The Fall of Night

Chapter Fifty: The Second Battle of Dorking, Take One

Near Dorking, United Kingdom

“They’re coming,” the aide said. Major-General Charles Langford nodded; a week of waiting and preparing for the Russian offensive had come to an end. “The SAS are reporting heavy Russian forces moving towards Dorking from their bases.”

Langford took a long breath. He would be running the battle from a carefully-prepared command tent, one with direct links to both the CJHQ and the different units of the surviving British army; the telephone system was impossible for the Russians to detect in operation. As the Russians tightened their control over the air, anything transmitting a signal had been targeted and destroyed, a sharp lesson in what happens when SHORAD was neglected. The handful of American units did what they could, but they weren’t enough to make a difference; Langford wasn’t sure if anything would make a difference.

The Russians had slowly secured their grip over Kent and the southeast of England, expanding their control and making it much harder for Special Forces to operate, even through the SAS was working wonders in delaying tactics. Their bases had expanded and as they had brought a port back into service, so had their forces; there was no way that their supply lines could be interdicted any longer. The handful of surviving Royal Navy units had been pulled back to take part in the final evacuation, but the Russians were still pressing at them; Langford knew that more ships would be lost before it was all over.

He could have gone on one of the ships, he supposed; the thought had been tempting, even though it would have been the coward’s way out. He could make it to one of the ships even if the battle was lost, but he had made up his mind; whatever happened, he would face it in the country he had become leader of, so unexpectedly. He had made his plans; all that remained was to carry them out and remain strong.

It wouldn’t be long now.

“Send the general signal to all men,” he said. “Tell them… to fight like mad bastards and give them hell.”

The Russian tankers peered nervously out at the English countryside as they advanced, watching out for ambushes, mines, or other surprises that the British might have left in their path. They had learned to be careful in Chechnya, but the British had a few surprises of their own, including a handful of mines that looked harmless, or devices that somehow burned incredibly hot and burned through heavy armour as if it was nothing more than plastic. The Americans had supplied it, some of the tankers whispered, as they drove onwards towards the British lines. One day, perhaps there would be a chance to settle scores with them as well.

High overhead, the first flight of Russian bombers headed west, their targets already preset and designated for attention. Their bomb bays had been loaded with heavy bombs; they now broke into attack runs and headed towards the British positions. Russian spotters and penal soldiers, volunteers trying to work weeks off their sentences, had penetrated the British positions and reported back; many of them were caught and killed, but others survived long enough to warn the Russian pilots of new targets. The bombs began to fall…

Further back, Russian artillery was already beginning to fire, targeting the British lines and the dug-in infantry in towns and villages. Flames spread rapidly as the soldiers drove for cover, the work of centuries being shattered by Russian guns as the Russians advanced; they braced themselves and crawled forward to the newer trenches they had dug to await the Russian ground forces. The British prepared themselves as best as they could for the final battle, carefully concealed tanks and guns becoming active and waiting for targets. Everything depended upon holding the line.

“We don’t fall back,” Colonel Stuart Robinson said, as the Company dug in and prepared to face the Russian attack. This time, they knew that they would be attacked; this time, it would be different from any number of skirmishes right across the continent. “Whatever happens, we don’t fall back.”

“Understood,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart said. He barked orders to the men holding the trench system; hundreds of man-hours had gone into preparing it as a deadly and well-hidden surprise for the Russians. The noise of Russian guns was getting louder; the handful of British guns would remain in reserve until they had targets right where they wanted them. The Russians would have difficulty assaulting their position with tanks; they would have to come face to face with the British soldiers as they fought. “We will hold.”

Robinson touched the medal he wore on his chest. The Army had done the best it could for wounded soldiers, including shipping many of them to heavily-defended Iceland under American care, but he knew that escape was probably impossible. He had asked Hazel to take the opportunity of a shot on an evacuation ship, but she had refused; how could she leave him? She was safe, for the moment, but it still worried him; what would the Russians do to her if they caught her? Reports said that the Russians cracked down hard on unsanctioned atrocities, and they had certainly captured more than a few penal soldiers who had been arrested for rape, but Hazel had thrown a spanner into their plans. The Russians carried grudges; the very war itself was proof of that.

“Yes,” he agreed. He peered through the camouflage down towards where the Russians would have to appear when they attacked. Everyone was certain that the Russians would come to confront the remains of the mobile British Army, the remaining force left on Britain itself; the bombers that had passed overhead and attacked Dorking were proof enough that the planners had called that one correctly. They could see the fires raging upwards from their distance; he didn’t want to think about what could happen if the Russians turned those firebombs on civilians. If the line broke, the British civilian population would be at the mercy of the Russians. “We will not break.”

