The Fall of Night

Chapter Fifteen: Picking Up The Pieces, Take Two

London, England

“Mr Ambassador, there’s a fucking air raid coming in,” Captain Douglas McDonald shouted, bursting into the room. “Get into the emergency escape shaft, now!”

Ambassador Andrew Luong didn’t hesitate; the access shaft was already unsealing as alarms started to sound inside the American Embassy. He wondered if it was the President’s idea of a joke — he had once accused her of being on the rag when she had sent Special Forces into Central Asia to kill a warlord who had been only making anti-American proclamations — but dismissed the thought of a drill; McDonald had sounded far too serious… and even scared.

His assistant, Margery Wayne, was even more scared. He ignored her questions as the training took over; he took a breath and jumped into the emergency shaft, falling down through several floors into the bomb shelter underneath the basement. Though some miracle of science he didn’t even begin to understand, his fall was slowed somehow and he popped out of the end of the tube as if he had just jumped off a stool. Moments later, a protesting Margery followed, her skirt bunched up around her waist by the air pressure in the tube, revealing her underwear to his eyes. He grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the tube, seconds before McDonald followed, his voice grim.

“All right,” Luong said, “what the hell is going on?”

“We just had a FLASH warning from NORAD,” McDonald said. “Orbiting satellites have tracked the launch of over three thousand missiles in Europe, with at least two hundred of them aimed into British airspace. We don’t have targeting indicators for them yet, but it’s a certainty that some of them are going to fall within London. This place is a prime target.”

The Marine wasn't even breathing hard, Luong noticed, resentfully. “I see,” he said, between pants. His heartbeat was racing so fast that he was surprised he hadn’t had a heart attack by now. “What’s the hell happened? Are the Europeans at war?”

“It looks that way,” McDonald said. “I’m very much afraid that…”

“Targets identified, central London,” a Marine called, from the large console that controlled the emergency systems in the basement. If a group of terrorists mounted an attack, standard procedure was to hole up in the bunker and wait for the English cops to arrest the terrorists, after which the Americans could escape. Missiles, on the other hand… Luong knew that a bunker-busting missile would have no problems at all busting the embassy bunker. “I think… Westminster and Whitehall; one fell in Northwood, explosion registered on NORAD’s satellites, non-nuke, I repeat, non-nuke.”

Luong closed his eyes. His tenure as Ambassador to Great Britain had been a surprise to him, particularly after the infamous rag comment, but he had understood the importance of the President’s decision. The United States needed allies, and even if NATO and all of the formal alliances had been dissolved, there was still a great deal of cooperation between the United States and its former allies. It was true that the misnamed and over-exaggerated Embassies War had damaged reputations, but some elements within the various establishments were still willing to work privately with the Americans.

But even that had limitations. If he had had the chance, Luong would have happily strangled Corporal Mike Collins himself; the young fool had cost America far too much. No one, not Hitler, not Yamamoto, not even Osama bin Laden himself had wreaked so much havoc… and the worst of it all was that it had been unnecessary. The British might have frowned on prostitutes, but there had been plenty of them near RAF Mildenhall. Collins had never needed to go find a young innocent girl, let alone rape and murder her. The crime had shocked England…

Luong had seen the reports, the increasing war waged in Parliament, tearing apart a desperate attempt by the British Government to keep it all quiet until Collins could be extradited properly and sentenced to life imprisonment at His Majesty’s pleasure. The American Government had cooperated… but the British media and even some media back in the States had treated it as if Collins had been flown out of the country to safety. The British Government had been forced into retreat after retreat and finally… America had been asked to leave the country. It had been the final act of that government; it had fallen a month afterwards.

Collins had died the same year, murdered in Leavenworth by a fellow inmate during a particularly nasty homosexual rape; as far as Luong was concerned, it wasn't anything like enough. The storm had refused to abate; governments had fallen across Europe, and by the time the storm had started to fade, American forces had been evicted from almost every base in Europe. Horror stories, many of them older than the Cold War, had been dug up and tossed at America; Americans were using Europe, Americans were fighting the war in Europe, Americans were intent on eternally controlling Europe…

The year afterwards, NATO had dissolved permanently.

