“Good,” Shalenko said. He glanced at his watch; it was almost exactly on time. The remains of the Polish army would either be scattered or prisoners of war; in any case, they would be in no position to dispute with the Russians for a while. It was time to move ahead with the second stage of the plan, before the Poles and EUROFOR gathered themselves into a serious threat. “Is 2nd Shock still operative?”
Anna nodded. “The Poles were completely disorganised,” she said. She held up the terminal for him to see; the Poles had been battered enough to shatter them as a coherent force. “They only lost thirty tanks.”
Shalenko smiled. “Then give the order,” he said. He had waited a long time for this moment. “The advance forces are to continue the offensive… and the secondary forces are to move on Warsaw.”
Chapter Twenty: A Day That Will Live In Infamy, Take Three
Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.
Near Warsaw, Poland
There was something in the air.
Captain Stuart Robinson could feel it, somehow; the sense that matters were somehow not quite right. It reminded him far too much of Sudan, or of patrolling through a hostile town, the sense that everyone was watching you for just a hint of weakness. The old sweats who had served in Iraq had told him about the feeling from Basra and other godforsaken places in the Middle East; the sense that at any moment the horde of people was going to turn on you and try to kill you.
He shook his head, trying to dismiss the feeling. They were in Poland, in Europe; they were not in the heart of Afghanistan or darkest Africa. Sure, they didn’t like the French, or had a long history of fighting the Germans, but they weren't about to carry the feeling onto the battlefield. The only bloodshed between England and France these days had been in the last football match, where two players had smashed into one another without looking where they were going, breaking an entire list of bones. The Poles weren't unhappy to see them, they didn’t feel occupied, so why the feeling?
Sergeant Ronald Inglehart felt it too. “I doubled the patrols, sir,” he said, without being asked. Robinson knew that he should feel slighted by the Sergeant refusing to seek his permission, but some Captains wouldn’t have moved because of a ‘feeling.’ It didn’t make him any happier to know that the Sergeant was sharing his thoughts; he would have been able to dismiss them if it had been just him. “The sensors have been reporting movement all night from wild animals, but nothing else.”
Robinson rolled his eyes. His own guard duty had been spent at a RAF base, where they had been replacing the RAF Regiment for a short period while the members of the regiment, overworked like everyone else, went for training on the newer equipment. The heights of excitement there had been a chance to watch local wildlife through the night-vision equipment — that, and laying bets on who would be the first to get inside Flying Officer Cindy Baker’s pants. The memory made him smile; the female fast-jet pilot had gone through men as if they were going out of season, looking for a different man each night. He’d kept the book; as a married man, he had had no intention of chasing other women.
He frowned. It had struck him, suddenly, what was missing. “Jacob, have you had any contact with the Polish command centre?”
Captain Jacob Anastazy looked up at him. He’d been in a mood since Marya had left… with the telephone numbers and emails of half the Company in her pocket. Marya, too, could date a different man a night… and Anastazy had been worried about her. Robinson hadn’t cared; as long as his men were gentlemen, he didn’t worry about it. Marya was a grown-up girl…
“No,” Anastazy said slowly. “Normally, they call me, just to check in.”
Robinson exchanged a long glance with Inglehart. Maybe it was just another manifestation of the overworked computer systems breaking down and taking the communications system with it — Microsoft had done half the work, which explained some of the problems, although the European Consortium that had attempted to finish the work had its own share of bugs — or maybe it was a sign that something was actually wrong. He almost felt relieved; they would have something real to face, a problem he could solve. It was bound to be nothing, really.
“Try and raise them,” he said. A mischievous thought occurred to him. “Tell them that we want more booze and hookers.”
“I bet you have a habit of putting stink bombs in the General’s quarters as well,” Anastazy commented dryly, as he lifted his radio to his lips and activated it. A screech of static burst out of it, causing him to almost drop it in shock. “Sir, I… that was…”
“Jammed,” Inglehart snapped. “Someone’s jamming us!”
Robinson felt his blood run cold. Perhaps it was a drill, but that would have been announced, surely. The Poles wouldn’t have held any drills without telling people who depended on the communications network… and EUROFOR would have told him if they had intended to take down the communications network.
“Sergeant, get the men into defensive positions,” he hissed, removing his rifle from his shoulder and bringing it up into defensive position. “Jacob, see if you can locate any signals, EUROFOR or Polish or…”
“Captain,” Lieutenant Benjamin Matthews shouted. The note of alarm in his voice brought Robinson to his side quicker than anything else could have done. The small laptop that served as one of the hubs for the radar they had mounted on the hilltop was buzzing an alarm at them. The display was lighting up with red icons. “We have problems.”
Robinson stared down at the screen. It was making his eyes hurt; it was so bright. “What the hell is happening?”
Matthews tapped the laptop. “One moment, everything is nice and normal, from that bunched up and pissed off group of commercial airliners, to the handful of Russian aircraft in the air and… then all hell broke loose. We have aircraft and missiles rising everywhere and coming for Poland — coming for us.”
Robinson felt training reassert itself. “How are you getting the information?” He demanded. He pointed one long hand towards the radar unit. “Is that thing working?”
“Yes,” Matthews said. “It’s…”
A scream echoed across the sky; a blast of lightning seemed to reach down and touch the radar, which exploded in a burst of fire. Robinson realised dimly that it had been a missile, fired from somewhere not too far away, targeted perfectly upon the radar. It had been a HARM-type missile, he saw; it had homed in on the radar transmissions and destroyed the radar. It was sheer luck that no one had been hurt.
“Get the trucks moving,” he snapped. If someone, most likely the Russians, had decided to start something, they would try to take out the CADS as soon as possible. They would want control of the air and the CADS represented one of the latest breakthroughs in air denial systems; even without their radars, they would make prime targets. “I want them to move and then…”
Shooting broke out, far too close for comfort; mortars and grenades started to explode. He threw himself to the ground, rolling down towards the position of his guards, as they opened fire on the attackers. The enemy soldiers wore unmarked uniforms and seemed to be determined to kill all of the British soldiers. He heard the noise of helicopters in the distance as the enemy pushed closer; whatever else was going on, this was no minor accident.