The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  “It’s a surprise,” her escort had said, and refused to say anything else about the reason for coming. Hazel had reluctantly accepted it, but the B&B was boring; the owner was one of the owners who insisted on treating each and every guest like a potential thief. She had been reluctant to loan Hazel a DVD player, she had been reluctant to loan her books, or even make-up and other womanly supplies; it was no surprise that there was no visitor’s book. If she had been visiting of her own free will, she would have left the day afterwards; the woman had been very resentful of Hazel’s escort, who had insisted that the woman provide lunch and dinner as well as breakfast.

  A car drew up outside; Hazel wondered if it was her escort, coming back to take her somewhere else. Moments later, she heard angry chatter downstairs; the woman had to be angry at whatever was happening, but she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. Someone came up the stairs, walking very lightly, and then there was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” Hazel shouted. Her mouth fell open. “Stuart!”

  He stood there, tired, dressed in muddy clothes and with three weeks of stubble on his face, but it was him. Hazel was across the room, flinging her arms around him, before she even realised who it was; his body felt wonderful in her arms. There was a rightness to it that made her melt, even before his lips met hers in a long lingering kiss. Messy as he was, it was no trouble at all undressing him and pulling him into the bed the grumpy woman had prepared for her; it had been too long since she had felt him inside her. He felt wonderful.

  The morning afterwards, they had a long shower together, made love again, and then lay together in bed. “So, what happened to you?” Robinson asked, his voice carefully nonchalant. “I only heard a few rumours…”

  “I’m pregnant,” Hazel squealed, remembering. She was gushing and couldn’t help herself. “Oh Stuart, it must have been that last night…”

  He looked oddly mixed between joy and worry. “It may not be a good world to have a child,” he said, and told her everything. The deployment, the surprise attack, the long retreat through Europe…and finally the trip on the commandeered liner from Ostend to Dover. “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  “Me either,” Hazel said, and told him everything about the Russians. She left out a handful of details he didn’t need to know, but she told him proudly how she’d broken the pipe and used it to escape, revealing the existence of the Russians to the police. “Then they brought me here…”

  “It must have been a reward for you,” Robinson said finally, shaking his head. His face had become deathly pale. “I thought you were safe…”

  “I thought you were safe,” Hazel said, and started to cry. They fell into each other’s arms again. “I was thinking of you all the time, thinking that you would be safe and…”

  Robinson just held her and said nothing.

  “So,” Hazel said finally, “how long do we have?”

  “I was told two days,” Robinson said. He shook his head grimly. “I may be in some trouble; I left a valuable pair of vehicles back with the Germans and some people want me and Ben in serious hot water for it. Under the circumstances, I should be fine, but…”

  He grinned. “I think that after that I’ll be assigned to the defence force here,” he said. “I think that you’re going to get your cute ass back to Edinburgh or somewhere after the end of my leave.”

  Hazel stood up. She enjoyed the way his eyes followed her breasts; it gave her a sense of power. “I am not going to leave you again,” she said, firmly. Was that a tear she saw in his eyes? “I will find somewhere nearby and stay near you…”

  “Hazel, it’s not safe,” Robinson said, and pulled her close. “Please…”

  For a few moments, everything was all right with the world.

  Interlude Four: The End of Europe

  The defeat of the French near Nancy spelled the end of Europe.

  In the Mediterranean, Russian submarines received coded transmissions and went into action. Hidden under the waves, the Russian submarines wiped out the ships that Algeria had used to transport their soldiers to France, both the remains of their professional army and holy warriors fired with faith. Tens of thousands died, unaware of their ally’s treachery; the Algerian conquest of France faltered and died. The French had been fighting back with increasing desperation and savagery, their professional training making up some of the difference in numbers; now, the French finally had a chance to cut off and destroy the remaining Algerian forces.

  Malta had fallen in the first hours of the war; Algerian forces had invaded Corsica and Sardinia, but rapidly discovered that the natives had their own reputation for bloody-mindedness. The Algerians, cut off from their supply line, held on grimly; the resistance moment bided its time and prepared the final blows. Sicily, invaded by a mixture of Algerian and Libyan forces, became a bloody battleground as the Italians fought back desperately, or tried to escape to the mainland. Italy itself was no longer safe; the chaotic war was shattering the very fabric of Italian society. The Pope’s call for peace was swept aside as Italy descended into ethnic conflict; in many places, priests even called for a crusade against the Islamic forces. When Russian units walked through the Czech Republic and Austria and entered Italy, they were almost welcomed as saviours.

  The Russian enclaves in Norway were rapidly expanded, even as Sweden and Finland agreed to enter the new Russian Federation on very favourable terms. The Russian President had a sneaking respect for the Finns; they would be permitted considerable autonomy provided they remained out of trouble. The Swedes, less well regarded, were forced to enter on Russian terms. The Norwegians had had two weeks to get organised, but open resistance was futile; the remains of the Norwegian Army and thousands of civilian volunteers melted into the mountains and prepared themselves for an underground war.

