Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (31 page)

The second day of the Paris Conference dealt mostly with economic and reconstruction issues, apart from one brief debate which would become highly controversial after the war.  As Repulse progressed, the NATO warlords assumed surviving warriors would be withdrawn on the air transports which had delivered them.  With little deliberation, the decision was taken to deploy all available submarines to the Mediterranean to intercede.  In the event, and as will be shown below, this decision would account for the highest number of warrior casualties during the war.

The second half of November saw hundreds more Omegas deployed and was followed by a corresponding acceleration of territory recovered.  Winter descended on Northern Europe, and, as Sir Terry Tidbury had desired for Repulse all along, Caliphate forces were obliged to fight their retreat in progressively colder conditions.  This led to a hastier withdrawal.  In the north, the Polish First Battalion hurried on to Poland’s eastern border with Belorussia and the Kalingrad enclave.  NATO poured more formations fresh from England into the theatre in anticipation of Russian interference.  On 29 November General Pakla of the Polish First Battalion authored a situation report and sent it back to SACEUR, expressing his, and to an extent his country’s, fears: ‘Conditions on the ground appear to be as the SkyMasters report.  The first snowfalls have done little to disrupt ACA activity, and the border is calm.  One can conjecture that the Russian military is in hiding, biding its time, but so far our fears of an invasion from the east have not been realised.’

Nor would they be.  As became apparent over the following days and weeks, the president of Russia had withdrawn the bulk of his forces from Belorussia.  While some historians after the war tried to suggest this was due to pressure from China, no evidence has come to light to support this.  A more likely explanation is the presence of a significant number of Scythe Omegas.  The best Russian ACA at that time had far weaker capabilities than the new NATO machines.  Military pragmatism appears to have played the major role in Moscow’s decision not to take advantage of Europe’s savaged condition to steal Polish territory.

NATO forces entered Warsaw in the early hours of Sunday 2 December.  Through swirling snow, they found a city ruined like so many before it.  Private Natalia Ornass, who had helped capture the first injured Caliphate warrior eighteen months earlier, now returned to her home town and described the scene: ‘All of the churches were destroyed.  Sometimes a spire reared up through the blowing waves of snow, but it only sat atop a pile of rubble.  All the time you’re fighting in other places, you know what it’s for.  You’re helping people, your country, you’re helping Europe.  But when I got to Warsaw and saw what the raghead had done there, to my town, to streets I’d travelled down a thousand times, then I felt real pain.  It was ironic, never had I felt more ready to fight, but there were no ragheads left in Warsaw.  They’d all run away because it was too cold for them.’

Throughout December the NATO front pushed southwards, meeting only sporadic resistance from Caliphate forces.  While Private Ornass and many troops ascribed the enemy’s absence to inclement weather, the truth was more layered.  After the war, the West would gain more details of the upheaval inside the Caliphate at this time.  The practical result was that the armies of the democracies continued to advance and casualties to lessen.  The Polish First Battalion reached Kraków on 4 December and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains two days later.  On its right flank, elements of the German 21st Armoured and British First Corps cleared the Czech Republic and advanced into Austria, Slovakia and then into Hungary.

Attack Group South secured the Iberian Peninsula on 12 December, in a final battle involving retreating warriors at Valencia.  US Marine Gill Stevenson complained at the time: ‘We were pissed.  We found a base that must have serviced tens if not hundreds of the Caliphate’s air transports - and it was empty.  We couldn’t believe we were letting the pieces of shit escape back to their own territory.’  Unknown to Private Stevenson and her comrades, however, fifteen NATO submarines stalked the sea between Europe and North Africa, periodically launching super-AI controlled sea-to-air missiles.  These small devices emerged from the waves and attacked the Caliphate air transports.  Despite the Siskins screening them, post-war estimates suggest over 80% of these transports were brought down.  On 12 December alone, the Caliphate endured more than one hundred thousand warrior casualties.  An able seaman serving aboard
HMS Spiteful
said after the war: ‘We were very safe at a depth of five hundred metres.  After an hour or so, we began detecting the wreckage of their air transports drifting slowly down to the bottom.  I think the atmosphere on the boat could best be described as “grimly satisfying”.  Almost all of us had lost someone to these bastards since the war began, and we didn’t mind knowing they were drowning.  Each blip on the screen represented up to twelve hundred dead ragheads.  My mate turned to me at one point and whispered: “I bet the fuckers wish they had a navy now.”  I only smiled and nodded, enjoying the justice.’

