The Fall of Night

Christopher G. Nuttall

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The Fall of Night

Europe, 2025.

Britain – and the European Union – is struggling to remain civilised.  Unemployment is high, ethnic and religious tensions are rising sharply, crime is skyrocketing, the value of money is falling and the whole system is on the verge of collapse.  Across the continent, united only in name, countless individuals struggle to keep themselves afloat and survive for a few more days.  

But weakness invites attack and covetous eyes set their sights on the remains of Europe’s industry and trained population.  As a military juggernaut descends on an unprepared continent, the remains of Britain’s once-proud military must fight to defend their country ... or watch helplessly as Britain falls into darkness.

Author’s Note

All details given as to the size, composition and technology of the British, Russian American and European Forces involved in the story were derived from reasonable speculation as to the future of those armed forces.  Likewise, the details of the updated British emergency protocols are purely fictional, although based on protocols known to be in existence for the Cold War period.  I apologise for any confusion that might have been caused.

Please let me know if you would like a sequel.

CGN 
Prologue

From: The Guardian.  1st June 2007

Following questions in Parliament, Scotland Yard confirmed that the prime suspect in the rape and murder of Judy Lewisham near RAF Mildenhall was Corporal Michael Collins, an American serviceman stationed at RAF Mildenhall, a base operated by American forces in Britain.  Collins, one of thousands of Americans stationed in Britain, was apparently confined to the base following the rape and murder; the Police investigation conducted by Inspector David Briggs was taken over by the Home Office, following the use of DNA remains to trace the murderer.  The attempt by the Home Office to hush the entire affair up has caused great distress to the people of Judy’s community.

Unconfirmed reports have further reached this reporter that allege that Collins was flown out of the country as soon as the Home Office contacted American authorities regarding the possible extradition of Collins for trial and sentencing in Britain.  Protesters, led by Judy’s family, have surrounded RAF Mildenhall and have refused to be dispersed by either police or American guards; a number of violent incidents have already been reported near American bases in other locations, with Americans attacked and in some cases banned from pubs and shops.

Condolences, many directly addressed to Judy’s family, have been flowing in from all over the world.  President Nekrasov of Russia has offered his sympathies and support, if necessary, to ensure that Collins is brought to justice.  General Henri Guichy, who is in line for a seat on the European Defence Commission, called for the incident to be treated as a symbol of American arrogance in the world and for Europe to insist on revisions to the various Status of Forces agreements, particularly the ABM bases established in Poland against the expressed resolution of Brussels.

Although neither Ten Downing Street nor the White House have commented, it strikes this reporter that relations between Britain – and to some extent the European Union – and America have reached an all-time low.  Between inflammatory comments made by Senator David Howery and Congressman Reaper, and calls for American bases to be placed firmly under British jurisdiction by a multi-party group of Members of Parliament in London, it seems that relations between Europe and America are about to go through a very rapid series of changes, perhaps even a total break.  This reporter says; not a moment too soon.

Chapter One: Raging at Infinity

The problem with the British Army is that there is a British Army.
Unnamed Progressive, 2007

London, England

It was turning into a very bad day.

“They’re about to begin the march,” Sergeant Harold Page said.  “The Superintendent wants to ensure that everything is ready for them.”

Inspector David Briggs said nothing, merely looked down at the images from countless CCTV cameras scattered around the centre of London, from the park where the marchers were gathering to the entire region of Hyde Park, which had been designated as the endpoint for the march, where the leader of the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress would address the crowd.  There were thousands of people there, some of them dedicated marchers, some of them students or tourists drawn into the excitement, some of them there merely to pick up girls…and a hardcore of real troublemakers.  

“We have over a thousand police officers on duty,” he said, knowing that the Metropolitan Police had drawn in other officers from all over the country, as well as calling up all of the reserves.  The remainder of London would be shorthanded for the duration of the march, something that worried the Superintendent enough for him to pass local control over to Briggs.  The Superintendent was a political animal; he knew that little good would come out of the march, and it would be a career-wreaker for any officer if something went wrong.  “We have medics, riot control squads and even armed anti-terrorist units on alert.  What could go wrong?”

Page shrugged.  The Metropolitan Police dreaded a repeat of the protest marches that had occurred in America, where a handful of local terrorists had used car bombs to slaughter the protesters and incite anger.  The American War on Terror had been going on for twenty-three years and the British public – along with the remainder of the European Governments – feared that it would one day spread back to Britain and Europe.  It would only take a handful of hardcore troublemakers – and the Home Office had warned that several dozen known troublemakers were planning to attend the march – to kill thousands and further stain the reputation of the Police.

Briggs was, for a moment, lost in thought.  If it had been up to him, he would have banned the protest from taking place, no matter what the law said.  It was a disaster waiting to happen…but the Prime Minister would never allow the Metropolitan Police to prevent protesters from marching.  The protesters had played a major role in the fall of the British Government after the RAF Mildenhall Incident…or perhaps it had been after the Sudan Disaster.  They would never dare prevent the people from asserting their right to protest, no matter the dangers, or the extremists who would use it as political leverage.  Peace was important, the Government said, peace at any price…

The Sergeant coughed.  “Yes, I know,” Briggs said, more in private irritation than in anger.  The Metropolitan Police had what seemed like a permanent manpower shortage and they couldn’t afford to lose anyone.  “Tell the Superintendent that everything is ready and we hope that it can be concluded quickly.”

He leaned back in his chair and muttered a curse under his breath.  It was just like the Metropolitan Police of 2024; they could build a mobile command centre that was capable, in theory, of commanding a police operation over the entire United Kingdom…while at the same time, they could neither provide the manpower to police Britain effectively, or even comfortable chairs for the officers on duty.  He would have preferred to have handled matters from New Scotland Yard, but procedure called for the officer commanding – at least until politics decreed his replacement – to be on the scene.  At one point, that had meant something; now, all it meant was chaos.

The protesters hadn’t waited for the police go-ahead; that would have been dreadfully conformist of them.  The stewards provided by the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress hadn’t attempted to stop them; three of them were already cooling their heels in a police van, handcuffed to the side of the van, until they could be transported to the nearest police station to be charged with assault and attempted rape.  The Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress was a genuinely transnational organisation; Briggs had been disgusted with some of the stewards who had been brought in to provide crowd control.  The Superintendent hadn’t allowed him to use that as a cause to have the march cancelled; politics, once again…

The bastards would probably get away with it as well.

“Two pickpockets caught by the crowd,” Page said, interrupting his thoughts.  The dumber of London’s petty criminals had gravitated to the crowd as well, seeing an opportunity for quick profit; the crowd might allow them to get away with it, or they might turn on the crooks.  Socialists, in Briggs’ experience, tended to get very irate when it was their pocket being picked.  “The local officers have them in custody.”

“Good,” Briggs said.  There had been several marches where the crowd had fought police officers to free criminals, for whatever reasons made sense to the vast human body; this march, so far, hadn’t turned nasty.  “Get them to the vans and transported to the police station.”

He flicked through the images from different CCTV cameras.  The march organisers had predicted that over ten thousand interested people would come; it looked to Briggs as if they had been out by an order of magnitude.  The elaborate programs scanning the images faster than the human eye could begin to grasp were reporting well over a hundred thousand people in the nearby vicinity, including identifying thousands of people known to the police though Facial Recognition Software.  Some of them were people who had had a brief run-in with the police, some of them were famous figures; he spotted two MPs, one MSP and five candidates for the local elections, coming soon.  The Mayor of London was there, glad-handing with his constituents, including some that Briggs would never have expected to see together…

Before the world had gone crazy.

One large body of marchers were very openly homosexual; they wore garish clothes and marches with exaggerated movements, designed to shock as much as attract.  A second body – several bodies – of marchers was composed of Muslims, marching in a bizarre combination of groups, united temporarily by their dislike for the Americans and suppressing their dislike for the homosexuals.  Iran had put a dozen gaysexuals to death the week before the Iran War had begun; the homosexual marchers could expect nothing, but death under Islamic rule.   Briggs knew, even if the government ensured that the general public knew little about it, about the young Muslim men killed by their peers…merely for being gaysexual.  To Briggs, a practical man, it made no sense; why were two groups with so much reason to hate each other allied?

The answer made itself clear as the first American flag burst into flame.  Everyone knew that North Korea had been rattling the sabre – again – in Korea and the South Korean Government had screamed for help.  Despite America’s overstretched position in the Middle East, the American Government had organised the hasty dispatch of an American force…ignoring the protests from Europe and Russia alike.  American spokesmen had pointed to the ongoing Chinese Civil War; Kang Seung Jae, the Dictator of North Korea, had to know that North Korea was finally coming to the end of its existence…and appeared to be preparing one final gamble.

Everyone also knew that North Korea had nukes.

Page was tapping instructions into one of the consoles.  “Sir,” he said, “is that her?”

Briggs peered past the ‘BUSH; WAR CRIMES,’ RAPE KIRKPATRICK NOW’ and the ‘NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL’ signs, and nodded.  “That’s her,” he said, shortly.  “Daphne Hammond, otherwise known as the Leader of the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress, cast-iron stone-cold bitch.  Those stunning looks, Harry, conceal a mind that is cold and very calculating.”

Page cocked an eyebrow.  Daphne Hammond was around thirty and looked twenty, with long blonde hair, a balcony that someone could perform Shakespeare from, and stunning blue eyes.  She was also a trained lawyer, a woman who had outlasted at least two husbands, and privately considered to be the most dangerous woman in the world.  He had been on the receiving end of her tongue more than once; as the leader of the Front for Peace, Freedom and Progress, she was formidable…and perhaps destined to be Britain’s second female Prime Minister.  Certainly, her name had been put forward as a possible candidate…

Briggs shook his head and wondered; what was Daphne playing at?  She might have been blonde, but she was no dummy; she had brought together a coalition that included factions that wouldn’t be impressed by her good looks, or would regard a woman in power as an abomination.  The Front had smaller sections all over Europe; as a mainly European Party, it might even have more clout than the figures suggested.

“That’s definitely one of the troublemakers,” another operator injected.  Briggs pushed the issue of Daphne’s actions to the back of his mind – it wasn’t as if anyone had any proof that she was involved in anything other than political actions, even if her two husbands had met early graves – and turned to the console.  The Facial Recognition Software was certain; the CCTV cameras had locked onto a known troublemaker, someone who had caused more than a few riots…and somehow never jailed.  “That’s Baz Falkland, all right.  I’m not sure if he is chatting up that girl or if he is up to something.”

Briggs scowled.  “Have supporting units moved up,” he said.  If it did turn nasty, a lot of people were about to be hurt.  “I want…”

Page interrupted him.  “Sir, the stewards just muscled him off,” he said.  Briggs blinked; he hadn’t known that the stewards had either the knowledge or the determination to move the troublemaker along.  Baz Falkland was trouble, everyone knew it; a reputation that had started in Manchester and moved through many of England’s cities.  Only sheer luck had saved him from a jail term.  “It looks as if they were pretty rough.”

Briggs nodded.  “I want additional constables in the area,” he said.  He would shed no tears for Baz Falkland, but if the stewards started muscling innocent people around, the police would have to intervene quickly, even if it meant his career.   “And someone reassure the Superintendent; everything is under control.”

It said something about the general opinion of the Superintendent that no one even blinked at the scorn in his voice.

***
“I would have thought,” Caroline Morgan remarked, as her shoulder-mounted camera sensor tracked a set of marchers carrying BUSH MUST FACE THE ICC signs, “that beating the President Bush horse is just a little outdated by now.  It is 2024, after all.”

“But it was President Bush who started the American grab for the Middle East,” Daphne Hammond said, her voice almost girlishly innocent.  Caroline would have been fooled, perhaps, were it not for her instincts; Daphne Hammond was bad news.  She seemed young, and sincere…except for her eyes.  They were cold and hard, as if she had seen everything a thousand times over, and hadn’t been impressed the first time.  “Even now, the Americans are fighting to hold down the Middle East and extract the last drop of oil from its soil.”

Caroline almost tuned the speech out of her mind, knowing that it was all carefully prepared to impress people who were already inclined to distrust America.  According to Daphne Hammond, after CIA operatives had carried out the terrible atrocity of 9/11, the Americans had used it as an excuse to first invade Afghanistan, and then Iraq, before luring the Europeans into first Iraq, and then Sudan…before cutting off their supply lines and leaving General Éclair to take the blame and kill himself, incidentally weakening EUROFOR to the point where it could not provide the counterbalance to America…and then luring Iran into a war.  Americans had bombed Israel, for some reason that had only made sense to them, and then allowed their own soldiers to endure two nuclear attacks…and a long and bloody occupation of the Middle East.

As history, it was utterly grotesque.

“Thank you,” Caroline said, as soon as Daphne had finished.  “But tell me, what do you really think?”

Daphne’s eyes flickered with rage, just for a second, and then the mask was back in place.  “I think that the European compliance with the Americans has gone on long enough,” she said.  “It wasn’t anything like enough to evict almost all of the American forces from Europe after that terrible incident in Mildenhall, but instead we have to created a United Europe which can provide a strong and positive voice in the United Nations towards creating a strong and dignified Earth.”

Caroline took a moment to sort it all out in her mind.  “You must be aware that the European Union has become much more unpopular in both Britain and France, to cite, but only two cases,” she said.  It was true; the British believed that Europe had been ruining British industries, while French opinion blamed the endless influx of Algerian and Palestinian refugees on the EU.   “Why do you feel that your…transnational group would win elections to the European Parliament?”

“We have already won seats in several elections across Europe,” Daphne reminded her dryly.  “I have also been offered the chance to compete in the Liberal Democrat internal elections for leadership as the party approaches the coming election.”  She smiled.  “I don’t know if I will be running as an independent MP, or if I will leave that to others within the Front and take up the nomination, but it should give you some idea of my…electoral chances.”

Caroline considered.  There had been a time when it had been almost unthinkable for politicians to switch parties; now, it happened almost as often as footballers changing football clubs.  What did it mean to the country?  Had the Liberal Democrats decided that Daphne was a vote-winner, or had their own Far Left insisted on her challenging the current leader, or…?

There were too many possibilities.  There were people who would detest her; they wouldn’t vote for the Liberal Democrats if it meant that Daphne got to plant her arse in Number Ten.  The march today wouldn’t help matters; for everyone who saw the marchers and felt admiration, there would be ten who would be disgusted.  The Far Right was also making a comeback; the fallout from the American War, everyone was certain, would eventually fall on the United Kingdom.  They allowed themselves to forget London, Glasgow, Blackburn…

Daphne stood up.  “I would love to continue chatting to you, my dear, but I fear that I have to walk all the way to Speaker’s Corner and give a speech,” she said.  She grinned suddenly.  “Of course, it is only five minutes from here, and the stewards have kept the passage clear; would you like to come with me?”

Caroline shook her head.  She had been lucky to be granted the quick interview, but there was already too high a price; the price for the scoop of walking beside Daphne was too much for her to pay.  There would be dozens of audio and visual sensors trained on her as she mounted the soapbox – literally; the Front had found one specially for her – and she would gain nothing from being close to her.

“Be seeing you, then,” Daphne said.

“Break a leg,” Caroline replied.

***
It would not have surprised Zachary Lynn – or the man who had refused to think of himself as anyone other than Zachary Lynn – that the Police had a command post near Hyde Park.  It was common sense…and, if the government of the day had little in the way of common sense, or even self-preservation instincts, the Metropolitan Police had plenty of experience in real police work.  And besides, Lynn himself had a command post, far too close to the heart of the action for anyone’s comfort.

Lynn himself smiled as the marchers flooded into Hyde Park.  There were more than he had predicted, even with his own opinions of the degree of foolishness of the British public set very low indeed.  It was impossible, among other things, to give every citizen an ‘above average’ income, let alone provide a counterbalance to America and cut the military at the same time.  France’s attempt at ‘assisting’ Algeria should have proven that…that, and the reappearance of the Argentinean claim to the Falklands.

There was a buzz in his earpiece.  “Sir, we have apprehended Baz Falkland,” his aide said.  The aide knew everything, the only person in Britain apart from Lynn who knew the entire scope of the plan.  If the Police stumbled onto them, he would have to carry on while Lynn killed himself to prevent interrogation.  “Do you have any specific instructions?”

Lynn nodded.  “The same as usual, assuming that the Police haven’t noticed,” he said.  They had a link into the heart of the Metropolitan Police, a mole who had provided information that they had used for their own reasons; they would know pretty quickly if the Police had realised that Baz Falkland had been more than just muscled away.  “Tell him that he can work for us at good rates of pay, or he can enter the Thames with concrete overshoes.”

On the display, broadcast by half a dozen news channels, some of them old and trusted, some of them new and inexperienced, Daphne Hammond was beginning her speech.  It was a good speech, one of her speechwriter’s best; she would condemn the Americans, praise the European Union, and promise a new Heaven and a new Earth if her party was elected.  He was proud of Daphne Hammond, in his own way; it was a shame that her talents could not be used openly for the cause.  

He smiled.  American flags were burning, London was almost at a standstill, and the plan was moving ahead.

It was turning into a very good day.

Chapter Two: Armageddon Rising

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache. Catherine the Great

Moscow, Russia

The line of cars appeared out of nowhere, seemingly entering the city at the same time and angling into a single line that advanced mercilessly towards the Kremlin.  They were all black, all with tinted windows; the police herded the population of the city out of the way as the cars flashed onwards.  There were few protests; the citizens of Moscow knew that their lords and masters were in the cars, many of whom deserved actual respect.  A handful of criminals, convicted and sentenced to work as brute labour, made obscene gestures as the cars passed; their supervisors, themselves brutes, laid around them with their whips.  Order would be maintained.

General Aleksandr Borisovich Shalenko sat in his car as the vehicle entered the Special Security Zone at the heart of Moscow, the heart of Russia.  Decades of war with the Chechnya rebels and the re-absorption of the former SSR states in Central Asia had made Russia a target for every international Jihadist group; even the extreme control practiced over the citizens by the new government found it hard to prevent all attacks.  No one was allowed to enter the Special Security Zone without being searched, not even a General and one of the President’s closest friends and confidents; Shalenko would have had the guards executed if they failed to search him with as much care as they would devote to a lowly civil servant.