  For France, the Russians had a different fate in store. Paris fell, three weeks after the war began; the Russians walked into the city after the provisional government tried to escape to the south, to the other war zone. As cities were surrounded and forced to surrender, insurgent leaders came out, expecting to be greeted as allies. They were surprised when specially trained and prepared FSB units snatched them, cuffed them, and in many cases rewarded them with a bullet to the back of the head. Other insurgencies and isolated French units struggled to hold out; the Russians secured the locations they needed and surrounded hotspots of resistance. They could be handled later.

  The ports along the coast saw a massive exodus as French shipping fled the ports, heading to Britain, or to America and Canada, trying to escape the Russians. The Russians came in the wake of the fleeing refugees, carefully taking control of the areas that interested them, leaving pockets of resistance to die on the vine. In some places, they faced determined opposition, but in others, they were able to go where they wanted, or were even greeted as liberators. They represented law and order; for those who had hidden from the insurgencies, the Russians were even more welcome than French soldiers. The Russians had a stout attitude to Islamic terrorism, some of them whispered, and besides, the Russians were the winning side. Would it not be better to work with them until the wind changed? Besides, the Russians would show les salarabes who was boss…

  A week passed as the Russians advanced into the south. French soldiers who met them found themselves arrested and sent to detention centres; French civil servants, policemen, and local government workers found themselves meeting the same fate. The Russians surrounded the hotbeds of insurgency and waited, patiently, for them to run out of food. The message was loud and clear; the insurgents could come out, naked, or they could starve. Civilians fled, chased by fire from their more radical fellows; the radicals rapidly discovered that the Russians were prepared to fire heavy weapons at snipers and that their supposed allies didn’t like them much. Only a small percentage of France’s Muslim population had known about the insurgency in advance; many of the young, trapped in an endless cycle of poverty, had welcomed
the chance to take it out on the native French. They had looted, raped and burned their way through the cities, now, facing death by starvation or heavy guns, they too voted with their feet. The Russians scooped up everyone who came out naked – those who came out dressed were shot down in case they were suicide bombers – and processed them; they were identified, segregated by sex, and then sent into detention camps. The remaining fanatics, those who were not shot in the back by their own people, were rapidly wiped out.

  Even as they set up the detention camps, under heavy guard, the Russians were searching through Europe’s prisons. Many of the prisoners had escaped, but over half had remained in their cells; the Russians added the prison guards to their detention camps and carefully inspected each prison’s records. The mild criminals, the white-collar criminals, were sent to camps where they would be added to the workforce. The terrorist suspects met two different fates; those wanted by American authorities were sent to a camp near a port, where they would be transported to America. Those who the Americans didn’t want were quickly disposed of; the same went for the dangerous criminals. Murderers, traitors, child molesters…all met a final terrifying end.

  They were merely the first to feel the weight of Russian power.

  Chapter Forty-One: Covenants without Swords, Take One

  Covenants without swords are, but words

  Thomas Hobbes

  Warsaw, Poland

  “Caroline Morgan, come forth.”

  The voice stirred Caroline to her feet as she looked around the vast prison camp. The Russians hadn’t been violent, or brutal; they’d merely frogmarched them into a captured Polish truck and driven them towards Warsaw, towards what had once been a football stadium. With armed guards surrounding it, it had become a prison camp for captured EUROFOR and Polish personnel…and people who had been caught in the middle of the fighting.

  Caroline had tried to keep herself together, even as the weeks slipped by with little chance of reparation or even being freed from the camp. She was lucky; as a civilian, she had full run of the camp, such as it was. The prisoners from the different military forces were shackled permanently to seats designed to survive the worst efforts of football yobs. Their condition was far more desperate than hers; from time to time, the Russians triggered the auto-washing system and used it to clean up the mess. For them, their lives had descended into hell.

  Others had joined them. Two women, Zyta Konstancja and Melania Kazimiera, had also been shoved into the camp, along with two young children, both Melania’s daughters. Caroline had talked to them – the Russians didn’t seem to care what they did, provided they didn’t try to escape – and all they had done had been unlucky enough to be caught talking to a known resistance fighter. The fighter, from what Zyta had said, had been over sixty years old; the Russians had beaten him to death in front of her. They’d seen enough about Russian rule to know what was happening in Warsaw; the Russians were digging in for the long haul.

  They’d talked in hushed whispers about registration, ration cards, and the promise of work. Many young men of Warsaw, those who were not connected to the military or the police, had gone to work for the Russians; it was the only way to feed their families. Caroline wanted to scream abuse at the handful of young men they saw every day, heading to dig graves or worse for the Russians, but she understood; the young men had had no choice, but to collaborate with the Russians. If most of Poland was in the same boat, resistance would be futile.

