“Contacts hostile, Captain. Targets confirmed.”

“Designate them for USAAF intercept, Ms. Burchill. Slave to the Intelligence.”

“Aye, Captain. Targets designated. Intercept squadrons Thirty-five and Thirty-nine moving to engage. Posh has control.”

Captain Karen Halabi thanked her EWAC boss, Lieutenant Burchill, and watched as two squadrons of F-86 Sabers peeled out of the holding pattern they’d been describing over the channel and kicked in the thrust to head off the massed air attack forming up over Luxembourg. Lady Beckham, the Trident’s Combat Intelligence, had detected 130 E-type 262s as they entered the edge of her threat bubble, at exactly the point she’d been told to watch for them.

Such a timely warning smacked of a skinjob, one of the Germans from the original Multinational Force who’d been trained up and sent into the Reich as deep-cover agents. Halabi had no idea which of them it might be, but they were doing the good Lord’s work today.

The phrase brought her up, just momentarily. That was one of her husband’s favorite sayings. She’d picked it up hanging around Mike on her last bit of rec leave in the States. As a lapsed Muslim-well, not that lapsed, because she’d never been that observant-Karen Halabi tended to steer well clear of any biblical or Koranic allusions in her everyday speech. She found it put people on edge. Or it had back in the Old World.

But Mike was an unreconstructed Vatican III Catholic, and his private conversations were peppered with references to the good Lord, appeals to the good Lord, and occasionally, when things turned to poo, some gutter-mouthed Texan abuse of the good Lord.

Halabi briefly wondered where he was. But she had business in the here and now.

Being the primary command, control, and electronic intelligence node for the Allied invasion of Europe, Trident had a huge number of tasks delegated to the quantum processors of her Combat Intelligence. One such job was to guard against the raid now taking shape to the south of General Patton’s Third Army. British intelligence had sent through a watching brief ten days ago, ordering that the highest priority be given to early detection and interdiction.

Within an hour of the brief Captain Allan Leroy-the fighter command liaison officer stationed aboard Trident-knocked on her door, figuratively speaking, with an air tasking order for six squadrons of F-86 interceptors that would provide a standing combat air patrol. There would be two squadrons permanently on station at any given time.

Halabi was impressed. The Sabers were the latest models, just out of the States, packed with all sorts of design tweaks and mouthwatering mods like AT/AIM-7 Sparrows, first-generation heat seekers, and beam-riding semi-active air-to-air missiles, nose-mounted continuous-wave radar sets, and the new Pratt Whitney JT3C axial flow turbojets. Those babies could deliver nearly five thousand kilos of thrust, making them almost as fast as the Skyhawks Mike was taking to the Marianas. You didn’t put that sort of asset on standby for ten days without a very good reason.

And the eight linked flat panels of her main battlespace display showed her the reason. A hundred and thirty of them, to be exact.

One entire monitor had been given over to the feed from the Nemesis arrays that were focused on the airspace around the approaching Luftwaffe raid. Smaller pop-up windows ran enhanced imagery of the USAAF response and the disposition of ground forces in Belgium. As the Trident’s CI vectored the American jets onto their targets, Halabi wrestled with the irrational feeling that she had become something akin to a spectator in the Ladies’ Stand at the cricket.

Save for a few suicidal air attacks, the Trident hadn’t directly engaged an enemy combatant in nearly a year. Having fired off the last of her offensive weapons to repel the German’s attempted invasion in 1942, she’d been “reduced” to playing the role of a floating radar station and comm hub. Her ship had been retrofitted with “new” antiship missiles, and a very useful Phalanx Close-In Weapons system to replace her Metal Storm pods and laser packs, but she was also surrounded by the equivalent of her own battle group.

Two Royal Navy carriers and a small armada of battle cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers attended her every move. A squadron of RAF Sabers maintained a permanent combat air patrol seven thousand meters overhead.

Everyone understood how important the Trident remained-not least the Germans, who had expended enormous numbers of men and machines trying to sink her. But Halabi and her largely unchanged 21C crew couldn’t help but be stung by the chiding they took from the “real navy,” as the ’temps sometimes referred to themselves.

And here they were again, not really fighting, just directing traffic.

“Interceptors closing to range, Captain.”

“First missile locks.”

“Multiple targets acquired.”

“All hostiles now locked.”

“Interceptors launching.”

Halabi accepted a mug of Earl Grey tea from a young seaman, one of the few ’temps who’d come on board to perform nontechnical duties. “Thank you, Beazley,” she said.

On the main battlespace display nearly two hundred white lines reached out from the blue triangles denoting the USAAF interceptors. They sped away from the launch point, tracking swiftly across the screen toward the red triangles of the Luftwaffe’s attack group. On screen the German 262s suddenly tried to scatter, their tight formation breaking up into a chaotic swarm of diving, twisting, climbing planes.

“CI reports the Germans have deployed chaff and flares, Captain.”

“Thank you, Ms. Burchill. Are they proving significant?”

“Posh calculates that about forty percent of the USAAF salvo appears to have been drawn off-target, ma’am.”

But small white circles started to bloom on the monitor as the other missiles, which had not been fooled by the German countermeasures, began to strike home. Just one or two at first, then five or six all at once. Dozens of tiny pixilated flashes marked where a missile had plowed into an exhaust vent, wing, or fuselage and detonated, punching the aircraft out of the sky and its pilot out of existence.

“CI confirms forty-eight kills, Captain.”

“Second launch detected.”

Dozens more missiles sped away from the blue triangles. Posh counted sixty-eight in total. Again the Trident’s Nemesis arrays detected the Luftwaffe pilots’ attempts to decoy the AT/AIM-7s, and again they were successful in about 40 percent of cases. But another twenty-six German jets were raked from the sky.

“Third salvo ma’am.”

“Thank you, Burchill.”

All but five of the surviving attackers were engulfed and destroyed. Halabi watched as the Sabers continued on the same heading for half a minute, suddenly breaking formation as they came within cannon range of the Germans. Less than a minute later every last attacking plane had been scythed down.

The Sabers broke off and made for their base back in northern France, while another two squadrons took up the holding pattern in their place, guarding against any follow-up attack. Halabi sipped at her tea.

“Very good work, everyone,” she said. “Mr. Leroy, my compliments to fighter command.”

“You betcha, ma’am. That was some fine shootin’.”

Halabi nodded quietly, wondering again how Leroy, a Texan just like her husband, had ended up in fighter command, an RAF show. She’d never had a chance to ask him. On most days, anywhere between thirty and forty ’temp liaison staffers were aboard. They came, they went. She’d given up trying to keep them straight in her head.