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"Well, there it is. We've postponed the attack once already. Now either we go on the 6th, with only marginal conditions, or postpone again in the hope of getting perfect conditions." Eisenhower looked around the room, searching the faces. "What do you think, Monty?"
Montgomery responded instantly, not a trace of hesitation in his voice. "I say go. Go!"
"I must remind everybody that the American convoys for the Omaha and Utah beaches - they have farthest to go - must be given the order within the next half hour if the assault is to take place on the 6th."
"We can't keep almost a quarter of a million men on ships and in embarkation areas indefinitely. The longer we wait, the more acute our security problem." He picked his glasses up from the table and perched them on his nose, peering at some documents on the table before him. "The next time the tides and the moon will be right... not before July."
Eisenhower contemplated it for a long moment. "Gentlemen... such a postponement is too bitter to contemplate."
"I still wish we knew more about these reports that have been coming out of Russia and our networks in Germany itself," the intelligence officer at the end of the table ventured. A stir went around the room, looks of both apprehension and exasperation on everyone there.
"I think we've heard rather too much of those stories," Montgomery said sharply.
"But sir, if the reports are accurate..." the man began.
"Accurate!" Montgomery cut him off. "Absurd nonsense!"
"The same nonsense, coming to us independently from better than fifty different sources?" The officer shot back.
"Your sources have obviously fallen victim to a disinformation campaign," Montgomery said. "The Germans have either fed them nonsense, or turned them in order to feed us nonsense. They're trying to spook us, plain and simple."
"I tend to agree," Eisenhower said. "We have discussed this issue several times, and I have given it careful thought. It seems to me that we are in danger of immersing ourselves in the intelligence to such an extent that we lose sight of the basic reality. Surely if we take a step back and think about it for a moment, we must understand that these stories of German soldiers who are almost invulnerable to any weapon, and possessed of inhuman strength, cannot be based in reality. I am inclined to agree with Monty," he added, drawing a satisfied smile from the British general and a wince from the intelligence officer. "Look at our own efforts in Operation Fortitude; we have put tremendous effort into convincing the Germans that the main landings will occur at Pas de Calais. We have created entire fictional divisions complete with faked barracks, vehicles, radio message traffic... we even assigned one of our senior generals to command this fictional force, knowing that the attention of the Germans would be drawn to him. If we can accomplish this, cannot we expect the Germans to have their own fictional forces?"
"But Russian troops are reporting actual encounters, experiences from real combat..." the intelligence officer said desperately.
Eisenhower shook his head. "The fact that reports of such encounters exist does not prove that the encounters themselves have taken place," he said firmly. "I am convinced that the Germans have managed to insert these faked reports into the Russian command structure, possibly via fifth column forces who are submitting faked reports to generate exactly this kind of hysteria."
The intelligence officer fell silent, knowing that further argument was useless. Eisenhower paused, seeking further comment; there was none.
"Very well, then," he said. "I'm quite positive we must give the order. I don't like it, but there it is. Gentlemen, I don't see how we can possibly do anything... but go."
Inge broke the surface, looking around immediately for the others of her squad. The sun was still well below the horizon; the cloudy sky was just starting to brighten, but it was still hard to pick anything out in the gloom. One by one, nine other heads broke the water. She smiled and focused further out.
The sight took her breath away. Ships. Ships everywhere, more than she could ever have believed possible. In one glance she could see what must be well over a hundred of then, low grey shapes squatting in the channel. Destroyers, transports, cruisers, landing ships, row after row of them stretching to the horizon.
And there, just five hundred metres away, the ship which was their target. The vast looming bulk of HMS Warspite, thirty three thousand tons of British steel whose eight thirty four centimetre guns were currently preparing to lob shells up to thirty kilometres over the shores into occupied France. The ship could fire two broadsides a minute, each delivering over seven metric tons of steel and explosive onto German forces.
It was her team's job to put a stop to that. She grinned fiercely in anticipation of the fun to come.
The team set off to swim the short distance to the ship, muscles powering them through the water with a strength beyond all human limits. They drove through the water at more than thirty kilometres per hour, covering the distance in under a minute. About half way there the water around them exploded into foam as bullets hammered into it; somebody must have picked out the wake each woman was leaving behind her, Inge thought. A heavy shell smashed into her back, exploding on impact. She smiled and carried on swimming.
As they reached the ship the heavy fire fell off, most of the guns unable to depress enough to reach them; instead only the occasional bullet smacked into the water as increasingly shocked Royal Navy crew on the deck fired rifles down at them.
Inge looked up, grinning ferociously at the startled faces peering down at her from six metres overhead. She slammed her fingers into the steel flanks of the ship, feeling the thick armour bending beneath the stunningly powerful impact. She couldn't hope to punch through it completely - thirty five centimetres of solid steel armour was beyond even an Amazon's strength. But she could dent it, just enough...
