Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
Watching from the flight deck of the
Ronald Reagan
, Able Seaman First Class Ira Blake said: ‘I can’t describe the shock, I can’t get anywhere near how it felt to see that actually happen. She was a big ship, armed to the teeth, but once her defences went down, so did she. I swear it took no more than three or four Blackswans, and the waves closed over the
Jarvis
and it was like she’d never even been there. She was just gone.’
Meanwhile, three thousand, two hundred kilometres to the southeast, the crew on the bridge of the
USS Franklin D. Roosevelt
watched the drama unfolding in the Mediterranean with, it can be assumed, a certain concern. The naval military tactic of swamping a ship’s defences had for decades been well established in doctrine, but those involved realised abruptly that the Caliphate’s attack exceeded their worst projections by a frightening margin. Despite the shock, NATO responded to the assault with all means at its disposal. Bases on Crete and the European mainland readied and launched PeaceMaker and other ACAs which hurried to the fleet’s assistance, only to draw off a fraction of the attacking force.
The
Ronald Regan
’s Pulsar cannons fell silent at 03.24. The
Mississippi
changed course to close on the carrier, in a vain attempt to draw the Blackswans’ attention, but the situation was hopeless. The SkyWatcher directed the reinforcement NATO ACAs to protect the fleet as much as possible, but while these distracted a few tens of Blackswans, hundreds more raced in to destroy the ships. The
Ronald Reagan
and
Mississippi
sank together at 03.26, the former’s last recorded communication being Captain Burgess giving the order to abandon ship. The cruiser
Cleveland
held out until 03.28, and the remaining three destroyer-escorts were obliterated in quick succession.
The Royal Navy squadron fared little better, with one important exception that would play a vital part as the war progressed. The Royal Navy’s version of the Pulsar Mk. III laser cannon, called the Sea Striker, allowed miniscule variations in each shot’s coherence length. The US version did not have this feature, as the Americans regarded the range to be too small to make any combat difference. However, Captain Wexley, commanding
HMS Hyperion
, had studied his ship’s weapons systems to great depth, and now seeing its predicament, as a last resort he instructed the super AI to vary the coherence length shot by shot. In the midst of intense action, Captain Wexley saw a marginal increase in this length lower the number of shots required to destroy a Blackswan. These data were passed on to the other five ships, which between them managed to destroy fifty-eight Blackswans before they were finally overwhelmed. All of this information was relayed to Navy Command Headquarters in Whitehall, London, where through the shock some members of the Fleet Battle Staff gained an inkling of how NATO might progress.
The last Royal Navy ship disappeared beneath the waves at 03.42. The engagement had lasted less than forty-five minutes, and resulted in a rout for NATO. There was also a sting in the tail. Once the ships had been sunk, the Blackswan ACAs hovered over the area and dispatched Spiders to detonate close to surviving seamen. At length, the Blackswans returned to North Africa, leaving behind more than five thousand casualties. Only two crew members from the fifteen ships survived, both of whom have been quoted above.
Records show that the shock and violence of the attack on the Mediterranean fleet caused an understandable paralysis in Washington. Since the war, there has been much debate as to whether the
USS Franklin D. Roosevelt
carrier group in the Arabian Sea could have been saved from meeting the same fate. However, it fell to the commanders on the scene to decide. Communications show that the captain of the carrier was fully aware of the likely outcome, but the group would not flee from the approaching storm, and ships with a top speed of thirty-five knots would in any case not outrun Blackswans travelling at Mach 8. From 03.49, thousands of Caliphate ACAs descended on the carrier group, and in addition to the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
, the US Navy lost two cruisers, five destroyers, four destroyer-escorts, and three supply ships. On this occasion, there were no survivors. The Caliphate had shown the world that technological progress had rendered the modern blue-sea navy obsolete.