Luong stared up at the console, saying nothing, as the missiles found their targets. He had had hopes of repairing the relationship with Britain, at least, after he had been appointed to England. It hadn’t been easy; the Prime Minister was a committed believer in Europe and had been inclined to allow matters of international concern to slip to Brussels. The European Parliament, overwhelmingly elected by socialists and known anti-Americans, had found America-bashing to be a substitute for its own failed politics. They had passed resolutions that condemned the rise of the American police state, border controls and harsh responses to terrorism, all the while ignoring the growing threat under their own noses. Places like France, and Spain, and even London provided a haven for terrorists… and the European Parliament didn’t even care. They had even welcomed in thousands of known terrorist fighters from Palestine…

A Marine looked up at McDonald, just as the ground shook. “That was at least four impacts in quick succession,” he said. “The missiles hit Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament; NORAD’s uplink is reporting multiple missile hits across the United Kingdom and several airliners going down in flames. The main power seems to have failed completely, sir; the generator is all that’s keeping the embassy working.”

Luong took a breath, trying to act ambassadorial and failing. America had warned the British that they were inviting trouble; they had warned the French and the Germans, but none of them had listened. It was easy to blame America for Europe’s woes, from the endless trade disputes to the funding provided for terrorists from European Muslim groups. Some Americans could never set foot in Europe without being arrested for war crimes; many more Europeans who had no loyalty at all to Europe would be arrested and charged with terrorism — which carried the death penalty — in America. America had lost some of her innocence… and it showed.

He sighed. “Do we have some idea of who’s actually launching the missiles?”

“I think its Russia,” a Marine said. His face was very pale, but his eyes were bright. “NORAD tracked at least a thousand missiles coming out of European Russia, others coming out of Serbia and Algeria, Russia’s closest allies. Others were launched from submarines and aircraft and only we or the Russians have that kind of capability.”

Luong nodded. The Chinese had tried to build it, but Chinese ambitions had firmly sunk after the attempt to seize Taiwan had failed so badly, destroying most of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Luong thought that it would have made the Chinese feel better if American ships and submarines had been directly involved; the proof that the Taiwanese were determined to avoid reunification had proven the downfall of the Communist Government. The Chinese Civil War still raged on.

Margery caught his arm. She was terrified, he realised; she hadn’t signed up for being trapped in a bunker. They weren’t trapped, it wasn’t as if they couldn’t get out onto the streets, but he knew that they were probably safer in the bunker until the situation on the ground clarified itself. It shouldn’t take long; Britain might have been in the dumps, but it was far from a Third World country.

Her voice was thin and reedy. “What do we do?”

“It’s a cliché, but we have no choice, but to wait,” Luong said. He held her hand for a long moment until she calmed down. “The Russians seem to have just ignored us completely.”

He wished he could say that he was surprised. The Russians had been growing more and more powerful, ever since they had recovered from the post-Cold War depression and started to rebuild their country. They had sold arms to everyone who was interested, much to American outrage; Russian weapons had killed Americans in Iran and the Middle East. They had also sold weapons to Latin and South America — he remembered, his blood running cold, the British task force that had been dispatched to shore up the defences of the Falkland Islands — and, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine, even started a long-term process of upgrading the Latin and Southern American militaries. They had even invited the Central Asian states back to the fold… and many of them had actually rejoined the Russians. They no longer trusted America either.

America hadn’t wanted to become involved in the Ukraine situation and had been more than happy to leave it to the Europeans; it was in their backyard, after all. Luong had been more alarmed, however, by the rise in Russian preparations for outright violence; the Russians had said, quite clearly, ‘this far and no further.’ They had wanted to keep the Ukraine within their sphere of influence and that had meant, as far as they were concerned, no foreigners allowed. They already dominated Belarus; the CIA had been privately warning that the Russians intended to support various factions in Ukraine to take control and evict the pesky Europeans. It had surprised them that the Russians had even allowed a EUROFOR unit into the Ukraine…

Outright missile attacks across the United Kingdom? Luong had a feeling that he knew what had happened to the European forces in the Ukraine. The CIA had warned repeatedly about some of the methods the Russians were using to rebuild their country, including the use of forced labour and the genocide of thousands of Chechens. The Russians had just started World War Three.

Luong sat down on a sofa and glanced around. He hadn’t spent much time in the bunker and the drab utility of its design surprised him. The embassy itself was very luxurious, but the bunker was cold, if not dark; a line of weapons were mounted against one wall, just in case a final last stand was required. It was how he imagined a missile launch room in a nuclear silo to look; the pistols so that the crew could take their own lives, rather than die slowly under the rubble.

“I just heard from Vince, on the roof,” Rolf Lommerde said. The CIA spook, the main intelligence operative for London, looked grim. “He says that there’s fires everywhere and even some gunfire; no sign of an official reaction as yet. There’s a great deal of jamming on the British military, police and civilian bands; it looks as if Britain just took one hell of a hammering.”

