“There are more deserters from the Citizen Force, lad,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart said, interrupting his thoughts. Robinson would never be a Colonel to Inglehart; they had shared too much together. The Citizen Force, conscripted from the young unemployed, were nervous about their chances when the shooting started; they were neither armed nor trained to use weapons. They’d broken out a store of the dreaded and loathed SA80 automatic rifle… but even those old weapons weren’t enough to arm every trained soldier who needed armed, let alone louts taken off the streets. The Russians might well regard them as illegal combatants… and so many of them deserted. “Shall I round up some redcaps to find them all?”
Robinson nodded. They had had the unarmed soldiers preparing trenches and earthworks; given enough time, they could have made the entire area impenetrable. He didn’t think that they would have the time; even with the weapons that the Americans had supplied, the Russians still raided the ground forces as well, causing soldiers to scatter as Russian bombers and fighters shot up irreplaceable equipment before the RAF could beat them off. He wasn't blind to the implications; if the Russians were hammering his force, and their forces were resting and ready to move, they would have yet another advantage.
“Get them back to work,” he said, knowing that they would be lucky if they found half of the deserters. Some of them would have vanished into London’s teeming suburbs, or Maidstone, or any of a hundred smaller towns and villages in the countryside. They could lose themselves there until close of play, whatever happened; some civilians might even help them. Not everyone thought that the survival of Britain was worth conscription. “Don’t take too long over it, however; we don’t have time to waste.”
He stared into the distance, his mind’s eye filling in details; hidden weapon emplacements, hidden bunkers and trenches, the telephone system right out of the Second World War that bound it all together without radiating a single betraying emission. The entire system had been linked into Britain’s Internet system; they could download information from the AWACS and use it to plan the defence. The AWACS themselves orbited to the north, out of range of the Russians; the American-supplied tankers floated, waiting for pilots who needed to refuel.
The Russians had learned once that attacking the tankers was an easy way to degrade and diminish the RAF. They would press the attack again until they brought down the other aircraft as well, and then they would land with full control of the skies. Military history explained in quite some detail what happened to units in such conditions; they got pounded to scrap before they even reached the battle. It just didn’t seem fair…
And the waiting was the hardest part.
There was a body in Flying Officer Cindy Jackson’s bed. The gentle pressure of his presence brought her back to awareness, even as the aches and pains in her body refused to recede. The RAF had never flown flight schedules like it was doing now since 1940; even during the days of the Iraq War, there had been more pilots and more planes to handle a limited number of missions. Now, now the RAF was desperately exhausted, desperately overstretched, and seriously outnumbered. Every day, Russian aircraft would fly overhead, challenging the RAF to come out and fight, or watch bombs being dropped with cold precision on the defence lines. The soldiers on the ground were soaking up more Russian ordnance — a bloodless term for dead bodies and blood and gore everywhere — than any British soldier had had to face since the Falklands, and that had been nothing compared to the Second Battle of Britain.
The RAF pilots — and the naval pilots who had been pressed into service — were tired; they were making mistakes. The Prince of Wales had flown its JSF fighters to Britain as soon as it could, with some help from American tankers; they’d been added to the defence force, which had reached a high point of seventy aircraft, most of them older than Russian designs. A flight of RAF Tornados had launched a low-level raid on a Russian-occupied airfield in Belgium, the role that had been planned for them during the Cold War and proved suicidal during the Gulf War; all, but one of the Tornados had been shot out of the sky. It had been the last attempt to take the war to the Russian bases in France.
She rolled over and contemplated the young French officer in her bed. He had been the bravest of the brave, risking life and limb to fly to Britain with his aircraft, and then to fight on alongside British forces to try to hold the UKADR. Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg might be the senior surviving officer of the French Air Force; only a handful more had made it out in the ships that had fled France as the Russians advanced. A few hundred French soldiers, thousands of helpless and destitute French civilians… she wondered just how long it would be before the Russians launched their invasion of Britain. No one in the RAF doubted that there would be an invasion; the Russians were bound to push their advantage as far as it would go. The Americans weren’t going to get involved, but that might well change; if the Russians took Britain, American intervention would become much harder.
She knew that she should sleep, but she couldn’t; she was literally too tired to go to sleep. She wanted sleep, but she also wanted to get fucked; Montebourg had proven himself good at giving her what she wanted, but he was sleeping, a design fault in the human male. She remembered the old joke about Adam trading the ability to piss standing up for multiple orgasms; the female body was much better in that respect. She didn’t want to be deferred to, or treated as the bitch empress of Godforsakenstan; she just wanted a man who was her equal, who wouldn’t bow down to her, and wouldn’t take any shit from her.
She sighed, wondering if she should wake him up; duty asserted itself and she left him to sleep. It was odd, mulling on the possible futures she might face; the government had made no attempt to hide from the military personnel what was happening to their counterparts across the Channel. The SAS had small groups on French and German soil, reporting back through American satellites; their reports made grim reading. Mass round-ups of military officers, forced labour from unemployed and Arabs alike, and the compulsory registration of all citizens; she knew what it all meant. As anyone who had lived under the welfare state could testify, a grey man in a grey office with command over the files could dictate who lived and who died, without ever meeting his victims…
Her future… seemed bleak. She had wondered, the year before the war, what would happen to her; sooner or later, the RAF would either promote her for good behaviour, or fire her for bad behaviour. It would have been ironic for them to have promoted her, but… she would have had enough time in grade to be promoted, perhaps even to the point of commanding a Squadron… from the ground. Hell, in other words; she wouldn’t even be allowed to fly. Outside the RAF, what career did she have? Her ideal would be to become a private jet pilot, but even that was less rewarding these days… and as for a family…? The men she’d met could either be dominated by her, or tried to dominate her… and she never gave up under pressure. She wanted a partner before she could have children; she had faced, a long time ago, the prospect of being the only surviving member of her family… and the last of her line.