The Fall of Night

by Christopher Nuttall

  ***

  “We are breaking through the main defence line,” Anna said. Shalenko nodded; the casualties had been heavier than he had expected, but the French had almost no reserves at all. Their only armoured units had moved out to engage the Russian armour and had been picked off from the air by Russian bombers; far too many Frenchmen had retreated into the nearest town, where they were engaging the Russian soldiers in house-to-house combat. Russian bombers were roaming the skies unchallenged after the first hail of SAM missiles; everything that even looked suspicious was targeted for destruction. “The commander of 2nd Shock is requesting permission to exploit the breakthrough.”

  “Granted,” Shalenko said shortly. The breakthrough had to be exploited as quickly as possible; the French Army had proven itself a tough opponent and if it managed to retreat into Nancy, he would have to flatten the town to kill them all, or starve them out in a long siege. “Has there been any progress on locating the enemy command post?”

  “Intelligence believes that it has a rough location,” Anna said. “Do you want it targeted?”

  “I want a commando team to move in,” Shalenko said. They had sent several hundred additional commandos behind French lines, waiting for opportunities like this one. “I want the commander alive if possible.”

  He turned his attention back to the advance.

  ***

  “Inform the reserves that they are to move back into the pre-prepared defences at Nancy,” Pelletier ordered, as calmly as he could. The sheer violence of the Russian attack had stunned him; it was the Second World War fought with modern weapons, and total command of the air. One of his handful of armoured units had been picked off from the air without ever having a chance to take a shot at the enemy. He could bleed the Russians out in Nancy; perhaps the remaining citizens would forgive his memory, one day, for the devastation that was about to be visited on their city. “I want…”

  There was a burst of firing from outside. He cursed as his subordinates grabbed weapons; they all knew what that meant. Russian doctrine called for decapitating the enemy force as quickly as possible; he was only surprised that they hadn’t ordered a bomber to take a JDAM and blow the command post away before anyone knew what had hit them. The remaining French SAM missiles had been fired off against other bombers and there were no more left to contest the air. The command post shook as grenades – he had been in the infantry; he recognised the noise – detonated, sending chips of plaster falling down from the ceiling. The Russian commandos burst in…and some of his people raised their weapons, preparing to fight to the end. There were a series of quick shots and the armed personnel fell to the ground, dead. Blood and gore scattered everywhere…

  “Which of you is the commander?” The Russian snapped. Pelletier saw his fate in that instant; collaboration, infamy beyond anything heaped on any past Frenchman, the treason to end all treason. He didn’t delude himself; he might have been wearing battle-dress instead of a fancy uniform, but the Russians would know who he was once they compared his face to their files. There really was no other choice; Pelletier had never fancied the role of Darlan and his fellows for himself. “If the commander makes himself known to us…”

  Pelletier was still raising his pistol when they shot him through the head. He died with a smile on his face, laughing at them; they had failed, in the end, to take him prisoner and ruling France would be just that bit harder. The final thought before darkness failed to quell the smile; France had made her last stand…

  And lost.

  Chapter Forty: Alone

  Goodnight then: sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France! Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.

  Winston Churchill

  Near Dover, England

  The line of soldiers looked bedraggled in the rain as they stumbled into barracks that had been hastily prepared for them. In the semi-darkness, they looked beaten, broken; Langford would have liked to have believed that it was only an illusion. The British Army, one of the toughest and most professional armies in the world, had had its collective arse soundly kicked…along with the French, the Germans and the Poles. They all knew that, even if the civilians hadn’t quite realised yet; the scale of the defeat had been almost total.

  Langford looked up at Erica. “It’s confirmed, then?”

  Erica nodded once. She wore no parka, nothing covering her short blonde hair; rain dripped through it and pressing it to her skin. “HMS Vengeance missed its radio call,” she said. “The Americans are looking for it, but I think we have to assume the worst; the nuclear submarine might well have been lost with all hands.”

  “Along with the missiles,” Langford said. He looked down towards the other members of the party, half-hidden in the darkness. “You know what this means, of course?”

  “Yes,” Erica said grimly. “Any hope that we might have of threatening nuclear attack to force the Russians to break off is more or less gone. We got rid of the other weapons under the European convention on nuclear weapons; the absence of mushroom clouds over France suggests that the French have also lost their control over their nukes. Now that Paris has fallen…”

  Langford stared down at the tattered soldiers. “Just how bad was it?”

