Final impact

“Something fu

“Not really,” Kolhammer said as he fitted his powered shades in place. “I was just thinking of serendipity. Do you remember the exact song that was playing?”

“Not really,” Jones said, looking nonplussed.

“Well, I don’t know whether you heard or not. I think you were talking to Chief Rogas at the time. But Hidaka, he was sort of whimpering after she broke his arm, begging De Marco to tell him what she was going to do.”

“And?”

“And so she leaned into him and told him they were going to boogie-oogie-oogie until they simply could not boogie no more.”

Jones’s rich baritone laughter rolled out over the naval base.

Kolhammer allowed himself a chuckle, too, now that they were out of earshot of the typing pool and any other ’temps who might be listening. They just wouldn’t understand.

11

Julia had missed the first day of the offensive-she was stuck on the road from Dieppe to Abbeville, which, in her humble opinion, blew chunks. She didn’t like to stand still for very long these days. It gave her time to think about all the mistakes she’d made. It didn’t matter what anyone told her, she knew that she was to blame for Rosa

She shook her head in the back of the jeep and cursed softly.

“Y’all okay there, Miss Duffy?” her driver asked. He was a pimply black kid from Detroit, name of Private Franklin, and he was still in awe of his unexpected passenger.

She smiled kindly at him. They were stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Thousands of vehicles stretched away in front and behind them. GIs trudged alongside the road in an unceasing line. Some of them slowed down to talk every now and then, usually until some noncom bawled at them to haul ass again. It would have been an irresistible target for the Luftwaffe…had the Luftwaffe not ceased to exist in any real sense in this part of the world. High above them countless numbers of Allied fighter aircraft described long, lazy figure eights, “guarding the parking lot,” as Julia explained to her companion.

“We’ll be out of this soon, ma’am. I’m sure of it,” Franklin promised.

“S’okay,” she said, staring across the plowed fields that surrounded them on both sides. “Gives me a chance to tally up all my regrets.”

“You, ma’am?” he gasped. “You couldn’t have any regrets! Damn, excuse me, ma’am. But damn, you’re famous and all. And rich. And pretty, too, if you don’t think me too forward for saying so, ma’am.”

Her smile touched the corners of her eyes for the first time in many days. “Thanks, Franklin. But I’m not Sinatra. I’ve had more than a few regrets.”

The jeep lunged forward a few feet as a pulse of movement crept along the jam.

“Hey, you know, that’s my favorite song, Miss Duffy. You want me to sing it for you? I can sing it real well. My mom says so, anyway.”

Before she could shrug and say Sure he was into the first verse, beating out a kickin’ version of the old tune, which had bounced around in the top ten for the last six months. She couldn’t help but laugh and join in the chorus. A couple of grounded paratroopers picked it up as they marched past, and within moments it had spread up and down the almost stationary line of traffic. Thousands of tired, bloodied men ripping out an a cappella power-ballad version of “My Way.”

Julia quickly unpacked her Sonycam, blocking out a precious few minutes of lattice memory to record something other than blood and horror.

There was more than enough of that waiting for her up ahead.

For six days the combined air forces of Britain, Canada, and the United States had carpet-bombed a corridor 120 kilometers long and 30 wide. Within that target box lay twelve armored and motorized divisions the Nazis had released from the “defense” of Normandy to attack the Allied Forces around Calais.

The first concerted air strikes had begun as the lead element of the German counterattack-the Panzer Lehr and the Panzer Korps Herma

The Tigers, their crews, and the armored perso

The strategic bombers hammered the centerline of the advance, all 120 kilometers of it, while hundreds of Cobra gunships and ground attack aircraft buzzed viciously on the flanks, chewing over any smaller formations that escaped the crucible. Nearly twelve hundred Tiger and Leopard tanks were destroyed in the first hour. By the end of the engagement two thousand more had been reduced to scrap metal, and approximately forty thousand German soldiers were dead.

Allied losses ran to two dozen bombers and fifteen helicopter gunships. The first press reports in London actually understated the scope of the victory, because nobody could bring themselves to believe it. Once the devastated corridor was secured by a highland regiment, Julia had hopped a flight over to see for herself the realities of what the tabloids had dubbed “the Great Turkey Shoot.”

When she’d finally escaped the corps-level traffic snarl, she’d recognized the first signs of destruction from twenty klicks out-a great burned-out scar on the face of the earth.

“Holy shit,” she muttered as her chopper bled off altitude and dropped down toward the ruined countryside. “Those boys really did do it their way. Anyone know how many Frenchies bought it?” she asked in a louder voice.

The pilot’s voice came back over the intercom. “Nobody’s saying, Miss Duffy. But I don’t see how anything could have survived inside the target box. I’ve flown twenty miles in, and all the way out to the horizon on both sides that’s all you see. Scorched earth. It’s fucking amazing.”

She nodded. The highway into Damascus had looked a bit like this when the air force had trashed the Syrian First Armored Corps. But at least that wreckage had maintained a sort of integrity, like a long drawn-out junkyard. You could see, as you flew over it, each cohesive unit that had been set upon and destroyed.

The devastation stretching across northern France was something entirely different, something she was only just getting used to, along with the ’temps. They might be a little backward in many ways, but when they put their minds to it they could do violence on an apocalyptic scale. It was fu