Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (28 page)

Dixon finishes with a wholly justifiable and moving tribute to Hastings and his comrades.  Meanwhile, as reports of a strange type of earthquake inside the Caliphate rippled out, Sir Terry Tidbury was not slow to grasp the opportunity the success of Thunderclap afforded Repulse.  He called an emergency situation briefing for the following morning in the war rooms below Whitehall in London.  As Dixon and Palmer waited in vain for the rest of the Thunderclap team, Sir Terry ordered the acceleration of Repulse.  Napier’s aide, Crispin Webb, attended the briefing and noted in his diary: ‘You could cut the disbelief with a knife.  The Field Marshall made the announcement with his customary dourness: “We appear to have destroyed the enemy’s key ACA manufacturing plant in the North African desert.  In result, I will order the regional commanders to increase deployments to the European mainland and advance the timetable for Repulse accordingly.”  One of the USAF guys was a little frowny and asked about other locations - what if production at those plants could be increased?  An intelligence bod answered with something about even if they could, it would take them weeks or months, which is a long time in this war.  Then the Field Marshall used that as an even stronger reason to take back Europe as soon as possible.’

X. WRECKAGE

Many people considered the disaster at Tazirbu had indeed been caused by a natural earthquake.  Those who believed in a god drew comparisons with Tazirbu and the fate that befell the US East Coast the previous October.  In Brazil, a young Cardinal Pedro Camacho, the papacy in Rome still fifteen years in his future, urged his congregation to ‘… consider whether God is indeed showing His displeasure,’ while in Dallas, Texas, the Christ’s Children Church began a fundraising campaign to build deep-earth shelters, insisting the oft-foretold end of the world would soon come to pass.

The second week of August saw increased military movement from England to the continent.  The various super AIs in civilian and military infrastructure coordinated seamlessly to rework air, ground and maritime schedules.  Thousands of refugees began returning to Normandy, many of whom aided the military in reconstruction.  On 14 August, construction replicators completed a provisional rail line from the coast at Calais to Paris.

Journalists found many survivors in the ruins and lost little time reporting their stories.  Few who read about Mme. Petit would forget her tale.  Seventy-four at the outbreak of war, she survived its duration in the basement of a tenement building in the town of Sarcelles on a diet of potatoes and boiled oats.  She told bemused listeners: ‘Every autumn I buy several sacks of potatoes from a local farmer who sells them cheaply.  When the war began, I still had a few sacks left, and divided them up to last a year.  By then, of course, they’d all grown long roots, but even these were quite tasty when boiled properly with salt and dried herbs.  When they ran out, I boiled a handful of dried oats a day until I saw our wonderful French soldiers in the street a few days ago.’  Before war broke out, Mme. Petit was urged by her son to make the short journey to join the Paris resistance with him and his family.  Mme. Petit refused: ‘… I would not risk them failing to gain entrance because of me.  I knew the mayor didn’t want any elderly people or very young children, and as Gaston’s children were adults, all five of them would get in without me, but probably not with me.  But at least we said a proper farewell, I’m grateful for that.  I never expected that they would perish and I would survive.  Life can be strange, sometimes.’

Investigators continued following the fronts as they gained more territory in the second half of August.  In addition to malnourished survivors, more disturbing discoveries were made.  For example, in a disused and rundown former industrial estate north of Paris, NATO investigator Marcel Berger and his team found a group of forty-eight men, women and children who had been dead less than two months.  As Berger later described the scene: ‘The summer heat had done its work in the cramped space under an obsolete factory, and we could only enter with breathing apparatus.  Despite the conditions the bodies were in, one could see these people had died from violence.  The initial assumption was that warriors had perpetrated this atrocity, but on closer inspection, we realised with horror that these survivors seemed to have killed each other.  At the rear there stood a basic food replicator - damaged so it would no longer work.  Most of the victims had gunshot wounds.  I wanted to stay and investigate, for I would have expected to find forensic evidence and wanted to prove if the criminals had been among the original group, or had found them and killed them.  I wanted very much to unearth the causes of their deaths, but there was no time as we had to continue.  There were many more corpses to find and remove in other places, and I only remember this event because of the strawberry-blond hair of a little girl.  She could have been no more than eight years old, and her thin arms were wrapped around the neck of another victim, although the decay was so advanced by then, I could not tell if it was her mother or father.’

