The Fall of Night

Chapter Forty-One: Covenants without Swords, Take One

Warsaw, Poland

“Caroline Morgan, come forth.”

The voice stirred Caroline to her feet as she looked around the vast prison camp. The Russians hadn’t been violent, or brutal; they’d merely frogmarched them into a captured Polish truck and driven them towards Warsaw, towards what had once been a football stadium. With armed guards surrounding it, it had become a prison camp for captured EUROFOR and Polish personnel… and people who had been caught in the middle of the fighting.

Caroline had tried to keep herself together, even as the weeks slipped by with little chance of reparation or even being freed from the camp. She was lucky; as a civilian, she had full run of the camp, such as it was. The prisoners from the different military forces were shackled permanently to seats designed to survive the worst efforts of football yobs. Their condition was far more desperate than hers; from time to time, the Russians triggered the auto-washing system and used it to clean up the mess. For them, their lives had descended into hell.

Others had joined them. Two women, Zyta Konstancja and Melania Kazimiera, had also been shoved into the camp, along with two young children, both Melania’s daughters. Caroline had talked to them — the Russians didn’t seem to care what they did, provided they didn’t try to escape — and all they had done had been unlucky enough to be caught talking to a known resistance fighter. The fighter, from what Zyta had said, had been over sixty years old; the Russians had beaten him to death in front of her. They’d seen enough about Russian rule to know what was happening in Warsaw; the Russians were digging in for the long haul.

They’d talked in hushed whispers about registration, ration cards, and the promise of work. Many young men of Warsaw, those who were not connected to the military or the police, had gone to work for the Russians; it was the only way to feed their families. Caroline wanted to scream abuse at the handful of young men they saw every day, heading to dig graves or worse for the Russians, but she understood; the young men had had no choice, but to collaborate with the Russians. If most of Poland was in the same boat, resistance would be futile.

Marya had held out hope, for a while, that Captain Jacob Anastazy had survived; she had told Caroline that he was probably leading a resistance army by now, somewhere in the countryside. That dream had died the day the Russians had told her, without gloating, without even a leer, that Captain Jacob Anastazy was dead, killed in a gunfight along a motorway. It had been the fact that the Russians hadn’t even tried to convince her that had convinced her, finally, that they were telling the truth; Marya had cried herself to sleep that night and had been broken afterwards.

As the weeks passed, the camp had changed its composition. Caroline, as a long-staying resident, had found herself appointed camp supervisor by the Russians. She had refused, citing her media neutrality, but the Russians had pointed out that if someone didn’t supervise the camp, everyone would rapidly grow sick and die in their own filth. Caroline had done what she could, but the Russians had very quickly removed anyone useful, such as the handful of prisoners who had medical training. She was improvising and knew it; people were dying, in some cases of avoidable problems, in other cases of nothing more than despair.

A month after they had become prisoners, Caroline, like all the other unshackled prisoners, was ordered into a side compound, where they were locked in and left to wait while burly Russian soldiers moved in on the military prisoners. Some struggled — one of them hit a Russian officer in the groin, sending the civilian prisoners into giggles — but it was futile; they were released, shackled together, and marched off out of the camp. A week later, they hadn’t returned; the handful of guards who talked to the Poles either didn’t know what had happened to them, or were unwilling to discuss it. The Polish women, some of whom had become quite fond of the men, screamed and ranted, but the Russians just ignored it. Caroline found it a worrying sign; she had studied history privately, not in a British school, and she knew that the Russians had once massacred thousands of Polish prisoners to prevent them serving as the nucleus of resistance.

In their place, other prisoners had arrived; the young men and women of Warsaw. Their tales were grim; they had been arrested for one fault or another, mainly breaking curfew, and the Russians had arrested them, beaten them and in one case raped an offending girl. That girl had only the small benefit of seeing her rapist marched off into a penal unit; she told Caroline that the Russians had taken over the brothels in Poland and were using them for their soldiers under military control. The whores were the best fed women in Poland. Some of the young had had idealist dreams about fasting until they were freed, but Caroline had dissuaded them as best as she could; the Russians hadn’t cared about anyone else who had died in the camps, so why should they care about young Poles? They had nothing, but their bodies; some of the young men were taken out, a day later, and sent to a labour gang.

She stumbled over to the gate. It was heavily guarded; the Russians insisted on watching the prisoners as if they were She-Hulk, or Supergirl. She wished that she was; the dream of crashing through the camp’s guards and running back to safety kept running through her head whenever she was dozing. She knew what would happen if she didn’t present herself; it had happened before, to other prisoners. The Russians had come into the camp, found them, and shot them in front of the others, a reminder that their lives were in Russian hands.

