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The operation wasn't complicated, but it required Jones and his fellow signalmen to be proficient at using a new technology—or a new adaptation of technology—and to have the wits to work coolly and swiftly under tense conditions. All their long weeks at Pathfinder school in North Witham, all their arduous training jumps and rehearsals, had been designed to prepare them for a task that could take no more than ten minutes to execute from start to finish.

The same concentrated time frame applied to assembling the Eureka equipment. Lillyman had ordered Council and Walton to mount the unit in a treetop, and they'd shimmied up its trunk as Zamanakos kept lookout on the ground. The cue for triggering the Holophanes would be the sound of the approaching transports: when the signalmen heard their engines rumbling over the horizon, they would turn them on, one operator to a panel, and then hurry out of the sudden glare to avoid enemy eyes while remaining close enough to guard them against attack. It was the responsibility of the man with the telegraph key to stay in position even under fire.

At first, things went without a hitch for both Lillyman's T/3s and signal operators. But that was to change in a flash—literally.

With the T laid into position, Wilhelm's fingers were too fast for his own good again, finding the light switch well before the transports were in earshot. He barely had time to realize what he'd done when the Holophane beamed up into the sky like a searchlight, its brightness outlining the surprised troopers near the T in stark silhouette.

Horrified and furious at himself, Wilhelm was fumbling to turn the light back off when a series of machine-gun volleys rattled from the hedgerows. Then he heard the
whump
of mortar rounds detonating in the open field nearby.

We've had it
, he told himself, swearing under his breath. How could he have done something like this again?

Rocca, standing with him, was equally dismayed. It sounded as if half the German Army had opened up on them.

Under increasing fire now, the signalmen stayed put near the valuable Holophanes. Their job was to do whatever they could to prevent them from being shot out. Council and Walters, meanwhile, clung to their treetop perches with the radar transmitter, using the bushy foliage for concealment.

The machine guns kept discharging from the bushes. With his eyes focused on their muzzle flash, Lillyman weighed his orders to avoid engaging the enemy and decided he had no recourse but to make an exception. He waved two of the Pathfinders toward the hedgerow, adding, with characteristic bravado, a few words about “teaching those Krauts the error of their ways.” Then he watched the pair of troopers dash into the shadows, staying back to guard the T with the rest of his men.

The German machine-gun nest had been dug into the ground deep in the bordering thicket. Getting as close as they dared, the troopers pulled the pins on a couple of grenades and lobbed them in its direction.

Yards away, Lillyman heard the loud
whumph
of the detonations . . . and then the volleys stopped. Everything was suddenly quiet. He waited until he saw his men returning and then exhaled.

But his mission was far from accomplished, and he could only hope the Germans didn't send out reinforcements. At this point, there was little or nothing his Pathfinders could do but await the coming of the planes.

Lillyman would remember that wait as the longest of his entire life.

18.

Captain Basil Jones had gotten a flash of inspiration.

His orders from the admiralty were to stay on patrol against German warships, to stop for nothing that didn't represent a direct threat to the Allied invasion force. As an officer of the Royal Navy and commander of the 10th Flotilla, he was bound by his fidelity to duty and did not intend to disobey those commands.

Neither was it Jones's intention, however, to leave American paratroopers and airmen floundering in the Channel. There was, to be sure, a chance they were German spies. But if they were who and what they claimed to be—and his eyes, brain, and intuition told him they were—the skipper knew that by ignoring the men he would likely sentence them to death.

Stop or don't.

His choices were mutually exclusive, out-and-out contradictions . . . or were they?

Making his decision, Jones ordered his steersmen to circle the evacuees at slow speed and prepare to drop the lifeboats. He would save as many of them as he could without stopping the ship. As long as it kept moving, he could honestly say it had remained on uninterrupted patrol, and no one could claim he was at all violating his orders.

HMS
Tartar
wound her way around the struggling men, following their “ahoys” and other calls for help, picking them out of the water one, two, or three at a time. Overseeing the rescue effort, Jones found himself face-to-face with one dripping wet trooper whose features were still blackened with camo grease. Shivering, soggy, water pooling around his jump boots, he stood on deck and took a wary assessment of his surroundings.

