was risking his life for a last-minute splurge on pornography or black-market cigars.

A
Kübelwagen
was idling at the side of the road and obviously intended to make a quick getaway, but the last major convoy had left the city long ago and Harry didn’t fancy his chances. Perhaps he’d been ordered by some general—or even a
Reichsmarshall
—to secure whatever it was he was bargaining for.

Harry placed a firm guiding hand in the small of Ronsard’s back and gave him a gentle push to keep him hurrying along. A dedicated link to the Big Eye had opened up, feeding threat data and nav aids into the powered sunglasses he was sporting, a pair of retro Ray-Bans that wouldn’t look too much out of place. This part of Paris wasn’t much different from his own day, and he needed little help in finding his way to the target, but even a few seconds’ delay for a wrong turn might mean failure, and London had emphasized in the strongest terms that failure was not an option today. The fact that he and Ronsard had been pulled off the transport for Scotland, and sent into the city without notice or preparation, evidenced not just the urgency of their mission but its unforeseen nature, as well.

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 Cité 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.

Harry pounded down the sidewalk and barged through the scrum of panic-stricken prostitutes, one of them trying to grab at his arm as she cried out something about “Le Boche.” The two Resistance men, Alain and Pietr, had pulled ahead of him and were approaching the corner. Ronsard was at his right. Claudel, his left. The other woman, Veronique, was a few feet ahead and carrying what looked like an enormous old Webley pistol in both hands. He had no idea where she’d kept the thing hidden. It looked like a bazooka against her small frame.

The few people on the street were hurrying to get out of their way. Even onlookers on the far side scurried into doorways or made for whatever cover they could find. Gunfire had been a constant and growing background noise throughout Paris for days, but the Place Pigalle had apparently been spared any overt violence until now.

Then a volley of small-arms fire broke out, cutting down Alain and Pietr as they swung into the alleyway. Pietr, a big man, a white Russian émigré, disappeared as momentum carried him forward and out of view, but Alain spun like a child’s top and crashed to the ground, his light blue shirt pockmarked with bullet holes and discolored with spreading bloodstains. Harry stopped without thinking and turned, training the muzzle of his weapon back up the street. The German who’d been bartering outside the hotel was standing at the open door of the
Kübelwagen,
his arms full of heavy-looking white sacks. He was too far away for Harry to make out the expression on his face, but he assumed it was one of surprise. The SAS officer keyed up a three-round burst on the 24’s selector and linked its laser designator to the targeting chip in his sunglasses.

The German seemed to leap toward him with dizzying swiftness as the Ray-Bans’ nano-optics refocused. Now he could see the man’s face as though it were just a few feet away. Three small red dots moved in tight, jumpy circles on his chest, just above the sacks. Harry squeezed the trigger and sent three ceramic bullets downrange. The 24 employed a multitube barrel arrangement, with three separate muzzles opening at the mouth of the gun. All three projectiles thus impacted at the same time. They were flechette rounds, engineered to penetrate the target mass and unfold themselves inside, like small tumbleweeds composed of razor wire.

Half of the man’s upper torso disintegrated as the kinetic energy flipped him back into the open-topped car.

Harry spun back and ran toward the alleyway. A window with a top-down view of the contested alley appeared in the lower quadrant of his visual field as the voice of the
Trident
’s sysop spoke in his earpiece.

“Nine hostiles confirmed, Colonel Windsor. Four have entered the building. Five remain outside to guard the exit.”

Flashing red triangles marked the position of the Germans in the pop-up window. Two had hunkered down behind a sandbag barricade, in front of which lay a dead man and woman in civilian clothes. Another had taken up position inside a doorway to the building. The last two hugged the wall just around the dogleg corner of the alleyway. They were probably the ones who had killed the Resistance fighters.

Just in front of him Veronique sprinted across the mouth of the back street and pressed herself up against the corner of the building on the other side. A couple of bullets whistled past as she did so. Ronsard and Anjela held position at the corresponding corner on his side. They were all waiting on him, knowing that he could call on any number of views from the Big Eye drone humming far above.

