“Time to go,” he said, already cataloguing what they would need. If they were really lucky, their attack would be blamed on a terrorist group, but even if it wasn't, it would hardly matter. All that mattered was attacking the very fabric of British society; Iraqis had known for years that Saudi Arabia was behind their woes after the American Invasion, but they hadn’t been able to muster the determination to rebuild and crush Saudi, because the insurgency kept burning away at their new fabric. His force had been trained in destabilisation; a single car bomb could do the work of thousands of air bombs if placed in the right place. “Once we get back, we’ll find a way of using Hazel’s car to take a bomb past the job centre.”
Security in the heart of Edinburgh and around the aircraft crash site was pretty heavy, with nervous armed police officers patrolling some parts of the streets. There were fewer cars on the streets; posters had already begun to appear, printed off by some wag, about the need to conserve fuel. IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY VITAL? One asked; GO HOME, HENRY — ALL THE VILLAGE KNOWS YOUR JOURNEY IS NOT IMPORTANT, another warned, with the image of a beaten middle-aged man being kicked off by a railway guard. Edinburgh was slowly coming to grips with the thought that it was at war; as he turned into the street that held Hazel’s house, he saw other signs of panic. Some of the buildings near their building had been abandoned the day after the war began; he’d watched the people going with only a few suitcases, abandoning the rest to the looters.
“Home again,” Ossetia commented dryly. They climbed out of the car and locked the doors. There was a droll tone in his voice; after they bombed the job centre, they would have to change their bases before some bright spark with a CCTV system and supporting footage put everything together and found them. “Are you going to feed your pet…?”
Ustinov opened his mouth to reply, and then he saw them; men appearing from the houses, weapons held high. They weren’t police; they held themselves with an easy confidence, an ease of motion, an awareness that they were the best, that screamed Special Forces at him. Somehow, they had been detected; somehow…
“HANDS IN THE AIR,” a voice bellowed, loudly enough to shake the entire neighbourhood. They had to have all been evacuated; somehow, the British security forces had managed to get into position without them even noticing that they had driven right into a trap. If they had still been in the car, escape might have been possible, but in the time it would take to get back in, they could be killed several times over. “THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING…!”
Ossetia snatched up his pistol and fired once towards one of the figures; a sniper bullet blew the top of his head off, before he could even hit one of the SAS soldiers surrounding them. Ustinov stared at them, calculating, and knew that it was futile; he could only get himself killed, not even taking one of them with him. They had him directly in their sights and he knew it.
Carefully, he raised his hands above his head and waited for the end.
Chapter Thirty-Five: Rats and Sinking Ships
The problem with collaboration is that most people will never collaborate… until it seems to be the only rational choice. If the wind changes, the collaborators find themselves facing their outraged countrymen… in many cases merely for having tried to do the best they can. It is not given to humanity to know the outcome in advance — sometimes, it seems as if the best choice is to sell out for the best terms you can get.
Moscow, Russia
The terminal was dark and cold.
Prime Minister Zdeněk Kundera of the Czech Republic waited with as much patience as he could bring to bear on the situation. A kindly, almost scholarly man, Kundera knew that he was not cut out for the interplay of political power and naked violence that determined the future of most of the world, but then, the Czech Republic had never intended to play a major role in the world. The Czech Republic had been willing to commit itself to the European Union, but it had never imagined that it would be called upon to fight a serious war; commitments to peacekeeping missions and the occasional EUROFOR operation had been the limits of its involvement… until the 1st of June.
Kundera remembered the terror as missiles had crashed down into Prague, only sheer luck keeping him safe as buildings had shattered around him and the remains of his close-protection detail struggled to get him to safety. That had been found on a military base that had been lucky enough to survive almost intact; Kundera had found himself Prime Minister in the middle of a war. The President was dead; nearly a third of the Czech Armed Forces had been wiped out in the opening shots. Kundera had struggled to try to pull a defence together, but it had seemed futile; the sheer violence of the Russian attack into Poland and later Germany had stunned him. He knew where he was debating in Parliament, or making points in front of the cameras; he was completely out of place in a war zone. Russian aircraft were flying in and out of his airspace, and he was unable to issue orders…
And then the Russian Ambassador had appeared. Kundera had never liked the Russian Ambassador; he was too… slick, with an ‘I know something you don’t’ attitude that grated on Kundera’s own sense of the appropriate. It had been obvious since the missiles had fallen what he had known that Kundera hadn’t known… and his role in the disaster that had overtaken the Czech Republic was obvious. Polish refugees were flooding into the Republic’s territory… and Russian soldiers wouldn’t be far behind.
“Go to Moscow,” the Ambassador had said, after an agonising session of insincere pleasantries and half-hidden gloating. “They’ll meet you there, perhaps offer you something you want, an end to the war you didn’t expect.”
Kundera had stared at him, wanting to throw it back in his face and not quite daring. “Or what will happen to the Republic?”
The Ambassador had leaned forward. His breath smelt terrible… or was Kundera imagining it? He had never considered that he would be in the position, one day, of accepting or rejecting what was an ultimatum in everything, but name. Russian forces were only ten kilometres away from the Polish border; his military officers had warned him that they could be halfway to Prague within a day, and the Czech Republic had nothing that could stop them. Kundera knew that he had no choice, but to listen; he just wanted to block out the screams.
“They’re prepared to offer you a place in the new world order,” the Ambassador had whispered. There was nothing subtle about it at all; there was none of the nuances and polite inanities that Kundera knew and loved. “If you refuse the offer, as generous as it is, your country will not like the second offer at all.”
And so Kundera stood on the tarmac in the dark, waiting. He understood the reason, of course; his briefers had worked desperately to brief him on what the Russians might do to convince him that further resistance, such as it had been, was futile. The wait was one reason, a less-than-subtle way of informing him that President Aleksandr Sergeyevich Nekrasov did not consider him important enough to arrange for either rooms, or an immediate meeting. The cooling metal of the aircraft that had flown him to Moscow, escorted all the way by Russian fighters, ticked in the night; the crew remained inside, wondering if they would ever be allowed to leave again.