The Fall of Night

Chapter Forty-Four: Waiting

Near Dover, United Kingdom

It was the waiting that was the worst part.

Two weeks had passed since the Russians had chased the remains of EUROFOR off the continent and into Britain, two long hard nervous weeks. Colonel — he had been promoted for some reason — Stuart Robinson watched as the men under his command prepared part of the defence line, and scowled; the work wasn’t going quickly. He had heard, during a brief promotion ceremony, that the remains of the high command had also been worried; if the Russians had managed to force a landing on British soil right after Ostend fell, they might well have defeated the British in a single campaign. Robinson might almost have welcomed the battle; the brief interlude with Hazel had only reminded him of how much danger the entire country was facing… and how weak the defences were. The noise of jet fighters, almost every day, reminded those who tried to forget; the Russians were upping the pressure every day.

Dover itself had been completely evacuated — including one very irate landlady who had complained incessantly about stains on the bed — and the city-port was carefully being turned into a strongpoint. The planning had been limited, there just hadn’t been the time or equipment; there were accidents, some of them fatal, almost every day. Soldiers were everywhere, seeming to swarm across the land in infinite numbers, but Robinson knew better; there were barely five thousand soldiers committed to defending Dover and the surrounding area, while the remaining tanks and artillery were held in reserve. It had worried him; Russian satellites had doubtless probed all of the British defences from orbit, and they might try to land somewhere else, perhaps along the south coast, or even north towards Ipswich. Dover seemed the logical target, but the Russians might well know that too; all they had to do was land elsewhere and they would have valuable time to get established before the British forces could react.

“We have submarines in those waters,” Major-General Langford had said, when he had seen the General and broached the issue with him. “I know the Russian commander; he’ll try to keep the variables down to the lowest possible level, and landing elsewhere will mean exposing his forces for longer.”

Robinson had accepted the argument, reluctantly; he still needed more supplies. Several of the soldiers had taken to burning photographs of Princess Diana in effigy; they needed landmines and they had almost none. The Americans had shipped over a few hundred mines and they had been carefully emplaced on some of the possible landing zones, but there were nowhere near enough. If there had been a stockpile maintained by the British… but no, the campaigns to ban the weapons had resulted in only a handful of mines being kept, all of which had been lost in the opening days of the war. They needed weapons, they needed SAM missile launchers; only the fact that they would have never managed to save one of the CADS from Germany had saved him from facing a court martial over losing it. Intelligence suggested that Generalmajor Günter Mühlenkampf had met the death he craved… and failed to slow the Russians down for more than a few moments.

“There are more deserters from the Citizen Force, lad,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart said, interrupting his thoughts. Robinson would never be a Colonel to Inglehart; they had shared too much together. The Citizen Force, conscripted from the young unemployed, were nervous about their chances when the shooting started; they were neither armed nor trained to use weapons. They’d broken out a store of the dreaded and loathed SA80 automatic rifle… but even those old weapons weren’t enough to arm every trained soldier who needed armed, let alone louts taken off the streets. The Russians might well regard them as illegal combatants… and so many of them deserted. “Shall I round up some redcaps to find them all?”

Robinson nodded. They had had the unarmed soldiers preparing trenches and earthworks; given enough time, they could have made the entire area impenetrable. He didn’t think that they would have the time; even with the weapons that the Americans had supplied, the Russians still raided the ground forces as well, causing soldiers to scatter as Russian bombers and fighters shot up irreplaceable equipment before the RAF could beat them off. He wasn't blind to the implications; if the Russians were hammering his force, and their forces were resting and ready to move, they would have yet another advantage.

“Get them back to work,” he said, knowing that they would be lucky if they found half of the deserters. Some of them would have vanished into London’s teeming suburbs, or Maidstone, or any of a hundred smaller towns and villages in the countryside. They could lose themselves there until close of play, whatever happened; some civilians might even help them. Not everyone thought that the survival of Britain was worth conscription. “Don’t take too long over it, however; we don’t have time to waste.”

He stared into the distance, his mind’s eye filling in details; hidden weapon emplacements, hidden bunkers and trenches, the telephone system right out of the Second World War that bound it all together without radiating a single betraying emission. The entire system had been linked into Britain’s Internet system; they could download information from the AWACS and use it to plan the defence. The AWACS themselves orbited to the north, out of range of the Russians; the American-supplied tankers floated, waiting for pilots who needed to refuel.

