The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  And the waiting was the hardest part.

  ***

  There was a body in Flying Officer Cindy Jackson’s bed. The gentle pressure of his presence brought her back to awareness, even as the aches and pains in her body refused to recede. The RAF had never flown flight schedules like it was doing now since 1940; even during the days of the Iraq War, there had been more pilots and more planes to handle a limited number of missions. Now, now the RAF was desperately exhausted, desperately overstretched, and seriously outnumbered. Every day, Russian aircraft would fly overhead, challenging the RAF to come out and fight, or watch bombs being dropped with cold precision on the defence lines. The soldiers on the ground were soaking up more Russian ordnance – a bloodless term for dead bodies and blood and gore everywhere – than any British soldier had had to face since the Falklands, and that had been nothing compared to the Second Battle of Britain.

  The RAF pilots – and the naval pilots who had been pressed into service – were tired; they were making mistakes. The Prince of Wales had flown its JSF fighters to Britain as soon as it could, with some help from American tankers; they’d been added to the defence force, which had reached a high point of seventy aircraft, most of them older than Russian designs. A flight of RAF Tornados had launched a low-level raid on a Russian-occupied airfield in Belgium, the role that had been planned for them during the Cold War and proved suicidal during the Gulf War; all, but one of the Tornados had been shot out of the sky. It had been the last attempt to take the war to the Russian bases in France.

  She rolled over and contemplated the young French officer in her bed. He had been the bravest of the brave, risking life and limb to fly to Britain with his aircraft, and then to fight on alongside British forces to try to hold the UKADR. Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg might be the senior surviving officer of the French Air Force; only a handful more had made it out in the ships that had fled France as the Russians advanced. A few hundred French soldiers, thousands of helpless and destitute French civilians…she wondered just how long it would be before the Russians launched their invasion of Britain. No one in the RAF doubted that there would be an invasion; the Russians were bound to push their advantage as far as it would go. The Americans weren’t going to get involved, but that might well change; if the Russians took Britain, American intervention would become much harder.

  She knew that she should sleep, but she couldn’t; she was literally too tired to go to sleep. She wanted sleep, but she also wanted to get fucked; Montebourg had proven himself good at giving her what she wanted, but he was sleeping, a design fault in the human male. She remembered the old joke about Adam trading the ability to piss standing up for multiple orgasms; the female body was much better in that respect. She didn’t want to be deferred to, or treated as the bitch empress of Godforsakenstan; she just wanted a man who was her equal, who wouldn’t bow down to her, and wouldn’t take any shit from her.

  She sighed, wondering if she should wake him up; duty asserted itself and she left him to sleep. It was odd, mulling on the possible futures she might face; the government had made no attempt to hide from the military personnel what was happening to their counterparts across the Channel. The SAS had small groups on French and German soil, reporting back through American satellites; their reports made grim reading. Mass round-ups of military officers, forced labour from unemployed and Arabs alike, and the compulsory registration of all citizens; she knew what it all meant. As anyone who had lived under the welfare state could testify, a grey man in a grey office with command over the files could dictate who lived and who died, without ever meeting his victims…

  Her future…seemed bleak. She had wondered, the year before the war, what would happen to her; sooner or later, the RAF would either promote her for good behaviour, or fire her for bad behaviour. It would have been ironic for them to have promoted her, but…she would have had enough time in grade to be promoted, perhaps even to the point of commanding a Squadron…from the ground. Hell, in other words; she wouldn’t even be allowed to fly. Outside the RAF, what career did she have? Her ideal would be to become a private jet pilot, but even that was less rewarding these days…and as for a family…? The men she’d met could either be dominated by her, or tried to dominate her…and she never gave up under pressure. She wanted a partner before she could have children; she had faced, a long time ago, the prospect of being the only surviving member of her family…and the last of her line.

  Her hand reached out idly and touched Montebourg’s penis; a slow motion and it grew hard in her hand, rising with all the vigour of youth. She climbed on top of him in one movement, gently kissing him as her urges drove her on, before pushing down on him and pulling her inside him, riding him into the light of the morning. It wouldn’t be long before they both had to fly again…and so all they could do was make use of what time was left to them.

  “I could love you,” she whispered to his sleeping form. The pressure of war had brought them together; it wasn’t as if they were squadron mates. “I could…and perhaps I will, one day…”

  There wouldn’t be much time before they both had to fly again.

  ***

  An unbiased observer, assuming that that mythical entity actually existed, who saw the safe house would have wondered if its owner had known that there was a war coming. That unbiased observer would have been entirely correct; Zachary Lynn had bought the house a few years ago through several different shell companies – records said that the owner was still in residence – and even he had been surprised when he had examined the house in person.

