“Mr. McTeale,” she said to her executive officer, “I’ll be on the bridge for half an hour, then I’m turning in. Keep my chair warm here, would you?”

“Very good, ma’am,” the XO answered in his warm Scottish brogue. “And congratulations to you, too, Captain. You saved a lot of mams from losing their bairns tonight.”

“Traffic control, Mr. McTeale. It’s just traffic control.”

“That must have been it.”

Patton’s intelligence boss scanned the southern skies with a pair of Starlite binoculars, but there wasn’t much to be seen. The weather had closed in, and there was no telling whether the faint flashes came from the air battle Julia had just been told about, or from the sheet lightning that strobe-lit the countryside at irregular intervals.

“Damn shame,” Patton said as he looked longingly at his radar-controlled triple-A and SAM half-tracks. “I was looking forward to that.”

Julia Duffy rolled her eyes in the dark. These guys took their whole alpha-male routine way too seriously. The last thing you wanted was a bunch of German fast movers getting close enough for you to see the fireworks when they got swatted. They moved so fast, there was always a good chance some were going to slip through. She’d happily give that a miss.

For all of the combat she’d covered with the Times after the Murdoch takeover back up in twenty-one, she had never seen anything to match the world-ending violence of a big armor clash. Most of her work uptime had seen her embedded with small units of ground fighters, working jungle or mud brick environments in Asia and the Middle East. On those occasions when she had covered large-scale land battles, they tended to be very one-sided affairs, like the battles of Damascus or Aden, with American or British armored divisions rolling over the burned-out wrecks of late-Soviet-era antique tanks.

Patton was using air supremacy to make his campaign as one-sided as possible, but without an Eastern Front to fight on, the Germans had well over a hundred divisions to block the Allied path to Berlin, and they were learning not to mass their armor and artillery out in the open where it could be hammered from above.

Patton leaned over the hood of his jeep, peering at a map covered in a dense tangle of red and blue lines. They’d pulled up on a ridge overlooking the site of a fierce struggle that had taken place an hour earlier between the Black Panthers and what had turned out to be an SS armored regiment.

“Krauts aren’t gathering like they used to,” he grunted. “They’ve broken up into these much smaller task groups, some of them with organic air support. It’s a lot harder to beat them this way, and a lot less neat.”

Julia looked up from the map and scanned the field that stretched away about a kilometer below them. There certainly wasn’t anything neat in the aftermath of the battle down there. With her powered goggles she could make out hundreds of torn-up bodies and shattered, burning vehicles. She was glad to have witnessed it from a distance. When the firefight had reached its insane peak, it had looked like some kind of satanic foundry, a place where nothing was created, only destroyed. The crescendo of gunfire, rockets, and clashing armor had only been drowned out by the ear-shredding scream of low-flying aircraft as they ripped overhead to loose whole racks of missiles and hundreds of cannon shells.

Cobra gunships had thudded in and out of the holocaust, hosing down concentrations of German soldiers with miniguns and rocket fire, sometimes dueling with the few Luftwaffe choppers that dared to show up.

Through it all, however, Patton tore across the countryside in his jeep, barking orders at his staff, yelling at radio operators, slapping his hands down on maps, and ordering units to reinforce this battalion or that regiment. In the darkness and violence, he alone seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Julia did what she could to capture the essence of what was happening where the two armies met, but she kept returning to the figure of the tall, raspy-voiced general consigning some of his men to their doom, and others to glory.

“Do you want to go see your black boys now, Miss Duffy?”

“Sorry?”

She jumped, then looked up, jolted out of her reverie.

Patton pointed down at the field where she had been staring.

“The Seven Sixty-first broke through down there, and they’ve pushed on to Oostakker, with the Ninetieth Infantry. Those boys made the breach and I’m sending my army through it. I’m proud of ’em, Miss Duffy, they fought like fucking champions. So, you want to follow ’em?”

“Okay,” Julia said. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

Patton’s command post consisted of four jeeps and a light armored vehicle that looked like it might have come off the Kandahar. But according to Chris Prather, it was only six months old. She’d taken a peek inside, and the electronics were all contemporary.

The small group mounted up, and the jeeps and the LAV bounced down the hillside, through smashed dry-stone walls and over deep furrows dug into the soil by the tracks of the Easy Eight Shermans. Patton’s driver, Sergeant Mims, had a bulky pair of night vision goggles, but he’d pushed them up out of the way. Burning tanks and APCs provided more than enough light to navigate the slope. Even Julia took off her Oakleys. They were capable of dealing with the hot spots, but like Mims she found she could see just fine with her own eyes.

As hardened as she was, it was still an overwhelming experience. She wondered how anyone could have survived the maelstrom of high explosives and speeding metal. Dust-off choppers were carrying the first loads of wounded away as medics ran back and forth, providing first aid. The heat coming from so many burning vehicles made the skin on her face feel tight. The screams of the dying sounded no different from what she’d heard before, but Julia had never seen a general hop down from his transport, as Patton did at that moment.

He walked over to a litter, kneeling down and, she was certain, kissing the forehead of the soldier who lay there. Patton’s body blocked her view, so she couldn’t tell whether the man was a black tanker or a white infantryman, and in the end, what did it matter? With her camera she took in as much as she could of the ruined, burning tanks and the smashed-up bodies of the men who’d fought in them, even though she knew that much of it would be censored outside the Zone. The ’temps were still very touchy about showing their own casualties.

She ducked without thinking as a German Tiger cooked off a hundred yards away, its ammunition bay lighting up and blowing off the turret, which rose about three meters in the air before falling back onto the body of the wrecked vehicle with an almighty clang. Patton didn’t even look up. He made his way down a long line of wounded men who were waiting to be choppered back to a MASH, kneeling down and speaking a few words to each, smoothing the hair of one, patting another on the shoulder. She could see now that the wounded men were black and white, tankers and infantry.

“Hey, Sergeant,” she said, spotting someone she’d met earlier, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stone wall. “Remember me?”

The man tilted his head and squinted in the dark as firelight played over his features. “Sure,” he said. “You’re Miss Duffy. Captain Prather’s reporter. You gonna write about this?”

Julia racked her mind trying to recall his name.

Turley, that was it.

“You bet I am, Sergeant Turley. Are you wounded?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I just lost my tank. We took a whole bunch of RPG rounds. Lost the tracks first, then one punched in through the upper deck. Guy who fired it must have been sitting up in a tree or something.”