Churchill sighed audibly at that. Only four divisions!
"-we will hold in reserve the Canadian First Army, Free French Second Armored, and American infantry divisions on the GHQ Line, with our XXX Corps armored and infantry units advanced to engage the enemy at the bridgehead, wherever that may be."
Wavell swept his hand across the breadth of the map covering all of the southern counties.
"The imponderable question is where General Ramcke's paratroopers will land. Here I think we find the hinge of victory or defeat. Without control of the air or the sea-lanes, the Germans must plan on massive losses for their seaborne forces. We know they have made a massive investment in rebuilding the Fallschirmjager, and Himmler has personally overseen the creation of a Waffen-SS air-assault division. Wherever they land, we must fix them and destroy them. To this end, I am holding in reserve the Guards Armored and the First Infantry Divisions."
Wavell, who had been reading from a paper on the table in front of him, looked up from his eyebrows at Lieutenant Williams.
"For what it's worth, the SAS Regiment has been attached to the First Infantry and will do whatever it is they do when we know where Ramcke has set down."
Churchill ignored Wavell's bad grace. He had faith in the young prince and his merry men. They seemed just the right sort of bastards to turn loose on the Nazis.
31
RAF Biggin Hill in the London borough of Bromley was one of the most important airfields in the defense of London during the Battle of Britain. Built at the end of the First World War, it sat on high ground above the village of the same name. The first RAF flights controlled by radio flew out of there, and the first kill of the Second World War was credited to a fighter from Biggin Hill. It had been the object of endless attacks during the Battle of Britain, suffering massive damage, which almost but never quite closed down its operations.
Three of Halabi's crew were quartered there, coordinating battlespace management with the 'temps, and supervising a number of experimental programs, such as the Super Spitfire night fighter squadron. Those twelve prototype planes were located in hardened bunkers at the eastern end of the airfield, protected by radar-controlled Bofors guns. They weren't specifically targeted, but they were amongst the first casualties of the incoming strike.
Of the Trident crew on station at Biggin Hill that morning, only Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins was on duty. The others, a flight sergeant and a pilot officer with an advanced electrical engineering degree, were both asleep in their billets down in the village. Both had worked through the previous thirty-six hours.
The Trident flashed an alert to all her shore-based personnel, twenty-nine officers and others of various rank, as soon as the threat of the incoming missile strike was detected. When Hobbins's flexipad began screeching, she was lying on a gurney under one of the Spitfires. She didn't even bother to look at the screen-she'd been through hundreds of drills, and five actual alerts. She just spun off the gurney and started yelling as loudly as she could.
"Incoming! Get out. Get out! Move! Move! Move!"
Five seconds later, sirens began to wail all over the base.
Twenty-two men and women had been working in the hardened hangar when the alert came through. That had surprised Petty Officer Hobbins at first. She'd come to Biggin Hill expecting to find an exclusively male domain, but had been chuffed to discover a large number of women "auxiliaries." Equal opportunity debates were by the by now, though.
Everyone was running for their lives.
Hobbins hammered out of the aircraft shelter, overtaking a couple of lead-footed 'temps who'd spent a few too many quid on the real ale down at the Black Horse in the village.
"Move your fat arses," she yelled at them.
Hundreds of ground crew, technicians, and even pilots who'd been enjoying the warm autumn day were hurrying for slit trenches and sandbagged antiair mounts. Hobbins felt rather than saw it when the tarmac changed to grass beneath her pounding boots. A zigzag trench line beckoned, and some finely honed instinct made her dive for it rather than running and climbing in. That jump saved her life.
A grotesquely loud shriek, whoosh, and roar signaled the arrival of the hypersonic Laval over the base. The shock wave burst the eardrums of everyone within eight or nine hundred meters, including Hobbins, who screamed as it felt like long metal skewers were being driven into her head.
Unlike the American hammerhead-type missiles, the French weapon didn't need to open a bay door on its underside. Two hundred mini-silos were built into the fuselage, and those spat out submunitions of fused DU and SRDX accelerant. Rendered deaf, Hobbins was unable to register the impact of the first bomblets as they went tearing into the hardened concrete bunker, shredding it like crepe paper.
The rolling percussion of primary and secondary explosions registered as dull mallet blows somewhere outside her head. The Laval screamed past, far enough away that she survived the impact of the small front of violently compressed air that was trailing the rocket at five thousand kilometers an hour. Unprotected, the two crewmen she'd passed earlier flew apart as though hit by a speeding locomotive when the wave struck them.
A blizzard of offal poured into the slit trench, which threatened to collapse as the rest of RAF Biggin Hill was destroyed.
Petty Officer Fiona Hobbins curled up at the foot of the trench and waited to die. But the final eruption never came.
HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
There was no live video feed available, for which Harry was grateful. He didn't need to see what happened when you unleashed a Multipurpose Augmented Ground Attack device on a target that wasn't prepared for it. He'd been amongst the first troops into Algiers after the French Mediterranean Fleet "reduced" the city in retaliation for the radiological attack on Marseilles. Biggin Hill was a little sturdier than the mud brick capital of Algeria, but not so much as made any difference.
The SAS men and their Norwegian colleagues had cheered when the screen in the Trident's main hangar had shown the first two Lavals veering off course. But the cheering had died out as it became obvious there'd be no reprieve from the third missile. Harry had turned away from the screen, and was busying himself checking their gear for the short hop back to Portsmouth when Sergeant St. Clair called out.
"Look, guv, the primary didn't go off."
Harry looked up and was amazed to discover that his RSM was right. The Combat Intelligence indicated that the submunitions had fired, but not the main warhead. That would have excavated about three quarters of Biggin Hill down to a depth of thirty meters in less than one second.
"Has it moved on to a secondary target?" he asked. A part of him was afraid that the Germans had figured out how to program the missile to strike at multiple points, as it was meant to do.
But no. A flashing dialog box indicted that the ship's Nemesis arrays were no longer tracking the weapon, and hadn't registered any primary detonation of the Laval's subfusion plasma yield warhead.
Most likely it had simply crashed somewhere.
"Vive la France," Harry murmured. Whoever had been able to dicker with the first two shots, he must have been interrupted before he could finish with number three. The SAS commander wished him-or her-good luck, wherever they were.
Even so, Biggin Hill was a write-off. But he wondered if the Germans knew what had happened.
THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA
"We shall have crushed the life out of them by the time nightfall arrives," boasted Goring.