Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
Among the civilian populations, however, the Tense Spring was a business of daily concern, of not knowing when the day of molestation would come. For those who lived through it, the stress that the Caliphate could attack at any time played on nerves which were already frayed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many decided the time had come to leave permanently. Assisted-suicide clinics in Switzerland, France and Poland saw an increase in customers, with many elderly people publicly explaining themselves on social sharing platforms. Typical was ninety-nine-year-old retired fire-fighter Simon John, who wrote to his friends: ‘Just want to wish the youngsters (and by “youngsters”, I mean anyone under the age of 75!) the best of luck for the future. I’ve decided to call it a day and am waiting for my final consultation at the Terminus Clinic near Krakow. I’m not complaining: the cloned heart and lungs I got twenty-five years ago have kept me on this Earth far longer than I thought possible, but in any case the GenoFluid is overrated, and these days my joints ache more and more. So, I don’t see any point in hanging around for an end to my life which seems likely to be needlessly painful and which I’ll probably have no control over. Try to be positive, everyone - life absolutely will go on, however this war ends. I’m hoping that on the other side of the darkness, I’ll find an endless summer - the long, hot summer of 1976, to be precise. Those were happy days, so long ago, but they seem like yesterday. Wish me luck finding them again, please. Goodbye!’
Many citizens used this respite to settle their affairs by, for example, moving ownership of property to descendants and moving savings overseas to countries not under immediate threat. Incidents of civil disobedience lessened with the restrictions on alcohol and drug sales, and emergency measures included making crimes against property capital offences. In May police in London shot twenty-three looters, with similar numbers being recorded in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw. But these were far from the norm: most citizens faced the coming storm with a defiance that ranged from stoic fatalism to grim determination.
As the weeks of May passed, the sense of foreboding increased. A young, then-unknown poet called Luke Waldron confided to his diary: ‘The days lengthen, the flowers open, the leaves unfurl. And for what? A black cloud closes in from the south, full of violence and destruction and death. Life on Earth continues oblivious, while we little ants scurry to and fro, wondering when those other ants from the next nest will decide to do something hideously vile and utterly pointless.’
The waiting would end on Friday 2 June 2062.
Although many would argue that the Battle for Europe began with the first stage of the invasion in February, the Caliphate’s decision to prepare fully for the next part of its conquest also allowed NATO to draw clear battle lines at which it intended to halt the invader. Elements of the French Army’s 2nd Armoured Brigade formed defensive enclaves around the town of Tarbes, fifty kilometres from the Spanish border. These were supported by units from the British Army’s Royal Armoured Corps, equipped with Challenger 5 Mk. IV autonomous main battle tanks and fifty American Abrahams N4-1A tanks. Further east, the German Army’s 21st Armoured Brigade had deployed at several points south of Milan, also equipped with Abrahams tanks. In Hungary a defensive line was created stretching twenty kilometres from Pécs in the west to Baja in the east. This position was the most cosmopolitan, including the bulk of the Hungarian army, units from the Czech Republic as well as elements of Polish mechanised brigades. Thousands more NATO troops were kept in reserve at their well-protected bases, given the anticipated fluidity of warrior movements once the invasion began.
At 03.45 in the morning of 2 June, the network of SkyWatcher ACAs above Germany detected multiple launches from Caliphate-held territory. Over the next hour, some three thousand Blackswans took off and approached in three waves: from northern Spain, northern Italy, and the Balkans. Nick Williams, a twenty-six-year-old communications officer monitoring European airspace from HQ Air Command at RAF High Wycombe, described what happened next during a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing after the war: ‘We knew what to expect. We’d been trained, we’d held exercises, but, by God, what a thing to see. The forward units in France, Germany and Hungary opened up with everything they had. Hundreds of PeaceMakers went into the sky. We threw absolutely everything at them - ACAs, smart missiles, Pulsar lasers, the lot. Through my headset I heard one of the German units put their battlefield Pulsars on to full automatic and watched the Blackswans fall out of the sky like grouse at a toffs’ shooting party. To begin with, our defences did alright, really. The PeaceMaker screen for northern Europe destroyed hundreds of the bloody things. I think the ratio came down to around six PeaceMakers for one Blackswan. But there were so many of them.’
At this point the Caliphate appeared to make a rare tactical error. Military doctrine insisted that the priority should have been to annihilate NATO’s forward units, but only a fraction of the attacking ACAs broke off the main force to engage them. With the benefits of coherence-length variation and a number of prototype airborne Pulsar cannons, the forward units in all three locations were able to hold their ground, despite each suffering 20-40% casualties by the following afternoon.