The sound of high explosives was getting closer as the first of the Russians appeared, moving carefully forward and looking for traps. By now, they all knew how to spot a penal soldier from the slumped shoulders, the absence of weapons or rank insignia, and the suicidal actions. The Russian was crawling forward, completely unarmed; Robinson felt a moment of sympathy before hardening his heart and muttering a command for the sniper to take the Russian down. The Russian twitched once and lay still; the heat of the air seemed to suppress any noise he might have made, or perhaps it was the noise of the battle in the far distance that was concealing his cries. Other Russians appeared, crawling forwards; they were armed and fired as they slipped from cover to cover, hunting for the British sniper who had killed their former colleague.

They don’t know we’re all here, Robinson realised. The Russians clearly thought that they were dealing with a lone SAS sniper, like the one who had killed a Russian General two nights ago when the idiot had gone driving through barely-secured territory; their tactics were designed to beat the sniper out of hiding, not assault a dug-in infantry force. He muttered commands to Inglehart, who passed them along the line; hold your fire and wait.

The Russians came closer and closer, their bullets cracking through the air well above the heads of his men, the universe shrinking to the point where it held only the Russian company and the British company, men who were about to kill and be killed. Robinson felt deadly calm as he took aim, considering his targets carefully; a green-clad Russian officer, waving his men on with one hand, seemed the best possible choice. He used hand signals himself, issuing orders to the mortar crews; those weapons, at least, they had plenty of rounds to fire at the Russians. Time ticked by…

“Fire,” he shouted, and fired down at the Russian. He had no business in the line of fire himself, but he was damned if he was abandoning his men now, and it was a chance to hit back for all Hazel had suffered since he had gone off to war. It seemed a dream now; the universe replaced by endless war as Russians were caught in the stream of bullets, or threw themselves to the ground as British firepower poured onto their locations. The dull thumping of mortars could be heard as the soldiers fired the antipersonnel rounds into the Russian positions, slaughtering hundreds of Russians; the remainder scattered back and returned fire as best as they could. The British mowed them down mercilessly.

Robinson threw his head back. “Plaza-toro,” he shouted, words that would hopefully mean nothing to the Russians. “Plaza-toro!”

All along the line, most of the soldiers scooped up their weapons and hauled them away, heading towards the second set of trenches. A handful remained, brave volunteers; Robinson would have liked nothing better than to stay with them, but he knew his duty. He ran from the trenches as something changed in the air pressure… and then a mighty series of explosions blew him to his knees. The Russians had fired heavy guns, aiming them directly onto their positions; shrapnel and cluster bombs, even small mines, flew everywhere. Robinson kept his head down and watched his feet carefully; here and there, a soldier screamed as a tiny mine detonated, blowing off their legs and crippling them for life. It was easy to see why people had wanted such weapons to be banned, but in the end… the Russians had cared nothing for the ban.

A British MLRS rapid-fired a stream of rockets in reply, arcing over his head as the soldiers stumbled and crawled to the second set of trenches. It seemed like a nightmare, or something out of the First World War; the looming presence of a Russian tank, trying to flank them, underlined the strange nature of war in the new world. Inglehart blasted it with a Knife before the Russian could do more than fire a long burst of machine gun bullets at the fleeing soldiers; the Russian tank exploded into fire and died rapidly. Russian gunners were trying to target the MLRS; Robinson prayed that the crew had managed to move their vehicle before it was too late. The sound of shouts in Russian could only mean one thing; the Russians were in hot pursuit.

“Get into position, you worthless bastards,” Inglehart was shouting, as the soldiers scrambled to obey. A handful of wounded were being carted away by medics, trying to get them to one of the evacuation ships before the Russians caught them; several more were refusing to leave and were preparing to join the final stand. “I want you to kill every god-damned Russian who pokes his dick over that crest, got that?”

The sky seemed to be lit up with rockets and aircraft, hunting for targets. Robinson looked for signs that someone else was mounting a defence, fighting the Russians in the air, but there was no sign of any British aircraft at all. The noise was strange; he could hear sonic booms and the thunder of bombs, and then there would be moments when it was almost quiet and peaceful. The shape of a Russian tank lumbered into view and they braced themselves as an infantryman took arm with an RPG, striking the Russian tank and destroying its treads. A second shot sent tankers boiling out of it; the British mowed them down before the flames consumed the tank and detonated its ammunition.

