The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  Aliyev sighed in relief.

  “You won’t get away with this,” the commander said. Her voice spat defiance. “They’ll come and kill all of you.”

  “Maybe,” Aliyev replied, unwilling to banter. The team wouldn’t have hesitated to break her if she had been a serious problem, but for all of her defiance, she was nothing, but a nuisance. He lifted his tactical combat radio and smiled. “All units, report in.”

  He listened as the reports trickled back. The commando teams had seized the hangers and aircraft inside intact, although one of the aircraft was out of service and had been in the middle of being repaired when the fighting had begun. The fuel dump under the airport had been intact, but it hadn’t been quite as full as they had hoped; Poland had been having a semi-permanent fuel crisis since 2020, when Russia had started to get serious about using the fuel supplies for political leverage. It was ironic; if they had sent the Poles all the fuel they needed, aircraft landing at the airport could have been refuelled for much longer. As it was…

  He shook his head. It wasn't something that he could alter now. They had to work with what they had, not with the world as they would like it to be. Other teams had secured the fence surrounding the airport and reported that all of the cars on the road had been turned back; hundreds of additional prisoners had been taken as they tried to escape the airport. That was unfortunate; the news would be likely to spread further before more reinforcements could arrive, but again, there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Secure the perimeter and get the prisoners back into the terminal,” he ordered. He turned quickly to the pre-prepared operators. “Get in touch with higher command and inform them that we have secured the airport and are ready to receive transports.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lead operator said. They had trained for a week on terminals that had been rigged up to look exactly like the terminals they worked with now; they moved with practiced ease to set up the system and issue orders over the Russian communications network. Far behind the lines, aircraft were waiting for the order to take off and transport their units to the airport, where they would become a dagger aimed at Poland and Germany.

  The Polish operators watched in horror; for some of them, it was becoming increasingly obvious what was happening; the nightmare of Russian invasion and occupation had returned to Poland. Aliyev felt no sympathy; he had fought long enough in Central Asia to hate those who held protest marches and wrote long detailed articles – mainly with the facts made up – about what they called genocide. Aliyev had been there; it hadn’t been anything like that.

  He swung around to glare at the Sergeant. “Our causalities?”

  “Seven down, three injured,” the Sergeant reported promptly. “A handful of men landed outside the airport fence and had to make their way in by foot.”

  “How embarrassing,” Aliyev said. The men would be the butts of their comrades jokes for weeks, although he wasn't that annoyed; the operation had had a certain amount of friction built into it, after all. He had expected much more to go wrong than actually had; if the European pilot had fired on the aircraft, he could have lost a third of his force. He looked down at the prisoners. “Bring them.”

  Ignoring protests, the soldiers picked up the Poles and carried them carefully back into the main terminal, where they were dumped on the ground. The follow-up units had secured all of the adult civilians, male or female; the children sat next to their handcuffed parents, staring at the armed Russians with wide terrified eyes. The feeling of dread and fear was almost amusing; for the first time, Aliyev understood the rush of power that hostage-takers felt. He had killed many hostage-takers in Moscow; the thought that he might have something in common with them terrified him. He ground his teeth; he was a professional soldier and that was the end of it. Terrorising and population control was the task of the FSB.

  “Bastards,” he muttered under his breath.

  “We searched the entire terminal thoroughly, sir,” a Captain reported. He didn’t salute; salutes were forbidden in combat zones, not that the commandos were big on such gestures anyway. It wasn't considered insubordination. “There are no more hiding civilians or workers; we had a man injured trying to bring down a Polish policeman.”

  Aliyev scowled. The fate of the policemen had already been decided. He glared around at the prisoners and saw how few of them could meet his gaze; they had clearly decided to keep their heads down and hope not to be noticed. Most of them were tourists, not soldiers; there was no real need to terrorise them still further.

  Captain Alexander Vatutin appeared. “I have deployed the SAM teams to cover the airport and moved units into combat position for defending the airport terminal if there is a low-level probe,” he reported. “The cars will make excellent barricades once we get them moved into position.”

  “Good,” Aliyev said. It was time to see to the long-term fate of the prisoners. “Has the prison detachment found a suitable spot?”

  “The rich capitalists’ car park,” Vatutin said. “It’s got a fence with barbed wire. We couldn’t have done it better if we had planned it that way.”

  Aliyev nodded and coughed for attention. “Good morning,” he said, mischievously. The prisoners looked up at him, their eyes terrified. “For those of you who haven’t realised, a state of war now exists between Russia and the European Union. Unfortunately for you, you have been caught in the middle; I have to hold this airport and you, I fear, are in the combat zone. I would dearly like to just throw you all out of the gate, but you would tell the Polish authorities what is happening, so that is not an option.”

