Lommerde’s eyes went wide. He was far from stupid, after all. “General… do you think that they could reach Britain?”
Langford hesitated. “It would be a formidable undertaking,” he said, soft-pedalling it as best as he could. The Russians would have to secure all of France before they even thought of trying to leap across the Channel, but with the French distracted in the North, they might well manage to secure France within a month. It all depended on just how much control they thought they needed; would they want every last problem terminated, or would they settle for holding the vital points and waiting? “I don’t think that we need to worry about that for a while.”
“But this is Britain,” Lommerde protested. “Such things don’t happen here…”
Langford thought about that as the helicopter carried him back towards London. No one had understood that the Russians were planning an invasion of Europe, even if there had been hints and signs of possible trouble. Europe had known about the capabilities of the Russian forces, Europe had known about Russian plans for the Cold War invasion that everyone had feared, but Europe hadn’t put all the tiny bits of information together. They had pushed at Russia, in the Ukraine, in Serbia, in even North Africa, without a thought as to the possibility of a violent Russian response. The FCO had considered that the Russians were just pontificating from time to time, and if their views were taken into consideration, they wouldn’t cause trouble.
He scowled. The American data made it clear what the Russians had been planning… and why they had even made friendly overtures of their own. The EUROFOR unit from Sweden, in the Ukraine, had been attacked brutally, just like the EUROFOR forces in Poland, and had been crushed without mercy. The survivors, he was sure, would have been shipped into a prison camp somewhere. The Irish unit had been luckier; they had scattered into the countryside, but how long could they survive without supplies? The Russians had plenty of allies in the Ukraine; already, they were handing over security duties to them and moving more units towards the west.
It was the same story in the Balkans. Serbian units had attacked the EUROFOR forces in the Balkans, and then moved on into Kosovo, where they had promptly started to remind the natives of why they had been chased out in the first place. The Balkans had been caught up in the war; aided by Russian aircraft, the remaining EUROFOR units fought a desperate battle to survive, some of them even surrendering to the Russians, rather than face the Serbs. Years of humiliation demanded blood; there were even reports that Turkish forces were considering a move into Greece. Thousands attempted to flee to Italy, only to discover that the Italians had their own problems; the Libyan forces that attempted to attack Italy discovered that the Italian military reputation was nonsense. The fighting raged on…
“Welcome back, General,” Sara said. Her eyes were lowered; she had to know that he hadn’t been happy about being sedated. “Was your trip successful?”
“Yes, and no,” Langford said shortly. He didn’t want to discuss it. “Are they in the briefing room?”
Sara nodded and led him to the room he was starting to slowly, but very surely detest. The CJHQ had never been designed for long-term occupancy and it showed; the work on establishing a proper seat of government was going slowly, even though it was obvious that something would be needed, if only to give the Russians something to shoot at. If they found the CJHQ, they would launch a missile at it… and the CJHQ was not designed to take a bombing. A single JDAM would put it out of use permanently.
“General,” Erica said. She looked tired; she hadn’t taken a sedative herself. Langford made a mental note to order her to take one after the meeting; she didn’t look as if she could remain on her feet for much longer. “I have the latest report from both Britain and Europe.”
Langford lifted an eyebrow. Had they at last managed to make contact with someone in authority? “The good news is that we managed to make contact with a French General, in the south of France, and warned him about the dangers of the Russian offensive,” she said. “The bad news is that he cannot disengage from the war against the Algerians; they’re not that competent, compared to the French forces, but there are a lot of them and Russian aircraft are providing a lot of support. The entire south of France is going to be devastated; the same, more or less, goes for Spain and Portugal. We had an emergency transmission up-linked from Gibraltar; the Governor doesn’t believe that they can hold out for much longer under the shelling. Everyone on the Rock is stuck.”
Langford could see it now; the Russians would let the Algerians and the Moroccans serve as cannon fodder while they finished off the Germans, and then turned on their allies. The Russians had no time for radical Islam; the Algerians would discover that the Russians had stuck a knife in their backs. A handful of Russian submarines could close their shipping lanes permanently… and the Algerians would never know who was really responsible.
“It gets worse,” Erica admitted. “The Russians have turned the German flank and have captured Hamburg; that suggests that they could push down into the Netherlands, and once they do that, we won’t be able to extract any more forces from Europe. I think we have to redouble our efforts to call them all out and extract as many Europeans as we can as well.”
She paused. “We have managed to make contact with our surviving units and ordered them to pull out,” she said. “Most of them will try to bring their allies along with them, others will have issues with abandoning their people, but I feel that we will be able to pull out around a thousand British servicemen and around twice that many Germans and Frenchmen. The main problem would be the equipment; it would be tricky to pull that out unless we get a secure harbour.”
“Dunkirk again,” Langford said. “Can we secure a harbour?”
“I believe that we could secure several places in Belgium,” Erica said. “The Russians will still need several days, perhaps even as long as a fortnight, before they reach the Belgium coast. Once we get some Royal Marines into the ports, some of which have been badly damaged, we should be able to start taking people out.” She paused. “There is a case that doing that is like declaring war on Belgium.”
“Ridiculous,” Langford snapped. The thought actually made him laugh dryly. “Do we have any contact with anyone in Belgium?”
“No one whom we recognise,” Erica said. “There are still thousands of garbled messages, but from the panic, there are no traces of the civil government at all. The real danger is that we might have to take thousands of refugees as well… hell, we should try and take as many as we can if we can use them to fight.”
Langford looked up at the map. “Can we spare the resources?”
“We won’t be committing anything more than a large Marine force,” Erica said. “Seven hundred men won’t make much difference to the situation inside Britain, which may have taken on a darker tone.” She scowled. “Sergeant Roach found a large cache of weapons in London, during the clear-out operation. The interesting thing is that none of the survivors from the area knew that it was there.”
The implications were obvious. “We have Russians underground somewhere,” Langford concluded. “Do we have any idea as to who?”
“We knew that they had commandos on our soil,” Erica said. “The point is… there were enough weapons there to make taking and holding a medium-sized city possible, for a while. The question is… how many more of them are there out there?”