The Fall of Night

Chapter Six: The Lords and Masters

London, United Kingdom

“Your papers, please, General,” the guard said. His weapon wasn’t — quite — pointed at Langford’s chest. “I must insist.”

Major-General Charles Langford passed over his identification and waited patiently for the guard to complete a biometric scan of his body, comparing it to the details stored in both the ID card and the PJHQ computers. The tiny microchip in the card was supposed to be impossible to fake or alter, but Langford knew better than to assume that anything was impossible. It was why there were armed guards emplaced around the PJHQ — the Permanent Joint Headquarters — and why there was an entire company of armed soldiers stationed within the surrounding buildings. The last terrorist attack on the United Kingdom had been years ago, but it was only a matter of time.

“You may pass, sir,” the guard said. His partner saluted; the guard himself didn’t. Saluting on duty was a punishable offence; it could distract a guard from his duties. Langford would have understood the guard’s nervousness about not showing a superior officer respect — he had been written up for once saluting a superior in a combat zone — but there was no helping it. Security came first.

“Thank you,” Langford said, as the gate opened. It had been designed to prevent a truck bomber or something similar from entering the parking lot, but it all seemed absurdly flimsy compared to the Green Zone in Baghdad, even though the Americans there had known that they were likely to be attacked at any moment. The government of Britain hadn’t wanted to invest in much in the way of security, let alone the forced buy-outs of the property surrounding the PJHQ, but almost every security officer had threatened to resign and go public unless the government agreed. Security came first and, despite the Liberal Government, there were still people who wanted to keep the country safe.

He passed through the gate and entered the main building, receiving a second security check as he entered, before heading down into the bunker. It had been designed years ago, during the threat of Russian nuclear attack — in typical MOD fashion, it had been finished after the Cold War had been won — and seemed far too flimsy these days. Both the Americans and the Russians had deployed heavy bunker-busting bombs, ruining the reputation of French and British engineers who had built the bunkers where third world despots had hidden out from American aircraft. Many of them had died with defiance on their lips.

“Sir,” Captain Christopher Drury said, standing to attention and saluting. The bespectacled officer didn’t look much like a combat soldier, nothing like the guards in battle dress on the outside of the building, but as one of the operators of the PJHQ, he was one of Langford’s most trusted officers. He might have given off the impression of a blonde Jeff Goldblum, but there was little eccentric about him. “Welcome back to the PJHQ. I must remind you that you have the weekly situation meeting at 1300hrs and there are still protesters blocking the roads; the Metropolitan Police suggest that you use one of the helicopters.”

Langford scowled. He had never married and had been an army brat; he had never understood why protesters picketed military bases, such as the handful of barracks scattered around London and the PJHQ, rather than government buildings. The military didn’t decide when to go to war; that was the choice of the politicians. Every European general had advised against the Sudan deployment, and then against withdrawing half of the force… and had been ignored. They had also gotten the blame afterwards.

“Wonderful,” he said, unwilling to think about the issue. The weekly situation meeting and security brief was supposed to be a simple task, but it wasn’t anything of the sort when some security matters were handled by EUROFOR and others by PJHQ, while Brussels kept attempting to expand their authority. It didn’t help that a united front of French, German and British officers had pointed out that there was no need to spend billions of Euros on a new headquarters in Brussels; the PJHQ alone could have provided all of the coordination that EUROFOR could have required. The French headquarters — the public one, that everyone knew about, and the secret one that no one was supposed to know about — could have accomplished the same tasks; the European Defence Commission had insisted on its own headquarters and the various governments had given in. It was empire-building at its worst; that money could have mended a few defects in EUROFOR’s actual line of battle.

He shrugged. It wasn’t something he could do anything about. “Is there anything I should know about?”

“There’s a torrent of Jihadists invective coming from Algeria and to some extent from Libya, thanks to some frog who wanted to cut the balls of every Algerian or something like that,” Drury said. Langford felt a flicker of sympathy for the unnamed Frenchman. “It’s all the usual stuff; the Frenchman must die before the Eiffel Tower comes crashing down and exterminates the French when it hits the ground.”

“Pretty big explosion,” Langford observed dryly. The image made him smile; the French had tougher laws on terrorism than the British, although they were mild compared to either the American or Russian laws. “Anything else?”

Drury shook his head. “The French Air Force has requested that we provide an AWACS and a couple of fighters for a drill in a week,” he said. “The French think they have a new way of detecting aircraft at very low level and want us to be the aggressors in a raid on France. The Chief of the Air Staff was very interested and wants us to agree.”

“That is within my purview,” Langford said. Unless something went very wrong, the government wouldn’t have to know about it at all… and the RAF’s training standards had been slipping badly, recently, due to the torrent of complaints about the noise of low-flying aircraft. “Anything on the Threat Board?”

