Robinson desperately started to look for a hole. “But… they sent the helicopters here against the CADS,” he protested. “Do they know…?”
“They do now,” Matthews said. “The original version of the CADS had the radar and the missiles mounted on the same truck; the Russians might just have assumed that we had the same kind of vehicles and launched an attack using helicopters. It hardly matters, sir; we cannot stay here.”
Robinson nodded. “Get your vehicles moving at once,” he ordered. “I’ll get the men ready.”
“We lost twenty-one, with seven injured,” Inglehart reported, as the CADS roared to life behind them. Robinson cursed; that meant that half of his strength had been killed. “We also lost three of the lorries; all of them were taken out by enemy mortar fire…”
“Have the wounded moved into the remaining lorry and prepare to move out,” Robinson snapped. “Jacob, anything?”
“There’s nothing on the handful of bodies,” Anastazy reported. “Sir, I don’t know for sure, but those were definitely Russian helicopters and they were…”
“I know,” Robinson said. There was no drill planned for any such incident; the closest they had come to planning for a full-scale Russian attack was a plan to cut off a major cross-border raid. “We have to move out, somewhere west. If we can’t get in contact with higher authority…”
“I got something,” the radioman called. “There’s a signal, in Polish…”
Anastazy listened carefully… and paled. “No,” he said. “It can’t be… its Molobo!”
Robinson wanted to slap him. “Translate it,” he ordered. Anastazy’s country might be under threat, but he cared more for the lives of his soldiers, the men under his command. He needed every possible source of intelligence and Anastazy was the only one he had. Whoever Molobo was, he had to be connected to the Russians somehow. “I need to know what they’re saying!”
Anastazy took a breath. “Citizens of Poland, this is an emergency announcement,” he recited, as the speaker started to repeat himself. “There is a military and civil emergency going on; remain in your homes and stay off the streets. Do not venture outside. Do not attempt to use telephones, radios or other methods of communication; all communications must be reserved for the emergency services. Whatever you see or hear, stay in your homes; do not put yourself and the lives of your friends and families in danger. Electric supplies will be restored as soon as possible. Further information will be relayed to you as soon as possible; continue to listen on this frequency and ignore every other frequency. I repeat; these are very dangerous times. Stay in your homes.”
The message began to repeat. “Jesus,” Inglehart breathed. Robinson shook his head slowly as the sinister import of the message began to sink in. “What the hell does it mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lieutenant Benjamin Matthews snapped. “The Russians are invading Poland… and we’re caught in the middle!”
Chapter Twenty-One: Strike from the Sky, Take One
I love it when a plan comes together.
Polish Airspace, Near Szczecin
“Are you sure that this is actually working?”
Captain Boris Lapotev shrugged. “So far, there’s been nothing since we lost contact with the ground,” he said. “The Europeans put all their eggs in one basket, and what part of the civil aviation network the missiles didn’t fuck up got fucked up by the cyber attacks. We’re just a group of harmless civilian aircraft who are meandering blindly along towards Szczecin-Goleniów Airport. What could go wrong?”
Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev, who knew much more about the overall plan than Lapotev, said nothing. It was possible, if not particularly likely, that one of their own commandos down on the ground would launch a SAM at them… and any of the countermeasures built into the aircraft, if used, would give away their real identity. It might not matter, not with the confusion down on the ground, but it was better to be safe than sorry. On the ground, the five hundred commandos under his command were dangerous; in the air, they were sitting ducks for enemy aircraft.
He glanced back out of the cockpit. The aircraft had once been a fairly normal Boeing 747, before the Russian Air Force had gotten their hands on it and handed it over to the GRU. Now, it looked like a normal jetliner, acted like a normal jetliner, but it had carrying space for over a hundred commandos and their equipment. They could have packed more into the aircraft, but he knew that if they were lucky, they could take the airport, and if the Germans or Poles had time to react and dig in, they were all about to die. Everything depended upon the Europeans being fooled.
They’d taken off in the early hours of the morning, replacing a set of aircraft that had been coming the long way around the Ukraine, something that had become routine after several years of chaos and the occasional explosion in the Ukraine. Russia had bent over backwards to ensure that the pilots, crew and passengers of those aircraft had felt welcome on their brief stopover on a Russian airport, but the last time had been different. Passengers and pilots had been herded off their aircraft; the IFFs had been quickly copied and a new flight of aircraft were on their way, to all intents and purposes the same as the aircraft that had landed… at least from the outside observer’s point of view. The long flight had been nerve-wrecking — they'd seen at least one vast explosion in the distance — but the combination of jamming, limited contact with other aircraft and panic on the ground had prevented anyone from asking questions that Lapotev couldn’t have answered.
“Roger that, Speedbird-Seven,” Lapotev said. Aliyev covered his mouth to conceal a smile; anyone who knew the actual pilot’s voice would blame any misunderstandings on the jamming. “We confirm no contact with anyone on the ground; have you any contacts at all?”
He thumbed the radio off and grinned. “Everyone is completely confused and doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on,” he said. “Some of them might try to land at the airports anyway, even without radio contact.”
“I had limited contact with Dresden, Ukraine-Four,” Speedbird said. Lapotev had identified it as a British aircraft, intending to fly into Poland before all hell had broken loose. “They’re warning of terrorists with missiles and rioting on the ground, and then we lost contact again.”
Aliyev said nothing. He couldn’t remember, offhand, if Dresden was a target or not for commando teams, but the airport would certainly have received a dose of missiles, just to ensure that it didn’t start helping military aircraft into the air. Dresden had played host to a large immigrant community, he remembered; perhaps some of the FSB’s attempts to spread rioting had actually worked there. He scowled down at the final update from an operative in Szczecin; there had certainly been no sign of any military presence at the airport, but standard European procedure was to put all the airports on alert… if they knew that there had been SAM attacks elsewhere in Europe. One of the problems with such attacks was that it was impossible to know just how well you had done… his force might have an easy fight or run headlong into a battle they couldn’t win.
Fortune favours the brave, he reminded himself. There was no questioning the bravery of his men. They had served together in the worst of war zones, which had allowed them to weed out everyone who might have let them down at the worst possible time. Poland should be an easy target compared to some places in Central Asia. Who dares… wins… most of the time.