The Fall of Night (6 page)

Ustinov scowled.  He would have been much happier only using email, but the Americans had refined their techniques for tracking and decrypting emails, and while the Americans and the Europeans seemed to be permanently divorced these days, it was folly to assume that the Americans wouldn’t tip off the Europeans if they knew that there was something big going down.  Pre-planned messages had their uses, but there were only a limited number of possible messages that they could agree upon…and one certainty of the universe, as far as Ustinov knew, was that anything they planned for wouldn’t happen as they planned it.  Friction was worked into every good plan, but the smaller the plan, the more chance for friction to terminate operations with extreme prejudice.

On the plus side, at least they’d be choosing their own targets.

Control stood up.  “There will be no further contact,” he said, tapping a small case in the centre of the room with his shoe.  “You have some details in there of other arms caches, but there were obvious limits as to what we could emplace in the city; the British are rather paranoid after Glasgow and Blackburn.  You both know where to find some specific stocks that you can use for terror if you need them, so…all I can really say is good luck, and I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

Ossetia looked up at him.  There was almost a nervous tone in his voice; anticipation mixed with concern about how he would perform when it all went into action.  Ustinov knew the feeling; he had had it himself on his first mission in Chechnya.

“Something really big is about to happen, isn’t it?”

Ustinov smiled inwardly.  “Yes,” Control said flatly.  Ustinov wondered just how much control knew about what was coming; it didn’t seem likely that he would know everything, but at the same time, he wouldn’t be completely in the dark.  “Your task is to sow random terror.”

Until we are either killed or run out of weapons
, Ustinov thought.  He knew better than to assume that the British police would just let them get on with it.  The British SAS were almost as good as the Spetsnaz…and Ustinov knew that neither of them were trained to the peak of Spetsnaz perfection.  Their skills lay in infiltration, not commando shootouts in the middle of schools and government buildings.  He would have been delighted to have had some Spetsnaz helping out, but few of them could pass for harmless foreign slaves or stupid British people.  It was up to them, he reflected;
this could get very interesting; nasty, brutish and short
.

“Good luck,” Control said shortly, assuming the face of the capitalist exploiter again.  The Russian immigrants
were
exploited, Ustinov had found; both of them had been worked to the bone more than once, just because their position was so precarious.  He had studied British politics enough to be certain that the ruling party was going to lose the next general election, putting in a Conservative Government with a mandate to, among other things, evict all immigrants.  Or, perhaps, they would just move right to the British National Front; the European laws against hate speech hadn’t managed to put the BNP out of business…and they had even some MPs in Parliament.  “I’ll see you again in Moscow.”

He strode out of the building, looking to all the world as if he had just given two downtrodden lackeys their orders.  Ustinov checked the building quickly, then transferred the contents of the case into their own bags; money and some documents.  The documents would be memorised at night, and then shredded; both men had near-perfect memories.  There was a great deal of work to do in the building, mainly the plumbing; neither of them complained as they got to work.  They needed to work to prove they’d earned their money legitimately.

Ossetia coughed.  “Lunch at Euro-Burger?”

Ustinov smiled.  Euro-Burger had been set up in direct competition to McDonalds and had been winning the struggle for dominance.  He didn’t really understand it; both of them tasted like crap.  They had moved some of their operations into Russia, where they were ruining the taste buds of countless Russian youngsters; Ustinov would have quite happily bombed either of them if he had thought that it would have managed to achieve something.  It wouldn’t; they would need a bigger target to really shock the British public.

An aircraft flew high overhead.

He shuddered.  He knew what it portended.

The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.

Oliver Cromwell

“Your papers, please, General,” the guard said.  His weapon wasn’t – quite – pointed at Langford’s chest.  “I must insist.”

Major-General Charles Langford passed over his identification and waited patiently for the guard to complete a biometric scan of his body, comparing it to the details stored in both the ID card and the PJHQ computers.  The tiny microchip in the card was supposed to be impossible to fake or alter, but Langford knew better than to assume that anything was impossible.  It was why there were armed guards emplaced around the PJHQ – the Permanent Joint Headquarters – and why there was an entire company of armed soldiers stationed within the surrounding buildings. The last terrorist attack on the United Kingdom had been years ago, but it was only a matter of time.

“You may pass, sir,” the guard said.  His partner saluted; the guard himself didn’t.  Saluting on duty was a punishable offence; it could distract a guard from his duties.  Langford would have understood the guard’s nervousness about not showing a superior officer respect – he had been written up for once saluting a superior in a combat zone – but there was no helping it.  Security came first.

“Thank you,” Langford said, as the gate opened.  It had been designed to prevent a truck bomber or something similar from entering the parking lot, but it all seemed absurdly flimsy compared to the Green Zone in Baghdad, even though the Americans there had known that they were likely to be attacked at any moment.  The government of Britain hadn’t wanted to invest in much in the way of security, let alone the forced buy-outs of the property surrounding the PJHQ, but almost every security officer had threatened to resign and go public unless the government agreed.  Security came first and, despite the Liberal Government, there were still people who wanted to keep the country safe.

