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.But damn, you re famous and all.And rich.And pretty, too, if youdon t think me too forward for saying so, ma am. Her smile touched the corners of her eyes for the first time in many days. Thanks, Franklin.But I m not Sinatra.I ve had more than a few regrets. The jeep lunged forward a few feet as a pulse of movement crept along thejam. Hey, you know, that s my favorite song, Miss Duffy.You want me to sing itfor you? I can sing it real well.My mom says so, anyway. Before she could shrug and saySure he was into the first verse, beating out akickin version of the old tune, which had bounced around in the top ten forthe last six months.She couldn t help but laugh and join in the chorus.Acouple of grounded paratroopers picked it up as they marched past, and withinmoments it had spread up and down the almost stationary line of traffic.Thousands of tired, bloodied men ripping out an a cappella power-balladversion of My Way. Julia quickly unpacked her Sonycam, blocking out a precious few minutes oflattice memory to record something other than blood and horror.There was more than enough of that waiting for her up ahead.For six days the combined air forces of Britain, Canada, and the UnitedStates had carpet-bombed a corridor 120 kilometers long and 30 wide.Withinthat target box lay twelve armored and motorized divisions the Nazis hadreleased from the defense of Normandy to attack the Allied Forces aroundCalais.The first concerted air strikes had begun as the lead element of the Germancounterattack thePanzer Lehr and thePanzer Korps Hermann Gring approachedthe town of Abbeville.The lead three tanks, Tiger IIs, rumbled onto a ridgeto the east of town, but never even made it to the downslope.High above them,fifteen Lancaster bombers, protected by a squadron of Saber jet fighters, allof them controlled by the Nemesis battlespace arrays of HMSTrident threehundred kilometers away, released the first of tens of thousands of dumb ironbombs that would fall on the Germans over the next week.The Tigers, their crews, and the armored personnel carriers traveling behindthem were obliterated.The quantum arrays of theTrident delivered the weaponspackage in such a focused manner that most of the initial target mass wasatomized, so tightly compressed was the storm of high explosives.The strategic bombers hammered the centerline of the advance, all 120Page 92 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlkilometers of it, while hundreds of Cobra gunships and ground attack aircraftbuzzed viciously on the flanks, chewing over any smaller formations thatescaped the crucible.Nearly twelve hundred Tiger and Leopard tanks weredestroyed in the first hour.By the end of the engagement two thousand morehad been reduced to scrap metal, and approximately forty thousand Germansoldiers were dead.Allied losses ran to two dozen bombers and fifteen helicopter gunships.Thefirst press reports in London actually understated the scope of the victory,because nobody could bring themselves to believe it.Once the devastatedcorridor was secured by a highland regiment, Julia had hopped a flight over tosee for herself the realities of what the tabloids had dubbed the GreatTurkey Shoot. When she d finally escaped the corps-level traffic snarl, she d recognizedthe first signs of destruction from twenty klicks out a great burned-out scaron the face of the earth. Holy shit, she muttered as her chopper bled off altitude and dropped downtoward the ruined countryside. Those boys really did do it their way.Anyoneknow how many Frenchies bought it? she asked in a louder voice.The pilot s voice came back over the intercom. Nobody s saying, Miss Duffy.But I don t see how anything could have survived inside the target box.I veflown twenty miles in, and all the way out to the horizon on both sides that sall you see.Scorched earth.It s fucking amazing. She nodded.The highway into Damascus had looked a bit like this when the airforce had trashed the Syrian First Armored Corps.But at least that wreckagehad maintained a sort of integrity, like a long drawn-out junkyard.You couldsee, as you flew over it, each cohesive unit that had been set upon anddestroyed.The devastation stretching across northern France was something entirelydifferent, something she was only just getting used to, along with the temps.They might be a little backward in many ways, but when they put their minds toit they could do violence on an apocalyptic scale.It was funny, in a reallydark way, thinking back to how horrified they d been when the uptimers camespilling out of the wormhole with their detached, postmodernist, unemotionalapproach to warfare.There d been quite a run of little books and magazinearticles by the sniffier sort of contemporary intellectual about the refinedbarbarism of future morality and culture.Some days readingThe New Yorker waslike being trapped in a stalled elevator with Harold Bloom and that hadhappened to her once, so she would know.As a genuine uptime celebrity Juliahad even been dragged into the debate, arguing on radio with some idiotprofessor who wanted to ban television for fifty years to allow society timeto prepare for its arrival.For all their initial squeamishness, however,the temps had proven themselves fast learners in the arts of savagery.And when all that savagery was directed as it had been over northernFrance by twenty-first-century Combat Intelligence, the effect was exactlywhat she d come to observe and report on: a genuinely biblical catastrophe. Holy shit, she repeated. Yeah, the pilot agreed, that s what everyone says. After they landed, Julia bivouacked with a British intelligence unit taskedwith picking over the scrap metal and body parts, not that there was much ofeither to analyze.Over the next two days she shot a few megs of imagery thatPage 93 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlwas eerily reminiscent of footage she d seen from the First World War, thentried and failed to gain access to the handful of prisoners who d been taken.There weren t many, and she believed the Intel Division colonel who told herthey weren t speaking to anyone yet.Most were under sedation, he told her inconfidence.She filed a thousand words for theTimes on her impressions of the GreatTurkey Shoot, which were really no different from anything anybody else had tosay.No matter how she tried to spin it, it all boiled down to holy shit. She did a hometown puff piece on the crew of the Huey she d ridden in withand filed a great bit on Private Franklin s impromptu cover of Frank Sinatraon the road to Abbeville.Then, while waiting for a lift back to Calais, she missed the opening shotsof Patton s breakout and drive toward Belgium.D-DAY + 24.27 MAY 1944.0411 HOURS.BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.The fhrer was screaming.The object of his rage, a poor Luftwaffe colonelwith more bad news from the Western Front, looked gray, perhaps even feverish.Certainly he didn t look healthy.Rather than creating a pall over the crowded underground room, however,Hitler s outburst actually lifted a few spirits, because it meant that thefocus of his rage had shifted safely away from everyone else, at least for abrief moment.It had no effect whatsoever on Himmler, though, since he hadlong since stopped paying any attention to the fhrer s rants.They were likea constant background refrain, similar to the rumble of the British bombsduring the night.Still, the SS leader felt nearly as sick as the Luftwaffe officer looked.Itwas he who d convinced Hitler to release the forces from Normandy for a strikeagainst the Allied foothold
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