It was confirmed; the Russian main landing site had been identified. Orders were sent out rapidly to the units caught in the firing line; they were ordered to break contact and pull back to the second defence lines as quickly as they could. For many of them, it was an impossible task; the Russian paratroopers might have been melting away, but the Russian naval infantry were hard on their heels, searching for targets. They knew that they were vulnerable; the cold knowledge made them deadlier than ever.
Further back into the British lines, expertly camouflaged, the remaining MLRS trucks in the British Army opened fire, sending a shower of deadly rockets down onto the Russian positions. The rockets had been supplied by the Americans, an improved version of the original rounds; they homed in on tanks and ships, often mixing kinetic speed with explosive force to knock out and destroy Russian tanks and landing ships. Others came in closer; a captured German liner was driven aground and Russian naval infantry stormed out of her, heading up the beach towards their rally points, and then being dispatched out to link up with the paratroopers and expand their zone of control. Other naval infantry had to swim, or use smaller boats, but they made it to the shore; officers rapidly sorted out the chaos into slightly more organised chaos and directed them to their pre-planned points. The invasion would continue.
Far out to sea, Russian Mainstay AWACS tracked the location of the MLRS and directed bombers onto them as priority targets, along with located positions of British soldiers. The British had come up with a handful of tricks, including American-supplied missiles and cannibalised CIWS taken from ships that had been damaged beyond repair, hacking bombers out of the sky as long as the missiles held out. The supplies had always been low; a handful of the MLRS trucks were caught on the ground and destroyed by the bombers, two more were hunted down by Russian helicopters as they started to enter the battle. The motorway had been secured rapidly and penal units were dispatched to see to clearing the mines as far as the defences of Dover and Folkestone; the entire shore would have to be cleared to allow the plan to proceed. The Russian planners were pleased; they had taken heavier losses than they had expected, but they had secured a lodgement.
All they had to do was make it permanent.
The Spetsnaz commandos almost opened fire before they recognised the uniforms of the naval infantry; they had been completely focused on the fighting before the order had come to disengage. Aliyev checked around with his people as the naval infantry moved forwards; they could handle the fighting long enough for him to tend to his own men. Several hundred had been killed in the brutal fighting, including the General; Aliyev has suspected as much from the sudden end of barked orders. That gave him other responsibilities; he was now in command of the remaining four hundred men who were almost uninjured.
He grinned to the west. The British were falling back; all the Russians had to do was breach a major defence line and then they would have the lodgement they needed to build up the forces to advance into the two port cities. Even without the ports, it wouldn’t slow down the landing process much… and then they would advance on London. His men might even get another combat jump out of it before major combat operations came to an end; they could certainly act as shock infantry if they were denied any other role.
Once London fell…
Once London fell, it would be all over.
Chapter Forty-Eight: Operation Morskoi Lev, Take Three
Battlezone, English Channel
Colonel Stuart Robinson peered through his binoculars along the road. The Russians would have to come along it to hit his defence line, such as it was; he didn’t have the heavy weapons to make a proper stand. A handful of soldiers had been dug into Hawkinge, trying to slow down the Russians; from the flames in the distance, it seemed as if the Russians had simply burned down the town and killed most of the defenders.
The line of survivors had passed through Robinson’s lines minutes ago; there were no more active units registering on his terminal, no more little signals from the American microburst equipment reporting that a unit was still intact, if trapped. The forces in Dover and Folkestone had dug in to the buildings, but now the Russians had gained control of the countryside, the cities could be left alone until they were ready to deal with them. Robinson wished, desperately, for an air strike, or perhaps even a tactical nuke, but the former had been lost to the British when most of the RAF had gone down in the Battle of Dover.
“The next people who come along that road,” he ordered, looking down at his veterans and the newcomers alike, “I want you to kill.”
The very horizon seemed to be on fire. He could only be glad that Hazel was well out of the way in Edinburgh; if she had stayed in London, as she had wanted to do to be near him, she might have been caught up in the chaos. The radio reports said that the entire city was panicking and demanding evacuation; there was no way that Britain’s overstressed transport network could move even a small fraction of the city’s population out in time. The noise of guns — Russian guns — and aircraft — Russian aircraft — was a constant crescendo; the Russians had more of everything and it showed. The British forces were operating right at the edge of their capabilities; it wouldn’t be long, one way or the other, before they had to fall back to the line at Dorking. The Russians would probably try to surround the city before actually trying to enter it; Dorking was one of the strong points along the line surrounding London.
“My god,” Sergeant Ronald Inglehart breathed, as they watched the flames growing in the distance. The noise of fighting never faltered; the isolated remnants of British units, trapped and turning like trapped rats to take a last bite out of the enemy before being overcome. The Russians would know that they had been in a fight, not like the Germans or the Poles, where only isolated resistance had been mounted across most of the country. Robinson had been offered a chance to leave the country and had rejected it; like so many others, he would make his stand with his men. “What are they doing in there?”
Robinson had no answer. The Russian jamming was affecting some of their datalinks with higher command, but they had enough information to know that the Russians had secured most of their sea-lanes to Britain and were pouring supplies through the gap; the little left of the Royal Navy was powerless to prevent them. They might not have a port, but they didn’t need one to land some supplies, and given time, they would be able to jury-rig a temporary pier for unloading the heavier supplies. They needed interdiction of some kind, but the Company’s EW officer had reported on the air-search radars and missile launchers that were being set up around the Russian landing zone; an air attack would be suicide with the handful of aircraft that the RAF had left. A suicidal strike mission wouldn’t even get close enough to make the loss of the aircraft reliable; only the RAF at full strength would have had a prayer of success… and that would have cost them dearly.
The noise of a CADS broke the sound of Russian weapons; he saw the flares of its rockets as they lanced off into the sky, tracking an unknown target, perhaps a Russian drone hunting for British forces. The majority of the surviving forces were either trapped in the cities, part of his line, or falling back on the final defence line around London. The Russians had probably done a headcount…