“Papers, please,” a guard said, his AK-2015 pointed just away from Shalenko’s chest.  He wouldn’t hesitate to fire if there was something seriously wrong, or even if his suspicions became aroused; no one would forget the truck bomb that had devastated Stalingrad, or the LNG tanker that had devastated Oakland in America.  Shalenko passed over his papers without comment; the days when Russian Generals could barge though security were long over.  “You may pass, sir.”

The driver took the car into the car park, where it would be searched, while Shalenko himself walked into the guardhouse.  The search process was through; the guards removed his service weapon even as they checked his identity, his possessions, and the contents of his security briefcase.  They weren’t cleared for any of the information in the briefcase; they had to wait for one of the President’s aides to inspect it for them, just in case there was a bomb inside.  It wouldn’t be the first time that an unsuspecting officer would be turned into an unknowing suicide bomber.  Finally, however, Shalenko was permitted access into the inner heart of Russia.

“Welcome back, General,” Colonel Marina Konstantinovna Savelyeva said.  Her official rank was Colonel; her position as chief aide to the President gave her status and power well above her station.  In Russia, power, responsibility and rank sometimes existed in inverse proportion to one another; Shalenko himself had once been a mere Captain with Colonels and even Generals reporting to him.  “The President is keen to begin the meeting.”

They walked the remainder of the way into the Kremlin in silence, their only escorts a handful of security troops, intent on ensuring that there was absolutely no threat to the President and the bureaucracy that made up the core of Russia.  Shalenko had once considered it overkill, before the series of attacks in America had begun; the Russian state might have suffered some attacks, but nowhere near the number of brutal attacks that the Americans had weathered.  The price for that was a police state that would have had the old KGB reeling in astonishment and a disregard for any notion of civilised warfare.  They paused for a second in front of the new statue of Stalin – Russia had been caught for years in a wave of Communist nostalgia – and then entered the Kremlin, passing through still more checkpoints and finally entering the main room.  It had been renovated in the years since the new government had taken up power; it was now both a testament to Russian military glories in the past, and the advanced technology that Russia had adapted from the West.  The old and the new merged seamlessly, all embodied in the face of the man who accepted Shalenko’s salute as they entered.

He was old, but with youthful eyes; his short-cropped white hair seeming too white to be real.  He was shorter than Shalenko, with a stocky body and hints of a greater strength than seemed possible, but he dominated the room by the sheer force of his presence.  No one doubted that the man facing them was the undisputed lord and master of Russia; Shalenko knew that if the President gave the order, his own troops would shoot Shalenko down within seconds.  He was respected and feared, a hard man to love, but not a hard man to follow.

President Aleksandr Sergeyevich Nekrasov.

“General,” Nekrasov said, without preamble.  His power sat easily around him; the only times when he had ordered one of his inner circle executed had been when the member in question had concealed information from him.  Failure wasn't an automatic death sentence, not like it had been in Stalin’s day, but lying to him was never tolerated.  The Russian disease could not be allowed to spread.  “I trust that your inspections were successful?”

Shalenko nodded.  “The vast majority of units are ready,” he said, truthfully.  He had kicked arse and taken names all over European Russia and Belarus to ensure that the units were at their optimum condition.  “The commando units need to have their specific targets assigned, but in most cases they would be capable of carrying out their missions without further preparation.”

“We have time,” Nekrasov assured him.  They had been old friends for years, long enough to ensure that they understood one another.  Shalenko’s private fear had been that he would be asked to take up the post of Minister of Defence, but Nekrasov had spared him that; the role Shalenko held was the one he wanted.  “We will review the operation as soon as the entire Cabinet is assembled.”

They trickled in, one by one, as they were all cleared by the security forces.  Nekrasov waited patiently as they came in, taking the time to exchange comments with a handful of people, asking after the health of wives and children with one breath and discussing the career of promising officers with another.  The new Russia needed promising officers; Shalenko himself had ensured that dozens of officers who had talent received training to go with the talent.  The reform of the Russian military since the end of the Soviet Union had been a painful process, but it had all been worthwhile; Nekrasov controlled what was perhaps the most powerful land force on the continent.

As the doors closed, Nekrasov tapped the table.  “My Friends, it has been over thirty years since the power of Russia was broken by the Americans and their European lapdogs,” he said.  “We were cast down and forced to be humble; our power and prestige was stripped from us and we were outcasts, always the target of jibes, always prevented from gaining the help we needed to develop ourselves.  Our people starved as America abandoned us and Europe lectured; military bases moved ever closer to our powers and America deployed ABM systems intended to ensure that our nuclear arsenal was no longer dangerous.  I remember the final withdrawal from Poland…

“I swore then that we would return.

“For the past ten years, we have been pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps,” Nekrasov said.  The room was very quiet.  “We have developed our energy sources and have been using them to earn hard cash, that we have in turn used to develop and reform our military, and finally give Russia something for us all to be proud of.  Now, we have a window of opportunity…and a deadly threat to our very well-being.”

Shalenko listened as Nekrasov listed, one by one, the insults and indignities piled on Russia by Europe.  Nekrasov had nothing, but contempt for Europe; Europe wasn't the Americans, who had the military strength and geographic luck to back up their words.  Brussels hectored and hounded, persecuting Russian immigrants, while meddling in the endless state of Ukraine unrest and assisting the Baltic States to break their agreements with Russia.  Ever since he had come to power, Nekrasov had used the advantages of Russia ruthlessly, from ensuring that the fuel that Russia supplied came at a high enough cost to impede Polish economic development, to using the positions in Belarus to build a support base for the greatest military attack the world had ever known.

“We have been preparing for this for years,” Nekrasov finished.  “We have been waiting for the window of opportunity…and now we are ready.  In a month, Operation Stalin will commence…and a continent will be brought to its knees.”

The reactions ran around the room.  Some of them had known from the start that the operation would be launched unless something very significant occurred to prevent it.  Some of them had thought that the entire operation was a pipe dream, or a desperately impossible gamble; they had never expected that anyone would actually try it.   They all burned to avenge the multiple insults that Russia had suffered over the years, but Operation Stalin…

Nekrasov smiled at them all.  “General?”

“I have completed my review of the units that have been assigned to Operation Stalin,” Shalenko said shortly.  “The security requirements were quite high – most of the units have little idea that they will be going to war within a month – but training and supplies are excellent.  The logistics chain has been carefully prepared and the logistics units will be able to supply the advance forces with everything they will need to maintain the offensive.  It would be nice to be able to capture European supplies, at least of fuel and rations, but we are not dependent upon it.  We just completed RED STORM, a major exercise, and I am pleased to report that the battlespace management system worked fairly well.  Striking the balance between control from the rear and local awareness of conditions was tricky, but we believe that we have successfully mastered the art.

“The Special Forces units have been largely prepared for their own missions, although we have been unwilling to assign them any specific intelligence on their targets,” he continued.   “Their role in the operation is absolutely crucial, but until we are ready to inform them of their targets, further training is likely to be counter-productive; we will begin practical training once all units have returned to their barracks and entered lockdown.  Security will be maintained.”

He paused.  “The operation has been extensively wargamed,” he concluded.  “Assuming that everything goes in our favour, we will win within a month; assuming that the enemy is aware of our intentions and takes steps to thwart us, we should still be able to win, but within six months.  It is therefore important that the long-range strike plan is launched; if we can destroy the European logistics chain, our victory is certain.”

The Minister of Industry, Ostap Tarasovich Onyshenko, coughed.  “That assumes, of course, that we neutralise both the European nuclear deterrent and the prospect of American intervention,” he said.  “Can you guarantee that we can accomplish both?”

Nekrasov smiled thinly.  “All warfare is based on risk,” he said.  “We can knock out most of the nuclear deterrent in the first round.  Olga?”

Olga Dmitriyevna Sedykh, the Foreign Minister, spoke from her part of the table.  “The Americans are fully committed in the Middle East and Korea, where the North Koreans are preparing to launch an attack against the south.  We have said nothing about this, of course; Kang is unlikely to need encouragement from us to attack either the Americans or his southern brothers.  The rift between Europe and America is a deep and apparently permanent one; the Americans no longer have an obligation to come to Europe’s rescue.  We expect that they will protest and secure Iceland, somewhere where we are not even preparing to threaten; even if they intend to interfere, they will have very limited forces at hand to interfere.”

She paused.  “The main danger is the American ABM units in Poland,” she concluded.  “They have to be neutralised…carefully.  We cannot afford to give the President a bloody flag to wave.”

“I have a specialised unit prepared for that mission,” Shalenko assured her.  “If nothing else, avenging the insult offered to us in Iran will seem like an excuse for the American public, as unreasonable as the Americans are on such matters.”

“In any case, they would hesitate, I think, before becoming embroiled with us,” Nekrasov said.  “They will be confused, at first, as to what is actually going on.  Maksim; what about our security?”

Maksim Nikolayevich Zaripov, FSB Director of External Intelligence, smiled.  “There have been no signs that anyone within the American or European intelligence services suspects the existence of Operation Stalin,” he said.  “We have very good penetration of the establishment in Brussels and Poland and while the Poles are worried about the presence of so many Russian soldiers in Belarus, to say nothing of the influx of refugees, they do not have any actual proof that we mean them ill.  The greatest proof, I think, is the ROE that Brussels gave to the three EUROFOR deployments; Poland, Ukraine and Bosnia.  All of the units have no authority to so much as blow their noses without permission from Brussels.”

“Requested in triplicate, of course,” Admiral Petr Yegorovich Volkov said.  “Fifty-page forms, no mistakes, in three different languages.”

There were some chuckles.  “I believe that our security remains intact,” Zaripov said.  “Our deployment of submarines and weapons to the Algerians and Serbs has excited some comment, but nothing major; the main complaint is that we have been muscling out their weapon manufactures when it comes to sales to the Far East.  For some reason, not many people trust European weapons.”

Shalenko smiled.  The French had supplied weapons to Iran, weapons that they could turn off at will…and they had been caught at it.  The Americans had forced the French to hand over the shutdown codes; the final radio broadcasts from Tehran had warned the entire world of the danger.  The integrated European defence industry had taken a major drop in sales.

Nekrasov tapped the table.  “Margarita?”

Shalenko found his eyes turning to Margarita Sergeyevna Pushkina, the FSB Director of External Operations, with interest.  She was pretty, but dangerous; she was known as the ‘Black Widow’ behind her back.  There were rumours that Nekrasov and Margarita were lovers, but informed opinion tended to disregard the possibility; the idea of the Black Widow having anything to do with anything as soft as love…

“We have established penetration of all of the countries within Europe, some of them through the use of long-term FSB sleeper agents, others with the assistance of the Algerians,” Margarita said.  Her voice was soft and very musical, but there was a hard edge that undercut her dark-haired appearance and soft skin.  “This has the added advantage that if the Europeans stumble onto some parts of our network, the Algerians and radical Islam will get the blame.  The Algerian plan for a major uprising can, with our help, succeed to a certain extent.”

She smiled.  There was no humour in the smile.  “The Islamic Government of Algeria has been plotting its war for a long time,” she said.  “Their problem was that they would get their arse kicked if they tried it alone; with our help, they have a fair chance at pulling it off long enough for us to make our gains permanent.  Afterwards…well, it’s not as if we owe them anything.  They have been smuggling in weapons and preparing terror cells for years; we took advantage of the opportunity to move some of our own people into the region.”

She paused.  “I should stress that this part of the plan could fail,” she admitted.  “I have every confidence that our own people will carry out their missions or die trying, but I don’t trust the fanatics the Algerians have been sending in, or the Palestinians who took up residence in France.  Some of them probably suspect that we intend to stab them in the back as soon as we secure all of the vital targets, others will intend personal revenge, rather than anything that might help us.  As long as they keep the French and Spanish busy…”

It went on and on; Shalenko found his head getting heavy as every last part of the plan was reviewed, examined, hacked apart and rebuilt and finally approved.  The planners had built friction into the plan; Shalenko was too old a dog to expect that everything would go perfectly, even if the first steps of the plan were played to perfection.  Over a million soldiers, sailors and airmen, some of them Kontraktniki officers, had been prepared for their mission; thousands of tanks, aircraft, missiles and warships had been produced for the greatest military attack that the world had ever seen.  Nothing would ever be the same again…

“I think that we have taken care of every detail that we can control,” Nekrasov said finally, after the details of the diplomatic offensive had been examined.  “Are there any final issues we must cover?”

There was a pause.  Stalin would never have said anything like that, or at least he would never have meant it.  

“There is a point,” Shalenko said.  “We must avoid causing atrocities, at least until we are firmly in control, that involve the general population.  If they believe that they have a future under our rule, sir, they will be less inclined to fight to the death.”

Nekrasov looked briefly at him, and then at FSB General Vasiliy Alekseyevich Rybak.  Rybak was known, not without reason, as the ‘Butcher of Chechnya;’ he had brought peace to the region, the peace of the grave.  He had also been mocked mercilessly because of his name.  The International Criminal Court had tried to indict him; the Russian Government had told them to go to hell.

“We will have to establish control as quickly as possible,” Rybak protested.  He met Nekrasov’s eyes.  “We cannot tolerate defiance, but we can try to ensure that there are no…incidents.”

“Good,” Nekrasov said firmly.  “Revenge can wait until we have won the war; we cannot take the risk of doing the Europeans a small injury, after all.”  He looked once around the room.  “In a month, Operation Stalin will begin…and the global balance of power will shift towards us.  Good luck to us all.”

Chapter Three: They Also Serve…

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
John Stuart Mill

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The girl was waiting for him in the darkness…

He could see her, her haunting dark eyes in her dark skin, wrapped in a purple cloth that had covered her young body.  He had seen her in the refugee camp, her dark eyes pleading for the safety that the Europeans had promised her…and then withdrawn.  He remembered her, dreaming – had the dream become reality or had reality become the dream? – her body charred and burnt by the fires that had consumed the camp, her body dying even as it moved sinuously towards him.  He could make out her curves, slowly being washed away by the fire; her breasts and thighs consumed, leaving only her eyes to glare accusingly at him.  She blamed him…

Captain Stuart Robinson woke up screaming.  His body was coated in sweat; there was a body by his side.  It took him long terrifying moments to remember that the body was that of his wife; he checked her pulse with one practiced hand, only to sigh in relief when he realised that she was alive.  The remains of the nightmare still floated around his mind; they were not in Sudan, but in Edinburgh.

His wife looked up at him.  “The nightmare?”

Robinson would have lied to Hazel if he could have done; they had lived together long enough to know that lying would be futile.  Hazel had been there for him when the remains of the Sudan Deployment had returned to Europe, some of them to face charges of disobeying orders, others to quit their various armed forces in disgust, others to soldier on as best as they could.  Hazel’s father, a man who was quite a powerful local businessman, had offered to take his son-in-law on, but Robinson had refused the offer; the military was his life.

“Yes,” he said.  The nightmare always returned the day before a deployment.  The long period of leave for his infantry company had come to an end.  “I saw her again.”

Hazel placed her hand in his and they held each other.  It wasn’t fair on her, Robinson thought, but there was nothing he could do about it.  The girl – he had never learned her name – had been one of the teenage girls at risk of losing honour, dignity and lives to the insurgents in the Sudan, the type of people that the deployment had been intended to protect.  Instead, they had merely made a bigger target for the insurgents, the bastards who killed, raped and looted across the entire region.  The Rules of Engagement had made engaging them difficult…how else were they meant to prevent a massacre?  General Éclair's decision to tell the politicians in Brussels to go fuck themselves and order the enemy engaged had come too late; thousands had died in the ‘safe’ refugee camps.  And then…

They had been ordered home, of course, some of the British soldiers to face charges of disobeying orders.  Robinson had been a young private at the time, newly married; he had been spared any formal prosecution, but morale in the armed forces had plummeted.  General Éclair had killed himself, taking the blame on himself; some said that the European military tradition had died with him.  There had been a time when ‘damnation to the French’ had been a British toast; now, soldiers drank to the last of the European commanding officers worth a damn.  All Robinson had to worry about had been the nightmares.

Hazel’s blonde hair spilled down as she straddled him.  “Do you have to go back?”

He knew what she meant; why don’t you leave the army and take up the job offer from my father?  It wasn't as if he hated George Alban; the man had been quite accommodating to the squaddie who had courted, and then married, his daughter.  They might not have managed to provide him with any grandchildren yet, but Robinson was sure that they would have time for that one day; it was the thought of becoming dependent upon his father-in-law that bothered him.  He loved the junior ranks of the army.  

And besides, even in this times, it was far better than life as a civilian.

“I don’t have a choice,” he said, as his hands explored her breasts.  Nearly a decade of living together, since they were both in their teens, had given them unmatched knowledge of one another’s body.  She could draw anything from him and he could make her come for hours; nothing he had experienced before matched it.  She pushed down on him, pulling him into her, and he forgot himself for nearly an hour.  “Hazel…”

“Don’t you dare fall asleep,” Hazel said, afterwards.  “You have to have a shower and then I think I’ll make you change your sheets.”

“That’s your job,” Robinson said, and ducked the pillow she hurled at him, running into the shower before she could find something harder to throw.  He took a moment to shave, using one of the new vibrating shavers to quickly remove all of his stubble, before running through a quick exercise routine and then showering to remove all the sweat.  The nightmare always made him wake up screaming; he wasn't the only one who had been to Sudan to have nightmares, but the Government had refused counselling to the soldiers who had been.  They had just wanted to forget about it.  It had brought down a government, after all; they would have been happier to dance across a minefield.

He dressed quickly and neatly, and then headed into the living room.  They kept such a large house because of the lodgers – something that George Alban had organised to ensure that his daughter was kept in the manner to which she was accustomed – but none of them worked in the mornings.  They had only two lodgers at the moment, something that Robinson was privately relieved about; the last thing he wanted was to run into them after a nightmare.

“I’ll have your breakfast out in a moment,” Hazel called, through the doorway to the kitchen.  She was a pretty good cook; she had also been surprised to learn that Robinson himself could cook, something the army had bashed into his head.  “Why don’t you watch telly and find out what’s going on?”

