The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Helicopters,” Matthews shouted, loud enough to be heard over the firing. Robinson realised that he was using one of the loudspeakers. “Incoming helicopters!”

  Robinson turned his head and saw them; four helicopters, black and hanging in the air like angry angels. There was no mistaking them; they were Russian assault helicopters, each one armed to the teeth. He’d seen briefings on them; deployed to Afghanistan and Chechnya, they had been feared by the insurgents and underground fighters alike. They would make short work of his position and he didn’t have anything that could touch them except…

  “Ben, tell me that you can kill those bastards,” he shouted. The Russian attack seemed to have tailed off as the helicopters drew closer; the British took the opportunity to pick off several Russians who had unwisely exposed themselves. “Tell me that or we’ll have to make a break for it!”

  “Trust me,” Matthews shouted back. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” Robinson demanded. He thought again of Hazel; what was happening to her in the new world? What would happen to her? The black helicopters were racing closer now; it wouldn’t be long before they opened fire. “just kill those cock-suckers…”

  The first CADS opened fire. The roar was deafeningly loud, much louder than a Stinger missile or a Yank missile; the line of light seemed impossibly fast as it slammed into the lead helicopter and blew it apart. The second opened fire, then the third; the first finished off the fourth helicopter. It was the only helicopter to fire a shot; the missile struck one of the CADS and blew it away, sending red-hot shrapnel everywhere.

  “Fuck the lot of you,” Matthews shouted; his voice gleeful. Robinson laughed as Matthews shouted out his victory. “Who’s your daddy, eh?”

  There was a final round of firing and the attack finished, as quickly as it had begun. The enemy soldiers faded away into the woods and vanished, watched warily by their British enemies. Robinson felt as if he had run a ten-mile race in minutes; his breathing was coming think and heavy, the strange rush of combat fading as the danger ebbed. He forced himself to think and think hard; what the hell had just happened?

  “Status report, right bloody now,” he snapped at Inglehart who saluted and turned to count the cost. The soldiers had all performed well; some of them had just had their first doze of a real fight. It had been surprisingly clean, compared to the Sudan; the enemy had been quite honourable, in their way. “Jacob, find out who they are!”

  “CADS Three is a complete write-off,” Matthews said, looking grim. He too was coming down from the rush of combat. “The missile punched into the truck and detonated; there’s literally nothing left of the crew.” He paused. “We can’t stay here.”

  “I worked that out,” Robinson said. “What do you think is happening?”

  Matthews picked up the military-grade laptop and opened it. It might have been slower by several orders of magnitude than most civilian machines, but it was tough; a group of soldiers had once used it for a football and the machine had been undamaged. The radar feed might have been gone, but it still had its memory; it had recorded all that the radar had seen.

  “This is what we were seeing, just before the first missile,” Matthews said. “Notice how quickly everything changes and compare that to our position behind the lines. We were not in the path of a cross-border raid, sir; we were deliberately targeted, along with plenty of other targets in Poland. If they attacked us, they attacked more or less half of Poland, perhaps all of Poland.”

  Robinson looked east. Columns of smoke were rising in the distance. “This is war,” Matthews said. “They intended to destroy us, both removing your force off the balance sheets and destroying the radar; my CADS is designed to act as a passive radar sensor as well, and it’s reporting that there are very few radars still operating in range. The attack we beat off is going to report that we are still alive and that we still have two CADS…and then they’re going to come searching for us.”

  Robinson desperately started to look for a hole. “But…they sent the helicopters here against the CADS,” he protested. “Do they know…?”

  “They do now,” Matthews said. “The original version of the CADS had the radar and the missiles mounted on the same truck; the Russians might just have assumed that we had the same kind of vehicles and launched an attack using helicopters. It hardly matters, sir; we cannot stay here.”

  Robinson nodded. “Get your vehicles moving at once,” he ordered. “I’ll get the men ready.”

  “We lost twenty-one, with seven injured,” Inglehart reported, as the CADS roared to life behind them. Robinson cursed; that meant that half of his strength had been killed. “We also lost three of the lorries; all of them were taken out by enemy mortar fire…”

  “Have the wounded moved into the remaining lorry and prepare to move out,” Robinson snapped. “Jacob, anything?”

  “There’s nothing on the handful of bodies,” Anastazy reported. “Sir, I don’t know for sure, but those were definitely Russian helicopters and they were…”

  “I know,” Robinson said. There was no drill planned for any such incident; the closest they had come to planning for a full-scale Russian attack was a plan to cut off a major cross-border raid. “We have to move out, somewhere west. If we can’t get in contact with higher authority…”

  “I got something,” the radioman called. “There’s a signal, in Polish…”

  Anastazy listened carefully…and paled. “No,” he said. “It can’t be…its Molobo!”

  Robinson wanted to slap him. “Translate it,” he ordered. Anastazy’s country might be under threat, but he cared more for the lives of his soldiers, the men under his command. He needed every possible source of intelligence and Anastazy was the only one he had. Whoever Molobo was, he had to be connected to the Russians somehow. “I need to know what they’re saying!”