  He repeated himself in German and English, and then continued. “None of you are combatants and I intend to keep you out of the firing line as much as possible,” he said. It was almost true; the security staff, the policemen and the two survivors of the antiterrorist team would never see their homes again. The others would have to wait until the Russians knew who they were, and then they would either be released or sent out to prison camps somewhere in Siberia. “My people will be moving you out to a makeshift prison in the car park; I strongly advise you to cooperate with my people, rather than trying to resist. If you need attention, tell them; we will do our best to look after you…”

  He paused. “But understand this, I will not allow you to threaten my success here,” he concluded. “If you cause trouble, you will be shot.”

  He nodded to the Sergeant. “Take them away.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Prisoner of War

  The Geneva Conventions are a wonderful idea that are completely impractical and unenforceable.

  Christopher Nuttall

  Near Warsaw, Poland

  The first thing that Caroline Morgan knew about the war was the explosion.

  “Stay here,” Captain Loomis snapped, before Caroline could say anything. She had been interviewing Hannah Loomis, a female infantry captain, as to the role of women in the military. Hannah, a fearsome figure, had been more than willing to talk, although she had dismissed some of the common knowledge about women in the military as feminist or sexist nonsense. The real state of affairs was quite different.

  “If you’re in the military – worse, if you’re in the military as a woman – you have to behave as one of the men, within reason,” she had said, much to Caroline’s surprise. “You have to eat with them, sleep – and I don’t mean sex, I mean sleep – with them, crap with them, fight with them, kill with them…and generally act as one of the men. You’re either one of the boys or you’re queen for a year…provided you act like it. Some women go mad for sex because there’s only one woman and fifty-odd men and they can get whatever they want if they reward the men with sex, some women go ice queens…frankly, if you give it up for one guy, it’ll tear the unit and your reputation apart.”

  Caroline hadn’t really understood. “You can be one of the guys; eat, sleep, shit, talk about women…or you can be a slut,” Hannah had said. “It’s really a case of not creating tension within the group; as
my first Sergeant put it, you don’t want brave stupid young men rescuing brave stupid young women rather than getting out there and kicking the shit out of the enemy. Have one woman with one man and plenty of other men who aren’t getting any…well, that’s a recipe for trouble.” She laughed. “Oh, and being brave helps as well.”

  Caroline didn’t feel very brave as a second explosion rocked the camp. She had wanted to call Hannah back as the young Captain fled the room, pistol in hand, but she hadn’t quite dared. It was something far less…congenial than the time she’d spent with the soldiers on distant deployment near Warsaw; they’d been friendly and relaxed, particularly with Marya. Caroline had felt distantly ugly in comparison, even if she had had a string of boyfriends back home. Marya was still sleeping the effects of the alcohol they’d consumed off; Caroline had swallowed a de-tox pill, cleared away the effects of the drinking, and gone back to work. She hadn’t expected to be caught in the middle of a war zone.

  The sound of shooting was growing louder. She glanced around, frantically, as the noise grew louder, finding only a small table to hide under. The windows shattered and she dove for cover, crawling under the table and praying aloud to God to help her out of her position. She felt the reassuring shape of the terminal in her pocket – a direct link back to the BBC in London – and activated it. The signal refused to form; there was absolutely no contact with the BBC at all.

  A voice was shouting something defiant in French; seconds later, there was another explosion, much louder than any others. Caroline whimpered as the noises grew louder and louder; she could hear shouts in a language she couldn’t understand. Something bad was going on; the thought that it might have been a drill was rapidly dismissed as wishful thinking. No one, as far as she knew, would be crazy enough to fire off live ammunition during a drill, particularly not into a room where a civilian was trying to work. Something thudded against the side of the building and she cringed again before realising that it hadn’t killed her; she could hear the approaching rumble of engines…and then the sound of a tank’s main gun.

  She scrabbled at her terminal, trying to use it for one of its more secret functions. The BBC had kept them quiet over the years; it was also capable of scanning nearby radio bands and trying to record and play them back. She didn’t understand why no one knew about that – the technology’s capabilities had been in the public domain for over a year – but it would work in her favour; she scanned the different radio signals nearby, only to hear more static and bursts of Russian words. She didn’t speak Russian; she couldn’t make out at all what was actually happening.

  Something new flickered into the radio, on one of the civilian bands. It should have been a Polish radio station, now it was something else, something sinister. “Citizens of Poland, this is an emergency announcement,” it said. “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.”

  Caroline felt her blood run cold as yet another burst of shooting echoed out over the camp. She was far from stupid; the message had to mean that something had really gone wrong, and she was in the middle of a camp that was under attack. She felt for her press pass carefully, hoping that she still had it safe; that would get her out of trouble if the Russians caught her. The sound of a helicopter rose in the air; a dark shadow fell over the window for a moment, then the noise of rockets being launched echoed through the window. The helicopter was attacking targets in the camp!