She sank her fingers into the dent and pulled herself up, punching another finger-hold higher up. Slowly she worked her way up towards the deck of the ship, glancing from side to side to make sure her team were doing the same. Off behind here a dull explosion sounded, and she felt shrapnel pinging against her back harmlessly. A grenade.
She reached the deck, grabbing the rail and vaulting over it in one graceful movement. A dozen sailors stared at her, frozen still, shocked eyes peering out of pale faces as the giant naked Amazon smiled and stepped towards them.
An officer finally broke the spell, raising his Webley revolver. Inge stopped before him, smiling invitingly as the gun cracked. She felt the slightest of feather-taps as the bullet ricocheted off her cheek. She waited patiently, amused as the man fired again and again, emptying his weapon uselessly.
As the last shot fired a silence fell. The men stared at her, unable to quite accept what had just happened. They'd probably convinced themselves that all the shots fired up to now had somehow missed, she mused, but it's hard to deny it when a man empties his weapon at you from a metre away.
She darted forward, her huge hand wrapping around the fist clenching the empty weapon. She yanked the officer forward, feeling something snap in his arm as he slammed into her steel-hard body. She spun him around and released his arm, closing her hand around his neck as her other arm wrapped around his chest.
"Watch this," she said to the other men in heavily accented English.
With one jerk she ripped the man's head clean off his body. Blood fountained from the stump of his destroyed neck, spraying over her face and breasts. She tossed the head to one of the sailors. The man caught it reflexively, stared at it for a long moment, then fell to his knees and vomited into the dead officer's face.
Inge laughed with delight, flinging the officer's body at another seaman. It slammed into him full on at more than a hundred kilometres an hour, sending him into the guard rail with a crunching of broken bones.
Further down the deck Gertrud had a sailor by the ankles, swinging his body in vicious arcs, using it as a club as she smashed other men aside. The others were spreading their own mayhem, slaughtering the helpless men as they ran in terror.
Inge turned at the sound of a steel hatch slamming shut. Oh no, she thought to herself, there's no getting away, not from us. She gripped the edges of the steel door, fingers sinking into the steel. Muscles bulged as she braced herself, tearing the door off the frame in a squeal of distressed metal. She flung the door down the deck, sending it smashing into a group of sailors who were trying to flee. The door scythed through them, sending them flying in a mess of severed limbs and broken bones.
Inge plunged into the innards of the ship. The passageways were claustrophobic for an ordinary person; to the hulking Amazons they were tiny, cramped beyond belief. The ship was a maze of compartments, walls and ceilings festooned with equipment of every imaginable kind, permeated by a maze of wiring and pipework.
Inge worked her way through it almost at random. Here and there she tore a bundle of wiring off a wall, her immensely powerful muscles snapping them like so many cotton threads. A few times she would squeeze a pipe between her fingers, ripping it open and allowing whatever was inside to pour free.
There were men everywhere; compartment after compartment held sailors, most of them unaware of what was happening, wondering uncertainly about the noises of death and destruction filtering through the ship. She slaughtered them like the helpless prey that they were, smashing heads and bodies with casual flicks of her arms. A fierce joy filled her as victim after victim fell before her; her arms were coated with blood up to the shoulders, fragments of bone and gore clinging to them. Men screamed in terror as she found them, screams that turned to agony as they fell before the hammer blows of her fists.
Their mission was simple; they were to slaughter as much of the crew as possible and ruin the ship beyond any hope of repair. Inge took time out to smash any important-looking equipment as she moved, tearing metal hatches off their frames to ruin the watertight integrity.
She worked her way through the guts of the ship, looking for her ultimate target. She found it largely abandoned; the sailors left alive were probably cowering in hiding somewhere, she mused. Shame.
The compartment was bigger than most. It was crammed with countless cylindrical white cloth bags; Inge smiled as she shrugged off the small backpack on her shoulders. She reached in and yanked on the trigger, then tossed the explosive charge back amongst the bags.
Each of the bags contained a large cordite charge. They were packed into the giant 38 centimetre guns, behind the enormous metal shell itself, and exploded there to propel it on its way. The room contained literally tons of explosives, more than enough to rip the bottom out of the ship.
One more task. She went outside the powder store and searched through the pipework until she found the ones she was looking for - the pipes that could flood the compartment with seawater. A quick yank ripped the metal pipes apart, rendering the flooding system useless.
A man in an officer's uniform blundered into the room, his pathetic little pistol brandished before him. Inge turned, chuckling as his eyes bugged out at the sight of her blood-drenched body. He tried to aim the gun at her but his hand was shaking so badly with terror that he couldn't even manage that.