He passed through the gate and entered the main building, receiving a second security check as he entered, before heading down into the bunker.  It had been designed years ago, during the threat of Russian nuclear attack – in typical MOD fashion, it had been finished after the Cold War had been won – and seemed far too flimsy these days.  Both the Americans and the Russians had deployed heavy bunker-busting bombs, ruining the reputation of French and British engineers who had built the bunkers where third world despots had hidden out from American aircraft.  Many of them had died with defiance on their lips.

“Sir,” Captain Christopher Drury said, standing to attention and saluting.  The bespectacled officer didn’t look much like a combat soldier, nothing like the guards in battle dress on the outside of the building, but as one of the operators of the PJHQ, he was one of Langford’s most trusted officers.  He might have given off the impression of a blonde Jeff Goldblum, but there was little eccentric about him.  “Welcome back to the PJHQ.  I must remind you that you have the weekly situation meeting at 1300hrs and there are still protesters blocking the roads; the Metropolitan Police suggest that you use one of the helicopters.”

Langford scowled.  He had never married and had been an army brat; he had never understood why protesters picketed military bases, such as the handful of barracks scattered around London and the PJHQ, rather than government buildings.  The military didn’t decide when to go to war; that was the choice of the politicians.  Every European general had advised against the Sudan deployment, and then against withdrawing half of the force…and had been ignored.  They had also gotten the blame afterwards.

“Wonderful,” he said, unwilling to think about the issue.  The weekly situation meeting and security brief was supposed to be a simple task, but it wasn’t anything of the sort when some security matters were handled by EUROFOR and others by PJHQ, while Brussels kept attempting to expand their authority.  It didn’t help that a united front of French, German and British officers had pointed out that there was no need to spend billions of Euros on a new headquarters in Brussels; the PJHQ alone could have provided all of the coordination that EUROFOR could have required.  The French headquarters – the public one, that everyone knew about, and the secret one that no one was supposed to know about – could have accomplished the same tasks; the European Defence Commission had insisted on its own headquarters and the various governments had given in.  It was empire-building at its worst; that money could have mended a few defects in EUROFOR’s actual line of battle.

He shrugged.  It wasn’t something he could do anything about.  “Is there anything I should know about?”

“There’s a torrent of
Jihadists
invective coming from Algeria and to some extent from Libya, thanks to some frog who wanted to cut the balls of every Algerian or something like that,” Drury said.  Langford felt a flicker of sympathy for the unnamed Frenchman.  “It’s all the usual stuff; the Frenchman must die before the Eiffel Tower comes crashing down and exterminates the French when it hits the ground.”

“Pretty big explosion,” Langford observed dryly.  The image made him smile; the French had tougher laws on terrorism than the British, although they were mild compared to either the American or Russian laws.  “Anything else?”

Drury shook his head.  “The French Air Force has requested that we provide an AWACS and a couple of fighters for a drill in a week,” he said.  “The French think they have a new way of detecting aircraft at very low level and want us to be the aggressors in a raid on France.  The Chief of the Air Staff was very interested and wants us to agree.”

“That is within my purview,” Langford said.  Unless something went very wrong, the government wouldn’t have to know about it at all…and the RAF’s training standards had been slipping badly, recently, due to the torrent of complaints about the noise of low-flying aircraft.  “Anything on the Threat Board?”

“Only some suggestion that the Russians are considering a move into Ukraine,” Drury said.  “EUROFOR HQ is handling the matter, but they don’t anticipate trouble; in any case, it’s out of our hands.  Major-General McLachlan says that the Poles are worried, but EUROFOR HQ is convinced that the Russians are going to wait until after the elections before they move, if they move.”

“Then I see no reason why we should not go along with the French request,” Langford said.  The French commander had skirted the edge of what could be done without EUROFOR’s knowledge; it was fitting to show that not everything needed EUROFOR to go along with it.  “Coordinate it with CAS, but unless something new appears, then we should try to beat the French at their own game.”

He smiled at Drury’s expression and headed into his office, taking the time to pick up a cup of coffee before reading through his secure emails.  There was little of importance, but seventy percent of his work was never important; hurry up and wait applied even more to the PJHQ than it did to soldiers in the field.  They, at least, got to shoot at the enemy.  The entire Falklands situation seemed to be calming down now that a major task force, including the
Prince of Wales
, was on its way to the area.  That was nearly a third of the Royal Navy…and the politicians would probably claim that it was all a wasted deployment.

