by Chris James
V. THE WAR IN EARTH ORBIT
From a military standpoint, the only tactical option available to NATO was surrender. Coordinated super-AI simulations, now far better informed than a fortnight previously, produced a range of statistics which painted a bleak picture for Europe’s future. Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury opined in In the Eye of the Storm: ‘The forecasts began to reach blackly comedic proportions, with projections of the Caliphate defeating all of Europe in either weeks or, at the outside, maybe a few months. A part of me did worry that this kind of thing could have an effect on morale, so the first order of business was to break the threat down into its component parts, and then look at how we could best tackle each of those. But we all knew we had precious little time to pull something out of the hat.’
At a secret meeting of the NATO Chiefs of Staff on the day after the attacks on Greece and Italy, priority was assigned to defeating the Caliphate’s ability to prevent any electronic penetration of its airspace. John Parsons, a space-warfare expert with the US Strategic Command, said after the war: ‘… my colleague Dan gave the overview, using a 3-D graphic, of the different altitudes that we knew the Caliphate flew its satellites at. Dan took care and made sure all the European folks there understood the huge distances involved. Then I described the history of US monitoring ops in some detail, but very quickly one of the German guys began asking why I kept qualifying my statements with words like “probably” and “most likely”. I told him that we could only estimate because we didn’t know for sure how they were taking our devices out. With his constant verbal jabbing, it quickly became a game of eliminating the impossible so that whatever remained, however improbable, had to be the truth. Then a French scientist made a deduction which really saw the shit hit the fan: nuclear fusion.’
The minutes of this meeting show that the participants rapidly began formulating plans to prove whether it could be true that Caliphate satellites utilised a more advanced nuclear fusion technology than was believed possible in the West. Although in hindsight this may be a somewhat obvious deduction, it is worth noting that in the preceding decade, Western scientific consensus tended towards the view that fusion had reached its apogee as a potential power source. Nuclear scientists at Europe’s and the US’s leading facilities remained convinced that the potential for fusion extended only to small-scale devices which had limited military application.
Parsons describes what happened next: ‘The French guy didn’t mind all the scoffs and head-shaking. He shrugged his shoulders, cool as a kitten, and explained how the Caliphate’s scientists must have found a way of bringing muon-catalysed fusion up to a workable level. The German guy who’d been sparring with me then got him to expand on that, and Frenchy detailed one theory which went right over my and Dan’s heads.’
The French scientist in question was a young Louis Reyer, the Nobel Prize for physics still eighteen years in his future. As he insisted at the time, the limited evidence the West possessed led to the conclusion that the problem of each muon having only a 1% chance of ‘sticking’ to an alpha particle must have been overcome. This explained how the Caliphate’s weapons systems could function as they did: driven by such a power source, ACA- and satellite-mounted lasers would be markedly stronger than anything NATO currently fielded.
However, proving this theory and then finding a solution to counteract the Caliphate’s superiority might take months or even years. In the meantime, the NATO countries were obliged to take any practical steps they could in the limited time they had before the Caliphate invaded Europe. In the early hours of Thursday 15 February, three wings of PeaceMakers from the Nineteenth Air Force launched from Texas and climbed to eighty thousand feet, where they released their cargoes of Rampart satellite-killer super-AI missiles. All of the Caliphate’s satellites held geostationary orbits above its territory, as their key functions were to prevent any foreign power from seeing electronically inside the Caliphate’s borders, as well as to stop its own citizens from communicating with any outsiders. As such, the US Air Force knew precisely the locations of their targets.
Gavin Sparks, a thirty-year-old Tech Sergeant monitoring the attack, told the post-war US Congressional hearings: ‘I think we all felt real positive. Finally we could stop being discreet and just skirting round, losing kit without finding anything out. Now the war was on, we attacked. The PeaceMakers released the twelve Ramparts. These were tough, clever little missiles, and we sure weren’t expecting them to go down as quickly as they did. They identified the lead Caliphate device, and we told all of them to go right at it. And all of them vanished. We got brief readings of increasing external heat, and they were gone.’
