The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  ***

  Anton Mihailovich Sviridov, stripped of all rank and status, swam ashore through warm water, praying to a God he had abandoned long ago that he would make it safely through the British defences and onto the shores, and then perhaps to his old rank. Sergeant Sviridov had been having some fun with a German girl – the FSB had been given German girls to have fun with, but the common soldiers had been left with the prostitutes, and besides, Sviridov had fought his way through Germany and needed some fun – when the military police had caught him. The girl – naturally – hadn’t realised that as a victor, her body belonged to him; she had claimed that he had taken her against her will.

  So what? He had argued, when he had faced his commanding officer; the girl was a slut. All German and European girls were sluts; the Russians had seen more legs and breasts in their march across Europe than they had seen in anywhere else they had visited, from Moscow’s own Red Light district, to places in Central Asia where the women remained covered and well out of sight of Russian patrols. She had teased him, and taunted him, and played hard to get, but he had known what she had wanted from the moment she smiled at him. She had wanted it rough, she had wanted the illusion of submission…and Sviridov had been happy to oblige.

  The argument had cut no ice with his commanding officer. Looting, rape and unnecessary property damage were officially forbidden, and that meant a spell in the penal units for Sviridov. His rank and campaign medal had been stripped from him and he had been forced to wear the bright pink uniform of a penal soldier; pink in the hopes that the enemy would take a pot-shot at the obvious target rather than the more sanely dressed combat soldiers. After a short spell clearing up debris alongside imprisoned Arabs and the male survivors of various protest groups – he had taken some delight in telling them what had happened to the girls who had survived the protest – he had been sent along with his unit, like prisoners, to a base in Belgium.

  “If you survive this, you will be freed in advance,” the military policeman had informed them. Sviridov had three weeks left of his sentence, during which all he could expect was hard and dangerous work; he had gratefully accepted the offer as a way of regaining his old rank. His seniority would be permanently stripped from him, but he would have his rank back and in the future he would stick to the brothels; there was a constant stream of young women looking to earn money and rations lying on their backs. “If you survive…”

  Sviridov had known how to swim, of course – it was a required skill in the Russian Army – but he had never swum in a sea before. He had heard that some officers had intended the penal soldiers to literally swim the entire Channel, but sanity had prevailed before the Russian officers could take the chance to free themselves of a liability and send the penal soldiers on a suicide mission. Their current mission wasn't much of an improvement; if they faltered, or if they were slowed, the FSB marksmen in the boats would shoot them down on the spot. The water covered his head, a foul-tasting brine, and he was almost sick as he crawled up onto the beach, almost gasping in horror as he saw a crab for the first time. He didn’t take chances; he brought his foot down on the animal hard and then started the advance up the beach.

  The mission brief had been simple; the British would have mined the beach and prepared booby-traps. Sviridov and his unit had to clear all of the traps, a mission that would win them their freedom…or kill them all if they failed. The beach was strewn with wire and seaweed; the soldiers started to pull at the wire, wincing as British soldiers fired at them from time to time, the fire answered by the heavy guns on the naval infantry transports as they grew closer. A shell landed close to him and the shockwave picked him up, tossing him head over heels towards the water; he had a chance to see the approaching wave of naval infantry as they stormed towards the shore.

  He forced himself back to work. Penal soldiers were held in contempt by all other soldiers; many of them wouldn’t pause to piss on one if he were dying of thirst. The wire was reaching up towards a stairway heading upwards towards the British lines; Sviridov pulled at it carefully, wondering what the British had been doing with it. The wires wouldn’t snarl up a tank’s engines; they would be lucky if they slowed down armed infantry. For a moment, the sound of firing seemed to die away as he crawled onwards, not daring to stop for fear of being shot in the back…and then he heard an audible click.

  Oh shit, he thought, as he realised in a split-second that he had triggered a mine. Moments later, his body was blown to bits by an improvised explosive device…and Russian naval infantry stormed onwards, heading towards the British lines, now caught between two fires. The might of the Russian Navy was about to be displayed on land for the first time since Denmark.

  ***

  It was confirmed; the Russian main landing site had been identified. Orders were sent out rapidly to the units caught in the firing line; they were ordered to break contact and pull back to the second defence lines as quickly as they could. For many of them, it was an impossible task; the Russian paratroopers might have been melting away, but the Russian naval infantry were hard on their heels, searching for targets. They knew that they were vulnerable; the cold knowledge made them deadlier than ever.