Robinson laughed and sat down, finding the remote and clicking the interactive television on.  It had been a gift from his father-in-law on their wedding day, a new system that could present news to them based on their requirements, or give them an entire series of programs, if they had time to download them.  He had once downloaded all ten seasons of Doctor Who and watched them, end to end; now, he put the temptation aside and turned to the news.  The computer in the system knew his preferences.

“American spokesmen today informed the world that American soldiers had been dispatched to South Korea in conjunction with a division from Australia and a smaller unit from New Zealand,” the newsreader said.  She was a computer-generated program with impressive vital statistics; she was also the most popular pornographic character in the world, all computer-generated.  It had sparked off an entire series of studies into the human character.  “Despite protest marches in a dozen European and Latin American capitals, the administration of President Joan Kirkpatrick is determined to avoid any appearance of weakness in the run-up to the forthcoming American elections.   The marchers…”

“Leftist morons,” Robinson muttered, knowing that it had been the marchers who had gotten Europe into Sudan and then out of the damned country.  George Alban had been really scathing about them.  “Next!”

Another computer-generated face, this time vaguely French in appearance.  “The leader of the French National Front yesterday called for Arab and Palestinian immigrants to be forcibly sterilized,” she said.  Images of protest marches and riots spread across the scene.  “Jean-Luc Barras claimed that the rising tide of immigration was permanently changing France’s demographics and insisted that the French Government take firm steps to prevent further immigration.  The pronouncement was greeted by riots and protests; the European Court of Justice will meet today to decide if they should prosecute him for hate speech.  Both Radio Jihad and Islamic Law stations, broadcasting from Algeria, have called for his head.  The Islamic Government of Algeria has demanded that the French Government hand Barras over to them for trial.”

Robinson rolled his eyes.  The French would probably give in too.  

“The Canadian Government today refused to hand over a suspected terrorist to American authorities without some proof that he was a terrorist,” a different face said.  “This comes in the wake of American draft-dodgers fleeing to Canada and being turned back by the Canadian authorities, despite an underground movement intended to help the young Americans.  Congressman Dave Howery, of Michigan, demanded that President Kirkpatrick show resolve and compel the Canadian authorities to surrender the man.  The White House has not commented.”

“Cheerful news,” Hazel commented, as she placed his breakfast in front of him.  Robinson grinned; bacon, eggs, fried potatoes and hash browns.  What more could anyone want?  All of it was cooked by his wife, not by a mess officer; the British Army had a recurring joke about men taking one look at the meals and deserting to the enemy.  “Is there any good news?”

Robinson passed her the remote, allowing her to skim through the hundreds of different news articles that were available to them.  It wasn’t like it had been back in 2007, when it had taken hours to download one episode of Doctor Who; now, it only took minutes to have an hour-long episode streamed over to them, and seconds for a short and chunky news piece.  He’d read articles that claimed that it was bad for people to have such access, but personally he loved it; the service was available everywhere in the UK and America.  They could even have accessed news reports from Poland, or watched Polish television…and the world became a little smaller.

“Ah, a kitty caught up a tree,” Hazel said, after a moment.  “Shall we watch that?”

Robinson realised that he was being teased.  “No,” he said.  “Anything of more interest to me?”

“The convicted killer of a child molester-, Alfred Ashford, was today remanded to the custody of a medium-security jail,” the newsreader said.  Robinson felt his jaw clench; there had been protest marches against that, the only protest march he had ever attended in his lifetime.  Ashford had caught a convicted paedophile molesting Ashford's daughter and had killed the bastard, only to be charged with murder; the streets of Britain were no longer safe.  “Ashford is expected to spend at least ten years behind bars…”

“Assuming he survives his first year in prison,” Robinson snarled.  He glanced down at his watch.  “What are you doing for the next hour?”

“We have another lodger coming to look at the third room,” Hazel said.  “I want to give it a clean-up before they look at it and make their choice.  I need to check that Rashid and Sergey have left the bathroom in good condition, just to impress the newcomer.  The conditions here are so much better than the hostels and the rent isn’t much higher.”

Robinson shrugged.  Rashid Ustinov and Sergey Ossetia were both refugees from Russia, people who had fled the police state that the new government had created, somehow finding their way to Britain and temporary workers permits.  They both had jobs within the city and paid taxes; they were also both quiet and soft-spoken.  He had worried, at first, about leaving Hazel with them, but they had behaved themselves.  Sergey was homosexual, something that Robinson knew was taboo in Russia, while Rashid had brought home a girlfriend from time to time.  It was hard to see what they actually had in common.

“So, no time to get back into bed?”  Robinson teased.  He wanted her so badly at that moment.  “I’m going to miss you.”

“Randy animal,” Hazel said, teasing him.  He reached out for her and their lips met in a long kiss.  “I’m going to miss you too…and if you get killed, I’m going to kill you, understand?”

“Yes,” Robinson said.  He gave his wife a second kiss, then a third, and then a fourth.  He would come back to her or die trying; what they had was too important to lose.  “I do have some sense of self-preservation, after all.”

He kissed his wife goodbye and started the long walk towards Redford Barracks, pausing only to throw a quick salute to the portrait of General Éclair that he had attached to the wall.  It was – officially – frowned upon, but hundreds of soldiers had decided to ignore official warnings and keep the pictures of those who had died or been betrayed by their own governments after Sudan.  The Netherlands and Denmark had been particularly vile to their soldiers; if a far-right group did manage to get into power there, Robinson privately predicted blood on the streets.

Redford Barracks themselves were a set of massive buildings, set within Colinton, home to The Rifles as well as several smaller units and a Territorial Army base, right next door.  Robinson showed his security pass to the guards at the gate, armed and ready for trouble; they searched him and allowed him to enter the base.  He paused to salute the flag flapping in the wind, and then headed into the briefing room.  Other soldiers would be trickling in over the coming two days; as a Captain, Robinson had the pleasure of being called back into service early.   It wasn't an easy time to be a junior officer in His Majesty’s Army.

He stood and saluted, along with a handful of other officers, when Major General John McLachlan entered the room.  McLachlan was fairly well-known; unlike Robinson himself, he had seen service in the ill-fated Iraq campaign, as well as Afghanistan and several other places where the general public would be astonished to learn that British troops had served.  His dark hair was fading to grey now, but he still gave the impression of strength and, more importantly, competence.  Rumour had it that he had wanted to retire, but the person who would be likely to get his job was an incompetent paper warrior.

“At ease,” McLachlan said, as he returned their salutes.  “You will be pleased to know that we are being deployed, along with several RAF and SAS units, to Poland.  You may have heard rumours about the repeated Argie claim to the Falklands, and the Government has authorised the deployment of a major force of Royal Marines and Royal Navy ships, but we are going to Poland.  So far, the fact that a major force is going to the Falklands, in the hopes of preventing a repeat of the 1982 war, has been kept a secret; the requirement for a deployment to Poland has not.  I assume that all of you know the background, seeing that you all did a tour two years ago during the first crisis; there are few changes of importance in the background.

“Almost the entire regiment is going, along with several other regiments, under my national command and the European command of General Konrad Trautman, who has experience in the Balkans and the Ukraine.  No one expects serious trouble on this deployment, but we have been able to gain some permission from Brussels to deploy some units to expand our control of the area and hopefully increase our ability to react to any real emergency.  It should be noted that there have been several incidents recently in Ukraine that Intelligence fears will trigger off a full-scale civil war; if that happens, we may find ourselves working with the Poles to seal the border.  We are supposed to have reinforcements in that case, but with the Falklands becoming a trouble spot again, we may have reinforcements from France or Germany, rather than British reinforcements.”

He paused.  “Forward deployment will be at Rheindahlen Military Complex, North Rhine, Westphalia, Germany,” he said.  “You have all been there before, so you know the area; kindly ensure that your soldiers always use their contraceptives if they intend to sample the local nightlife before we get permission to move on into Poland.  We will have a long and enhanced period of training; the good news is that we will be getting some of the new equipment that they promised us five years ago.  The 7th Panzer might have the new Eurotanks, but we will have several smaller vehicles, including some Close-Air Denial Systems, trucks carrying the latest antiaircraft missiles.  I expect heavy training from all of you.”

Robinson nodded.  McLachlan could be a martinet from time to time, but he knew his business, even if he had been known for insisting on perfect grooming in the field.  Everyone hatred training until they had actually been under fire, in which case they loved it; they could never get enough training.  The new enlisted soldiers, who had been surprised by the intensity of their early days in the army, would be astonished to discover that they would be expected to train until they reached the end of their careers.  Far too many of them had come unprepared to the army.

“We will be deploying one week from today to Rheindahlen,” McLachlan finished, after briefly detailing the other units that had been assigned to EUROFOR, including several French, German and Spanish units.  “I expect that all of you will have your battalions and companies ready before we move to Catterick Garrison, where we will be transported to Germany.  It may not be the Falklands, but I expect each and every one of you to carry out his or her duty to the best of your ability.  And besides, we have to show up the French at something other than football.”

There were some chuckles.  “Dismissed!”

Chapter Four: Storm Warning

A form of government that is not the result of a long sequence of shared experiences, efforts, and endeavours can never take root.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Brussels, Belgium

“You know,” Captain Saundra Keshena remarked, as the two American officers made their way towards the centre of Brussels, “I’m fairly sure that it is impossible for one man to have so many muscles.”

Colonel Seth Fanaroff smiled as he studied the statue of General Éclair.  It said something about how highly General Éclair was regarded that the Pentagon had flown its flag at half-mast the day his death had been confirmed – although, incidentally, not the manner of it.  Even the most data-constipated bureaucrat in Brussels had hesitated before admitting that their finest commanding officer – a Frenchman who had had the political skills of Eisenhower matched with the military skills of Sherman – had killed himself because of the impossible task he had faced and the disaster that had occurred.  The Americans had learnt something about accomplishing the impossible after the Pakistani Incursion and the Second Afghanistan War; the European Union hadn’t learned anything until too late.

Fanaroff wasn’t that surprised.  His role as the United States Military Intelligence liaison to the European Defence Force – EUROFOR – gave him a unique insight into how the institution worked.  It had been the result of so many political compromises that it was surprising that the attempt to send troops to the Sudan had ever gotten off the ground; EUROFOR was all chiefs and very few Indians.  The day that NATO had dissolved in a shower of acrimony had been proclaimed as the ‘hour of Europe’ – years later, the Europeans were still waiting for their military to actually do something useful.  Billions of Euros had been spent…on what?

“They idealise him,” Fanaroff said, without any real anger in his voice.  America and Europe were decoupled these days; even his message wouldn’t change anything.  There had been a time when V Corps had been stationed in Germany; a powerful force of tanks, infantry, mobile rocket launchers…even tactical nuclear weapons.  Now, there were only a handful of American officers in Europe, mainly liaison officers like Fanaroff himself, even though there was little actual cooperation, at least in the public eye.  There were people in the Pentagon who believed that the real reason for Turkey’s rejection from the EU had been because of the possibility of having to work with American forces in the Middle East.  “The one man who could have built EUROFOR into a real army.”

The entire system was bizarre, something that proved, more than anything else, that Europe considered itself unthreatened.  EUROFOR had only four multinational regiments; the remainder of the force considered of units that were assigned to EUROFOR by the national governments that owned them.  It was worse in the European Air Force; all that was owned was a handful of helicopters and the former NATO force of Sentry AWACS.  As for the navy…

His lips twitched.  The European Standing Force in the Mediterranean consisted of units from five different countries, trying to work together in the face of mounting political infighting over just what they could do to the force of immigrants that swarmed across the water every night.  For some reason, the people in Algeria thought that France would provide a better home for them than Algeria…and, with the show trials and executions for everyone who showed even the slightest urge to question the government, it was easy to see their point.  Nothing short of machine gunning every last boat would have stopped it…and the European Governments refused to take that step.

Captain Saundra Keshena looked up at him.  “Sir?”

Fanaroff smiled to himself.  “Yes?”

“Sir,” Saundra asked, “why are we here?”

“I assume you don’t mean in the cosmic sense,” Fanaroff teased her.  She was a conscript, one of the unlucky third of the American female population who had been drafted into the armed forces.  There was some evidence that the five years service that each conscript had to do in the Army was improving America, but Fanaroff himself wanted more information before passing judgement; Saundra seemed only suited to be a paper-pusher, something the army already had too many of.  “We’re here to talk to the European Defence Commission and see if they’ll listen to us.”

He felt his eyes narrow as they passed a series of protesters.  Brussels saw more protests than any other European city, ever since it had become the capital of the European Union, in name as well as fact.  Some protesters were demanding easier immigration, others were opposing the desperate attempts to limit immigration, some were demanding military intervention in one struggling country or another…and all of them were opposed to America.  One protester was even against the American determination to maintain embassies in every European country; never mind the fact that that had been a European balls-up from start to finish.  The European Parliament had tried to set itself up as the only voice for Europe and national governments had stamped down hard.  America hadn’t been involved.

It was the first time that Saundra had visited the headquarters of the European Defence Commission, the home of EUROFOR.  Judging from her stare, she wasn’t impressed; the Europeans had spent enough money to create and outfit two armoured divisions on a building that could only be described as an eyesore.  The security around it was a joke; Fanaroff had seriously considered taking a bomb in one day and rubbing the collective nose of EUROFOR in its own weakness.  Everyone knew, one day, that the Terror War would spread to Europe…apart from those responsible for Europe’s defence.

“It’s a giant dick,” Saundra protested.  “What were they thinking?”

“You should hear what the grunts call it,” Fanaroff said, for once serious.  “That, my dear, is what happens when you let Joe Shit have free reign.”

The security hadn’t improved since the last time he had visited; the guards swung sensors over their bodies and checked the mobile phones, terminals and briefcases they both carried.  Fanaroff, who knew that sensors could be spoofed quite easily by someone with the right equipment, was nervous; there was a reason why the Pentagon insisted on a strip search before allowing anyone into the building.  In Europe, after a couple of occasions where guards had strip-searched a veiled woman, even female guards had been forbidden to search anyone.  It was a disaster waiting to happen.

The interior of the building looked like a palace; the interior decorations alone had cost more than the richest man in America brought home in one year.  A giant portrait of Napoleon I took up most of one wall, other portraits of famous military leaders dominated the remainder of the ground floor.  Someone unfamiliar with the military might have been impressed; Fanaroff, who had volunteered for the army, could see the weaknesses…and knew enough to know who had been left out.  Bomber Harris, Rommel, Petain, Bismarck…

“I could take a suitcase bomb in here, blow it up, and do EUROFOR a vast favour,” he muttered, as their escort finally appeared.  “Remember, be nice to the poor gentleman.”

“Welcome to EUROFOR HQ,” the young man said.  His uniform was so spotless that Fanaroff immediately deduced that he had never seen active service.  “I have been ordered to escort you before the Commission.”

“Thank you,” Fanaroff said.  “Lead on.”

He amused himself with making notes about how dangerous the building was for anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in a bomb attack; the Europeans hadn’t even created a clear air space around Brussels.  The only countries that had done anything like that were the French and the British, both of whom had faced terrorist attempts to use airliners as weapons.  The guards weren’t armed…and while he was sure that there was a security force nearby that could stand off a major attack, the real danger was a quick strike, not a major attack.  A single airliner could wipe out much of the European Union’s high command.

“I am afraid that your aide will have to remain outside,” the escort said, as they reached the big doors.  “Please would you come this way?”

The office was large enough to play football in, Fanaroff considered; it was only a slight exaggeration.  It was more luxurious than the Oval Office and considerably less practical; the five men in the office turned to face him as he entered.  One of them wore a European Service Uniform – the equivalent of American BDUs – the others wore the more flamboyant dress uniforms of REMFs.  Fanaroff knew General Konrad Trautman by reputation; the others he had met from time to time in an official capacity.

“Welcome to EUROFOR HQ,” General Henri Guichy said.  He carried the additional title of Commissioner, as France’s official representative to the European Defence Committee, the closest thing that Europe had to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Fanaroff had long ago creased wondering which tail wagged which dog.  The EDC had vast power and influence in Europe…and its structure was such that it promoted paper-pushers, rather than fighters, to high rank.  “I was quite surprised when you requested this meeting.”

I bet you were, Fanaroff thought.  He took a moment to study Trautman with care; the German, at least, was a real combat soldier.  There were some who wondered if he was the real heir to General Éclair, not a thought that would please Guichy and his kind.  The brown-haired General looked competent enough; his posting to Poland had been proclaimed as Europe’s reaction to Poland’s unjustified fears about the Russians.  Fanaroff suspected, along with several others in the American defence establishment, that those fears were not so unjustified after all.

“I have been asked to convoy some information from Langley,” he said, referring to the catch-all term for American Intelligence, in particular the CIA.  The information had been gathered from a dozen different sources, but it had been an overworked analyst in the CIA who had put it all together.  “The White House was keen that you heard the information as quickly as possible.”

Guichy shrugged and waved them all to chairs.  “One hopes that this information is more accurate than the vaunted American search for weapons of mass destruction,” he said.  “You must understand that Brussels is hardly going to jump into action at the command of the American President, no matter how important she is.”

“Of course,” Fanaroff said, unwilling to argue politics with either Guichy or one of his people.  He opened his briefcase and pulled out a small secure datachip.  “I assume that you have a reader here with biometric sensors?”

Guichy nodded and passed him the reader.  Fanaroff inserted the chip and placed his hand on the sensor, allowing the reader to confirm that he, Colonel Fanaroff, was permitted to access the information on the chip and share it with others on the cleared list.  The CIA and the other intelligence services collected thousands of gigabytes worth of information on everything under the sun; the problem was in using the information before it was too late.

“You will know, of course, that the first Russian surge of troops into Belarus occurred in 2018, following a request by the Dictator to protect himself and his cronies from their own people,” Fanaroff said.  It had been one of the few things that Europe and America had actually been in agreement upon; it was a bad thing.  Both nations had protested, to no avail.  “Four years later, the Russians surged more troops into the country and sealed the borders; those units included armoured divisions, attack helicopters, and other units that seemed useless for a counter-insurgency operation.”

“And the Poles panicked,” Guichy snapped.  “I remember.”

“You didn’t have other problems at the time,” Fanaroff said.   “The Russians have been fuming about the actions of the Baltic States against the Russians living within the states…and you have been backing the Baltic States.  But…the Russians have been shipping weapons, including Scud missiles, to Algeria…and other weapons to Argentina.  The British have already had to dispatch a major force to the South Atlantic; what about the danger of Algeria?”

