“In order that the inhabitants of Hanover be integrated properly into the new economic system, it is vitally important that all citizens be registered with the provisional government of the city, in order that formerly employed citizens can be aided to return to work, and unemployed citizens will be found work, payable in good Russian currency. Please report to the nearest government centre within a week, bringing with you your passports, European driving licences, employment details and other forms of identification. If you have a Prisoner’s Card, or an Ethnic Entitlements Card, bring those along with you as well. An ID card will be produced for you at the government centre, which must be carried at all times and produced upon demand; failure to either register or produce an ID card after the week will result in arrest and detention. This message will be repeated every hour on the hour.”
Gudrun had hated the thought, every time successive European governments had brought it up; ID cards! The French and Spanish had had them and pressure from Progressive factions had forced them to abandon them; Italy’s milder version had also been washed away under a tidal wave of public mistrust of the government. Sure, there were cards for prisoners, or Ethnic Entitlement Cards for those who had suffered because of their ethnicity, but they were all wrong; she hated the thought of being nothing more than a number on a card. She knew that others would be feeling the same way…
They massed in the suburbs and began a long march to the remains of the New Town Hall, now the centre of the Russian occupation authorities. The Lord Mayor made the occasional broadcast, but everyone knew that the Russians were pulling his strings; everyone suspected that the Russians might have even had him as a willing ally from before the war. It was easy to look for people to blame; was it the government, the skinheads, the Arabs, the…? There was no way to know for certain, although Gudrun’s father had certainly had an opinion; Gudrun considered him, at least in part, a class enemy.
She had sneaked out of the house after her father had left for his seemingly endless task of rebuilding the city’s infrastructure. The Russians had rounded up a few hundred trained workers, but they’d been massively overstretched by the scale of the disaster; the city had tilted on the brink before they had finally managed to save it from drought and starvation. Her father hadn’t known about the march; he would only have forbidden her from going. The throng welcomed her, as they welcomed everyone willing to join them; they advanced towards the New Town Hall, shouting their defiance at the Russians. Gudrun, now part of the pack, shouted too; no identification cards, Russians go home…
The marches thronged the streets, only vaguely aware of the Russian helicopters that passed over them briefly, taking careful notes. Their shadows sent gloom wherever they touched, but Gudrun was unimpressed and the gloom faded when they vanished again, perhaps having attempted to terrify the students into dispersing. They had failed.
“They can’t scare us,” a male voice shouted, and the crowd rapidly took up the chant. “Russians out, Russians out, Russians out…”
They had protested before; they had even played a role in the downfall of one German government. The crowd was almost a living thing; Gudrun could feel it as they focused their energy on the Russian guards at the end of the road, a line of Russians deploying themselves to face the crowd; they were useless, the crowd laughed at them and kept going. The wave of energy suffused them; they were unstoppable, the Russians would run, the Russians would hide from the power of the people united…
The Russians opened fire.
The noise of the heavy machine guns tore through the air, shocking the crowd; those hit by the bullets added their own noise to the racket, blood and gore splashing everywhere as the Russians fired directly into the crowd. For many, it was their first sight of blood; they fainted, or screamed, trying to run as the Russian troops waded forwards, weapons raised. Clubs came lashing down on skulls; anyone who tried to fight was gunned down mercilessly. The crowd, stung by a thousand red hot bullets, disintegrated; students and protesters tried to run, only to be herded back by more Russian soldiers, wielding clubs and shouting orders in German.
Gudrun had been one of the lucky ones; she had been knocked to the ground as soon as the shooting started, unhurt apart from bruised knees and bloody scratches on her legs. She tried to crawl away, only to be caught, secured, and thrown towards a group of her fellow female protesters, all forced to sit on the ground with their hands brutally tied behind their backs. The male protesters were rounded up as well; she caught sight of her boyfriend’s broken face as the Russians escorted the male protesters into trucks driven by German drivers, all handcuffed to the wheel. She met his eyes, one final time; they were torn with horror and despair.
She didn’t want to look at the bodies, or the blood; there were hundreds of bodies waiting for disposal as the Russian soldiers moved through them, inspecting them all, unconcerned about the blood. A handful of mortally wounded protesters were quickly shot in the head, their cries fading away as they were sent into merciful oblivion; a handful of protesters who had been playing dead were found and tossed in with the other trapped protesters. The Russians finally completed their grizzly task and barked orders; Gudrun, despite herself, wasn’t blind to the implications of separating the men from the women. Somehow, she didn’t think that their fate would be pleasant.