“Your food,” the Russian soldier said, in halting English. He was one of the good ones, a soldier who had been disabled enough to warrant his departure from an infantry unit, but determined to serve the Russian President in whatever way he could. Caroline had tried to befriend him and a handful of the other guards, but that was becoming harder; more and more faces were vanishing, to be replaced by cold pale men whose gaze refused to even fall to her half-exposed breasts. “You will be summoned again later.”

Caroline felt her blood run cold. Any change in routine was a danger, she had been told; she was normally summoned once every day, and then they were left alone. One of the kinder Russian guards had dropped in cards and several board games; the prisoners either spent their time playing, or discussing their fate in low voices. It hadn’t escaped her notice that nearly half of the camp’s population was composed of reporters and various other media workers; some of them had even come from as far west as Dresden. When the city had fallen, one of them had told her, the Russians had rounded up reporters along with the policemen and soldiers; they’d been dumped into trucks and shipped west to the camp near Warsaw. She had tried to view that as a positive sign, but it was impossible; they might have had a good reason to secure her, but not reporters they’d snatched off the streets.

“Thank you,” she said, carefully. Her Russian was almost non-existent. “Do you know why?”

The guard raised his shoulders and shrugged in the universal gesture for ‘don’t know.’ Caroline gave him a kiss on the cheek anyway and took the trolley of supplies, pushing it back into the camp, calling for the prisoners as she moved. One prisoner had tried to hide in the trolley; the Russians had seen a foot sticking out, burst out laughing, and dragged him out before shooting him. The meals changed only slightly; the Russians had captured thousands of EUROFOR MRE — Meals Ready to Eat — packs and distributed them to the prisoners. It was cruel and unusual punishment, as far as Caroline could determine; the prisoners who could cook had even offered to cook for the guards as well, if they were given some supplies to cook. The guards had refused; their paranoia was such that they would count each and every plastic fork and beat people if they tried to keep them.

Caroline ate her food slowly, worrying; she was much thinner than she had been the day she had boarded the aircraft to Poland. She had never been as vain as some people in the media business, but she knew that her looks had their uses when it came to convincing people to talk to her; if they had seen her now, her boyfriends would have been shocked. She looked like one of those rape victims, carefully made up to seem pathetic, who were paraded in front of a jury. Her hair was dull and listless; her bones were starting to show through her chest. She wasn't sure how much longer she could go on…

There was an escape committee, of course; seven Poles who had been imprisoned and wanted out, or at least to see their families again. Caroline was supposed to report any escape attempts to the guards, but she hadn’t bothered; escape seemed completely impossible. Under the torn-up turf, the stadium bottom was hard concrete, while the guards had been careful never to allow a weapon to fall into the hands of the prisoners; Caroline suspected that such a mistake would lead to the responsible guards, assuming that they survived the experience, joining the prisoners in the pen. More than one prisoner had been strangled by another, often for the smallest things; the guards wouldn’t have cared if they had all killed each other. Only the steady flow of MRE packs convinced her that the Russians didn’t just want to kill them all.

“They want to see me afterwards,” she whispered to Marya. The Polish woman sat there, arms and legs akimbo; Caroline knew that she was almost completely broken. She would have spared Marya her torment if she could have done so; Marya was an innocent who deserved none of the horrors that had swept up and consumed her life. “They may hurt me…”

Some prisoners had been taken for interrogation, mainly policemen and a handful of reporters. They had returned, some of them; beaten and broken. It was obvious that they had been tortured to extract information, but all of it had been trivial information; the policemen had been asked about a handful of criminals, while the reporters had been asked about politicians. It was brutal, pointless… and banal. Caroline’s world had shrunk to the four corners of the prison camp; it was growing increasingly hard to remember London, or the politicians who had helped create the mess for Europe. She wanted to forget…

“No,” Marya said. She clung to Caroline as if Caroline was her mother. “You can’t go, please…”

“I have no choice,” Caroline said. They’d become like sisters in the camp; Caroline, Marya and the other Polish women, who had worried about the two young girls. The Russians had reluctantly agreed to provide food for them and to look for other accommodation, but Caroline suspected that they would have either forgotten, or hadn’t found anyone. The Polish sisters had been related to soldiers, after all; their relatives might have all been disappeared. Promise me you’ll take care of yourself…?”

“Yes,” Marya said. “Just come back, please…”

“Caroline Morgan, come forth,” a harsh voice bellowed. “Caroline Morgan, come forth!”

