She stood, now, in the centre of the American base and smiled. The soldiers of Unit One had searched the base and removed a handful of documents, but their commanding officer had told her that they were more or less useless. Captain Vladimir Ivanov had cursed the Americans, assuming that they had destroyed files, but Natasha had reassured him; the Americans had merely kept most of their information in their computers. The handful of books, articles and porn magazines were hardly vital strategic information. It was the computers, all around her, that were important; she could hardly wait to get inside them and see how the Americans had made them all tick.
She touched one and the screen lit up. The Americans used sensors on their computers these days; the system would probably recognise that she wasn't cleared for any information and refuse access, but that hardly mattered. The screen lit up… and showed nothing, nothing at all. A moment passed, and then an image of a Jolly Roger appeared, a tiny primitive GIF straight out of the early years of computing.
GUTEN MORGAN, INGLANDER SCRUM, printed on the screen. YOU HAF NO WAYS OF MAKIN ME TAK.
Natasha laughed… and sensed that something was wrong. She touched the side of the computer and felt something, an odd otherworldly tingle, passing through her arm. Muttering under her breath, she pulled at the panel, which came off. It should have refused to be opened, but it opened… and a massive cloud of dust billowed out at her. She jumped backwards, sneezing; the dust had caught in her throat. She gagged, reaching for her water bottle, and washed her mouth out before looking back at the computer. A terrible sense of doom overtook her.
“Shit,” she breathed. Only a few components, ones that she was sure had been home-produced, were still active; somehow, the remainder of the computers had been reduced to dust inside their cabinets, without letting her sense that anything was wrong. She opened a second, then a third, and then a fourth; it was the same story with all of them. Whatever the Americans had done, it would be impossible to recover any data or even more than a little useful data. “Bastards!”
Her grand triumph had just turned to dust.
Literally.
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Advance on Warsaw
Warsaw is burning. Warsaw is fighting its enemy in this last mortal battle. All the promises let us down, the help did not arrive. Lack of food and lack of potable water paralyses and weakens. Yet we fight: with the enemy, with the fire and with the epidemics. Everyone is fighting. Whole city is tied in this mortal struggle. You send us letters of compliments and best wishes from London and Paris. We don't want wishes any more, nor do we await your help. It's too late for help. Before it arrives there will be only rubble here, a corpses-covered, levelled terrain. What we await is revenge. We expect that you will start fighting one day, just like Warsaw is.
Near Warsaw, Poland
“The Americans screwed us!”
General Aleksandr Borisovich Shalenko found it hard to contain his fury, made worse by the fact that he knew that he had been the one who had concluded that they had managed to successfully take control of the American base intact. Major Fletcher had stated that he wouldn’t destroy any files… but he had already done it, somehow. The report from Natasha Belova, who had almost been in tears, had been clear; they would get nothing from the American systems, but dust.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” President Aleksandr Sergeyevich Nekrasov said. Shalenko felt his heart sink; the Russian Government had historically had a long history of blaming the messenger, or the commanding officer, for any mistakes, even if it hadn’t actually been their fault. Nekrasov was different, but at that moment, the remembrance that terror and death were very close was chilling. He had promised to secure the American base… and Fletcher had been laughing at him behind his weakness. “Still, we could hardly expect the Americans to roll over.”
Shalenko understood, once again, the frustration that led to atrocities. He had spent years rebuilding the professional Russian army and he had trained them, as best as he could, to avoid committing atrocities. He wouldn’t hesitate to cause a civilian slaughter if the civilians were in his way, but he shrank from mass slaughter for no good purpose. It was the task of the pacification units to continue preparing Poland — and the rest of Europe — for integration into the Russian Federation; they were criminals and Kazakhs, not true soldiers. They would also have Warsaw, once he took it; they were only in theory under his control.
His lips twitched. If they caused his supply lines to be broken, he’d kill them all personally.
“The Americans said that they would destroy nothing,” he snapped. He paused; Natasha’s report had been clear and concise, and it had reported an impossible precision of devastation. The computers had looked intact when he had walked through the base; Natasha had claimed that only the interior, part of the interior, had been damaged. The Americans had even engaged in a little taunting. “They broke the terms of their surrender!”
“The Americans have made it clear that the destruction was carried out as soon as Operation Stalin actually began,” Nekrasov said, coldly and very calmly. The chill in his voice worried Shalenko, even if it was not directed at him personally; the President seemed more angry at himself than anything else. “Under the circumstances, we could hardly treat them as surrendered prisoners who grabbed guns and started to shoot.”
He held up a hand before Shalenko could say anything. “No, we will honour what we told the American Government, through their Ambassador; the men will be returned to America though Turkey, which has agreed to take them,” he continued. “The loss of the computers and the other systems there is irritating; my people here can’t figure out how it happened. One thought is that the Americans somehow caused the molecules in the computers to come apart, but how…? No one seems to know.”
Shalenko nodded. “Mr President, one day we will be able to do it ourselves,” he said. “Did Unit One find anything of interest apart from American porn magazines?”
“Not much,” Nekrasov said. They shared a mischievous grin before Nekrasov was all business again. “What is the current status of the offensive?”
He could have downloaded it from the Battlespace Management System, Shalenko knew; his friend wanted his impressions, not the cold dispassionate figures. “We have secured most of our targets for paratrooper drops and supply lines,” he said. “The Shock Armies are spreading out to push deeper into Poland while the smaller armies are preparing to take Warsaw and secure the city. Once that is completed, we can turn our attention to further north and link up with the northern prongs.”
Nekrasov nodded once. “And resistance?”
“We have smashed most of their forces on the ground in the first few moments of actual combat,” Shalenko said, proudly. “A number of isolated units stood their ground and fought to the death, a handful more started to flee back to Germany. Air resistance has been almost non-existent; we have lost a handful of aircraft to ground-based systems and one accident at a captured airport. So far, there is no sign that the enemy has begun to organise coordinated resistance or even a general withdrawal. It will become harder from here, of course, but we have smashed most of the forces they would use against us.”
“That is acceptable work,” Nekrasov said, as they shared a glance. “What about the civilians?”
Shalenko winced. “There have been thousands of injuries or deaths,” he admitted. “Around twelve of our men have been remanded to the penal units on charges of rape and in one case shooting a child by accident. The general population in areas we occupy are staying in their homes, out of sight; there’s a lot of panic further west, despite our radio broadcasts. I fear that there will be more deaths before we have finished.”