  The original owner had been paranoid enough to be Russian, he had decided, after his first visit. He had actually been a South African with a lot to hide. The house was not only set well away from any other human habitation, but had a bomb shelter, a private power generator and military-grade water filter, and a stockpile of food. None of those details appeared on the official records; some private checks had confirmed that no one in authority was aware of the building. He had wondered if he had accidentally stumbled upon a MOD building of some kind, but no, the owner was legitimate. He just hadn’t bothered to tell the government just what he was building.

  Lynn himself sipped a gin and tonic and waited in the house. The satellite communications network in the house was normal to all, but a very careful inspection; in fact, it linked directly into an FSB satellite that was pretending to be a weather satellite. He had issued orders the week before the fighting had begun; his individual units knew that they would have no orders issued from him unless something went very badly wrong. Many of them would have hidden themselves; what Zachary Lynn didn’t know, he couldn’t be made to tell. The British would be quite likely to torture him, or indeed any of his agents, but they had only seen ‘Control;’ how could they connect him with Lynn?

  The surprise had been that Daphne Hammond had been arrested. Truthfully, Lynn wasn’t all that surprised; she had been trying to raise civilian protests against both conscription and the military government. If there hadn’t been a clear and present danger, and indeed real benefits to military orders, lovely Daphne might have even managed to do real damage, but instead she had been threatened with lynching, and then the Police had saved her and rescued her. Personally, Lynn would have left her to die, even though she had been useful…and would be useful in the future. The danger, however, was that she knew ‘Zachary Lynn’ and could tell her interrogators everything about him, or at least enough to set them on the right track.

  It hardly mattered now, from the point of view of the overall war; Lynn had carried out his mission and had done it well, well enough to distract the British long enough for his people to carry through and defeat the Europeans. They would invade soon, he had been told, or if not he could leave the house one night and be extracted by a Russian submarine. He was sure that other commandos had been landed on British soil; the British ships had been badly damaged and the Royal Navy was straining the limits trying to block Russian submarines from moving into p
osition. His work, again…

  But there was his failure. He had failed to find out the location of the new government headquarters. There had been something missed, something that would have sent the British into the same kind of anarchy as the French and Spanish had it been destroyed; the British had a secret command post somewhere. Where? He had devoted a great deal of effort to finding it before Daphne had been arrested and drawn a blank; he didn’t even have a rough location. If he could find it, he could end the war…but he had no idea where to start looking, and he was trapped in the house. He had studied maps, wondering; logically, it was somewhere near London, but where?

  He sat back and smiled. Whatever else happened, he had done his duty, played the role of serpent in the garden to the best of his ability…and helped his country to win the war. All he had to do was survive; his people would reward him for what he had done.

  ***

  “More possible contacts, Captain,” the sensor operator reported, as the Winston Churchill moved through the dark waters. “I think…I’m sure there was a Russian submarine out there, just for a moment.”

  “Go active,” Ward ordered. The odds were that the Royal Navy had expended several dozen torpedoes on large fish and perhaps wrecks under the sea, but every contact had to be investigated. Only yesterday, a Type-45 destroyer had been sunk by a Russian submarine; the Russians were forcing them out of the English Channel. The Winston Churchill’s luck had run out after they had escaped the chaos surrounding Gibraltar; they had been bombed several times and damaged, only dumb luck had kept them alive. “See if you can locate the bastard!”

  “Got him,” the sensor officer crowed. The exultation in his voice made up for a lot of dangerous fighting. “One Russian attack submarine, trying to sneak out again when we pinged him the first time.”

  “Target designated,” the weapons officer said. He grinned savagely. “Captain?”

  “Fire at will,” Ward ordered. A torpedo lanced away from the Winston Churchill. “I want this bastard sunk and disposed of…”

  A burst of water appeared on the screens from an underwater detonation. “We hit the bastard,” the weapons officer said. Their third kill. “I think they’re gone completely.”

  “Captain,” the exec said, very quietly. “Look.”

  Ward followed his gaze and cursed; the screen that was permanently pointed at the carrier was blinking up red light. HMS Ark Royal, a tiny joke of a carrier and their only source of air cover, was burning. Someone else had just scored a kill.

  And the war went on.

  Chapter Forty-Five: The Final Countdown

  If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius where reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Near Brussels, Belgium

  “I cannot say that I am happy about it,” General Aleksandr Borisovich Shalenko said, very calmly. “How many have died in the brief confrontations with the steel of our power?”

  “How many of them were worth anything?” FSB General Vasiliy Alekseyevich Rybak countered. He had been placed in overall command of the occupation of Europe, leaving Shalenko in command of the forces massing along the west coast for the final stage of the campaign. “How many of them were actually inclined to help us, or at least to obey? Dissent is one thing; outright disobedience is another.”