"Pathetic," she said to him in English. She planted a foot on his chest and shoved, thick thigh muscles propelling him into the bulkhead and smashing his ribcage into a pulp. She laughed delightedly at the look on his face as he died, then headed for the deck. She only had fifteen minutes or so left to get clear.
* * *
Ursula watched the explosions on the horizon and smiled. Much of that belching flame was the firing of naval guns, she knew; explosions tore at the beach all around her, shrapnel pinging harmlessly off her enhanced body from time to time. But some of those explosions marked the death of Allied ships. She could feel the sadistic glee radiating from them as her sisters carried out their deadly work, and emotional tickle, like the intimate caress of a lover. And as the landing craft swarmed towards the beach, she knew it was her turn.
She hefted her weapons, a pair of MG-151/20 cannon. Usually carried as fixed armaments on Luftwaffe aircraft, they had been modified for the Amazons to use as personal weapons. She lifted their 42 kg mass effortlessly; even the enormous ammunition pack she carried on her back, almost as large as she was, felt like so many feathers.
Ursula had always been an oddity. As a child, she had been a determined tomboy. Her despairing parents had spent the first twelve years of her life trying ever more desperately to turn her into a proper young lady, all to no avail. Birthday presents of dolls and tea sets sat in a closet collecting dust whilst she limbed trees and kicked footballs around with the neighbourhood boys. They dressed her in girlish dresses, only to have them constantly come home torn and muddy from her adventures.
When puberty hit, Ursula began to grow at a prodigious rate. By her fifteenth birthday she was as tall as her father; it was around then that both of her parents gave up on the idea that she would ever be anything remotely resembling ladylike. Her father lost interest in her entirely at that point, whilst her mother simply treated her with a kind of distant regret.
At nineteen years old, Ursula topped out at no less than a hundred and eighty eight centimetres. She was tall, gangly, slightly clumsy, and as unladylike as it was possible to imagine. Her male friends had drifted away as the more girlish girls began to draw their attention, leaving her isolated and alone. She had decided, only half consciously, to accept who and what she was and revel in it. She began to exercise, spending hours alone in her tiny room working her body to exhaustion. Over time, she became less gangly and clumsy as her body began to fill out with muscle.
The ragged line of Higgins boats lumbered within a kilometre of the beach. Ursula grinned ferociously. Soon... very soon...
Whist she came to accept herself, though, isolated misfit had been the very definition of her life from then on. She had always excelled academically, but she had never been able to find much success in the jobs market. She had drifted between secretarial and administration posts, eternally frustrated at having to sit and watch smaller, duller men than she spending half their time making poor decisions and the other half avoiding the blame for them.
Even the onset of the war hadn't changed things much - she had heard that the Britishers were putting women into manufacturing jobs in aircraft and ammunition factories, and once she had heard a song on the radio about Rosie the Riveter, 'that little frail can do more than a male can do'.?? The thought had excited her so much that she had spent the rest of the night masturbating to images of tough Rosie performing punishing physical tasks in a factory.
But Germany had a very different attitude about war than her enemies; a woman's place was still very much in the home, raising children for the Fatherland.
That had changed eight months ago, however. She had been out shopping for some food when she passed a couple of soldiers at a little wooden stand in the street. A young blonde woman was chatting to the men whilst a line of half a dozen or so women stood waiting. Above the stand was a sign :
LADIES! SIGN UP TO SERVE THE FATHERLAND TODAY!
Intrigued, Ursula had joined the line. Twenty minutes later the soldiers were explaining that they were recruiting volunteers for 'military service'. They grimly warned her that the service would be 'demanding', and even 'life changing'. Ursula couldn't sign up fast enough.
The Change had been the greatest revelation in her life. It had been agonising, but she felt like she had been reborn from it.
And what a glorious rebirth it was! Even by the standards of her Aryan Amazon sisters, Ursula was a Goddess. She stood an incredible 246 centimetres tall - a solid eight feet. Her body rippled with hundreds of kilos of muscle, giving her a strength no other Amazon could approach. Through the orientation and training process, Ursula had proved to have a speed, strength and endurance that was completely unmatched.
If her physical prowess was peerless, her aggressiveness and outright sadism had been similarly unparalleled. She had spent her entire life being frustrated at men - at her father, who had demanded she be something she was no and could not and had no wish to be, at the boys who would taunt her for being different, and then turned away from her altogether for other, nicer girls. At employers who looked at her as little more than a charity case, somebody to perform menial work for the minimum possible money. The frustrations of her entire life had poured out of her, amplified by the conversion process and the shared mindset of the Amazons.
In six months on the Russian front, she had killed better than three hundred men. When she needed to, she was a whirlwind of death and destruction - she had once charged an infantry formation single-handed, running through them so quickly the attack was over before the last man had even begun to react. Fists and elbows and feet had lashed out with a speed that was all but invisible, leaving a trail of fifteen shattered bodies on the ground in as many seconds.