“Damned Argies,” Langford muttered.  Every so often, Argentina would shake its fist and make threatening moves in the direction of the Falklands, and British forces would be forced to react.  Even the Liberals who were in power knew better than to simply give up the islands, no matter their anti-colonial sentiments; their government would fall quicker than an apple from the tree, or an American bunker-busting bomb.  “I wonder…”

“Sir, your helicopter is ready to depart,” Drury said, hours later.  Langford nodded tiredly; he had been studying deployments, wondering where he could draw a company or battalion from to make up some of the overstretch.  It wasn’t like 1914, where Britain had had worldwide interests, or even 2003, but it was still tricky…and the endless cuts in the deployable forces hadn’t helped.  “The Police are still reporting that the streets are blocked.”

“I should go in a Challenger tank,” Langford said.  He smiled at the thought; the British Army had been intended to switch to Eurotanks, of which there were nearly a thousand units on order, two years ago; naturally, the project had overrun and only one European unit had Eurotanks.  “That might show them something about the world.”

Drury said nothing.

The Metropolitan Police hadn’t exaggerated, Langford realised, as the helicopter came down towards Whitehall and the MOD Main Building.  Protesters swarmed as close as they could to the centre of the British Government, the organised protests disintegrating into peaceful anarchy.  The protesters seemed to just want to protest; Langford had heard that the police had wanted to disperse them, but the government had forbidden it for political reasons.  The weather forecast had promised heavy rain in a day or so; it had been hoped that the rain would put most of the protesters off their game.  Some of them shouted towards the helicopter as it came in to land on the roof; they were too far away to know what they were shouting.  He doubted that it was anything important.

“Welcome to the Main Building, sir,” Captain Scott Hammock said.  “They’re all waiting for you in the briefing room.”

“Thank you,” Langford said.  He wasn’t surprised that the others had arrived first; they could use the series of tunnels linking all of Whitehall together without having to avoid protesters.  They walked down corridors, the monotony broken only by a faded VOTE SAXON poster that no one had had the heart to take down, and into the main hall.  A small set of aides and assistants were waiting outside; they were wallflowers as far as the weekly security briefing was concerned.

The interior of the briefing room had been renovated several times, currently designed to reassemble a corporate office, rather than the dignified centre of government that Whitehall aspired to be.  The Prime Minister stood to greet Langford as he came to a halt and saluted; his bulk made it seem as if he was a beached whale.  Prime Minister Nicholas Donavan actually believed half of the statements he made in public and in private; Langford gave him that much credit.  Like John Major, no one really questioned his integrity; his grasp of political affairs was another matter.  If Labour and the Conservatives, to say nothing of the Scottish Nationalists, hadn’t so thoroughly discredited themselves…

“Thank you for coming,” Donavan said.  Everyone else in the room, with the exception of a dour-faced Police officer, was a political appointee or politician; Langford was uncomfortably aware that he was outnumbered.  The ongoing budget crisis, seemingly impossible to solve, had left Donavan with a desperate need to cut costs, anywhere.  The MOD’s budget got smaller every year.  “I believe that we can begin now.”

Langford took his seat, noting the presence of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Jack Redding, and the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Neddy Young.  The Deputy Prime Minister was off pressing the flesh for a by-election in Scotland; his place had been taken by one of his trusted aides.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bruce McClain, looked grim; he was the third person to hold that role since Donavan had become Prime Minister.

“You may have heard that there was an…unfortunate incident in France last week,” the Policeman said.  His nametag read BRIGGS.  “There have actually been some protests in several southern cities in Britain relating to it, all coordinated through the network of mosques that we have identified as being hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism.  The protests have been carried out without violence, but there were some incidents of genuinely worrying behaviour and, I believe, signs that there is a real network coordinating their actions.  This cannot be coincidence, Prime Minister; I believe that this represents a disturbing trend in Islamic behaviour.”

He tapped the display.  “You will remember that the Americans killed seven British Muslims in what remains of Saudi Arabia last month,” Briggs continued.  “All of them came from these four mosques” – the display changed again – “and all of those mosques held protest marches demanding that the Americans turn over the bodies for proper disposal.  This was impossible, of course; the Americans simply destroyed the bodies once they had been identified.  Less well known is the fact that the Americans took an eighth British Muslim alive…and forced him to talk.  He was talking about an entire recruiting ring that gave him training before shipping him into Saudi.”

Donavan shuddered.  “The Americans tortured him,” he said.  There had been any number of articles on the practice when it had begun, before Oakland; afterwards, the American public would have been quite happy to bathe the entire Middle East in radioactive fire.  Millions had died in Oakland.  “He would say anything under torture.”

“The Americans gave us some of the information and we checked it out,” Briggs said.  Langford felt a moment of sympathy for him; his superiors should have handled such matters, not dropped them in the lap of a relatively junior officer.  “Sir, there
is
a network there and it represents a clear and present danger; we need to take it apart, quickly!”