'That was a big one,' somebody grumbled. 'Must be fifteen miles away.'

Ernst heard a rumble of engines. Looking up he saw planes crossing the sky, very high, without lights, just silhouettes against the steel grey, like cardboard cut-outs, flying north to south.

'Old Goering will swat those fuckers like flies,' somebody said, yawning.

'But he was supposed to have got rid of the RAF by now.'

'Nothing to do with us, lads,' said the man at the head of the queue. He hammered on the toilet door. 'What are you doing in there, Wilhelm? We're freezing our balls off.'

More planes swept over, all of them coming from the north, wave after wave of them, without a challenge from any Luftwaffe planes, or a single anti-aircraft shot being fired.

XXXI

As Gary entered the ops room he was met by a barrage of popping flashbulbs and calls, some of them in American twangs. 'This way, Gary!' 'Over here, Corporal Wooler!' 'Gary! Smile for the folks back home, Gary!'

He stood there, uncertain, reluctant, the staff officer who'd escorted him at his side. They were behind the British lines here, in Alton, a few miles from the Petersfield to Farnborough line where Gary's own division was concentrated.

Beyond the blizzard of light the work of the ops room continued. Gary looked down on the great map table in the pit below him. The map showed southern England, a fat green peninsula pinned by the grey mass of London on the northern edge, and bounded by the pale blue of ocean to the south. This very old country was crowded with towns and villages, and by the traceries of roads that snaked around the lumpy brown of ranges of hills. But now it was disfigured by the bold red slashes of defensive lines, and harsh black scribbles that must be the perimeters of the occupied territories. Coloured blocks littered the map, representing units of men and armour, shoved across the map by Wrens with long-handled wooden shovels, like croupiers in some immense game of roulette. Along the coast from Brighton to Dover there was a cloud of toy aircraft, while little ships pushed through the Channel.

The Wrens wore headsets, and talked constantly. Telephones and radio receiving stations were set up around the walls. Officers in the uniforms of all the services watched from railed balconies, with a few civilians, ministers perhaps, puffing cigars. Still the flashbulbs popped.

None of this seemed real to Gary. The pit of light, the controlled murmur of voices, the flashing bulbs, the smell of cigar smoke, made it all dreamlike. He wasn't sure how he had kept functioning, in fact, since his mother had got through to him two days ago with the news about Hilda. He was going through the motions of his duties. But he felt as if he were neither asleep nor awake.

An officer, Royal Navy from his uniform, marched towards Gary. Maybe forty, he looked sharp, intelligent, his face lean and ruddy, an outdoors look, and he wore a precisely clipped black moustache. 'Corporal Wooler? I'm Captain Mackie, RN – Tom Mackie, MI-14. Look, I'm sorry for this charade. I know you'd rather be with your unit.'

'Yes, sir-'

'But in this bloody war, image and news presentation are assets just as significant as boots and guns on the ground. Let's get it over with and kick this shower of hacks and bulb-wasters out of our ops room, shall we?' He grasped Gary's hand and turned to the cameras, which flashed even more furiously. Through a fixed grin, Mackie said, 'Of course we're proud you've chosen to wear the uniform of the British Army. But it's a shame you don't look a bit more American, if you know what I mean.'

'I should have worn spurs and a cowboy hat.'

'That's the spirit! Look, General Brooke hoped to be here himself to meet you.'

'General Brooke?'

'CIC Southern Command, since July. He's been shaking up our home defence and doing a bloody good job, I should say. Right, that's enough for this lot. Show these gentlemen the door, would you, Sergeant Blackwell?'

'Right you are, sir.'

Mackie touched Gary's shoulder and led him to the railing that overlooked the big ops table. 'I know you're eager to get back to your unit. But I want you to take a moment to understand the big picture, and to see why your contribution today is so important, you and your mother's. I'm with MI-14, by the way, I think I mentioned that. We're that corner of Military Intelligence dedicated to analysing the Germans' intentions. I take it you can read the map?'

'More or less, sir.'

'We know that since establishing their first beachheads the Germans have moved forward to a preliminary covering line that runs from Uckfield to Canterbury, roughly. He pointed at the map. 'And although we've been disrupting the shipping, over the last few days they've managed to get some supplies and more men over, through the captured ports and airfields. Now we think their intention is to push forward to a deeper objective line, running from Portsmouth through Guildford and Reigate, all the way to the Thames estuary at Gravesend. Do you see? If they achieve that, they'll have sliced off the whole of south-east England, including all the airfields. And we believe that after that they will make a thrust west of London, up from Guildford to Reading. London would then be pretty much at their mercy.'

'So the plan is to stop them.'

'Quite right. Now.' He pointed to the Uckfield-Canterbury line. 'We can't hold the whole of that perimeter; we can't stop them crossing the line somewhere. Even if we hadn't left half our bloody army on the beaches at Dunkirk, we couldn't manage that. What we're trying to do is to contain their advance. Now look, can you see our assets? What we want to do is to confine their thrust roughly to the Uckfield-Guildford corridor.'

'Why there?'

'For one thing it's at the boundary between the two armies, the Ninth and Sixteenth, that make up the Germans' Army Group A. Always a weak point, that, the hinge between two forces…'

To achieve this containment British and allied units had been positioned to deter the Germans from advances elsewhere. The First London would block a push north of the high ground of the Weald. In the east a division of New Zealanders was trying to block an advance on Rams-gate; they were outnumbered, but had heavy guns capable of knocking out a Panzer advance. The Forty-fifth Division was positioned on the Weald itself, forcing the Germans to go west. North of the Weald were bodies of reserves, including Canadians, an armoured division and a tank brigade.

And in the west more reserves, including the Third Division under Montgomery – the division Gary had been transferred to – were ready to fall on the expected advance towards Guildford, when the opportunity rose, and carve it up.

'You see the pattern,' Mackie said. 'Now while all this is going on we've still got the RAF and Navy striking at the Germans supply lines, in their rear. They seem to have seriously miscalculated their logistics. They are still reliant on fuel and other supplies shipped over from France; the fuel especially is critical. That's the plan. It's all about logistics, essentially. We bottle them up, strike at them when they try to advance, and starve them of supplies. A kind of mobile siege.' He glanced at Gary. 'So what do you think?'

Gary considered. 'Sir, I'm just a regular corporal, and I've only been that a few days-'

'Oh, you're a bit more than that, Wooler.'

'This is above my head. It seems like it might have a fighting chance.'

'Yes, yes.' Mackie nodded. 'Well, that's how it seems to me. A fighting chance. But no more than that. You see, Wooler, the loss of the BEF was a dreadful blow, both materially and in terms of morale. We're putting up a fight. I think it's possible we can hold these bloody Germans on our soil, today and tomorrow. But it's certainly going to take more than we've got to drive them back into the sea. Which is where you come in.'