She was lightning fast... when she needed to be. But when she could, when time was not pressing... Ursula could make a man take days of agony to die. She would often bring two or three men back from the battle with her, usually shattering the bones in a leg or a foot so they could not even try to run. She would tie them down in some location near her camp, ready for an evening's entertainment once she was fed and cleaned up. And oh, such fun she had! She was wet just remembering it.
Today, though, was about speed. Fifty Amazons defended this beach, a beach that was about to be assaulted by thousands of allied troops. She smiled ferociously at the thought.
A whistle blew in the distance. Ursula leapt out of the trench in one five metre bound, sprinting down the bluff towards the beach. To the sides, her sisters followed.
She ran down towards the waterline, bringing the MG-151/20 to bear on a landing craft as it ploughed towards her, no more than fifty metres away. She squeezed the triggers; both guns exploded into action, glowing tracer rounds reaching for the boat and connecting with it. The recoil was nothing to her colossal strength, she could have handled a hundred times as much with ease. She could see the impacts of the rounds tearing through the flimsy front of the craft, explosive shells tearing huge holes in it, shredding the men inside. She smiled ferociously as she switched to another boat... and another...
The gigantic pack of ammunition on her back held better than a thousand rounds, about forty seconds worth for the two guns. Ursula was careful to use no more than two or three seconds worth on each boat, more than enough to tear the men inside to bloody pieces. She should easily be able to destroy fifteen boats, she reckoned.
She reckoned without the fire support from offshore, though. Although more than a few allied ships had been turned into blazing wrecks by the Amazons out at sea, hundreds more remained. Shells began to rain down on the beach, exploding all around her. She was contemptuous of most of them, shrapnel barely did more than tickle her body.
But then a large shell must have landed practically next to her. She catapulted through the air, slamming into the beach with such force that she left a ten metre trench in the sand. She pulled herself to her feet, blinking in surprise as she checked herself for damage. There was none, on her body. Her weapons, however, were both smashed.
Ursula grinned fiercely as she shrugged the backpack off. So be it. She was more than happy to fight with her hands.
She looked around, finding the nearest boat just as it ran aground. She leapt into action in an instant, racing towards it as the bow ramp went down. Browning .30 calibre machine gun rounds began pinging harmlessly off her body as she accelerated, and she grinned fiercely; as if any mere man could harm a Goddess like she!
Nearly forty men started to charge down the ramp as it splashed into the shallow water, screaming a ferocious battle cry... a cry that turned to shrieks of shock and terror as over three hundred kilos of steel-hard muscle slammed into them at better than ninety kilometres per hour.
Ursula, arms stretched out wide, went through the tightly-packed men as if they were made of paper. She was vaguely aware of arms and torsos crunching and exploding against her all-but indestructible body, the sudden slick wetness of warm blood coating her as she reached the engine compartment towards the rear of the boat and crashed into it. Her head slammed into the Gray Marine Diesel, tearing a metric ton of metal right off its mountings and sending it smashing through the stern to drop into the water.
She skidded to a stop in the water, turning to enjoy the carnage she had caused. The boat was a shattered wreck, virtually the entire back end ripped off. The cargo space was littered with the torn and broken remains of men, most of them dead, a few screaming feebly. One of the two gunners was scrambling over the side into the water, gibbering with fear as he tried to get away from the woman who had just murdered an entire platoon of men in a second. The other was firing his Browning at her, his eyes bulging in sickly terror as the bullets bounced off.
Ursula bent down and picked up the engine, grinning as the enormous dent her head had left in it. She looked around, picked another nearby boat heading for the shore, and spent a second or two judging the speed and distance... then flung the engine in a low, flat trajectory. It blurred through the air, practically supersonic as it reached the boat and smashed it into an explosion of wood and metal and blood.
Ursula grinned as she waded ashore, taking a moment to glance down at the terrified machine gunner who was struggling to reload his weapon. "I'm sorry boy, I have no time to play with you now," she murmured as she reached out a giant hand and casually crushed his head between her fingers. He had just enough time to draw a breath to scream - a scream that was cut off as his head shattered under her titanic strength. She laughed in delight as blood and bits of skull and brain burst between her fingers.
She looked around, hungry for more victims. A lot of the boats seemed to have run aground on sandbars, fifty or more metres out from the beach. Hundreds of men were wading through neck-deep water, struggling to reach the shoreline. Fire was pouring down into them from the cliffs above, and occasional screams drifted across the water. Other boats were shattered wrecks, bodies drifting in the water around them.
She took a moment to submerge herself in the water, washing off the fragments of bone and flesh that were clinging to her body, then set out for the beach.
It was going to be a good day.
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