Guichy looked up at him.  “The Algerians do not have the capability to launch an attack on Europe,” he said.  “They might fire missiles at us, but they will all be downed by the Patriot missiles that we purchased from you at vast expense.”

Fanaroff took a breath.  “There is also the fact that the Russians have been backing the pro-Russian factions in the Ukraine,” he said.  “You have two regiments, one Swedish, one Irish, providing peacekeeping forces in the region; you’re overstretched and the Russians are pouring on the pressure.”

“The Poles have been worried about the safety of their borders since the first cross-border raid,” Trautman said slowly.  Guichy shot him a ‘shut up’ look that he ignored.  “Still, I would hardly call that pouring on the pressure.”

Fanaroff frowned.  “What is EUROFOR’s position when it comes to Ukraine?”

Guichy matched his frown.  “Our orders from the European Parliament are to maintain the peace of the region, safe in the knowledge that the long-term interests of Europe will be satisfied by Ukraine becoming prosperous, and then joining the European Union as a full and equal member.”

“Interesting concept,” Fanaroff said.  He paused, just long enough to make them nervous.  “What about the Russian attitude to all of this?”

Guichy blinked.  “I do beg your pardon?”

“A while back, you offered to buy Kaliningrad off them, following the independence demonstrations that took place in the Oblast,” Fanaroff said, as calmly as he could.  “The Russians reacted with speed and fury; they sent in thousands of airborne soldiers and muscled the Lithuanian forces into allowing them passage through Lithuanian territory.  Thousands of refugees fled west…while hundreds of others were shipped into Russia and sent to the gulags.”

“There are no such things these days,” Guichy protested.

“I can show you the satellite photographs, if you would like,” Fanaroff said.  “It hardly matters; the point is that Kaliningrad is now a loyal component of the Russian Federation, which has also reabsorbed Belarus, most of the Central Asian states and, for the first time since 1960, no longer has a threat in the east to worry about.  The Chinese Civil War has seen to that.

“So tell me, how are the Russians going to react?”

“They are not going to start a war with us,” Trautman said.  “If the people of the Ukraine decide that they want to vote to join us, what right have they to interfere?”

“It is no use passing resolutions on vegetarianism when the wolves are of a different opinion,” Fanaroff said.  He had had a girlfriend who had been a vegetarian once; she had been so self-righteous that he had dumped her right after one argument too many.   There was a point when even great sex didn’t make up for the fact that you really didn’t like each other.  “The Russians have launched a major military build up” – he pointed to several locations on the display – “here, here and here, perfectly positioned for a rapid advance into the Ukraine.  They could brush the Ukrainian Government forces, such as they are, aside within a week…while you’re arguing over what to do about it.  The American Government…”

“Is worried about the security of the ABM stations in Poland,” Guichy snapped.  “I would like to remind you that they’re there are the sufferance of the European Union…”

“The Polish Government, which for some reason wanted to keep the military agreement that Poland signed with us,” Fanaroff snapped back.  “The Poles agreed to keep them, because they wanted the radars to provide additional coverage for their own air force and EUROFOR is not involved and doesn’t even get a feed from the stations!”

He took a long breath.  “It is the recommendation of the American Government that you reinforce Poland so that you actually have something in position to react when the Russians decide that the Ukrainian elections are tilted against them and come over the border,” he said, as calmly as he could.  “For what it is worth, the American Government has also agreed to offer EUROFOR access to the direct feeds from the stations, if EUROFOR would like to take them up on the offer!”

There was a moment’s pause.  “That would be quite welcome,” Trautman said.  “In fact…”

“There is no intelligence to suggest that the Russians intend to do anything other than abide by the election results,” Guichy said.  He nodded to a young carrot-topped man.  “Major?”

Major Nekropher O'Mans, of EUROFOR Intelligence, shook his head.  “There have been no reports that the Russians have dire intentions towards the Ukraine,” he said.  “They actually played quite an important role in getting the Swedes into position, providing some help with transport and intelligence to prevent some of the factions from starting a civil war.  A civil war is hardly in their interests.”

“I hope you’re right,” Fanaroff said.  He unlocked the chip and passed it over to O'Mans.  It had puzzled him that an Irishman had been appointed to EUROFOR Intelligence; the French or British had much more capable intelligence agencies and far more contacts to draw on.  “That is the information we have been able to gather, Major; I hope that you are able to disprove the conclusion, but…I have a nasty feeling that you’re wrong.”

He saluted them and left the room; Saundra was waiting outside, skilfully deflecting the escort’s attempts to chat her up.  The escort passed her his email and telephone number before escorting them back outside the building, into the warm sun.  Brussels was lovely in spring, apart from the new buildings; they had been built to a standard where taste didn’t apply.

She tossed the note away as soon as she was outside.  “Sir, how was it?”

Fanaroff looked back at the EUROFOR HQ.  “They’re all doomed,” he said.  He ignored her astonished questions.  “Come on, we have to get back to the Embassy; I need a stiff drink.”

Chapter Five: Sleepers

A fifth column is a group of people which clandestinely undermines a larger group to which it is expected to be loyal, such as a nation. 
Emilio Mola

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

“Welcome to Edinburgh,” Hazel said, as the new prospective lodgers arrived.  She took a moment to check out their appearance; one man, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, and one woman, her eyes faintly desperate.  The Scottish Parliament might have issued grandiose proclamations on how it intended to create new housing in the city, but in a fit of typical brilliance, the Parliament had managed to build houses that were too expensive for most buyers.  “I understand that you are living together?”

“Yes, thank you,” the man said, his voice clearly from the Highlands.  He held out a hand.  It felt limp and sweaty to her touch.  “We were recently offered a transfer to Edinburgh and…well, it was the sort of transfer that you take or you leave permanently.”

Hazel nodded in sympathy, reappraising them.  She had assumed that they were lovers, at least, not merely colleagues; they had to be desperate to be sharing a flat.  She had no objections to them sharing a room, but they would definitely be sharing a double bed, unless one of them had a sleeping bag.  Her husband had a spare one if it were to be needed; she would go the extra mile for them if she could.

“The rent is three hundred pounds a month,” she said.  In theory, she could accept Euros instead, but she had no real trust in European money.  It just didn’t look real.  “If you are sharing a room, I assume that you will be sharing the cost?”

“Yes,” the woman said.  “I’m Shelia and this is Grant Murdock.”

“Pleased to meet you both,” Hazel said, leading them up the stairs.  “There are two floors to the building; the flats are all on the second floor.  There are no real restrictions on what you can do here, except smoking; smoking is firmly banned in this building.  If you bring anyone home, you are responsible for any damage they might do, and if you do break one of the rules, your possessions will be seized until you pay up.  How long do you think you’ll be staying?”

Shelia seemed to be doing most of the talking.  “We honestly don’t know,” she admitted.  “The way things are these days, we just don’t know what to expect; the damned boss gets the golden handshake, we get the door and a kick in the arse if we don’t move fast enough to suit them.  We hope to be here for at least a year, but…”

Hazel nodded.  She understood; her husband shared her concerns about the job market these days.  They all had debts to pay off, debts and endless taxes and red tape complicating their lives; there were times when she wanted to just go up to the IRS and detonate a really large car bomb right in front of the building.  

“This is the main living room,” she said.  She noticed Rashid Ustinov sitting on the sofa, probably waiting for his friend to come out of his room; the Russian wore simple labourer’s clothes.  He worked on a building site somewhere; it was probably how the pair had met.  He waved absently at the pair of them and turned his attention back to the book in his hand.  “You’ll notice a fridge, for cold and frozen items, and a microwave, along with a computer port and a television.  There’s a computer port in the room itself; the shower is just at the end of the building.  It’s shared, I’m afraid.”

She showed them the room itself and knew instantly that they weren’t intending to rent it.  It was smaller than they had expected, even if it did have a large bed; she had hoped that there would be more married couples moving into the house.  She went through the entire explanation anyway, pointing out how the designer had hidden drawers and other units in the room, including a larger wardrobe than seemed possible.  There was a sink for their basic needs; she even pointed out the washing machine that the two Russians used for their own washing.  It wasn’t as if they had many clothes, after all; she’d only seen them in their basic labourers outfits.

“I think that it is a little small for the pair of us,” Shelia said finally.  Hazel nodded in grim understanding; it wasn’t as if Stuart and her were short of money, but she knew better than to assume anything.  The Government might just decide that her husband was no longer needed in the army.  “We will keep it in mind, but…”

“I quite understand,” Hazel said, keeping her face blank through determined effort.  “You do know that if someone else comes with an offer, I am going to have to accept it…?”

“Yes, thank you,” Shelia said.  “We do understand.”

Hazel showed them both out, sighed, and headed back upstairs to the living room.  “You can count them out,” she informed Ustinov, who shrugged.  The Russian was a man of few words; he’d only unbent far enough to tell her that he had committed a political indiscretion that had resulted in him being chased out of the country.  Her husband had once commented that Ustinov was as fit as a soldier, something he had explained as being due to the Russian program of conscription.  “You won’t get them as flatmates unless they change their minds.”

“That’s bad, I guess,” Ustinov said.  He glanced back down the corridor.  “We’d pay more if we could.”

“It’s not the money,” Hazel assured him.  “It’s the fact that this place is meant to be full of life and it…isn’t.  If Stuart and I ever have children, then perhaps there will be little feet running around, but…”

Ustinov grinned.  “Perhaps,” he agreed, as the sound of a door opening echoed down the corridor.  “Ah, here he is.”

Hazel smiled at Sergey Ossetia as he entered the living room.  She had never gotten a gay vibe from him, not in the sense that some gaysexuals dressed in a feminine fashion, often comically exaggerated for effect, but she presumed that that was because Russia had a dim attitude to homosexuals.  She had been looked at by enough men to know the difference between lust and dispassion…and Ossetia had shown no interest in her body whatsoever.

“Sorry about the delay,” Ossetia said.  He spoke perfect English; neither of them had much in the way of an accent.  “I was just emailing home and lost track of time.”

Ustinov glowered at him.  “We’re late,” he said.  “Come on; we’ll see you later, Mrs Robinson.”

“I assume that you don’t want your rooms cleared?”  Hazel asked, teasing them.  “I can do it for a small charge…”

“No, thank you,” Ustinov said, with great dignity.  “You have a break while we go to work to earn the money to keep you in house and home.”

Hazel laughed and waved at them as they headed down the stairs and out onto the streets, and then got back to work.  The house didn’t clean itself, after all.

***
Ustinov, who was a Captain in the FSB Commando detachments, checked around them out of habit as the two men strolled onwards through the Meadows, heading towards the other side of the city.  The Meadows made a good place for them to have a private chat; it was somewhere where the British security services would have real problems spying on them, even though there was no sign that the British had even noticed them as more than the simple labourers they appeared to be.

Ossetia, who was a Lieutenant and technically Ustinov’s subordinate, frowned as he carefully hunted for signs of pursuit.  “Are you sure that the items are safe?”

Ustinov nodded.  “She hasn’t gone into our rooms since we took them,” he said.  He had taken the precaution of scattering a handful of portable sensors around since the first week they had spent in the building; Hazel hadn’t even poked her head in, let alone anything else.  “In any case, we have them all secure, don’t we?”

“More or less,” Ossetia agreed.  They had moved beyond the ordinary relationship between a Captain and a Lieutenant; there was little point in maintaining the formalities when it was just the two of them.  They knew that there was at least one other officer in Edinburgh, their superior, but they knew nothing about him…or about the others they assumed would exist within the city.  Neither of them had been assigned to specific targets; both of them knew enough to know that some targets in the city would not have been left alone.  “The boxes should remain secure, short of someone actually managing to burn through the casing, triggering the self-destruct system.”

“One hopes that that won’t happen,” Ustinov said shortly.  They were almost at the university.  “The blast would vaporise the entire house and hopefully be blamed on Islamic terrorists.”

They kept their mouths closed as they passed the university library, noticing the protesters protesting against the American deployment to Korea without showing their disdain, and headed towards the Mosque.  It was a building that was a little piece of Arabia in Edinburgh, built by money supplied by Saudi Arabia before it collapsed into chaos; the two Russians kept their faces blank as they passed it.  Once they had completed their first mission, perhaps the Mosque would make a good second target for chaos.  The streets were packed with cars, despite the limited supplies of oil from the Middle East; it was easy to get into the crowds, lose themselves within the swarm of humanity, and finally reach a nondescript building near Arthur’s Seat.  Every base had been covered; if anyone had asked, they had been called to the building and paid minimum wage to perform some basic repairs.

Control was waiting for them in a shabby room.

Neither of them knew his real name, nor did they know anything useful about him that the security services could use to track him down.  They assumed that he was a deep-cover agent, working somewhere within Edinburgh, perhaps within the entire United Kingdom, to touch base with all of the Russian operatives within the country.  They had been given some specific instructions concerning him; they were to tell him nothing about their positions, or where they stayed or…

The planners had tried to plan for everything.

“Boris and Boris, pleased to meet you,” Control said.  The name Boris was a private joke; anything else would have kicked off alarms in their heads.  If Control had called them Ivan, he had been captured and turned and they would have to run for their lives.  “Take a seat; events are moving faster than we had anticipated.”

Ustinov nodded.  They had privately expected to be called back to Moscow; they had run plenty of dry-runs before and nothing had ever come of it.  When they had been inserted into Britain this time, they had expected nothing else; they would be just a pawn in Moscow’s endless power games with Europe.  The acts they had planned and prepared, ever since they had come out of Chechnya with a burning hatred of all things European, Islamic or both, had seemed meaningless on their own.  In the context of some much larger operation, however…

They seated themselves on the floor.  “This building has been checked carefully,” Control said.  “You have some work to do afterwards, but for the moment, the agency has ensured that we had some time together.  I assume that you have a secure base and have placed your weapons somewhere where you can lay claim to them?”

Ustinov nodded again.  “Yes, sir,” he said.  That was as far as he was prepared to go when it came to sharing details.  If something happened and they lost Control, there were contingency plans for himself and Ossetia to either launch attacks on their own, or flee the country.  “Everything is as safe as it could reasonably be.”

Control smiled.  “Good,” he said.  “The start day of the operation has been set; the 1st of June, local morning.  You have been assigned to target set A; I assume that you have scouted out possible locations?”

“Yes, sir,” Ustinov said.  Again, he couldn’t share details; men who shared information knew that sooner or later, accidentally or otherwise, they would be betrayed.  They had, as it happened, found the perfect place for their actions.  The only real danger was running into another team with similar ideas.  “We also have the equipment that we need.”

“Good,” Control said.  He leaned forwards.  “Are you sure that you can carry out the mission without problems?”

Ustinov nodded.  “Yes, sir,” he said.  There were questions he wanted to ask and didn’t dare.  “Once we carry out the mission, we should be able to escape without serious problems.”

“We need you to continue attacks,” Control said.  Ustinov nodded slowly; he had expected that much.  “There is a mighty storm coming and we will need all the help that you can muster to make certain that we win.  I won’t give you a list of secondary targets, some of which may be hit by other teams” – both men drew in their breath at the vague confirmation that there were other teams – “but you are ordered to hit as many targets as you can with the aim of causing disruption and chaos in the streets.  Keep watching your email; we’ll send you a message if we want you to end the attacks and come out.”

Ustinov scowled.  He would have been much happier only using email, but the Americans had refined their techniques for tracking and decrypting emails, and while the Americans and the Europeans seemed to be permanently divorced these days, it was folly to assume that the Americans wouldn’t tip off the Europeans if they knew that there was something big going down.  Pre-planned messages had their uses, but there were only a limited number of possible messages that they could agree upon…and one certainty of the universe, as far as Ustinov knew, was that anything they planned for wouldn’t happen as they planned it.  Friction was worked into every good plan, but the smaller the plan, the more chance for friction to terminate operations with extreme prejudice.

On the plus side, at least they’d be choosing their own targets.

Control stood up.  “There will be no further contact,” he said, tapping a small case in the centre of the room with his shoe.  “You have some details in there of other arms caches, but there were obvious limits as to what we could emplace in the city; the British are rather paranoid after Glasgow and Blackburn.  You both know where to find some specific stocks that you can use for terror if you need them, so…all I can really say is good luck, and I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

Ossetia looked up at him.  There was almost a nervous tone in his voice; anticipation mixed with concern about how he would perform when it all went into action.  Ustinov knew the feeling; he had had it himself on his first mission in Chechnya.

“Something really big is about to happen, isn’t it?”

Ustinov smiled inwardly.  “Yes,” Control said flatly.  Ustinov wondered just how much control knew about what was coming; it didn’t seem likely that he would know everything, but at the same time, he wouldn’t be completely in the dark.  “Your task is to sow random terror.”

Until we are either killed or run out of weapons, Ustinov thought.  He knew better than to assume that the British police would just let them get on with it.  The British SAS were almost as good as the Spetsnaz…and Ustinov knew that neither of them were trained to the peak of Spetsnaz perfection.  Their skills lay in infiltration, not commando shootouts in the middle of schools and government buildings.  He would have been delighted to have had some Spetsnaz helping out, but few of them could pass for harmless foreign slaves or stupid British people.  It was up to them, he reflected; this could get very interesting; nasty, brutish and short.

“Good luck,” Control said shortly, assuming the face of the capitalist exploiter again.  The Russian immigrants were exploited, Ustinov had found; both of them had been worked to the bone more than once, just because their position was so precarious.  He had studied British politics enough to be certain that the ruling party was going to lose the next general election, putting in a Conservative Government with a mandate to, among other things, evict all immigrants.  Or, perhaps, they would just move right to the British National Front; the European laws against hate speech hadn’t managed to put the BNP out of business…and they had even some MPs in Parliament.  “I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

He strode out of the building, looking to all the world as if he had just given two downtrodden lackeys their orders.  Ustinov checked the building quickly, then transferred the contents of the case into their own bags; money and some documents.  The documents would be memorised at night, and then shredded; both men had near-perfect memories.  There was a great deal of work to do in the building, mainly the plumbing; neither of them complained as they got to work.  They needed to work to prove they’d earned their money legitimately.

