The Fall of Night

Chapter Twenty-One: Strike from the Sky, Take One

Polish Airspace, Near Szczecin

“Are you sure that this is actually working?”

Captain Boris Lapotev shrugged. “So far, there’s been nothing since we lost contact with the ground,” he said. “The Europeans put all their eggs in one basket, and what part of the civil aviation network the missiles didn’t fuck up got fucked up by the cyber attacks. We’re just a group of harmless civilian aircraft who are meandering blindly along towards Szczecin-Goleniów Airport. What could go wrong?”

Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev, who knew much more about the overall plan than Lapotev, said nothing. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that one of their own commandos down on the ground would launch a SAM at them… and any of the countermeasures built into the aircraft, if used, would give away their real identity. It might not matter, not with the confusion down on the ground, but it was better to be safe than sorry. On the ground, the five hundred commandos under his command were dangerous; in the air, they were sitting ducks for enemy aircraft.

He glanced back out of the cockpit. The aircraft had once been a fairly normal Boeing 747, before the Russian Air Force had gotten their hands on it and handed it over to the GRU. Now, it looked like a normal jetliner, acted like a normal jetliner, but it had carrying space for over a hundred commandos and their equipment. They could have packed more into the aircraft, but he knew that if they were lucky, they could take the airport, and if the Germans or Poles had time to react and dig in, they were all about to die. Everything depended upon the Europeans being fooled.

They’d taken off in the early hours of the morning, replacing a set of aircraft that had been coming the long way around the Ukraine, something that had become routine after several years of chaos and the occasional explosion in the Ukraine. Russia had bent over backwards to ensure that the pilots, crew and passengers of those aircraft had felt welcome on their brief stopover on a Russian airport, but the last time had been different. Passengers and pilots had been herded off their aircraft; the IFFs had been quickly copied and a new flight of aircraft were on their way, to all intents and purposes the same as the aircraft that had landed… at least from the outside observer’s point of view. The long flight had been nerve-wrecking — they'd seen at least one vast explosion in the distance — but the combination of jamming, limited contact with other aircraft and panic on the ground had prevented anyone from asking questions that Lapotev couldn’t have answered.

“Roger that, Speedbird-Seven,” Lapotev said. Aliyev covered his mouth to conceal a smile; anyone who knew the actual pilot’s voice would blame any misunderstandings on the jamming. “We confirm no contact with anyone on the ground; have you any contacts at all?”

He thumbed the radio off and grinned. “Everyone is completely confused and doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on,” he said. “Some of them might try to land at the airports anyway, even without radio contact.”

“I had limited contact with Dresden, Ukraine-Four,” Speedbird said. Lapotev had identified it as a British aircraft, intending to fly into Poland before all hell had broken loose. “They’re warning of terrorists with missiles and rioting on the ground, and then we lost contact again.”

Aliyev said nothing. He couldn’t remember, offhand, if Dresden was a target or not for commando teams, but the airport would certainly have received a dose of missiles, just to ensure that it didn’t start helping military aircraft into the air. Dresden had played host to a large immigrant community, he remembered; perhaps some of the FSB’s attempts to spread rioting had actually worked there. He scowled down at the final update from an operative in Szczecin; there had certainly been no sign of any military presence at the airport, but standard European procedure was to put all the airports on alert… if they knew that there had been SAM attacks elsewhere in Europe. One of the problems with such attacks was that it was impossible to know just how well you had done… his force might have an easy fight or run headlong into a battle they couldn’t win.

Fortune favours the brave, he reminded himself. There was no questioning the bravery of his men. They had served together in the worst of war zones, which had allowed them to weed out everyone who might have let them down at the worst possible time. Poland should be an easy target compared to some places in Central Asia. Who dares… wins… most of the time.

Speedbird-Seven was talking again. “I have radar and aircraft coming into Poland,” he said. He was still on the verge of panic; his radar had to be seeing the first thrust of Russian aircraft into western Poland. There would be fighters and transports heading in everywhere now. The plan was coming together. “What is going on?”

“I think that there have been a few terrorist attacks,” Lapotev said. “I think that if we are patient, we will know what to do pretty soon.”

Aliyev smiled at him. That wasn't likely.

Lapotev unkeyed the radio and scowled. “I feel like just telling him the truth,” he sneered. “Commercial pilots; cut them off from their daddies and they go to pieces.”

Aliyev smiled. “How much longer?”

“Twenty minutes,” Lapotev said. “If they try to order us away, we’ll keep going anyway and claim communications failure.”

Aliyev nodded. “Twenty minutes,” he shouted back down the aircraft, to the commandos who were performing the final checks on their weapons. They were all ready to move; the aircraft crew would launch their supplies into the air after them before turning to flee back towards Russia, or a secured airfield in Poland. “Twenty minutes before we do or die!”

They cheered.

