The Fall of Night

Chapter Forty-Eight: Operation Morskoi Lev, Take Three

Battlezone, English Channel

Colonel Stuart Robinson peered through his binoculars along the road. The Russians would have to come along it to hit his defence line, such as it was; he didn’t have the heavy weapons to make a proper stand. A handful of soldiers had been dug into Hawkinge, trying to slow down the Russians; from the flames in the distance, it seemed as if the Russians had simply burned down the town and killed most of the defenders.

The line of survivors had passed through Robinson’s lines minutes ago; there were no more active units registering on his terminal, no more little signals from the American microburst equipment reporting that a unit was still intact, if trapped. The forces in Dover and Folkestone had dug in to the buildings, but now the Russians had gained control of the countryside, the cities could be left alone until they were ready to deal with them. Robinson wished, desperately, for an air strike, or perhaps even a tactical nuke, but the former had been lost to the British when most of the RAF had gone down in the Battle of Dover.

“The next people who come along that road,” he ordered, looking down at his veterans and the newcomers alike, “I want you to kill.”

The very horizon seemed to be on fire. He could only be glad that Hazel was well out of the way in Edinburgh; if she had stayed in London, as she had wanted to do to be near him, she might have been caught up in the chaos. The radio reports said that the entire city was panicking and demanding evacuation; there was no way that Britain’s overstressed transport network could move even a small fraction of the city’s population out in time. The noise of guns — Russian guns — and aircraft — Russian aircraft — was a constant crescendo; the Russians had more of everything and it showed. The British forces were operating right at the edge of their capabilities; it wouldn’t be long, one way or the other, before they had to fall back to the line at Dorking. The Russians would probably try to surround the city before actually trying to enter it; Dorking was one of the strong points along the line surrounding London.

“My god,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart breathed, as they watched the flames growing in the distance. The noise of fighting never faltered; the isolated remnants of British units, trapped and turning like trapped rats to take a last bite out of the enemy before being overcome. The Russians would know that they had been in a fight, not like the Germans or the Poles, where only isolated resistance had been mounted across most of the country. Robinson had been offered a chance to leave the country and had rejected it; like so many others, he would make his stand with his men. “What are they doing in there?”

Robinson had no answer. The Russian jamming was affecting some of their datalinks with higher command, but they had enough information to know that the Russians had secured most of their sea-lanes to Britain and were pouring supplies through the gap; the little left of the Royal Navy was powerless to prevent them. They might not have a port, but they didn’t need one to land some supplies, and given time, they would be able to jury-rig a temporary pier for unloading the heavier supplies. They needed interdiction of some kind, but the Company’s EW officer had reported on the air-search radars and missile launchers that were being set up around the Russian landing zone; an air attack would be suicide with the handful of aircraft that the RAF had left. A suicidal strike mission wouldn’t even get close enough to make the loss of the aircraft reliable; only the RAF at full strength would have had a prayer of success… and that would have cost them dearly.

The noise of a CADS broke the sound of Russian weapons; he saw the flares of its rockets as they lanced off into the sky, tracking an unknown target, perhaps a Russian drone hunting for British forces. The majority of the surviving forces were either trapped in the cities, part of his line, or falling back on the final defence line around London. The Russians had probably done a headcount…

“There,” Inglehart muttered. Robinson blinked, confused, and then he saw the Russian attack helicopter drifting into the air, floating over a force of seven green tanks that were advancing into the English countryside. The force of Russian infantry were moving out in front — it took Robinson a moment to realise that he was looking at a penal unit, not a regular unit — and were marching back and forwards ahead of the tanks. “Mine clearing, sir; I bet you…”

Robinson felt sick. The British Army had a great deal of experience in clearing mines; it seemed that the Russian solution to the problem was to march their naughty soldiers in front of their tanks, down a road that might have been mined. Intelligence wasn't clear on what a soldier had to do to get into a penal unit; for all he knew, the men who were moving slowly along the road had objected to the thought of invading Europe. It was wishful thinking, he had to remind himself; there was no way that a few of the penal soldiers wouldn’t be killed in the firing. Only a politician could believe it was possible to accomplish any such stupid ideal.

He lifted his field telephone. “Fire on my command; firing plan zeta,” he muttered. They’d had the time to plan the action carefully. The war had been unpredictable, but the Russians had to answer to the same basic laws of military logistics, same as everyone else. The British Army had stripped the area of everything that might be useful; if they could give the Russians a bloody nose or two, they would win themselves time…

A little voice whispered at the back of his mind. For what…?

