The Fall of Night

Interlude Two: The Price of Inaction

All over Europe, the chickens were coming home.

It started in Paris, where Algerian sleeper cells had worked for years, preparing the revolution. The plan had been simple; supplying the weapons had been even simpler. The Algerians had only a small force of radicals, but they knew that many of their fellow Arabs would join them, while the Palestinians would bring their talents at confounding the Israelis to work against the French. At the designated moment, the call for Jihad was sent out and the first bombs started to detonate in the city.

All over Paris, police and government buildings found themselves under attack; the missile strikes had shattered the French command and control systems, preventing a unified response. Algerian sleeper teams seized several important targets, while isolated police and military units found themselves fighting a desperate running battle for survival. They responded with brutal force, allowing racism to surge to the surface, inciting more violence as Paris dissolved into a nightmare of fire and death. The sleepers had planned carefully; before the day was done, they wanted to hold the entire city and proclaim their new world.

The same story was occurring all over Europe. In Spain, long the favoured destination of Moroccans and Algerians, massive bombs shattered buildings and spread panic. Rumours were rife, ranging from the long-dreaded civil war courted by the ETA to a landing of soldiers from America; panic and chaos spread rapidly. The missiles had shattered the Spanish Government, leaving only fire and death in their wake. In Germany, the far-right came out and attacked Muslim and Turkish immigrants, along with Russian guest workers and even American tourists, promoting massive retaliation by the ethnic groups. A savage multi-sided war had begun right in the heart of Europe.

The Russians had inserted themselves into many far-right and far-left groups in Europe; the Algerians had worked hard to control the different Islamic groups. The combination was explosive as the first dominos fell, one by one; attack was repaid by attack and then a full-scale race war broke out. The police, seen as the enemy by all sides in the conflict, were forced back, often right out of the cities completely; more than a few policemen, their fortitude torn and broken by multiculturalism, tore off their uniforms and vanished into the night. The terror had taken on a life of its own; no one, not even the Algerians, could control it. It didn’t matter, or so the Russian planners had intended; the chaos could only work in the Russian favour.

The Netherlands, the capital of radical Islam in Europe, found itself sucked into darkness as the first bombs detonated. The Dutch had been growing ever more resentful of the population of Muslims within their ranks; no one would forget in a hurry the murder of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic extremist. Even as Muslim radicals asked the dreaded question — “are you with us or against us?” — to the other Muslims in the Netherlands, the far-right was already on the march. The streets ran with blood.

The civil network had broken down almost at once, first under the impact of Russian missiles, and then under the pressure from Russian commando groups. Unseen, unheard, the Russians moved silently through Europe, taking out targets that could become problems, later. Politicians who showed fortitude were targeted for elimination; weapons dumps and other military bases were targeted for destruction or capture. In some cases, groups of anarchists snatched weapons and used them on everyone, fighting for their own purposes, while the cities burnt around them. The Russians, untouched, carried on their grizzly work.

A dozen timers ticked down in a dozen ships. The tankers had been stalled in port because of a strike; an embarrassed Russian government had paid their tolls… and Europe had laughed at the Russians who hadn’t dared to strike outside free and liberal Europe. Now, the timers reached zero and ships loaded with Liquid Natural Gas exploded, devastating the surrounding areas and forcing the remains of the European emergency services to concentrate on a very different disaster. Isolated, cut off from their superiors, they did what they could, unaware of the real threat.

In the south of France, the explosions were a sign to the Algerian Special Forces units that had been inserted into France two weeks before the war began. Five thousand Algerians had gone to Russia to be trained; seven hundred had returned, each one a lethal killer and a ruthless operative. They moved now as the sky lit up with unholy fire, driving towards the massive refugee camps that had been set up to house the immigrants from Algeria, Morocco and further south in Africa. The French had wanted to return them, but the European Courts had said no; they had remained there, day after day, under guard…

The guards disliked their job and the people they watched over. Some of them did the best they could, some of them abused the refugees, or traded food for sexual purposes. They were hardly the cream of the French armed forces… and there was no reason to expect that they would be attacked in the heart of France. The sudden assault overwhelmed them; the guards killed before they could sound an alarm, and the commandos looked upon those who had fled their country, months ago. Many of them had allowed themselves to be caught.

Weapons had been provided and limited plans made; the makeshift army surged out of the camp, already forming up into groups. The commandos knew how to control brute troops; they had gained respect by killing the guards and they used that mercilessly. Under their leadership, the refugees would take part in the violence, intended to establish the Islamic State of France. None of them knew, nor would they have cared, that the Russian plans were very different. Doubt was not in their mindset; the few dissenters among the male population, those who had been in the camps and had escaped being radicalised, were rapidly dispatched with quick shots to the head. Howling, the army set off towards the burning city on the horizon, the Promised Land that had turned its back on them.

In Britain, the situation was different. In the light of burning cities, far-right groups launched attacks; Muslim groups fought back, the situation made worse by the sight of aircraft crashing and wild rumours spreading across the country. As in Europe, police stations and TA bases found themselves under attack; a string of accidents to gladden the heart of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf occurred on the streets. Manchester, Bradford, Luton, Liverpool, Birmingham and even some parts of London fell into civil disorder and chaos; both sides, once again, were targeting the police as well as any other part of the national government. The chaos seemed unending…

No one knew that, in Poland, it had only just begun.