  Further back into the British lines, expertly camouflaged, the remaining MLRS trucks in the British Army opened fire, sending a shower of deadly rockets down onto the Russian positions. The rockets had been supplied by the Americans, an improved version of the original rounds; they homed in on tanks and ships, often mixing kinetic speed with explosive force to knock out and destroy Russian tanks and landing ships. Others came in closer; a captured German liner was driven aground and Russian naval infantry stormed out of her, heading up the beach towards their rally points, and then being dispatched out to link up with the paratroopers and expand their zone of control. Other naval infantry had to swim, or use smaller boats, but they made it to the shore; officers rapidly sorted out the chaos into slightly more organised chaos and directed them to their pre-planned points. The invasion would continue.

  Far out to sea, Russian Mainstay AWACS tracked the location of the MLRS and directed bombers onto them as priority targets, along with located positions of British soldiers. The British had come up with a handful of tricks, including American-supplied missiles and cannibalised CIWS taken from ships that had been damaged beyond repair, hacking bombers out of the sky as long as the missiles held out. The supplies had always been low; a handful of the MLRS trucks were caught on the ground and destroyed by the bombers, two more were hunted down by Russian helicopters as they started to enter the battle. The motorway had been secured rapidly and penal units were dispatched to see to clearing the mines as far as the defences of Dover and Folkestone; the entire shore would have to be cleared to allow the plan to proceed. The Russian planners were pleased; they had taken heavier losses than they had expected, but they had secured a lodgement.

  All they had to do was make it permanent.

  ***

  The Spetsnaz commandos almost opened fire before they recognised the uniforms of the naval infantry; they had been completely focused on the fighting before the order had come to disengage. Aliyev checked around with his people as the naval infantry moved forwards; they could handle the fighting long enough for him to tend to his own men. Several hundred had been killed in the brutal fighting, including the General; Aliyev has suspected as much from the sudden end of barked orders. That gave him other responsibilities; he was now in command of the remaining four hundred men who were almost uninjured.

  He grinned to the west. The British were falling back; all the Russians had to do was breach a major defence line and then they would have the lodgement they needed to build up the forces to advance into the two port cities. Even without the ports, it wouldn’t slow down the landing process much…and then they would advance on London. His men might even get another combat jump out of it before major combat operations came to an end; they could certainly act as shock infantry if they were denied any other role.

 
Once London fell…

  Once London fell, it would be all over.

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Operation Morskoi Lev, Take Three

  For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

  But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Battlezone, English Channel

  Colonel Stuart Robinson peered through his binoculars along the road. The Russians would have to come along it to hit his defence line, such as it was; he didn’t have the heavy weapons to make a proper stand. A handful of soldiers had been dug into Hawkinge, trying to slow down the Russians; from the flames in the distance, it seemed as if the Russians had simply burned down the town and killed most of the defenders.

  The line of survivors had passed through Robinson’s lines minutes ago; there were no more active units registering on his terminal, no more little signals from the American microburst equipment reporting that a unit was still intact, if trapped. The forces in Dover and Folkestone had dug in to the buildings, but now the Russians had gained control of the countryside, the cities could be left alone until they were ready to deal with them. Robinson wished, desperately, for an air strike, or perhaps even a tactical nuke, but the former had been lost to the British when most of the RAF had gone down in the Battle of Dover.

  “The next people who come along that road,” he ordered, looking down at his veterans and the newcomers alike, “I want you to kill.”

  The very horizon seemed to be on fire. He could only be glad that Hazel was well out of the way in Edinburgh; if she had stayed in London, as she had wanted to do to be near him, she might have been caught up in the chaos. The radio reports said that the entire city was panicking and demanding evacuation; there was no way that Britain’s overstressed transport network could move even a small fraction of the city’s population out in time. The noise of guns – Russian guns – and aircraft – Russian aircraft – was a constant crescendo; the Russians had more of everything and it showed. The British forces were operating right at the edge of their capabilities; it wouldn’t be long, one way or the other, before they had to fall back to the line at Dorking. The Russians would probably try to surround the city before actually trying to enter it; Dorking was one of the strong points along the line surrounding London.

  “My god,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart breathed, as they watched the flames growing in the distance. The noise of fighting never faltered; the isolated remnants of British units, trapped and turning like trapped rats to take a last bite out of the enemy before being overcome. The Russians would know that they had been in a fight, not like the Germans or the Poles, where only isolated resistance had been mounted across most of the country. Robinson had been offered a chance to leave the country and had rejected it; like so many others, he would make his stand with his men. “What are they doing in there?”

  Robinson had no answer. The Russian jamming was affecting some of their datalinks with higher command, but they had enough information to know that the Russians had secured most of their sea-lanes to Britain and were pouring supplies through the gap; the little left of the Royal Navy was powerless to prevent them. They might not have a port, but they didn’t need one to land some supplies, and given time, they would be able to jury-rig a temporary pier for unloading the heavier supplies. They needed interdiction of some kind, but the Company’s EW officer had reported on the air-search radars and missile launchers that were being set up around the Russian landing zone; an air attack would be suicide with the handful of aircraft that the RAF had left. A suicidal strike mission wouldn’t even get close enough to make the loss of the aircraft reliable; only the RAF at full strength would have had a prayer of success…and that would have cost them dearly.