  “We recovered around a thousand soldiers, four hundred of them from other European countries,” Erica said. “Major-General McLachlan had nearly twenty thousand soldiers under his command; we recovered barely six hundred of them before the Russians drove us out of Ostend. There may be other groups trying to get home, but for the moment, we must assume that they are either dead or prisoners of war.”

  Langford sat down on the nearby bench and tried to come to grips with it. The British Army hadn’t suffered such losses in a single campaign since…offhand, he couldn’t remember a single campaign that had claimed so many lives. Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan had claimed around nine hundred between them, before the new government had abandoned the Americans and scuttled for safety in political appeasement; had there ever been such losses since the Second World War? The First World War was strewn with blood, even if there had been less shed than politicians claimed these days; there had been no war since 1945 that had claimed so many lives. The Germans and the French would have taken far more causalities; their territory had actually been invaded directly…

  Invasion…

  “They’re going to be coming for us next,” he said, very softly. He had had the thought before, but until recently it had refused to materialise in his head as a possibility. “We never even planned for invasion; the possibility wasn’t even considered.”

  Erica nodded grimly. “We have been studying the attack the Russians used on Denmark and Norway,” she said. “They would have some problems applying it to us, but they could do it, in theory…and if they managed to land, they would be able to rapidly reinforce their forces and advance towards London.”

  She paused. “They might even have some help,” she said. “That woman in Edinburgh gave us a break, but…”

  Langford scowled. “The prisoner told us nothing?”

  “I don’t think he knows anything,” Erica said. “Oh, the Russians did a lot to prepare him for interrogation and possible torture, but we borrowed some of the American manuals and drugs and worked on him. He may be hiding some details, but…he knows nothing beyond the existence of someone called Control who gave them their final orders, and then vanished. He may well have been killed in the first round of hostilities, which would be quite ironic, but in any case their orders were to continue to attack until they were caught, or they were ordered to extract themselves.”

  She paused. “He didn’t even know that the Russians were planning to invade Europe until he heard the radio reports,” she continued.
“Imagine; thousands of them, still running around the country, striking like they did at the tanker. What happens if a few of them take up position near a RAF base and launch more missiles?”

  “We have to find them,” Langford said. “How did they get here anyway?”

  “Russian workers hired by a shell company,” Erica said. “The Security Service was trying to look into the paper trail; guess what happened to the people in charge of the company?”

  Langford took a wild guess. “Trapped in Russia by the war?”

  “And their records destroyed,” Erica said. “There were hundreds of thousands of Russians coming to Britain to work; if even a tenth of them were agents, we have an entire underground invasion army on our hands.”

  “Have them all rounded up and moved into the detention centres,” Langford said, hating himself. He had always thought that detaining people without trial was un-British, even if it had been the only way to handle international terrorism. The unfortunates who had already been detained had either been offered a chance to make up for their crimes by serving in the army, or had been told that they would remain there until they could be sent to America to face charges there. The known terrorist

  Mustapha had been caught, much to everyone’s surprise, and he would be out of the country in a week. “We can sort them all out later.”

  “Most of them will have gone underground by now,” Erica said. She scowled. “Someone very well placed must have been organising this for years.”

  “I don’t think that the last government needed the help,” Langford said bitterly. He ran a hand through his hair. On its own resources, Britain couldn’t rebuild its army before it was too late, not the vital equipment, at least. Many of the factories for constructing smaller weapons, such as rifles and pistols, had been hit, although those were fairly easy to build, given time. The aircraft and tanks…it could take months before any new aircraft came off the assembly line; once they ran out of spares, the entire RAF would be grounded pretty quickly. “How many soldiers can we assemble here?”

  “Around thirty thousand, at most, counting the TA,” Erica said. “The initial losses were very heavy, particularly in units that were in their barracks at the time; we have to get what we do have left into a coordinated force and replace the equipment – I think we also have to call back the Falklands force now, without further delay.”

  Langford nodded bitterly. “See to it,” he said. A sonic boom split the air; everyone knew that it wouldn’t be long before the Russians started air attacks in earnest, securing command over the sea and as much of southern England as they could. He wondered what had caused the boom; a RAF fighter on patrol, or a Russian fighter preparing to enter the UKADR and thumb its nose at the British. With stockpiles of advanced weapons so low, the British could not afford to engage every probe unless it came over the mainland…and by the time the two AWACS tracked the probe as coming in over the mainland, it might be too late to respond. “I think that we also need to draw up a plan for resisting an invasion.”

  He looked along the beach to one of the other men standing there. “I think we also need to do something we should have done a long time ago,” he said. “I think we have to ask for help.”

