Ernest sneaked a glance in the mirror. The colonel was looking intently at the map as Cess traced their route.

“And this is the road we’re on now. It takes us through Dover, and then we take the Old Kent Road to London.”

“You’re right,” Ernest said. He started the car and yanked on the gear stick. The gears ground. He jiggled the knob back and forth, trying to get it to shift, and it finally slid into reverse. He backed the car out onto the road and went on, past more camps and storage dumps and so many airfields he lost count, full of P-51s and DC-3s parked wingtip to wingtip.

“Good Lord, will you look at all this?” Cess said, sounding awed, and Ernest wasn’t sure that that was just for the colonel’s benefit. He’d known the D-Day invasion had been a massive project, but the sheer magnitude of the undertaking was impossible to get one’s mind around—thousands upon thousands of planes, tanks, and trucks, and tons of equipment.

As they drove, the colonel seemed to grow more and more ashen and to sink into himself, deflating like one of their dummy tanks.

He knows there’s no way they can win against this, Ernest thought. He wondered if that was part of the plan, if the purpose of this trip was not only to fool von Sprecht into believing they were invading at Calais, but also to show him the overwhelming might of the Allied invasion force and convince him of the hopelessness of the Germans’ resistance. If so, the plan was succeeding. He looked more defeated with every passing mile.

But he wasn’t the only one being affected by the sprawling tent cities, the squads and companies and battalions drilling in the fields and crammed into the trucks that passed them. I’ll never be able to find Atherton among all these camps and all these men, Ernest thought. Atherton could be anywhere, in any one of the fifty fields they’d passed or the hundreds of transit camps. There was no way Ernest could find him in the next five weeks—correction, three weeks—even if he dumped Cess and the colonel out of the car right now and started asking for Atherton at every Army HQ from now straight through to the fifth of June.

“A chap I met said there are a million men in this corner of England,” Cess said. “Do you think that could be right?”

No, Ernest thought bitterly, it’s two million.

“I mean, one would think Kent would sink under the weight. Perhaps that’s what the barrage balloons are for,” Cess said, pointing to hundreds of silver specks in the sky ahead. “To hold England up.” He grinned. “We should be coming to Dover soon,” he added, consulting the map.

Which meant Portsmouth. That meant they were on schedule, in spite of their late start. At least something was going right. At this rate they should be in London by three and he might still be able to deliver his articles to Mr. Jeppers before the Call’s deadline.