He could see a handful of British soldiers trying to fire at the parachutes as they came down, but it was too late now; even the bullet that cracked through his parachute and tore a steadily-expanding hole was too late to prevent him from landing and bringing up his weapon into firing position. Others from his unit had done the same; the British were mown down in a brief exchange of fire. Four of his own men had fallen.
“Rally,” he shouted. The British would have seen them coming down and were doubtless preparing to react in any number of interesting and painful ways. There were plenty of ways to wipe out infantry and the British knew most of them; his soldiers formed up and advanced quickly before anything could happen. The motorway lay ahead; behind it, facing the sea, there were British trenches and even a handful of British armoured units. “All units; attack!”
The paratroopers had not passed unnoticed; British soldiers were already turning to attack them. A deadly series of fire-fights began, up and down the trench; both sides were calling in requests from their support units. Aliyev called a bomber into position to drop napalm and smoke grenades on the British; the British answered with long-range fire from hidden guns further into Britain. Aliyev dispatched a handful of his men to find the guns and assault them; those were light weapons that would otherwise be pouring fire into the transports and smaller ships convoying soldiers from France to Britain. He glanced down at his watch; ten minutes. Had it really been that long? It felt as if the fighting had gone on forever…
“Tank,” someone shouted, as four light British tanks appeared, heading towards the Russian soldiers as they scattered under its fire. The commandos couldn’t move; it was vitally important that they kept the British focused on them, rather than on the seas. It wouldn’t be long before the first ships arrived and began to unload soldiers and equipment to assault and hopefully take the British ports nearby. The smaller commercial jetties and piers would probably have been mined, but the engineers had had lots of practice at disarming IEDs from Chechnya. “Tank…”
“Take them out,” Aliyev snapped, into his short-range radio. Several antitank rockets were fired, designed to kill early Abrams and Challenger tanks, perhaps even Eurotanks if they were lucky; they made short work of the Scimitar tanks. The British kept up the pressure; it felt as if they would never be forced out or defeat the British. The entire campaign had boiled down to one long endless fight… and there seemed to be no end in sight.
Anton Mihailovich Sviridov, stripped of all rank and status, swam ashore through warm water, praying to a God he had abandoned long ago that he would make it safely through the British defences and onto the shores, and then perhaps to his old rank. Sergeant Sviridov had been having some fun with a German girl — the FSB had been given German girls to have fun with, but the common soldiers had been left with the prostitutes, and besides, Sviridov had fought his way through Germany and needed some fun — when the military police had caught him. The girl — naturally — hadn’t realised that as a victor, her body belonged to him; she had claimed that he had taken her against her will.
So what? He had argued, when he had faced his commanding officer; the girl was a slut. All German and European girls were sluts; the Russians had seen more legs and breasts in their march across Europe than they had seen in anywhere else they had visited, from Moscow’s own Red Light district, to places in Central Asia where the women remained covered and well out of sight of Russian patrols. She had teased him, and taunted him, and played hard to get, but he had known what she had wanted from the moment she smiled at him. She had wanted it rough, she had wanted the illusion of submission… and Sviridov had been happy to oblige.
The argument had cut no ice with his commanding officer. Looting, rape and unnecessary property damage were officially forbidden, and that meant a spell in the penal units for Sviridov. His rank and campaign medal had been stripped from him and he had been forced to wear the bright pink uniform of a penal soldier; pink in the hopes that the enemy would take a pot-shot at the obvious target rather than the more sanely dressed combat soldiers. After a short spell clearing up debris alongside imprisoned Arabs and the male survivors of various protest groups — he had taken some delight in telling them what had happened to the girls who had survived the protest — he had been sent along with his unit, like prisoners, to a base in Belgium.
“If you survive this, you will be freed in advance,” the military policeman had informed them. Sviridov had three weeks left of his sentence, during which all he could expect was hard and dangerous work; he had gratefully accepted the offer as a way of regaining his old rank. His seniority would be permanently stripped from him, but he would have his rank back and in the future he would stick to the brothels; there was a constant stream of young women looking to earn money and rations lying on their backs. “If you survive…”
Sviridov had known how to swim, of course — it was a required skill in the Russian Army — but he had never swum in a sea before. He had heard that some officers had intended the penal soldiers to literally swim the entire Channel, but sanity had prevailed before the Russian officers could take the chance to free themselves of a liability and send the penal soldiers on a suicide mission. Their current mission wasn't much of an improvement; if they faltered, or if they were slowed, the FSB marksmen in the boats would shoot them down on the spot. The water covered his head, a foul-tasting brine, and he was almost sick as he crawled up onto the beach, almost gasping in horror as he saw a crab for the first time. He didn’t take chances; he brought his foot down on the animal hard and then started the advance up the beach.
The mission brief had been simple; the British would have mined the beach and prepared booby-traps. Sviridov and his unit had to clear all of the traps, a mission that would win them their freedom… or kill them all if they failed. The beach was strewn with wire and seaweed; the soldiers started to pull at the wire, wincing as British soldiers fired at them from time to time, the fire answered by the heavy guns on the naval infantry transports as they grew closer. A shell landed close to him and the shockwave picked him up, tossing him head over heels towards the water; he had a chance to see the approaching wave of naval infantry as they stormed towards the shore.
He forced himself back to work. Penal soldiers were held in contempt by all other soldiers; many of them wouldn’t pause to piss on one if he were dying of thirst. The wire was reaching up towards a stairway heading upwards towards the British lines; Sviridov pulled at it carefully, wondering what the British had been doing with it. The wires wouldn’t snarl up a tank’s engines; they would be lucky if they slowed down armed infantry. For a moment, the sound of firing seemed to die away as he crawled onwards, not daring to stop for fear of being shot in the back… and then he heard an audible click.
Oh shit, he thought, as he realised in a split-second that he had triggered a mine. Moments later, his body was blown to bits by an improvised explosive device… and Russian naval infantry stormed onwards, heading towards the British lines, now caught between two fires. The might of the Russian Navy was about to be displayed on land for the first time since Denmark.