The Russians had learned once that attacking the tankers was an easy way to degrade and diminish the RAF. They would press the attack again until they brought down the other aircraft as well, and then they would land with full control of the skies. Military history explained in quite some detail what happened to units in such conditions; they got pounded to scrap before they even reached the battle. It just didn’t seem fair…

And the waiting was the hardest part.

There was a body in Flying Officer Cindy Jackson’s bed. The gentle pressure of his presence brought her back to awareness, even as the aches and pains in her body refused to recede. The RAF had never flown flight schedules like it was doing now since 1940; even during the days of the Iraq War, there had been more pilots and more planes to handle a limited number of missions. Now, now the RAF was desperately exhausted, desperately overstretched, and seriously outnumbered. Every day, Russian aircraft would fly overhead, challenging the RAF to come out and fight, or watch bombs being dropped with cold precision on the defence lines. The soldiers on the ground were soaking up more Russian ordnance — a bloodless term for dead bodies and blood and gore everywhere — than any British soldier had had to face since the Falklands, and that had been nothing compared to the Second Battle of Britain.

The RAF pilots — and the naval pilots who had been pressed into service — were tired; they were making mistakes. The Prince of Wales had flown its JSF fighters to Britain as soon as it could, with some help from American tankers; they’d been added to the defence force, which had reached a high point of seventy aircraft, most of them older than Russian designs. A flight of RAF Tornados had launched a low-level raid on a Russian-occupied airfield in Belgium, the role that had been planned for them during the Cold War and proved suicidal during the Gulf War; all, but one of the Tornados had been shot out of the sky. It had been the last attempt to take the war to the Russian bases in France.

She rolled over and contemplated the young French officer in her bed. He had been the bravest of the brave, risking life and limb to fly to Britain with his aircraft, and then to fight on alongside British forces to try to hold the UKADR. Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg might be the senior surviving officer of the French Air Force; only a handful more had made it out in the ships that had fled France as the Russians advanced. A few hundred French soldiers, thousands of helpless and destitute French civilians… she wondered just how long it would be before the Russians launched their invasion of Britain. No one in the RAF doubted that there would be an invasion; the Russians were bound to push their advantage as far as it would go. The Americans weren’t going to get involved, but that might well change; if the Russians took Britain, American intervention would become much harder.

She knew that she should sleep, but she couldn’t; she was literally too tired to go to sleep. She wanted sleep, but she also wanted to get fucked; Montebourg had proven himself good at giving her what she wanted, but he was sleeping, a design fault in the human male. She remembered the old joke about Adam trading the ability to piss standing up for multiple orgasms; the female body was much better in that respect. She didn’t want to be deferred to, or treated as the bitch empress of Godforsakenstan; she just wanted a man who was her equal, who wouldn’t bow down to her, and wouldn’t take any shit from her.

She sighed, wondering if she should wake him up; duty asserted itself and she left him to sleep. It was odd, mulling on the possible futures she might face; the government had made no attempt to hide from the military personnel what was happening to their counterparts across the Channel. The SAS had small groups on French and German soil, reporting back through American satellites; their reports made grim reading. Mass round-ups of military officers, forced labour from unemployed and Arabs alike, and the compulsory registration of all citizens; she knew what it all meant. As anyone who had lived under the welfare state could testify, a grey man in a grey office with command over the files could dictate who lived and who died, without ever meeting his victims…

Her future… seemed bleak. She had wondered, the year before the war, what would happen to her; sooner or later, the RAF would either promote her for good behaviour, or fire her for bad behaviour. It would have been ironic for them to have promoted her, but… she would have had enough time in grade to be promoted, perhaps even to the point of commanding a Squadron… from the ground. Hell, in other words; she wouldn’t even be allowed to fly. Outside the RAF, what career did she have? Her ideal would be to become a private jet pilot, but even that was less rewarding these days… and as for a family…? The men she’d met could either be dominated by her, or tried to dominate her… and she never gave up under pressure. She wanted a partner before she could have children; she had faced, a long time ago, the prospect of being the only surviving member of her family… and the last of her line.

Her hand reached out idly and touched Montebourg’s penis; a slow motion and it grew hard in her hand, rising with all the vigour of youth. She climbed on top of him in one movement, gently kissing him as her urges drove her on, before pushing down on him and pulling her inside him, riding him into the light of the morning. It wouldn’t be long before they both had to fly again… and so all they could do was make use of what time was left to them.

“I could love you,” she whispered to his sleeping form. The pressure of war had brought them together; it wasn’t as if they were squadron mates. “I could… and perhaps I will, one day…”

There wouldn’t be much time before they both had to fly again.