The MIG-41 appeared out of nowhere, almost before Staffelkapitän Mayer realised that it was there, a testament to the Russian Air Force’s improved skill at stealth aircraft. The MIG-41, known as the Flatpack to its NATO observers, fired a missile at Mayer’s aircraft and then swung into a long evasive pattern itself. Mayer fired a single ASRAAM missile from his Eurofighter Typhoon back at the enemy and evaded the Russian missile though a series of hair-raising manoeuvres, trying to avoid being shot down. The Russian pilot was less lucky; Mayer saw him trying to escape the missile, but failing.

The entire encounter had taken less than a minute.

Mayer stared down at his onboard display and silently cursed to himself. He was one of the lucky pilots who had managed to get off the ground, but he was starting to wonder if it had really been lucky at all. Jagdgeschwader 74, his fighter wing of the Luftwaffe, had been placed on alert status when someone had reported a terrorist waving a portable SAM missile launcher and threatening commercial traffic. As the first reports of SAM attacks on civilian aircraft came in, the QRA aircraft, including Mayer, were launched into the sky… and then all hell had broken loose. The base, in Southern Germany, in Bavaria, had been attacked by cruise missiles. Moments later, it had seemed that the entire command net had gone down.

Mayer and his three wingmen had consulted and decided that the Vaterland was under attack. Their onboard systems had reported the sudden spurt of cruise missiles that were flying over Germany, some of them heading towards towns and cities. The four fighters had engaged the cruise missiles, but then they had finally received orders from a different airbase; they were to attempt to determine what the hell was going on. Moments later, that airbase too had vanished off the net… and the Eurofighter’s sensors were reporting explosions on the ground, big explosions. Meyer had feared nuclear war, even as cold logic reminded him that there had been no EMP pulse; the Eurofighter would have fallen out of the sky if an EMP had struck it.

No, he had decided; they were under conventional attack.

Meyer had issued his subordinates with orders, each aircraft to a different region, and separated, heading over Poland. The Poles should have challenged him before he crossed the border, even at supersonic speed; they were paranoid about German aircraft. Meyer, who had had a grandfather who had served in the Luffwaffe, rather understood their concern, but something very bad had happened. The cruise missiles alone added up to only one answer. They were at war and only one power had the means and the motivation to hit Germany.

Russia.

As he’d flown north-eastwards, he had attempted to raise the Polish air traffic controllers, only to discover that most of them were off the air. His radar had picked up a massive flight of transport aircraft, heading out of Russia towards Poland, but he had refrained from engaging them; he still wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. He saw smoke and flames reaching up from targets right across Poland, which meant that the cruise missiles hadn’t just been aimed at Germany. The main Polish military airfields, Biała Podlaska, Cewice and Częstochowa-Rudniki, seemed to have been hit; there didn’t seem to be any Polish aircraft in the skies at all. Commercial traffic had to be panicking; they would be flying through suddenly very hostile skies… without the slightest idea of what was going on.

Meyer himself wasn’t sure that he knew what was going on.

“Jagdgeschwader 74-9, you will listen to the code words,” his radio crackled suddenly. Meyer’s heart leapt; he wasn’t alone! Someone knew where he was and what he was doing! The voice was young and dreadfully nervous, and he could hear a French accent underlying the German, but it was a contact. “Please respond; alpha-tango-theta-napoleon.”

The Eurofighter’s onboard database provided a match; a French AWACS aircraft that had been intended to take part in a small exercise with the British. It all seemed to belong to another world now, not the nightmare of fire and death that had crashed down upon Europe, when everything had seemed so safe and tranquil. He was more relieved than he could say to hear the voice… and then it dawned on him that the voice belonged to a kid, a very junior officer. Dear God… had the French been hit as well?

“This is Jagdgeschwader 74-9,” Meyer said, and gave his details. “Update me.”

“I… everything’s gone to hell,” the young Frenchman said. The voice made him think of the French cadets who had defended their academy back in 1940, years ago. “We were on patrol, then someone launched SAMs at us and our escort sacrificed himself to save us, but we can barely talk to anyone and the network is failing badly! There are civilian aircraft trapped in the sky and we can’t even talk them down because the bases are out of service and there are terrorists in the airports…”

“Not terrorists,” Meyer said. He remembered the brief deadly encounter with the Russian fighter. “Russians.”

The Frenchman didn’t argue. “Can you do a radar sweep?”

Meyer had thought about that; he needed intelligence, but lighting up the radar was one way to guarantee that every Russian in the area would know his location. He could pick up the sweeps of the French AWACS now — it struck him that it might be the only AWACS left in Europe — and knew that he didn’t dare refuse. That AWACS had just become the most vital aircraft in Europe.

“Operating,” he said. He smiled suddenly. “What’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg,” the Frenchman said. “It was meant to be my first command and…”

Meyer could fill in the details himself. The French would have given young Montebourg a chance to prove himself, unaware that he would have to deal with a real emergency. The radar sweep had been brief and powerful, but it depressed him; there were hundreds of aircraft in the air, some of them clearly warplanes. There was no sign of his former wingmen.

“I hope you got all that,” he said, grimly. “Do you have a place to land?”