This pattern of Caliphate superiority in armaments would go on to define the first year of the war. As will be seen below, this caused severe problems in the NATO hierarchies because the limitations in the democracies’ arms forced difficult decisions, what Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury referred to as, ‘… constantly battling to treat the symptoms instead of the cause. We could never get anywhere near the cause in those early days, so we had to give up and fight to save what few lives we could once the invasion started.’
The cause to which Sir Terry refers is the Caliphate’s satellites. For as long as they remained undefeatable, NATO could not mount a defence which had the slimmest chance of success. The opening military disasters for NATO forces at sea and on land depended to a large degree on the Caliphate’s ability to control its airspace from low-Earth orbit. Once the Caliphate expanded beyond its own borders, there was only a small window of opportunity before it closed off the territory it gained to outside eyes and ears. But until NATO developed and deployed new weapons on a par with those with which the Caliphate began the war, the democracies would be obliged to conduct the best fighting defence they could.
Invasion
I. THE FOUR FRONTS
In the early morning of Sunday 18 February, the Caliphate began its invasion of the European mainland on four fronts. In the west, three thousand Blackswans launched from the North African coast at points from Tizi Ouzou to Jijel and headed northwest to begin their destruction of the Spanish mainland on a one-hundred-kilometre front from Cartagena to Alicante. Following the ACAs came the first waves of - and NATO’s introduction to - the Caliphate’s main warrior-transport aircraft, shortly to receive the NATO reporting name ‘Tawny Eagle’. A vast, bulbous machine with angled, retractable wings and vertical take-off and landing capability, each could carry up to twelve hundred warriors and supporting equipment.
Three hundred kilometres further east, a larger force of Blackswans emerged from around Bizerte and proceeded towards the Italian mainland, with more than twenty thousand warriors following. These would land on a fifty-kilometre front on either side of Rome and would transpire to form the most serious threat. The third front opened on the Greek mainland at the Athens peninsula. A similar size force as that attacking Spain approached the Greek capital. The fourth incursion emerged from Istanbul, with mere hundreds of Blackswans moving towards Bulgaria and the Balkans. These last two fronts would be the first to link up.
Despite all that had happened since the war began, the sense of shock is not difficult to detect among NATO personnel. At SHAPE headquarters, an adjutant to SACEUR General Joseph E. Jones called Mason Underwood described his feelings in a diary which has only recently come to light: ‘I looked at the General and he just sat back and whispered, “Holy shit”. We all stared at the screens showing the Caliphate’s approach. At the briefing the previous evening, we’d been told the invasion could happen at any time. Hell, we knew it wouldn’t be long, but to see it unfold like that was something… Magisterial? Exquisite? The places being invaded didn’t surprise anyone, I think. Every country in Europe was as ready as it could be. Their militaries were at the highest readiness, reservists had been recalled and armed, civilians had been told to protect themselves. I’d never heard the General profane before, but he did then: “We might be fucked, but we need to make these pieces of shit pay the
price.” I thought that was an easy thing for a four-star general to say, seeing as we were safe enough here in Belgium. I looked back at the screens, as those thousands of ACAs and warriors came on, and I felt fear and respect for those poor bastards who would have to face them.’
NATO defence protocols were activated: in Spain the approaching Caliphate Warrior Group West would be met by Army Group West; the combatants in the Italian theatre had the designation ‘Central’; the onslaught Greece would shortly face became the Eastern theatre; and the eruption from Istanbul was designated the Turkish front.
NATO PeaceMaker ACAs sent to intercept Caliphate forces fared badly, being outnumbered and outgunned. In Spain, it required on average thirteen PeaceMakers to account for a single Blackswan. NATO could field fewer than a thousand of its machines, so the Caliphate’s initial landings and advance were in general untroubled with significant interference. Throughout the third week of February, a scale of military and humanitarian disaster began to unfold such as Europe had not endured for well over a century.
There is little to be gained from an in-depth recounting of this period in the war: the world’s media relayed distressing images of suffering civilians and defeated NATO soldiers. Today all major cities and towns in the conquered countries, from Madrid to Bucharest, have museums dedicated to the victims of those darkest days, in which one can bear witness to the full horror of the Caliphate’s advance. Testimonies, digital recordings of the violence and tributes from loved ones document in the minutest detail the speed and brutality of events.