The majority of Caliphate ACAs continued to attack their designated targets: capitals and other major cites. At 04.21 five-hundred-and-twenty Blackswans streaked across the English Channel on their approach to London. They divided into two spearheads, to the southeast and southwest, to test the city’s defences to the maximum. Watching illicitly from her bedroom window, fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Blanche Phillips later recalled: ‘I remember the hissing most of all, the hissing which followed behind them because they were going so much faster than the speed of sound. Our house looked out over a valley, and the sky lit up with these zinging lines of light. Suddenly, more things took off from the ground and hit the things in the sky. In a few seconds, there were all kinds of flashes and bangs going on. I know I should’ve been scared, but I wasn’t. I watched one of them tumble out of the sky and it crashed into a house below us. Then my dad came into the room looking worried and took me and my little brother to hide in the cellar with mum. Dad said the machines had travelled all the way from Spain in only half an hour. Later, we found out that an elderly couple in the house that was hit had been killed, and I felt sad for them.’
The outer defensive line in the Surrey hills accounted for fifty-five Blackswans. Seconds later the inner defensive line around Croydon engaged the Caliphate’s machines with greater success, and fewer than three hundred remained to begin the destruction of the city. High above London, SkyWatchers directed fleets of PeaceMakers to intercept the Blackswans, while on the ground batteries of Pulsar lasers opened fire immediately Caliphate machines came into range.
Gunnery officer Freddie Buckley, one of the few to survive, conveyed the sense of desperation: ‘Our battlefield-Pulsar unit lasted less than three minutes after we began tracking the first targets. In that time, we managed to bring down four Blackswans. I remember wondering how much good we were actually doing. Even if we stopped these flying bombs getting into the city, they were still crashing and exploding somewhere in the suburbs. Then, their super AI must have decided we were a threat to be eliminated. While we were hitting a Blackswan which was coming right at us, my sergeant noted three more vectoring in on our position. The clever bastards were approaching outside our field of fire, too. I ordered the unit to be evacuated. I made sure all the men got out, and we ran for cover. The unit went up sky high and threw me into a dense hedgerow, taking off my legs in the process. I think that’s why the Spiders left me alone instead of killing me along with the rest of my men.’
Across London, many similar vicious engagements were resolved in a matter of moments after furious exchanges of fire. By midmorning the attack was over, the last Blackswan releasing its deadly cargo over St. Bartholomew’s hospital. As military and civilian emergency services rushed to do their utmost to deal with the chaos, another storm erupted almost at once, in the media. Tara Arnold, a twenty-five-year-old nurse working at the hospital, posed the question that morning: ‘Can anyone tell us why St. Bart’s has been almost flattened, but just a couple of miles away St. Paul’s Cathedral stands undamaged?’
In the days and weeks following the London attack, controversy raged as it became clear the Civil Defence Authority had given precedence to the city’s cultural heritage over locations such as hospitals. London had been insufficiently prepared to meet the attack, and the limited defences programmed to protect historical sites as a priority. In this they did not wholly succeed, as the Tower of London and the newly restored Houses of Parliament were both comprehensively ruined. However, many monuments, including Buckingham Palace, the Royal Albert Hall and much of the area surrounding Hyde Park, escaped unscathed, while in total some 67% of all hospitals in the Greater London area were either partially or totally destroyed.
These figures compare unfavourably with the attacks on other European cities on the same day. All of Paris, Brussels, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin and Warsaw endured similar onslaughts. For example, in Paris the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Arc-de-Triomphe and Musée d’Orsay were reduced to rubble, but more than 70% of the city’s hospitals were defended successfully. The figures for the other cities are comparable. Thus, amid the drama of the invasion, which the Caliphate renewed in the south, and as the authorities in the democracies struggled to cope with millions of civilian casualties, political mudslinging became the order of business on the British Isles. The Leader of the Opposition, the taciturn David Bentley, could not resist asking the same question as the nurse at St. Bart’s, albeit coached in softer terminology. He called on Napier to explain why so many London hospitals had suffered. Napier had no intention of doing anything of the sort, and ultimate responsibility fell to her Home Secretary, Aiden Hicks. Despite initially defending that London boasted more monuments and sites of historical interest than other European cities, Hicks was obliged to resign the next day. (Within weeks of the war’s end, Hicks published a memoir which remains one of the most damning accounts of Napier’s premiership.)
For the military, however, the imperative remained the Caliphate’s advance, which resumed on all three fronts at 07.00 that morning. In what was taken as a sign of the invader’s resources becoming stretched, Caliphate warriors deployed the Lapwing laser ACA which had worked so effectively in Israel and in subduing the southern parts of Europe. Once again, coherence-length variation played a pivotal role in delaying the Caliphate advance. At around 11.00, units of the French 2nd Armoured Brigade began a phased withdrawal northwards, leapfrogging the British Royal Armoured Corps. Twenty-seven-year-old French Captain Pascal Degarmo later reported to his superiors: ‘Before we withdrew, through the smoke of battle we glimpsed the warriors approaching in their land transports. Many of the men wanted very much to engage them, and I even had to threaten one or two with court martial if they did not withdraw. I had to convince them that we would have to wait for revenge.’