Before the last destroyer had settled on the Mediterranean seabed and while the crews of the Arabian Sea carrier group mulled their fate, the Caliphate began its assault on Turkey. From 03.40 to 04.00, more than one hundred waves totalling fifty thousand Blackswans entered the demilitarised zone and raced towards Turkey’s southern border, on a line of attack from Iskenderun in the west to Mardin in the east, a front of some four hundred kilometres. They entered a thoroughly divided country.
For the preceding two decades, successive Turkish governments had promoted a return to traditional Muslim values. After the financial crisis in the late 2030s, populist political parties began to take a greater share of the vote, which culminated in the
Allah Her Yerdedir
party’s outright majority in the 2049 election. Led by the charismatic but corrupt Yagiz Demir, the new government immediately changed the country’s constitution to allow religious interference in judicial decisions, and in keeping with the popular sentiment of the day, extended the period between elections in the country from four to ten years. History regards the corpulent Demir as a venal, self-serving sycophant of the Caliphate. The facts support this view. The 2059 election is widely accepted to have been manipulated to return Demir to power with an overwhelming majority. Scandal erupted in February 2060 when the body of the leader of Turkey’s main moderate opposition party washed up, headless, on the south bank of the Bosporus close to Istanbul. Thus Turkish citizens, many of whom held fierce loyalty to their country’s traditional secular independence, found their country divided by a political elite who had more sympathy for the Caliphate than interest in maintaining the European status quo.
NATO members and European countries tried to pressure the Ankara government into moderating its more hard-line domestic policies; Demir responded in August 2060 by taking Turkey out of NATO. Unsurprisingly, Russia and China welcomed Ankara’s show of independence, but among ordinary Turkish citizens there was much concern. Furkan Polat, a thirty-three-year-old lawyer with a wife and young child, expressed the fears of many when he wrote to relatives in Germany: ‘… and the situation worsens by the week. Western capital is fleeing the country with only a trickle coming in from the Chinese, which won’t make up the difference. We hear rumours that Demir has begun radicalising the army, and last week the TBMM [Turkish Parliament] passed a law giving the state a minimum 50% stake in all media organisations. This angered everyone in the firm, until the managing partner said with scorn: “Just wait till next year. I’ll bet you that fat maniac Demir will order a referendum on whether to join the Caliphate.” That really made us think. Things in the south are bad enough as it is, but what if the Caliphate thought it would be welcome here?’
Many moderate Muslim Turks expressed similar fears. Hazan Yilmaz, an erudite, single mother-of-two working as a part-time secretary in the town of Eskisehir, wrote to her aging parents: ‘I’m getting scared now. We seem to be going backwards, into the past. That nearly all of us are of the faith will mean little if the Caliphate decides to bring its hard-line hatefulness here. I don’t believe its public policy of only assimilating countries that request to join it. I don’t believe there can be anything like the peace and prosperity inside its borders which its propaganda in the press keeps claiming. And I don’t believe the Caliphate can bring any good to the rest of the world.’
However, this was by no means the view shared by everyone in the country. Kuzey Uzun, a fifty-six year old low-ranking civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, related to a friend a meeting he attended, ‘The atmosphere was calm, congenial even. Demir’s government really wasn’t the hotbed of extremism the Europeans were trying to make it out to be. I sensed a feeling of change around the table. We were discussing forecast crop yields for 2062 through 2066 when the Vice-Minister wondered aloud if the Caliphate wouldn’t be a better export partner. This was followed by murmurs of approval, and criticisms of Europe’s constant belligerency towards the peace-loving Caliphate. Finally, I thought, we could get some proper values to return to our shallow, libertarian society.’
If this sounds absurd today, it nevertheless demonstrates the degree to which the Caliphate’s propaganda convinced a sizable proportion of the country’s population, until they were disabused of its benevolent intentions in the early hours of that Monday morning. Of greater significance, however, is that since Turkey had withdrawn from NATO the previous year, its military no longer benefitted from the intelligence network and mutual support the organisation offered. Thus, when the Caliphate invaded, the bulk of the Turkish army was on a broadly peacetime footing.