“Only some suggestion that the Russians are considering a move into Ukraine,” Drury said. “EUROFOR HQ is handling the matter, but they don’t anticipate trouble; in any case, it’s out of our hands. Major-General McLachlan says that the Poles are worried, but EUROFOR HQ is convinced that the Russians are going to wait until after the elections before they move, if they move.”

“Then I see no reason why we should not go along with the French request,” Langford said. The French commander had skirted the edge of what could be done without EUROFOR’s knowledge; it was fitting to show that not everything needed EUROFOR to go along with it. “Coordinate it with CAS, but unless something new appears, then we should try to beat the French at their own game.”

He smiled at Drury’s expression and headed into his office, taking the time to pick up a cup of coffee before reading through his secure emails. There was little of importance, but seventy percent of his work was never important; hurry up and wait applied even more to the PJHQ than it did to soldiers in the field. They, at least, got to shoot at the enemy. The entire Falklands situation seemed to be calming down now that a major task force, including the Prince of Wales, was on its way to the area. That was nearly a third of the Royal Navy… and the politicians would probably claim that it was all a wasted deployment.

“Damned Argies,” Langford muttered. Every so often, Argentina would shake its fist and make threatening moves in the direction of the Falklands, and British forces would be forced to react. Even the Liberals who were in power knew better than to simply give up the islands, no matter their anti-colonial sentiments; their government would fall quicker than an apple from the tree, or an American bunker-busting bomb. “I wonder…”

“Sir, your helicopter is ready to depart,” Drury said, hours later. Langford nodded tiredly; he had been studying deployments, wondering where he could draw a company or battalion from to make up some of the overstretch. It wasn’t like 1914, where Britain had had worldwide interests, or even 2003, but it was still tricky… and the endless cuts in the deployable forces hadn’t helped. “The Police are still reporting that the streets are blocked.”

“I should go in a Challenger tank,” Langford said. He smiled at the thought; the British Army had been intended to switch to Eurotanks, of which there were nearly a thousand units on order, two years ago; naturally, the project had overrun and only one European unit had Eurotanks. “That might show them something about the world.”

Drury said nothing.

The Metropolitan Police hadn’t exaggerated, Langford realised, as the helicopter came down towards Whitehall and the MOD Main Building. Protesters swarmed as close as they could to the centre of the British Government, the organised protests disintegrating into peaceful anarchy. The protesters seemed to just want to protest; Langford had heard that the police had wanted to disperse them, but the government had forbidden it for political reasons. The weather forecast had promised heavy rain in a day or so; it had been hoped that the rain would put most of the protesters off their game. Some of them shouted towards the helicopter as it came in to land on the roof; they were too far away to know what they were shouting. He doubted that it was anything important.

“Welcome to the Main Building, sir,” Captain Scott Hammock said. “They’re all waiting for you in the briefing room.”

“Thank you,” Langford said. He wasn’t surprised that the others had arrived first; they could use the series of tunnels linking all of Whitehall together without having to avoid protesters. They walked down corridors, the monotony broken only by a faded VOTE SAXON poster that no one had had the heart to take down, and into the main hall. A small set of aides and assistants were waiting outside; they were wallflowers as far as the weekly security briefing was concerned.

The interior of the briefing room had been renovated several times, currently designed to reassemble a corporate office, rather than the dignified centre of government that Whitehall aspired to be. The Prime Minister stood to greet Langford as he came to a halt and saluted; his bulk made it seem as if he was a beached whale. Prime Minister Nicholas Donavan actually believed half of the statements he made in public and in private; Langford gave him that much credit. Like John Major, no one really questioned his integrity; his grasp of political affairs was another matter. If Labour and the Conservatives, to say nothing of the Scottish Nationalists, hadn’t so thoroughly discredited themselves…

“Thank you for coming,” Donavan said. Everyone else in the room, with the exception of a dour-faced Police officer, was a political appointee or politician; Langford was uncomfortably aware that he was outnumbered. The ongoing budget crisis, seemingly impossible to solve, had left Donavan with a desperate need to cut costs, anywhere. The MOD’s budget got smaller every year. “I believe that we can begin now.”

Langford took his seat, noting the presence of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Jack Redding, and the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Neddy Young. The Deputy Prime Minister was off pressing the flesh for a by-election in Scotland; his place had been taken by one of his trusted aides. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bruce McClain, looked grim; he was the third person to hold that role since Donavan had become Prime Minister.

