They rounded a corner and came face to face with a scene from hell. Cars, dozens of cars, were smashed and broken by the force of a blast, used as barricades by desperate European soldiers, fighting against hordes of young teenage men, screaming insults and obscenities in Arabic. Fanaroff hadn’t seen anything like it since Iran; there was a savage glory surrounding the entire desperate fight. The young men seemed completely heedless of their own personal safety; they charged at the Europeans, spraying bullets from AK-47s and launching RPG shells from insanely close range.
“No,” Fanaroff said. His lips twitched as he ducked back. “Perhaps we should go the other way.”
The entire area had been designed to be a celebration of Belgium’s culture, or so he had been told; privately, he wondered if that meant that the natives had no culture, or had stolen it from everyone else. It had been strange and very tasteless, in its way; one artwork that had hardly deserved the name had been a model constructed out of frozen human shit. The commentary from nationalists in Belgium had been bitter; not a single ‘real’ native had had an artwork accepted. There was a moral in that, somewhere…
“Stop,” a voice snapped. Fanaroff glanced ahead; two youths were bearing down on them, lifting AK-47s. He would never forget what the AK-47 looked like; the entire Middle East was awash with them, manufactured everywhere from Saddam’s palaces to caves in the darkest reaches of Afghanistan. The Europeans would use the German-designed Eurorifle; the youths had to be unfriendly. “Stop and…”
Fanaroff shot the leader through the head; the young man collapsed to the ground, with half of his head blown clean off. Saundra dispatched the second one, sending him screaming into the next world. His insane giggle suggested that he was hyped up on something, perhaps one of the drugs that some Islamic fighters had been known to take before going into battle. Neither of them had been wearing body armour, nor had they shown tactical sense; something didn’t quite add up.
“Guard us,” he muttered. If the youths had friends, the shots would bring them running. He checked through the bodies quickly, removing wallets and two ethnic entitlement cards, both written in Arabic, rather than English or any other European language. That meant something, but he had forgotten what; the European Parliament had passed a ruling about native languages two years ago when it came to ID cards. There was nothing to suggest that they were soldiers, just some additional bullets for their weapons and one mobile phone, broken.
“Take the rifle,” he said. It had been a long time since he had used an AK-47, but his body had refused to forget; it had once been a survival skill in Iran. He had been holed up in a flat and had had to use enemy weapons to last the night. He hoisted the other weapon onto his shoulder and waited for her to finish before starting the long walk back towards the embassy. “I think that we’re in the middle of a riot.”
“No shit,” Saundra said. “I would never have noticed.”
“Just don’t let them take you alive,” Fanaroff warned. “There is a fate worse than death.”
The side-streets of Brussels were deserted. Fanaroff hoped that that meant that the population was inside, hiding behind locked doors; he suspected that it actually meant that most of the population was joining in the rioting. If rioting it was… there was something organised about the attack, rather like insurgencies had been organised in the Middle East. The Mullahs and other clerics had used young men as cannon-fodder; they had run their groups like criminal gangs and taken a cut from the loot. The young men had often proven impossible to control, but… so what? It wasn't the Mullahs who suffered — or, at least, it hadn’t been until the last President had signed the Sanction Protocols into effect.
He could hear it, though; the endless drumming of the guns. Some guns were constant, well-known; AK-47s and the handful of knock-off versions that had come out of China and a dozen other countries. Others were larger and more regular, more professional; he wondered just who was firing those weapons… and what they were firing at. A light in the air caught his attention and he saw the trail of a SAM rising up to strike a target he couldn’t see; moments later, there were two explosions in quick succession.
“Shit,” Saundra hissed. She had tripped over a body; it was a policeman, one with light dark skin. He had been garrotted; something rare in Belgium… and his trousers had been torn down. Fanaroff felt sick; someone had taken a knife to his penis and severed it from his groin. Fanaroff could almost read the story; the young policeman had defied his culture and people to try to make a difference on the streets as a policeman… and had paid the ultimate price. “Sir… how do we reason with these people?”
“You don’t,” Fanaroff said. It was impossible to reason with barbarians; you could only defend yourself and hope that they would grow out of it. He held up a hand. “Quiet!”
He’d sensed them before he saw them, a line of people, dressed in civilian clothes, but wearing body armour under their clothes. They didn’t look Muslim, he realised; many of them were paler than he himself was, and they moved as if they knew what they were doing. Arabs made bad soldiers, in his opinion; the only decent ones he’d met had been Kurdish warriors before the Turks had set out to kill them all. The insurgents might have had a certain honesty, unlike so many Arab civilians he had met, but they were hardly professional soldiers. None of them would have gotten through Hell Week without being kicked out in disgrace.
The newcomers were professionals… and it struck him, suddenly, just what was going on. The coordination, the weapons, the perfectly targeted attacks… and now commandos. Only one power could do that and have motivation… the Russians. They had been angry at the Europeans, they could be fairly certain that the United States would not interfere… and they had been making vast military moves. He had thought, CIA had thought, DIA had thought, that the Russians had only been planning to snatch the Ukraine, but then, the Russians were masters at counter-espionage. They had even made Iran far more dangerous by teaching them how to fool spy satellites and probing sensors from the west.
He thought, briefly, about surrendering. If the Russians had really decided to go medieval on Europe’s collective arse, they wouldn’t want to piss off the United States by shooting two military officers out of hand. He dismissed the thought within seconds; the Russians were much more likely to shoot them and swear blind that it was an accident, or disarm them and leave them handcuffed until they returned. Either way, it was not going to be a pleasant trip back to the States.
The Russians slipped out of sight. He shook his head as Saundra lifted her rifle, instead leading her down the alley back towards the embassy. The noise of the guns was getting louder and he realised, suddenly, that the embassy was under attack. The new building had been designed with security in mind, but if the entire city had fallen into chaos, then what would happen to the defenders when they ran out of weapons? He nodded towards a fire escape and scrambled up the side of the building, meeting only a pair of frightened eyes at a window, as he reached the roof.
He froze. There were two men there, firing down towards the Embassy square. He pulled his pistol out and shot them both quickly, in the back, watching dispassionately as their bodies fell down towards the ground. A third body lay on the roof, quite dead; he showed every sign of committing suicide by sniper. The insurgents had never grasped just how good American snipers actually were; it was amazing what could be done with modern technology and deadly intent. He kept low, knowing that the Marine sniper — if he was still alive — would have no way to know that he was friendly, and peered carefully over the edge.