Ossetia coughed.  “Lunch at Euro-Burger?”

Ustinov smiled.  Euro-Burger had been set up in direct competition to McDonalds and had been winning the struggle for dominance.  He didn’t really understand it; both of them tasted like crap.  They had moved some of their operations into Russia, where they were ruining the taste buds of countless Russian youngsters; Ustinov would have quite happily bombed either of them if he had thought that it would have managed to achieve something.  It wouldn’t; they would need a bigger target to really shock the British public.

An aircraft flew high overhead.

He shuddered.  He knew what it portended.

Chapter Six: The Lords and Masters

The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies. 
Oliver Cromwell

London, United Kingdom

“Your papers, please, General,” the guard said.  His weapon wasn’t – quite – pointed at Langford’s chest.  “I must insist.”

Major-General Charles Langford passed over his identification and waited patiently for the guard to complete a biometric scan of his body, comparing it to the details stored in both the ID card and the PJHQ computers.  The tiny microchip in the card was supposed to be impossible to fake or alter, but Langford knew better than to assume that anything was impossible.  It was why there were armed guards emplaced around the PJHQ – the Permanent Joint Headquarters – and why there was an entire company of armed soldiers stationed within the surrounding buildings. The last terrorist attack on the United Kingdom had been years ago, but it was only a matter of time.

“You may pass, sir,” the guard said.  His partner saluted; the guard himself didn’t.  Saluting on duty was a punishable offence; it could distract a guard from his duties.  Langford would have understood the guard’s nervousness about not showing a superior officer respect – he had been written up for once saluting a superior in a combat zone – but there was no helping it.  Security came first.

“Thank you,” Langford said, as the gate opened.  It had been designed to prevent a truck bomber or something similar from entering the parking lot, but it all seemed absurdly flimsy compared to the Green Zone in Baghdad, even though the Americans there had known that they were likely to be attacked at any moment.  The government of Britain hadn’t wanted to invest in much in the way of security, let alone the forced buy-outs of the property surrounding the PJHQ, but almost every security officer had threatened to resign and go public unless the government agreed.  Security came first and, despite the Liberal Government, there were still people who wanted to keep the country safe.

He passed through the gate and entered the main building, receiving a second security check as he entered, before heading down into the bunker.  It had been designed years ago, during the threat of Russian nuclear attack – in typical MOD fashion, it had been finished after the Cold War had been won – and seemed far too flimsy these days.  Both the Americans and the Russians had deployed heavy bunker-busting bombs, ruining the reputation of French and British engineers who had built the bunkers where third world despots had hidden out from American aircraft.  Many of them had died with defiance on their lips.

“Sir,” Captain Christopher Drury said, standing to attention and saluting.  The bespectacled officer didn’t look much like a combat soldier, nothing like the guards in battle dress on the outside of the building, but as one of the operators of the PJHQ, he was one of Langford’s most trusted officers.  He might have given off the impression of a blonde Jeff Goldblum, but there was little eccentric about him.  “Welcome back to the PJHQ.  I must remind you that you have the weekly situation meeting at 1300hrs and there are still protesters blocking the roads; the Metropolitan Police suggest that you use one of the helicopters.”

Langford scowled.  He had never married and had been an army brat; he had never understood why protesters picketed military bases, such as the handful of barracks scattered around London and the PJHQ, rather than government buildings.  The military didn’t decide when to go to war; that was the choice of the politicians.  Every European general had advised against the Sudan deployment, and then against withdrawing half of the force…and had been ignored.  They had also gotten the blame afterwards.

“Wonderful,” he said, unwilling to think about the issue.  The weekly situation meeting and security brief was supposed to be a simple task, but it wasn’t anything of the sort when some security matters were handled by EUROFOR and others by PJHQ, while Brussels kept attempting to expand their authority.  It didn’t help that a united front of French, German and British officers had pointed out that there was no need to spend billions of Euros on a new headquarters in Brussels; the PJHQ alone could have provided all of the coordination that EUROFOR could have required.  The French headquarters – the public one, that everyone knew about, and the secret one that no one was supposed to know about – could have accomplished the same tasks; the European Defence Commission had insisted on its own headquarters and the various governments had given in.  It was empire-building at its worst; that money could have mended a few defects in EUROFOR’s actual line of battle.

He shrugged.  It wasn’t something he could do anything about.  “Is there anything I should know about?”

“There’s a torrent of Jihadists invective coming from Algeria and to some extent from Libya, thanks to some frog who wanted to cut the balls of every Algerian or something like that,” Drury said.  Langford felt a flicker of sympathy for the unnamed Frenchman.  “It’s all the usual stuff; the Frenchman must die before the Eiffel Tower comes crashing down and exterminates the French when it hits the ground.”

“Pretty big explosion,” Langford observed dryly.  The image made him smile; the French had tougher laws on terrorism than the British, although they were mild compared to either the American or Russian laws.  “Anything else?”

Drury shook his head.  “The French Air Force has requested that we provide an AWACS and a couple of fighters for a drill in a week,” he said.  “The French think they have a new way of detecting aircraft at very low level and want us to be the aggressors in a raid on France.  The Chief of the Air Staff was very interested and wants us to agree.”

“That is within my purview,” Langford said.  Unless something went very wrong, the government wouldn’t have to know about it at all…and the RAF’s training standards had been slipping badly, recently, due to the torrent of complaints about the noise of low-flying aircraft.  “Anything on the Threat Board?”

“Only some suggestion that the Russians are considering a move into Ukraine,” Drury said.  “EUROFOR HQ is handling the matter, but they don’t anticipate trouble; in any case, it’s out of our hands.  Major-General McLachlan says that the Poles are worried, but EUROFOR HQ is convinced that the Russians are going to wait until after the elections before they move, if they move.”

“Then I see no reason why we should not go along with the French request,” Langford said.  The French commander had skirted the edge of what could be done without EUROFOR’s knowledge; it was fitting to show that not everything needed EUROFOR to go along with it.  “Coordinate it with CAS, but unless something new appears, then we should try to beat the French at their own game.”

He smiled at Drury’s expression and headed into his office, taking the time to pick up a cup of coffee before reading through his secure emails.  There was little of importance, but seventy percent of his work was never important; hurry up and wait applied even more to the PJHQ than it did to soldiers in the field.  They, at least, got to shoot at the enemy.  The entire Falklands situation seemed to be calming down now that a major task force, including the Prince of Wales, was on its way to the area.  That was nearly a third of the Royal Navy…and the politicians would probably claim that it was all a wasted deployment.

“Damned Argies,” Langford muttered.  Every so often, Argentina would shake its fist and make threatening moves in the direction of the Falklands, and British forces would be forced to react.  Even the Liberals who were in power knew better than to simply give up the islands, no matter their anti-colonial sentiments; their government would fall quicker than an apple from the tree, or an American bunker-busting bomb.  “I wonder…”

“Sir, your helicopter is ready to depart,” Drury said, hours later.  Langford nodded tiredly; he had been studying deployments, wondering where he could draw a company or battalion from to make up some of the overstretch.  It wasn’t like 1914, where Britain had had worldwide interests, or even 2003, but it was still tricky…and the endless cuts in the deployable forces hadn’t helped.  “The Police are still reporting that the streets are blocked.”

“I should go in a Challenger tank,” Langford said.  He smiled at the thought; the British Army had been intended to switch to Eurotanks, of which there were nearly a thousand units on order, two years ago; naturally, the project had overrun and only one European unit had Eurotanks.  “That might show them something about the world.”

Drury said nothing.

The Metropolitan Police hadn’t exaggerated, Langford realised, as the helicopter came down towards Whitehall and the MOD Main Building.  Protesters swarmed as close as they could to the centre of the British Government, the organised protests disintegrating into peaceful anarchy.  The protesters seemed to just want to protest; Langford had heard that the police had wanted to disperse them, but the government had forbidden it for political reasons.  The weather forecast had promised heavy rain in a day or so; it had been hoped that the rain would put most of the protesters off their game.  Some of them shouted towards the helicopter as it came in to land on the roof; they were too far away to know what they were shouting.  He doubted that it was anything important.

“Welcome to the Main Building, sir,” Captain Scott Hammock said.  “They’re all waiting for you in the briefing room.”

“Thank you,” Langford said.  He wasn’t surprised that the others had arrived first; they could use the series of tunnels linking all of Whitehall together without having to avoid protesters.  They walked down corridors, the monotony broken only by a faded VOTE SAXON poster that no one had had the heart to take down, and into the main hall.  A small set of aides and assistants were waiting outside; they were wallflowers as far as the weekly security briefing was concerned.

The interior of the briefing room had been renovated several times, currently designed to reassemble a corporate office, rather than the dignified centre of government that Whitehall aspired to be.  The Prime Minister stood to greet Langford as he came to a halt and saluted; his bulk made it seem as if he was a beached whale.  Prime Minister Nicholas Donavan actually believed half of the statements he made in public and in private; Langford gave him that much credit.  Like John Major, no one really questioned his integrity; his grasp of political affairs was another matter.  If Labour and the Conservatives, to say nothing of the Scottish Nationalists, hadn’t so thoroughly discredited themselves…

“Thank you for coming,” Donavan said.  Everyone else in the room, with the exception of a dour-faced Police officer, was a political appointee or politician; Langford was uncomfortably aware that he was outnumbered.  The ongoing budget crisis, seemingly impossible to solve, had left Donavan with a desperate need to cut costs, anywhere.  The MOD’s budget got smaller every year.  “I believe that we can begin now.”

Langford took his seat, noting the presence of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Jack Redding, and the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Neddy Young.  The Deputy Prime Minister was off pressing the flesh for a by-election in Scotland; his place had been taken by one of his trusted aides.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bruce McClain, looked grim; he was the third person to hold that role since Donavan had become Prime Minister.

“You may have heard that there was an…unfortunate incident in France last week,” the Policeman said.  His nametag read BRIGGS.  “There have actually been some protests in several southern cities in Britain relating to it, all coordinated through the network of mosques that we have identified as being hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism.  The protests have been carried out without violence, but there were some incidents of genuinely worrying behaviour and, I believe, signs that there is a real network coordinating their actions.  This cannot be coincidence, Prime Minister; I believe that this represents a disturbing trend in Islamic behaviour.”

He tapped the display.  “You will remember that the Americans killed seven British Muslims in what remains of Saudi Arabia last month,” Briggs continued.  “All of them came from these four mosques” – the display changed again – “and all of those mosques held protest marches demanding that the Americans turn over the bodies for proper disposal.  This was impossible, of course; the Americans simply destroyed the bodies once they had been identified.  Less well known is the fact that the Americans took an eighth British Muslim alive…and forced him to talk.  He was talking about an entire recruiting ring that gave him training before shipping him into Saudi.”

Donavan shuddered.  “The Americans tortured him,” he said.  There had been any number of articles on the practice when it had begun, before Oakland; afterwards, the American public would have been quite happy to bathe the entire Middle East in radioactive fire.  Millions had died in Oakland.  “He would say anything under torture.”

“The Americans gave us some of the information and we checked it out,” Briggs said.  Langford felt a moment of sympathy for him; his superiors should have handled such matters, not dropped them in the lap of a relatively junior officer.  “Sir, there is a network there and it represents a clear and present danger; we need to take it apart, quickly!”

He paused.  “The growth of right-wing extremism is also becoming worrying, with reports of illegal arms and training flooding into inner cities,” he continued.  “Incidents of racial hatred and even outright violence have been on the increase, some of it in response to the actions of the Islamic network.  Something has to be done.”

“If we arrest the people behind the network, we’ll have a riot on our hands,” Neddy Young said.  “We cannot afford that, not when we are making progress at last.”

“You mean when you are appeasing them,” Briggs snapped, too tired to continue.  Langford silently applauded him.  “This situation is too unstable to continue…”

“We will take it and think about it,” Donavan said.  Briggs heard the note in his voice and sat down bitterly.  “Major-General?”

Langford exchanged a long look with Briggs before taking control of the display.  “The main item on the agenda is the deployment to the Falklands,” he said.  “The fleet is currently one week away from the islands and the number of incidents has fallen sharply.  ASW frigates reported some contacts with submarines – we know that the Argentineans have purchased several newer submarines from the Russians, including three nuke boats – and there have been some long-range aircraft flying out to take a look at us, but nothing of great importance.  The Americans…”

“I told you so,” Bruce McClain snapped.  “This little operation cost us billions of pounds, money we can ill afford to lose; I knew they were bluffing.”

“It had to be done,” Donavan said reluctantly.  Langford could almost read his thoughts; to a man like him, the wishes of the islanders were paramount…and he assumed the same was true of the archetypical reasonable man.  The problem was that nationalists were not given to being reasonable over some issues.  The Argentinean Government, back in the economic dumps after the fallout from the American War on Terror had spread into Latin and South America, had been beating the nationalist drum again…and what better cause than the Falklands?  “We could not afford a repeat of the Falklands War.  General?”

Langford smiled.  “The other matter of importance is the deployment to Poland,” he said.  “Under the auspices of EUROFOR POLAND, we have dispatched several regiments to join the defence force, assuming that it is actually needed.  There are some reasons to be concerned that the Russians might attempt to take over the Ukraine if the elections there don’t go their way.  Sir, I must request that we force the European Defence Commission to revise the ROE, at least for units that might have to go into Ukraine and support the EUROFOR units already there.”

“Out of the question,” McClain snapped.  The fury in his voice was almost a tangible thing.  “The last thing we need is to get embroiled in a war with Russia.”

Donavan tapped the table.  “Major-General, do you have any reason to be suspicious?”

Back to Major-General, I see, Langford thought dryly.  “The Russians have been moving up forces into positions that they could use to jump into Ukraine and they have said, several times, that they would not tolerate an anti-Russian policy on the part of the Ukraine,” he said.  “It was hard enough to convince them to accept the deployment of two European battalions into the Ukraine, and they have prevented us from any serious joint operations.  The Irish and the Swedes might be tough, but they’re not ready to act if the Russians try something and don’t have the firepower to act in any case.  We would have to react instantly if something happened…and we don’t even have a political line to fall back on.”

Donavan tented his fingers.  “It has been discussed in the European Parliament,” he said.  “The general consensus is that eventually the Ukraine will apply to join the European Union, and so patience is all that is required.”

Langford shook his head.  “And what happens if the Russians refuse to go along with it?”

Afterwards, he took the helicopter back to PJHQ.  He had some leave coming up, but he hated to go on leave when he had the sense that something bad was about to happen.  Not for the first time, he thought about accepting the American offer of American citizenship to any European soldier and his or her family who was prepared to spend a few years in the American Army.  At least the Americans were doing something…while Europe fiddled merrily away.

Chapter Seven: To Be in Poland, In the Summertime

“...In general the bravery and heroism of the Polish Army merits great respect” Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt

Near Warsaw, Poland

The Polish countryside scrolled past as the line of vehicles, jeeps, trucks, and three CADS vehicles, moved along the country road, heading well away from any civilisation.  They passed a handful of farmers and traders on the way to their deployment zone, using the SATNAV system to ensure that they found the correct location within Poland.  For the common soldiers, there was little to do, but wait in the trucks; some talking, some catching up on their sleep…a handful playing with electronic toys.

“It’s only a couple of kilometres further,” Captain Jacob Anastazy said.  The Polish liaison officer, there to help the British soldiers find their way around the country and smooth out any difficulties that they might encounter with Polish citizens, looked confident.  There hadn’t been any real difficulties; the only problem they had encountered had been an impromptu victory parade when they had passed through a small town.  “This area is pretty much deserted.”

“Good,” Captain Stuart Robinson said.  He was one of the lucky handful who got to ride in a jeep; the other soldiers mainly had to sit in the trucks.  It was better, he supposed, than marching all the way from Germany to Poland, but not by much.  The trucks had been designed for dozens of different purposes, including both heavy transport and prisoner transfer and it showed.  Comfort had never been on the agenda.  “We can do without a friendly fire incident.”

It was easy to believe that they were at war, looking around them; the area was almost deserted and there were no sign of any other military force, hostile or friendly.  EUROFOR had deployed the equivalent of two divisions to Poland, but they were spread out to provide hasty reactions to any Russian cross-border raid into the refugee camps in eastern Poland.  From what Anastazy had said, some of the Poles would be quite happy to allow the Russians to destroy the camps; the refugees were either competing for Polish jobs or merely a drain on Polish resources.  The Polish army was deployed near the border, at least, some of it was; European pressure and economic constraints had prevented the Poles from a full mobilisation.  

They passed a handful of Polish tourists, who gaped at the military convoy as it passed by, before being left alone again.  Anastazy had admitted that there were fewer cars in Poland these days; Poland was already too dependent on the Russians for energy supplies and had been rationing fuel for nearly a decade.  Warsaw and the other major cities had a new system of electric trams that used power from the European-designed nuclear power plant ten kilometres from the city…and closer to Robinson’s position than he could have liked.  He had grown up near Torness Nuclear Power Plant, but the thought of being near a nuclear plant in a weapons free zone chilled him.

His mind slipped back to the base at Rheindahlen Military Complex, Germany.  The EUROFOR briefer had made them work for their supper, both ensuring that his company had the required number of German, French, Polish and Spanish-speaking soldiers, and ensuring that he understood the ROE.  The ROE were basically simple; he was not to engage any targets unless his command was either under attack, or had orders to engage targets.  He was grimly aware that his unit would be out on a limb if there were serious problems; the sixty men of his company would be isolated from the remainder of the regiment.

“Bastards,” he muttered, as he checked his terminal.  The Americans had designed the system and EUROFOR command had fallen in love with it, even though every soldier worthy of the name would have preferred more tanks and guns.  It was communicator, computer and GPS system all in one, allowing him to accept orders from Brussels without having to go through the British command system.  The other soldiers had shared his disdain; one French Captain had rudely remarked that it meant that they couldn’t do anything without asking permission first.  He had been a paratrooper, much to Robinson’s amusement; were they going to be parachuting EUROFOR into its positions?  A French armoured or infantry division would be much more useful.

