He checked the gunner’s panel quickly. “Choose your targets,” he muttered. Little strands of laser light, connecting each of the tanks to one another, flickered out, designating targets. The Russians would probably detect a laser targeting system, but one wasn’t needed for the Eurotanks, not at this range. The Russians were still coming along, watching for trouble, but unaware of the presence of his tanks. “Stand by…”
The image of the lead Russian tank grew in front of him. “Fire!”
The Eurotank was the result of seventy years of armoured warfare experience, much of it British, American or German. It barely shuddered as it fired a main antitank shell towards the enemy tank, catching it completely by surprise. The gunner didn’t hesitate; even before the shell had struck its target, he was swinging the barrel of the main gun around to engage a second target and…
Six Russian tanks exploded. The high-energy shell had been developed to defeat the latest armour; they punched right through the Russian tanks and exploded. He saw the turret of one of the Russian tanks exploding into the air, wrapped in a wreath of flame, and come crashing to the ground. The gunner fired a second shot, then a third… and then the Russians started to turn their own guns at terrifying speed.
“Get us out of here,” Markus snapped. The driver didn’t need to be told twice; he hit the engine and the tank leapt backwards, heading as quickly as it could down the hill. The foliage seemed to explode as a hail of Russian fire cut through the woodlands that had hidden the tanks, but only one of Markus’ tanks was hit and destroyed. There were no survivors. “Move it!”
A Russian tank crested the hill, its guns already searching for a new target; two of Markus’s tanks fired at it and disintegrated it. The passive sensors were blinking up alerts; the Russians were sending in their helicopters to cover their tanks, which would be moving around the hill, trying to outflank the Europeans. The driver kept them moving as fast as they could trying to get out of the firing range, while Russian infantry appeared, holding antitank weapons.
“I think we made them mad,” the gunner remarked, as he fired at them with the tank’s machine guns. Russians fell under his fire or dived for cover, trying to escape the machine guns, as the Russian helicopters swooped down. The Eurotank’s sensors were working completely now; it fired an automatic missile at the first Russian helicopter, blowing it apart in a sheet of flame. The second helicopter fired a stream of rockets at the tanks and killed two of them, roasting their crews inside the flames. A Russian tank burst out of nowhere, narrowly missing Markus’s tank with a high-explosive shell; they destroyed it with a single shot. A second tank was hit in the treads and skidded to a halt, but he realised that its main gun was still working.
“You’re telling me,” Markus said, as the tank reached the road. The driver gunned the engine and the tank drove rapidly away from the encounter, the crew knowing that they had only a limited amount of time before the Russians gave chase or called in a close-air support aircraft to finish the surviving two tanks off. “Get us to the next firing point!”
He found himself very calm, even as the Russians stopped their pursuit; he’d faced his first major encounter with the enemy, and survived. Over half his force had died, but he had survived… and he promised himself that he would exact revenge for what the Russians had done to his crewmen. A shadow fell across the tank and the sensors screamed a warning… just as the Russian attack helicopter blew the Eurotank away.
The road to Warsaw lay open.
“Excellent work,” Shalenko murmured, as he watched from the command vehicles. The remains of 7th Panzer had dug themselves in well, but they had exposed themselves to his fire when they had engaged his lead units, and he had far more tanks than the European forces had. He didn’t understand it; the Europeans could have built thousands more Eurotanks for the sums of money they had spent upon their headquarters, but they had chosen to waste the money instead. He could only be grateful; the Germans had handled themselves well… as had the French, further north. If they had had more tanks, air cover, and advance warning, the attack would have bogged down.
“General, the advance units are requesting permission to enter the city,” Captain Anna Ossipavo said. “They believe that resistance will be minimal.”
Shalenko nodded. “Remind them that they are to use the minimum force consummate with the survival of their commands,” he said. He looked towards the burning city; smoke and flames were rising into the air. “The President wants Warsaw fairly intact.”
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Stillness Upon the Sea
There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
HMS Churchill, Mediterranean Sea
“Still nothing?”
“No, sir,” the communications officer said. “There’s nothing from EUROFOR HQ, Marseilles or PJHQ.”
Captain Adam Ward scowled. HMS Churchill, a Jean Monnet-class surface control destroyer, had been assigned to the Standing Force in the Mediterranean Sea, attempting to block the flow of immigrants to France, Italy and Spain. It seemed more like a public relations job than anything else; the Standing Force was more armed and equipped to fight a major sea battle, rather than blockade a coastline. They could have done it perfectly if they had been allowed to engage every target they saw and generally treat it as a war, but no, the European Union had to be civilised about it. That meant that every ship had to treat the enemy — and the crew referred to the immigrants as the enemy — with respect; Marines had to board their ships and turn them back, sometimes under gunfire.
He scowled. It wasn’t a public relations job; it was a public relations disaster. When new immigrants were picked up and escorted to the camps in France and Spain, it was a disgraceful failure on the part of the French Admiral Bellemare Vadenboncoeur; when the fleet actually boarded a ship, it was a disgraceful display of French bullying — as if all the ships in the fleet were French. The Churchill had been designed for major-level combat, not for a blockade; it showed in the way the crew reacted to their mission. They would have preferred to have gone with the Falklands Task Force.
The display flickered as a handful of aircraft appeared, heading out from Algeria. The Islamic Government in Algeria endlessly blamed the Standing Force for all Algeria’s woes, that and the French. The Algerians had driven the French out years ago, well before Ward had even been born, but the new government was fond of issuing threats against the fleet from time to time, just to remind them that they were there. The Algerians were encouraging people to flee their country, or so Intelligence said; it was amazing how many Muslims wanted to flee the Islamic paradise. Algerian Radio told of a day when they would rule all of Europe, but they had been saying that for so long that no one took it seriously.
He looked back at the communications officer. “Has the Admiral issued any orders?”
“No, sir,” the communications officer said. Admiral Bellemare Vadenboncoeur was a fairly competent, if uninspired, naval tactician, one of two Admirals who were considered to be Europe-rated. The other was German and in the Baltic Sea. Vadenboncoeur knew what he was doing, but didn’t have the Nelson Touch; he wouldn’t take risks with any of his large ships if he could avoid it. “There seems to be a great deal of confusion, but no real answers.”