XIX. DEFENDING GAINS

The military imperative became to secure the Spanish coastline.  The first Scythe Alphas were deployed on a one-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre line between Almeria and Cartagena.  A senior development technician explained at the time how the new ACAs operated: ‘They patrolled high, not as high as a SkyMaster, but above any attack unit the enemy used.  When instructed, they could come right down and generate shielding to block an enemy attack.  With sufficient numbers, they would block any extensive attempt.  The Alpha carried no weapons and had limited manoeuvrability.  In essence it was one big flying shielding generator.  At the tactical level, in an attack it would be down to the Omegas to actually deal with the enemy, but with enough Alphas nothing would get through to hit civilians.’

On 19 December, many earthquake-monitoring stations around the world detected a tremor originating from inside the Caliphate, with an epicentre near Medina, North Saudi Province.  At the time, Tehran put out a statement that there had indeed been a small earthquake with few casualties.  Only after the war would it be confirmed that the event was in fact the detonation of a two-kiloton nuclear warhead, part of the on-going turmoil inside the Caliphate.  Unknown to the NATO powers, many thousands of warriors who sated their appetites in Europe now wished to return to their homelands to confront issues there.  For example, many battalion-strength formations which made up Warrior Group Centre were composed of men drawn from regions either in or close to North Saudi Province.  But for many, there would be no return as the NATO submarines in the Mediterranean defeated their air transports’ ACA cover and sent the majority to a watery grave.

XX. FINAL RECOVERY

By 1 January 2064 only Italy, the lower Balkans and Greece remained under Caliphate control.  The three NATO attack groups had linked up and the generals enjoyed the rare luxury of selecting formations to drive down from Monaco, Milan and Venice to clear Italy, and of deciding whether to give the honour of regaining Greece to Polish, German or British armies.  Although less violent than at the beginning of Repulse, in the last month of the war carelessness would still be punished.  Blackswans and Siskins were thrown into battle in numerous skirmishes, usually to be defeated by Scythes before they could reach NATO troops.  Spiders were left to lay dormant as warriors retreated, ready to catch the unwary patrol.  A few hundred small warrior formations opted to make tactically pointless stands, able only to engage the advancing troops if they could evade the attention of the Scythes, which few did.  Nevertheless, each day throughout January the NATO armies averaged six hundred casualties, albeit down from the two-thousand-per-day average at the start of the operation the previous August.

Rome was regained on 8 January; Sarajevo and Belgrade the next day.  Diplomatic approaches were made to Beijing to intercede with the Caliphate to discuss reparations, but the response nonplussed London and Washington: the Chinese government claimed not to know who was currently in charge in Tehran.  In a remarkably frank virtual conference with Coll and Napier on 12 January, Chinese Foreign Minister Lu Chen admitted that ‘something’ had happened and the Caliphate’s notorious secrecy now extended to the one country that used to be its main trading partner and conduit to the rest of the world.  The staffs of both leaders lost little time using their countries’ limited resources to verify the Chinese claim.  US and British intelligence agencies came under further pressure to discover information, which in turn led to incidents that in peacetime might have caused serious diplomatic incidents.