  Erica nodded. “I’ll return to the headquarters and start making the preparations,” she said. “If nothing else, we need to evacuate this whole area; I don’t think that the Russians would dare land anywhere else. Too many variables.”

  Langford watched her go, and then sped up his own walk. He had asked the two men ahead of him to come to see the return of British forces; it was the easiest way he could think of to stress how serious the situation had become, at least in British eyes. The older man turned as Langford approached; Ambassador Andrew Luong looked almost as tired as Langford felt. Colonel Seth Fanaroff had been briefing him on what had happened in Brussels; the United States had already lost over four hundred lives to the war, many of them in the first day of the fighting. The Americans who had made themselves known to Russian forces had been sent back to America; Langford ground his teeth at the thought. A few atrocities would have made his task much easier.

  “Ambassador,” he said, as he took in the two men. Fanaroff had brought back his assistant and ten women, nine of whom were prostitutes who had devoted themselves to ministering to the soldiers. The civilian population had done what they could as well, but many of them had just stayed inside, keeping themselves to themselves, seeing to their families first. “May we have a word?”

  Luong nodded once. “It doesn’t look good,” he said, before Langford could say anything. “I don’t understand; why did no one ever see this coming?”

  “Water under the bridge,” Langford said. It hardly mattered now. “Ambassador; Britain needs help.”

  “I thought you might ask that,” Luong admitted. There was a long pause. “It may be politically impossible to provide more than limited support.”

  Langford closed his eyes for a moment. “Give us the weapons and we can win,” he said. He had never been a diplomat; perhaps “Ambassador, have you considered what the Russian conquest means for America?”

  Fanaroff nodded before Luong could speak. “The Russians intended nothing less than conquest, and now that the remainder of France is being brought under Russian authority, it won’t be long before they come here,” he said. “Once that happens, they will be almost impossible to remove without a war that will make World War Two look like a child’s tea party.”

  “The American public is generally not inclined to take the long view,” Luong said, more to Langford than to Fanaroff. “The President may agree with you, but you must know that the American Army is heavily engaged in both Korea and the Middle East. The supplies that used to be based here are gone; even if we were prepared to send troops, they wouldn’t be capable of being more than…speed bumps for the Russians.”

  He paused. “There is also a good chance that political opinion would be so strongly against intervention that the President would be able to do nothing,” he continued. “You know, you must know, exactly what Brussels has said about America…”

  Langford shrugged. “And Washington has said what about Brussels?”

  “Washington isn’t the place that needs help,” Luong pointed out dryly.

  Langford felt real despair for the first time.

  The American shrugged. “I want to help, I want America to help, but it may be impossible both politically and practically. The average Joe Six-pack in the US is probably cheering on the Russians and wondering what the Russians will do to all the terrorists who have managed to make themselves into media darlings in Europe, so that they could never be sent out of the country to face trial. The Russians in control of Europe may end the flood of poison money; informed opinion may want to wait and see if the Russians improve the situation…”

  “Which won’t happen if the Algerians get control over the south of France,” Langford said. “I was under the impression that the Algerians were on your list of states to knock over and repair.”

  “It was, but not for a few years,” Luong said, grimly. He met Langford’s eyes. “I will go to Washington to plead your case.” He held up a hand. “I would not, however, advise hope; the most I think that Washington will be able to give you is supplies and some additional support, maybe even a few additional tankers and aircraft if they are available.”

  “I think that anything would be welcome,” Langford said. He stared out over the grey sea towards France. “At the moment, if the Russians land, we will lose. If that happens, you will be unable to repair the situation without hideous losses.”

  ***

  Hazel hadn’t known what would happen to her in the days since she had found the police station and betrayed the two Russians. She had been interrogated repeatedly by policemen and people in plain suits she guessed were from MI5, digging out every last fact about the Russians that she knew. Her information, she had been told, had been very detailed and very useful, but the Russians had been ca
reful to lay false trails. The attempt to trace their allies, assuming that they had allies, had failed; Hazel had been warned that it would be a long time before she could go home. The Russians might want revenge for the betrayal.

  Instead, she had spent several days being moved south, into England. The people escorting her hadn’t explained why she was being driven along deserted motorways, taking their time as they drove down towards the south; she had merely had to remain with them until they reached Dover, where she had been booked into a B&B and left there. No one knew that she was there; she hadn’t been allowed to talk to her father and the telephone system was still out of commission. Dover had been under a curfew; the police and armed soldiers were patrolling the streets, preventing anyone from being out at night. It had seemed like a strange place to hide; Hazel might have been only a civilian, but she was certain that Dover was the closest place in England to Russian-occupied France.