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dreaming spires of Oxford, Winston Spencer Churchill stood stiffly at a window, smoking a cigar and peeking through a crack in his blackout curtains. The three men seated behind him waited tensely, watching the cigar’s blue smoke curl up toward the red cornice.
    “Headlights,” Churchill said, a note of triumph in his voice.
    He turned from the window. His face wore its customary scowl of pugnacious concentration, but these men knew him well. They saw the excitement in his eyes. “Brendan,” he said gruffly. “Meet the car outside. Show the general directly to me.”
    Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s former private secretary, Man Friday, and now minister of information, hurried to the main entrance of Chequers, one of the country estates that the prime minister used as a wartime hideaway.
    Churchill quietly regarded the two men left in the room. Sitting rigid by the low fire was Brigadier General Duff Smith. The fifty-year-old Scotsman’s empty left coat sleeve was pinned to his shoulder; the arm that should have filled it was buried somewhere in Belgium. A personal friend of Churchill, Smith now directed Special Operations Executive, the paramilitary espionage organization whose primary directive, penned by Churchill in 1940, was to “SET EUROPE ABLAZE.”
    To Brigadier Smith’s right stood F. W. Lindemann, now Lord Cherwell. An Oxford don and longtime confidante, Lindemann advised the prime minister on all scientific matters, and monitored the work of a gaggle of geniuses—gleaned mostly from Oxford andCambridge—who labored twenty hours a day to increase the Allies’ technological advantages over the Germans.
    “Are we quite ready, gentlemen?” Churchill asked pointedly.
    Brigadier Smith nodded. “As far as I’m concerned, Winston, it’s an open and shut case. Of course, there’s no guarantee Eisenhower will see it our way.”
    Professor Lindemann started to speak, but Churchill had already straightened at the sound of boots in the hallway. Brendan Bracken opened the door to the study and General Dwight D. Eisenhower strode in, followed by Commander Harry C. Butcher, his naval aide and friend of long standing. Sergeant Mickey McKeogh, Eisenhower’s driver and valet, took up a post outside the door. The last American to enter was a major of army intelligence. He was not introduced.
    “Greetings, my dear General!” Churchill said. He moved forward and pumped Eisenhower’s hand with all-American enthusiasm. His red, black, and gold dressing gown contrasted strangely with the American general’s simple olive drab uniform.
    “Mr. Prime Minister,” Eisenhower replied. “It’s good to see you again, though unexpected.”
    The two men’s eyes met with unspoken communication. Last month’s conferences at Cairo and Teheran had not gone off without tensions between the two men. With the invasion less than five months away, Churchill still had reservations about a cross-Channel thrust into France, preferring to attack Germany through what he called the “soft underbelly” of Europe. Eisenhower, though he had just been named supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, was still adjusting to the mantle of power and had yet to assert his primacy in matters of strategy.
    “An uneventful trip up from London, I hope?” Churchill said.
    Eisenhower smiled. “The fog was so thick on Chesterfield Hill that Butcher had to get out and walk ahead of the car with a flashlight. But we made it, as you can see.” He crossed the room and respectfully shook hands with Brigadier Smith, whom he’d known since 1942. Everyone else was introduced, excepting the American major ofintelligence, who remained silent and stiff as a suit of decorative armor beside the closed study door.
    Churchill rescued his dying cigar from an ashtray and walked over to his desk. He did not sit. This was the atmosphere he liked—his Parliamentary milieu—him on his feet, speaking to a captive audience sitting on its collective ass. He