“Russian bastards,” Anastazy agreed.  His voice was disdainful; the Poles both hated and feared the Russians, not entirely without reason.  The Polish Government had been horrified at the restrictive rules of engagement, which would almost certainly allow the Russians first shot if they were plotting something, but the European Defence Commission had stuck to their guns.  “Nearly there…”

They came around a corner and reached a small hill.  Someone had been busy; there were signs everywhere informing the Polish public and tourists that the entire area was off-limits.  He inspected it quickly as the jeep drove around the hill; they could set up the radar on the hill, and then deploy the other soldiers around the hill, providing protection for the CADS units.

He glanced over at Anastazy.  “How large an area have you cleared?”

“Around a kilometre, centred on the hill,” Anastazy said.  “We didn’t want to risk an accident where one of your men shoots a farmer.”

Robinson nodded.  Accidents happened and some of them had nightmarish consequences.  He tapped a command into his terminal and then shouted at the driver to halt the jeep, bringing them to a halt just outside a fallow field.  It would make an ideal place for the tents, he decided; it would spare them the horrors of Russian-built barracks.  The trucks came to a halt behind him and the soldiers spilled out, helped along by shouts from the Sergeants and Corporals.  Robinson was proud of them; some of them might have been bastards, but they were good men to have behind you in a firefight.  Most of them had seen combat before.

“All present and correct, sir,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart reported.  Despite his name, he was as black as the night, a Jamaican who had enlisted in the British Army and served for several years as an NCO.  He was the toughest son of a bitch that Robinson had ever met, always ready for a fight – and yet he was also one of the kindest men imaginable to his old mother.  “No desertions to the fleshpots at all!”

Robinson had to smile.  “Secure the area, and then set up the tents and field kitchen in that field,” he said.  The orders, he was sure, were unnecessary; Inglehart would have done everything without a young Captain teaching his grandmother to suck eggs, but they had to be given.  “I’ll deal with the CADS.”

The CADS themselves looked like something out of Captain Scarlet; a short squat set of lorries, carrying four missiles on their roofs.  He'd seen the videos; the CADS could engage four different targets at the same time, reload, and engage four more, until they ran out of missiles.  Each truck carried twenty-four missiles; one of the supply lorries carried a complete set of replacements for all three of the units.  He had heard that the RAF, upon attempting to penetrate an area defended by a single CADS unit, had lost five Tornados to their fire.  It had all been simulated, of course, but it suggested that the company would have some protection from aerial attack.

Lieutenant Benjamin Matthews saluted as Robinson came up.  He hadn’t been idle while Robinson had been deploying the company; his crew had all dismounted and were running basic systems checks.  There were twelve of them, four of them women, something that might cause problems later.  The Company had seven women, but all of them were very definitely off-limits; the CADS crewers might be courted by bored and horny soldiers.  Robinson made a mental note to consult with Anastazy about nearby brothels; the mental state of the company had to be treated with care.

“We are ready to deploy on your command,” Matthews informed him.  Technically, Matthews wasn't in the same chain of command, but Major-General McLachlan had been very clear on the subject.  Matthews would serve under Robinson as long as they were guarding the godforsaken hill.  “One of the missiles developed a fault, but the others all read out as working fine.”

Robinson eyed the missile that two of Matthews’ crew were carrying away from the trucks.  “Is that thing safe?”

“We removed the warhead and the propellant,” Matthews said.  “The problem is in the computer chips that are supposed to guide it to its target; they weren’t working right.”

Robinson scowled.  It seemed that the more advanced equipment became, the more things that could go wrong…and were impossible to fix on the spot.  The missile would be sent back to Germany, where the technicians would try to find a replacement for the computer chips and send it back to them.  Missiles were expensive; no one would just junk it.

“Good,” Robinson said absently.  “You have to deploy now, then we can report back and hopefully spend a couple of weeks getting bored out here.”

The camp slowly took shape.  The entire area was searched twice, finding nothing, but a handful of birds and wild animals, and then the real work began.  Sergeant Inglehart organised it all, from sensors designed to detect anyone approaching to organising regular patrols around the outskirts of the camp.  Robinson would have been happier with a fence or something that would keep ramblers out, but EUROFOR Command had refused to allow permission; they would just have to be careful.  The first mobile radar was deployed on the hill, an insulated cable leading down from the hill towards the CADS systems, limiting the amount of electronic emissions that an enemy could pick up.  Robinson wasn’t impressed; the radar itself would attract attention, a perfect case of penny wise, pound foolish.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Matthews assured him, when he said that out loud.  “The radar itself is a target, sure, but only when the radar is activated.  In an ideal world, we would be taking readings from ground-based radars further to the west and merely shooting at the targets using their readings.  If we do use the radar, and we are going to have to use it, any missile launched at it will not take out the actual missile launchers we have here, while we can move them to prevent the enemy from locking on to their positions.”

He tapped a command into the mobile command system.  “Now…let’s see.”

The display lit up, seemingly reporting hundreds of unknown targets.  The computer went to work, tracking IFF signals and microburst transmissions, identifying nearly a hundred targets as civilian airliners from Russia, Germany and Sweden.  Other aircraft proved to be Polish helicopters or Eurofighters; the Russians themselves were flying a Combat Air Patrol of MIG-41s – Flatpacks, according to the western designation – a hundred kilometres to the east.

“There’s more traffic than I would have expected,” Matthews commented.  “Of course, with all the instability in Ukraine, a lot of traffic has been routed over Russia and then over Belarus, rather than risk flying directly over Ukraine and panicking someone.  It doesn’t make sense, but what do you expect?”

Robinson shrugged.  “Do we have a direct link into the EURONET?”

Matthews nodded.  “Yep,” he said cheerfully.  His face twisted into a smile.  “We’re getting data from them and they’re getting data from us.”

“Good,” Robinson said.  “I want you to maintain a permanent watch on events, with at least three people on duty at any one time, understand?”

Matthews’s face twisted slightly, Robinson could almost read the thought in his mind.  Asshole.  It didn’t matter; they were deployed to maintain the safety of Poland and even though neither of them really expected trouble, he was determined to ensure that it wouldn’t manage to surprise him, should trouble actually come knocking.

“I understand, sir,” Matthews said.  More Russian aircraft blinked into existence on the display, low-level anti-insurgency aircraft, deployed in Belarus.  “We will treat this as a military situation.”

Robinson quickly inspected the camp, finding it excellent; Sergeant Inglehart had outdone himself.  The conditions would be Spartan, but they would be tolerable until they had to move to Warsaw, or took leave when some new detachment was spared.  He had been informed that EUROFOR intended to rotate them pretty regularly, but he would believe that when he saw it; EUROFOR POLAND had too many tasks and nowhere like enough men to handle them all.  He shrugged and made plans to engage in more training and exploration of the surrounding area tomorrow, then started to compose an electronic message to Hazel in his head.

He missed her already.

***
The Polish guards at the main gate into the military camp were brisk, but firm; a female guard inspected every last inch of Caroline Morgan’s body before allowing her access to the camp.  She had had boyfriends, even one who had had an ass fetish, who hadn’t explored her body with such thoroughness.  The privacy hadn’t made it any easier to take; she had been all-to-aware that there were armed guards outside who would burst in if she made any noise at all.

It was odd, she reflected, as she dressed again under the watchful eye of the Polish guard.  The Poles provided most of the security for EUROFOR…and they were utterly paranoid when it came to maintaining security, even to the point of making themselves unpopular with the press by sending back any reporter who gave away something that enemies could use against EUROFOR.  They were desperate to keep their country safe, even if it meant annoying the reporters; Caroline wasn't sure if that was admirable, or just irritating.

“Right this way,” her escort said, and led her though a maze of Soviet-era buildings.  The camp had been built back when the Red Army had occupied the country…and the Poles hadn’t improved it much, even if some enterprising Polish officer had planted some apple trees in the middle of the camp.  Soldiers, some of them in full battle dress, were everywhere, all of them trying to organise EUROFOR into something that could actually put out more than one regional fire at once.  She’d heard enough to know that rapid reaction forces had been flown all over Poland at the drop of a hat, only to get there too late, or be called back before anything could actually happen.  “Major-General McLachlan is in this building here.”

There was a Union Jack in front of the building, marking it out as a British building; it was something that the European Defence Commission hated.  They had an uphill fight to prevent it from happening; she could see a French and Dutch flag just in the camp alone, and there were detachments from nearly a dozen nations in Poland.  The bureaucrats would probably win in the end, she was sure, but it was surprisingly good to see all of the flags.  She wasn't sure why.

“You must be Caroline Morgan,” Major-General McLachlan said.  “Welcome to Camp Three.”

Caroline smiled.  “Camp Three?”

“All the proposals for names were shot down,” McLachlan said.  “Some places have names that they couldn’t get rid of easily - Rheindahlen Military Complex, for example – but this place was soulless even back in the days of the Red Army.  I understand that you wanted to be attached to this unit?”  Caroline nodded.  “Who did you piss off to get that job?”

Caroline laughed.  “My supervisor wanted some background impressions on how EUROFOR was shaping up as a military machine,” she said.  It was truthful, as far as it went; the BBC needed to prepare itself for the coming elections.  The people of Britain were hungry for news and the BBC had to provide or lose even more of its market.  “I got the short straw.”

McLachlan laughed.  He had a surprisingly deep laugh.  She found herself liking him on sight.  “He wasn’t just trying to get into your panties?”

“The first woman who gets him interested will be the first,” Caroline admitted, remembering the resolutely gaysexual activities of Fell Nelson.  There was a moral in that somewhere, perhaps young men and women should be made to cover their faces when they were interviewed.  Many of his staff complained of sexual harassment, something that wasn’t new in the recording business, but mostly it was male on female.  “No, I just drew the short straw.”

“Lucky you,” McLachlan said.  He met her eyes.  She was almost lost within soft brown eyes that seemed to harden, then soften, at will.  “I assume you read the background material?”

Caroline nodded.  “I read everything they gave us,” she said.  She had too; it was long on glossy photographs and elaborate statements of principle, but short on actually useful details.  “Most of it was quite bland and uninformative.”

“Don’t breach security here,” McLachlan advised.  His voice had become very serious.  “The Poles will arrest you, send you to an uncomfortable jail and charge you with malicious accidental espionage.  Don’t rely on the Court of Human Rights getting you out, either; after it was proven that that young reporter fool from Portugal caused the deaths of three soldiers…”

He smiled thinly.  “Apart from that, we will be showing you everything within the camp,” he said.  Caroline gulped.  Was there any way for her to be certain that she was not breaking any security laws?  “Do you have any specific questions?”

“A few,” Caroline said.  She forced her smile up a few watts.  “Do you feel that EUROFOR is a viable military force?”

McLachlan’s smile vanished.  “A truthful answer?”  Caroline nodded.  “The truth is that if we had all the units we were promised, we would be the most powerful force in the region.  We were promised ten divisions; what we have is around two divisions, many of whom have never worked together before, trained together, done anything together…does that answer your question?”

Chapter Eight: Special Purpose Units

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a “peace conference,” you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and aeroplanes. 
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin

Near Moscow, Russia

“Go!”

Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev was first out of the aircraft as it stabilised its course for a matter of moments, falling towards the ground in free fall.  The shape of buildings became clearer and clearer as the paratroopers fell towards the ground, the black bursts of ground fire dancing in the air towards the planes as they pulled away, tossing the final paratroopers all over the landing zone.  They had targeted the runways of the airport…and, as the seconds ticked away, Aliyev became very calm.

At precisely the right moment, he pulled his parachute, coming to a far more controlled descent as he steered himself and the remainder of his team towards the runways.  The black bursts of ground fire were coming closer; Aliyev dismissed them as irrelevant.  There was nothing that he could do about them, but endure; if one of those puffs of smoke caught him, he was as good as dead.  His fall was still slowing rapidly, but the ground was coming up, and up and…

His legs bent as he hit the ground, an impact that had knocked the wind from him in his first jump, something that he was used to after practicing combat jumps for most of his career.  He didn’t hesitate; he barked orders and drew his weapon as the defenders moved to defend their airport, bringing up rifles and heavy machine guns.  His team fired back, sending flickers of laser light dancing across the airport; one by one, the defenders fell to the ground and didn’t move as the commandos fanned out and searched the airport quickly and efficiency.  They knew the airport almost as well as they knew their own home bases; it was a matter of minutes to search and snatch every last security guard and enemy soldier defending the terminals and the control tower.  Some fought, killed and were killed; others held up their hands in surrender.  They were searched roughly, cuffed, and dumped in one of the terminals under armed guard.  Resistance would be punished with a bullet to the head.

Aliyev himself led the team that seized the control tower.  Intelligence had been impressive as to the degree of alertness on the part of the tower staff, something that he was used to and had planned for, even to the degree of risking the destruction of part of the tower to secure it before the controllers could raise support from the outside.  Aliyev had every confidence in his men, but they were basically light infantry; a single armoured enemy detachment would make short work of them, or at least shut down the airport and prevent the exploitation of their victory.  The control tower had been sealed; a shaped charge made short work of it and the team charged upwards.

“This is Airport One, we need help,” a female voice was pleading, high above them.  There was no point in being stealthy now; the team advanced as quickly as they could, finding a second locked door, but one light enough to be kicked aside with a single kick.  The paratroopers swarmed into the room, seeing a set of flight controllers, their eyes wide with terror and shock.  One of them was screaming into a radio; Aliyev shot her, just on general principles.  The others raised their hands and were rapidly secured, searched, and placed out of the way.

“Delta-lead, we have secured objective two,” a voice buzzed in his ears.  Aliyev had had years of training to come to grips with the local secured communications network that the Americans had invented and the Russians had copied.  “There are seven aircraft and plenty of fuel; five down and seventeen prisoners.”

“Move them to the terminal,” Aliyev ordered, as the flight controllers were herded out of the room, pushed and shoved by Russian commandos.  The body of the dead flight controller was moved out of the way as Aliyev took the main terminal, shouting for two of his specially trained commandos to come in and take over the flight terminal.  The airport had to be cleared of traffic so that their reinforcements could come into the airport and help them to secure it.  “Have the pilots check the aircraft and let me know if they can be used for our own transport.”

“I have locked the airport out of the general network,” a commando reported.  “We have full control over the terminals and there are no signs that anyone intends to come take it off us.”

Aliyev smiled once; had it really been ten minutes since they had begun the operation?   It felt as if it had been hours.  “Get the radioman to work,” he snapped.  They had been lucky; one of the other random variables would have been a destroyed or damaged civilian airliner on the runway, something that would prevent them from flying in reinforcements until it could be moved out of the way.  “I want them to know that they can send in their reinforcements as quickly as possible.”

He took a breath.  There were hundreds of aircraft holding position well behind the front lines; they would have their chance to move in and reinforce the new position, with thousands of additional commandos, some heavy weapons, and even a few light armoured vehicles.  By the time the enemy got themselves organised, Aliyev would have an entire brigade sitting on the airport and expanding his zone of control as rapidly as he could.  Unless they reacted quickly, the enemy would discover that their rear area was disintegrating under his pressure…and that of the main body of the Russian forces.

“This is Control,” a new voice said.  Aliyev lifted an eyebrow.  He hadn’t expected that so quickly.  “Stand down; I repeat, stand down.  This exercise is terminated.”

The ‘shot’ flight controller stood up, rubbing the side of her body.  She had been lucky; it wasn't unknown for participants in Spetsnaz exercises to come away with broken bones, if not worse.  The soldiers were trained to be ruthless, even with the units who were playing the role of the defender; the only concession to humanity had been the use of laser weapons instead of real assault rifles.  It was enough to know that if it had been a real assault, the unit would have taken the airport very quickly, without a real fight.

“I trust I was convincing,” she said, as they headed down the stairs.  “I thought I might actually have managed to raise someone on the outside that time.”

Aliyev shrugged.  They came into the main terminal, where commandos were untying the hands of the defenders, while the ‘dead’ defenders were abandoning the pretence and assisting the commandos in freeing their allies.  Like soldiers everywhere, there was plenty of bullshitting going on, but the lieutenants in command of the smaller detachments were trying to gather the early results.  The referees would tell them just how well they had done, but damn it; Aliyev knew that they had done well!  He was proud of his people; it was the ninth time they had played the exercise and they’d won almost all of them.

He glanced at Captain Alexander Vatutin, his second-in-command.  “Causalities?”

“We lost twelve men in simulation and four serious injuries in reality,” Vatutin said.  He sounded pleased with himself and he had reason to be; the expected loss rate for attacking a defended target with paratroopers was very high.  In some of the more aggressive simulations, where the enemy had an entire armoured unit nearby, the loss rate had been total and the game had been lost.  “Sergeant Ulya Kozlina is the worst; he broke both legs and several ribs.”

“Have a medic see to him and the others,” Aliyev ordered shortly.  “Any news on why the exercise was discontinued so rapidly?”

“That would be me,” a voice said, from behind him.  Aliyev almost jumped; he was a trained Spetsnaz commando, with an almost supernatural awareness of the area around him, and the voice’s owner had slipped up behind him.  He turned sharply, taking in the uniform and the badges that marked a former Spetsnaz officer, and saluted sharply; it wouldn’t do to irritate the President’s most trusted officer.

“General Shalenko,” he said.  The General returned his salute.  Shalenko had been an officer in the Spetsnaz himself for a while, before transferring to the combined arms sections following an injury while taking part in a dangerous antiterrorist mission.  “Welcome to Airport One.”

“Your men did well,” Shalenko said.  “The referees are still counting beans, but I think that you will be declared the undisputed winner of the contest.”

Aliyev laughed at the dry tone in his voice.  The Russians knew, better than the Americans, that it wasn’t body counts that were important, but victory.  If Aliyev had lost half of his force and taken the airport, he would have won; if he had saved his force, but been driven away from the airport, he would have lost.

“Still, there are other matters at hand,” Shalenko continued.  “If you would care to pass over command to your second and come with me…?”

Aliyev followed him outside, into the cold morning air.  Airport One was a giant simulation of an airport, built to allow the interior to be continuously revised and allow the defending force considerable advantages.  Aliyev was certain that he could have held the airport with his paratrooper force alone, assuming that he had had a few days to prepare the defences; a handful of mines alone would have made the task of the attack much harder.  The Spetsnaz used it to prepare antiterrorist operations, or at least that was the official explanation; their recent operations suggested something else.

They were going to war.