“Who the hell's navy is this anyway?” he grunted truculently.

The skipper just grinned at him. Whatever slender doubts he'd had about these men being bona fide Americans had been dispelled once the paratrooper asked his question. It was an introduction he would never forget.

The rescue effort went on for about half an hour. Somehow, every last airman and paratrooper from the downed transport was brought safely aboard the destroyer. Most were nicked up, but none too badly hurt. Wheeler, the man Sergeant Malley had accidentally cut with his pocketknife, was the most seriously injured among the group, and Jones had him rushed to the infirmary for medical treatment. The rest were given an immediate taste of English hospitality: warm showers, fresh dry British uniforms, and shots of hot buttered rum—or grog, as their hosts called it—to take the chill out of their bones.

The group's participation in the D-Day invasion had ended. For some of them, especially Richard Wright, it was a profound letdown. He'd wanted to be in the vanguard of the fight against Nazi evil, to go to war alongside his friend Salty Harris, and had never gotten his chance that night. But he'd promised himself he would make up for it, and it was a pledge he took very seriously.

Within a few days, Wright and the others in his unit were turned over to the Air/Sea Rescue Services, brought back to England, and held behind bars for seventy-two hours while their status as American paratroopers was verified. More or less unscathed, their stick hadn't suffered a single loss in a calamity that could have easily taken every life aboard their flight.

Not all the Pathfinder teams would be so blessed.

19.

Along with the rest of his stick, Private Salty Harris came down almost on target at the outskirts of Hiesville.

The C-47 from which he'd jumped had carried one of five Pathfinder teams assigned to mark off the area designated Drop Zone C. Clyde Taylor's V serial—Planes 4, 5, and 6—had brought Pathfinders from the 101 Airborne's 501st and 506th PIRs to light the way for hundreds of main wave paratroopers slated to drop on the DZ around one o'clock in the morning. The other two teams, members of the 502nd PIR, flew aboard Planes 19 and 20, the last Pathfinder transports to leave North Windham airfield. Their mission was to guide in several hundred CG-4A Waco gliders from the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment by establishing illuminated runways in their landing zones. Towed across the Channel by C-47s, the wood, metal, and cloth gliders each carried a complement of thirteen troops and their equipment, including a Willys jeep and a howitzer or trailer.

From an operational standpoint there was little difference between preparing an area for paratroopers and preparing one for glider landings. Although larger and flatter than paratrooper drop zones, the glider LZs were still to be marked with Eureka beacons and lighted Ts. But the Pathfinders descending to mark their runways would run into much heavier resistance than Lillyman's group.

This was no coincidence. While Field Marshal Rommel had erroneously thought the main blow of the amphibious and naval assault would come farther east, he'd been correct in expecting gliders and paratroopers to descend on the peninsula. To prepare for an attack by airborne forces, he'd built up his defenses in many of their probable landing spots, flooding other areas to impede their movements.

Located near the strategically important Caen Canal, DZ C was a concentrated pocket of German ground troops and artillery, its perimeter bristling with rifle pits and machine-gun emplacements. The guns had been sending up steady streams of ammunition as Lieutenant Dwight Kroesch's Plane 5 made its pass, the flak so intense that Kroesch dropped shredded tinfoil as chaff to confuse enemy radar. Once the troopers jumped, he boomeranged back toward the coast for the return crossing to England at his top speed of 210mph, convinced he had a Luftwaffe night fighter on his tail.

The Pathfinders he'd dropped also ran into a firestorm—and had a longer than average descent in which to experience it. Kroesch had been among the transport pilots who opted to fly through the cloud bank rather than underneath it, seeking a hole from which he could see the ground. He'd found one at about eight hundred feet, four times the height at which Lieutenant Crouch had deployed his troopers. The extra time the men spent in the air gave the Germans a longer and better opportunity to shoot them out of it.

