A group of Polish prisoners sat in one corner, guarded by a bored-looking soldier. Their faces were masks of horror and grief; they had been caught, almost literally, asleep at the switch. A handful of Spetsnaz, wearing Polish uniforms, had entered the customs post and subdued the border guards, almost without firing a shot. The prisoners now stared at the advancing Russian force, their hands firmly secured behind their backs, broken by what they were seeing in front of them. Shalenko ignored them magnificently; their fate had already been decided.
A massive line of infantry-carrying lorries rumbled past him, carrying Russian soldiers who still seemed a little bemused at going to war. They had been drilled relentlessly for months, but they had never been told why, not until the hurried last-minute briefings that had explained what they were going to do. Some of them had deserted under the sudden news; Shalenko had heard that Russian border guards had shot two men trying to make a break for Poland. If another had managed to make it into Poland, he hadn’t been able to alert the Poles in time to make a difference; there had only been four Polish aircraft in the air when the missiles started to land. They had been swiftly bounced and destroyed by MIG-41 aircraft.
“General,” Captain Anna Ossipavo said. She was his aide, lover and bodyguard, all rolled into one. No one would take her seriously — sexism was still alive and well in most levels of the Russian hierarchy — until it was too late; even the Black Widow herself hadn’t convinced Russians that sexism was a dangerous weakness. Shalenko suspected that most of her detractors thought she was a lesbian. “I have the first reports from the observation and assault teams.”
Shalenko turned and smiled. They stood together in the middle of organised chaos. He knew what it all meant; none of the Poles, or even most of his own people, would have a real inking of the truth. Four massive Russian forces were invading Poland, crashing into the Polish borders and their unprepared defences; behind the lines, Russian commandos were ripping apart the Polish command and control centres, hacking the proud Polish Army into a screaming mob of tiny units. Some would break under the pressure, some would fight to the death… it hardly mattered. Isolated, they couldn’t pose a threat, or a problem.
“Good,” he said. The Battlespace Management System would warn him if anything went seriously wrong, but he still needed the details. “What’s the bad news?”
“We scored around a seventy percent success rate,” Anna said, seriously. “In several places, the Polish guards were alert and killed most of the assault terms before they could detonate their bombs or launch the attack; those teams either retreated or were wiped out to the last man. A handful of Polish aircraft were launched into the air before the missiles destroyed their airbases; they may pose a threat to our advance. The attack on Warsaw airport more or less succeeded, but an airliner was destroyed on the runway and is now blocking activities.”
Shalenko shrugged. He hadn’t expected that part of the plan to work. “Remind the team leader…”
“His deputy, sir,” Anna said. “The team leader was killed in the assault.”
“Remind the new team leader that if the Poles do manage to mount a counterattack, he is to destroy as much as he can and run,” Shalenko said. There was little point in trying to hold the airport; the Poles had always had an infantry force nearby, and the missiles might not have destroyed or scattered it. If there was a counterattack, the Russians would lose. “And the rest of the news?”
“We have destroyed or crippled around seventy percent of the deployed Polish armed forces, as well as hitting all of their barracks and bases with missiles,” Anna said. “The strike team that attacked the EUROFOR camp near Warsaw reported complete success, but they had to mortar the barracks; a mixed force of soldiers was holding out and imperilling the success of the operation. Other strike forces have more or less completed their missions; bridges, dams and command centres are in our hands and the Poles are crippled.”
Shalenko nodded. Tanks were far more powerful than they had been in the days of Stalin, but the price tag was high… and not just in money. The Poles would have ample opportunity to slow his forces if they managed to scrape together the coordination to mount counterattacks; a single destroyed bridge could stalemate the invasion for hours. The lighter tanks, using armour developed by the Americans and stolen from them by the FSB, might find it easier to advance, but they were more vulnerable to heavy weapons. The Americans had thought about the problem of engaging insurgents, not another armoured force.
He smiled. “And further in?”
“The assault units that hit Germany and France have reported success as well, although some of them have been lost or at the very least haven’t reported back yet,” Anna said. “The jamming stations have been emplaced and are being used; that’s actually impeding our own operations in some locations, although we still have direct laser links to orbiting communications satellites. The monitors back at Moscow are claiming that ninety percent of the missiles launched at European targets have found their targets, but they’re requesting that we prioritise the surviving targets for attention as soon as possible.”
“The devil is always in the details,” Shalenko said, as a hail of gunfire echoed out over the horizon. There were countless Polish civilians in the area and he felt a little sympathy for the hell that they were about to go through. They were caught in the path of an invading army and that was hell for civilians, particularly young female civilians. He had made it clear to his men that atrocities would not be tolerated — and the penal units had an endless thirst for men — but the FSB units were only marginally under his command. “What about the radio signal?”
“It was transmitted on the general bands, all civilian,” Anna said. The message had been pre-recorded by a traitor, the greatest success story that the FSB had had in Poland since the end of the Cold War, a success story so unbelievable that Shalenko had wondered if it was a sting operation. It was amazing what people would do under the threat of having their night time activities revealed to the world. “The message is repeated every ten minutes, in between the jamming; we took out the official radio and other media centres in the opening moments of the offensive. Even if the President has survived our attempt to kill him, he won’t be able to get his message out… and really, what can he say that disagrees with our message?”
“True,” Shalenko said.
They watched in silence as assault helicopters flashed overhead, heading for targets within Poland, harrying the remains of the Polish Army and EUROFOR to the point where they would disintegrate. Other armoured thrusts were moving to relieve commandos who had seized targets; a handful of FSB units had already been given the task of securing prisoners before they could be sent back into the wastelands of Siberia. Shalenko didn’t like that solution, but there was little choice; it was that, or else kill them all. The FSB had argued in favour of just that solution, but Shalenko had put his foot down; besides, they might need something to bargain with.
A young officer came running up to them. “General Shalenko, sir,” he gasped. Captain Vladimir Ivanov was in the best of health; he had had to have run all the way from the helicopter landing pad away from the guard battalion protecting the makeshift base. “We have all of Unit One in position.”
“Excellent,” Shalenko said. Ivanov was young for his role and seriously under-ranked, not something unusual in Russia, but Ivanov’s role had been critically important. Unit One was not charged with fighting a war, but preventing one… or at least preventing the war that Russia had started from getting out of control. The entire episode had to be handled very carefully. “Come on, Anna; we’re going for a helicopter flight.”