The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  He stood up. “First order, then,” he said, trusting them to carry it out. “I want us to mobilise what remains of the Territorial Army, and then prepare to retake our cities, by whatever means necessary. Briggs was talking about problems in London, so I want whatever survived at the nearby garrisons formed up into scratch units and moved in. I want those problems stamped on fast.”

  “Second; I want as much as possible of the navy at sea,” he continued. “I – we – need to secure the sea lanes as quickly as possible, before it occurs to the Russians that sinking a few dozen ships would complete the task of strangling us. Get back in touch with Admiral Wilkinson, whatever it takes. We’re going to have to recall his force and forget the Falklands. For now.”

  Casey was moved to protest. “Sir…?”

  Langford swung around on him. “What price the jewel in the crown, such as it is, if the crown itself is lost?” Casey said nothing. “Third…dear God, what do we tell the people…?”

  Erica smiled. “You could always tell them the truth,” she said. “There are a lot of frightened people out there and they need to know that there is continuity of government and that it’s not the end of the world.”

  “I know,” Langford said. “But Major…what if it is?”

  Interlude Two: The Price of Inaction

  All over Europe, the chickens were coming home.

  It started in Paris, where Algerian sleeper cells had worked for years, preparing the revolution. The plan had been simple; supplying the weapons had been even simpler. The Algerians had only a small force of radicals, but they knew that many of their fellow Arabs would join them, while the Palestinians would bring their talents at confounding the Israelis to work against the French. At the designated moment, the call for Jihad was sent out and the first bombs started to detonate in the city.

  All over Paris, police and government buildings found themselves under attack; the missile strikes had shattered the French command and control systems, preventing a unified response. Algerian sleeper teams seized several important targets, while isolated police and military units found themselves fighting a desperate running battle for survival. They responded with brutal force, allowing racism to surge to the surface, inciting more violence as Paris dissolved into a nightmare of fire and death. The sleepers had planned carefully; before the day was done, they wanted to hold the entire city and proclaim their new world.

  The same story was occurring all over Europe. In Spain, long the favoured destination of Moroccans and Algerians, massive bombs shattered buildings and spread panic. Rumours were rife, ranging from the long-dreaded civil war courted by the ETA to a landing of soldiers from America; panic and chaos spread rapidly. The missiles had shattered the Spanish Government, leaving only fire and death in their wake. In Germany, the far-right came out and attacked Muslim and Turkish immigrants, along with Russian guest workers and even American tourists, promoting massive retaliation by the ethnic groups. A savage multi-sided war had begun right in the heart of Europe.

  The Russians had inserted themselves into many far-right and far-left groups in Europe; the Algerians had worked hard to control the different Islamic groups. The combination was explosive as the first dominos fell, one by one; attack was repaid by attack and then a full-scale race war broke out. The police, seen as the enemy by all sides in the conflict, were forced back, often right out of the cities completely; more than a few policemen, their fortitude torn and broken by multiculturalism, tore off their uniforms and vanished into the night. The terror had taken on a life of its own; no one, not even the Algerians, could control it. It didn’t matter, or so the Russian planners had intended; the chaos could only work in the Russian favour.

  The Netherlands, the capital of radical Islam in Europe, found itself sucked into darkness as the first bombs detonated. The Dutch had been growing ever more resentful of the population of Muslims within their ranks; no one would forget in a hurry the murder of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic extremist. Even as Muslim radicals asked the dreaded question – “are you with us or against us?” – to the other Muslims in the Netherlands, the far-right was already on the march. The streets ran with blood.

  The civil network had broken down almost at once, first under the impact of Russian missiles, and then under the pressure from Russian commando groups. Unseen, unheard, the Russians moved silently through Europe, taking out targets that could become problems, later. Politicians who showed fortitude were targeted for elimination; weapons dumps and other military bases were targeted for destruction or capture. In some cases, groups of anarchists snatched weapons and used them on everyone, fighting for their own purposes, while the cities burnt around them. The Russians, untouched, carried on their grizzly work.

  A dozen timers ticked down in a dozen ships. The tankers had been stalled in port because of a strike; an embarrassed Russian government had paid their tolls…and Europe had laughed at the Russians who hadn’t dared to strike outside free and liberal Europe. Now, the timers reached zero and ships loaded with Liquid Natural Gas exploded, devastating the surrounding areas and forcing the remains of the European emergency services to concentrate on a very different disaster. Isolated, cut off from their superiors, they did what they could, unaware of the real threat.