“This room has been secured,” Shalenko informed him, as they passed a set of guards and entered a secure room.  Paranoia didn’t just run in the FSB, it galloped; there was hardly anything in the room that could conceal an electronic surveillance device.  It was almost like a prison; no television, no computers, no radios…nothing.  The cold hard benches reminded Aliyev of his early days in the Russian Army.  “We can talk freely.”

“I see,” Aliyev said carefully.  If he were in trouble for something, Shalenko wouldn’t bother coming out from Moscow to scream at him in person; one of his minions could do that.  The odds were vastly in favour of this being good news.

Shalenko seemed to read his thoughts.  “How would you rate the performance of your brigade just now?”

Aliyev didn’t hesitate.  “We are ready for anything,” he said, and meant it.  The unit was oversized for a reason; they could soak up training accidents and move on.  It was the sort of attitude that had kept them in business even though the dark years of Yeltsin.  “Do I assume that you have a mission for us?”

Shalenko clasped his arm.  “This is ultra-classified information,” he warned.  “If you breath more than you are permitted to breath, you will be shot in the head; understand?”  Aliyev nodded.  “On the 1st of June, we will go to war with Europe.”

Aliyev stared at him.  “Yes,” Shalenko said, understanding his concern.  It wouldn’t be the first time that a Spetsnaz unit had been put through hell, or deliberately misinformed for political reasons, but Shalenko seemed deadly serious.  “All of the training that your unit and almost every other unit stationed in European Russia and Belarus has been angled towards this moment.”

“I see,” Aliyev said finally.  It made a lot of sense; they had attacked Airport One so many times now, so many different scenarios, so much that he had wondered if there was a motive behind it besides simple sadism.  “Our mission, then, is to seize an airport?”

“Szczecin-Goleniów Airport, otherwise known as ‘Solidarność,” Shalenko said.   He pulled a small CD-ROM out of his pocket and passed it over to Aliyev.  “That is all the information we can gather about it, reviewed by me personally, and the overall details of the plan that we have spent five years putting together, reviewing, updating, and finally implementing.  We slipped as much as we could of Szczecin-Goleniów into Airport One; taking the airport is important to allow us to establish a presence in western Poland as quickly as possible and deter the Germans from trying anything clever.  There are details in the CD, but one possibility is that the European forces in Poland will attempt to retreat into Germany; it might be a good idea not to let that happen.”

“Of course, sir,” Aliyev said.  He paused.  “What about the other airports in Poland?”

“All of them will be targeted,” Shalenko assured him.  “If everything goes to plan, you should only have to hold out for a couple of days at most before we manage to place an armoured force into the area from the sea, or a little longer from the east.  The enemy should be heavily confused – we have a number of operations going to give the Germans and Poles other problems to worry about – and you may not be attacked for hours or at all.”

Aliyev studied the map for a long moment.  “That’s quite close to Berlin,” he observed.  “Will we be advancing on the city?”

“Perhaps,” Shalenko said.  He met Aliyev’s eyes.  “I have been in your shoes, Colonel; your main concern here is to secure the airport for us to fly in supplies and equipment to you.  Unless you get very lucky and capture a lot of Polish tanks, we don’t expect you to do more than hold the airport until relieved.”

He held up a hand.  “It’s not an insult, Colonel,” he said.  “Russia needs your young men too much to simply throw them away.”

“I know, sir,” Aliyev said.  He felt real excitement spinning through him…and a desire to even the score a little.  Some of Russia’s worst enemies would never have taken up arms against them, were it not for Europe; some of the Chechen leaders whose forces he had fought and defeated had taken up residence in Paris, well out of Russia’s reach…or were they?  “I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t,” Shalenko said.  He tapped the map thoughtfully.  “I don’t expect you to secure the city either, but I do expect you to behave yourselves; we don’t need to make either the Poles or the Germans think that they’re doomed under our rule, understand?”

Aliyev smiled.  “Sir, my men are not…Kazakhs,” he protested, referring to the soldiers from Kazakhstan who had taken up service with Russia after Kazakhstan had hastily rejoined the Russian Federation.  The Kazakhs had a reputation for being mad, bad, and dangerous to be anywhere near, although Aliyev also considered them vastly overrated as soldiers.  “They can behave themselves.”

“See to it,” Shalenko said.  He tapped the CD-ROM.  “Get them all briefed up and confined to barracks; I want you to have all of the bases covered before the attack is launched.  Friendly forces, known hostile forces, the reinforcement plans, best case, worst case…you know the drill.  If there are problems, I expect to hear about them before we launch the operation; Glasnost, remember?”

Aliyev nodded.  President Nekrasov’s policy of ‘openness’ was different from the original; in the new Russia, the bearer of bad news didn’t get the blame.  He knew enough to know that he could rely on it, if there was something wrong with his force, but he knew that there would be nothing wrong with his men.  There was only one slight problem, but he was sure that it could be handled…

“We may need to do a handful more combat jumps,” he said.  “I want everyone right at the peak of fitness when we launch the operation.”

Shalenko looked at him for a second, and then nodded.  “Requisition whatever you need from stores,” he said.  “Failure is not an option.”

Aliyev saluted.  “We won’t fail the President, sir,” he said.  “We will take the airport or die trying.”

Shalenko returned the salute and left the room, leaving Aliyev alone with the CD-ROM.  For a long moment, he just stared at it, feeling his thoughts whirling around his mind; he had wanted to be part of a massive combat operation…and now, it seemed that he would have his chance.  The last major war the Russian Army had engaged in had been Afghanistan; Chechnya had been a miserable task, butcher’s work…and Aliyev had hated it.  The FSB security battalions, mainly the dregs of Russian jails and barbaric recruits from Central Asia, had loved every last minute of it.  Fighting in Europe would be different…

He remembered his younger brother.  Pavel had wanted to be in the Spetsnaz too; he had had to spend a year in the infantry first, and had been blown up in an ambush by rebels in Belarus.  They had to have known that Russia was prepared to be merciful, but instead they had fought…and taken Aliyev’s younger brother from him.  His mother’s heart had broken because of it; she had died blaming Aliyev, who blamed Europe.  Hadn’t they known what they were doing?

He pocketed the CD-ROM and left the room.  The commandos were finishing up the clean-up, ensuring that nothing was left behind for the cleaners to remove.  There was no such thing as a spare moment in the Spetsnaz; a handful of commandos who had nothing to do were running laps around the runway, just to keep fit.  

“I want our lorries back here as soon as possible,” he said, to Captain Alexander Vatutin.  They had known that they would be returning to the barracks, but again, they hadn’t expected to be doing it for hours; some drills were known to last for weeks.  He had expected to spend a week defending the airport against whatever forces had been assigned to the defending force.  “It seems that they have finally found something for us to do.”

He allowed a smile to break through his cold face.  “We’re going west…”

Chapter Nine: While Europe Slept

I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened. 
Winston Churchill

Moscow, Russia

It was the 30th of May.

“This is the point of no return,” Margarita Sergeyevna Pushkina said.  The FSB officer sipped her drink carefully.  She was never one to get drunk, something that was wise for a woman in Russia.  “Everything is in place; the chaos will begin in two days and…well, we would be committed.”

President Nekrasov smiled to himself.  “How certain are you of success?”

Margarita flushed slightly.  “The people we ourselves emplaced will carry out their missions or die trying,” she said.  “Some of them may be detected by the local authorities – too late.  There is nothing perfect in any of these plans; we could lose half of the operations and still win, particularly the random terror part of the operations.  We built so much redundancy into the plan just in case we lost half of our people; frankly, I expected to lose more than we have.”

Shalenko leaned forwards angrily.  “We have lost people?”

“Four of our people were picked up by the German police within Berlin, following a major riot against Turkish immigrant workers,” Margarita said.  “None of them knew much; even in the worst case, they couldn’t have told the Germans anything about the overall plan.  A handful of Algerian illegal immigrants were picked up in France, but the French Government contented itself with dropping them into the refugee camps, rather than shooting them in the head or a rigorous interrogation.”

She grinned.  “Frankly, I expected that the Algerians would have lost control over their own people well before we reached the point of no return,” she said.  “We didn’t plan for that nincompoop in France calling for them all to be sterilised; idiot should have just waited a couple of months and he would have gotten much more than his wish.  There were a handful of other nasty incidents, but the main body of the cells remained underground…and in any case, we can handle the important part of the mission without their help.”

“But I would be happy to have it,” Shalenko said, thinking cold thoughts about the dangers of an alert Europe facing his forces.  He had expected to see sudden bursts of activity, expected to see the Germans, French and British suddenly realising their danger and dispatching their forces to the Polish border, as well as wiping out the sleeper agents and revising their rules of engagement to make survival a much more likely prospect for EUROFOR.   “You know that we cannot rely on the enemy simply folding at the first blow.”

He closed his eyes for a moment.  Russian military doctrine called for making the first blow of any offensive as hard as possible, to try to make the first blow the last blow…but it wouldn’t work in Europe.  The enemy would have time to withdraw to more defensible lines if they had time to realise what was happening and the authority to order a general retreat.  If they had a war going on in their own backyard, their commanding generals would have too many problems to handle and EUROFOR would disintegrate.

He hoped.

“I know,” Nekrasov said.  “What are we facing?”

“In theory, we’re facing two divisions of European soldiers and the Polish Army,” Margarita said.  “In practice, the Europeans are not working as an integrated group and two-thirds of the Polish forces remain un-mobilised.  Even if they give the order now, they would have real problems getting them into position to actually oppose us before it was too late.  The targeting plan will knock out most of their reserve forces and hopefully make it impossible for them to muster any of their home forces before it’s too late.  For the French and Spanish, they will also be looking in the wrong direction, rather than towards us.”

Nekrasov nodded slowly.  “The time is so slow,” he said, wryly.  Shalenko recognised it as nerves and said nothing.  “General, what about our own forces?”

Shalenko glanced down at his notes.  “We have over forty divisions in the region or ready to move in as soon as we kick the offensive off,” he said.  “Furthermore, we have five thousand dedicated Special Forces units operating behind the lines, all slipped into Poland and Germany and lying low for the offensive.  Several other units will knock out the EUROFOR units in the Ukraine, while one division apiece has been dedicated to each of the Baltic States.  None of them are particularly strong and have placed their faith in EUROFOR to defend them; we do not expect much trouble in overwhelming their defences.

“On the naval front, Admiral Volkov and Admiral Sulkin have their forces prepared for action,” he continued.  “The Turks have turned a blind eye to our submarines as they move though the choke point there; officially, of course, they’re being moved to the bases in the north.  The Northern and Baltic fleets are ready for operations in support of the army; we will move the Black Sea fleet through the choke point as soon as war is declared, unless the Turks decide to get involved.  They shouldn’t – they’re not keen on the Europeans since they were told they couldn’t play in the European club – but it doesn’t matter.   Our main priority in the Mediterranean is clearing the European Standing Force out of the way and assisting the Algerians, until the day that we knife them in the back.  Again, there is no sign that the Europeans have any idea that anything is untoward; the only point of concern for them is the Gazprom strike.”

Nekrasov laughed shortly.  The Gazprom Company handled almost all of Russia’s exports of energy supplies, including LNG; it wasn’t likely that its workers would want to strike.  Now, however, there were over a dozen fully-loaded Gazprom tankers in a variety of harbours across Europe, all apparently held there by a strike.  The Europeans had laughed and believed the claim that they were striking in Europe because strikers in Russia would be shot; the Russian Government had paid for the docking slips and negotiations were dragging on.

Or, at least, that was the official story.

“Finally, we will have over three thousand aircraft dedicated to the operation, from bombers and fighters to heavy transports that will support the paratroopers and the other forces behind enemy lines,” Shalenko concluded.  “The doctrine has been revised countless times and prepared; we should be able to destroy most of the opposing air forces within the first week or force them to expand their supplies faster than they can replace them.  At the worst case, the Americans will ship missiles and spare parts from America to the British, but they cannot replace pilots or airframes.”

Nekrasov smiled.  “It was nice of the North Koreans to finally launch their offensive,” he agreed.  “That should give the Americans something to worry about.”

Shalenko nodded.  The North Koreans had pushed back the South Koreans and the Americans through sheer weight of firepower…and through some advanced weapons they had purchased from China before China had made its desperate grab for Taiwan, lost, and plunged into civil war.  The Americans were rushing in more air power and soldiers from all over the world; insurgents in the Middle East were not slow to take advantage of it.  The Americans would have their hands full.

Nekrasov looked up at him.  “Alex, how good would you say our chances actually are?”

Shalenko had thought about it, time and time again, attempting to cut as many variables out of the equation as possible.  The plan had been years in the making, but he knew, as well as anyone, that anything could go wrong.  Friction had been built into the plan, but the urgent need to knock as much of EUROFOR out of the fighting within the first few hours had meant that there had been compromises made…some of them truly nerve-wracking.  What would happen if…?

He owed Nekrasov a honest answer.  “If everything goes to plan,” he said, “we should win the main body of the fighting within a month at most.  We will then have to consolidate, ensure that the Algerians don’t get a chance to make their own gains permanent, and ensure that we secure most of what we need from Europe.  Consolidation could take months, but our victory would be certain.

“If everything does not go to plan, we still have a good chance of winning, but at a much higher cost,” he continued.  “We might also have to concede some gains to the Algerians, something that we don’t want and they will be working to force us to accept.  If they trust us, I would be very surprised; they have to know that we intend to take most of the gains from Operation Stalin.”

“If worst comes to worst, we can block their shipping lanes and ship their people off to Siberia,” Nekrasov said.  Shalenko nodded; the fate of the thousands of people in Europe who were considered either dangerous or worthless had already been decided.  The FSB would handle that part and do so with gusto.  “There’s no need to permit their dangerous cancer to spread into our new lands.”

“The most dangerous prospect is that of a nuclear release,” Shalenko said.  “The ABM system is good, but if there is one failure…disaster.  Whatever it takes, we have to ensure that there is no permission for nuclear release.”

“That has been taken care of,” Margarita said coldly.  “Whatever happens, no politician in a position of power will survive the opening rounds of the war.”

Shalenko nodded.  “I have been speaking to the commanding officers and the soldiers,” he said.  “Most of them are certain that they can handle the missions, many of them are looking forward to it, seeing that Europe was behind many of their woes in Belarus.  The important thing is to keep moving; cities can be reduced later, but mobile forces must be destroyed as rapidly as possible.  A pause could prove fatal.”

“I know,” Nekrasov said.  He looked up towards the portrait of Stalin on the wall.  Russians had both feared and loved Stalin; Shalenko knew that no one, apart from Nekrasov himself, had come close to the ideal of the Russian leader.  “Are you going to be taking up your command in Belarus?”

Shalenko nodded.  “I have a flight back tonight,” he said.  “Time enough to ensure that everything goes to plan and that the Poles remain quiet long enough for us to take over quickly.  Civilian resistance could put an unexpected spanner in the works.”

“If that happens,” Nekrasov said, “deal with it.  No scruples.”

Shalenko bowed his head.  “No scruples,” he agreed.  

Near Warsaw, Poland

The fire was a tiny concession to the campfire atmosphere of the location, Robinson had decided, when Captain Jacob Anastazy had lit it.  Nothing had happened in the week that they had remained in their position, nothing of importance anyway; the only excitement had been a flight of aircraft leaving Russia that had turned out to be civilian aircraft that had been routed away from the Ukraine.  He missed Hazel, more than he could admit, even to himself; her sheer presence was missing from his mind.  Emails…just didn’t come up to it.

Dear Hazel, he wrote, and concentrated on several passages designed to remind her of just what he was missing in Poland.  I hope that you are enjoying yourself in Edinburgh and that you did get to see the McCalmans like you intended; I wish that I could have gone with you and the old man.  How is he, by the way?  Is he still nagging you about grandchildren?

The thought almost brought a tear to his eye.  It was possible, of course, that they could have had children.  He had just felt as if it wasn’t the time, even though they had been having more unprotected sex lately.  Some of the soldiers were in their teens; they had never even thought of getting married, even if there were advantages in the army to having a wife.  A couple of them were openly homosexual; Robinson didn’t care, as long as they remained within the rules of fraternisation.  The British Army might never have quite adapted to the concept of homosexual behaviour, but as long as there was a manpower shortage…

He was wracking his brains for something else to say when Sergeant Ronald Inglehart appeared in the command tent.  “Captain,” he said, “the journalists have arrived.”

Robinson had to smile at his tone.  He couldn’t have announced the arrival of child molesters and rapists with more disdain.  “Thank you,” he said, as he put the laptop aside and came out of the tent.  Two women stood there, one of them clearly British, the other Polish; he remembered Captain Jacob Anastazy telling him about the Polish reporter.  She was some relative of his, he recalled; a heart-stopping young woman with honey-blonde hair.  Robinson found himself surprisingly tongue-tied as he faced her.  “Welcome to the camp.”

“Thank you,” the Englishwoman said.  She was dark-haired and surprisingly attractive in her own right.  “We won’t be staying long, Colonel; we merely need to get some background interviews.”

“Of course,” Robinson said, watching as two of the soldiers played court to Marya Jadwiga.  Anastazy was looking more and more grim as they chatted about nothing in particular.  Robinson had read, once, that American soldiers had often brought home a Polish bride; looking at Marya, it was easy to see why.  “What do you need to know?”

“I’m Caroline, by the way,” the woman said.  Robinson blushed at the amusement in her voice and reminded himself that he was a married man.  “How are you enjoying your time out here?”

Robinson laughed at the question.  “It could be better,” he said, “but so far it has been more like an adventure holiday than anything else.”  He had gone on an adventure holiday with Hazel once; he had found it trite and easy after actually soldiering with people trying to kill him.  The instructor hadn’t known half as much as he had; he shuddered to think what an SAS trooper would have made of it.  Mincemeat, probably.  “We’re just sitting here waiting for something to happen and monitoring this particular section of Polish airspace.”

Caroline seemed to understand.  “Do you get bored out here?”

“It beats Sudan,” Robinson admitted.  He had to smile when he looked over at Marya; if the poor girl wasn't careful, she was likely to end up with a very different kind of background interview.  He had had to discipline a soldier once for sending a request to a female correspondent for a more revealing photograph and had been laughing too hard to make a proper job of the chewing out.  “In a week, we’ll be somewhere else, perhaps guarding somewhere even more important, but until then…”

Caroline nodded in understanding.  “And don’t you want a real barracks?”

