Her hand reached out idly and touched Montebourg’s penis; a slow motion and it grew hard in her hand, rising with all the vigour of youth. She climbed on top of him in one movement, gently kissing him as her urges drove her on, before pushing down on him and pulling her inside him, riding him into the light of the morning. It wouldn’t be long before they both had to fly again… and so all they could do was make use of what time was left to them.
“I could love you,” she whispered to his sleeping form. The pressure of war had brought them together; it wasn’t as if they were squadron mates. “I could… and perhaps I will, one day…”
There wouldn’t be much time before they both had to fly again.
An unbiased observer, assuming that that mythical entity actually existed, who saw the safe house would have wondered if its owner had known that there was a war coming. That unbiased observer would have been entirely correct; Zachary Lynn had bought the house a few years ago through several different shell companies — records said that the owner was still in residence — and even he had been surprised when he had examined the house in person.
The original owner had been paranoid enough to be Russian, he had decided, after his first visit. He had actually been a South African with a lot to hide. The house was not only set well away from any other human habitation, but had a bomb shelter, a private power generator and military-grade water filter, and a stockpile of food. None of those details appeared on the official records; some private checks had confirmed that no one in authority was aware of the building. He had wondered if he had accidentally stumbled upon a MOD building of some kind, but no, the owner was legitimate. He just hadn’t bothered to tell the government just what he was building.
Lynn himself sipped a gin and tonic and waited in the house. The satellite communications network in the house was normal to all, but a very careful inspection; in fact, it linked directly into an FSB satellite that was pretending to be a weather satellite. He had issued orders the week before the fighting had begun; his individual units knew that they would have no orders issued from him unless something went very badly wrong. Many of them would have hidden themselves; what Zachary Lynn didn’t know, he couldn’t be made to tell. The British would be quite likely to torture him, or indeed any of his agents, but they had only seen ‘Control;’ how could they connect him with Lynn?
The surprise had been that Daphne Hammond had been arrested. Truthfully, Lynn wasn’t all that surprised; she had been trying to raise civilian protests against both conscription and the military government. If there hadn’t been a clear and present danger, and indeed real benefits to military orders, lovely Daphne might have even managed to do real damage, but instead she had been threatened with lynching, and then the Police had saved her and rescued her. Personally, Lynn would have left her to die, even though she had been useful… and would be useful in the future. The danger, however, was that she knew ‘Zachary Lynn’ and could tell her interrogators everything about him, or at least enough to set them on the right track.
It hardly mattered now, from the point of view of the overall war; Lynn had carried out his mission and had done it well, well enough to distract the British long enough for his people to carry through and defeat the Europeans. They would invade soon, he had been told, or if not he could leave the house one night and be extracted by a Russian submarine. He was sure that other commandos had been landed on British soil; the British ships had been badly damaged and the Royal Navy was straining the limits trying to block Russian submarines from moving into position. His work, again…
But there was his failure. He had failed to find out the location of the new government headquarters. There had been something missed, something that would have sent the British into the same kind of anarchy as the French and Spanish had it been destroyed; the British had a secret command post somewhere. Where? He had devoted a great deal of effort to finding it before Daphne had been arrested and drawn a blank; he didn’t even have a rough location. If he could find it, he could end the war… but he had no idea where to start looking, and he was trapped in the house. He had studied maps, wondering; logically, it was somewhere near London, but where?
He sat back and smiled. Whatever else happened, he had done his duty, played the role of serpent in the garden to the best of his ability… and helped his country to win the war. All he had to do was survive; his people would reward him for what he had done.
“More possible contacts, Captain,” the sensor operator reported, as the Winston Churchill moved through the dark waters. “I think… I’m sure there was a Russian submarine out there, just for a moment.”
“Go active,” Ward ordered. The odds were that the Royal Navy had expended several dozen torpedoes on large fish and perhaps wrecks under the sea, but every contact had to be investigated. Only yesterday, a Type-45 destroyer had been sunk by a Russian submarine; the Russians were forcing them out of the English Channel. The Winston Churchill’s luck had run out after they had escaped the chaos surrounding Gibraltar; they had been bombed several times and damaged, only dumb luck had kept them alive. “See if you can locate the bastard!”
“Got him,” the sensor officer crowed. The exultation in his voice made up for a lot of dangerous fighting. “One Russian attack submarine, trying to sneak out again when we pinged him the first time.”
“Target designated,” the weapons officer said. He grinned savagely. “Captain?”
“Fire at will,” Ward ordered. A torpedo lanced away from the Winston Churchill. “I want this bastard sunk and disposed of…”
A burst of water appeared on the screens from an underwater detonation. “We hit the bastard,” the weapons officer said. Their third kill. “I think they’re gone completely.”
“Captain,” the exec said, very quietly. “Look.”
Ward followed his gaze and cursed; the screen that was permanently pointed at the carrier was blinking up red light. HMS Ark Royal, a tiny joke of a carrier and their only source of air cover, was burning. Someone else had just scored a kill.
And the war went on.
Chapter Forty-Five: The Final Countdown
If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius where reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation.
Near Brussels, Belgium
“I cannot say that I am happy about it,” General Aleksandr Borisovich Shalenko said, very calmly. “How many have died in the brief confrontations with the steel of our power?”
“How many of them were worth anything?” FSB General Vasiliy Alekseyevich Rybak countered. He had been placed in overall command of the occupation of Europe, leaving Shalenko in command of the forces massing along the west coast for the final stage of the campaign. “How many of them were actually inclined to help us, or at least to obey? Dissent is one thing; outright disobedience is another.”
Shalenko said nothing. “We have to establish ourselves as The Boss and make sure that all of Europe knows it,” Rybak said, looking up at the third man in the room. “You may have taken the girls out of the camps we established for the Arabs, but overall, you know that there was no choice; order had to be maintained.”
“And others will be driven to try to fight us,” Shalenko said, irritated. “The supply lines are still quite flimsy; a capable insurgency in Germany would force us to postpone the campaign for several months, perhaps long enough for the British to convince the Americans to interfere, or…”