The Fall of Night

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Long Way Home

Near Warsaw, Poland

“I think we have to make some decisions,” Captain Stuart Robinson said, as the small force stopped two miles west of the attack site. They had remained as quiet as they could, ignoring the enemy aircraft passing overhead, although Matthews had argued that they should have engaged them with the CADS. “Our position is not good.”

The mysterious and ominous radio message had been repeated every twenty minutes, on the main Polish radio channel, interspersed by jamming. Robinson had tried several times to get in touch with someone higher up the chain of command, but the radio systems seemed to be completely jammed except at short-ranges, and the satellites seemed to be gone. Matthews had sworn blind that the laser communications system should have been working perfectly; the satellite, for whatever reason, was refusing to respond. The implications of that worried Robinson.

They had worried him enough to order Matthews to make a very quick low-powered radar sweep from time to time. Passive sensors had recorded bursts of Russian activity that seemed designed to hunt down European units; the low-powered bursts had revealed flights of heavy Russian transports heading into Europe. The sense of threat, of being watched, had followed them from the scene of the ambush; Robinson was no longer inclined to dismiss the feeling at all. It affected them all; the soldiers spread out, as if they were launching a probing attack rather than just marching to the nearest base. They held their weapons at the ready, eyes scanning the horizon; as far as they were concerned, they were in bandit country.

He gathered Anastazy, Inglehart and Matthews together while they took a short break. “We are more or less out of communication with anyone higher up,” he said, as they smoked cigarettes. He had once smoked as a teenager, in defiance of the ban on smoking; only Hazel had forced him to break the habit. Her threat of no sex if he so much as looked at a cigarette had forced him to quit; now, he found that he needed one just to keep a clear head. “We know that there are Russians roaming the country and plenty of Russians in the air. What do we do?”

It wasn’t normal for any commanding officer to call a council of war, but there was little choice; he had both Matthews, his nominal equal, and Anastazy along as well as his soldiers. Both of them looked worried; Anastazy because it was his country that was under attack, Matthews because he had lost one CADS already and might lose more if the Russians caught them. Without its active sensors, the CADS was much less effective as a system, but using active sensors might have been like calling up the Russians and inviting them to launch a missile at their position. So far, they’d been lucky; Robinson didn’t want to press his luck.

Anastazy spoke first. “We’re not that far from Warsaw,” he said, nodding towards one of the looming pillars of smoke. The soldiers had seen over nine massive pillars of smoke rising up into the sky, several of them near places they had known to hold other soldiers. “We could head towards the city, find out what’s going on…”

The noise of a distant aircraft made them all jump. “I think that that would be the worst possible option,” Matthews said. He was no coward — he had proved that in several encounters before the ambush — but he sounded distinctly worried. “I was studying the Russian aerial manoeuvres and they’re flying heavy military transports to the west… and they wouldn’t be doing that if they thought there was a serious risk of ground-fire. They’re big bastards; we saw them during the Russian flight to Algeria and they’re capable of carrying hundreds of men, or even light tanks. Where are they going?”

He picked up a map and showed it to them. “There are several large airports in the west of Poland,” he said. “If the Russians managed to mount a sneak attack on us, they might have done the same for the airports; it was the type of threat we planned to counter back in the NATO days. With communications shattered, or at the very least badly damaged, they could reinforce quickly before any local defenders could mount a counterattack. Once they do that… they expand their areas of control and cut off any forces that try to retreat out of Poland.”

Anastazy glared at him. “What are you suggesting?”

“We have to fall back,” Matthews said. “We’re too exposed out here, sir; they have the power to trap and destroy each part of EUROFOR before we can build a proper defence line. I know that the 7^th Panzer is up there somewhere” — he nodded in the direction of Warsaw — “but they will have been hit as well, and if we move too openly, we’ll be seen and hit from the air.”

Robinson stroked his chin, feeling the impact of tiny pieces of stubble. It had been too long since he had shaved, even though he had had the opportunity; Hazel would have been annoyed with him. She had never liked kissing his stubble. The thought of his wife made his heart ache; she had to be worried out of her mind. The BBC would probably be screaming that the British had lost the war already and had to get back to Britain before it was too late.

“We have your two vehicles to protect us from air attacks,” Anastazy said. “We have a duty to Poland.”

Robinson held up a hand. “Sergeant?”

Inglehart looked wary. “I think that Captain Matthews is right,” he said. His face twisted with the bitterness of retreat. “We’re down to thirty active fighters and two CADS, not enough of a force to make a difference on our own.” He peered at the map. “There was a Polish training facility out here, if I remember correctly” — Anastazy nodded — “and that’s only twenty miles in the direction of Germany. If they’re active and they know something useful, we can decide what to do then; if not, we head back towards Germany and hopefully encounter other European units.”

