Harry didn’t turn off the nav aids that filled so much of his visual field with transparent arrowheads, flashing circles, and red squares. The Resistance crew invariably led him where he was supposed to be, and on the one or two occasions that they hadn’t it was only to take a shortcut that the Trident’s human sysop and Combat Intelligence were unaware of. As they passed the intersection with the Citй du Midi, a narrow dead-end street lined with much smaller, two-and three-story buildings that seemed to lean over the cobbled roadway, at least eight or nine women burst from the next street along. Dressed for the boudoir, they flew down the Rue de Clichy with their robes and ribbons streaming behind them.

A voice spoke into his earpiece. “Trident here, Colonel. Those women just ran out of the target building. Hostiles approaching from the Rue d’Orsel. Estimate two minutes until contact with asset.”

“Acknowledged,” Harry said, a vibe wire in the frame of his powered glasses picking up his speech and converting it to a quantum signal for relay back to the stealth destroyer. “Right,” he said in a much louder voice to the others, “let’s go kick some fucking arse.”

Still jogging along, they all hauled out weapons and began to run harder.

Harry could hear the first gunshots ahead.

His first shot took the woman in the neck. As the Gestapo approached she’d briefly disappeared around the corner, and when she came back Brasch took it as a sign that the game was on. He aimed at the center of her chest but shot high. He was never that good a marksman. The collaborator spun into the wall as blood sprayed from a severed artery.

Brasch then put two rounds into the broad back of her cohort, who moved for the first time in an hour as the pistol barked. Brasch heard two dull thuds under the Luger’s report, then the metal clang of the woman’s helmet striking the brick wall. Kinetic energy drove the man into the sandbag revetment, collapsing it into the Rue Houdon. The engineer wondered if he had time to dash down and retrieve a couple of the potato mashers. Those grenades would turn the alleyway into a killing jar.

Then he remembered that he could check. He had access to Fleetnet. He needed only to make the request, and the sysop on the Trident would send him a live video feed from the drone above. In response to his signal, they’d told him they had the area under constant surveillance now.

Just as he was about to call the ship, a British voice spoke from his flexipad. “Trident here, Herr General. Remain where you are. Hostiles are fifty meters away and closing quickly. Extraction team is two hundred meters to the southwest. Do you copy?”

“Acknowledged.”

Brasch moved away from the window frame and into the hallway.

The small screen on his handheld device reformatted with a top-down view of the streets immediately outside. He could see nine black-clad figures moving quickly; then they stopped momentarily on the Rue Houdon before pressing on with even greater urgency, running toward his building, brandishing automatic weapons. Red triangles shadowed them on the display.

Around the corner he could see six individuals charging around the corner of Clichy and Guelma. A blue circle surrounded one. The leader, perhaps?

He could see that the Gestapo were going to beat them.

Prince Harry enjoyed more than a passing familiarity with the Rue de Clichy.

In 2007 while at the Royal Military Academy, he’d spent a couple of days’ leave in France for the Rugby World Cup. Between matches he and a couple of mates from “Alamein” company at Sandhurst would hit the bars around Montmartre. It was a last taste of freedom before joining the Household Cavalry and, later on, the Special Air Service.

Charging along the beautiful sun-dappled street was a little like running through a V3D memory stick. The war had spared Paris, for the most part, and this area of the old city was almost identical to what he had encountered in his day, architecturally at least. In 1944, of course, there was no sign of the Intifada. Poplar trees still threw their shade onto the narrow footpath, and the length of the street presented an unbroken wall of elegant nineteenth-century apartments and offices, most them standing between five and six stories high.

Harry pounded down the sidewalk and barged through the scrum of panic-stricken prostitutes, one of them trying to grab at his arm as she cried out something about “Le Boche.” The two Resistance men, Alain and Pietr, had pulled ahead of him and were approaching the corner. Ronsard was at his right. Claudel, his left. The other woman, Veronique, was a few feet ahead and carrying what looked like an enormous old Webley pistol in both hands. He had no idea where she’d kept the thing hidden. It looked like a bazooka against her small frame.

The few people on the street were hurrying to get out of their way. Even onlookers on the far side scurried into doorways or made for whatever cover they could find. Gunfire had been a constant and growing background noise throughout Paris for days, but the Place Pigalle had apparently been spared any overt violence until now.

Then a volley of small-arms fire broke out, cutting down Alain and Pietr as they swung into the alleyway. Pietr, a big man, a white Russian йmigrй, disappeared as momentum carried him forward and out of view, but Alain spun like a child’s top and crashed to the ground, his light blue shirt pockmarked with bullet holes and discolored with spreading bloodstains. Harry stopped without thinking and turned, training the muzzle of his weapon back up the street. The German who’d been bartering outside the hotel was standing at the open door of the Kьbelwagen, his arms full of heavy-looking white sacks. He was too far away for Harry to make out the expression on his face, but he assumed it was one of surprise. The SAS officer keyed up a three-round burst on the 24’s selector and linked its laser designator to the targeting chip in his sunglasses.

The German seemed to leap toward him with dizzying swiftness as the Ray-Bans’ nano-optics refocused. Now he could see the man’s face as though it were just a few feet away. Three small red dots moved in tight, jumpy circles on his chest, just above the sacks. Harry squeezed the trigger and sent three ceramic bullets downrange. The 24 employed a multitube barrel arrangement, with three separate muzzles opening at the mouth of the gun. All three projectiles thus impacted at the same time. They were flechette rounds, engineered to penetrate the target mass and unfold themselves inside, like small tumbleweeds composed of razor wire.

Half of the man’s upper torso disintegrated as the kinetic energy flipped him back into the open-topped car.

Harry spun back and ran toward the alleyway. A window with a top-down view of the contested alley appeared in the lower quadrant of his visual field as the voice of the Trident’s sysop spoke in his earpiece.

“Nine hostiles confirmed, Colonel Windsor. Four have entered the building. Five remain outside to guard the exit.”

Flashing red triangles marked the position of the Germans in the pop-up window. Two had hunkered down behind a sandbag barricade, in front of which lay a dead man and woman in civilian clothes. Another had taken up position inside a doorway to the building. The last two hugged the wall just around the dogleg corner of the alleyway. They were probably the ones who had killed the Resistance fighters.

Just in front of him Veronique sprinted across the mouth of the back street and pressed herself up against the corner of the building on the other side. A couple of bullets whistled past as she did so. Ronsard and Anjela held position at the corresponding corner on his side. They were all waiting on him, knowing that he could call on any number of views from the Big Eye drone humming far above.