  In the south of France, the explosions were a sign to the Algerian Special Forces units that had been inserted into France two weeks before the war began. Five thousand Algerians had gone to Russia to be trained; seven hundred had returned, each one a lethal killer and a ruthless operative. They moved now as the sky lit up with unholy fire, driving towards the massive refugee camps that had been set up to house the immigrants from Algeria, Morocco and further south in Africa. The French had wanted to return them, but the European Courts had said no; they had remained there, day after day, under guard…

  The guards disliked their job and the people they watched over. Some of them did the best they could, some of them abused the refugees, or traded food for sexual purposes. They were hardly the cream of the French armed forces…and there was no reason to expect that they would be attacked in the heart of France. The sudden assault overwhelmed them; the guards killed before they could sound an alarm, and the commandos looked upon those who had fled their country, months ago. Many of them had allowed themselves to be caught.

  Weapons had been provided and limited plans made; the makeshift army surged out of the camp, already forming up into groups. The commandos knew how to control brute troops; they had gained respect by killing the guards and they used that mercilessly. Under their leadership, the refugees would take part in the violence, intended to establish the Islamic State of France. None of them knew, nor would they have cared, that the Russian plans were very different. Doubt was not in their mindset; the few dissenters among the male population, those who had been in the camps and had escaped being radicalised, were rapidly dispatched with quick shots to the head. Howling, the army set off towards the burning city on the horizon, the Promised Land that had turned its back on them.

  In Britain, the situation was different. In the light of burning cities, far-right groups launched attacks; Muslim groups fought back, the situation made worse by the sight of aircraft crashing and wild rumours spreading across the country. As in Europe, police stations and TA bases found themselves under attack; a string of accidents to gladden the heart of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf occurred on the streets. Manchester, Bradford, Luton, Liverpool, Birmingham and even some parts of London fell into civil disorder and chaos; both sides, once again, were targeting the police as well as any other part of the national government. The chaos seemed unending…

  No one knew that, in Poland, it had only just begun.

  Chapter Eighteen: A Day That Will Live In Infamy, Take One

  There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily. All because one man went to sleep on the job. But they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before they did.

  George S. Patton


  Near Warsaw, Poland

  “Regarding your response to my request for another infantry regiment, I must say that it is most inconvenient,” General Konrad Trautman dictated to his assistant. “I have the task, it seems, of defending the borders of Poland without either a clear mission statement or sufficient force to deter a cross-border raid. As the Polish President has made clear to Parliament, the Russians can rush a force into the border, complete their mission and withdraw, all the while being fairly safe from our interference. Two heavy armoured units are valuable, but they are not suited to the role of rapid reaction force, while for political reasons Polish units are held back.”

  He took a breath. “I must say that this is not improving the reputation of EUROFOR in the Polish military,” he continued. It was one of his less serious problems…the serious problems were potentially disastrous. “The Poles are fast running out of patience with us and only their dependence upon energy supplies from Russia have prevented them from defying us and moving up their own infantry, counting on them to deter any raids. If this happens, Commissioner, I must question the value of both the security guarantee and the Parliament’s commitment to Poland. EUROFOR must be reinforced effectively or heads will roll.”

  He smiled tiredly at his assistant. “Sign it and have it sent by courier back to Brussels, marked for the attention of Commissioner Henri Guichy,” he ordered. His opinion of Guichy wasn’t high; odd, given that most of the German Army regarded him as Guichy’s closest German ally. “Have the courier issued with all of the special permits that he will require to gain admittance into the headquarters.”

  “Yes, sir,” his assistant said.

  She saluted and left the room. Trautman watched her go, wishing that he shared her problems; his problems seemed almost insolvable. The EUROFOR organisation had managed to deploy the rough equivalent of two divisions to Poland, backing up the forces the Poles kept ready for action, but they were hardly prepared for the role of securing the borders. The chaos that broke out, from time to time, in Belarus sent thousands of refugees fleeing across the border, some of them with bad intentions towards Russia. The Russians launched raids to capture them…and the Poles were prevented by the European Parliament from securing their own borders, just to avoid provocation. Instead, they had…

  They had General Trautman and EUROFOR. Trautman had spent enough time with each of the major units to know that they were hardly prepared for the task; the two heavy armoured units, one from France, one from Germany, were not suited to the task of sealing the borders. If the Russians ever launched a raid with heavy armour, then they might be useful, but otherwise, Trautman was grimly aware that getting them into position would take far too long. He needed more infantry…and it was infantry that the European Defence Commission was refusing to send him.

  He scowled at the map. Poland was a large country and it had a long land border, almost impossible to secure at the best of times, one that was crossed regularly by criminals and terrorists as well as illegal immigrants and freedom fighters from Belarus. The Russians called them terrorists and demanded that the Poles hand them over; the Poles themselves would have been happy to comply. European laws, however, were clear; anyone seeking asylum had to be granted at least provisional asylum unless there were very clear circumstances proving that they should be returned. Trautman had read enough of the media’s left-wing reporting – and the outraged right-wing independent media – to know that there seemed to be no case where someone would actually be sent back to face justice. If Brussels was prepared to give asylum to people wanted for the bombing in Oakland, there was no way that they would send Russians back to Russia.

