by Chris James
XVIII. NATO ADVANCES
On Friday 2 November the war took a decisive turn in favour of NATO forces with the first deployment of the Scythe Omega ACA. The initial squadrons were assigned to the USAF and sent to relieve the Marines on the Spanish/Franco border. The preceding two weeks had seen a war of attrition develop, with the Pyrenees and surrounding terrain littered with more than half a million shot down ACAs, including thousands of Caliphate machines and the hundreds of thousands of NATO devices required to fight them to hold the line.
Airspace Monitor First Class Harrison Breece, who had witnessed the introduction of the Siskin two weeks earlier, now saw the balance of power shift in the opposite direction. He later recalled: ‘The Omega really was the ultimate fighting machine of the whole war. If you understood the physics involved, what they made that thing able to do was somethin’ else. They’d come up with a universal-angle propulsion unit twice as powerful as anything the raghead had. All of the ACAs were real manoeuvrable, but the Omega could dance rings round them all.’
The spatial dexterity of the Omega gave it a fundamental edge over the Siskin. In the initial engagements that Friday morning, the first three squadrons defeated more than a hundred Caliphate machines without the loss of a single Omega. Marines on the battlefield described their amazement: ‘The damn thing moved quicker than your eye could follow.’ said one private. Another reflected: ‘I couldn’t work out how it dissipated the friction-heat moving through air like that must cause. The son of a bitch acted like it was in space, no gravity, no drag. The ragheads’ machines couldn’t keep up and were shooting into thin air.’
Throughout the first two weeks of November, Omegas were produced and deployed the length of the frontline in Europe. This also led to a positive change in the troops’ attitude. Major Basel wrote in a report to his CO: ‘There is a feeling in the ranks that the war is back on. We still take casualties daily on the advance, but whenever an Omega zips around on the scene, surrounded by a squadron of X-7s or X-9s, one can sense an increased determination to retake more ground.’
As NATO forces advanced, more harrowing stories of survival and sacrifice emerged. As noted above, the pattern seldom varied, with Caliphate warriors committing the basest crimes against broadly defenceless civilians. In The Great European Disaster, G. K. Morrow lists with depressing banality the thousands of victims as troops found them and recorded details of the scenes. For example, at Strakonice in the Czech Republic, a town with a pre-war population of twenty-five thousand, support units following units of the German 21st Armoured listed a mere fifteen-hundred survivors. As G. K. Morrow noted: ‘Nearly each ruined building told a disturbing story. In one house, the remains of a family of seven, dead since the beginning; in the next, eleven young women - four of them pregnant - with their throats recently cut; at a road junction, up to a hundred badly charred corpses, probably male.’ Such scenes were repeated the length and breadth of Europe, and understandably led to demands for revenge from the surviving populations.
On Thursday 8 November, there began a two-day conference at the newly refurbished Shangri-La Hotel in Paris to decide the post-war strategy for Europe. President Coll, English PM Napier and the heads of all European governments-in-exile were joined by military chiefs from the NATO armies. A split in the political consensus soon became apparent. As Napier’s aide recorded in his diary: ‘So far it’s all been about reclaiming Europe, but now we’re here to discuss the next steps. And the boss has a problem: Liam Burton is talking about an invasion of the Caliphate. He’s got a few of Coll’s people on his side, but we’re not sure how many of the Cabinet would follow him. It really is a shock. Liam knows most of the figures. You don’t need a super AI to tell you we’d have no chance whatsoever to beat the Caliphate on its own ground - it’s larger than Europe, for one thing, and for another, what would we do with their civilians? Kill them all? Nope, I’m sure Liam wants the boss’s job, but I think she can handle him.’
The desire for revenge understandably coloured many attendees’ perception of what would constitute an acceptable post-war settlement. Coll and Napier had held previous discussions during which both women agreed that NATO was not militarily powerful enough to effect an invasion and defeat of any substantial portion of Caliphate territory. In consultation with their military experts and super AI, the President and Prime Minister understood that the only potential avenue of a peaceful settlement would be the payment of suitable reparations. The American super AI tasked with estimating the financial cost of the Caliphate’s work in Europe gave a range of four to six quintillion Yuan. Now, however, NATO had deployed a new and more powerful ACA than any device the enemy had. Those who considered that the Caliphate’s towns and cities should be obliged to suffer a similar experience, led by the British Defence Secretary, tried strongly to push the agenda to include an explicit declaration to make war on the Caliphate, led by the Scythe Omega.
The first day’s debates centred on the need to secure the safety of Europe’s future. The conference heard from a number of military scientists who described the defensive role the Scythe Alpha would play. When the British Defence Secretary asked if the Alpha could be re-tasked for a more offensive purpose, the meeting descended into angry exchanges between the two factions. Writing in In the Eye of the Storm, Sir Terry Tidbury said: ‘Emotions ran high, I could understand that. What I could not understand was the idea of invading the Caliphate, because that would extend the war indefinitely with no guarantee of victory, and no idea what to do with the conquered territory if victory were achieved. I did not wish to get involved at all in the political aspects of this scrap. I was a soldier, and my job was to ensure Repulse succeeded. If at some future point my political masters had ordered me to attack the Caliphate, I would have likely responded by resigning.’
