The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Sergeant Roach, reporting,” he said, to a harassed looking police officer. The other policemen seemed either pleased that the heavily-armed soldiers were there, or nervous around them, regarding them as more violent than the criminals they frequently had to arrest. “We’re ready to move in as soon as possible.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” the officer said. Roach nodded; he could hear shooting from the distance, some of it seemingly aimed into the sky. The gangs were at war; some of them would have noticed the police cordon and laughed at it. What could the police do to them. “Those folks want to get back home…”

  He cocked a finger at several dozen people, waiting and watching the soldiers with nervous eyes. They were mainly Indian or Africa; Brixton had been an African area before a careless government had also organised thousands of Indians to move in as well, perhaps in the unspoken hope that they would kill each other off. Roach had no doubt that the last government – which had died along with Downing Street – would have screwed the immigrants if it could have done; the British people had been growing less and less tolerant of immigration over the years. They wouldn’t be allowed to return yet, he had been told; everyone who came out alive would be held in a makeshift detention camp until their identities could be discovered and their future decided.

  Three helicopters flew overhead, police helicopters; Roach admired their bravery. The police knew – they had to know – that some people on Britain’s streets had access to SAM missiles; they’d been used to shoot down at least a dozen airliners. The police pilots were risking their lives in aircraft Roach wouldn’t have taken into harm’s way if it could have been avoided, but they carried out their duty faithfully. They deserved better than the scorn of the population.

  “THIS IS THE POLICE,” loudspeakers bellowed, the racket setting the birds to flight. The thunderous voice echoed across all of the area; everyone in Brixton would hear it. “MARTIAL LAW HAS BEEN DECLARED. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS HELD HIGH OR RISK BEING SHOT. THIS AREA IS UNDER THE PATROL OF ARMED MEN! ANYONE CARRYING A WEAPON WILL BE SHOT! THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER WARNING!”

  Roach turned to the officer. “Do you expect any response?”

  “There are people in there who don’t dare to leave,” the officer said, bitterly. “The real hard men won’t surrender and won’t let anyone else from their groups leave; we might have some people coming out, but they won’t be serious hard cases.”

  Roach waited. A handful of women, of all races and creeds, were inching their way out, keeping their hands firmly in the air. One of them crumpled as a shot rang out; Roach snapped an order to his sniper as the young man carrying a rifle took aim at a second woman. A shot rang out and the enemy sniper fell to the ground, dead.

  “Nice shooting,” Roach commented. The surviving women fled towards them and the police met them, escorting them to one of the waiting pens where they would be held until they could be moved to the detention camp. More were coming now, women and a handful of men; they kept their hands in the air. One woman, completely naked, drew appreciative whistles from some of the soldiers; Roach asked and discovered that she had thought that she would be mistaken for a suicide bomber unless she approached naked. She was quickly loaned a coat and sent to the pens. “I think that…”

  More shooting flickered out in the area. “That's the gangs about to start shooting, I think,” the officer said. He glared down at a terminal he held in his hands. “The bastards smashed all of the cameras as soon as mob rule appeared on the streets.”

  Roach felt his teeth grind together. “Give them the final warning?”

  The Police officer muttered into his radio. “THIS IS THE POLICE,” the helicopters bellowed again. “ARMED OFFICERS ARE ENTERING NOW. ANY RESISTANCE WILL BE CONSIDERED A CRIMINAL ACT AND PUNISHED UNDER MARTIAL LAW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!”

  Roach lifted an eyebrow. “You have no idea,” the officer said, “just how good it feels to be able to make clear statements like that.”

  Roach nodded. “Put the engines in gear, lads,” he ordered. “It’s time to move.”

  The Floid vehicles had been hastily retooled for the Sudan when it seemed likely that intervention was going to be required, but had never sent there as the famine and uprising had happened before they were ready to deploy. They had then considered white elephants by the Ministry of Defence, who had shoved all of the fifty production models into a warehouse near London and forgotten about them. A soldier who had driven one remembered them and mentioned it to his commander; a quick check had revealed that the warehouse had escaped harm and the Floids had been quickly recovered. They had been built for city-warfare; it would take a heavy RPG to damage them even slightly, while they were armed with non-lethal weapons as well as machine guns. If the…rebels, insurgents, criminals, whatever they were…had something that could damage them, Roach intended to call for a helicopter strike rather than risk his men.

  He had been tempted to play music as they advanced, something to both warn the insurgent gangs and reassure his men, but had dismissed the thought. They needed to remain alert; this was unconventional warfare, but equally as dangerous as anything else the British army had ever done. They had plenty of experience; the only question was if they would have the resources to do it properly. One by one, buildings were checked, searched, and secured by the police; a handful of people who had been found hiding, terrified, had been cuffed and sent to the rear. He didn’t have time to play it gently; experience had taught him that people who looked harmless often weren’t when it came to the crunch.

