“God willing,” Erica said. They had become friends in the terrible two months; he wished that he had known her before the war had begun. “For what it’s worth, sir, it was a honour to serve with you.”
Clutching their weapons, they waited all along the line; some confident, some nervous, some anticipating the moment when they would come to grips with the enemy. For some of them, it was their first shot at real combat; many of them had escaped being sent to the Sudan. For others, it was the chance to avenge fallen comrades and even the score a little before there could be peace. They took their positions with care and forethought, hiding from the bombers they knew would soon be high overhead; it wouldn’t be long before they discovered if they were brave soldiers, or cowards. No one knew until they came face to face with the elephant. Some said their final prayers as they braced themselves; Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu… united at last in defiance against the common foe. Others only waited for it all to begin. History was moving around them…
In Dover, Folkestone and a dozen smaller towns and villages, smaller detachments lurked. They had prepared the docks to surprise the Russians as best as they could; now they waited for the Russians to come within range of their weapons. They had prepared the towns and buildings for house-to-house fighting; the Russians would be forced to dig them out one by one if they wanted the towns. Many of them had sworn terrible oaths; the Russians would have to kill them all at their posts before they took the places they were defending.
Further back, mobile artillery and other systems waited, holding fire only until they had targets to service. The crews checked their vehicles carefully; they had seen all of the data from the handful of heavy battles the Russians had fought in Europe, and the Battle of Lorraine had made it clear; the Russians would hammer them into the ground as soon as they detected their fire and localised their position. They had prepared to move as soon as the Russians found them; they were determined that they would make the Russians pay a price for invading their country. Direct feeds to a hundred hidden soldiers, lurking near possible landing zones, lit up; all they needed now was targeting data, targets to destroy. It wouldn’t be long now.
All along the line, they waited.
“I have a direct lock on seven heavy enemy transports,” the weapons officer snapped, as the Winston Churchill evaded a missile from a Russian aircraft with ease. The Russians had concentrated most of their efforts on suppressing the land defences over the past few weeks and it showed; the Royal Navy had enough time to muster its final stand. “Captain; request permission to open fire.”
Captain Ward nodded slowly. The fighting was taking its toll… because they didn’t dare head any closer to the Russian-held coastline. The Winston Churchill had grown up in a world where missiles and guided-bombs presented a serious threat to ships… and no ship in existence, with the exception of the really big carriers, could survive a single hit with a heavy warhead. Her class might have been designed as the closest thing the European Union had intended to a battleship, but her armour was puny compared to that of the battleships that had last contested the Channel, back in 1940.
“Engage the enemy,” he said, as the first of the sea-skimming cruise missiles started to launch. The Churchill normally carried twenty-four; the battles had drained their stocks down to nine, and seven of them had just been launched against moving enemy transports. He understood the logic — without the transports, the Russians would be unable to land their army — but they had a lot of transports. Had they commandeered every last civilian ship in Europe? There had been hundreds of ships, many of them registered under different flags; had all of them been brought to land soldiers on British soil? “Air defence?”
“Four enemy bombers, heading towards the fleet’s location,” the air defence officer reported. Ward cursed; they had fired off most of their SAM missiles, and all they had left apart from that was the CIWS units, which were known to run out of bullets quickly. Replenishing them hadn’t been a problem — something that had been a relief, as they were around the only items that could be replaced quickly — but there would be no time to re-supply in the middle of a battle. “Requesting permission to engage.”
“Coordinate fire with the other ships and engage at will,” Ward snapped. “Weapons?”
“Three direct hits; they went up like firecrackers, Captain,” the weapons officer said. “Russian CIWS killed the other missiles and saved the transports!”
Ward cursed under his breath. “Bring us around and regain firing solutions,” he ordered. “I want…”
“Captain, the Russian aircraft are launching missiles,” the sensor officer said. “I have at least nine missiles homing in on our location!”
“Evasive action,” Ward ordered, sharply. The Russians were trying to smother them; they were making up for problems in some of their targeting systems by overloading the British point-defence network. “You are cleared to engage the missiles with CIWS!”
The yammering of the guns could even be heard on the bridge… and then they stopped. “Weapons jam, weapons jam,” the weapons officer snapped. “Three incoming missiles…”
HMS Winston Churchill, the last of her class still in existence, took three hits along the superstructure. The Russian warheads punched though the thin hull and detonated inside the ship, destroying the entire vessel in a shattering cataclysm. There were no survivors.
“I have fourteen Russian fighters advancing towards you, nineteen more holding in reserve,” Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg snapped, over the command network. “They’re trying to draw the RAF out to play…”
“I love you too, Jacques,” Flying Officer Cindy Jackson said, as she banked the Eurofighter Tempest out over the south-east of England, waiting for the Russians to come calling. The Russians looked as if they had expected the RAF to come engage them right in the heart of their formation, and before the Americans had made their unexpected delivery, the RAF had planned to do just that. “We’ll hold position and wait.”
There were thirty fast-jet fighters left in the RAF, mainly Typhoons and Joint Strike Fighters from the Royal Navy; Cindy knew that it was their last shot. She’d had it made brutally clear to her; if the RAF could knock out the Russian transports, it might just save Britain from Russian occupation. The Russians themselves were coming forward towards the British fighters; a handful more were remaining with the transports, probably cursing their luck at being stuck shepherding the slower aircraft. Fighter jocks were all the same; the Russians had a three-to-one advantage, just in the battlezone alone, and they weren’t going to waste it. They were coming towards her aircraft at supersonic speed and…
Someone down on the ground flicked a switch. A dozen CADS and several light American launchers that had been prepared for auto-fire opened fire, mingled in with old Rapier and Javelin systems, sending nearly a hundred SAM missiles into the air. The Russians, caught by surprise, scattered; many of them had already become victims as the American-made missiles locked onto their aircraft and entered their terminal runs. Some Russian pilots punched out of their aircraft, choosing to risk capture rather than die in fire; others tried to evade until the very last moment.
“Go,” Cindy snapped. The RAF fighters hit their afterburners at once and streaked south-east at supersonic speed, their weapons systems already receiving the download from the AWACS as they passed over the hidden weapons and headed into the teeth of the enemy transports. A handful of Russian fighters, the surprised escorts, were desperately trying to come into position to take a shot at her, but it was too late; they were too late. The RAF fired a hail of missiles towards the Russian transports and bombers, ignoring the fighters; twenty-three Russian aircraft exploded in midair as the RAF blew through them and kept firing, engaging every last target they saw. Russian fighters were trying to chase them out again, but the Russian formation was falling out of shape; their fighter controllers had to be going mental just trying to keep up with the rapidly changing situation. She laughed aloud, jamming her hand down on the trigger for her cannons; a Russian transport aircraft and its parachute soldiers died under her fire.