Sir Terry’s view expressed above is one of the few which attempted a semblance of measured distance. Coll and Napier agreed that at the war’s end, when Caliphate forces had been expelled from the European mainland, the priority would be to prevent a repeat of the disaster two years earlier. This is what the Scythe Alpha had been designed to achieve. In this they were undoubtedly correct, but both women came under severe pressure from their political enemies and their countries’ media. There appeared a wilful refusal to acknowledge the practical difficulties and ruinous cost of mounting an invasion of the Caliphate. Europe’s economies were shattered, and would take years to rebuild after the end of hostilities. In addition, super-AI forecasts predicted the Alpha and Omega would enjoy battlefield superiority for only six to twelve months before the Caliphate responded with a superior weapon, thus Europe would be obliged to continue an aggressive arms race until the Caliphate was wholly defeated. In a further complication, if NATO forces did invade enemy territory, the risk of suffering nuclear and other similar attacks rose exponentially, as Tehran would likely be prepared to sacrifice its outer populations to defend its core territory.
Almost in an admission of defeat, none of the belligerents who demanded a continuation of the war troubled themselves to produce any kind of detailed plan. Two days after the Paris Conference, Napier fired her Defence Secretary and three other cabinet members, replacing them with junior ministers who demonstrated a faculty for allowing facts to take precedence over their emotions. After the war, some of these discarded individuals would gleefully add to the volume of literature criticising Coll, Napier and those who saw the tactical situation through more pragmatic eyes.
The second day of the Paris Conference dealt mostly with economic and reconstruction issues, apart from one brief debate which would become highly controversial after the war. As Repulse progressed, the NATO warlords assumed surviving warriors would be withdrawn on the air transports which had delivered them. With little deliberation, the decision was taken to deploy all available submarines to the Mediterranean to intercede. In the event, and as will be shown below, this decision would account for the highest number of warrior casualties during the war.
> The second half of November saw hundreds more Omegas deployed and was followed by a corresponding acceleration of territory recovered. Winter descended on Northern Europe, and, as Sir Terry Tidbury had desired for Repulse all along, Caliphate forces were obliged to fight their retreat in progressively colder conditions. This led to a hastier withdrawal. In the north, the Polish First Battalion hurried on to Poland’s eastern border with Belorussia and the Kalingrad enclave. NATO poured more formations fresh from England into the theatre in anticipation of Russian interference. On 29 November General Pakla of the Polish First Battalion authored a situation report and sent it back to SACEUR, expressing his, and to an extent his country’s, fears: ‘Conditions on the ground appear to be as the SkyMasters report. The first snowfalls have done little to disrupt ACA activity, and the border is calm. One can conjecture that the Russian military is in hiding, biding its time, but so far our fears of an invasion from the east have not been realised.’
Nor would they be. As became apparent over the following days and weeks, the president of Russia had withdrawn the bulk of his forces from Belorussia. While some historians after the war tried to suggest this was due to pressure from China, no evidence has come to light to support this. A more likely explanation is the presence of a significant number of Scythe Omegas. The best Russian ACA at that time had far weaker capabilities than the new NATO machines. Military pragmatism appears to have played the major role in Moscow’s decision not to take advantage of Europe’s savaged condition to steal Polish territory.
NATO forces entered Warsaw in the early hours of Sunday 2 December. Through swirling snow, they found a city ruined like so many before it. Private Natalia Ornass, who had helped capture the first injured Caliphate warrior eighteen months earlier, now returned to her home town and described the scene: ‘All of the churches were destroyed. Sometimes a spire reared up through the blowing waves of snow, but it only sat atop a pile of rubble. All the time you’re fighting in other places, you know what it’s for. You’re helping people, your country, you’re helping Europe. But when I got to Warsaw and saw what the raghead had done there, to my town, to streets I’d travelled down a thousand times, then I felt real pain. It was ironic, never had I felt more ready to fight, but there were no ragheads left in Warsaw. They’d all run away because it was too cold for them.’
Throughout December the NATO front pushed southwards, meeting only sporadic resistance from Caliphate forces. While Private Ornass and many troops ascribed the enemy’s absence to inclement weather, the truth was more layered. After the war, the West would gain more details of the upheaval inside the Caliphate at this time. The practical result was that the armies of the democracies continued to advance and casualties to lessen. The Polish First Battalion reached Kraków on 4 December and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains two days later. On its right flank, elements of the German 21st Armoured and British First Corps cleared the Czech Republic and advanced into Austria, Slovakia and then into Hungary.
