The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

“God willing,” Erica said. They had become friends in the terrible two months; he wished that he had known her before the war had begun. “For what it’s worth, sir, it was a honour to serve with you.”

  ***

  Clutching their weapons, they waited all along the line; some confident, some nervous, some anticipating the moment when they would come to grips with the enemy. For some of them, it was their first shot at real combat; many of them had escaped being sent to the Sudan. For others, it was the chance to avenge fallen comrades and even the score a little before there could be peace. They took their positions with care and forethought, hiding from the bombers they knew would soon be high overhead; it wouldn’t be long before they discovered if they were brave soldiers, or cowards. No one knew until they came face to face with the elephant. Some said their final prayers as they braced themselves; Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu…united at last in defiance against the common foe. Others only waited for it all to begin. History was moving around them…

  In Dover, Folkestone and a dozen smaller towns and villages, smaller detachments lurked. They had prepared the docks to surprise the Russians as best as they could; now they waited for the Russians to come within range of their weapons. They had prepared the towns and buildings for house-to-house fighting; the Russians would be forced to dig them out one by one if they wanted the towns. Many of them had sworn terrible oaths; the Russians would have to kill them all at their posts before they took the places they were defending.

  Further back, mobile artillery and other systems waited, holding fire only until they had targets to service. The crews checked their vehicles carefully; they had seen all of the data from the handful of heavy battles the Russians had fought in Europe, and the Battle of Lorraine had made it clear; the Russians would hammer them into the ground as soon as they detected their fire and localised their position. They had prepared to move as soon as the Russians found them; they were determined that they would make the Russians pay a price for invading their country. Direct feeds to a hundred hidden soldiers, lurking near possible landing zones, lit up; all they needed now was targeting data, targets to destroy. It wouldn’t be long now.

  All along the line, they waited.

  ***

  “I have a direct lock on seven heavy enemy transports,” the weapons officer snapped, as the Winston Churchill evaded a missile from a Russian aircraft with ease. The Russians had concentrated most of their efforts on suppressing the land defences over the past few weeks and it showed; the Royal Navy had enough time to muster its final stand. “Captain; request permission to open fire.”

  Captain Ward nodded slowly. The fighting was taking its toll…because they didn’t dare head any closer to the Russian-held coastline. The Winston Churchill had grown up in a world where missiles and guided-bombs presented a serious threat to ships…and no ship in existence, with the exception of the really big carriers, could survive a single hit with a heavy warhead. Her class might have been designed as the closest thing the European Union had intended to a battleship, but her armour was puny compared to that of the battleships that had last contested the Channel, back in 1940.

  “Engage the enemy,” he said, as the first of the sea-skimming cruise missiles started to launch. The Churchill normally carried twenty-four; the battles had drained their stocks down to nine, and seven of them had just been launched against moving enemy transports. He understood the logic – without the transports, the Russians would be unable to land their army – but they had a lot of transports. Had they commandeered every last civilian ship in Europe? There had been hundreds of ships, many of them registered under different flags; had all of them been brought to land soldiers on British soil? “Air defence?”

  “Four enemy bombers, heading towards the fleet’s location,” the air defence officer reported. Ward cursed; they had fired off most of their SAM missiles, and all they had left apart from that was the CIWS units, which were known to run out of bullets quickly. Replenishing them hadn’t been a problem – something that had been a relief, as they were around the only items that could be replaced quickly – but there would be no time to re-supply in the middle of a battle. “Requesting permission to engage.”

  “Coordinate fire with the other ships and engage at will,” Ward snapped. “Weapons?”

  “Three direct hits; they went up like firecrackers, Captain,” the weapons officer said. “Russian CIWS killed the other missiles and saved the transports!”

  Ward cursed under his breath. “Bring us around and regain firing solutions,” he ordered. “I want…”

  “Captain, the Russian aircraft are launching missiles,” the sensor officer said. “I have at least nine missiles homing in on our location!”

  “Evasive action,” Ward ordered, sharply. The Russians were trying to smother them; they were making up for problems in some of their targeting systems by overloading the British point-defence network. “You are cleared to engage the missiles with CIWS!”

  The yammering of the guns could even be heard on the bridge…and then they stopped. “Weapons jam, weapons jam,” the weapons officer snapped. “Three incoming missiles…”

  HMS Winston Churchill, the last of her class still in existence, took three hits along the superstructure. The Russian warheads punched though the thin hull and detonated inside the ship, destroying the entire vessel in a shattering cataclysm. There were no survivors.

  ***

  “I have fourteen Russian fighters advancing towards you, nineteen more holding in reserve,” Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg snapped, over the command network. “They’re trying to draw the RAF out to play…”

  “I love you too, Jacques,” Flying Officer Cindy Jackson said, as she banked the Eurofighter Tempest out over the south-east of England, waiting for the Russians to come calling. The Russians looked as if they had expected the RAF to come engage them right in the heart of their formation, and before the Americans had made their unexpected delivery, the RAF had planned to do just that. “We’ll hold position and wait.”

