The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  She focused her attention on her sensors as she came up on Denmark. She had taken the precaution of avoiding ports as much as possible, but it was still an intimidating sight on the display screen; the Russians were being busy. Their radars revealed the presence of other aircraft to her sensors; there were hundreds of aircraft in the air, many of them either coming from Russia, or leaving Denmark to return to Russia. She did the maths in her head; the largest troop transport aircraft the Russians had built could carry one thousand soldiers, if they didn’t mind only limited equipment. A hundred of them could land a hundred thousand troops in a single flight…and the Russians built their equipment to last. It might not be as advanced as the European or American equipment, but most of it would hold out long enough to land thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers behind the lines. The ships…there were hundreds of ships, some of them military, but most of them civilian…

  The sheer scale of the invasion terrified her. The Russian radars didn’t seem to have seen her, but she could detect Russian fighters on patrol and banked to avoid them as her sensors faithfully recorded everything they saw. Denmark itself was dark, with only a handful of lights showing, but she could see the glare of lights from the Russian-captured ports from a far distance. The unloading was going on throughout the night; she wondered if they had captured enough civilian traffic to help them move all of their supplies to their units. Hamburg had either fallen or was on the verge of falling; when it did, the German units that had survived would be destroyed.

  It wouldn’t be long before the Russians reached the Netherlands and Brussels, she decided. Under her breath, she muttered a curse on the European bureaucrats who had driven EUROFOR to disaster as she hunted for more intelligence. She would have liked nothing more than to have led a force of Eurofighters and heavy bombers into the area to wreak havoc, but that was impossible. Thanks to the politicians, the RAF had lacked the firepower to do that even before the missiles had taken out most of the force. The remaining units were being conserved; everyone knew, even though no one had spoken of it directly, that Britain itself was under direct threat for the first time since 1940.

  “A single bombing run,” she muttered, wistfully. The Argentines had tried that during the Falklands War – she wondered if they would try again with the British distracted by the Russian War – and they had caused real problems…and would have caused worse if they had had worked the tactic out properly. She would have volunteered for the flight; a single very low-level bombing run, right over those ships and ports and airports that had been pressed into service. She might even have got very lucky and hit an ammunition ship; an Italian port had been wrecked by just such an explosion, back in the Second World War. “Why not…”

  She banked the aircraft around, heading for Germany; the Tempest felt almost disappointed to be taken away from a possible encounter with the enemy. The German countryside was dark and almost completely unlighted; the only bursts of light were explosions as Russian bombers prowled, looking for targets that they could drop heavy bombs on. What they lacked in precision they made up for in enthusiasm; they dropped very heavy bombs without wringing their hands over the civilians who got caught up in the blasts. If those civilians had demanded a real defence capability…

  Ping! The moment of lock-on was a complete shock to her; she banked the Tempest without thinking about it. The Russian Mainstay had somehow gotten a sniff of her and was bringing up more search radars, hunting for her…and three of its friends were also bringing up their own radars. They had to suspect that she was a stealth aircraft – a non-stealth aircraft would have been detected well before – and would be sharing data; the green sweeps of their radar waves passed across the Tempest…and locked on. The sheer power was burning through her coating and ECM; the scattered bursts of radar energy would force them to triangulate her position, but they could do it. No…they would do it; she had no doubt at all that they would succeed.

  “Lock-on,” the flight computer warned. It had the voice of her father, something that she had considered funny at times, but now it just seemed sick joke. If only the lawsuits forbidden the use of voices without permission hadn’t gone through… “Alert; Russian radars have locked on…”

  “Tell me something I don’t fucking know,” Cindy snapped. The Mainstays might carry some anti-aircraft weapons themselves – the Russians were paranoid, with reason – about their AWACS – but she was well out of their missile range and there was no way that such an aircraft could intercept her themselves. No, they would send in the fighters, unless through sheer ill luck they had set up a passive ZSU system below her. “Find me their fighters…”

  “Alert; enemy fighters detected,” the flight computer said. “Three fighters; flight characteristics suggest MIG-41 Flatpack aircraft. Suggest evasive action.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Cindy snapped, remembering the one time she had sworn as a teenager in front of her father. He had forced her to wash her mouth out with soap. Enemy radars were coming on all over the area and the Russians would have a fair chance at getting a shot at her, even if she fled at once. She checked the weapons the Tempest carried; she might well have to fight her way through the Russians if they attempted to engage her. “Order; prepare data dump.”

  Everything that the Tempest had recorded had been saved firmly in its computers. If she believed that escape was impossible, she would have triggered the transmission and sent everything back to the AWACS orbiting far over the North Sea, betraying her presence in one burst of radio activity. As she turned the aircraft and hit the afterburners, the Russians closed in, while their radars kept a firm track on her flight path. They didn’t look as if they were going to be reasonable about it and let her go.