Robinson nodded. “Jacob, I can’t order you to come with us, but your chances of survival will be much improved if you are with us,” he said. “Please… will you come?”

Anastazy nodded once.

The drive would have taken only half an hour at most in a car. Keeping to the back roads, well away from civilisation, it took over two hours, not least because of the walking soldiers, rather than using the truck. Robinson had considered pausing at a Polish farm long enough to requisition a second lorry, but they would already be targets for Russian high-attitude aircraft or reconnaissance satellites; he expected that the Russians would know that they were still out there somewhere. They heard aircraft from time to time, even saw a few, but most of them seemed to be concentrating their attention on Warsaw. They heard explosions echoing out in the distance…

Robinson looked at Anastazy, walking with his head bowed, almost as if he were a prisoner. The Pole was walking away from his duty, and even if cold logic supported the decision, it didn’t sit well with him to run away. Robinson had read several books where the United Kingdom had been invaded and he had often wondered; what would he do if he was faced with such a choice? Would he abandon Edinburgh — and Hazel — to regroup somewhere outside the city, or would he desert his mates and see to the safety of his wife? How could anyone be asked to make such a choice?

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. Anastazy either didn’t hear or didn’t respond. “I wish it could be different.”

Silently, he cursed the Prime Minister under his breath; had he already been thrown out of office in disgust? Everyone had been saying that everything was fine… except those who used the Internet and other media to try and fight the culture wars. The experts had been predicting that the current government would remain in power, but the rise of tension within Europe might have surprised them all; would a far-right party be elected into power soon? The French National Front had been hotly tipped to win the last general election in France… and only the assassination of their leader had torpedoed their campaign. Might it have been different?

He shook his head. There was no point, now, in wondering over what might have been.

“Shit,” Matthews snapped. Robinson felt his head jerk up as the CADS started to rotate their missiles into firing position. “We have two Russian fighter-bombers, I think; closing in on us and targeting…”

His voice broke off as two black shapes skimmed along the ground, almost at treetop level, dropping their bombs on what looked like a harmless field. Robinson almost didn’t see it, but the single SAM rising up from the field was impossible to miss, not like the hail of rifles being fired at the Russian aircraft. The Russians were rising now, banking as they caught sight of the CADS… and Matthews fired. Two streaks of light marked the rise of the missiles; two massive explosions marked the deaths of the fighters, revealing their position to the enemy.

“We’d better keep moving,” Inglehart muttered. “Whoever is there may have to wait.”

Robinson shrugged. “I think I want to know who they are, first,” he said. “We might need their help.”

Anastazy was shouting in Polish; the reply came back in German. “They’re Germans,” he said. He sounded as if he couldn’t decide to be relieved or angry. “God alone knows how they got here.”

The Germans turned out to be the remains of an infantry unit that had been positioned in a camp to the south of Warsaw.

“They attacked us at the same time they hit you,” the leader said. Major Cajus Bekker was a short grim man with a deadly scar running down his face and an air of competence that Robinson rather liked. “They hit us with bombs, and then missiles struck the barracks and FAE bombs completed the massacre. Nearly seven hundred men, all wiped out in a few moments; we decided that we had to head for Germany before the noose tightened.”

Anastazy leaned forward. “The noose?”

“The Russians are moving,” Bekker said. “We were lucky; we had a communications van along and we managed to talk briefly to a handful of Poles using the more obscure bands before the jamming caught them. There are two major Russian thrusts developing and they’re moving to cut off Warsaw and destroy as many of our units as we can.”

Robinson felt his blood run cold. If they had stayed where they had been, they would have been quite likely to be destroyed as well. They had stood off a small commando attack, but how could they have stood off an attack with tanks and rockets? He glanced to the east and heard more aircraft and distant explosions; the front of the war was moving on fast.

“We must have been noticed and they had a go at us an hour ago,” Bekker continued. “They killed the communications truck and more of my men, then we lost them, and then they found us again and would have killed us all, if you hadn’t interfered.”

“Sheer luck,” Robinson said. “Did you manage to make contact with EUROFOR higher command?”

“Not a peep,” Bekker said. “My tech thought that the satellites had been destroyed as they weren’t responding to her and that’s supposed to be impossible, but as we don’t have any communications truck any longer, we can’t continue to try to get a response.”

“We couldn’t raise the satellites either,” Matthews said, from his perch. He had been supervising the reloading of the CADS, but he had warned Robinson privately that they didn’t have that many missiles left. “We’re supposed to receive a permanent data download from them, but in the absence of anything useful coming from them, the only thing we can assume is that the satellites are destroyed or otherwise out of service.”