  Shalenko said nothing. “We have to establish ourselves as The Boss and make sure that all of Europe knows it,” Rybak said, looking up at the third man in the room. “You may have taken the girls out of the camps we established for the Arabs, but overall, you know that there was no choice; order had to be maintained.”

  “And others will be driven to try to fight us,” Shalenko said, irritated. “The supply lines are still quite flimsy; a capable insurgency in Germany would force us to postpone the campaign for several months, perhaps long enough for the British to convince the Americans to interfere, or…”

  “There was little choice,” President Aleksandr Sergeyevich Nekrasov. The Russian President leaned forward, his face steeped with gravity; both men had protested loudly at his decision to visit Brussels. If the British found out about it in time, they might decide that the target was worth expending their remaining cruise missiles on an assassination attempt. The President was the one man Russia could not afford to lose. Without him, the new world order might totter…it might even fall. “We could not allow our supply lines to be limited even for a moment.”

  Shalenko nodded grimly. In many ways, the Russian control over France and parts of Germany had been an illusion, in the early days. The supply lines had been far too long, and even if most of the fight had gone out of the French, and their Arab enemies, the Russians had been running a serious risk. The plan hadn’t worked perfectly, but in the end…it had worked well enough. It was Spain that might prove a later problem; the multi-sided war raging there was sending thousands of refugees into France, all of whom had to be registered and put to work. Even a month after the Battle of Lorraine, the Russian grip on some parts of France was weaker than he would like, and there were entire armies lost somewhere within the mountains of Scandinavia. They dared not have their supply line disrupted…and they dared not create an insurgency in their rear; for the first time, Shalenko understood the problems that had faced European politicians since the first wave of immigration to Europe.

  “There are even signs that large parts of the population is happier under us for the moment,” Rybak pressed, taking his advantage and running with it. “They have law and order on their streets, the Muslims make scapegoats for all their ills…and they’re actually stripped of red tape, taxes and all the nonsense that the European Union created to limit productivity. Many of the older ones were even sick of the protesters and their protests…”

  “Those who haven’t lost people to your…men,” Shalenko injected.

  “And they’re quite happy to help us,” Rybak continued. “The teams examining the European technical base and working on using it for our own advantage are working fairly quickly and developing other possibilities from it for later use. The Americans snatched the ESA launching base in South America – wisely, as we had hoped that one of our allies there would pick up on it – but the remainder survived fairly intact. Large wages, perks and rewards…they should be back to full productivity soon.”

  He paused; the President invited him to continue with a raised eyebrow. “Italy took the worst damage and the worst bloodshed; bloodshed by native Italians, as opposed to immigrants and Arab soldiers,” Rybak said. Shalenko smiled thinly; the Algerians and Libyans had probably worked out that they had been screwed by now, but what were they going to do about it? Complain to the Americans? The United Nations? “By the time we got there, the Pope was thinking about committing suicide to avoid falling into the hands of one faction or another; our paratroopers saved his life and made him our prisoner. His support was invaluable, but Italy will be the poorest of the new territories for a long time. In time, however, they will be back to full productivity as well.”

  “Good,” Nekrasov said shortly. He shared a thin smile with Shalenko; both men knew that the President’s judgement about the Americans and the United Nations had been correct. The Americans had furiously denounced the invasion, but they had limited themselves to seizing Iceland and trying to send some supplies to the British, both expected. Rumour had it that the Canadians were sending some of the Eurofighters they had purchased from Europe to the British, but Shalenko doubted that that would get very far; the Canadians had their own worries about Russia. “That brings us to the final issue; Operation Morskoi Lev.”

  Shalenko smiled. He had chosen the name himself. He felt that it suited. “We have continued air raids against the British bases and naval facilities since we drove them into the sea at Ostend,” he said. They had also put thousands of
Arabic men to work as forced labour, clearing up the damage caused by heavy fighting right across the region, as well as moving out the population. Most of the citizens now had identity cards; unsurprisingly, the process had slowed slightly as the Russians had found themselves working on other problems. The one attempt by the Arabs to resist had been treated with deadly force; the survivors learned the lesson and worked. Besides, they had been promised access to their womenfolk if they worked hard. “The results have been quite promising.”

  He tapped the display in the bunker, hoping again that the British had no idea where it was; it was a tempting target without Nekrasov’s presence. “The largest force the British have deployed against us was twelve aircraft at a time; their numbers have been falling sharply to the point that several of our probes and raids were completely unopposed. We focused our efforts on the bases they were using to resupply their aircraft and forced them to fight; they must be running out of energy by now. They’re definitely conserving advanced weapons; only a handful of missiles were fired over the last week.”

  “Perhaps they’ve run out,” Rybak said. “They can hardly have an unlimited supply, even with American help…and the Americans can’t have an unlimited supply either.”