“Looks like you’ve cut them up into pockets,” Jeffrey said.
“Ja. Easier than we anticipated. Speed and planning and impact. There were a lot of them, but we had the jump from the beginning. Light casualties.”
“And you had those . . . what are they called, those moving fortresses?”
“Tanks.” Heinrich snorted, and a few of the other officers smiled sourly. “Terrifying when they work, which is less than half the time. We’re supposed to have one here.”
Jeffrey turned his glasses northward; the city suburbs thinned out from here, although it was harder to see since there wasn’t a slope over the intervening ground.
“You’re preparing for counterattack?” he said.
Heinrich laughed again and jerked a thumb at the dirigible passing overhead. “I love those things,” he said. “We dropped battalion-sized task forces with lots of automatic weapons at the road-rail junctions halfway to Veron. The wops have something like six divisions concentrating there, but there’s no way they can do a damned thing for a week—and by then we’ll have linked up with the airborne forces, plus we’ll have landed the better part of an army corps.”
Jeffrey nodded, pasting a smile on his face. That seemed like a very good analysis. But there were times when you wanted so badly to be wrong.
“Impressive,” he said.
Heinrich laughed heartily. “Stay with us for a while,” he said. “And we’ll show you impressive.”
CHAPTER SIX
“In the sight of Almighty God, God the Parent, God the Child, God the Spirit, I pronounce these two as one. What God has joined, let none dare put asunder.”
John Hosten gripped Pia’s hand, conscious that his own was slightly damp and sweaty. The long embroidered cord was bound around their joined hands and wrists in the ritual knot. Incense rose towards the tall vaulted ceding of the cathedral. The wedding party was small and sparse, old Count del’Cuomo in his dress outfit, a few other men in Imperial field uniform, some friends from the embassy. They rattled like a handful of peas in the huge, dim, scented stone bulk of the place, lost in the patterns of light from the stained-glass windows that occupied most of its walls.
He raised her veil and kissed her, soft contact and a scent of verbena.
The priest raised his staff for the blessing, then halted, listening.
They all did, and looked upward. A dull crump . . . crump . . . came in the distance; everyone in Ciano knew that sound now. Hundred-kilo bombs from a Chosen dirigible bomber, working its way across the sky at two thousand meters.
“Down by the docks,” John whispered to himself, “trying for the gasworks.”
probability 93%, ±2, Center said.
“John!”
He looked down at Pia. Her lips were fixed in determination. “This is my wedding day. I will not let those tedeschi pigs interfere with it.”
Pia’s tone was conversational, but it carried in the stillness of the cathedral. A murmur of approval went through the watchers. John could feel Raj smiling at the back of his mind.
You’re a lucky man.
“I am a lucky man,” John murmured aloud.
count no man lucky until he is dead, Center observed.
* * *
The open-topped car hummed down the roadway, gravel crunching under the hard rubber of its wire-spoked wheels, throwing a rooster-tail of dust behind it. Shade flicked welcome across John’s face from the plane trees planted beside it, each one whitewashed to the height of a man’s chest. Through the gaps he could see the fields, mostly wheat in this district, with the harvest just finishing. Stocks of shocked grain drew a lacy pattern across the level fields; here and there peasants were finishing off a corner of a poplar-lined field with flashing sickles. Ox-drawn carts were in the field, piled high with yellow grain, hauling the harvest to the barns and threshing floors; the laborers would spend the rainy winter beating out the grain with flails.
Damn, but that’s backward, John thought, holding the map across his knees with his hands to keep the wind from fluttering it. At home in Santander, all the bigger farms had horse-drawn reapers these days, and portable steam threshing machines had been around for a generation.