Anastazy looked up. “I have a duty to my country,” he said. “Once we reach the training base, I will leave you and join whatever unit was on duty at the time of the war, and take the fight to the Russians.”

Robinson didn’t bother to argue. “We can’t stay here,” he said. If Anastazy had made that choice, he would respect it, even if he believed that it was a stupid choice. How could one man, or even a small Company, change the face of the war? “Hopefully, they’ll be wary about sending more aircraft after us, but if they want to find us, they could send infantry after us.”

“They must have bigger fish to fry,” Matthews pointed out. “We’re only two CADS and thirty soldiers, hardly war-winning material…”

“It hardly matters,” Robinson said. “I intend to get to the German border and hopefully find out what is going on there. Major… what do you and your men intend to do?”

Bekker gave Anastazy a grim look. “The same,” he said. Robinson winced; he had been hoping that perhaps Bekker had known something that they could use to strike back, or at least get back in touch with higher command. The presence of a hidden armoured division with air support would have been a nice surprise, but the only two European armoured divisions in Poland were likely to be under heavy attack. “The sooner we move, the better.”

They passed through several villages as they drove onwards. Anastazy insisted on stopping long enough to tell the villagers what was actually happening; all they’d heard had been the Russian radio broadcast telling them to remain in their homes. For farmers, that wasn't an option; they had to keep working or the farms would go bust. Anastazy spoke, bitterly, of European farming regulations that had been driving the farmers out of business; taxes, more red tape, everything that farmers dreaded wrapped up into one. The Russians needed food; Robinson wondered if the Russians would make the farmers grow as much as they could, or would they simply collectivise the farms as they had done in the days of the Soviet Union.

He looked to the east. Was there any resistance at all? His force, and the remains of the German force, was on the run… and they hadn’t seen a single friendly aircraft. If the Russians had really been landing behind Polish lines, they might run into Russians in front of them as well, and that would be even worse. The question of fuel continued to nag at him; European units could take all kinds of fuel — the only real benefit that had come from integration — and they had taken some from the villages, but what happened when they ran out? Matthews had warned that they might have to leave the CADS on auto-engage and abandon them; there seemed to be little choice.

He turned his head to the west and kept walking, one step at a time.

In no particular order, Natasha Belova was brown-haired, beautiful enough to set hearts fluttering even as a child and one of the smartest Russian women on the planet. She had won a scholarship at age twelve and had spent ten years in America, learning from the best, before spending a year in Japan, finally returning to Russia to share what she had learned in the field of computer science with her fellow Russians. Natasha had been one of thousands of Russians who had studied abroad, spies in all, but name; she had taken what the Americans had shown her and used it to benefit Russia.

She stood, now, in the centre of the American base and smiled. The soldiers of Unit One had searched the base and removed a handful of documents, but their commanding officer had told her that they were more or less useless. Captain Vladimir Ivanov had cursed the Americans, assuming that they had destroyed files, but Natasha had reassured him; the Americans had merely kept most of their information in their computers. The handful of books, articles and porn magazines were hardly vital strategic information. It was the computers, all around her, that were important; she could hardly wait to get inside them and see how the Americans had made them all tick.

She touched one and the screen lit up. The Americans used sensors on their computers these days; the system would probably recognise that she wasn't cleared for any information and refuse access, but that hardly mattered. The screen lit up… and showed nothing, nothing at all. A moment passed, and then an image of a Jolly Roger appeared, a tiny primitive GIF straight out of the early years of computing.

GUTEN MORGAN, INGLANDER SCRUM, printed on the screen. YOU HAF NO WAYS OF MAKIN ME TAK.

Natasha laughed… and sensed that something was wrong. She touched the side of the computer and felt something, an odd otherworldly tingle, passing through her arm. Muttering under her breath, she pulled at the panel, which came off. It should have refused to be opened, but it opened… and a massive cloud of dust billowed out at her. She jumped backwards, sneezing; the dust had caught in her throat. She gagged, reaching for her water bottle, and washed her mouth out before looking back at the computer. A terrible sense of doom overtook her.

“Shit,” she breathed. Only a few components, ones that she was sure had been home-produced, were still active; somehow, the remainder of the computers had been reduced to dust inside their cabinets, without letting her sense that anything was wrong. She opened a second, then a third, and then a fourth; it was the same story with all of them. Whatever the Americans had done, it would be impossible to recover any data or even more than a little useful data. “Bastards!”

Her grand triumph had just turned to dust.

Literally.