“Granted,” Shalenko said shortly. The breakthrough had to be exploited as quickly as possible; the French Army had proven itself a tough opponent and if it managed to retreat into Nancy, he would have to flatten the town to kill them all, or starve them out in a long siege. “Has there been any progress on locating the enemy command post?”
“Intelligence believes that it has a rough location,” Anna said. “Do you want it targeted?”
“I want a commando team to move in,” Shalenko said. They had sent several hundred additional commandos behind French lines, waiting for opportunities like this one. “I want the commander alive if possible.”
He turned his attention back to the advance.
“Inform the reserves that they are to move back into the pre-prepared defences at Nancy,” Pelletier ordered, as calmly as he could. The sheer violence of the Russian attack had stunned him; it was the Second World War fought with modern weapons, and total command of the air. One of his handful of armoured units had been picked off from the air without ever having a chance to take a shot at the enemy. He could bleed the Russians out in Nancy; perhaps the remaining citizens would forgive his memory, one day, for the devastation that was about to be visited on their city. “I want…”
There was a burst of firing from outside. He cursed as his subordinates grabbed weapons; they all knew what that meant. Russian doctrine called for decapitating the enemy force as quickly as possible; he was only surprised that they hadn’t ordered a bomber to take a JDAM and blow the command post away before anyone knew what had hit them. The remaining French SAM missiles had been fired off against other bombers and there were no more left to contest the air. The command post shook as grenades — he had been in the infantry; he recognised the noise — detonated, sending chips of plaster falling down from the ceiling. The Russian commandos burst in… and some of his people raised their weapons, preparing to fight to the end. There were a series of quick shots and the armed personnel fell to the ground, dead. Blood and gore scattered everywhere…
“Which of you is the commander?” The Russian snapped. Pelletier saw his fate in that instant; collaboration, infamy beyond anything heaped on any past Frenchman, the treason to end all treason. He didn’t delude himself; he might have been wearing battle-dress instead of a fancy uniform, but the Russians would know who he was once they compared his face to their files. There really was no other choice; Pelletier had never fancied the role of Darlan and his fellows for himself. “If the commander makes himself known to us…”
Pelletier was still raising his pistol when they shot him through the head. He died with a smile on his face, laughing at them; they had failed, in the end, to take him prisoner and ruling France would be just that bit harder. The final thought before darkness failed to quell the smile; France had made her last stand…
And lost.
Chapter Forty: Alone
Goodnight then: sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France! Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.
Near Dover, England
The line of soldiers looked bedraggled in the rain as they stumbled into barracks that had been hastily prepared for them. In the semi-darkness, they looked beaten, broken; Langford would have liked to have believed that it was only an illusion. The British Army, one of the toughest and most professional armies in the world, had had its collective arse soundly kicked… along with the French, the Germans and the Poles. They all knew that, even if the civilians hadn’t quite realised yet; the scale of the defeat had been almost total.
Langford looked up at Erica. “It’s confirmed, then?”
Erica nodded once. She wore no parka, nothing covering her short blonde hair; rain dripped through it and pressing it to her skin. “HMS Vengeance missed its radio call,” she said. “The Americans are looking for it, but I think we have to assume the worst; the nuclear submarine might well have been lost with all hands.”
“Along with the missiles,” Langford said. He looked down towards the other members of the party, half-hidden in the darkness. “You know what this means, of course?”
“Yes,” Erica said grimly. “Any hope that we might have of threatening nuclear attack to force the Russians to break off is more or less gone. We got rid of the other weapons under the European convention on nuclear weapons; the absence of mushroom clouds over France suggests that the French have also lost their control over their nukes. Now that Paris has fallen…”
Langford stared down at the tattered soldiers. “Just how bad was it?”
“We recovered around a thousand soldiers, four hundred of them from other European countries,” Erica said. “Major-General McLachlan had nearly twenty thousand soldiers under his command; we recovered barely six hundred of them before the Russians drove us out of Ostend. There may be other groups trying to get home, but for the moment, we must assume that they are either dead or prisoners of war.”
Langford sat down on the nearby bench and tried to come to grips with it. The British Army hadn’t suffered such losses in a single campaign since… offhand, he couldn’t remember a single campaign that had claimed so many lives. Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan had claimed around nine hundred between them, before the new government had abandoned the Americans and scuttled for safety in political appeasement; had there ever been such losses since the Second World War? The First World War was strewn with blood, even if there had been less shed than politicians claimed these days; there had been no war since 1945 that had claimed so many lives. The Germans and the French would have taken far more causalities; their territory had actually been invaded directly…
Invasion…
“They’re going to be coming for us next,” he said, very softly. He had had the thought before, but until recently it had refused to materialise in his head as a possibility. “We never even planned for invasion; the possibility wasn’t even considered.”
Erica nodded grimly. “We have been studying the attack the Russians used on Denmark and Norway,” she said. “They would have some problems applying it to us, but they could do it, in theory… and if they managed to land, they would be able to rapidly reinforce their forces and advance towards London.”
She paused. “They might even have some help,” she said. “That woman in Edinburgh gave us a break, but…”
Langford scowled. “The prisoner told us nothing?”
“I don’t think he knows anything,” Erica said. “Oh, the Russians did a lot to prepare him for interrogation and possible torture, but we borrowed some of the American manuals and drugs and worked on him. He may be hiding some details, but… he knows nothing beyond the existence of someone called Control who gave them their final orders, and then vanished. He may well have been killed in the first round of hostilities, which would be quite ironic, but in any case their orders were to continue to attack until they were caught, or they were ordered to extract themselves.”