Attack Group South secured the Iberian Peninsula on 12 December, in a final battle involving retreating warriors at Valencia. US Marine Gill Stevenson complained at the time: ‘We were pissed. We found a base that must have serviced tens if not hundreds of the Caliphate’s air transports - and it was empty. We couldn’t believe we were letting the pieces of shit escape back to their own territory.’ Unknown to Private Stevenson and her comrades, however, fifteen NATO submarines stalked the sea between Europe and North Africa, periodically launching super-AI controlled sea-to-air missiles. These small devices emerged from the waves and attacked the Caliphate air transports. Despite the Siskins screening them, post-war estimates suggest over 80% of these transports were brought down. On 12 December alone, the Caliphate endured more than one hundred thousand warrior casualties. An able seaman serving aboard HMS Spiteful said after the war: ‘We were very safe at a depth of five hundred metres. After an hour or so, we began detecting the wreckage of their air transports drifting slowly down to the bottom. I think the atmosphere on the boat could best be described as “grimly satisfying”. Almost all of us had lost someone to these bastards since the war began, and we didn’t mind knowing they were drowning. Each blip on the screen represented up to twelve hundred dead ragheads. My mate turned to me at one point and whispered: “I bet the fuckers wish they had a navy now.” I only smiled and nodded, enjoying the justice.’
XIX. DEFENDING GAINS
The military imperative became to secure the Spanish coastline. The first Scythe Alphas were deployed on a one-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre line between Almeria and Cartagena. A senior development technician explained at the time how the new ACAs operated: ‘They patrolled high, not as high as a SkyMaster, but above any attack unit the enemy used. When instructed, they could come right down and generate shielding to block an enemy attack. With sufficient numbers, they would block any extensive attempt. The Alpha carried no weapons and had limited manoeuvrability. In essence it was one big flying shielding generator. At the tactical level, in an attack it would be down to the Omegas to actually deal with the enemy, but with enough Alphas nothing would get through to hit civilians.’
On 19 December, many earthquake-monitoring stations around the world detected a tremor originating from inside the Caliphate, with an epicentre near Medina, North Saudi Province. At the time, Tehran put out a statement that there had indeed been a small earthquake with few casualties. Only after the war would it be confirmed that the event was in fact the detonation of a two-kiloton nuclear warhead, part of the on-going turmoil inside the Caliphate. Unknown to the NATO powers, many thousands of warriors who sated their appetites in Europe now wished to return to their homelands to confront issues there. For example, many battalion-strength formations which made up Warrior Group Centre were composed of men drawn from regions either in or close to North Saudi Province. But for many, there would be no return as the NATO submarines in the Mediterranean defeated their air transports’ ACA cover and sent the majority to a watery grave.
XX. FINAL RECOVERY
By 1 January 2064 only Italy, the lower Balkans and Greece remained under Caliphate control. The three NATO attack groups had linked up and the generals enjoyed the rare luxury of selecting formations to drive down from Monaco, Milan and Venice to clear Italy, and of deciding whether to give the honour of regaining Greece to Polish, German or British armies. Although less violent than at the beginning of Repulse, in the last month of the war carelessness would still be punished. Blackswans and Siskins were thrown into battle in numerous skirmishes, usually to be defeated by Scythes before they could reach NATO troops. Spiders were left to lay dormant as warriors retreated, ready to catch the unwary patrol. A few hundred small warrior formations opted to make tactically pointless stands, able only to engage the advancing troops if they could evade the attention of the Scythes, which few did. Nevertheless, each day throughout January the NATO armies averaged six hundred casualties, albeit down from the two-thousand-per-day average at the start of the operation the previous August.
Rome was regained on 8 January; Sarajevo and Belgrade the next day. Diplomatic approaches were made to Beijing to intercede with the Caliphate to discuss reparations, but the response nonplussed London and Washington: the Chinese government claimed not to know who was currently in charge in Tehran. In a remarkably frank virtual conference with Coll and Napier on 12 January, Chinese Foreign Minister Lu Chen admitted that ‘something’ had happened and the Caliphate’s notorious secrecy now extended to the one country that used to be its main trading partner and conduit to the rest of the world. The staffs of both leaders lost little time using their countries’ limited resources to verify the Chinese claim. US and British intelligence agencies came under further pressure to discover information, which in turn led to incidents that in peacetime might have caused serious diplomatic incidents.
The case of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Buckley is little-known outside journalistic circles, as his indiscretions were soon overtaken by
events. On 12 January in Maputo, Mozambique, Buckley followed a Chinese trade delegation as they left government offices to dine at an exclusive restaurant. The delegation included a high-ranking member of Chinese intelligence, who Buckley wanted to question about the Caliphate’s current situation. As the dinner progressed with Buckley keeping a prudent distance, he saw his chance when his target went to the bathroom. Buckley followed, intending to mob the Chinese official into revealing that Beijing was in truth orchestrating the upheaval inside the Caliphate to take global media attention off of the extensive slaughter now being revealed in Europe. Unfortunately for Buckley and unknown to him, the feared CIA had exactly the same intention that evening. Reports of what happened are to a degree contradictory, but what is not in doubt is that both the Chinese intelligence member and Buckley were killed when a CIA agent overreacted to their failure to surrender when confronted emerging from the bathroom. The death of a high-ranking member of the Chinese intelligence services at the hands of the CIA would have been a serious headache for Washington, but such was the global sense of disruption given the speed of events, Beijing made no formal protest. (Most historians of the war accept that the killing of an American businessman in Brasilia five days later, officially ascribed to a petty mugging, was in fact a tit-for-tat assassination by the Chinese, something which Washington seemed happy to accept to resolve the problem.)