For the next hour, their hands were freed and their legs were shackled together, before they were given their orders; clear up the mess. Some of the girls became hysterical at the sight before them and refused; the Russians simply shot them in the head, leaving only a few hundred girls to clear up the dead bodies. Gudrun forced herself to work, picking up the remains of her friends and fellows; she forced herself not to look as the remains were dumped in the back of several garbage trucks and carted out of the city. Gudrun wasn’t religious, but she didn’t like the thought of the remains of her friends being dumped in a mass grave; she didn’t dare protest. The slightest hint of defiance was met with death. Broken, sobbing, Gudrun worked until the Russians finally pulled them out of the hellish scene, loaded them onto trucks, and sent them back out of the city.
She exchanged glances with the other girls. What was going to happen to them? They all wondered; were they going to ever see their homes again? Some of them had small injuries, others had nasty-looking wounds; some of them weren’t even properly dressed any longer. All of them were covered in blood, staining everything; she felt dirty, disgusting…helpless. Unable almost to breathe, because of the smell, Gudrun was forced out of the van by the Russians, still shackled to the others, and forced into a shower. The cold water was a shock, but it was a relief; the girls tried as best as they could to clean themselves before the Russians escorted them into the next room, and stopped.
“No,” Gudrun said, or thought; it hardly mattered now. Their fate had become all too clear; she wondered, suddenly, if the same had happened to the boys, or if they had merely been dumped into a work gang. “No…”
They were facing a horde of Russian soldiers, looking at the girls with expressions that could not be described with mere words. Some of the girls tried to protest, knowing that it would get them killed…but they weren't killed, as the Russians started to undo their trousers and consider the helpless girls. They advanced towards the young girls…
And then the screaming really started.
Interlude Five: Nightmare
It was happening all over Europe.
The Russians had known, of course, about the depth of leftist sentiment in Europe, the feeling that protesters had the right to protest about whatever they liked, without any thought as to the consequences of their actions, or even possible punishment in the future. They had counted on it, flattered it, encouraged it…and ensured that many of the leaders of the ‘left’ were either brought under their control or disappeared before they could organise pacifist resistance. Many of them were realists and accepted the new world order; many more believed what they said, and had to be removed before they could cause trouble.
The Russians also knew the key to a successful campaign of civil disobedience.
It could be summed up as ‘choose your opponent carefully;’ the theorists of the left had never grasped that point. Looking for overall examples of people power – India, Mexico, even the Moscow Coup Attempt of 1991 – they had missed the specifics; the people had moved against opponents who had consciences. The British had not mown down the Great Salt March, nor had the Russian soldiers in Moscow fired on Yeltsin and his people; they had cared about their people, or about public opinion. The Russians did not care about either, particularly people who were useless; the students and young adults who thronged the streets of Europe were useless to them.
The wave of violence started and ended quickly. In Warsaw, a sit-down protest ended with the tanks ignoring the bodies in their path and driving onwards over them; seventy died and twelve more were injured and died soon afterwards. In Berlin, students who tried to retake the remains of the centre of government found themselves fired upon, clubbed, and hauled off to detention camps. In France, protesters who had found their way to one of the Arab detention camps and protested at the detention found themselves shoved into the camp; for the young women, they had been tossed into hell. Resistance was futile…
As the weeks passed, the Russians worked hard to bring Europe back to a state of normality, offering incentives to civil servants and engineers to return to work. Aided by vast numbers of Russians, the civil servants found themselves serving as Russian agents, registering each and every member of the European population from the Ukraine to the Spanish border, excepting only the neutral Swiss. Trained workers found themselves working on rebuilding the shattered transportation infrastructure; farmers found themselves ordered to forget EU regulations and produce as much as they could, paid in Russian money. The Eurobank had been seized; Russian money had become the only legitimate form of tender and only the Russians used it, paying those who worked for them, who in turn used it to pay their own people.
Other factories were reopened and offered contacts with Russian firms. Europe had a high-tech infrastructure second only to America’s…and on a fair level of equality with Japan, and a vast amount of technical workers. They found themselves working for the Russians, paid well to improve the Russian technical base and rearm the Russians for a future war. As more and more factories came back online, stripped of the red tape and European regulations, business even began to pick up; the Russians only had small taxes on business. All over Europe, workers were asking the same question; was it really so bad under the Russians?
The unfortunates in the various detention camps might have given them an answer. The Russians had put nearly two million people in the camps, from soldiers and policemen to insurgents and protesters. They now worked through them again, ensuring that they had the prisoners all registered, before organising their final disposition. The protesters were informed that for their crimes against the new authority, they would be sentenced to a year of hard labour, helping to clear up the wreckage from the fighting. With new ID cards and uniforms, they found themselves attached to labour gangs and forced to work for a living in their home cities. They were the lucky ones; the remains of the male insurgents, beaten and cowed, were shackled and put to work clearing up the damage they had caused, including burying bodies and removing explosives; the death rate rose rapidly. The female insurgents were sent to Russian brothels; their fate would be worse than that of their menfolk. As a final slap in the face, their food rations included pork; many starved, others broke Islamic Law and ate it to survive.
