“If you’re in the military — worse, if you’re in the military as a woman — you have to behave as one of the men, within reason,” she had said, much to Caroline’s surprise. “You have to eat with them, sleep — and I don’t mean sex, I mean sleep — with them, crap with them, fight with them, kill with them… and generally act as one of the men. You’re either one of the boys or you’re queen for a year… provided you act like it. Some women go mad for sex because there’s only one woman and fifty-odd men and they can get whatever they want if they reward the men with sex, some women go ice queens… frankly, if you give it up for one guy, it’ll tear the unit and your reputation apart.”
Caroline hadn’t really understood. “You can be one of the guys; eat, sleep, shit, talk about women… or you can be a slut,” Hannah had said. “It’s really a case of not creating tension within the group; as my first Sergeant put it, you don’t want brave stupid young men rescuing brave stupid young women rather than getting out there and kicking the shit out of the enemy. Have one woman with one man and plenty of other men who aren’t getting any… well, that’s a recipe for trouble.” She laughed. “Oh, and being brave helps as well.”
Caroline didn’t feel very brave as a second explosion rocked the camp. She had wanted to call Hannah back as the young Captain fled the room, pistol in hand, but she hadn’t quite dared. It was something far less… congenial than the time she’d spent with the soldiers on distant deployment near Warsaw; they’d been friendly and relaxed, particularly with Marya. Caroline had felt distantly ugly in comparison, even if she had had a string of boyfriends back home. Marya was still sleeping the effects of the alcohol they’d consumed off; Caroline had swallowed a de-tox pill, cleared away the effects of the drinking, and gone back to work. She hadn’t expected to be caught in the middle of a war zone.
The sound of shooting was growing louder. She glanced around, frantically, as the noise grew louder, finding only a small table to hide under. The windows shattered and she dove for cover, crawling under the table and praying aloud to God to help her out of her position. She felt the reassuring shape of the terminal in her pocket — a direct link back to the BBC in London — and activated it. The signal refused to form; there was absolutely no contact with the BBC at all.
A voice was shouting something defiant in French; seconds later, there was another explosion, much louder than any others. Caroline whimpered as the noises grew louder and louder; she could hear shouts in a language she couldn’t understand. Something bad was going on; the thought that it might have been a drill was rapidly dismissed as wishful thinking. No one, as far as she knew, would be crazy enough to fire off live ammunition during a drill, particularly not into a room where a civilian was trying to work. Something thudded against the side of the building and she cringed again before realising that it hadn’t killed her; she could hear the approaching rumble of engines… and then the sound of a tank’s main gun.
She scrabbled at her terminal, trying to use it for one of its more secret functions. The BBC had kept them quiet over the years; it was also capable of scanning nearby radio bands and trying to record and play them back. She didn’t understand why no one knew about that — the technology’s capabilities had been in the public domain for over a year — but it would work in her favour; she scanned the different radio signals nearby, only to hear more static and bursts of Russian words. She didn’t speak Russian; she couldn’t make out at all what was actually happening.
Something new flickered into the radio, on one of the civilian bands. It should have been a Polish radio station, now it was something else, something sinister. “Citizens of Poland, this is an emergency announcement,” it said. “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.”
Caroline felt her blood run cold as yet another burst of shooting echoed out over the camp. She was far from stupid; the message had to mean that something had really gone wrong, and she was in the middle of a camp that was under attack. She felt for her press pass carefully, hoping that she still had it safe; that would get her out of trouble if the Russians caught her. The sound of a helicopter rose in the air; a dark shadow fell over the window for a moment, then the noise of rockets being launched echoed through the window. The helicopter was attacking targets in the camp!
She clicked the terminal off and pocketed it, then tried to decide what to do. The shooting was dying down, but she didn’t know who had won; she didn’t know anything at all that might tell her which way to run. She thought about trying to sneak out of the camp, but that only worked in movies; the heroic stars always had three things going for them that Caroline didn’t have. They had a sympathetic scriptwriter, perfect grooming and chest sizes that could only be described by resorting to imaginary numbers. They always found a guard who could be seduced, or turned out to be lesbian vampires, or had something else up their sleeves. She had no military training; until recently, she had never seen a gun. What could she do?
The voices were growing closer, shouts and barks in an unfamiliar language. She listened carefully and felt her blood run cold; she was almost sure that that was Russian being spoken. She spoke German and French in addition to English; it was none of those languages, but something very different. It wasn’t Arabic, or another Asian language; it was something else, very different. Her second boyfriend — before he had embraced the Buddhist way of life — had once taken her to see a Russian show; it sounded very much like that. It sounded as if the Russians had won the fight.
The door exploded inwards and two black-clad men entered, their weapons raised and ready for a fight. Caroline cringed backwards, but there was little real cover and they saw her. One of them barked a command at her in Russian as their eyes met, but she didn’t understand him at all. He motioned with his rifle, but she was too terrified to move; fear had turned her legs into jelly. She was bitterly aware that Hannah — what had happened to her in the fighting? — would have handled it better, but she was so scared. She couldn’t even breathe!
The leader soldier grabbed her arm and roughly pulled her out of her hiding place, pushing her against the wall and ignoring her protests and gasps of pain. His hands roughly, but quickly frisked her, removing everything from her pockets, from a pair of pens to the terminal and her notepad, both of which he dumped on the table and left for later. He found her ID card hanging around her neck and inspected it briefly before leaving it; Caroline was too scared even to speak. Her hands were quickly caught and secured behind her back with a plastic tie; she was left leaning against the wall, her eyes blurred with tears she could no longer wipe away, while the Russians searched the room, removing anything that even looked dangerous. Caroline had once attended an inquest into an overzealous police officer who had confiscated a microwave on the grounds that it had computer chips inside; the Russians made him look like an amateur. Their paranoia seemed to have no limits.