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.The screens weren t locallymanufactured that capability was still a few years away.Maybe even a decade.No, they had been borrowed from the Zone especially for this event.Churchillwondered how he might hold on to them afterward.British industry wouldbenefit tremendously from being able to study them.He caught himself, however, thinking as though the future were settled.Theystill had this grim business to be done with, of crushing the Nazis.It wasentirely possible, he knew, that at any moment one of those screens wouldlight up with the news of an atomic blast somewhere in France, probablydirectly 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 thespecter of a Nazi A-bomb prevented him from enjoying what little sleep hedidget.He d read thousands of pages of secret reports indicating that theysimply did not have the resource base or industrial capacity to produce evenone such device, and thousands more warning of an inevitable atomic attacksome time in the next few weeks.Or even days.An aide appeared, and the British prime minister nodded for another cup ofcoffee, with a shot of Bushmills.For the moment the operation was running aswell as could be expected better, in some ways.The Germans were stillmaintaining the bulk of their forces in the Normandy area, waiting for a blowthat would never fall there.The Allies had established air superiority if nottotal dominance of the Calais battlespace.The Germans had put many more jetfighters into the fray than had been expected, and they had cut to ribbonswhole wings of old prop-driven fighters, but they simply could not prevailagainst the huge numbers of Allied, mostly American, F-86 Sabers thatconfronted them.And the Germans didn t have anything like the numbers ofheavy and medium bombers that the RAF and USAAF could bring to bear.Nor hadthey invested in any kind of airborne warning and control systems like theAllies.The great strategic surprise of the campaign, however, had been the airlift.The heavy, coordinated investment in just three types of helicopter by all ofthe Allies had paid handsome dividends.In just four days an extra sixdivisions had been lifted directly into the combat zone, including threeartillery regiments with all of their howitzers and ammunition.It was amiracle. 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, PrimeMinister.D-DAY + 8.11 MAY 1944.0232 HOURS.SOUTH-CENTRAL FRANCE.Fifteen silver darts shrieked over the evergreen forests of Correze, bluecones of superhot exhaust pushing them toward their target at a thousandPage 46ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlkilometers an hour.Squadron Leader Fiona Hobbins nudged the stick over slightly, shifting herheading two degrees to the south.The moonlit landscape blurred beneath her,the shimmering surface of a small lake rushing toward the nose of herfighter-bomber and vanishing beneath in just a couple of heartbeats.She paidit no heed, instead concentrating on the world she could see in the heads-updisplay of her powered goggles, a precious set of Oakleys on loan fromtheClinton.Behind her the other pilots wore identical sets, linked via the flexipads intheir cockpits to one of theTrident s high-altitude drones.It was a slipshodhalf-arsed arrangement, in Hobbins s opinion, but there was no avoiding it.Until somebody built a plant capable of fabricating quantum chips, or even oldPentiums, 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, butthat was enough to allow them to thread through the tangled mess of the airbattle over France and into the target box, a short, shallow valley in thequiet south.As the squadron flashed over a small French hamlet, designated inlight blue outline by theTrident s Combat Intelligence, she craned her headto the left, where twenty-eight small green triangles were converging on herheading at about a quarter of her airspeed.The Chinooks carrying Prince Harry and the SAS.Five minutes late and twochoppers short.She quickly checked a status display and found that one of thebig birds had been forced to turn back with hydraulic failures.Another hadcrashed in the channel.Hobbins performed a few constrained isometric stretches to work out the kinksand some residual nervousness.If she fucked up, the men in those helicopterswere all going to die.If not in battle, then soon thereafter.The Germanswere still summarily executing any Kommados they captured.A chime in her helmet sounded, and the voice of theTrident s CombatIntelligence spoke up. Five minutes to release point.Arm warheads.A small flashing red box appeared just above the virtual horizon in her HUD.She nudged the stick again, lining up the yellow arrowhead with the targetdesignator.Back up in the twenty-first, a CI would have handled all of this,with the pilot riding along just in case something went wrong.Of course, backup in the twenty-first she wouldn t have been on a mission like this.Shewasn t a jet jockey or hadn t been, anyway.But thousands of hours flyinglight transport planes in and out of Third World death traps like Damascus andAddis Ababa had marked her out when the talent scouts had come calling.So nowshe flew jets.Specifically she flew the contemporary version of the F-86F Saber jet. Three minutes to release.Slaving mission package to CI.TheTrident s CI, still speaking in the voice of an as-yet-unborn LadyBeckham, informed the squadron that she had taken over the bomb release.Hobbins wanted to grip the stick harder, but she forced herself to breatheout, to relax her hold on the plane, and let herself flow through the moment.Page 47ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlA quick check of the heads-up confirmed that all fifteen Sabers were information and lined up for the final run in.High above them, theTrident sBig Eye tracked the jets feeding the data back to the stealth destroyer s CI,which measured their progress against position fix emitters set in place bythe Resistance, and calculated the time left to release while keeping thesquadron on the correct heading.The Chinooks had fallen well behind now.Hobbins would need a top-down viewof the battlespace if she wanted to track their progress.Instead, sheconcentrated on the darkened world that was rushing past her bubble canopy,and the objective that lay just ahead.It was a cloudless night; the starswere pinpoint emeralds in her LLAMPS vision, the Central Massif a wall oflime-green negative space, blotting out the heavens to the southeast.Tacticalreadouts and rendered terrain display overlaid the soft luminous Frenchcountryside, where every human-made structure was drawn on her goggles in hardschematic outline.A dry stone wall.A tumbledown barn.A burned-out church.And then, rushing toward them at a seemingly insane velocity, the target boxand nearly two dozen smaller icons: flashing red triangles where the Big Eyehad detected and designated antiaircraft guns and concentrations of armoredvehicles. Begin climb.Begin climb.Begin climb.She pulled back on the stick, and the nose of the F-86 turned skyward.Shecould feel the g-force pressing her back into her seat, trying to squeeze theblood out of her brain and down into her butt, despite the pressure suit shewas wearing. Begin dive.Begin dive.Begin dive
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