An unbiased observer, assuming that that mythical entity actually existed, who saw the safe house would have wondered if its owner had known that there was a war coming. That unbiased observer would have been entirely correct; Zachary Lynn had bought the house a few years ago through several different shell companies — records said that the owner was still in residence — and even he had been surprised when he had examined the house in person.

The original owner had been paranoid enough to be Russian, he had decided, after his first visit. He had actually been a South African with a lot to hide. The house was not only set well away from any other human habitation, but had a bomb shelter, a private power generator and military-grade water filter, and a stockpile of food. None of those details appeared on the official records; some private checks had confirmed that no one in authority was aware of the building. He had wondered if he had accidentally stumbled upon a MOD building of some kind, but no, the owner was legitimate. He just hadn’t bothered to tell the government just what he was building.

Lynn himself sipped a gin and tonic and waited in the house. The satellite communications network in the house was normal to all, but a very careful inspection; in fact, it linked directly into an FSB satellite that was pretending to be a weather satellite. He had issued orders the week before the fighting had begun; his individual units knew that they would have no orders issued from him unless something went very badly wrong. Many of them would have hidden themselves; what Zachary Lynn didn’t know, he couldn’t be made to tell. The British would be quite likely to torture him, or indeed any of his agents, but they had only seen ‘Control;’ how could they connect him with Lynn?

The surprise had been that Daphne Hammond had been arrested. Truthfully, Lynn wasn’t all that surprised; she had been trying to raise civilian protests against both conscription and the military government. If there hadn’t been a clear and present danger, and indeed real benefits to military orders, lovely Daphne might have even managed to do real damage, but instead she had been threatened with lynching, and then the Police had saved her and rescued her. Personally, Lynn would have left her to die, even though she had been useful… and would be useful in the future. The danger, however, was that she knew ‘Zachary Lynn’ and could tell her interrogators everything about him, or at least enough to set them on the right track.

It hardly mattered now, from the point of view of the overall war; Lynn had carried out his mission and had done it well, well enough to distract the British long enough for his people to carry through and defeat the Europeans. They would invade soon, he had been told, or if not he could leave the house one night and be extracted by a Russian submarine. He was sure that other commandos had been landed on British soil; the British ships had been badly damaged and the Royal Navy was straining the limits trying to block Russian submarines from moving into position. His work, again…

But there was his failure. He had failed to find out the location of the new government headquarters. There had been something missed, something that would have sent the British into the same kind of anarchy as the French and Spanish had it been destroyed; the British had a secret command post somewhere. Where? He had devoted a great deal of effort to finding it before Daphne had been arrested and drawn a blank; he didn’t even have a rough location. If he could find it, he could end the war… but he had no idea where to start looking, and he was trapped in the house. He had studied maps, wondering; logically, it was somewhere near London, but where?

He sat back and smiled. Whatever else happened, he had done his duty, played the role of serpent in the garden to the best of his ability… and helped his country to win the war. All he had to do was survive; his people would reward him for what he had done.

“More possible contacts, Captain,” the sensor operator reported, as the Winston Churchill moved through the dark waters. “I think… I’m sure there was a Russian submarine out there, just for a moment.”

“Go active,” Ward ordered. The odds were that the Royal Navy had expended several dozen torpedoes on large fish and perhaps wrecks under the sea, but every contact had to be investigated. Only yesterday, a Type-45 destroyer had been sunk by a Russian submarine; the Russians were forcing them out of the English Channel. The Winston Churchill’s luck had run out after they had escaped the chaos surrounding Gibraltar; they had been bombed several times and damaged, only dumb luck had kept them alive. “See if you can locate the bastard!”

“Got him,” the sensor officer crowed. The exultation in his voice made up for a lot of dangerous fighting. “One Russian attack submarine, trying to sneak out again when we pinged him the first time.”

“Target designated,” the weapons officer said. He grinned savagely. “Captain?”

“Fire at will,” Ward ordered. A torpedo lanced away from the Winston Churchill. “I want this bastard sunk and disposed of…”

A burst of water appeared on the screens from an underwater detonation. “We hit the bastard,” the weapons officer said. Their third kill. “I think they’re gone completely.”

“Captain,” the exec said, very quietly. “Look.”

Ward followed his gaze and cursed; the screen that was permanently pointed at the carrier was blinking up red light. HMS Ark Royal, a tiny joke of a carrier and their only source of air cover, was burning. Someone else had just scored a kill.

And the war went on.