“Sir,” Captain Christopher Drury said, standing to attention and saluting. The bespectacled officer didn’t look much like a combat soldier, nothing like the guards in battle dress on the outside of the building, but as one of the operators of the PJHQ, he was one of Langford’s most trusted officers. He might have given off the impression of a blonde Jeff Goldblum, but there was little eccentric about him. “Welcome back to the PJHQ. I must remind you that you have the weekly situation meeting at 1300hrs and there are still protesters blocking the roads; the Metropolitan Police suggest that you use one of the helicopters.”
Langford scowled. He had never married and had been an army brat; he had never understood why protesters picketed military bases, such as the handful of barracks scattered around London and the PJHQ, rather than government buildings. The military didn’t decide when to go to war; that was the choice of the politicians. Every European general had advised against the Sudan deployment, and then against withdrawing half of the force… and had been ignored. They had also gotten the blame afterwards.
“Wonderful,” he said, unwilling to think about the issue. The weekly situation meeting and security brief was supposed to be a simple task, but it wasn’t anything of the sort when some security matters were handled by EUROFOR and others by PJHQ, while Brussels kept attempting to expand their authority. It didn’t help that a united front of French, German and British officers had pointed out that there was no need to spend billions of Euros on a new headquarters in Brussels; the PJHQ alone could have provided all of the coordination that EUROFOR could have required. The French headquarters — the public one, that everyone knew about, and the secret one that no one was supposed to know about — could have accomplished the same tasks; the European Defence Commission had insisted on its own headquarters and the various governments had given in. It was empire-building at its worst; that money could have mended a few defects in EUROFOR’s actual line of battle.
He shrugged. It wasn’t something he could do anything about. “Is there anything I should know about?”
“There’s a torrent of Jihadists invective coming from Algeria and to some extent from Libya, thanks to some frog who wanted to cut the balls of every Algerian or something like that,” Drury said. Langford felt a flicker of sympathy for the unnamed Frenchman. “It’s all the usual stuff; the Frenchman must die before the Eiffel Tower comes crashing down and exterminates the French when it hits the ground.”
“Pretty big explosion,” Langford observed dryly. The image made him smile; the French had tougher laws on terrorism than the British, although they were mild compared to either the American or Russian laws. “Anything else?”
Drury shook his head. “The French Air Force has requested that we provide an AWACS and a couple of fighters for a drill in a week,” he said. “The French think they have a new way of detecting aircraft at very low level and want us to be the aggressors in a raid on France. The Chief of the Air Staff was very interested and wants us to agree.”
“That is within my purview,” Langford said. Unless something went very wrong, the government wouldn’t have to know about it at all… and the RAF’s training standards had been slipping badly, recently, due to the torrent of complaints about the noise of low-flying aircraft. “Anything on the Threat Board?”
“Only some suggestion that the Russians are considering a move into Ukraine,” Drury said. “EUROFOR HQ is handling the matter, but they don’t anticipate trouble; in any case, it’s out of our hands. Major-General McLachlan says that the Poles are worried, but EUROFOR HQ is convinced that the Russians are going to wait until after the elections before they move, if they move.”
“Then I see no reason why we should not go along with the French request,” Langford said. The French commander had skirted the edge of what could be done without EUROFOR’s knowledge; it was fitting to show that not everything needed EUROFOR to go along with it. “Coordinate it with CAS, but unless something new appears, then we should try to beat the French at their own game.”
He smiled at Drury’s expression and headed into his office, taking the time to pick up a cup of coffee before reading through his secure emails. There was little of importance, but seventy percent of his work was never important; hurry up and wait applied even more to the PJHQ than it did to soldiers in the field. They, at least, got to shoot at the enemy. The entire Falklands situation seemed to be calming down now that a major task force, including the Prince of Wales, was on its way to the area. That was nearly a third of the Royal Navy… and the politicians would probably claim that it was all a wasted deployment.
“Damned Argies,” Langford muttered. Every so often, Argentina would shake its fist and make threatening moves in the direction of the Falklands, and British forces would be forced to react. Even the Liberals who were in power knew better than to simply give up the islands, no matter their anti-colonial sentiments; their government would fall quicker than an apple from the tree, or an American bunker-busting bomb. “I wonder…”
“Sir, your helicopter is ready to depart,” Drury said, hours later. Langford nodded tiredly; he had been studying deployments, wondering where he could draw a company or battalion from to make up some of the overstretch. It wasn’t like 1914, where Britain had had worldwide interests, or even 2003, but it was still tricky… and the endless cuts in the deployable forces hadn’t helped. “The Police are still reporting that the streets are blocked.”
“I should go in a Challenger tank,” Langford said. He smiled at the thought; the British Army had been intended to switch to Eurotanks, of which there were nearly a thousand units on order, two years ago; naturally, the project had overrun and only one European unit had Eurotanks. “That might show them something about the world.”
Drury said nothing.
The Metropolitan Police hadn’t exaggerated, Langford realised, as the helicopter came down towards Whitehall and the MOD Main Building. Protesters swarmed as close as they could to the centre of the British Government, the organised protests disintegrating into peaceful anarchy. The protesters seemed to just want to protest; Langford had heard that the police had wanted to disperse them, but the government had forbidden it for political reasons. The weather forecast had promised heavy rain in a day or so; it had been hoped that the rain would put most of the protesters off their game. Some of them shouted towards the helicopter as it came in to land on the roof; they were too far away to know what they were shouting. He doubted that it was anything important.
“Welcome to the Main Building, sir,” Captain Scott Hammock said. “They’re all waiting for you in the briefing room.”
“Thank you,” Langford said. He wasn’t surprised that the others had arrived first; they could use the series of tunnels linking all of Whitehall together without having to avoid protesters. They walked down corridors, the monotony broken only by a faded VOTE SAXON poster that no one had had the heart to take down, and into the main hall. A small set of aides and assistants were waiting outside; they were wallflowers as far as the weekly security briefing was concerned.
The interior of the briefing room had been renovated several times, currently designed to reassemble a corporate office, rather than the dignified centre of government that Whitehall aspired to be. The Prime Minister stood to greet Langford as he came to a halt and saluted; his bulk made it seem as if he was a beached whale. Prime Minister Nicholas Donavan actually believed half of the statements he made in public and in private; Langford gave him that much credit. Like John Major, no one really questioned his integrity; his grasp of political affairs was another matter. If Labour and the Conservatives, to say nothing of the Scottish Nationalists, hadn’t so thoroughly discredited themselves…