  She clicked the terminal off and pocketed it, then tried to decide what to do. The shooting was dying down, but she didn’t know who had won; she didn’t know anything at all that might tell her which way to run. She thought about trying to sneak out of the camp, but that only worked in movies; the heroic stars always had three things going for them that Caroline didn’t have. They had a sympathetic scriptwriter, perfect grooming and chest sizes that could only be described by resorting to imaginary numbers. They always found a guard who could be seduced, or turned out to be lesbian vampires, or had something else up their sleeves. She had no military training; until recently, she had never seen a gun. What could she do?

  The voices were growing closer, shouts and barks in an unfamiliar language. She listened carefully and felt her blood run cold; she was almost sure that that was Russian being spoken. She spoke German and French in addition to English; it was none of those languages, but something very different. It wasn’t Arabic, or another Asian language; it was something else, very different. Her second boyfriend – before he had embraced the Buddhist way of life – had once taken her to see a Russian show; it sounded very much like that. It sounded as if the Russians had won the fight.

  The door exploded inwards and two black-clad men entered, their weapons raised and ready for a fight. Caroline cringed backwards, but there was little real cover and they saw her. One of them barked a command at her in Russian as their eyes met, but she didn’t understand him at all. He motioned with his rifle, but she was too terrified to move; fear had turned her legs into jelly. She was bitterly aware that Hannah – what had happened to her in the fighting? – would have handled it better, but she was so scared. She couldn’t even breathe!

  The leader soldier grabbed her arm and roughly pulled her out of her hiding place, pushing her against the wall and ignoring her protests and gasps of pain. His hands roughly, but quickly frisked her, removing everything from her pockets, from a pair of pens to the terminal and her notepad, both of which he dumped on the table and left for later. He found her ID card hanging around her neck and inspected it briefly before leaving it; Caroline was too scared even to speak. Her hands were quickly caught and secured behind her back with a plastic tie; she was left leaning against the wall, her eyes blurred with tears she could no longer wipe away, while the Russians searched the room, removing anything that even looked dangerous. Caroline had once attended an inquest into an overzealous police officer who had confiscated a microwave on the grounds that it had computer chips inside; the Russians made him look like an amateur. Their paranoia seemed to have no limits.

  She focused on them; knowledge was power, as her boss had once said to her. They were both young and very strong; she could practically see the muscles rippling under their black uniforms. She knew what happened to American servicewomen who were captured by insurgents in the Middle East; was that about to happen to her? The insurgents tended to leave newspaper men and women alone, particularly European journalists, who tended to support them, but who knew what the Russians would do? Her mind kept chasing its own tail; she had thought about rape, every woman did at some point in their lives, but she had never really believed that it could happen to her. Her sexual favours were hers, as far as she was concerned; the choice about whether or not to bestow them was hers…except, perhaps, it was no longer hers. They were both young and strong; they could take her with ease.

  One Russian made a comment to the other and they both stood up. Almost before she could react, they were holding her and hustling her out the door, through the corridors and past several bodies lying in the dirt, weapons dropped where they had fallen. The stench was appalling as they passed what had once been – she thought – a man; was it even possible to have that much blood in a human body? Surely the chunks of gore belonged to several people; that couldn’t all be one person, could it? She was panting as she tried to force her legs to work; she was certain that the Russians would hurt her if they had to force her to move, or perhaps just carry her. She was completely at their mercy.

  She tried an experi
ment. “Where are you taking me?” She asked in English, and then in mangled French and German. “Là où êtes vous me prenant? Wo Sie mich nehmend sind?”

  There was no answer, not even a hint they understood her. She couldn’t understand them at all; they only spoke quickly, almost as if they suspected that she could understand them and were trying to confuse her. They reached four more armed men, guarding what had once been the entrance to the camp, and she winced; the Russians had definitely won the fight. Leaning against the corner, a massive wound in its chest, lay the body of Major-General John McLachlan. The Russians were collecting ID cards from the bodies and comparing them to a list; one of the guards examined her ID card with interest, and then compared it carefully to her face. Caroline almost laughed; she had been made up perfectly when the photograph had been taken, with a nice dress showing just the right hint of cleavage. Now…she shuddered to think what she looked like; her hands tied, her clothes disorganised, sweat and the smell of fear rising from her body.

  The Russian Commander looked up at her. “You are Caroline Morgan, Press Reporter?”

  She was so relieved to hear a voice speaking English that she almost wilted. “Yes,” she said, and forced her mouth to speak further. “Sir, I am a non-combatant in a war zone and…”