Harry slipped off the Ray-Bans, passing them to Ronsard so he could have a quick look at the drone feed. The Frenchman, who’d trained with the system in Scotland even though he was never likely to have access to his own Combat Optics, nodded and took a look. Then he handed them off to Claudel, who seemed to take a few moments to understand what she was looking at, but she quickly worked it out.

Harry used the brief interlude to remove a strip of ammunition from his handgun, replacing it with another from the breast pocket of the rather threadbare civilian jacket he was wearing. The regiment still had a reasonable supply of reloads for the 24s, having hoarded their own stocks and having benefited from the generosity of Captain Halabi, who’d turned over the contents of the
Trident
’s armory to them. He took the glasses back and fitted them again just as Veronique banged off a few rounds from her antique pistol to keep the Boche in their place.

A clatter of concentrated small-arms fire came from within the building, followed by a hollow boom that shook the whole place and dislodged a sprinkling of masonry dust. His earpiece crackled into life again.

“Major General Brasch requests
immediate
extraction, Colonel.”

“All right, all right, tell him to keep his fucking pants on,” Harry muttered, more to himself than to the operator back on the stealth destroyer. “Ronsard, give me a couple of seconds’ covering fire, then pull right back,” he ordered.

The Frenchman opened up, and the others followed suit, even though none had a clear shot: the flat hollow booms of Veronique’s Webley; the thinner, much less substantial cap-fire of Claudel’s little handgun; and the snarling bark of Ronsard letting rip the short full-auto bursts of another VLe 24.

Harry selected the barrel he’d just reloaded. As the French fighters pivoted away, he calmly stepped up to the corner, raised the weapon in a two-handed grip, and squeezed off half a strip of micronic grenades. They punched out with a slightly softer report than the penetrators he’d fired earlier, exiting the gun with a much lower muzzle velocity. Six of the electronically fired area-clearance rounds smacked into the brick wall at the far end of the alleyway, ricocheted off, and detonated in the middle of the passageway around the dogleg.

The high-explosive lozenges triggered with a roar that surprised the civilians. It sounded as though a barrage of mortar rounds had gone off. Glass shattered up and down the street. Thick clouds of dust came billowing out of the alleyway, and Harry took off again, leading them all in at a sprint. He and Ronsard fetched up at the corner first.

Disembodied limbs and torn, bloodied clothing littered the ground. Harry checked the top-down display in his Ray-Bans. Four of the red triangles had gone out. One was flashing, but he could see through the smoke that it tagged a man who was trying to crawl away, using only one arm. His legs and most of his other arm remained behind. Anjela Claudel put a single shot into the back of his head.

“Gestapo scum,” she said. “He should have suffered, but…”

A Gallic shrug.

Harry pressed himself up against the wall, which was painted with a sticky organic gruel of flesh and blood. A machine pistol, probably a Schmeisser, started up inside, hammering away in short, irregular bursts. The popgun reply of a small pistol could barely be heard over it.

Harry pulled out his flexipad. “
Trident,
can you get a point-to-point linkup with Brasch?”

“Aye, Colonel. Just a moment. There. Channel three. Audio only.”

Harry held up the flexipad like an old-style cell phone. “Brasch. Major General Brasch. Can you hear me? Can you respond? It’s Colonel Windsor of the Special Air Service. We’re here to extract you.”

The German replied in clear, if accented English. He sounded remarkably calm. “Your Highness, a rare privilege. I can talk and shoot, but not well together. I am at the end of the hall on the third floor. I have killed at least two of them with a small directional mine. But two remain and I am outgunned.”

“Can you see both?”

“No, just one. The other is probably watching his back. So you must be careful.”

Now, there’s a statement of the bleeding obvious,
Harry thought.

The
Trident
’s sysop broke in on their channel. “Colonel Windsor, we have two other hostile teams closing on your location by foot. The nearest is on the Avenue de Villiers, an estimated ten minutes away. A second team has changed direction and is moving toward you along the Rue du Faubourg St.-Martin. They will arrive in approximately fifteen minutes.”

Bugger.

Harry quickly explained the situation to his comrades as the gun battle continued inside.