  “Bastards,” she muttered, as the flight computer reported missile locks from the Russian fighters. She jinked rapidly, breaking the locks, and threw the Tempest into a long dive and turn, coming up facing the Russian fighters. She uncovered the firing key and depressed it, trusting in the ASRAAM missile to achieve a more permanent lock-on using its own systems. A Russian fired at the same time and she dodged the Russian missile, even as her missile scored a direct hit and blew the Russian aircraft out of the sky. The third Russian aircraft achieved lock-on and fired; she evaded through a series of daring and desperate manoeuvres, feeling her body ache as the gravity forces pulled at her. “Real bastards!”

  Her flight computer was screaming at her; the fight was inching out over the North Sea and they had to make their meeting with the tanker, or else they would run out of fuel and fall out of the sky. The Tempest was so classified that she couldn’t allow it to fall into Russian hands; the MOD had ensured that the aircraft had a self-destruct linked to the ejection seat. She glared down at her threat board, finding a Russian fighter trying to lock on to her, and launched her second missile at it. The Russian fighter jock threw his aircraft into a crazy dive and avoided the missile with ease. She forced herself to think; how many missiles did the Flatpack carry? She couldn’t remember…

  The Russian fighters broke off. For a moment, she wondered if it was a trick of some kind, or if they had run out of missiles and she hadn’t noticed, and then she saw the three Eurofighter Typhoons flashing towards her position. They had been escorting the AWACS; the controller had vectored them towards her, just to save her from the Russians. It had been a risk, but none of the remaining RAF fighter pilots would leave a comrade in trouble; they had too few pilots to lose one when she could have been saved.

  “It’s good to see you,” Cindy said sincerely, as the Typhoons fell into escort formation around her. She would be running on vapours by the time they met the tanker, but she was certain, now, that she would escape the Russians. There would be other chances to even the score a little, before the close of play. “That was a tight spot there.”

  “Tight as a virgin’s cunt,” her rescuer agreed. Cindy laughed bitterly. “At least you managed to hurt the bastards. We don’t even get to do that.”

  Chapter
Thirty-Two: Backs to the Wall

  Here is the answer that I will give to President Roosevelt: We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire... Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

  Winston Churchill

  London, United Kingdom

  The map on the wall showed Britain’s death throes.

  “Explain it to me again,” Langford said, as calmly as he could. He felt slightly better, even though he had reprimanded Erica for ordering Sara to slip him a sedative with his coffee; there might have been something that only he could deal with. “Why are we having problems?”

  Rolf Lommerde flinched. He had problems with soldiers, particularly armed soldiers; he had reacted as through the soldiers who had guarded the small building were wolves, with him cast in the role of the sheep. He had been on the verge of ivory-tower status, but unlike many academics, he had real experience in handling problems; he had coordinated some of the relief efforts that had taken place in England following the flooding of 2020.

  “It’s complicated,” he said. The government had never appointed a military supervisor to Lommerde’s headquarters during the flooding; he had been able to pretend that the soldiers working on the relief effort didn’t exist, or were just policemen in funny uniforms. “It would take a long time to explain…”

  “I’m a smart guy and I have time until my staff decides that it’s time for me to be briefed,” Langford snapped. He knew how to delegate and he had a good staff who had actually prepared for country-wide emergencies, but there were just too many fires that needed to be put out. “Explain it to me in layman’s terms!”

  Lommerde took a long breath. Langford wondered with a hint of uncharacteristic malice if he had ever been called upon to explain anything in anything but jargon and buzzwords before, or if he had just dazzled his listeners with babble. It wouldn’t have been difficult; the government the Russians had destroyed had been long on buzzwords and short on action. The bastards had left him with a terrible mess to sort out before the Russians started to attack Britain directly again.

  “Think of a city as a black hole,” Lommerde said finally, his jaw working frantically. Langford smiled to himself he was probably wondering if Langford would have him shot for failure. He was perfectly safe from that fate, but there was no need to tell him that; he might break out more buzzwords. “It sucks in supplies and so on from the countryside, power stations, water stations and so on. Each city needs thousands upon thousands of tons of supplies to work properly; the newsagent on the corner must be replenished every few days, just to ensure that they maintain their business. Understand?”

  Langford ignored the hint of derision in his tone and nodded.

  “Good,” Lommerde said. “Now…the Russians hit us pretty badly, destroying several power plants and transformers; I dread to imagine what would have happened if they had targeted nuclear plants specifically, but they left those alone. This caused a lot of panic and disruption; the supplies in supermarkets and shops were often removed by desperate people, or at the very least sold out rapidly. Worse, they hit Europe and devastated the supply chain there.”