“I don’t know,” Montebourg said. He sounded tired. “The base where we are normally stationed is in flames, and Paris is on fire; there are airliners nearby unable to land because of the terrorists. Sir… where the hell do we go?”

Mayer stared down at the data. There was a pattern there, aircraft that… were not panicking. They’d come out of Russia, he saw; they were heading towards Germany, and western Poland. There was something about them that worried him; he was sure, looking at it, that they were suspicious.

“Look at them,” he said, detailing his suspicions. “What do you think they’re up to?”

The kid, to give him his due, didn’t hesitate. “Can you investigate them?”

“I’m going to have to,” Mayer said. “Watch as long as you can, then head for Britain unless you can get an airfield in France.”

He rolled the Eurofighter over and launched the bird towards the unknown aircraft, noting in passing that their IFF signals didn’t match with their behaviour. If they were in denial, they should have been preparing to land… but they weren’t. They were going to fly over Szczecin-Goleniów Airport, almost in formation. The implications worried him; Szczecin-Goleniów Airport was in the west of Poland, near Germany and the German border. It was one of the places that had been marked as a possible emergency landing site for the EUROFOR air support squadrons… and should have been outside the realm of targeting possibilities for any attacker. The faint suggestions of aerial combat, further to the east, suggested that the Russians — if Russians they were, but who else could they be? — were winning. “I am going stealthy now.”

“Good luck,” Montebourg said.

The Eurofighter was not a pure stealth fighter, not like the newer fighters that had been produced by the Americans, the Japanese and even the advanced Eurofighter Tempest. It did have a very small radar cross-section and, without any active transponders, should have nothing calling serious attention to itself. If there were ground forces below that were friendly, in other words not Russians, they might try to shoot him down because he wasn’t broadcasting an IFF signal. There wasn’t a choice; he didn’t dare draw enemy attention until he knew what the hell was going on.

Air traffic started to grow far larger as his radars started to look further into Poland. Normally, the skies would be stacked with commercial airliners, but now there were only military transports… and he could see smoke rising from dozens of different places on the ground. Meyer had a sudden sense of what had happened to all of the commercial jets and shuddered; the Russians would have just shot them all down and never worried about the loss of life.

His sensors recorded everything as they grew closer, relaying them back to Montebourg. A Russian Mainstay — a Beriev A-50 AWACS aircraft, one of a hundred the Russians had produced and heavily modified over the years — was operating in the air over Poland, protected by a swarm of Russian fighters. Other heavy Russian transports seemed to be dominating the skies over Poland, while tankers and bombers floated around, picking on targets as they chose. The sheer scale of the effort was daunting… and the lack of any effective opposition was chilling. Had the Russians secured so much control that they could fly so close to Germany without fear?

He cursed softly as another flight of Russians headed into Western Poland, their escorts peeling off and returning to the tankers for refuelling. The entire area was lit up by hundreds of different air-search radar systems, watching out for possible attackers, and he realised that if he went any closer, he would almost certainly be detected. A flight of Russian transports rose into the air from Poland, heading back towards Russia, and he realised that he was looking at the greatest airborne invasion operation in human history. By the time the Poles rallied, they would be defeated; it was neat, elegant, and almost unstoppable.

They’re going to land at Szczecin-Goleniów Airport, he realised. No one in Germany would have the view that he had of the invasion, not until it was too late… and unless Montebourg managed to make contact with someone before the AWACS ran out of fuel, it would never be useful to anyone. He risked a microburst transmission, sending the data back to Montebourg, and then turned to see the unknown aircraft. Right on the border of the Vaterland…

The mystery aircraft were drawing closer and closer to him; he tried to hail them and received no response, not even a nervous pilot wondering what the warplane was doing, so close to a civilian aircraft. They looked civilian, he saw, as he swung the aircraft over the jet liner, except… there was something wrong.

“Shit,” Lapotev hissed. The alarm in his voice was unpleasant. “He has us; he’ll see the false images and then he’ll kill us.”

“Take him out,” Aliyev snapped. There were only five minutes until the jump began. A single Eurofighter could not be allowed to ruin it, not now; he wouldn’t allow it. He would sooner die than fail Russia. “Kill that bastard!”

Lapotev flicked a switch. “Done,” he said. The airliner shook, but if it was from the missile or the passage of the Eurofighter, Aliyev couldn’t tell. “You’d better get back and ready to jump.”

Ping…!

For a long moment, Mayer’s mind refused to grasp what had happened; the airliner, the innocent-looking airliner, had lit off a short-ranged military-grade air search radar, more powerful than the one that the MIG-41 he’d killed had carried. He had never seriously contemplated firing on a civilian airliner, not even if he had to prevent a repeat of September 11th and he hesitated. Fatally. The missile blasted away from its hidden launcher… and struck the Eurofighter before he could react. Mayer’s life came to a sudden end… as the first paratroopers began to fall on the airport far below.

The Battle for Szczecin-Goleniów Airport had begun.