The case of
The Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Buckley is little-known outside journalistic circles, as his indiscretions were soon overtaken by events.  On 12 January in Maputo, Mozambique, Buckley followed a Chinese trade delegation as they left government offices to dine at an exclusive restaurant.  The delegation included a high-ranking member of Chinese intelligence, who Buckley wanted to question about the Caliphate’s current situation.  As the dinner progressed with Buckley keeping a prudent distance, he saw his chance when his target went to the bathroom.  Buckley followed, intending to mob the Chinese official into revealing that Beijing was in truth orchestrating the upheaval inside the Caliphate to take global media attention off of the extensive slaughter now being revealed in Europe.  Unfortunately for Buckley and unknown to him, the feared CIA had exactly the same intention that evening.  Reports of what happened are to a degree contradictory, but what is not in doubt is that both the Chinese intelligence member and Buckley were killed when a CIA agent overreacted to their failure to surrender when confronted emerging from the bathroom.  The death of a high-ranking member of the Chinese intelligence services at the hands of the CIA would have been a serious headache for Washington, but such was the global sense of disruption given the speed of events, Beijing made no formal protest.  (Most historians of the war accept that the killing of an American businessman in Brasilia five days later, officially ascribed to a petty mugging, was in fact a tit-for-tat assassination by the Chinese, something which Washington seemed happy to accept to resolve the problem.)

Four days later, on Wednesday 16 January, the world gave a collective gasp when, from Tehran, the newly installed Fourth Caliph made his first pronouncement.  In the Muslim calendar, the previous night had been
Laylat al-Qadr
, or the Night of Destiny.  Western commentators were quick to note that the Caliphate’s war on Europe had begun on the Night of Destiny two years earlier.  As had been the way in dictatorships throughout history, the Fourth Caliph at once distanced himself from his predecessor’s ‘misguided adventures’, but at the same time warned the world that the Caliphate was more than capable of defending its own territory.  In a compromise to the infidel, all warriors would be withdrawn from the European mainland by the end of the month, but the provinces formally known as Turkey would remain part of the Caliphate.

In the evening of 17 January, NATO military and political leaders met at the rebuilt SHAPE headquarters in Brussels to discuss the development.  The conference began with a situation briefing from the frontlines.  For the first time since Operation Repulse began, daily casualties among the lead formations had dropped to fewer than five hundred.  In Southern Italy and Northern Greece, troops were reporting little resistance.  A fierce engagement did take place that afternoon north of Mt. Vesuvius, when elements of British First Corps reached a Caliphate transport hub and weapons dump ahead of schedule.  Of the few Caliphate air transports which managed to escape, all were subsequently shot down over the Mediterranean by submarines.  Advance Scythe Omegas reported dormant Spiders self-detonating without first acquiring targets.  Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘It was only when the Third Caliph was replaced by the Fourth that I let myself believe Repulse would, finally, succeed.  All through December and January I had been waiting for the counterpunch, looking for the feint which might be our only clue to a new storm unleashed from the south.  But every day more and more Scythe Alphas were deployed around Europe’s southern coastline, closing down opportunities for the enemy.  At length, it seemed he really had decided to withdraw.’

The main controversy that evening concerned whether to slow advancing troops to lessen NATO casualties, and if the submarines should be stood down.  Writing in his diary, Napier’s aide Crispin Webb gives an interesting insight into the mind of the English Prime Minister: ‘The boss is tired but relieved.  It seems like all the killing might soon be over.  She wants to order the armies to slow down and the submarines to return to their bases, but I don’t think she’ll get her way this time.  There are way too many complications.’

Indeed there were.  Most of the generals and air commanders present argued the convincing case that, as there had been no declaration of war, until some document existed which set out an official cessation of hostilities, any member of the Caliphate’s forces was a legitimate target.  In addition, whether or not hostilities existed between the two combatants should not be a decision entirely at the Fourth Caliph’s discretion.  Many in positions of power in the democracies craved a return to peace, an opportunity to recover and rebuild, and Napier felt she spoke for them.  But many more, especially among ordinary citizens and those who had joined the military, felt strongly that no quarter should be given.  In the event, a peculiar compromise was reached, whereby appropriate orders to minimise engagements with the enemy would be transmitted, but no action would be taken against any ‘misinterpretation’ of them by forward units.  As Sir Terry later wrote: ‘On the one hand, we knew the warriors had thrown the towel in, but on the other, many troops had scores to settle.  Once hostilities ended, anyone could see it would be unlikely that guilty warriors would willingly present themselves for prosecution in Europe for war crimes.  And time was running out.’