XI. A QUESTION OF MORALITY

The reduced Caliphate ACA threat encouraged the spearhead NATO elements to advance with greater confidence.  This in turn would lead to further setbacks.  By 17 August, in the north the Polish 1st Battalion had cleared Arnhem and continued towards Germany.  In the centre, the German 21st Armoured Brigade was progressing through the outskirts of Essen.  The southerly spearhead of this three-army advance saw two battalions of the British First Corps cross the Meuse at Liége.  A Platoon Commander of the Royal Anglians described a typical advance: ‘We wait for the SkyMasters, then we wait for the Scythes.  Then our Squitches tell us if up ahead is clear.  If not, we wait some more, until suddenly a Scythe comes streaking down out of the clouds and zaps whatever’s holding us up.  Then we patrol in, usually to find a bunch of toasted ragheads.  I thought it was quite a nice way to wage war.’

Rarely did Caliphate warriors surrender, but given the tension of combat, it is possible that a few may have tried but were killed in the attempt.  In a controversial decision, the NATO militaries decided to disarm the few safety protocols programmed into the Scythes.  In a notorious incident on 18 August at the German border, a company of Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry came under withering fire from an equivalent number of the enemy ensconced in a châteaux.  The warriors had the high ground and enjoyed a wide field of fire.  They allowed the NATO troops to advance into the open before commencing what quickly threatened to turn into a rout.  The major leading the advance called in a Scythe which made two passes over the scene without using its Pulsar canon.  In dismay, the major noticed on the third pass that several warriors emerged from the side of the building unarmed and with their arms held high in mock surrender.  On seeing this, the Scythe declined to fire.  The major sent surviving fire teams to outflank this Caliphate charade, and on the next pass a sufficient number of unarmed warriors were shot to make them desist.  The major called in the Scythe one further time and it duly reduced the châteaux to a smouldering wreck.  The major surveyed the resulting victory with little satisfaction, it can be assumed, as on the battlefield eighty-seven of his troops lay dead or injured.

When news of this action spread throughout the armies and reached headquarters, commanders at all levels insisted it could and should not be repeated.  Sir Terry Tidbury had little compunction in doing anything to save his troops’ lives, and did not have an interest in any moral arguments.  A meeting with Napier on the same day became strained, as the Prime Minister regarded such protocols as marking an important distinction between the democracies and the dictatorships.  Files recently released under the thirty-year rule include a secret memo circulated among her staff in which the opinion is given that Napier allowed the change ‘under severe and, some might say, unreasonable pressure’ from the Field Marshall.  This constitutes an interesting example of perception.  While Napier had a moral argument, Sir Terry undoubtedly had a stronger military argument.  As one technician supervising the protocol changes wrote to a friend at the time: ‘I nearly lost it with Phil when he said it wasn’t right.  I mean, seriously?  The Scythes aren’t doing some poxy surgical work where warriors are hiding among non-combatants.  This is real, full-on war, FFS!  I was over the moon to be doing something that would help our troops.  From now on, any warrior is going to get fried to a cinder even if he’s naked and on his knees begging for mercy… I think Phil thinks we should capture them and try them in front of judge and jury - the limp-wristed waster!’

