She composed herself, and returned to her notes, determined not to lift her head again until she was finished. “PQ Seventeen is scheduled to depart Iceland for Archangel on June twenty-seventh. It would consist of fifty-six freighters, an oiler, six destroyers, and thirteen other vessels. Admiral Pound, wrongly assuming the German battleship Tirpitz was loose, ordered the convoy to scatter and the escorts to withdraw. Aircraft and submarine attacks then sank twenty-four unprotected ships, carrying nearly three and a half thousand motor vehicles, four hundred and thirty tanks, more than two hundred aircraft, and nearly one hundred thousand tonnes of supplies. The losses, coming at the most critical juncture just before the summer blitzkrieg, and the subsequent refusal of the Western Allies to force the convoy route again for many months, lead to a severe strain on the relationship between the Allies and the Soviet government.”

Rachel drew a breath and peeked up. Commander Murray still looked furious, but kept his own counsel for the moment. About two dozen strong, her audience was a study in parallel but contrary natures. Nobody looked comfortable or remotely assured. She’d nearly majored in psych before switching to postgrad history, and would have loved to watch a video of the whole meeting, to tease out the personal clashes, to watch alliances take shape as the various interests maneuvered for dominance.

What a pity the outcome was so far from academic with thousands—if not millions—of lives dependent on the decisions that would be made in this room. She was glad the burden of choice did not fall on her.

“In North Africa,” she continued, “the Afrika Korps under Rommel are due to press an offensive to El Alamein . . .”

She delivered the rest of her brief speech with growing confidence, now that she knew Halabi would act as her shield. She reminded the senior commanders that the SS was carrying out an atrocity in Lidice at that very moment. She warned of attacks on convoys bound for Malta on the fourteenth and fifteenth of June, detailing the individual losses to air attack, torpedo boats, and surface raiders. She pointedly advised the British liaison officers to attend to the inadequate state of Tobruk’s defences—advice she could just tell they were going to ignore. She told Nimitz that General MacArthur should know that significant Japanese forces were supposed to land in New Guinea on July 22, and as things stood they would be opposed only by a limited number of Australian militia.

She concluded by pointing out that tens of thousands of Allied POWs were, for the moment, being held in large central camps in the Philippines and Singapore, and that many of them would die quite wretchedly over the next few years of their captivity. At each stage of her talk a panel of the wallscreen switched from displaying the world map to running images of the relevant topic. There was no escaping the human consequences of Lidice, or the Bataan Death March.