  A gunshot rang out, and then another; the bullets sparked off the armour of the lead Floid. Roach felt his lips twitch; it wasn't an unrealistic computer game, where enough hand-weapons could make a real difference to a tank, but real life. He would have loved to have brought a Challenger tank or even a Eurotank along; the insurgents would probably have taken one look and surrendered. It would have been a shame about the roads, but…

  “Enough,” he snapped. The entire building seemed to be infested with armed men. He nodded to the driver of the lead Floid. “Bring it down!”

  The vehicle inched forward, more and more bullets pinging off its armour, and pressed against the side of the market. It had a far more powerful engine than it really needed; all of that extra power was used in pushing against the weaker wall. It slowly buckled and twisted inwards, shattering as the driver hastily yanked the vehicle backwards to avoid being crushed under the rubble. The entire building was weakening rapidly; a handful of people fled out with their hands in the air. They were rapidly cuffed, marked as known insurgents, and sent to the rear. Others came out firing and were shot down before they could find their targets and hit a single soldier.

  The hours ticked on. One by one, the strongholds of resistance were reduced mercilessly; those that refused the call to surrender were attacked until they either surrendered or ended up dead. Roach wasn't in a taking prisoners mood; some of the bodies they encountered hadn’t been killed by his men, but had taken some time to die at the hands of the insurgents. He had had to threaten one of his men with his gun to prevent him from shooting all the prisoners after they found a raped woman’s body; it didn’t help that he shared the man’s rage.

  An explosion made him blink. He had been rotating his own people though the battlezone, inserting more soldiers as they arrived; somehow, he had ended up as local military commander. He wasn't sure if that meant that he was the senior officer – and that was worrying as he was only a sergeant – or if someone had decided that he was doing a good job and leaving him in place. The radio buzzed and he answered it absently; it felt as if they had been fighting for hours.

  “Sarge, you have to come see this,” one of his soldiers said. “We just stumbled across it in this dump.”

  Roach nodded and headed over to the half-wrecked building. The remaining insurgents had been trying to escape for hours, heading right into the teeth of the policed cordon, where they had been either forced to surrender or die. There
was fighting in other parts of London, but this particular fire was well on the way to being put out.

  “Here I am,” he said, as he entered the building. It had once been a gay bar and had been savagely destroyed on the first night of the war. Dead bodies were scattered everywhere; a handful of trained people were trying to find identification on them, identifying them for posterity. “What do you have to show me?”

  “This,” the soldier said. He pointed to a pit in the floor; Roach looked into it, expecting to see bodies, and saw, instead, guns. Lots of guns, many of them of Russian design…and modern. Not AK-47s, but modern weapons, including a Yank missile launcher. If they had been used by trained people, Roach realised, they could have made the Battle for Brixton much more violent…

  He scowled. There were enough weapons to take half of London.

  “Now, that's curious,” he said. He assumed a detective pose. “If these weapons were here, why didn’t any of the gangs use them?”

  “My name is not Watson, sir,” the soldier said. “Perhaps they didn’t dare use them…”

  “I doubt it,” Roach said. “If they didn’t use them, then they didn’t know they were here to use, which means…someone else put them here.” He skimmed through the collection of weapons. “I wonder what’s missing from here…and who took it…and where it went; those are the questions we have to answer.”

  Chapter Thirty-One: War in the Air

  If you don’t know who the greatest fighter pilot in the world is…it isn’t you.

  Fighter Pilot saying

  Over France

  “Charlie-one, you are cleared for departure,” the controller said. “Good luck and good hunting.”

  Flying Officer Cindy Jackson hit the thrusters and the Eurofighter Tempest raced down the runway, lunging into the air as if it were keen to come to grips with the foe. Her threat receiver showed no problems, as it had done for the five days since the war had begun with the treacherous attack on the airbases that were intended to defend Britain, and the download from the orbiting AWACS reported only limited air traffic as far east as Denmark. The civilian aircraft had been grounded, or shot out of the sky; the remains of the French and German air forces had been destroyed, along with much of the RAF. The handful of surviving aircraft had made their way to Britain.

  “This is Charlie-one,” she said. “I’m going dark now; see you on the flip side.”

  The Eurofighter Tempest was a new aircraft, one of only six in existence…and perhaps now only one of three. The project had been so expensive that the European Union had had to share it with the Japanese and Australians, something that was ironic as Japan and Australia had been having a handful of minor political disputes. It had been intended to create a fighter superior to the American Raptor…and, to be fair, the project had succeeded. If only the aircraft could be made cheap enough to equip an entire squadron, then Cindy would have been delighted; the RAF would have had a truly 21st Century force.

  She scowled down at her display as the aircraft raced further into the darkness. The politicians had cut the RAF’s budget, time and time again, and the result had been a fleet of aging aircraft and low morale, which had led naturally to low personal. Hundreds of trained RAF officers had taken the option of going to America, where the Yanks needed fighter and bomber pilots in their endless war, others did their duty with ever-diminishing resources. Cindy had been one of the latter – she loved her job – but even she had been missing a challenge. The thought gnawed at her, no matter how silly it was; had the Russian attack happened because she had been wanting a challenge?