Caroline stood up and walked over to the gate. The Russian guards raised their weapons as she approached; she almost laughed, aware that there was nothing that she could do to them. She would have given anything for a shot of some superpower that would have had her breaking the guards with ease, but she was tired and wearing rags. What sort of threat did they think a malnourished half-dressed girl presented?

“Hands,” a Russian growled. Caroline knew the procedure as well as anyone else in the camp; she turned slightly and put her hands behind her back, allowing the Russians to slip on a pair of handcuffs. That was a good sign; the prisoners had watched carefully and people who were handcuffed were normally returned to the camp, while those who were secured with plastic ties never returned. “Move!”

The darkness of the internal corridors, now serving as the barracks for the guards, left her half-blinded long enough to lose track of her position in an endless maze of facilities below the ground. Marya had told her that the stadium, constructed in 2020, had been the largest one ever constructed in Poland; it could hold thousands of people, and even had other facilities, below the ground. The only sign of sporting equipment now was a handful of footballs on the ground; everything else had been removed, making way for Russian soldiers and their equipment. There were enough guns in the various storage areas to restart the war… assuming that they could ever get to them. The escape committee hadn’t been able to think of a way past the guards after weeks of heavy thinking.

The guards finally led her into a brightly-lit room. She flinched back from the light, long enough for them to secure her against a wall, and leave her. Moments later, before she could realise what was happening, another Russian entered and studied her thoughtfully. Caroline felt like a trapped animal under his gaze; it didn’t help that she was firmly secured to what felt like a shower pipe. The Russian was remarkably pale, with very dark hair; his eyes were soulless, almost lifeless. He was a nightmare made flesh.

“I am the commanding officer of the 4^th FSB Security Battalion, Warsaw,” the Russian said finally. “You will identify yourself.”

Caroline couldn’t believe that he didn’t know her name already. The Russians had not only collected ID tags, but they had asked her, more than once, about her name, building up a picture of who they had in the camp, and why. She had cooperated as little as she could, but the Russians had been skilful at actually making their prisoners work for them, doing as much of the heavy lifting as they could without resorting to torture to ‘encourage’ them to talk.

“I am Caroline Morgan, reporter,” she said, and briefly outlined what had happened to her. She knew that holding anything back was a bad idea; the Russians were prepared to use torture if they felt that they had no choice. Caroline wasn’t a soldier, she was a civilian; she couldn’t have held out for long against pain, even if they had paid her. “What are you going to do to me?”

The Russian looked up at her. “The question has been discussed at the highest levels,” he said. Caroline, oddly enough, believed him. “We have faced a constant barrage of propaganda from Europe, condemning us for thousands of crimes and offences, some of them only theoretically possible. The European media has persistently taken the side of the enemies of Russia, along with the other enemies of the civilised world everywhere. I dare say that if French reporters had still been at work during the insurgencies, they would have claimed that the insurgents were actually somehow in the right, just because they were getting the short end of the stick.”

“I am a non-political reporter,” Caroline said. “I am not…”

He slapped her, hard, across her face. “You are a political reporter, all of you are,” he said. “You repeated the lies told by refugees and Chechens who had an axe to grind; you’d think that you would have learned something from Iraq, but no, you chose to repeat their propaganda. The media played a role in the European refusal to grant us the support we needed when we needed it; now, we need no support and we have our enemies at our mercy.”

Caroline could taste blood in her mouth. She looked for words to say, clever arguments that would win her freedom, but there were none. There was only force, and the threat of force… and Europe had acted as if both of those factors didn’t exist. She could have argued, she could have pointed out that the citizens of Poland and Germany… and perhaps even further west… hadn’t deserved occupation, but in the end, the Russians wouldn’t listen to her. Her own helplessness buzzed through her mind; the Russian could do anything to her, and she could do nothing about it. What hope was left for her?

“I see you have nothing to say,” the Russian said. His voice was icy cold, without a hint of gloating or pleasure. “A decision has been made about you, Morgan, and all of your kind. You have no place in the new world order.”

He drew his pistol and chambered a round. “Do you have any last words?”

Caroline felt oddly calm. “Go fuck yourself,” she hissed. She tried to kick the Russian, but it was impossible from her position; he just stepped back and watched her struggle to keep her balance. “One day, we’re going to kill all of you.”

“I don’t think that that will happen,” the Russian said, as he put the gun to her head. “The price of your socialist paradise was destroying the fighting spirit of the European Armies… and you gained your paradise at the cost of your freedom.”

He pulled the trigger.

Afterwards, they took her body, dumped it in one of the mass graves, and buried it unmarked under the Polish soil. No one in Britain would ever know for certain what happened to Caroline Morgan. Like so many others, she had just vanished in the nightmare that had consumed Europe.