  He took a breath. “As you know, sir, the European Union regulations stated that we had to purchase most of our food from Europe, as they purchased items from us,” he continued. “Those supply lines have been broken more or less completely, while we cannot get replacements quickly from other sources, such as America or South America. I have taken the liberty of sending purchasing agents to several possible sources with authority to buy food supplies, but that may come with a political price tag. In any case, we are dependent upon food sources in Britain itself, and those are rather short.”

  Langford reminded himself that Lommerde did actually know what he was doing. “We had stockpiles of food supplies during some parts of the Cold War, and stockpiled more after the first bout of heavy flooding in 2007,” Lommerde said. “There are also the locations in the supply chain; food doesn’t appear magically, and for every box of cereal in the stores, there are several in the supply line. Some of them have been looted, but others have been abandoned and my people have been able to recover them. Non-perishable food sources, or at least items that last longer than a week, have been recovered in great quantities. The real problem lies in the stuff that is perishable; milk, unfrozen meat and so on. Matters are not helped by the disruption of supply lines; some of the cities had problems because they had run out of water supplies, and then out of things to drink. We’ve had examples of truly awful behaviour, such as people eating pet food, but we are likely to get most of the population through the first month, providing that we maintain control.”

  Langford smiled. “I remember military cooking,” he said. “There were times when pet food would have been a vast improvement.”

  “Ah…yes,” Lommerde said. His face was a study in contrasts. He wanted to believe Langford’s comment at face value, and yet he didn’t quite believe it; Langford wasn’t exactly joking. Food supplies had sometimes gotten very short indeed at Basra. “The real problem lies in the long-term survivability of the country.”

  “I see,” Langford said. “Because we can’t get supplies from outside?”

  “Among other things,” Lommerde said. “Some items, milk for example, can be obtained; most of that still came from British farms. Other supplies are going to be harder to replace, sir; we got a lot of our meat from Europe…and the farmers weren’t happy about it. The supermarkets pretty much exploited the farmers and…well, what they grew wasn't what we actually needed, as opposed to wanted.” He paused. “With me so far?”

  Langford held up a hand. “Why can’t they just produce what we need?”

  “Two separate reasons,” Lommerde said. “The first problem is that they will need to sow fields that were allowed to lay fallow…and growing will take time, months even under the best of conditions. The second reason…I don’t know if you noticed, but the economy has collapsed. Much of our trade was with Europe and, at the moment, we’re getting almost nothing from the continent, and so businesses start to take losses. We didn’t see much of this in the first few days, because most people were keeping their heads down, but I expect that pretty soon the unemployment level will rise sharply. The trade wars with America did plenty of damage and the sudden loss of Europe will only make the damage worse; sir, this is uncharted territory for us, for any First World economy.”

  Langford rubbed his head. “We did it in the Second World War,” he said. “Why can’t we do it again?”

  Lommerde scowled. “Several reasons,” he said. “We had time to prepare for the Second World War, most of our trade was with the Empire and the Americans, and the Americans were willing to extend us credit. They basically screwed us after the war, economically speaking, but they allowed us to survive in wartime. Now…there’s no preparation, the sea-lanes are even less safe than they were in 1940, and a lot of people are thinking that money’s worthless. I’ve had reports of farmers using shotguns to try to defend their fields against mobs and farms being eaten out, all within a few days. Farmers…just don’t want money any longer.”

  Langford steepled his fingers. “All right,” he said. “What do we do about it?”

  “We have to ration food, and quickly,” Lommerde said. “If we can ensure a proper system of food distribution, we can at least put a lid on the panic for a few weeks and win us time. The NHS has actually been working much better in the last two days; your orders to forget the red tape has worked a small miracle, aided by the thousands of medical workers who came back to help the injured from the attacks. Given time, we can restore much of the country to normal, but…”

  His voice tailed off. Langford lifted an eyebrow. “But what?”

  “In the long term, General, we may be looking at a long depression at best, and depressions breed desperation,” Lommerde said. “You may expect to see real trouble on the streets befo
re too long, much larger than you have already seen and even handled, in most places. The mass of unemployed and unemployable was a serious problem for the government even before the war began, when they were fed from the welfare teat…but now, we can’t maintain the welfare teat at all. The best we can do is give them rationed food, but…”

  Langford had been wondering about that. “We might have to conscript them,” he said, seriously. Many people on the dole would have worked if they could have worked, others were lazy teenagers who had never got into the habit of actually working. The Army had been forbidden to recruit in many areas; that would have taken its own toll on the unemployed. If only they had been able to pay soldiers more…he shook his head; it was a dead issue now. “There are no arms, but muscle alone would be useful; could you help with that?”