In south-eastern Spain, Warrior Group West advanced an average of fifty kilometres a day throughout February and March, driving millions of refuges before it as NATO forces fought a desperate containing action. Many units of the Spanish army performed with notable heroism, much to NATO headquarters’ relief. Battlefield-support lasers invariably became the first casualties once Caliphate forces had command of the air. Among soldiers, these soon became known as ‘microwave trucks’ because the occupants could expect to be reduced to cinders within moments of battle being joined. After two days SHAPE headquarters ordered all of these units to be unmanned and left fully automatic: the only reason flesh-and-blood troops needed to be in them was to ensure the lasers did not inadvertently engage friendly forces. Given that the skies bristled with Caliphate ACAs, this was deemed not to be a significant issue.
Seldom did troops from both sides come into direct armed conflict. NATO placed Special Forces in secret, fortified locations ahead of the invasion, their primary mission to report the strength of the invading forces, thence to cause disruption to Caliphate supply lines. As Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury describes it in In the Eye of the Storm, these were not entirely suicide missions: ‘The Caliphate never deployed a navy, and once they’d dealt with our surface fleets, they seemed to forget we still had fifteen top-of-the-line manned submarines in the Mediterranean. We had to be as cautious as possible because at that time, we didn’t know to what depth their Spiders could operate. One badly timed transmission could bring more disaster. But we maintained contact with several units behind the lines in Spain, Italy and Greece. They told us that similar measures were put in place as in Turkey: men of military age were burned by lasers almost without exception; women and girls became chattels for raping or were organised for transport back to Caliphate territory to be sold as slaves.’
A more detailed analysis of these records shows that the Caliphate’s approach to the native populations was not uniform. In some regions, the local warrior commander might indeed exterminate boys and men without mercy, while in others wealthier individuals were given the option to ‘purchase’ their entry into the Caliphate. In other places still, warriors toyed with the inhabitants by assuring them of survival and acceptance into the Caliphate on surrender of their material wealth (currency and jewellery), only to execute them when they handed over what treasures they possessed.
II. SACRIFICE
For many of the Special Forces operating in these regions, it is perhaps understandable that they elected to strike a blow, however strategically pointless, at the invaders rather than follow orders to withdraw to await more favourable battle conditions. For example, by the time lead elements of Warrior Group West reached the outskirts of Madrid, Sergeant Emiliano Alvarez of the Spanish Army’s Third Special Operations Group and his unit of twelve men had reported back to NATO, via encrypted communications with HMS Spiteful some fifty kilometres off the coast, various warrior movements and had supplied detailed information on the follow-up waves of Caliphate support and administrative units.
In late March, with their supplies running perilously low, NATO headquarters ordered Alvarez to withdraw to the coast to await recovery by the submarine. Alvarez declined, explaining that he and his men felt certain their families had perished, and therefore they had voted to attack the occupiers. NATO repeated the order for the men to evacuate, but in a detailed communication, Alvarez stated that all except two privates had agreed. On further consideration, the two dissenters reconsidered, in order to support the unit. SHAPE relented. At a prearranged time, Alvarez and his men began an assault on the newly established Caliphate administrative post located a few kilometres south of Grenada. This was conducted in full video and audio transmitted back to HMS Spiteful and relayed to SHAPE headquarters.
As expected, militarily the attack did little more than prove an irritant, Alvarez and his unit killing only a handful of warriors before they were overwhelmed. However, of note was the fact that the overseer’s personal guards boasted individual, close-body shielding. Alvarez struck one warrior with a potent smart grenade which knocked the target over but left him otherwise unharmed. A previously unknown type of sentinel ACA further complicated the attack. After a mere nine minutes, all life-signs from Alvarez’s unit had ceased. (In Grenada’s town square today there stands a modest museum and statue to Alvarez’s and his unit’s sacrifice.) Nevertheless, Alvarez and his men provided NATO with invaluable data concerning the Caliphate and its organisation as the invasion unfolded. During the war and for some years afterwards, debate raged regarding whether Alvarez and the tens of similar sacrifices made by Special Forces operatives on the battlefield had been heroic or foolhardy. Had no useful data been gained, it could be argued that these individuals did indeed die for no benefit. However, as will be shown below, with each new piece of information NATO military scientists better understood the threats facing Europe. As with the navies, the Special Forces’ unfortunate fate should be recalled by posterity given the appallingly high price that had to be paid for NATO merely to gain more knowledge of the enemy.
