The Times That Try: Book 5 of The European War

THE TIMES THAT TRY

The European War, Book Five

Baku is a funeral pyre. The Reich has one field left to reach, and two armies racing for it.

July 1943. Four hundred wells burn on the Caspian shore, lit by the Russians who left them, and the largest campfire in the world warms no engine in the German army. Rommel is going east, up the pipeline from Beirut toward Mosul. Guderian is coming down out of the Caucasus to meet him. The arrows on the map converge on the last oil the Reich can still put a hand on, and the men drawing the arrows know what the men in the tanks do not: that a refinery captured and unrun is a garrison requirement, and the paper that authorized all of it was one honest page built on a French survey nobody checked.

George Patton has an army, a deed to an island the enemy holds, and a fury that has not cooled since Gabès. He is the fastest thing in the theater and he has been told to take a rock before he is allowed to take a road.

Over Europe, the sky fills with Americans. Fortresses by day and Lancasters by night, around the clock, and the first target is not a factory but a railway yard, because the Reich in this war runs on wagons. An engineer in Berlin reads the damage report and finds he already knows the figure, because he wrote it. A squadron leader from Larne trades the aeroplane he has flown since 1939 for an American one with the legs to reach the Ruhr, and finds that the fuel gauge that made his decisions for three years has nothing left to say. And the finest fighter pilot the Luftwaffe has, the man who won the air over Malta, dies over that railway yard to an enemy he never saw, in a sky where being the best has stopped being a category.

And in Rome, the government that carried a German army to safety learns that its reward is to be the throat.

The Reich is closer. America is faster. On a quay at Basra, above the oil, Patton lands behind both German arrows with the refinery in his hand and the Gulf at his back, and the race for Mosul becomes the question of who runs out first.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The fifth novel of The European War. Every great story begins with family.