The Russians advanced closer. He would have been delighted to mine the road, but it had been impossible to produce or obtain enough mines for everywhere that needed mining; it had been hard enough to mine some of the most likely beaches that the Russians had used for landing zones. He could hear them now as they came nearer to his position; his people knew the area far better than any Russians could hope to know it without a few years living in the region. He refused to think about the possibility that the Russians might have someone with them who had spent a year studying the possibilities…

They couldn’t have thought that far ahead, could they?

The lead Russian helicopter danced closer. He’d seen the formation before, in the training movies that had covered Afghanistan and some of the African missions the British Army had taken on and won. The real danger to the helicopter was ground-fire; the pilot was remaining over the ground forces to make it much harder for a single British soldier with a Stinger or a different antiaircraft missile to fire on him. Russian infantry, armed this time, were advancing as well… right into the teeth of his trap.

“Fire,” he ordered.

A soldier carrying a Stinger missile fired; the other guns opened up at the same time. The Russian infantry threw themselves to the ground and returned fire, as three of their tanks and the helicopter were struck and destroyed by the British fire. A fourth tank rumbled around the first tank, main gun already tracking on where it thought the attack had come from; the shell it fired missed the British and struck a barn some distance away, sending it up in flames. Robinson could only hope that there was no one hiding in that barn; certainly, no one had had the chance to get out.

The Russian infantry were brave, certainly; even the penal soldiers were showing bravery, though British Intelligence reported the penal soldiers had been warned that they would be shot in the back if they retreated or slowed down. It was a mad way to run an army, but the Russians seemed to use it constantly; they had used the same tactics back in 1945, when they had crushed the SS and moved into Germany. The British soldiers, carefully positioned in their trenches, picked them off until a Russian blew a whistle and the Russians fell back, waiting.

Robinson knew better than to wait to find out what. He muttered an order into his radio and the trenches were quickly abandoned, a handful of weapons left behind on auto-target, scanning constantly from side to side for the first sight of anything moving. Robot guns were rare, because the slightest movement could trigger them into firing, but Robinson was far too sure that there were no longer any friendly soldiers in the direction of Dover. He joined Inglehart in being the last to leave the trench, knowing that most of his soldiers would reach the second set of defence lines, fighting tiny battles constantly to slow up the invasion forces and force them to deploy to fight, all the while buying time…

The voice was back at the back of his head. For what…?

Two black shapes appeared at the corner of his eye, swooping down on their location; there was no mistaking the shape of the Devil’s Cross aircraft as they opened fire with heavy machine guns and small rockets. They wanted to kill every soldier in the trench, he realised, as he threw himself down into a ditch; they had brought along enough firepower to wipe out an armoured division. The explosions finally stopped and they crawled further away, refusing to be dismayed any more than they already were; they would reach the second set of trenches or die trying.

They didn’t look back.

The skies were supposed to be clear of British aircraft now, but Captain Anatoliy Maksimovich Veselchakov was nervous anyway; his bomber was an older craft and carried very little in the way of ECM. It also carried no defensive weapons; given the nature of the craft’s mission, it had probably been felt that Veselchakov didn’t need any weapons to shoot back at British aircraft. It might have annoyed them.

Veselchakov had been orbiting in his flight pattern, well out to sea, for nearly an hour before finally being given the call to action. He had spent most of the day admiring the apparently chaotic scenes on the sea and in the air, and admiring the talents of the flight controllers who kept the Russian Air Force under some kind of control. Veselchakov had never intended to join the air force; he had signed up to fly for one of the Russian commercial lines before being drafted for certain missions for the military. His attempts to protest had been futile; there were hundreds of thousands of Russians soldiers fighting in the war and a civilian like Veselchakov could not be expected to shirk his duty. Besides, as a semi-civilian, he had some rights that none of the fighter jocks or the bomber crews had, including the right to make comments about the food.

Still, he had been dreading the missions ever since he had been told what he would be doing, and had tried to look for a way out. The only way he had found to get out — apart from suicide — ran through Siberia; the labour camps could always use people who shirked their duty to the state and the glory of the Russian Federation. Veselchakov was old enough, and travelled enough, to know that the propaganda wasn't all it seemed, but in the end, it was true that Europe had treated Russia like an ill-mannered bumpkin. Russia’s culture had been dismissed as barbaric, Russia’s legitimate concerns dismissed as relics of the old Soviet Union, and Russia’s Army had been dismissed as a corrupt rusting war machine. The smile had been wiped off their faces now; Veselchakov knew enough about the FSB to know that certain politicians who had made political capital taking shots at Russia had probably been sent to Siberia by now.

