"Equipment check," he yelled over the noise.

Each paratrooper patted and pulled at the man in front him, checking for faults that might kill a man before he had a chance to fight.

"Sound off!"

They counted themselves down, halting temporarily at the ninth man, as two windows shattered and somebody screamed.

"It's Dietz. He's gone."

The puking kid was dead.

The count continued, as the men on either side of Dietz cleared his body from the lineup.

Albrechtson called out that he was clear as the red light turned green.

He grabbed the frame of the exit and thrust himself out. He felt the shock of hitting the airstream at speed and heard the zip-zip-zip of bullets passing by his head. His chute deployed, and his boots swung up with the jerk of interrupted momentum.

It was peaceful then, dropping through the autumnal sky, no longer trapped in the corrugated metal coffin. He could see the airfield below, and the gliders dropping gracefully toward their landing zone.

But his stomach lurched as he searched the sky for the transports that were carrying his Fallschirmjager. There were so few left. He knew they'd taken casualties before the escorts had driven off or-more likely-destroyed their attackers. But it seemed as though only a handful of 52s had made it through.

As he glided down, Albrechtson frantically searched for his binoculars, a small pair of Zeiss glasses he kept in a breast pocket. He found them, then nearly dropped them, before finally managing to turn them toward the target. He expected to find massed flak batteries down there. Or evidence of a squadron that had been missed by the Abwehr. There was no sign of either. Yet half his command had already been destroyed.

This was going to be like Crete all over again.

Prince Harry calculated that about 210 paratroopers had popped chutes overhead. Trooper Akerman said 220. Bolt put his money on around two hundred.

"We'll count them afterwards," Harry decided as he fixed a microlight targeting dot on the chest of a descending paratrooper.

"A fiver on the result." Bolt just wouldn't let it go.

The German appeared at a virtual distance of ten meters in Harry's goggles, although he was actually a good four hundred meters away. Harry exhaled slowly and applied smooth, even pressure to the trigger, until his rifle kicked back with a loud, flat bang.

In one of those post-Transition ironies, the venerable German firm of Heckler and Koch had manufactured his weapon, an M12 carbine. Made entirely of composites, it was a lightweight assault rifle of the old school. It didn't electronically fire caseless ceramic ammunition, instead feeding 5.56 mm augmented bullets from a thirty-six-round magazine, and 20 mm programmable grenades from an in-line stacker.

The German, who had been holding tightly to his risers, scanning the ground as it rushed toward him, jerked as the round hit. Harry didn't bother to put another shot in. He was firing shredders, which disassembled themselves inside the target before emerging at 940 meters per second, dragging about a kilogram of human tissue behind them.

He squeezed off another three shots as the troopers on either side of him did the same. The airfield defenders banged away enthusiastically with a variety of weapons, mostly Lee Enfield rifles and Tommy guns.

The crackle of small arms from Fitzsimons's three squads reached them. A glider broke up as a Bofors crew took it under direct fire.

"Nasty," hissed Bolt.

But the sheer weight of the German assault began to tell. Paratroopers made it to the ground and disengaged their chutes, running for cover. Some tumbled and spun, as the snipers began to pick them off. Even so, small groups of three and four, then larger parties of eight or nine survivors banded together and went to work.

"Over there, sir," Bolt cried as an antiaircraft redoubt came under assault. Five Germans charged it, firing rapidly, one of them hosing down the position with a Schmeisser.

"Bugger," Harry said as the volume of incoming fire stepped up a notch. Rounds whistled close by, kicked up clods of dirt, and occasionally thumped into the chest or splattered the head of a 'temp in the slit trench. He tried to draw a bead on the paratroopers who'd taken over the big gun, but they were at least seven hundreds meters away. His first shot burst a sandbag; the next caromed off the gun itself. He dialed up his sniper team on tac net.

"Angus, Stevo. You need to get busy, or you're going to get chopped into dog meat."

"Sorry, Skip," came Fontaine's reply. "I can't get a clear shot at them."

Harry examined the AAA site again. Pulling in as much as he could. The Germans zoomed in to fill his visual field. But it was difficult to stay focused, since every movement of his head was amplified a hundredfold. Bullets chewed up the sandbags, and one struck a paratrooper in the shoulder, but they stuck to the job of trying to get the gun depressed far enough to use it as a weapon against his people.

Harry was turning that over in his mind when Trooper Bolt suddenly pushed him down.

The ground seemed to shake with a volcanic eruption.

"The runway charges!" he cried.

Harry peeped up in time to see tons of dirt and broken bodies and the smashed up remains of a couple of gliders dropping back to earth. Four more gliders tried to avoid the crater, but it was too late. They went in nosefirst, with a bone-jarring crack and the crunch of splintered wood.

The Prince made a few quick calculations. "Fire the claymores, Andy."

Bolt did as he was ordered, even though no Germans were approaching. Two of the antipersonnel mines had been set close to the runway and had gone up with the demolition charges. The other six fired with a thunderclap and instantly peppered three of the wrecked gliders with thousands of steel balls.

"Fix bayonets!" yelled Harry.

He heard the rasp and click of nearly two dozen old-fashioned bayonets, as his own men quickly fitted their sawback fighting knifes.

"Follow me, gentlemen. Let's clean them out."

The war cry started amongst the 'temps, a guttural sound building into a full-throated highland scream as they charged across the grass toward the shattered gliders and deep, smoking holes excavated by Bolt and Akerman's shaped charges. Harry flipped his selector to three round bursts as he ran, snapping the M12 up to finish off a few lonesome parachutists who were still wafting down to the ground.

He heard the muffled whump of a grenade launcher. It was Bolt, sending a frag into the shallow pit where the glider with the least amount of damage had finished up. A German soldier had been emerging shakily from a huge tear in the rear of the plane, and he was blown back inside.

Whump. Whump.

Twin explosions split the glider into three sections, and Harry flipped his weapon to full auto, sending a stream of 5.56 mm into the crippled airframe. The industrial hammering of the other M12 assault rifles, the crash of grenades and small arms, all served to isolate Harry, almost cocooning him from the wider battle. But he had to press on, to get close enough to that Bofors pit to bring it under fire by grenade launcher.

He heard Akerman grunt and drop. A flashing red icon on his HUD told him the trooper had fallen off the tac net. He was dead. Harry didn't have time to check on why. A lucky shot, perhaps.

He held the M12 level now, the point of his bayonet leading him into the no-man's land of the ruined airstrip, the screams of berserkers all around.

They'd done it.

Albrechtson wanted to hug the men who'd risked all to capture that antiaircraft gun and turn it on the Tommies. They raked the tree line on the little hill where the enemy had deployed at least three of four separate sections to pour fire down on his men.