However blurred they became, lines of morality could still be crossed.  For example, on 20 August a unit of four men from the Royal Welsh found themselves sent back to England for courts martial when one of them transmitted the following communication to a comrade in another regiment: ‘You won’t believe what happened this morning, Tone.  We were going house-to-house in a crappy little village called Eupen.  We had X-9s above us giving it the “Unknown individual/Potential non-combatant” bullshit.  We surrounded this ruined shop and went in, and at the back were four ragheads, sleeping.  Rather than just kill the fuckers on the spot, we decided to wake them up.  They were drunk out of their fucking minds!  A few slaps from Bowler (you remember how big that bastard is!) soon got those twats on their feet and outside.  We let them stand there for a while, and Spats said he wanted to see them shit themselves, like his sister had shit herself when she was killed by a poxy Spider last year.  We got three of them to shit their pants, but the fourth one seemed to fancy himself as a hard bastard.  Then Bowler said we shouldn’t hang about in case an officer came along.  Also, some serious shit started kicking off a few klicks away and we had to get a move on.  I’ll tell you what, though, these cunts took their deaths pretty well, all things considered.  Spats shot his one, but the rest of us took their Scimitars and sliced them for a minute so they had a tiny fucking idea of the pain their fucking Caliph had inflicted on us.  Then we finished them and took their Scimitars as souvenirs.’  This unit was certainly the exception rather than the norm, as the majority of NATO troops, especially mixed-sex units, paid some consideration to the values which the democracies placed higher than any dictatorship.  Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous to pretend that atrocities were the sole preserve of the Caliphate’s warriors.

It is important to note that questions of morality are relatively straightforward to resolve with the benefit of sober analysis in comfortable surroundings.  However, due consideration must be given to the stresses of the times in which the above individuals are quoted.  On the one hand, it is comforting to believe the democracies did stand for a measure of human dignity generally absent from the dictatorships.  On the other, the men and women at the sharp end of the war in 2063 were striving to recover the European mainland from a foe which had displayed the utmost brutality (and would continue to do so where possible).  It is a very self-assured mind indeed which can place itself in the midst of the action, with Caliphate lasers and smart bullets burning its surroundings and whizzing by, and still reach a measured stance on whether the NATO troops’ actions were morally justified.

XII. A CHANGE IN TACTICS

On 22 August a new and altogether more problematic development arose.  Caliphate forces still had plentiful ACAs in the European theatre, but the destruction of the plant at Tazirbu meant that a coordinated counterattack would be bound to fail, due to the inability to reinforce.  The response which, after the war, was found to have been decided at the group level, led to the Spiders in Blackswans being redeployed ahead of advancing NATO troops to act as mines.  In the afternoon, lead companies of the US 4th Squadron 11th Armoured Calvary Regiment approached Poitiers in central France.  Corporal Trevor O’Bryan described the engagement: ‘We had to secure a road junction before we entered the town.  The place looked pretty beat up, it was gonna take a while before any super AI would be running vehicles through here.  C company was up front, and I was on their grid and heard the Squitches give the all-clear.  Then I glanced ahead and heard a popping sound and some shouts.  I didn’t believe my eyes.  A Spider came from nowhere and wrapped its claws around some poor Joe.  The other guys tried to get away, but the thing went off and threw me to the deck, and I was about two hundred metres away.  The crater it left was the size of a house.’

Half an hour later and eighty kilometres to the east, in the town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, units of the 2nd Squadron endured a similar calamity.  Both covering Scythes and Abrahams tanks cleared the advance, having missed buried Spiders which then inflicted substantial casualties on the companies.  By the end of the week, over a hundred separate incidences across the entire front had claimed more than two thousand casualties, and began to cause the generals a significant headache, not to mention worry for the frontline troops.  One private was overheard saying: ‘… suddenly the war became much more dangerous.  Until then, things worked pretty well.  But once the ragheads began leaving the Spiders behind like mines, we all thought that was very cowardly - exactly what you’d expect from the Caliphate.’

The issue centred on the Spiders’ ability to evade detection.  One technician tasked with finding a solution said at the time: ‘Signals’ emissions were too low for either ACAs or tanks to detect when the Spider was hiding and only pulse-scanning for targets.  Our kit depended on the Spider being either airborne or in some kind of contact with its managing Blackswan.  We ran a request for a countermeasure through the super AI and it suggested a new, small, mobile android tasked only to find hidden Spiders.  It had the designs ready in ten minutes, but they included a duel-sensor component that couldn’t be replicated.  This meant a wait of up to two weeks to manufacture the thing and get it to the frontlines.  We humans couldn’t come up with anything better, so we sent it upstairs.’