“Veronique and I will slow down the fascists on de Villiers,” Anjela Claudel said when he’d finished. “There is a café there, a favorite of the Communists. We will get help.”

There was no arguing with them. The two women simply spun away and took off.

“Right,” Harry said. “By the book then, Captain Ronsard.”

The Frenchman nodded. Harry spoke into the flexipad again.

“Herr General? We’re coming in. Move back from your door and take whatever cover you can.”

On the count of three they burst into the building.

Brasch fired off all but two of the bullets left in his clip. He would save those for the Gestapo if they came through the door. Having already upended the heaviest piece of furniture in the room across the doorway—an old, hardwood freestanding closet—he leapt into the small stronghold he’d made in one corner using a small vanity, a cheap writing table, and a stained, poorly sprung mattress. As he dived through the air, his ears were assaulted by an incredible cacophony, ripping bursts of automatic gunfire—much louder and fiercer than the MP40s the secret policemen had been firing at him—splintering wood, and cracking bricks, duller percussive thuds and enormous, bowel-shaking explosions. It was like Belgorod all over again.

Before driving into the unknown building and up three flights of stairs, Harry and Ronsard stripped in penetrators and area clearance. The small entrance hall was a slaughterhouse.

Brasch had rigged up some sort of claymore-type mine and triggered it as the Gestapo had entered. The first two men had taken the full force of the blast and nearly disintegrated. Their remains were embedded in the pitted, ruined hallway walls. The two commandos came in hot, hosing down a narrow arc in front of them with short bursts of tungsten penetrators. Designed to slice through monobonded plate armor, but meeting only plaster, brickwork, and wooden floorboards, they passed through like very small, hyperaccelerated wrecking balls, chewing the old brothel to pieces.

Pounding footsteps on the next landing warned them of somebody’s approach. Harry fired a full strip of penetrators into the ceiling, tracing a line along the axis of the corridor on the floor above them. He was rewarded with a strangled shriek, followed by a tremendous thump.

They took the stairs three at a time, their legs working like pistons. Ronsard made the next level first, firing a precautionary three-round burst to clear their way. He needn’t have bothered. The German lay in a crumpled heap of black leather trench coat.

“Clearance,”
Harry called, and Ronsard ducked as the prince pumped two high-explosive rounds up through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Both men hunched over as the pellets triggered with a deafening clap of thunder. Half the ceiling seemed to collapse, and with it came the body of another German.

Hopefully not Brasch.

Harry trained his gun on the body as it crashed to the floor, landing atop a pile of fallen wreckage like a sack of concrete. It didn’t move.

“Major General Brasch,”
he called out. “It’s Colonel Windsor. I think we’re clear.”

He heard grunts and the scrape of something heavy being shifted on the floor above. After a moment the German appeared, peering down through the gaping hole. He was dressed in civilian clothes, but wearing a holster into which he slipped his Luger.

“Your Highness, I hope.”

“And Captain Ronsard of the Free French Army,” Harry said. “Can you get down, General? Best we don’t stuff around too long here. Some more of your former comrades are keen to catch up with you.”

In the small pop-up window, Harry could see a gunfight just starting over on the Avenue de Villiers. It looked like a very disorganized affair. Claudel had not had time to set up a proper ambush. She seemed to have found three men to help her, but they were outgunned by the Gestapo, or SS, or whatever they were. The prince’s chivalrous nature urged him to tear over there and lend a hand, but a decade and a half of military training won through. The women had effectively offered to sacrifice themselves for the mission, and that meant getting Brasch safely away.

“Trident,”
he said into the flexipad as Ronsard helped the German clamber down through the ruined ceiling. “I need a route out of here right now.”

“Already laid in, Colonel,” the sysop replied. “Feeding nav data through now. You’ll be heading south, toward the Champs-Elsyées. The second team of hostiles is still three blocks away, but they are moving quickly. Best you get a move on.”

A large blue arrow appeared in the heads-up display, although it was a little premature since they were still inside. It pointed at a wall.

Brasch jumped the last, short distance and landed on the pile of plaster and shattered woodwork.

“Right then,” Harry said. “Let’s scarper.”

D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1454 HOURS.
BERLIN.