“I'm sorry,” he whispered. Anastazy either didn’t hear or didn’t respond. “I wish it could be different.”
Silently, he cursed the Prime Minister under his breath; had he already been thrown out of office in disgust? Everyone had been saying that everything was fine… except those who used the Internet and other media to try and fight the culture wars. The experts had been predicting that the current government would remain in power, but the rise of tension within Europe might have surprised them all; would a far-right party be elected into power soon? The French National Front had been hotly tipped to win the last general election in France… and only the assassination of their leader had torpedoed their campaign. Might it have been different?
He shook his head. There was no point, now, in wondering over what might have been.
“Shit,” Matthews snapped. Robinson felt his head jerk up as the CADS started to rotate their missiles into firing position. “We have two Russian fighter-bombers, I think; closing in on us and targeting…”
His voice broke off as two black shapes skimmed along the ground, almost at treetop level, dropping their bombs on what looked like a harmless field. Robinson almost didn’t see it, but the single SAM rising up from the field was impossible to miss, not like the hail of rifles being fired at the Russian aircraft. The Russians were rising now, banking as they caught sight of the CADS… and Matthews fired. Two streaks of light marked the rise of the missiles; two massive explosions marked the deaths of the fighters, revealing their position to the enemy.
“We’d better keep moving,” Inglehart muttered. “Whoever is there may have to wait.”
Robinson shrugged. “I think I want to know who they are, first,” he said. “We might need their help.”
Anastazy was shouting in Polish; the reply came back in German. “They’re Germans,” he said. He sounded as if he couldn’t decide to be relieved or angry. “God alone knows how they got here.”
The Germans turned out to be the remains of an infantry unit that had been positioned in a camp to the south of Warsaw.
“They attacked us at the same time they hit you,” the leader said. Major Cajus Bekker was a short grim man with a deadly scar running down his face and an air of competence that Robinson rather liked. “They hit us with bombs, and then missiles struck the barracks and FAE bombs completed the massacre. Nearly seven hundred men, all wiped out in a few moments; we decided that we had to head for Germany before the noose tightened.”
Anastazy leaned forward. “The noose?”
“The Russians are moving,” Bekker said. “We were lucky; we had a communications van along and we managed to talk briefly to a handful of Poles using the more obscure bands before the jamming caught them. There are two major Russian thrusts developing and they’re moving to cut off Warsaw and destroy as many of our units as we can.”
Robinson felt his blood run cold. If they had stayed where they had been, they would have been quite likely to be destroyed as well. They had stood off a small commando attack, but how could they have stood off an attack with tanks and rockets? He glanced to the east and heard more aircraft and distant explosions; the front of the war was moving on fast.
“We must have been noticed and they had a go at us an hour ago,” Bekker continued. “They killed the communications truck and more of my men, then we lost them, and then they found us again and would have killed us all, if you hadn’t interfered.”
“Sheer luck,” Robinson said. “Did you manage to make contact with EUROFOR higher command?”
“Not a peep,” Bekker said. “My tech thought that the satellites had been destroyed as they weren’t responding to her and that’s supposed to be impossible, but as we don’t have any communications truck any longer, we can’t continue to try to get a response.”
“We couldn’t raise the satellites either,” Matthews said, from his perch. He had been supervising the reloading of the CADS, but he had warned Robinson privately that they didn’t have that many missiles left. “We’re supposed to receive a permanent data download from them, but in the absence of anything useful coming from them, the only thing we can assume is that the satellites are destroyed or otherwise out of service.”
Anastazy looked up. “I have a duty to my country,” he said. “Once we reach the training base, I will leave you and join whatever unit was on duty at the time of the war, and take the fight to the Russians.”
Robinson didn’t bother to argue. “We can’t stay here,” he said. If Anastazy had made that choice, he would respect it, even if he believed that it was a stupid choice. How could one man, or even a small Company, change the face of the war? “Hopefully, they’ll be wary about sending more aircraft after us, but if they want to find us, they could send infantry after us.”
“They must have bigger fish to fry,” Matthews pointed out. “We’re only two CADS and thirty soldiers, hardly war-winning material…”
“It hardly matters,” Robinson said. “I intend to get to the German border and hopefully find out what is going on there. Major… what do you and your men intend to do?”
Bekker gave Anastazy a grim look. “The same,” he said. Robinson winced; he had been hoping that perhaps Bekker had known something that they could use to strike back, or at least get back in touch with higher command. The presence of a hidden armoured division with air support would have been a nice surprise, but the only two European armoured divisions in Poland were likely to be under heavy attack. “The sooner we move, the better.”
They passed through several villages as they drove onwards. Anastazy insisted on stopping long enough to tell the villagers what was actually happening; all they’d heard had been the Russian radio broadcast telling them to remain in their homes. For farmers, that wasn't an option; they had to keep working or the farms would go bust. Anastazy spoke, bitterly, of European farming regulations that had been driving the farmers out of business; taxes, more red tape, everything that farmers dreaded wrapped up into one. The Russians needed food; Robinson wondered if the Russians would make the farmers grow as much as they could, or would they simply collectivise the farms as they had done in the days of the Soviet Union.
He looked to the east. Was there any resistance at all? His force, and the remains of the German force, was on the run… and they hadn’t seen a single friendly aircraft. If the Russians had really been landing behind Polish lines, they might run into Russians in front of them as well, and that would be even worse. The question of fuel continued to nag at him; European units could take all kinds of fuel — the only real benefit that had come from integration — and they had taken some from the villages, but what happened when they ran out? Matthews had warned that they might have to leave the CADS on auto-engage and abandon them; there seemed to be little choice.
He turned his head to the west and kept walking, one step at a time.
In no particular order, Natasha Belova was brown-haired, beautiful enough to set hearts fluttering even as a child and one of the smartest Russian women on the planet. She had won a scholarship at age twelve and had spent ten years in America, learning from the best, before spending a year in Japan, finally returning to Russia to share what she had learned in the field of computer science with her fellow Russians. Natasha had been one of thousands of Russians who had studied abroad, spies in all, but name; she had taken what the Americans had shown her and used it to benefit Russia.