Aliyev smiled. “Sir, my men are not… Kazakhs,” he protested, referring to the soldiers from Kazakhstan who had taken up service with Russia after Kazakhstan had hastily rejoined the Russian Federation. The Kazakhs had a reputation for being mad, bad, and dangerous to be anywhere near, although Aliyev also considered them vastly overrated as soldiers. “They can behave themselves.”
“See to it,” Shalenko said. He tapped the CD-ROM. “Get them all briefed up and confined to barracks; I want you to have all of the bases covered before the attack is launched. Friendly forces, known hostile forces, the reinforcement plans, best case, worst case… you know the drill. If there are problems, I expect to hear about them before we launch the operation; Glasnost, remember?”
Aliyev nodded. President Nekrasov’s policy of ‘openness’ was different from the original; in the new Russia, the bearer of bad news didn’t get the blame. He knew enough to know that he could rely on it, if there was something wrong with his force, but he knew that there would be nothing wrong with his men. There was only one slight problem, but he was sure that it could be handled…
“We may need to do a handful more combat jumps,” he said. “I want everyone right at the peak of fitness when we launch the operation.”
Shalenko looked at him for a second, and then nodded. “Requisition whatever you need from stores,” he said. “Failure is not an option.”
Aliyev saluted. “We won’t fail the President, sir,” he said. “We will take the airport or die trying.”
Shalenko returned the salute and left the room, leaving Aliyev alone with the CD-ROM. For a long moment, he just stared at it, feeling his thoughts whirling around his mind; he had wanted to be part of a massive combat operation… and now, it seemed that he would have his chance. The last major war the Russian Army had engaged in had been Afghanistan; Chechnya had been a miserable task, butcher’s work… and Aliyev had hated it. The FSB security battalions, mainly the dregs of Russian jails and barbaric recruits from Central Asia, had loved every last minute of it. Fighting in Europe would be different…
He remembered his younger brother. Pavel had wanted to be in the Spetsnaz too; he had had to spend a year in the infantry first, and had been blown up in an ambush by rebels in Belarus. They had to have known that Russia was prepared to be merciful, but instead they had fought… and taken Aliyev’s younger brother from him. His mother’s heart had broken because of it; she had died blaming Aliyev, who blamed Europe. Hadn’t they known what they were doing?
He pocketed the CD-ROM and left the room. The commandos were finishing up the clean-up, ensuring that nothing was left behind for the cleaners to remove. There was no such thing as a spare moment in the Spetsnaz; a handful of commandos who had nothing to do were running laps around the runway, just to keep fit.
“I want our lorries back here as soon as possible,” he said, to Captain Alexander Vatutin. They had known that they would be returning to the barracks, but again, they hadn’t expected to be doing it for hours; some drills were known to last for weeks. He had expected to spend a week defending the airport against whatever forces had been assigned to the defending force. “It seems that they have finally found something for us to do.”
He allowed a smile to break through his cold face. “We’re going west…”
Chapter Nine: While Europe Slept
I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.
Moscow, Russia
It was the 30th of May.
“This is the point of no return,” Margarita Sergeyevna Pushkina said. The FSB officer sipped her drink carefully. She was never one to get drunk, something that was wise for a woman in Russia. “Everything is in place; the chaos will begin in two days and… well, we would be committed.”
President Nekrasov smiled to himself. “How certain are you of success?”
Margarita flushed slightly. “The people we ourselves emplaced will carry out their missions or die trying,” she said. “Some of them may be detected by the local authorities — too late. There is nothing perfect in any of these plans; we could lose half of the operations and still win, particularly the random terror part of the operations. We built so much redundancy into the plan just in case we lost half of our people; frankly, I expected to lose more than we have.”
Shalenko leaned forwards angrily. “We have lost people?”
“Four of our people were picked up by the German police within Berlin, following a major riot against Turkish immigrant workers,” Margarita said. “None of them knew much; even in the worst case, they couldn’t have told the Germans anything about the overall plan. A handful of Algerian illegal immigrants were picked up in France, but the French Government contented itself with dropping them into the refugee camps, rather than shooting them in the head or a rigorous interrogation.”
She grinned. “Frankly, I expected that the Algerians would have lost control over their own people well before we reached the point of no return,” she said. “We didn’t plan for that nincompoop in France calling for them all to be sterilised; idiot should have just waited a couple of months and he would have gotten much more than his wish. There were a handful of other nasty incidents, but the main body of the cells remained underground… and in any case, we can handle the important part of the mission without their help.”
“But I would be happy to have it,” Shalenko said, thinking cold thoughts about the dangers of an alert Europe facing his forces. He had expected to see sudden bursts of activity, expected to see the Germans, French and British suddenly realising their danger and dispatching their forces to the Polish border, as well as wiping out the sleeper agents and revising their rules of engagement to make survival a much more likely prospect for EUROFOR. “You know that we cannot rely on the enemy simply folding at the first blow.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Russian military doctrine called for making the first blow of any offensive as hard as possible, to try to make the first blow the last blow… but it wouldn’t work in Europe. The enemy would have time to withdraw to more defensible lines if they had time to realise what was happening and the authority to order a general retreat. If they had a war going on in their own backyard, their commanding generals would have too many problems to handle and EUROFOR would disintegrate.
He hoped.
“I know,” Nekrasov said. “What are we facing?”
“In theory, we’re facing two divisions of European soldiers and the Polish Army,” Margarita said. “In practice, the Europeans are not working as an integrated group and two-thirds of the Polish forces remain un-mobilised. Even if they give the order now, they would have real problems getting them into position to actually oppose us before it was too late. The targeting plan will knock out most of their reserve forces and hopefully make it impossible for them to muster any of their home forces before it’s too late. For the French and Spanish, they will also be looking in the wrong direction, rather than towards us.”
Nekrasov nodded slowly. “The time is so slow,” he said, wryly. Shalenko recognised it as nerves and said nothing. “General, what about our own forces?”
Shalenko glanced down at his notes. “We have over forty divisions in the region or ready to move in as soon as we kick the offensive off,” he said. “Furthermore, we have five thousand dedicated Special Forces units operating behind the lines, all slipped into Poland and Germany and lying low for the offensive. Several other units will knock out the EUROFOR units in the Ukraine, while one division apiece has been dedicated to each of the Baltic States. None of them are particularly strong and have placed their faith in EUROFOR to defend them; we do not expect much trouble in overwhelming their defences.