“You may have heard that there was an… unfortunate incident in France last week,” the Policeman said. His nametag read BRIGGS. “There have actually been some protests in several southern cities in Britain relating to it, all coordinated through the network of mosques that we have identified as being hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism. The protests have been carried out without violence, but there were some incidents of genuinely worrying behaviour and, I believe, signs that there is a real network coordinating their actions. This cannot be coincidence, Prime Minister; I believe that this represents a disturbing trend in Islamic behaviour.”

He tapped the display. “You will remember that the Americans killed seven British Muslims in what remains of Saudi Arabia last month,” Briggs continued. “All of them came from these four mosques” — the display changed again — “and all of those mosques held protest marches demanding that the Americans turn over the bodies for proper disposal. This was impossible, of course; the Americans simply destroyed the bodies once they had been identified. Less well known is the fact that the Americans took an eighth British Muslim alive… and forced him to talk. He was talking about an entire recruiting ring that gave him training before shipping him into Saudi.”

Donavan shuddered. “The Americans tortured him,” he said. There had been any number of articles on the practice when it had begun, before Oakland; afterwards, the American public would have been quite happy to bathe the entire Middle East in radioactive fire. Millions had died in Oakland. “He would say anything under torture.”

“The Americans gave us some of the information and we checked it out,” Briggs said. Langford felt a moment of sympathy for him; his superiors should have handled such matters, not dropped them in the lap of a relatively junior officer. “Sir, there is a network there and it represents a clear and present danger; we need to take it apart, quickly!”

He paused. “The growth of right-wing extremism is also becoming worrying, with reports of illegal arms and training flooding into inner cities,” he continued. “Incidents of racial hatred and even outright violence have been on the increase, some of it in response to the actions of the Islamic network. Something has to be done.”

“If we arrest the people behind the network, we’ll have a riot on our hands,” Neddy Young said. “We cannot afford that, not when we are making progress at last.”

“You mean when you are appeasing them,” Briggs snapped, too tired to continue. Langford silently applauded him. “This situation is too unstable to continue…”

“We will take it and think about it,” Donavan said. Briggs heard the note in his voice and sat down bitterly. “Major-General?”

Langford exchanged a long look with Briggs before taking control of the display. “The main item on the agenda is the deployment to the Falklands,” he said. “The fleet is currently one week away from the islands and the number of incidents has fallen sharply. ASW frigates reported some contacts with submarines — we know that the Argentineans have purchased several newer submarines from the Russians, including three nuke boats — and there have been some long-range aircraft flying out to take a look at us, but nothing of great importance. The Americans…”

“I told you so,” Bruce McClain snapped. “This little operation cost us billions of pounds, money we can ill afford to lose; I knew they were bluffing.”

“It had to be done,” Donavan said reluctantly. Langford could almost read his thoughts; to a man like him, the wishes of the islanders were paramount… and he assumed the same was true of the archetypical reasonable man. The problem was that nationalists were not given to being reasonable over some issues. The Argentinean Government, back in the economic dumps after the fallout from the American War on Terror had spread into Latin and South America, had been beating the nationalist drum again… and what better cause than the Falklands? “We could not afford a repeat of the Falklands War. General?”

Langford smiled. “The other matter of importance is the deployment to Poland,” he said. “Under the auspices of EUROFOR POLAND, we have dispatched several regiments to join the defence force, assuming that it is actually needed. There are some reasons to be concerned that the Russians might attempt to take over the Ukraine if the elections there don’t go their way. Sir, I must request that we force the European Defence Commission to revise the ROE, at least for units that might have to go into Ukraine and support the EUROFOR units already there.”

“Out of the question,” McClain snapped. The fury in his voice was almost a tangible thing. “The last thing we need is to get embroiled in a war with Russia.”

Donavan tapped the table. “Major-General, do you have any reason to be suspicious?”

Back to Major-General, I see, Langford thought dryly. “The Russians have been moving up forces into positions that they could use to jump into Ukraine and they have said, several times, that they would not tolerate an anti-Russian policy on the part of the Ukraine,” he said. “It was hard enough to convince them to accept the deployment of two European battalions into the Ukraine, and they have prevented us from any serious joint operations. The Irish and the Swedes might be tough, but they’re not ready to act if the Russians try something and don’t have the firepower to act in any case. We would have to react instantly if something happened… and we don’t even have a political line to fall back on.”

Donavan tented his fingers. “It has been discussed in the European Parliament,” he said. “The general consensus is that eventually the Ukraine will apply to join the European Union, and so patience is all that is required.”

Langford shook his head. “And what happens if the Russians refuse to go along with it?”

Afterwards, he took the helicopter back to PJHQ. He had some leave coming up, but he hated to go on leave when he had the sense that something bad was about to happen. Not for the first time, he thought about accepting the American offer of American citizenship to any European soldier and his or her family who was prepared to spend a few years in the American Army. At least the Americans were doing something… while Europe fiddled merrily away.