“There,” Inglehart muttered. Robinson saw them briefly; a line of Russian infantrymen, preparing themselves to move forward. “I think that’s our cue…”

The Russian shells landed.

“Hit,” someone was shouting, as explosions raged through the British trench lines. Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev wasn't so sure; the shells had actually fallen short, digging themselves into the mud and probably alarming the British, but not killing many of them. “We killed them all!”

“Onwards,” Aliyev shouted, as he hefted his own assault rifle. The British would be stunned and that wouldn’t last long; the British had held out stubbornly long enough to convince him that it would be the greatest fight of his career. He was almost relieved to be a mere infantryman again; no choices, no serious responsibility… just the urge to kill the enemy until they were all dead. It had been his reward; a soldier who accomplished much in the Russian Army would be forgiven much… and no one would complain about him wanting to enter the fight. The paratroops had been badly mauled by the fighting near Dover; Aliyev would have one last major battle before he was sent back to Russia to start the long hard task of rebuilding the paratroopers into a new force. “Advance against the British!”

The remainder of his paratroops moved forward with blinding speed, running up towards the British positions and preparing for the final lunge. The shells had disrupted the British; only a handful fired back as the paratroopers assaulted the position, moving from covering positions to wild desperate charges as they threw grenades and faced the British in close-quarter combat for the final time. The entire scene was beautifully chaotic; he loved it as the position disintegrated into a hundred tiny battles, even hand-to-hand combat between soldiers. He couldn’t have been happier…

A British officer slammed into him and they went down, fighting a desperate struggle to kill each other before it was too late; Aliyev went for the neck and felt his tormenter’s struggles die before he pulled himself out from under the body… and saw a rifle pointed at him from very near range. His hand lanced down to the fragmentation grenades at his belt; he just managed to pull the pin before the British soldier fired once, sending Aliyev howling into a nightmare of fire and death.

Robinson saw the Captain, a young studious officer who had handled his unit well, if without inspiration, go down on top of a Russian officer and screamed in outrage. The Russian broke the Captain’s neck with a single quick moment and slipped out; Robinson knew that he was too dangerous a fighter to risk a hand-to-hand fight, no matter how much he wanted one; he lifted his assault rifle and fired in one quick motion.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” he said, as he saw what the Russian had done. Instincts took over and he threw himself backwards as the grenades detonated; screaming red hot pain cascaded through him as the fragments of shrapnel burned through his legs and chest. He couldn’t feel his legs; the pain was too great to allow him even to think; the sense that someone was talking to him, someone very close, was confusing his mind. He couldn’t even focus enough to rally and kill Russians…

“Hazel,” he said, or thought he said, and blacked out.

Inglehart saw Robinson fall and cursed the Russians as he wounded one with a gut-shot, blowing the Russian’s head off with a second shot. He had liked Robinson; he had known him since he was a nervous common soldier, to becoming a commissioned officer, to becoming a competent Captain… and then the man who had saved all of their lives. He threw a grenade at a nearby group of Russians and knelt by his Captain — he could never think of him as a Colonel — examining the wounds; they were bad. The ruined legs alone would cripple him for the rest of his life…

The choice wasn't hard to make. The Russians had fallen back; Inglehart knew what that meant, a bombardment. He shouted orders to two of the medics, ordering them to carry the Captain out of the battlezone, and turned back to face the advancing Russians. He owed Robinson his life; he could have fled, but in the end… he had accepted the price of duty a long time ago, when he had first taken service in the army, a long time before Robinson had ever joined himself.

Inglehart was proud of Robinson; he was proud to be a Sergeant in the greatest army in the world. It had been a long career, watching the army rise and fall, seeing newer officers prove themselves or fail under the supreme test of combat. It had been a good life, all in all; wine — or rather beer — women and song, all spent with the finest bunch of bastards on the face of the planet. He wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Inglehart kept fighting until they overwhelmed him. He died surrounded by the bodies of his foes.

“They’re punching through the main defence line,” the aide reported. Langford could hear a hint of panic in her voice; they were on the verge of being trapped in the HQ if the Russian advance was not checked. “They’re moving to outflank Dorking itself.”

Langford scowled. The Russians had managed the penetration quicker than he had expected; he had anticipated the bombardment of Dorking, but not the almost suicidal tactics the Russians had used to break through. Time was on their side; was there some reason why they had forced the issue as much as they had, apart from sheer bloody-mindedness?

It didn’t matter. “Contact Major Ryan,” he ordered. The time had come to play the last card in his hand, the only card he had held back for the final battle. There had been no other choice, not until now; the last card had to be played, or abandoned along with the war. “The tanks will advance and engage the enemy.”