  The noise of a CADS broke the sound of Russian weapons; he saw the flares of its rockets as they lanced off into the sky, tracking an unknown target, perhaps a Russian drone hunting for British forces. The majority of the surviving forces were either trapped in the cities, part of his line, or falling back on the final defence line around London. The Russians had probably done a headcount…

  “There,” Inglehart muttered. Robinson blinked, confused, and then he saw the Russian attack helicopter drifting into the air, floating over a force of seven green tanks that were advancing into the English countryside. The force of Russian infantry were moving out in front – it took Robinson a moment to realise that he was looking at a penal unit, not a regular unit – and were marching back and forwards ahead of the tanks. “Mine clearing, sir; I bet you…”

  Robinson felt sick. The British Army had a great deal of experience in clearing mines; it seemed that the Russian solution to the problem was to march their naughty soldiers in front of their tanks, down a road that might have been mined. Intelligence wasn't clear on what a soldier had to do to get into a penal unit; for all he knew, the men who were moving slowly along the road had objected to the thought of invading Europe. It was wishful thinking, he had to remind himself; there was no way that a few of the penal soldiers wouldn’t be killed in the firing. Only a politician could believe it was possible to accomplish any such stupid ideal.

  He lifted his field telephone. “Fire on my command; firing plan zeta,” he muttered. They’d had the time to plan the action carefully. The war had been unpredictable, but the Russians had to answer to the same basic laws of military logistics, same as everyone else. The British Army had stripped the area of everything that might be useful; if they could give the Russians a bloody nose or two, they would win themselves time…

  A little voice whispered at the back of his mind. For what…?

  The Russians advanced closer. He would have been delighted to mine the road, but it had been impossible to produce or obtain enough mines for everywhere that needed mining; it had been hard enough to mine some of the most likely beaches that the Russians had used for landing zones. He could hear them now as they came nearer to his position; his people knew the area far better than any Russians could hope to know it without a few years living in the region. He refused to think about the possibility that the Russians might have someone with them who had spent a year studying the possibilities…

  They couldn’t have thought that far ahead, could they?

  The lead Russian helicopter danced closer. He’d seen the formation before, in the training movies that had covered Afghanistan and some of the African missions the British Army had taken on and won. The real danger to the helicopter was ground-fire; the pilot was remaining over the ground forces to make it much harder for a single British soldier with a Stinger or a different antiaircraft missile to fire on him. Russian infantry, armed this time, were advancing as well…right into the teeth of his trap.

  “Fire,” he ordered.

  A soldier carrying a Stinger missile fired; the other guns opened up at the same time. The Russian infantry threw themselves to the ground and returned fire, as three of their tanks and the helicopter were struck and destroyed by the British fire. A fourth tank rumbled around the first tank, main gun already tracking on where it thought the attack had come from; the shell it fired missed the British and struck a barn some distance away, sending it up in flames. Robinson could only hope that there was no one hiding in that barn; certainly, no one had had the chance to get out.

  The Russian infantry were brave, certainly; even the penal soldiers were showing bravery, though British Intelligence reported the penal soldiers had been warned that they would be shot in the back if they retreated or slowed down. It was a mad way to run an army, but the Russians seemed to use it constantly; they had used the same tactics back in 1945, when they had crushed the SS and moved into Germany. The British soldiers, carefully positioned in their trenches, picked them off until a Russian blew a whistle and the Russians fell back, waiting.

  Robinson knew better than to wait to find out what. He muttered an order into his radio and the trenches were quickly abandoned, a handful of weapons left behind on auto-t
arget, scanning constantly from side to side for the first sight of anything moving. Robot guns were rare, because the slightest movement could trigger them into firing, but Robinson was far too sure that there were no longer any friendly soldiers in the direction of Dover. He joined Inglehart in being the last to leave the trench, knowing that most of his soldiers would reach the second set of defence lines, fighting tiny battles constantly to slow up the invasion forces and force them to deploy to fight, all the while buying time…

  The voice was back at the back of his head. For what…?

  Two black shapes appeared at the corner of his eye, swooping down on their location; there was no mistaking the shape of the Devil’s Cross aircraft as they opened fire with heavy machine guns and small rockets. They wanted to kill every soldier in the trench, he realised, as he threw himself down into a ditch; they had brought along enough firepower to wipe out an armoured division. The explosions finally stopped and they crawled further away, refusing to be dismayed any more than they already were; they would reach the second set of trenches or die trying.