The American Abrahams N4-1A autonomous main battle tanks performed markedly better than the Challengers, as Sergeant Blake Skinner of the Windsor Household Cavalry ruefully acknowledged after the attack: ‘We left a little nest of eight Abrahams in the backstreets of Tarbes and followed the action as we pulled out. These things were much better in defence than we’d expected. Each of them took cover in houses and shops, mainly by smashing through the walls, and led the Lapwings a right little dance. It took four shells to burn through a Lapwing’s shielding, then the fifth shell would kill it. The Abrahams played off each other in pairs, drawing a Lapwing off. The Caliphate’s lasers thrashed about, making roofs and walls explode, but the Americans’ tanks worked so smoothly together. This wasn’t how it was with our Challengers. Those dumb beasts just sat in their positions, firing off shells. One or two made an effort to take defensive action, but most of them brewed up where they sat. I don’t think they destroyed a single Lapwing between them.’
No matter how well ordered, this was still a retreat: NATO lost territory; Caliphate forces gained it. The line around Milan fell back throughout the day similarly as in France. The German 21st Armoured Brigade also found the Abrahams to be a superior weapon, accentuated by the fact that the withdrawal took place in the densest conurbation of all three fronts. Lance Corporal Peter Baumann, a twenty-three-year-old medic with Tank Battalion 203, wrote to his family while on leave: ‘It was really the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen. We saw people peek through shattered windows as we withdrew along the streets. The majority of the civilian population had fled weeks earlier, of course, and with the information campaign there was no excuse for anyone to be there who wanted to leave. But faces - ghosts? - poked out now and again. I often wonder how many will survive.’
In Hungary, NATO forces found themselves obliged to fall back more swiftly, as had been anticipated at SHAPE, because they faced two Caliphate armies rather than one. But here occurred the first flesh-and-blood battle between the defenders and Caliphate warriors. Natalia Ornass, a young Polish private from the 1st Armoured Brigade, recounted her adventure in previously unpublished memoirs: ‘The colonel visited us two days before the attack. He gave us a rousing speech, including that us Poles would, like in Vienna four hundred years ago, face the largest and most powerful of the enemy’s formations. Once again, Europe needed Poland to save it. He urged us to show the world what we could do. He recalled the Warsaw Uprising, the Battle of Britain, and the Miracle on the Vistula. These were the steps in which we would shortly follow. We loved his speech, it is true, and I’m damn sure it made a difference when the attack came.’
Ornass’s commander, Colonel Pakla, was a thickset, bullet-headed thirty-eight year old who could trace his family’s military history back to the Battle of Britain. He would transpire to be one of the ablest commanders of the war, amply demonstrating the Polish military tradition of dogged resistance combined with a flair for seeing opportunities in the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, he was one of those commanders of which every army in each war needs at least one, as his troops would follow him wherever he led. Private Ornass continues: ‘We had to give ground almost at once. There were hundreds if not thousands of the Caliphate’s ACAs zipping all over the sky. One of the engineers had mapped a few abandoned railway tunnels around ten kilometres behind our lines. As we left the area, a message came from HQ - the Colonel - which said that if there was any opportunity to take a Caliphate warrior alive, this would be looked on very highly. Me and my unit had to argue with the others, but eventually we convinced them we should do it.’
Private Ornass and her unit, led by their commanding officer, took refuge in a disused tunnel ten kilometres long which ran in line with the Caliphate’s advance. They planned to wait in hiding, capture a warrior alive, then evacuate through the tunnel whose exit would still be behind their own lines. In a move of remarkable prescience, the CO advised his troops to deactivate as much of their electronic support systems as possible because, he guessed correctly, the ACAs used these signals to detect the NATO soldiers. Private Ornass describes what happened next: ‘All of us were nervous about switching our Squitches off, but we followed orders. The Caliphate ACAs knocked out the two tanks we’d left close to the tunnel entrance. All of us waited about a hundred metres inside with our Stiletto Z50 shoulder-launched missiles poised - deactivated. If an ACA came inside to have a look, we didn’t expect to last very long. The time passed, all of us held our breaths. The hissing from the ACAs faded and died away. No one made a sound. Then we heard shouting. Slowly we put our Stilettos on the ground and collected our Pickups. We heard a scream and some shots. The CO told us to stay silent.’