“I think I worked that out,” Luong snapped. He didn’t like Lommerde; the man was just too slick, even if sending one of his people to the roof was actually a good idea. He glared at the CIA officer with all the disdain a professional diplomat and former National Guardsman could muster. The National Guard had a low opinion of the CIA after a unit had walked into a firefight where the CIA had absolutely, positively, sworn blind that there was no chance of an enemy presence. “Was there any clue at all as to what was going to happen?”

“No, Mr Ambassador,” Lommerde said. He sat down next to Luong without being asked. “We tracked a lot of Russian military movement, but we believed that it was intended to convince the Poles that the Russians would act if they were to do anything stupid, such as calling for European intervention if the Ukraine actually boiled over into civil war. Other movements were in the same field; one of the most active units was right on Ukraine’s eastern border, well out of range to threaten Poland or Europe.”

For a moment, the mask slipped and Luong saw the desperation under Lommerde’s glib tongue. “He saw one of the places that are burning,” Lommerde said. “It was the Regent’s Park Mosque, one of the places that we maintain some covert — very covert — surveillance on, nothing that the British would have to take official notice of and prevent us from carrying on. The British Anti-Terrorist Unit knows about it and says nothing; we believe that the British Government knows nothing about it.”

He sighed, loudly. “But… that place has always had cells of radicals nearby; the Mosque was taken over by radicals several times. The British cleared them out, from time to time, but they always came back; Mustapha has been known to speak there and — God knows — we’ve actually tried to have him assassinated while he’s been in England. It would be worth it, even if we failed to find a criminal to subcontract the job out to, to trade one of our people for him.”

Luong ground his teeth. Mustapha was wanted in the United States for connections with the attack that had devastated Oakland. The evidence against him, however, had been gained by ‘special means,’ or torture, as more-enlightened people called it. The British Government might have let him be taken off the streets, but the Americans had made the mistake of asking the Prime Minister directly… and he had refused. Mustapha continued to spread havoc through Europe… untouched, unmolested; Luong wasn't even sure if the British maintained their own surveillance on him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Mustapha haven’t been watched at all.

“I see,” he said. “I don’t suppose that Mustapha is dead?”

“There’s no information,” Lommerde said. “Mr Ambassador; if someone wanted to start a civil war in London’s streets, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

“My God,” Luong said. The sheer scale of the operation impressed and terrified him. “What the hell is going on?”

McDonald came over and saluted, exchanging a brief glare with Lommerde. “I have managed to talk directly to my superiors,” he said. Luong rolled his eyes; in an emergency, the superiors were the officers at the Pentagon who supervised the close protection of American representatives around the world. “There are no further missiles heading towards Britain and they have provisionally decided to leave us here, unless the situation changes.”

Luong nodded in relief; the thought of an extraction under fire terrified him. He wouldn’t have been surprised to know that it terrified Lommerde, or even McDonald, as well; no one would forget the botched operation that had failed to save the lives of the Ambassador to Pakistan, back in the Pakistani Intervention. Perhaps that had been when the rot had finally set into America’s geopolitical strategy; who had reasonably expected other countries to play ball when the cost of playing ball could be even higher than not playing ball?

“The President has sounded a military alert and units of the Atlantic Fleet have been placed on alert to launch a covering mission for an extraction flight, if necessary,” McDonald continued. “At present, I do not believe that there is any real threat to the embassy, and you are safer inside here than you would be trying to escape in the middle of a shooting war.”

“I can’t fault the logic,” Luong said. USAF pilots had accidentally shot down civilian aircraft during the War on Terror before and he couldn’t see British pilots avoiding the same mistakes, particularly if several airliners had indeed gone down. Had they been hijacked, or was it merely a case of a terrorist with a portable SAM launcher? “Did the President have a message for me?”

“The National Security Council is meeting in emergency session fairly soon,” McDonald said. “The President has so far not commented, apart from approving you remaining within the embassy and attempting to open communications with the British Government, or what remains of the British Government. Brussels and every other European city appear to have been attacked as well; we can only conclude that these are the opening moves in a full-scale invasion.”

Luong found himself grasping for words. “But…”

“It is standard military tactics,” McDonald said. “We launched decapitation strikes during the Iraq War, and to some extent during the Iran War. If our intelligence had been better” — he paused to give Lommerde a scowl — “and the legal situation back then what it is now, we would have left the ragheads gasping for breath and utterly unaware of what was going on around them. There is no point in launching such a… brutal series of attacks, sir, unless you intend to go all the way.”

Luong felt his legs grow weaker and silently thanked God that he was sitting down. Europe… hell, if all of Europe had been hit as badly, then Europe no longer existed except in name. Somehow, he would have to pick up the pieces and find out who was in charge, before the Europeans lost the unexpected war. What the hell was going on?

“I see,” he said finally. “We need to get in touch with the local authorities, somehow; how do we do that?”