  There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Trautman shouted. One of the EUROFOR communications officers entered. “Report.”

  “General, we have a report from the field,” Captain Philippe Laroche said. The French officer was mercifully free of the institutional bias of Guichy and his fellow commissioners; most junior French officers were at least as good as their German or British counterparts. The French just had a habit of promoting officers for their political skills rather than their military skills; General Éclair had had political skills as well as military skills, a rarity in any army. “Several border guards are reporting that they can hear engines on the far side of the border.”

  Trautman glanced down at the map; Laroche pointed out the location. “That hardly seems likely,” he said, as he worked through it in his head. “There’s no refugee camp near there, just the border guards and an infantry unit.”

  He glanced up. “Is there anything on the radars?”

  He would have been delighted to have taken up the American offer of a direct feed from the American bases in Poland. He would have been even more delighted to have had an American armoured division attached to his force; few countries enjoyed the thought of picking a fight with the Americans these days, not after Tehran had paid the price for the nuclear attack on American forces…even though the Jihadist propaganda claimed that it had been in response to the attack on Israel. The European Defence Commission had made its will clear…and Trautman was a loyal servant of Europe.

  He was uncomfortably aware that General Éclair would have done it anyway.

  “No, sir, just normal traffic,” Laroche said. “The Russians keep rerouting aircraft away from the Ukraine, but after that lunatic was seen with a SAM launcher, there was little else that they could do. The pilots are getting used to it; we can listen in on their chatter sometimes. The Russians have their standard five-ship air patrol up, but no sign of anything that would be supporting a cross-border raid.”

  Trautman rubbed his head. He was about to start his first headache of the day. If he sent out the alert, the Poles would be on hair-triggers and end up firing on Russians, or even perhaps accidentally firing on European units. If he didn’t send out an alert, the situation might get better, but it might also get worse…and if that happened, his forces would be caught on the hop.

  “Tell them to get ready to get ready,” he said, hoping that the young Dutchman in command of the closest European force would know what he meant. “If we need to support them, then…”

  The buzzer sounded. “General, you asked to be notified when the Polish supply convoy arrived,” his assistant said. “They’re just pulling up…”

  Her voice vanished; moments later, the lights and computers faded and died. Trautman opened his mouth to say something and realised that they had had a power cut; emergency systems were coming online, trying to get everything running again, but the small generator that the Soviets had left them with in the base hadn’t anything like enough capability to power everything. He had wanted to move in a more modern generator, but the idea had been dismissed as ‘unnecessarily provocative.’ There were times when he wondered if the entire European Defence Commission was in the pay of the Russians.

  “We’ve had a power cut,” he said, calmly. Laroche had drawn his service weapon and was looking around grimly. “”I don’t think there’s anything to worry about…”

  An explosion shook the camp, followed rapidly by a second explosion and a burst of heavy gunfire. Trautman recognised the sound at once; those were Russian weapons. His mouth fell open…and then the window burst as a third explosion detonated, far too close for comfort. He could hear the sound of mortars being fired and rounds impacting within the camp and realised, dimly, that they were under attack.

  “Sir,” Laroche shouted at him. Trautman found himself on the floor, the cold hard Russian floor, without a clear memory of how he’d landed there. “Sir, we have to get out of here!”

  The building shook again. Laroche was making sound tactical sense; they couldn’t remain in a building that the Russians – if Russians they were – would know perfectly. Trautman yanked open a drawer and removed his own service weapon, cursing the limited ammunition; if he had to fight, he would only have nine shots before he ran out of bullets. The door burst open and he almost shot the intruder before rea
lising who he was, the commanding officer of the French paratroopers who had somehow been assigned to the base. It had been at that moment that he had realised that the European Defence Commission just didn’t care…but now he was grateful. French paratroopers had a tough reputation.

  “Sir, we have to get you out of here,” the leader said. Trautman struggled to remember the Frenchman’s name; Captain Paul Montagne, if he recalled correctly. A service record with details classified beyond even his clearance, but some details of service in Africa and even in an ill-fated attempt to topple the Islamic Government in Algeria had slipped through the cracks. “This base is under attack!”

  Another explosion shook the base. “Fine,” Trautman snapped, as the paratrooper hustled them out into the corridor. Four more paratroopers, all heavily armed, were securing the corridor, their eyes flickering left and right as they waited for contact with the enemy. “What’s happening?”

  Montagne motioned for two of his people to go ahead and check out the corridor down towards the rear exit of the base. “The Polish Convoy was larger than it was supposed to be, but the guards let the lead truck into the gate anyway, whereupon a truck bomb exploded and killed the guards; two more truck bombs devastated the remainder of the defences. Armed men appeared and launched an attack; I sent the remainder of my people down to the rear entrance to hopefully keep it secure.”