But they were not the most unfortunate. The soldiers and policemen, those who had survived, had remained shackled in their camps under heavy guard. Day after day, the helpless captives would see new faces as the soldiers who had returned to their families instead of fighting were rounded up and added to the camps; night after night, bursts of gunfire split the air as attempted escape attempts were foiled with deadly force. Fed only on gruel and water, the prisoners lost their strength rapidly; they wondered if the Russians intended to simply kill them all without shooting them. One day, however, everything changed; bound and secured, the prisoners found themselves loaded onboard trains that headed east, directly to Siberia. As the weather grew colder, they wondered if they would ever see their homelands again…
Time passed. In the west, Russian forces gathered and a massive logistical effort began, focusing on the final stage in Operation Stalin. Europeans living nearby were removed from their homes and sent elsewhere, clearing the ports for Russian use alone; forced labour was used to clear up the damage from the fighting, preparing the ports to support the largest amphibious invasion in the 21st Century…
The Invasion of Britain…
Chapter Forty-Three: Mr Luong Goes to Washington
I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours... They are nations of eternal war.
Thomas Jefferson
Washington DC, USA
The paranoia of the Secret Service had only increased a thousand-fold, Ambassador Andrew Luong realised, as he entered the Security Zone around Washington DC. These days, there were only a few regular air flights to Washington directly; only the highest ranking military officers and congressmen were permitted to enter the area of airspace surrounding the centre of America. Twenty-three years of seemingly endless conflict against a determined and multi-faceted enemy had left the American people all-too-aware of their own vulnerability; while Europe soul-searched over the creation of a European Identity Card, Americans not only had cards, but other tricks as well; no one could be allowed near the world’s number one terrorist target without their identity being checked and rechecked. Luong, once one of America’s most important Ambassadors, was no exception; they treated him like a suspect right from the start.
Some elements of the paranoia seemed ridiculous, Luong knew; there was a reason for everything. They checked his blood, the implants hidden under his neck, and his eye-patterns, before escorting him into a secure room and ordering him to undress, inspecting each and every body cavity before presenting him with a White House issue suit – ill-fitting and very uncomfortable – and escorting him through a line of heavy weapons into the heart of the American Government. One enterprising terrorist had literally managed to make a vest that had exploded when it reached a certain temperature; the attack had come far too close to success and it would never be allowed to happen again. The White House, the Senate, and the Pentagon were all secured; the workers either lived in them, or they went through the security precautions every time they entered or left the compound.
He smiled as they reached the White House; it was no surprise that the vast majority of Americans chose to telecommute these days, assuming that they weren’t one of the unlucky ones drafted into the army. America had full conscription for the war, but not all of the males could be taken for the army; a third of the male population served in one of the armed services, volunteers first, then those who would benefit from a term in the services. It had had an effect; public health was up and crime figures were down. The problem was that America was vastly overstretched and, as he had said to Langford, not well disposed towards Europe.
CNN, which had become more right-wing than Fox following the horrific murder of several of its journalists, had reported on some of the demonstrations. Spanish, Irish and German Americans had demonstrated for helping their countries, but there had been counter-marches of Americans who remembered two long wars to save Europe from itself, only to be rewarded with scorn, disdain, and droll comments about empires. Luong knew that America had made mistakes, including allying itself with Saudi Arabia, but they had meant well; wasn’t that enough?
It wasn't. European media had looked for the worst and found it; even some American media had followed the same path of endlessly nitpicking and ignoring all the good that had been done. He was sure that the Shias in
Saudi Arabia had welcomed the Americans who had protected them from the mobs that had set out to kill them all, but no, the media had focused on protests at the American presence, because the Shias didn’t trust the Americans. Luong didn’t blame them, but he blamed the media; the Shias had thought they were going to be abandoned like so many other allies of America. And then Iran, and then Mike Collins, and then…
“The President will see you now,” the President’s personal assistant said. She was young, Japanese-American, and pretty enough to send heads turning everywhere. If it had been any other President, there would have been suspicions that she did more than just type, but they couldn’t say that about President Kirkpatrick. “Please will you come with me?”
The White House had been refurbished after a terrorist missile had destroyed the original Oval Office. The new one was a strange mixture of comfortable, authoritarian, and high-tech, all concentrated in the figure of the slight woman who rose from behind her desk to greet Luong. Her presence was almost overwhelming; it was easy to see why she had a seventy percent approval rating, few would dare vote against her. Luong himself had voted for her.
The Fall of Night Page 43