  Marya had held out hope, for a while, that Captain Jacob Anastazy had survived; she had told Caroline that he was probably leading a resistance army by now, somewhere in the countryside. That dream had died the day the Russians had told her, without gloating, without even a leer, that Captain Jacob Anastazy was dead, killed in a gunfight along a motorway. It had been the fact that the Russians hadn’t even tried to convince her that had convinced her, finally, that they were telling the truth; Marya had cried herself to sleep that night and had been broken afterwards.

  As the weeks passed, the camp had changed its composition. Caroline, as a long-staying resident, had found herself appointed camp supervisor by the Russians. She had refused, citing her media neutrality, but the Russians had pointed out that if someone didn’t supervise the camp, everyone would rapidly grow sick and die in their own filth. Caroline had done what she could, but the Russians had very quickly removed anyone useful, such as the handful of prisoners who had medical training. She was improvising and knew it; people were dying, in some cases of avoidable problems, in other cases of nothing more than despair.

  A month after they had become prisoners, Caroline, like all the other unshackled prisoners, was ordered into a side compound, where they were locked in and left to wait while burly Russian soldiers moved in on the military prisoners. Some struggled – one of them hit a Russian officer in the groin, sending the civilian prisoners into giggles – but it was futile; they were released, shackled together, and marched off out of the camp. A week later, they hadn’t returned; the handful of guards who talked to the Poles either didn’t know what had happened to them, or were unwilling to discuss it. The Polish women, some of whom had become quite fond of the men, screamed and ranted, but the Russians just ignored it. Caroline found it a worrying sign; she had studied history privately, not in a British school, and she knew that the Russians had once massacred thousands of Polish prisoners to prevent them serving as the nucleus of resistance.

  In their place, other prisoners had arrived; the young men and women of Warsaw. Their tales were grim; they had been arrested for one fault or another, mainly breaking curfew, and the Russians had arrested them, beaten them and in one case raped an offending girl. That girl had only the small benefit of seeing her rapist marched off into a penal unit; she told Caroline that the Russians had taken over the brothels in Poland and were using them for their soldiers under military control. The whores were the best fed women in Poland. Some of the young had had idealist dreams about fasting until they were freed, but Caroline had dissuaded them as best as she could; the Russians hadn’t cared about anyone else who had died in the camps, so why should they care about young Poles? They had nothing, but their bodies; some of the young men were taken out, a day later, and sent to a labour gang.

  She stumbled over to the gate. It was heavily guarded; the Russians insisted on watching the prisoners as if they were She-Hulk, or Supergirl. She wished that she was; the dream of crashing through the camp’s guards and running back to safety kept running through her head whenever she was dozing. She knew what would happen if she didn’t present herself; it had happened before, to other prisoners. The Russians had come into the camp, found them, and shot them in front of the others, a reminder that their lives were in Russian hands.

  “Your food,” the Russian soldier said, in halting English. He was one of the good ones, a soldier who had been disabled enough to warrant his departure from an infantry unit, but determined to serve the Russian President in whatever way he could. Caroline had tried to befriend him and a handful of the other guards, but that was becoming harder; more and more faces were vanishing, to be replaced by cold pale men whose gaze refused to even fall to her half-exposed breasts. “You will be summoned again later.”

  Caroline felt her blood run cold. Any change in routine was a danger, she had been told; she was normally summoned once every day, and then they were left alone. One of the kinder Russian guards had dropped in cards and several board games; the prisoners either spent their time playing, or discussing their fate in low voices. It hadn’t escaped her notice that nearly half of the camp’s population was composed of reporters and various other media workers; some of them had even come from as far west as Dresden. When the city had fallen, one of them had told her, the Russians had rounded up reporters along with the policemen and soldiers; they’d been dumped into trucks and shipped west to the camp near Warsaw. She had tried to view that as a positive sign, but it was impossible; they might have had a good reason to secure her, but not repo
rters they’d snatched off the streets.

  “Thank you,” she said, carefully. Her Russian was almost non-existent. “Do you know why?”

  The guard raised his shoulders and shrugged in the universal gesture for ‘don’t know.’ Caroline gave him a kiss on the cheek anyway and took the trolley of supplies, pushing it back into the camp, calling for the prisoners as she moved. One prisoner had tried to hide in the trolley; the Russians had seen a foot sticking out, burst out laughing, and dragged him out before shooting him. The meals changed only slightly; the Russians had captured thousands of EUROFOR MRE – Meals Ready to Eat – packs and distributed them to the prisoners. It was cruel and unusual punishment, as far as Caroline could determine; the prisoners who could cook had even offered to cook for the guards as well, if they were given some supplies to cook. The guards had refused; their paranoia was such that they would count each and every plastic fork and beat people if they tried to keep them.

  Caroline ate her food slowly, worrying; she was much thinner than she had been the day she had boarded the aircraft to Poland. She had never been as vain as some people in the media business, but she knew that her looks had their uses when it came to convincing people to talk to her; if they had seen her now, her boyfriends would have been shocked. She looked like one of those rape victims, carefully made up to seem pathetic, who were paraded in front of a jury. Her hair was dull and listless; her bones were starting to show through her chest. She wasn't sure how much longer she could go on…