Ambiguity surrounding the Caliphate’s intentions towards the European populations remained. Five days after the invasion of Spain, two spearheads of warriors were driving for Madrid from the south and west. The Caliphate’s Lapwings then made an appearance and began destroying villages and towns wholesale along the spearheads’ flanks. Most military observers understood that this was a necessary tactic to protect the Caliphate warriors as they advanced; however, as in so many other places the level of destruction went substantially beyond military requirements. Lapwings roamed southern Spain burning towns and the smallest villages at will. Alhambra Palace was levelled on 2 March. So complete was the Caliphate’s control of the battlefield it allowed its machines to systematically patrol the national parks and mountain ranges for weeks afterwards, incinerating stragglers and other hapless victims who had taken refuge in the wilds of nature.
III. SOUTHERN EUROPE OVERRUN
In Italy the invasion unfolded in a similar manner. Within three days Caliphate forces surrounded Rome and secured a corridor to Pescara on the Adriatic coast, dividing the country in two. As in Spain, the Caliphate faced little opposition in securing and building up its invasion force. Against the wishes of NATO command, the Italian Navy’s two submarines, the MM Enrico Toti and the MM Giada, were given permission to engage the enemy. On 1 March a SkyWatcher high above Germany noted a brief exchange of
fire with Blackswans approximately thirty kilometres off the coast of Anzio, and transmissions from the submarines ceased.
As the days passed, the Caliphate’s strategy in Italy became clearer: the southern half of the country and the islands close by were cut off, and the population would be left to starve. The Caliphate’s sophisticated jamming prevented communication, aid by sea would not be forthcoming, and local Caliphate commanders allowed Blackswans and Lapwings to maraud the towns and villages as they saw fit. For those underneath, any movement carried lethal risk even at night, as the Caliphate’s ACAs were equipped with infrared sensors. This condemned many of those who were not blasted or burned to a painful starvation over the subsequent weeks. In the meantime, lead elements of Warrior Group Centre moved north to meet NATO’s Army Group Centre.
In the east the pattern repeated: Caliphate spearheads overran Greek and Romanian defences within three weeks, and Warrior Group East linked up with Warrior Group Turkey in Sofia on 19 March. More ground had to be gained in this theatre for the Caliphate to consolidate its positions for the major assault on the rest of Europe, which by this stage the Caliph was publicly proclaiming an ‘annexation’. On all three fronts hundreds of thousands of refugees fled before the approaching invaders. Local military and social services struggled to cope, and roads leading away from Caliphate positions were soon lined with corpses. Caliphate units projected jamming beyond the territory they held so that, despite NATO’s best efforts, communications became sporadic.
Young Turkish engineering student Berat Kartal, last seen witnessing the destruction of the Acropolis in Athens, joined the multitudes fleeing north-westwards ahead of the Caliphate’s advance. His handwritten journal provides a unique insight into the problems facing these refugees: ‘So many of these people appear at a loss. Once their devices stop working and they can’t be told where they are or what is going on, panic seems to set in quite quickly. They repeat unverified rumours as though they were gospel. These last four days have been trying: I constantly pass stragglers of all ages heading west towards the sea, in the hope of a boat to Italy. I find it inconceivable that the Caliphate has not invaded there as well, but I have grown wary of striking up conversations with unkempt Romanians, Bulgarians and Serbians. Tonight my bed is in a barn in a village whose name I don’t know, approximately fifty kilometres south of Sarajevo. It is chilly outside but not uncomfortable in here. A draft whistles through broken slats in the roof, but that helps me to calm down somewhat, and there is a well in the yard which gives some water. I counted twelve bodies along the roadsides today, including a little girl… I bless my university course, which taught me such outdated things as basic navigation and cartography, although I worry it might not help if my boots continue to deteriorate. I will have to find a new pair soon, and then break them in somehow. My plan is to reach Sarajevo airport and hopefully get on an evacuation flight. Then again, I have nothing to barter for a seat, and could hardly - me, a fit young man - claim a place afore a young mother or an elderly person. But how long can I keep ahead of the Caliphate?’