  Anastazy took a breath. “Citizens of Poland, this is an emergency announcement,” he recited, as the speaker started to repeat himself. “There is a military and civil emergency going on; remain in your homes and stay off the streets. Do not venture outside. Do not attempt to use telephones, radios or other methods of communication; all communications must be reserved for the emergency services. Whatever you see or hear, stay in your homes; do not put yourself and the lives of your friends and families in danger. Electric supplies will be restored as soon as possible. Further information will be relayed to you as soon as possible; continue to listen on this frequency and ignore every other frequency. I repeat; these are very dangerous times. Stay in your homes.”

  The message began to repeat. “Jesus,” Inglehart breathed. Robinson shook his head slowly as the sinister import of the message began to sink in. “What the hell does it mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Lieutenant Benjamin Matthews snapped. “The Russians are invading Poland…and we’re caught in the middle!”

  Chapter Twenty-One: Strike from the Sky, Take One

  I love it when a plan comes together.

  The A-Team

  Polish Airspace, Near Szczecin

  “Are you sure that this is actually working?”

  Captain Boris Lapotev shrugged. “So far, there’s been nothing since we lost contact with the ground,” he said. “The Europeans put all their eggs in one basket, and what part of the civil aviation network the missiles didn’t fuck up got fucked up by the cyber attacks. We’re just a group of harmless civilian aircraft who are meandering blindly along towards Szczecin-Goleniów Airport. What could go wrong?”

  Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev, who knew much more about the overall plan than Lapotev, said nothing. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that one of their own commandos down on the ground would launch a SAM at them…and any of the countermeasures built into the aircraft, if used, would give away their real identity. It might not matter, not with the confusion down on the ground, but it was better to be safe than sorry. On the ground, the five hundred commandos under his command wer
e dangerous; in the air, they were sitting ducks for enemy aircraft.

  He glanced back out of the cockpit. The aircraft had once been a fairly normal Boeing 747, before the Russian Air Force had gotten their hands on it and handed it over to the GRU. Now, it looked like a normal jetliner, acted like a normal jetliner, but it had carrying space for over a hundred commandos and their equipment. They could have packed more into the aircraft, but he knew that if they were lucky, they could take the airport, and if the Germans or Poles had time to react and dig in, they were all about to die. Everything depended upon the Europeans being fooled.

  They’d taken off in the early hours of the morning, replacing a set of aircraft that had been coming the long way around the Ukraine, something that had become routine after several years of chaos and the occasional explosion in the Ukraine. Russia had bent over backwards to ensure that the pilots, crew and passengers of those aircraft had felt welcome on their brief stopover on a Russian airport, but the last time had been different. Passengers and pilots had been herded off their aircraft; the IFFs had been quickly copied and a new flight of aircraft were on their way, to all intents and purposes the same as the aircraft that had landed…at least from the outside observer’s point of view. The long flight had been nerve-wrecking – they'd seen at least one vast explosion in the distance – but the combination of jamming, limited contact with other aircraft and panic on the ground had prevented anyone from asking questions that Lapotev couldn’t have answered.

  “Roger that, Speedbird-Seven,” Lapotev said. Aliyev covered his mouth to conceal a smile; anyone who knew the actual pilot’s voice would blame any misunderstandings on the jamming. “We confirm no contact with anyone on the ground; have you any contacts at all?”

  He thumbed the radio off and grinned. “Everyone is completely confused and doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on,” he said. “Some of them might try to land at the airports anyway, even without radio contact.”

  “I had limited contact with Dresden, Ukraine-Four,” Speedbird said. Lapotev had identified it as a British aircraft, intending to fly into Poland before all hell had broken loose. “They’re warning of terrorists with missiles and rioting on the ground, and then we lost contact again.”

  Aliyev said nothing. He couldn’t remember, offhand, if Dresden was a target or not for commando teams, but the airport would certainly have received a dose of missiles, just to ensure that it didn’t start helping military aircraft into the air. Dresden had played host to a large immigrant community, he remembered; perhaps some of the FSB’s attempts to spread rioting had actually worked there. He scowled down at the final update from an operative in Szczecin; there had certainly been no sign of any military presence at the airport, but standard European procedure was to put all the airports on alert…if they knew that there had been SAM attacks elsewhere in Europe. One of the problems with such attacks was that it was impossible to know just how well you had done…his force might have an easy fight or run headlong into a battle they couldn’t win.

  Fortune favours the brave, he reminded himself. There was no questioning the bravery of his men. They had served together in the worst of war zones, which had allowed them to weed out everyone who might have let them down at the worst possible time. Poland should be an easy target compared to some places in Central Asia. Who dares…wins…most of the time.

  Speedbird-Seven was talking again. “I have radar and aircraft coming into Poland,” he said. He was still on the verge of panic; his radar had to be seeing the first thrust of Russian aircraft into western Poland. There would be fighters and transports heading in everywhere now. The plan was coming together. “What is going on?”