  The Tempest’s real strength lay in its stealth. Although it was capable of travelling at supersonic speed, it was almost impossible to detect on conventional radar sets, although some of the latest American equipment had been designed to detect some of the non-American stealth aircraft. The Americans had learnt a harsh lesson during their war with Iran; Russian radars were capable of detecting some of their stealth aircraft, and directing ground fire onto the targets. The Tempest could, in theory, fly through Russian air space without being noticed; in practice, it might not work quite as well as the scientists had kept claiming. She half-hoped that she would be detected; the chance to put a missile into a Russian fighter and avenge some of her dead comrades would be too good to miss.

  She clenched her teeth as the memories returned. She had always been a tomboy; when other girls had been putting on make-up, she had been learning at her father’s knee – her father had been an engineer with a passion for flying. Her mother had died when she had been very young and her father had never remarried; his only child had taken care of him in-between acing her Standard Qualification Tests and living a nightlife that would have had the Romans green with envy. Her father had taught her far more than she had ever learned at school; by the time she was twelve, she had been doing advanced maths in her head, and knew what she wanted to do with her life. The opportunity had come when she had joined a flying club, and then the RAF itself; they had been delighted to have her.

  The memories refused to vanish. She had lost her virginity at thirteen, had her first steady relationship at fourteen, lost the bastard at sixteen and since then had had a string of boyfriends and girlfriends, playing the role of the fighter jock to the hilt. She was fond of claiming that she had slept with more women then all of the men in the squadron put together; it was a way of relieving stress. The RAF could be dangerous; it didn’t help that the pilots knew perfectly well that many of the aircraft were older than they were. The Tornados had been intended to be removed from the RAF’s flight line years ago, but a handful remained; some of them had even served in the Gulf War. Like everywhere in Europe, Britain’s interest in its military had been waning for years…

  She checked the download from the French AWACS. The French mission commander, a young Lieutenant barely out of diapers – as the fighter pilots called very young officers – had flown all the way from France to Britain as the chaos had enveloped France. The people who had briefed her had said that they figured the French would beat off and kick Algerian arse, but the Russian pressure from the east was growing ever stronger. As the Russians probed west from Poland and south from Denmark, it seemed likely that they would defeat the Germans as well and then crush onwards into France; intelligence didn’t believe that it was part of the Russian plan to allowed the Algerians any part of France.

  “Time to move,” she muttered to herself. The Russians had been busy; her threat receiver warned of at least seventeen large and powerful ground-based air-search radars, sweeping the sky for threats, almost certainly backed up by ZSU missile launchers and fighters further to the east. If the Russians had managed to overrun a Danish fighter base that could be repaired quickly, they might even manage to have fighters operating from Denmark, which would reduce their reaction time significantly. American satellite information revealed that the Russians were using commandeered civilian ships to expand their foothold; most of Denmark had fallen before they even knew they were under attack. “Here goes nothing…”

  The Tempest lowered itself still further as it approached Denmark. The aircraft was supposed to be silent, but Cindy had never fully trusted the assurances that it couldn’t be heard from the ground. There were two known ways to stealth an aircraft – although there were persistent rumours that the Americans had invented a third, but if there was an aircraft that stealthy no one had seen it – and the Tempest used both of them. The aircraft was designed to both redirect radar energy away from the enemy sensors, through the shape of the design, and absorb radar energy through its coating. In theory, even if the Russians caught a sniff of her presence, they would have problems actually locating her enough to launch missiles at her; the radar return would have shown her as further away than she actually was. In practice…there were a lot of radars operating in the region she was heading towards, and the Russians would have almost certainly linked them all together into one coordinated system. If they got a response, they might well be ab
le to determine her rough location…

  Her display blinked up a warning; there was a small group of medium-sized freighters under her, heading towards Britain. She wasn’t surprised; the news of the Russian advance was now common knowledge throughout Europe, even though most of the media channels had gone down, and thousands of Europeans were trying to escape. Those lucky enough to be near the shore were trying to get onto ships; she’d heard that someone on the French side had detonated a bomb in the Channel Tunnel and blocked all ingress. She didn’t want to think about what it would have been like for anyone caught under the seabed when the bomb detonated. The Royal Navy was badly overstretched; some of the freighters would probably try to dump their human cargo near Britain, forcing them to swim to shore or die, and then head back to collect more refugees. Other Captains, older and wiser, were heading for the United States; they didn’t want to be caught by the criminal gangs or the Russians. The Russians would probably have been nicer; they would only have pressed the Captains into service.

  The entire North Sea was one vast no-man’s-land. She’d watched the satellites reporting on the small Russian fleet of ships that had landed in each of the major Norwegian ports, permanently closing them to shipping, but not expanding any further. It didn’t take a genius to understand why; the Russians might have been nervous about the prospect of American intervention landing in Norway, but they couldn’t have the manpower to take all of Norway at the same time as Germany and the rest of Europe. The ports might even be retaken by Norwegian forces; the delay was all that mattered to them. Russian and British submarines hunted each other through the North Sea; there had been hundreds of tiny encounters that had resulted in the loss of one or more ships for both sides.