  There were thirty fast-jet fighters left in the RAF, mainly Typhoons and Joint Strike Fighters from the Royal Navy; Cindy knew that it was their last shot. She’d had it made brutally clear to her; if the RAF could knock out the Russian transports, it might just save Britain from Russian occupation. The Russians themselves were coming forward towards the British fighters; a handful more were remaining with the transports, probably cursing their luck at being stuck shepherding the slower aircraft. Fighter jocks were all the same; the Russians had a three-to-one advantage, just in the battlezone alone, and they weren’t going to waste it. They were coming towards her aircraft at supersonic speed and…

  Someone down on the ground flicked a switch. A dozen CADS and several light American launchers that had been prepared for auto-fire opened fire, mingled in with old Rapier and Javelin systems, sending nearly a hundred SAM missiles into the air. The Russians, caught by surprise, scattered; many of them had already become victims as the American-made missiles locked onto their aircraft and entered their terminal runs. Some Russian pilots punched out of their aircraft, choosing to risk capture rather than die in fire; others tried to evade until the very last moment.

  “Go,” Cindy snapped. The RAF fighters hit their afterburners at once and streaked south-east at supersonic speed, their weapons systems already receiving the download from the AWACS as they passed over the hidden weapons and headed into the teeth of the enemy transports. A handful of Russian fighters, the surprised escorts, were desperately trying to come into position to take a shot at her, but it was too late; they were too late. The RAF fired a hail of missiles towards the Russian transports and bombers, ignoring the fighters; twenty-three Russian aircraft exploded in midair as the RAF blew through them and kept firing, engaging every last target they saw. Russian fighters were trying to chase them out again, but the Russian formation was falling out of shape; their fighter controllers had to be going mental just trying to keep up with the rapidly changing situation
. She laughed aloud, jamming her hand down on the trigger for her cannons; a Russian transport aircraft and its parachute soldiers died under her fire.

  Her threat receiver screamed an alarm, moments before a tail gunner put a handful of rounds into the Tempest, which screamed in pain. She heard noises she had only heard in simulations as the aircraft started to disintegrate around her, but she couldn’t eject, not in the middle of the battle. That would almost certainly be guaranteed suicide; the Russians had fired on ejecting RAF pilots before, another trick to weaken the RAF still further. She still had weapons and options; she still had some possible tricks she could pull…

  And there was one weapon left. Pointing the remains of her aircraft towards another aircraft, she reached for the ejection lever ... too late. Her Tempest crashed into a Russian transport and both aircraft vanished from the sky in a tearing fireball. No one ever found a trace of Flying Officer Cindy Jackson, or her aircraft.

  ***

  General Shalenko gritted his teeth as the losses came in. They had expected losses, and they had almost wiped out the Royal Navy in exchange for losing several transports and ASW craft, but the losses in fighter craft were appalling. It hardly mattered; they had crippled the RAF and slaughtered the Royal Navy. They still had most of the transports intact and the soldiers were waiting now for a chance to come to grips directly with the enemy. He wouldn’t let them down; Russians knew that victory was worth the price.

  He turned to his aide. “Give the order,” he said, addressing her directly. “Deploy the landing force.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Operation Morskoi Lev, Take Two

  Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan. ... Henceforth the solid law of discipline for each commander, Red Army soldier, and commissar should be the requirement — not a single step back without order from higher command

  Stalin

  Battlezone, English Channel

  The transport nearest his aircraft blew up in a massive explosion, tossing Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev’s aircraft across the sky, sending a ripple of muttered curses up from the parachutists as they braced themselves for their coming mission. They had prepared for it as best as they could, but Aliyev knew – they all knew – that it would be their most dangerous yet. Nearly the entire paratrooper force had been committed to the mission, under a GRU General; failure was not an option.

  “That was a RAF aircraft ramming a transport,” Captain Boris Lapotev called back. Lapotev had been delighted to be at the controls of a genuine military transport again; the modified civilian aircraft would have been sitting ducks in the raging air battle, and the British would have known that they were hostile. All British civilian aircraft had been sent to the west of England, or to Scotland, where they laboured to evacuate as much of the population as possible. Aliyev knew enough about logistics to doubt that they had a serious chance of evacuating the entire population; it was far more likely that they wouldn’t be able to get more than a few hundred thousand out at most, assuming that the Americans and Canadians were willing to keep taking them in. “Poor, brave, stupid bastard.”

  Aliyev shrugged. He had spent time fighting the Poles when they had rallied, only a few hours too late, to attempt to retake the airport. They had been brave as well, and determined; the few prisoners had all been heavily injured before the Russians had captured them. The civilians caught in the war zone had suffered badly; they would be repatriated to their home countries as soon as possible. Aliyev had promised them that and…well, he wasn’t an FSB butcher. He wouldn’t have hesitated to drive over them if they had been blocking his route, as the FSB had done in Warsaw, but he wouldn’t slaughter for no tactical purpose.