“Most of us would sooner sleep naked than sleep in a soviet-built barracks,” Robinson said.  “Have you ever slept in one?”  She eyed him carefully, and then shook her head.  “It explains why many Red Army soldiers were nasty bastards; they just couldn’t sleep properly.”

“Ah,” Caroline said.  “What about the Poles?  Do you have any contact with the locals?”

Robinson opened his mouth to answer, and then stopped.  There was something wrong; he could feel it, right on the edge of his instincts.  He couldn’t have explained it to her; it was just a sense that something wasn’t quite right, somewhere.  He had had it in the Sudan, just before some refugees had brought out swords – swords, for the love of God – and started to hack apart their fellows.

“No,” he said slowly.  “It’s very tranquil out here.”

London, United Kingdom

Major-General Charles Langford stepped out of the Convent Garden Royal Opera House with the sense that, finally, something was going his way. He had always loved the opera – not the depressing and seemingly endless Wagner operas, but the light-hearted Gilbert and Sullivan operas – and going to see a properly produced version of one was delightful.  The Mikado might have run afoul of the Race Relations Board, but the sheer torrent of protest had brought the Board to heel for once; only a handful of people could be bothered to picket the first production since the edict was repealed.

The sun was fading in the sky as he climbed onto the underground train, waving his ID card at the young Pakistani manning the barrier, who glanced around and then gave Langford the finger.  The temptation to report the young man was overwhelming, but Langford forced it down; it wasn't easy getting a job these days.  There were times when Langford wondered if it wasn’t just worth taking early retirement, or even leaving the country altogether.  England was no longer what it once was…

He got off the underground train – technically, over half of the network was actually above ground – and walked up the hill towards his flat.  His mother had left him her house in Croydon when she had died, but it was large enough for a family and Langford lived alone in Redhill, near London, but not quite part of the city.  He passed a group of grieving Indians on the way, the weeping women dressed in brightly-coloured clothes, and headed out onto the hill.  He was on leave, technically, even though he didn’t really want to go anywhere.  There was plenty of reading he wanted to catch up upon, but for the moment, all he wanted to do was pace.  The hill was empty; most of the young men and women who used it would have gone to the community centre, even though it was turning into a haven for crime.  It was starting to look if Britain was already dead, and men like him were only struggling against the inevitable.

Trying to banish such thoughts, he sat on the bench and looked out towards the sunset.  It all seemed so safe and tranquil.

Interlude One: Tick…tick…tick…

Tick…tick…tick…

They waited.

In Belarus, in Serbia, in Algeria, in Russia itself, they waited.  Soldiers checked their weapons obsessively as they waited for the dawn; their commanders checked their intelligence and battle plans, some of them wondering if they would be worthy commanding officers, others, more relaxed, tried to sleep.  Missile crews checked their missiles carefully, ensuring that all of them had their guidance systems locked onto their targets, hoping that nothing would go wrong at the worst possible moments.  Under the waves, Russian submarines made the final GPS checks to ensure that their targeting data was up to date, while aircraft revved their engines on hundreds of runways across Russia.

Tick…tick…tick…

In the darkness of the European night, commandos moved closer to their targets, preparing their weapons for action.  In every major European city, other commandos prepared their strikes, to unleash terror and destruction right across Europe.  In hidden bases, human voices spoke hatred unheard since Cain murdered Abel, inciting a hatred that would soon burst out into the streets.  In nondescript rooms, cyber-warriors prepared to hack into and disrupt countless computers right across Europe; the population would wake to find themselves trapped in a nightmare, from which they would never escape.

Tick…tick…tick…

Warships moved silently under the waves, closing in on their targets; Naval Infantry prepared themselves for the desperate dash across the water.  Hunter-killer submarines moved closer, their targets long identified and selected; their captains waited impatiently for the countdown to reach zero.  Others kept their ships well back from any risk of detection, waiting for the final moments before they moved in for the kill.  They would not miss their targets; surprise would be absolute.

Tick…tick…tick…

Thousands of targets had been designated; thousands of separate acts of sabotage planned.  High overhead, cold mechanical eyes peered down, refining the information now that it was too late, while other objects moved into firing position in the dark of space.  The intelligence had been better than any Russian had dared to expect; the Europeans had taken almost no precautions for the first total war of the 21st Century.  Europe was asleep…and by the time it awoke, it would be too late.

Tick…tick…tick…

Zero…

Chapter Ten: Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of War, Take One

The war was bound to be merciless.  Wars that begin with sneak attacks always are.
Robert A. Heinlein

London/Near London, England

“Five minutes, Captain,” the young enlisted seaman said.

Captain Ilya Ivanovich Mikhalkov nodded.  The Akula-II-class submarine Vladimir Putin had been lurking near England for nearly a week, waiting for the firing command, and that worried him.  The Putin might have been one of Russia’s latest submarines, designed to serve as both a hunter-killer and shore-assault ship, but he had no illusions as to its fate if a European ship stumbled across them.  Technically, they were lurking in international waters, but so close to Europe, they might encounter more than just the Royal Navy.  The Dutch might be military lightweights, but they had a navy, while the French were known to patrol these waters too.

He mentally reviewed the sealed orders he had been given before the nuclear-powered submarine had been sent out from its base in the north.  They had been simple; head to a predetermined location, or as near as practical, and then wait.  At a certain time, they were to listen for instructions; if they received the command, they were to fire their cruise missiles at the targets and return to base, sinking any European shipping they encountered along the way.  If they received no command, they were to maintain radio silence and wait until they ran short of supplies; the mission would only be cancelled by shortages.  There had been no provision for a recall command; it was too easy to fake.

They’d taken up position, far enough from most shipping to be fairly certain of avoiding detection, and waited.  The Putin was a new ship, built to new specifications, and tested, but there was always something for the crew to do.  The design had been vastly improved, ever since several of the class had been built for India and China; the Russians had quietly built a new one for themselves for every one they had exported to foreign buyers.  Iran had bought several before the Americans had closed them down permanently; Algeria and Libya had expressed interest in purchasing some for their ambitions in the Mediterranean.  He had every confidence in his ship.

Two days ago, they had received the order; a simple ‘go’ command and a time.  They’d had their targets selected already; it had surprised him to discover that the targets were all within the English capital, London.  He had assumed, at first, that they would be making a point to the British – like the new government had done from time to time by sending a Backfire or a Blackjack into British airspace to remind them that they had the capability – but instead…they had real orders to fire.  It made him proud; a long career in the Russian Navy had finally given him a chance to fight for his country.

“Confirm our location,” he ordered.  The seas around them were surprisingly empty; the antenna was almost impossible to detect under normal circumstances, but he knew from the ballistic missile submarine captains that they had to be very careful.  The GPS position check had to be perfect, or they might miss their targets; the die had been cast and the Putin would not be found wanting.  “Make sure that the targets are perfectly locked.”

“Targets confirmed,” the weapons officer said.  If anything, he was more nervous than Mikhalkov himself; the cruise missiles had been tested time and time again before they had left harbour, but it was too late for them to replace a malfunctioning missile.  The Putin carried thirty missiles in its bays, but a delay could be fatal; the British ships would come boiling out of their harbours with blood on their minds, the minute they launched the first missile.  “All missiles report ready.”

Mikhalkov’s hand shook slightly as he pulled the key from around his neck.  “I confirm that all of the targets have been locked,” he said, glancing down at the display.  Thirty targets glowed red in the dim light of the submarine.  “Mr Exec?”

His first officer nodded.  “Target’s locked, Captain,” he said.  There was a minute left to go.  The first officer inserted his key and twisted it once.  “Armed and ready.”

It was not as elaborate a procedure as launching nuclear missiles from a ballistic missile submarine, but Mikhalkov knew that it was important; an accidental launch from the Putin could have disastrous consequences.  The Russian Navy was full of stories about missiles that had accidentally been fired, or storage dumps during the bad old days following the end of the Cold War, where a single spark had triggered an explosion that had set off nuclear warning sensors around the world.  The Putin Government had started a long-term program for reforming and repairing the worst of the damage; the new President had completed the program.  The Russian Navy was again one of the most dangerous in the world.

Mikhalkov watched as the weapons officer inserted his key and twisted it.  He wanted to say something dramatic, but words failed him; he inserted his own key and turned it, activating the firing sequence.  Thirty missiles, packed into tubes, ready to launch in a rapid-fire sequence.  His breath was coming short as the display changed again; one single tap and the missiles would be launched.

The countdown reached zero.

“Firing,” he said.  He pressed the firing key and held it down for the precise number of seconds.  Moments later, the first of the missiles was launched…and the war began.  “May God have mercy on us all.”

***
There was one station in PJHQ that was manned at all times; the ballistic missile warning system.  The British Government might have shared the general opinion that the threat of all-out nuclear war had ended with the Cold War, but the threat of a rogue state remained in existence.  The possibility that North Korea might launch a missile towards America if the war went badly – as it might well – was ever-present, and the British government needed the most up to date information.  Besides, it was at least theoretically possible for terrorists to produce homemade cruise missiles.

Captain Katy Harland was on duty when it happened; the links to the orbiting European satellites began to go down.  She instantly activated the emergency procedure, linking several other radars into the main warning network, before trying to establish what had gone wrong.  The European military satellites, boosted into orbit by the ESA, had been problematic right from the start; she, like many of the other staff in PJHQ, regarded them with some suspicion, even if the ESA kept claiming that all the bugs were being worked out of the system.  Moments later, alarms started to sound…

For a long moment, Katy just stared at the display; hundreds of red icons were flickering into existence.  Out of habit, she glanced at the console to ensure that someone wasn't playing a training tape; it wouldn’t be the first time that someone had accidentally started a training program that had been mistaken for the real thing.  The new icons were appearing from the sea and were being picked up now by conventional radar systems, heading in towards London.  Entire sections of the command network were starting to fail; Katy realised that it was not a drill.

“Trigger the alert, now,” she snapped.  It was a simple task, but one difficult to actually accept doing, except in drills; she hit the command and hoped that she wasn’t too late.  The alert command should have warned the handful of TMD batteries around London that they would be needed, but she saw now that it was too late.  One of the missiles – two of the missiles – was heading right for the PJHQ.  The air raid alarm was sounding and staff were beating feet towards the bomb shelter, but it was too late.  There were only moments left as the supersonic missiles raced closer towards their targets.

Katy closed her eyes.

***
Nicholas Donavan had never quite gotten used to his position as Prime Minister.  He had never seriously expected that the Liberal Democrats would become the party in power, and indeed, some of its power was only maintained through an alliance with the Greens and the Socialists.  Labour might have been pretty much discredited by the failures of both Blair and Brown – the disaster in Sudan had only put an end to that particular government – but the Conservatives had been going from strength to strength recently, as had the BNP.  Donavan knew that the economic crisis was growing worse; people were starting to look towards the more extreme parties for government…

It didn’t seem fair.  Donavan had once had ideals, but government work had drained most of them out of his soul.  He had had hopes of turning Britain into a truly progressive society, but Britain had proved very resistant to change; his hand had been forced or held back on dozens of occasions.  He had wanted to create a land with social justice for everyone, only to discover that people wanted social justice for themselves, but not necessarily for everyone else.  There were times when it seemed like the news was a constant funeral dirge for Britain; racism, sexism and worse stalked Britain's streets…

Europe didn’t make matters any easier.  Didn’t they see, he asked himself, that Europe was the only way forward?  America couldn’t be depended on any more; Pakistan had learned that lesson, even after an American serviceman had raped a British girl.  The world needed a counterbalance to American power, and Europe was the only real contender, but…didn’t they see?  It seemed as if even the Euro-Socialists didn’t realise the dangers, while the other local governments were proving resistant to greater integration.  A United States of Europe still seemed like a dream…

An alarm rang.  He started, and then flinched as two armed men raced into his room.  He opened his mouth to protest, but they grabbed him and pulled him to his feet, half-carrying him down the stairs to the stares of astonished civil servants.  Donavan had been due a meeting with the Home Secretary in an hour; the Home Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister were in Parliament, addressing a packed house on the measures that the government intended to take to resolve the Falklands Island Crisis peacefully.  Surely, if Britain gave up something…

He forced his mind back to the present.  “What are you doing?”

“There’s an incoming attack,” one of the men said.  He was one of Ten Downing Street’s security staff.  “We have to get you into the shelter!”

The alarm was making it hard to think.  “An attack?”  Donavan asked.  “Who’s attacking us?”

“I don’t fucking know,” the man snapped.  Donavan didn’t know who he was; in all the years of government, he had never bothered to talk to any of the security staff, viewing them as holdovers from the day that a British Prime Minister was among the top ten targets for assassination.  “We got a warning that there was a cruise missile incoming and we have to get you into the bunker…”

They had reached the top of the second set of stairs, leading down into the basement and the bunker below.  “I can’t just…”  Donavan protested.  His legs seemed to refuse to move; he cursed his lack of exercise even as the two guards picked him up and carried him down.  “I can’t…I need to talk to my family!”

“You must,” the man snapped.  “There’s no time and we’re being jammed and all hell is breaking loose…”

The first missile struck Ten Downing Street.  It had been designed as a bunker-busting warhead; it punched through the façade of the normal, civilian, house and buried itself in the masonry before exploding.  The blast tore through the complex, sending shockwaves down into the tunnel system and collapsing many of the tunnels; for those in the bunker, the roof caved in and crushed them before they even had a moment to know that they were dead.   The second missiles struck moments later; its warhead was different, a compressed fuel-air explosive mixture that detonated just before hitting the ground, sending a wave of super-hot flame blasting out across Whitehall.  It was almost like being at ground zero of a nuclear detonation.

No one ever found a trace of Nicholas Donavan.

***
The skyscraper apartment was luxurious; Zachary Lynn loved it and so did the girls he brought back to the apartment on a fairly regular basis.  He had a habit of relaxing by picking up girls in the nearby nightclubs; one of them, Faye Martin, lay on the double-bed, quite naked.  Lynn would have liked to have spent more time with her, but duty called; only the cold awareness that tomorrow might be his last day on Earth had prompted him to pick up Faye.  She had been a good lay, but there had been an understanding; there would be no permanent relationship.

He stared down over London and saw them coming; the first of the missiles.  His hackers had gone to work already, attacking the computers that made up the most important and vulnerable part of the defence network; it looked as if they had succeeded, although the fact that the British hadn’t been on war alert had certainly played a role in the success.  He knew very little about the overall plan, but he did know that thirty missiles had been targeted on London…and they were coming down like rain.

The skyscraper shook as the first explosion echoed over the city.  The first missiles had been targeted on government buildings; it was vitally important to kill as many government ministers as they could.  The British politician was a strange beast; some of them even had the iron determination that had characterised Britain, years ago.  The Houses of Parliament had been meeting to discuss the Falklands – Lynn knew that the Government would have been happy to give away the islands, if the MPs would have allowed it – and he doubted that many of them would survive the explosion and fires spreading through Whitehall.  Other missiles were coming down now; the PJHQ, the various barracks scattered throughout the city, even New Scotland Yard…all of them had been targeted.

He smiled and lifted his mobile phone.  It had been produced by the Americans; the British mobile phone networks were either down or about to fail, while the BBC and the independent television and radio channels had also been targeted.  As London started to burn under his gaze, he sent a simple text message; go.

The building shook again.  A sleepy voice came from the bed.  “What’s happening?”

“London town is falling down,” Lynn said, and laughed.  The chaos had only just begun.  “Why don’t you and me celebrate?”

***
The alarm had shocked Inspector David Briggs out of a doze in the rear of the mobile command post.  They had deployed to set up security for a protest march later in the week, one that would have gone back to Hyde Park and the Mall; he had been tasked, again, with overseeing the procedures.  He was starting to think that it was a punishment; certainly, some of his subordinates had had to help the overworked park workers clearing up after the last protest.  There were parts of Hyde Park that looked as if they were a rubbish dump.

He glared down at the console, wondering what the hell was going on; that code meant military emergency, but what military emergency?  A terrorist attack?  He knew the procedure for an attack; all units had to report in to the nearest command post, and then await orders.  He hit the key transmitting their location to New Scotland Yard…and then looked up.  Something had registered in his mind…and then he saw it, a streak of light crossing the sky, heading towards Westminster and Buckingham Palace.  He stared, unable to quite believe his eyes, as the streak of light vanished…and moments later, an explosion shook the ground.

The door burst open.  “Sir,” Sergeant Harold Page snapped, “that was a fucking missile.”

Briggs was already jumping out of the vehicle, service pistol in hand.  “Get the engine started,” he snapped, as he looked towards Westminster.  He could see it now, towers of smoke reaching into the sky…and then a second string of explosions echoed out over the city.  Everywhere he looked, every direction of the compass, he could see smoke and flames billowing up into the sky.  The missiles…

His mind refused to grasp it.  Were they at war?  The last time London had been attacked by missiles had been during the Second World War; that had been nearly eighty years ago.  There had been no mistaking it; there had been a missile…and there were flames coming from the direction of Ten Downing Street.

“Get us moving,” he snapped.  Scotland Yard hadn’t responded to his signals, nor had the Disaster Recovery Centre; the implications of that didn’t bear thinking about.  Briggs had never considered himself a military man, but he knew something about how terrorists thought; one of their prime objectives was to cause casualties among emergency workers.  If they had knocked out…

A squeal of static blasted out of one of the speakers.  “I can’t make any contact at all with the dispatcher,” Page said.  His face was very pale; his hands clutched his pistol as if it was a life-saver.  Briggs remembered that Page had been courting Christine in Dispatches and silently prayed that she was all right.  They had made such a cute couple.  “What do we do?”

“Drive us to Whitehall,” Briggs snapped.  The streets were coming alive with panicking people; the driver hit the siren to help move them out the way.  Cars had been barred from the centre of London – except emergency vehicles – for years, but it hadn’t helped the remainder of the congestion problem.  Buckingham Palace was all right, he realised, but Whitehall itself was burning brightly.  People – policemen, guards and soldiers from the barracks, which looked to have been hit as well – were milling around; no one seemed to be in charge.

Ten Downing Street was gone…and, somehow, he had to gain control of the situation.  It all seemed so futile.