The general commanding the Turkish Land Forces was Mahmut Binici, a fifty-eight-year-old career soldier who had never seen combat, and who was due to retire that summer. His young aide, Siraç Sadik, had the unenviable task of waking him and delivering the news. After somnolent consideration, Gen. Binici wondered aloud if a welcoming committee should not be prepared, until Sadik informed him again that the lead Caliphate ACAs were already advancing on Ankara.
A dismayed Sadik later said, ‘The speed with which events unfolded on that infamous day still cause a shudder inside me. The General had no concept of what had befallen our great country. Of course I knew my place, but my spirit wept in frustration as monitoring stations reported that they were under attack, and then fell silent. I took it on myself to contact Ankara in the General’s stead. An adjutant insisted I must be wrong, that the Caliphate were merely testing our defences. Only at that moment did I realise, with horror, how far the cancer of Caliphate sympathy had penetrated our military. I understood then that we were doomed.’
For several years after the war historians argued over the real reason for Turkey’s abrupt and total collapse. Many of the refugees who managed to escape were scathing in their condemnation of Demir’s policy of moderation towards the Caliphate, with some accusing him of complicity in Turkey’s eventual assimilation. However, as with so many conspiracy theories driven by bitter emotion, the facts do not support them. On that bright, fresh Monday morning, many units of the Turkish army defended their positions as best they could, and it is to posterity’s detriment that so few survived to tell the tale. History rightly knows General Binici as an incompetent commander, however the most relevant fact is that the Caliphate attacked with an overwhelming number of ACAs, closely followed by warriors. Perhaps a fully prepared foe could have delayed the advance, but the outcome was in little doubt irrespective of how much effort Demir and Binici put into defending their country.
NATO leaders followed developments with only one eye as the first Caliphate warrior transports crossed the Turkish border at 10.26. Simultaneously, the enemy’s jamming ACAs proceeded to burn out local and regional components with powerful, directed microwave bursts, adding to the confusion among Turkish citizens. NATO ACAs were hurriedly directed to the northern regions of the country. Each PeaceMaker carried defensive bomblets which proved effective that afternoon, despite being hopelessly outnumbered. In addition, the PeaceMakers succeeded in capturing fragments of the distress in border towns as Caliphate warriors advanced. These snippets hinted at the thoroughness with which the Caliphate had prepared for its invasion and ultimate assimilation of a country it had already demarked into provinces.
In addition, the onslaught led to a wave of refugees fleeing ahead of Caliphate forces. The Turkish civilian transport infrastructure felt the full fury of the Spiders. Key rail and road junctions were obliterated in the first few hours, further hindering Turkey’s already feeble military response. While Caliphate warriors began their ruthless subjugation of the towns and cites they entered, their Blackswans roamed supreme over the land, streaking north-westwards to Ankara and then on to Istanbul. Taha Asker, the Turkish Foreign Minister, was an accomplished diplomat who had held on to his post through the most delicate political manoeuvring. He had never completely given up hope of his country moving back towards the West and rejoining NATO. At around 17.00 he was trying unilaterally to contact Western leaders to plead for more support. As will be shown below, however, by this time NATO was embroiled in a disaster that had already reduced Turkey’s plight to a sideshow.
As Asker desperately tried to reach NATO, the first Blackswans arrived in Istanbul. Their primary military objective was to sever the three bridges which connected Asia to Europe. At this time one of the most famous images of the first day’s fighting was captured and transmitted around the world. Sanaz Tilki, a twenty-four-year-old mother, had taken her young son Poyraz and a rucksack of provisions, and joined the crowds thronging the Third Bridge in central Istanbul in headlong flight from the Caliphate. The image shows her crouching, a hand protecting the head of her child, a look of terror on her face. The first Spider is almost on her, its articulated claws wrapping around her in a fatal embrace. The instant after the scene was recorded, the Spider detonated, destroying the middle span of the bridge, and removing Tilki, her son, and several hundred more civilians to the Bosporus below.