The ports along the coast saw a massive exodus as French shipping fled the ports, heading to Britain, or to America and Canada, trying to escape the Russians. The Russians came in the wake of the fleeing refugees, carefully taking control of the areas that interested them, leaving pockets of resistance to die on the vine. In some places, they faced determined opposition, but in others, they were able to go where they wanted, or were even greeted as liberators. They represented law and order; for those who had hidden from the insurgencies, the Russians were even more welcome than French soldiers. The Russians had a stout attitude to Islamic terrorism, some of them whispered, and besides, the Russians were the winning side. Would it not be better to work with them until the wind changed? Besides, the Russians would show les salarabes who was boss…
A week passed as the Russians advanced into the south. French soldiers who met them found themselves arrested and sent to detention centres; French civil servants, policemen, and local government workers found themselves meeting the same fate. The Russians surrounded the hotbeds of insurgency and waited, patiently, for them to run out of food. The message was loud and clear; the insurgents could come out, naked, or they could starve. Civilians fled, chased by fire from their more radical fellows; the radicals rapidly discovered that the Russians were prepared to fire heavy weapons at snipers and that their supposed allies didn’t like them much. Only a small percentage of France’s Muslim population had known about the insurgency in advance; many of the young, trapped in an endless cycle of poverty, had welcomed the chance to take it out on the native French. They had looted, raped and burned their way through the cities, now, facing death by starvation or heavy guns, they too voted with their feet. The Russians scooped up everyone who came out naked — those who came out dressed were shot down in case they were suicide bombers — and processed them; they were identified, segregated by sex, and then sent into detention camps. The remaining fanatics, those who were not shot in the back by their own people, were rapidly wiped out.
Even as they set up the detention camps, under heavy guard, the Russians were searching through Europe’s prisons. Many of the prisoners had escaped, but over half had remained in their cells; the Russians added the prison guards to their detention camps and carefully inspected each prison’s records. The mild criminals, the white-collar criminals, were sent to camps where they would be added to the workforce. The terrorist suspects met two different fates; those wanted by American authorities were sent to a camp near a port, where they would be transported to America. Those who the Americans didn’t want were quickly disposed of; the same went for the dangerous criminals. Murderers, traitors, child molesters… all met a final terrifying end.
They were merely the first to feel the weight of Russian power.
Chapter Forty-One: Covenants without Swords, Take One
Covenants without swords are, but words.
Warsaw, Poland
“Caroline Morgan, come forth.”
The voice stirred Caroline to her feet as she looked around the vast prison camp. The Russians hadn’t been violent, or brutal; they’d merely frogmarched them into a captured Polish truck and driven them towards Warsaw, towards what had once been a football stadium. With armed guards surrounding it, it had become a prison camp for captured EUROFOR and Polish personnel… and people who had been caught in the middle of the fighting.
Caroline had tried to keep herself together, even as the weeks slipped by with little chance of reparation or even being freed from the camp. She was lucky; as a civilian, she had full run of the camp, such as it was. The prisoners from the different military forces were shackled permanently to seats designed to survive the worst efforts of football yobs. Their condition was far more desperate than hers; from time to time, the Russians triggered the auto-washing system and used it to clean up the mess. For them, their lives had descended into hell.
Others had joined them. Two women, Zyta Konstancja and Melania Kazimiera, had also been shoved into the camp, along with two young children, both Melania’s daughters. Caroline had talked to them — the Russians didn’t seem to care what they did, provided they didn’t try to escape — and all they had done had been unlucky enough to be caught talking to a known resistance fighter. The fighter, from what Zyta had said, had been over sixty years old; the Russians had beaten him to death in front of her. They’d seen enough about Russian rule to know what was happening in Warsaw; the Russians were digging in for the long haul.
They’d talked in hushed whispers about registration, ration cards, and the promise of work. Many young men of Warsaw, those who were not connected to the military or the police, had gone to work for the Russians; it was the only way to feed their families. Caroline wanted to scream abuse at the handful of young men they saw every day, heading to dig graves or worse for the Russians, but she understood; the young men had had no choice, but to collaborate with the Russians. If most of Poland was in the same boat, resistance would be futile.
Marya had held out hope, for a while, that Captain Jacob Anastazy had survived; she had told Caroline that he was probably leading a resistance army by now, somewhere in the countryside. That dream had died the day the Russians had told her, without gloating, without even a leer, that Captain Jacob Anastazy was dead, killed in a gunfight along a motorway. It had been the fact that the Russians hadn’t even tried to convince her that had convinced her, finally, that they were telling the truth; Marya had cried herself to sleep that night and had been broken afterwards.
As the weeks passed, the camp had changed its composition. Caroline, as a long-staying resident, had found herself appointed camp supervisor by the Russians. She had refused, citing her media neutrality, but the Russians had pointed out that if someone didn’t supervise the camp, everyone would rapidly grow sick and die in their own filth. Caroline had done what she could, but the Russians had very quickly removed anyone useful, such as the handful of prisoners who had medical training. She was improvising and knew it; people were dying, in some cases of avoidable problems, in other cases of nothing more than despair.
A month after they had become prisoners, Caroline, like all the other unshackled prisoners, was ordered into a side compound, where they were locked in and left to wait while burly Russian soldiers moved in on the military prisoners. Some struggled — one of them hit a Russian officer in the groin, sending the civilian prisoners into giggles — but it was futile; they were released, shackled together, and marched off out of the camp. A week later, they hadn’t returned; the handful of guards who talked to the Poles either didn’t know what had happened to them, or were unwilling to discuss it. The Polish women, some of whom had become quite fond of the men, screamed and ranted, but the Russians just ignored it. Caroline found it a worrying sign; she had studied history privately, not in a British school, and she knew that the Russians had once massacred thousands of Polish prisoners to prevent them serving as the nucleus of resistance.