The Bofors mount had a direct line of sight that allowed them to target only half the ridgeline, being partially blocked by a crashed glider and a burning British truck. But the explosive ordnance had a dramatic and immediate effect, anyway, shredding the cover and chewing up huge gouts of soil and turf on that part of the hill that it could engage.

The volume of fire from that area dropped away almost completely.

Three more gliders touched down in the safety of the next field, and with only a handful of casualties, most probably from a sniper. Those men disembarked at a run.

A perimeter was established, and they began to work on the British flank, targeting those defenders who were protected from the ack-ack gun. He recognized the sweet sound of an MG42, so much like ripping cloth.

A second Spandau opened up.

A sergeant rolled into the small crater where Albrechtson had taken shelter. He had six other paratroopers with him, to add to the five the colonel had gathered together. Almost the makings of a platoon. If they could just-

"Get up!" he barked at them. "Now!"

A second German came at Harry as he struggled to withdraw his bayonet from the first, who was still thrashing about like a speared trout. He squeezed off a round, using the recoil and the hydrostatic shock to help him wrench free the blade.

But it was too late. He couldn't possibly turn around in time. His attacker was crazed. Eyes rolled back in his head, frothing at the mouth, tendrils of ragged flesh and khaki swinging from the bloodied spike that was attached to his Mauser.

Harry turned his hips, taking himself out of the line of attack and simultaneously parrying the bayonet thrust with the muzzle of his M12. He summoned a kiai from deep within his gut. The focused war shout directed his energies and disrupted the flow of his would-be killer. Without thought, without aim, he snapped out a side kick, driving his boot into and through the most vulnerable point, the German's kneecap, with all the force he could muster, pivoting on his other leg to deliver extra torque.

He felt and heard the joint disintegrate with a sickeningly wet crunch.

The man dropped, screaming, until the butt of Harry's carbine smashed into the bridge of his nose with such power that it destroyed the sinus cavities and caved in the frontal lobes. He was dead before he'd fallen all the way to the ground.

Men tore at each other like animals. So closely enmeshed were attackers and defenders that Harry couldn't fire his weapon normally, for fear of killing one of his own. Combatants shrieked and howled and sank their teeth into each other's throats. In the midst of this psychotic delirium, he and the other SAS man stood out for their economy of movement, and the efficiency with which they dispatched their victims. A knife-hand strike to the throat, a twisting lock that snapped the head free of the spine, the thumb driven into an eye socket, to distract before a fighting knife severed the carotid artery and windpipe.

With two decades of the close-quarter fighting between them, from the Tora Bora Mountains to the alleyways of Surabaya, they drew on a wealth of memory and experience about how best to kill a man when he's close enough to exhale his last ragged breath into your face.

A sledgehammer hit him in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. He thought he heard the rifle shot a second later, but of course that couldn't be so.

Harry hit the ground and rolled. The pain of the impact was enormous and crippling, even though he'd been saved by the reactive matrix weave of his body armor. Burnt earth, coppery with blood, filled his mouth. When the world stopped spiraling about him, he rolled onto his back, his pistol in hand. A German officer was standing ten feet away, frantically working the bolt on his rifle.

The Prince's arm was numb with shock. He had to tell his fingers to squeeze the trigger, cursing them as they refused to obey him.

The German raised the rifle.

Harry felt like his teeth might shatter, so hard was he biting down with the effort of just trying to pull the damned trigger.

The gun jumped, and the German spun into the ground.

Harry felt the familiar tingle of spinal inserts as they began squirting their contents into his nervous system. Some feeling returned to the arm; renewed energy coursed through his body. He levered himself up.

Two shots sounded nearby, then silence. Or at least relative silence. The Bofors gun still pounded away over the compressed roar of the German machine guns, which reminded him a lot of the old American M60. As he got to his feet, he saw the cost of the ground they had taken. There were no Germans left alive, but only six of his men remained, including Bolt, who had taken a bullet in the mouth and was now missing half his jaw. He was down, feet splayed, his back leaned up against the severed tail section of a German glider. His eyes had the far-away look that told of a massive drug dose washing through his system.

Harry was still stunned and trying to gather his wits when he realized he could hear the dull thud of rotor blades. Two contrails whooshed directly overhead, followed by the crump of detonation as a pair of Hellfire missiles stuck home.

The chopper was back, the earsplitting mechanical stammer of its autocannon a symphony of deliverance.

"I can't believe this," Halabi said. "What a bloody dog's breakfast."

She was strapped into her command chair. Indeed, everyone in the stealth cruiser's CIC was secured at their stations against the violent, high-speed course changes with which the Trident's Combat Intelligence guided them through the battle for the English Channel.

The main display teemed with thousands of contacts, friendly and hostile. The quantum processors and software of the Trident's Nemesis Battlespace Management System was busy collecting, analyzing, and disseminating terabytes of data every second. Posh broke down the attack into manageable chunks of information not just for the thirty-five dedicated sysops on board the Trident, but also for hundreds of newly trained shore-based officers who were laser-linked to the ship via the drones, which floated safely at the edge of the stratosphere.

As they watched, a wall of blue triangles moved across the computer-generated map of Suffolk toward the main German lodgment. Four larger, slower icons trailed behind them.

"Are those the Specter variants, Mr. Howard?"

"Aye, ma'am. But they call them Cyclones here."

Halabi nodded. Two of her engineers from the ship's Air Division had worked as advisers on the project, the fitting out of four Douglas Dakotas as gunships with electric miniguns firing out of two rear windows and the side cargo door. Each gun had been hand-tooled at a small factory in Scotland, and all used components stripped from various ships of the Multinational Force. Like their "forebear," the AC 47 gunship of the Vietnam War era, the Cyclones carried more than twenty-four thousand rounds of ammunition, and could plow up an area the size of a football field in a few seconds.

Halabi keyed in a request for a live feed from the Big Eye, with a footprint over the area.

Before she had a chance to take advantage of the feed, however, her weapons sysop called out. "Coming into range for launch on the Tirpitz group, ma'am."

She didn't need to request vision of the German battleship and its escorts, forging into the Channel. One panel of the main display had been devoted to their primary target all along. She heard the jackhammer of the Trident's Metal Storm pods as they lashed out at an air threat that had broken through the protective screen of 303 Squadron. A quick check revealed that they were down to 4.5 percent of their war stocks.