  “I think that there have been a few terrorist attacks,” Lapotev said. “I think that if we are patient, we will know what to do pretty soon.”

  Aliyev smiled at him. That wasn't likely.

  Lapotev unkeyed the radio and scowled. “I feel like just telling him the truth,” he sneered. “Commercial pilots; cut them off from their daddies and they go to pieces.”

  Aliyev smiled. “How much longer?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Lapotev said. “If they try to order us away, we’ll keep going anyway and claim communications failure.”

  Aliyev nodded. “Twenty minutes,” he shouted back down the aircraft, to the commandos who were performing the final checks on their weapons. They were all ready to move; the aircraft crew would launch their supplies into the air after them before turning to flee back towards Russia, or a secured airfield in Poland. “Twenty minutes before we do or die!”

  They cheered.

  ***

  The MIG-41 appeared out of nowhere, almost before Staffelkapitän Mayer realised that it was there, a testament to the Russian Air Force’s improved skill at stealth aircraft. The MIG-41, known as the Flatpack to its NATO observers, fired a missile at Mayer’s aircraft and then swung into a long evasive pattern itself. Mayer fired a single ASRAAM missile from his Eurofighter Typhoon back at the enemy and evaded the Russian missile though a series of hair-raising manoeuvres, trying to avoid being shot down. The Russian pilot was less lucky; Mayer saw him trying to escape the missile, but failing.

  The entire encounter had taken less than a minute.

  Mayer stared down at his onboard display and silently cursed to himself. He was one of the lucky pilots who had managed to get off the ground, but he was starting to wonder if it had really been lucky at all. Jagdgeschwader 74, his fighter wing of the Luftwaffe, had been placed on alert status when someone had reported a terrorist waving a portable SAM missile launcher and threatening commercial traffic. As the first reports of SAM attacks on civilian aircraft came in, the QRA aircraft, including Mayer, were launched into the sky…and then all hell had broken loose. The base, in Southern Germany, in Bavaria, had been attacked by cruise missiles. Moments later, it had seemed that the entire command net had gone down.

  Mayer and his three wingmen had consulted and decided that the Vaterland was under attack. Their onboard systems had reported the sudden spurt of cruise missiles that were flying over Germany, some of them heading towards towns and cities. The four fighters had engaged the cruise missiles, but then they had finally received orders from a different airbase; they were to attempt to determine what the hell was going on. Moments later, that airbase too had vanished off the net…and the Eurofighter’s sensors were reporting explosions on the ground, big explosions. Meyer had feared nuclear war, even as cold logic reminded him that there had been no EMP pulse; the Eurofighter would have fallen out of the sky if an EMP had struck it.

  No, he had decided; they were under conventional attack.

  Meyer had issued his subordinates with orders, each aircraft to a different region, and separated, heading over Poland. The Poles should have challenged him before he crossed the border, even at supersonic speed; they were paranoid about German aircraft. Meyer, who had had a grandfather who had served in the Luffwaffe, rather understood their concern, but something very bad had happened. The cruise missiles alone added up to only one answer. They were at war and only one power had the means and the motivation to hit Germany.

  Russia.

  As he’d flown north-eastwards, he had attempted to raise the Polish air traffic controllers, only to discover that most of them were off the air. His radar had picked up a massive flight of transport aircraft, heading out of Russia towards Poland, but he had refrained from engaging them; he still wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. He saw smoke and flames reaching up from targets right across Poland, which meant that the cruise missiles hadn’t just been aimed at Germany. The main Polish military airfields, Biała Podlaska, Cewice and Częstochowa-Rudniki, seemed to have been hit; there didn’t seem to be any Polish aircraft in the skies at all. Commercial traffic had to be panicking; they would be flying through suddenly very hostile skies…without the slightest idea of what was going on.

  Meyer himself wasn’t sure that he knew what was going on.

  “J
agdgeschwader 74-9, you will listen to the code words,” his radio crackled suddenly. Meyer’s heart leapt; he wasn’t alone! Someone knew where he was and what he was doing! The voice was young and dreadfully nervous, and he could hear a French accent underlying the German, but it was a contact. “Please respond; alpha-tango-theta-napoleon.”

  The Eurofighter’s onboard database provided a match; a French AWACS aircraft that had been intended to take part in a small exercise with the British. It all seemed to belong to another world now, not the nightmare of fire and death that had crashed down upon Europe, when everything had seemed so safe and tranquil. He was more relieved than he could say to hear the voice…and then it dawned on him that the voice belonged to a kid, a very junior officer. Dear God…had the French been hit as well?

  “This is Jagdgeschwader 74-9,” Meyer said, and gave his details. “Update me.”

  “I…everything’s gone to hell,” the young Frenchman said. The voice made him think of the French cadets who had defended their academy back in 1940, years ago. “We were on patrol, then someone launched SAMs at us and our escort sacrificed himself to save us, but we can barely talk to anyone and the network is failing badly! There are civilian aircraft trapped in the sky and we can’t even talk them down because the bases are out of service and there are terrorists in the airports…”