Salty Harris had been badgered by volleys throughout his drop and got no respite after making landfall. With ammunition spurting at him from the hedgerows, he tried to separate the oilskin bag containing his Eureka from his parachute harness, but it was all tangled up in the straps.

The guns kept firing away as he struggled to extricate the boxy unit, their salvos pulsing through the air around him. Desperate to escape the Germans' crosshairs, Harris finally ran for cover with the transmitter still strapped to his chest.

But not all the Pathfinders who came under immediate fire could run. Coming in on a separate flight, T/5 Richard Lisk bore one of his team's two Eurekas and was supposed to set it up for the gliders. An off-balance landing in a pasture left him with a fractured foot—and there was no medic nearby to give him a shot of morphine. As German bullets peppered the field, he stayed down on his belly, crawled to an open ditch alongside a hedgerow, and then tumbled down into it.

Several of Lisk's teammates would soon pass the spot where he'd hidden in the darkness, but aside from sharing some water out of their canteens, there was nothing they could do to help him. Unlike Snuffy Smith with Captain Lillyman's team, Lisk couldn't walk at all. His group had precious little time to find and mark the LZ and would have to leave him behind, promising to return when they'd completed their mission.

Burrowed down in the loamy soil, Lisk hid there in nervous silence as the troopers moved on toward their objective . . . but he wasn't alone for long. Within minutes, he heard the sound of heavy, booted footsteps approaching the ditch. Then low German voices.

Lisk held his breath, his body flat to the ground. The enemy foot patrol came close, closer, tramping past the ditch, kicking loose clods of soil into his face with the toes of their boots. He knew he'd be lucky to be taken prisoner if they discovered him—every member of the airborne was aware of Hitler's threat to have paratroopers shot as spies.

And that wasn't the only thing weighing on his mind.

He had the Eureka unit with him, a highly guarded piece of military technology. He couldn't let it fall into enemy hands. His orders were to activate the explosive charge inside it before that happened. To blow it to smithereens. But that wouldn't be possible with the Germans passing within an arm's reach.

Lisk knew that if he so much as twitched, they would see him. And if they saw him, they would never give him a chance to pull the det cord. He'd be captured or dead before he did it. The unit would fall into their hands. Even if they couldn't figure out how to replicate it, they might be able to learn the frequencies the Allies were using for their beacons.

His breath in his throat, his foot thudding with pain, Lisk watched and waited in the ditch, his only concealment the dark of night and the long moon shadows cast by the hedgerow behind him.

20.

About two miles south of DZ C, Drop Zone D was to be marked by a detachment of Pathfinders representing the 501st and 506th PIRs and occupying Planes 7, 8, and 9 of their serial.

The Three Kings were aboard Plane 8, and it was no accident that they had flown in the same stick.

T/5 Joseph Haller, Private David W. Hadley, and Private Lubimer Dejanovich had met back at Camp Mackall, South Carolina, in 1943, when they were teammates in the communications platoon of the 501 HQ's 1st Battalion. Hitting it off big, they had stuck together like glue before, during, and after drills. They'd also gotten on their company commander's nerves together, although for different reasons.

“We are the Three Kings . . . I am King ONE!” Haller had once stated.

The name stuck, although as far as the CO, Captain John Simmons, was concerned, he was nothing but a royal headache. Of Austrian descent, Haller had a booming voice to match his rowdy personality and could be happily obnoxious when he'd razz the guys in his outfit with his I'm-a-member of-the-Master-Race routine.

“Why am I always so
right
?” he would ask himself aloud in the barracks. His answer? “It must be my Aryan blood!”

While striking his best Nazi brownshirt pose, Haller also hammed it up by declaring he would someday rule the world, or by blurting out random German phrases just to aggravate people—and it worked, especially with an increasingly frustrated Simmons.

Dejanovich had followed Haller's lead by mining his Serbian origins for joke material. “Once we land in Europe, I'm going over the hill to join Tito!” he'd state, prompting the straitlaced Simmons to wonder if he was a Communist sympathizer.