He covered his ears as the weapons fired, launching thousands of missiles and shells into the air, firing in long rippling salvos. The Russians had taken the original design and run with it, improving on the idea and adding some refinements of their own. Every minute, the Russians would launch thirty rockets towards the French position, reloading and attacking again as quickly as they could, while the heavy guns would aim for more specific targeting, using satellites to watch the battlezone. The return fire was limited and badly coordinated; only one MLRS was struck by a French shell and blown to kingdom come by the blast. Counter-battery radars zeroed in on the location of the French batteries and pounded them, blasting their operators and their guns to dust. It had been a French General — Shalenko couldn’t remember who — who had said that ‘fire kills;’ the French were learning, once again, the truth of that maxim.
He tapped a command into the terminal that Anna held. Neither of them could hear each other under the noise of the guns. The command was simple enough; the battle had been planned beforehand, and so far was all going to plan. That wouldn’t survive for long, but Shalenko intended to push his advantage as much as possible. The command echoed through the network; ADVANCE!
Lieutenant Jean-Paul Foch felt his bones rattling as the Russian attack shook their line of makeshift bunkers; the pounding seemed never-ending. His unit had been shattered by the first Russian attacks and had been pulled back together with several other units, a company that held only fifty men, now assigned to holding a section of the line. Foch, who had only joined the Army because it offered more excitement than most jobs in France, was trembling; no one had ever expected that they would be fighting through France again… and he had now fought two different sets of enemies.
The bombardment was slowing; some of his men were twitching masses on the ground, despite the kicks from their comrades and the burly sergeant who had taken Foch under his wing. Foch’s ears were ringing; he could barely hear the shout of alarm as the first soldier crawled to their vision tube and peered out, seeing the advancing Russians closing in on their trench. Foch had prepared as best as he could — the sergeant had been a mass of good ideas and some discipline for the soldiers — but it was still terrifying as the soldiers rushed to their firing positions; the Russian bombardment had devastated the landscape. Foch had been born in Nancy; he didn’t want to think about what might have happened if some of the Russian shells had landed in the city. His three sisters lived there; one of them had never come home after the chaos began, the others had only been able to talk to him once before the Russians had started to move towards France. They had told him to run, to save himself; only the thought of failing the sergeant had kept him at his post. He would not run while he could hold himself in place.
He caught the sergeant’s eye and held up three fingers. He could still barely hear and knew that the others would have been deafened; the sergeant passed him a flare gun that they had liberated from a naval store as they had completed the task of suppressing the insurgency in Paris. They had planned for being temporarily deaf — at least he hoped it was temporary — and the green flash would be the sign to open fire. He watched the Russians as they moved forward, carefully watching for mines; Foch just wished that they had had any to emplace. France had only a few mines stockpiled and all of them had been designed for use against tanks; the various treaties against mines had robbed France of a desperately needed defence system. They had tried to rig up some mines, but they had all been primitive; they had probably been disabled by the bombardment.
“Fire,” he shouted, at the top of his voice, firing the flare into the air. It burst in a green flash of light; his soldiers opened fire, catching the Russians almost completely by surprise. A dozen Russians fell to the ground with lethal wounds, others threw themselves down and scrambled back as quickly as they could; mercilessly, the French defenders mowed them down before they could escape. A handful tried to throw grenades, but they all fell short, blasting holes in the barbed wire. He muttered a curse under his breath, wishing that he could hear himself; the Russians would be back at any moment.
“Sir,” a voice whispered, right in his ear. The sergeant had to have bellowed at the top of his own voice to be heard through the damage; Foch had heard tales of veterans from various wars who had never been able to hear again. The sergeant was pointing towards rising plumes of dust; for a long moment, Foch didn’t understand what he was looking at, and then he understood… just as the first armoured monster appeared, heading right towards the trench. The Russian tank was massive and seemingly unstoppable; the soldiers wavered as bursts of machine gun fire tore into the trench. “Here!”
Foch grinned as the sergeant passed him one of the Knife missile launchers, rapidly activating the missile launcher and putting it to his shoulder, taking a bearing on the tank. The Knife had been another joint European project, but unlike most of them, it was loved by all of the soldiers — not least because it had escaped being tagged with the irritating ‘euro’ prefix. The missile was reputed to be able to burn through the frontal armour of an American tank; he hoped that it would make short work of the Russian monster that was closing in on them. The Russian tank was painted green, he noticed; the driver was swinging the machine guns around…
He fired; the force of the rocket launcher pushing him backwards as the rocket screeched out of the launcher and directly into the Russian tank, which glowed red and exploded as its ammunition detonated. The soldiers whooped and concentrated on mowing down the Russian soldiers who had revealed themselves following the tank; the sergeant was carrying another Knife instead of a heavy machine gun, watching for more Russian tanks appearing to try to attack them. A second tank appeared, and then a third; Foch reached for the second flare gun and prepared to use it…
The sergeant caught onto his arm. The red flare gun was the signal to retreat. The first enemy tank was grinding up towards them as the sergeant passed Foch the Knife and picked up a bag of explosives they had been using to set booby-traps and makeshift mines everywhere, hefting it in one strong hand. Foch stared at him for a moment, and then a burst of fire brought him back to reality; he fired the second Knife on one quick motion, even as the sergeant threw the bag of explosives and detonators under the third Russian tank. There was a savage explosion; the Russian tank was blown over by the blast, rolling over and over until it caught fire and burned merrily away. More Russian soldiers had appeared, this time with mortars and other light weapons; the Frenchmen kept their heads down as the rounds started to fall near their trench.
Something at the corner of his eye caught his attention. Foch swung around to see a black aircraft, flying very close to the ground, closing in rapidly from the west. The black cross of the aircraft seemed to be hanging in the sky as it closed in… and started to open fire, shredding his men like paper dolls. Foch opened his mouth to call a retreat… and then hot bursts of pain tore through his body, and then darkness swept him away in its comforting embrace.
“We are breaking through the main defence line,” Anna said. Shalenko nodded; the casualties had been heavier than he had expected, but the French had almost no reserves at all. Their only armoured units had moved out to engage the Russian armour and had been picked off from the air by Russian bombers; far too many Frenchmen had retreated into the nearest town, where they were engaging the Russian soldiers in house-to-house combat. Russian bombers were roaming the skies unchallenged after the first hail of SAM missiles; everything that even looked suspicious was targeted for destruction. “The commander of 2nd Shock is requesting permission to exploit the breakthrough.”