  “Five minutes to jump point,” Lapotev said. Aliyev found himself tensing; he would be first out of the aircraft, as happened most of the time. Once they landed, they could expect to be attacked almost at once; if they were unlucky, the British might even shoot at them as they were falling out of the sky. It was early morning, but by now the British would be on the alert and gunning for the Russians with everything they had. “The air force is moving in first.”

  “Air farce,” someone muttered, in the semi-darkness of the plane. Aliyev ignored it; the soldiers could bitch and moan as much as they liked, provided they obeyed. The policy of openness had transformed Russian life and it would not be failed in his unit. “They’ll probably have left so that we get roasted as well.”

  “Two minutes,” Lapotev said. “Prepare for jump.”

  Aliyev shuffled towards the hatch as it yawned open, revealing the English Channel being replaced by beaches and patchwork fields, heading over a large motorway and back into the countryside. The sky was lit up by explosions and glowing missile trails; the British had their backs to the wall and knew it. It was possible, more than possible, that they would fire a missile at his aircraft; he would have no time to pitch himself out of the aircraft and survive the fiery death of his comrades.

  The Russian air force had been intended to assault their landing zone with bombs and napalm; the British could not be allowed a moment to realise that they had suddenly been dropped right into the front lines. Russian Intelligence had gone through all of the satellite images and other photographs taken by reconnaissance aircraft and had concluded that the British had prepared defences along the A20, between Dover and Folkestone; it made sense, from a tactical point of view. The British had to know that they would be assaulted from the sea and there weren’t that many places to land, short of a suicidal dash into a port. Denmark had been taken by the Trojan Horse trick, but the British would never let anything land in a port without inspecting it carefully. Once bitten…twice very shy; it would be a long time before anyone relaxed their guard.

  “One minute,” Lapotev snapped. His voice was becoming more excited as an explosion rocked the aircraft. “The bombers have gone in!”

  Aliyev counted down the moments as the paratroopers lined up behind him. The aircraft had been built purposefully for the deployment of paratroopers and it showed; they would be tossed out of the aircraft, along with some boxes of equipment, very quickly, and then the pilot would return to France and pick up more paratroopers. Aliyev wouldn’t be allowed to remain without reinforcements; the mission was too important for them to be allowed to fail. They would take the British in the rear, and then they would allow the naval infantry to assault the beach and allow the soldiers to land. Failure was not an option.

  A shrill whistle blew; seconds later, he was falling through the air, the wind blowing at him as he plummeted towards the ground. The thrill of it reached through to him, just for a moment, as the English countryside grew in front of him; the war didn’t exist as he screamed in exultation…

  Professionalism reasserted itself and he pulled the chute, sending it billowing out above him, catching the wind and slowing his fall to the bare minimum. The old Soviet Union had used dangerously slow descents; the newer Spetsnaz parachutes barely slowed the soldiers enough to prevent them from breaking their legs as they fell. Bursts of smoke were rising up from the ground; he could smell the sickly-sweet roast pork smell of burning human flesh. He had smelled it before, but it never failed to make him sick; there were few fates worse than being burnt alive.

  He could see a handful of British soldiers trying to fire at the parachutes as they came down, but it was too late now; even the bullet that cracked through his parachute and tore a steadily-expanding hole was too late to prevent him from landing and bringing up his weapon into firing position. Others from his unit had done the same; the British were mown down in a brief exchange of fire. Four of his own men had fallen.

  “Rally,” he shouted. The British would have seen them coming down and were doubtless preparing to react in any number of interesting and painful ways. There were plenty of ways to wipe out infantry and the British knew most of them; his soldiers formed up and advanced quickly before anything could happen. The motorway lay ahead; behind it, facing the sea, there were British trenches and
even a handful of British armoured units. “All units; attack!”

  The paratroopers had not passed unnoticed; British soldiers were already turning to attack them. A deadly series of fire-fights began, up and down the trench; both sides were calling in requests from their support units. Aliyev called a bomber into position to drop napalm and smoke grenades on the British; the British answered with long-range fire from hidden guns further into Britain. Aliyev dispatched a handful of his men to find the guns and assault them; those were light weapons that would otherwise be pouring fire into the transports and smaller ships convoying soldiers from France to Britain. He glanced down at his watch; ten minutes. Had it really been that long? It felt as if the fighting had gone on forever…

  “Tank,” someone shouted, as four light British tanks appeared, heading towards the Russian soldiers as they scattered under its fire. The commandos couldn’t move; it was vitally important that they kept the British focused on them, rather than on the seas. It wouldn’t be long before the first ships arrived and began to unload soldiers and equipment to assault and hopefully take the British ports nearby. The smaller commercial jetties and piers would probably have been mined, but the engineers had had lots of practice at disarming IEDs from Chechnya. “Tank…”

  “Take them out,” Aliyev snapped, into his short-range radio. Several antitank rockets were fired, designed to kill early Abrams and Challenger tanks, perhaps even Eurotanks if they were lucky; they made short work of the Scimitar tanks. The British kept up the pressure; it felt as if they would never be forced out or defeat the British. The entire campaign had boiled down to one long endless fight…and there seemed to be no end in sight.