Only Philby and the two fluent speakers raised their voices as the squad disembarked from the truck, still pretending to be wounded soldiers. Philby ordered them into the house and loudly announced that they'd be staying there until beds could be found for them at a military hospital.

Once inside, the men stripped off their bandages and bloodied rags, resuming their counterfeit roles as soldiers from Holland and Denmark. They unpacked their kit, checked weapons, and waited for the call.

It came within two hours.

Draper's chippy was a short walk from old Scotland Yard, off the northeastern end of Whitehall, and it proved more convenient to drop Viv and the others there before he and Harry continued on to the Ministry alone.

Hundreds of barrage balloons floated on tethers above the city, over which lay a dense blanket of smoke from the fires started by German bombing raids. Sirens still blared constantly, although the conflict's center of gravity was well away from the city, south in the Channel and northeast in Suffolk. Harry was just indulging in a moment of self-pity that he wouldn't get to sit down with a nice chip butty and a cup of tea when a sixth sense began to scream at him.

He snapped out of his reverie and took a sight picture of the scene in front of them. Draper was motoring down Whitehall at about thirty miles an hour. They'd just passed the Admiralty and the headquarters of the Horse Guards, and were coming up on the War Ministry. A black Bentley was parked in front of the Ministry, its driver moving around to open the back door.

A truck marked as a medical transport was pulling up on the other side of the street, and British soldiers were jumping down from the rear.

They were all bandaged as though badly wounded, but they were still armed, and judging from the way they moved, they weren't injured at all.

"Speed up, speed up now," ordered Harry as he reached for his M12.

Corporal Draper stepped on the gas, but not without asking what was up.

The rattle of small-arms fire reached them.

The Bentley's driver fell to the cobblestones, and Harry could hear the telltale impact of bullets on metal and armored glass. He flicked the power switch on the rifle's underslung grenade launcher and dialed up a firing sequence. Three fragmentation rounds and two incendiary. Bracing the gun on his knee he sent the five fat 20 mm programmable grenades on their way.

"Hey! That's Mr. Churchill's car, that is," protested Draper.

"I know," said Harry as the tiny bomblets dropped in pattern, the frags bursting on the blind side of the truck, to protect the Bentley from their blast effect. The incendiaries dropped onto the lorry and in amongst the knot of men. They were grouped at the rear of the vehicle to fire on Churchill's car and the guards rushing out of the Ministry.

The deuce-and-a-half rocked on its axle as the HE rounds went off, scattering most of the assassins like bowling pins. Two bright, white flashes followed immediately, setting alight the truck's canvas tarpaulin and the uniforms of the men Harry had targeted.

The jeep was bouncing so roughly that he couldn't be sure of hitting anything with his carbine, so he leapt into the rear of the vehicle and unsafed the.50-caliber mount. For an antique, the big gun was still an awesome piece of fighting machinery.

Harry had to fire in short bursts, lest he demolish the Bentley with a badly aimed volley. They'd begun to take fire now, bullets pinging off the metalwork and cracking the windshield. Draper simply sped up, hunching over the wheel and pointing the car directly at the screaming, burning troops. Harry squeezed out two more bursts, chopping a couple of his targets in half, before he snatched up his carbine again as they drew too close to depress the barrel of the huge machine gun any further.

Time stretched and pulled. They hit a chunk of road excavated by the grenades he had fired, and the jeep lifted off for a short flight through clean air, slamming into the bodies of four burning Germans-at least he hoped they were Germans. One of them flew apart into half a dozen flaming chunks of roadkill.

Then he was down, in amongst them, the rifle firing single shots. Return fire zipped and whistled past his head.

He heard the deep boom of a Webley revolver and saw Draper out of the corner of his eye, dueling with two men. One was missing an arm below the elbow, and both were singed and smoking. The driver killed them and hurried over to the Bentley.

Harry smashed the butt of his M12 into the blackened face of a man dressed in a contemporary British sergeant's uniform, who was swearing at him in low German.

And then nothing for a few seconds.

Silence.

…

…

…

His spinal inserts began to feed beta-blockers into his central nervous system, forestalling the tremors and shock that might otherwise have attended such an unexpected and violent incident.

Everything was rendered into hard clarity: the taste of the scorched air; the hundreds of pockmarks in the body of the prime minister's car; the sizzle and spitting of burning rubber as the truck settled on the steel rims of its wheels; the sound of Corporal Draper, retching in the gutter; the flat, hollow crack of another pistol.

Harry spun and saw a slant scar-faced man advancing on them, firing a Luger. He whipped up his M12, but the trigger pulled back without response. It was empty.

Another bullet cracked past his head. His fighting knife was in his hands as though he had wished it there. Without conscious thought, he threw the dagger as he had so many thousands of times in practice. It embedded itself in the shoulder of the last attacker. The man's face registered the pain as he attempted to wrench it out, but the serrated teeth on the inside of the blade stopped him.

And then he and Harry were on each other.

Iron knuckle-dusters slammed into Harry's chest, breaking a couple of ribs that had already taken some terrible punishment in the fight at Alresford. He spun with the direction of the blow anyway, looping his hand around the other man's forearm and pivoting quickly to bring force to bear on the vulnerable elbow. He heard the man gasp, but he was well trained, and accelerated his own movement in the same direction, speeding up to break free of the hold.

Harry grabbed the hilt of his fighting knife and reefed it free with a wet, tearing sound as they separated. The German grunted in pain, but no more. A shortened bayonet had appeared in his hand.

Both of them were breathing heavily, circling each other like caged wolves.

The man's eyes narrowed, and he smiled. "Prince Harold, if I am right? Not wearing your swastika today, then, Your Highness? Oh, dear? Have I missed the party season?"

Harry didn't respond. He was concentrating on the man's defenses, looking for an avenue of attack.

"My name is Skorzeny. Colonel Otto Skorzeny," he said. "And you are in my way."

Skorzeny struck out with a quick slash at Harry's knife hand, but the SAS officer was ready for that and withdrew the arm, which he'd hung out as a lure. He snapped a kick out, aiming for the colonel's knee, but the German, too, was ready, and he rotated just far enough to allow the blow to glance off.

They slashed at each other three or four times, close enough now to drive in a killing blow, except that neither could penetrate the other's defenses.

"Major Windsor, get out of the way, sir. Give me a clear shot."

It was Draper, nursing an arm shattered by a bullet from Skorzeny's pistol, aiming the Webley uncertainly with his other hand.

Harry heard a car door open behind him, and the thunder of boots on the steps of the Ministry.

Skorzeny smiled and plucked two grenades from his webbing, pulling the pin with his teeth, and dropping them on the ground. "Until next time," he said, spinning around as rifle fire snapped past Harry's head again.