“I am moving in now,” he said, as the aircraft tilted around him. It was another reason for using a civilian pilot; Veselchakov’s loss would not hurt the Russia Air Force one iota, although it might annoy them as one of them would have to take a second aircraft and try the same stunt themselves. He had done a few seasons of crop dusting, back when Russia had been experimenting with new ideas; the experience would serve him in good stead, even if the corn hadn’t fired back. “Clear the airspace…”

Smoke was rising all over the English mainland; he could see the shore as he came in lower and slower, racing to catch up with Dover. The British harbour was supposed to be captured intact, but the British had dug into the city… and his mission was to attempt to burn some of them out. The Russians on the ground had called upon the defenders to surrender; the only reply had been an instruction to do something biologically impossible. Veselchakov had never claimed to be a military expert, but he remembered the death toll from Groznyy and several other places in Central Asia; thousands of soldiers had been wounded, and hundreds had died. The planners wouldn’t want to do that again if they could avoid it.

He had been promised no ground fire; the British had fired off all of their missiles at the Russian Air Force, apparently getting in more than a few good hits as well. Veselchakov was as patriotic as the next man, but he found the thought of the Russian Air Force getting a bloody nose amusing; the fighter jocks had been so confident of their prowess and their success with the women of France. Their prowess had lasted as long as it had taken to come up against a prepared enemy… and Veselchakov knew that the ‘women of France’ were whores, paid for sleeping with the Russians. It was possible that there were some women who had slept with the Russians without financial inducements, but Veselchakov wouldn’t have bet on it; the fighter jocks ran out of charm very quickly…

And then the penal units had a new slave for a month.

The English city was already burning in places as he came in for his attack run. The location of most of the defenders was already known and he angled the aircraft for maximum exposure. It was the work of a few seconds to prepare the bomb bay… and then the spray of deadly flaming jelly began, raining down on the British below. The Americans had taken the original idea of napalm and improved on it; the Russians had copied the American idea and added a few refinements of their own. Anyone trying to breathe near the flames would be lucky to survive.

Veselchakov winced as a handful of bullets cracked through the aircraft, but breathed a sigh of relief as he escaped safely, heading back out to sea and safety back in France. The fighter jocks would be up there for hours yet; once he landed, unless they wanted him to repeat his stunt again, there were always the French prostitutes.

Behind him, Dover burned…

Langford hadn’t expected to actually hold the Russians, not once the attempt to seal the Russians off and destroy them had failed; all that mattered now was pulling as many units back as possible, and then digging in to the final defence line. The remaining units in Kent had to be pulled back before they were caught and destroyed; the Russians would have problems expanding out of Kent for at least a week. The British had gone over the entire country and destroyed as many bridges, blocked as many roads, and generally worked hard to give the Russians serious problems.

The burning of Dover hadn’t surprised him, but the sense that a city was steadily being literally burned off the face of the Earth worried him; the Russians might do the same to London, or Edinburgh, or any other city that had refused to surrender. They had used napalm before, in Europe, but…

Bad things were meant to happen elsewhere, he thought, laughing bitterly at himself. They weren't meant to happen in Europe…

He dismissed the thought. “Order a general pullback,” he ordered. Special Forces would do what they could to delay and harass the Russians — landing a good punch, then getting out before the Russians could react — but the regular military would be needed elsewhere. He couldn’t help, but thank God that the entire area had been evacuated; how many would have died if Dover had been left with its civilian population? “Tell all units to pull back to the secondary defence line.”

He wanted to go on the offensive, but he knew that that was impossible; he lacked both the mobile firepower and the air cover to mount any offensive. There was one chance, just one… and if he didn’t play his few cards exactly right, Britain would be lost along with the rest of Europe. It would have to work; he would do everything he could to make it work…

…Because the alternative was unthinkable. They had planned for a total defeat, but deep inside, he had never believed that it would be necessary, not until now. When had Britain come so close to defeat before? 1940? The humiliation of Suez had galvanised a stricken country, but that had been a political defeat, not a military one… and hardly fatal. The Falklands had been fought on a shoestring, but victory had come; defeat had seemed impossible. No nation had been able or willing to threaten Britain…

Until now…