Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (12 page)

Attempts at subterfuge continued, with moderate success.  The young British diplomat who obtained the copy of Zayan’s data-pod before the war began continued a slow-drip feed of moderately useful information, until he was uncovered and imprisoned in January 2064.  The diplomat, whose name has still not been released and whose ultimate fate remains secret, passed data which showed that out of the public eye, Beijing was less than happy with Tehran’s slaughter in Europe.  However, one exchange of communiqués demonstrated the limits of China’s actual ability to influence the Caliphate.  On 6 April Beijing threatened to stop exports of a number of materials, including heavy elements and replacement parts for weapons.  The following day, Tehran responded that it had amassed sufficient stockpiles of the former to subdue Europe, and that its replicators could ensure plentiful supplies of the latter.  The genie was very much out of the bottle.

With such a vast population, feelings among the general Chinese population are difficult to gauge accurately without aggregating vast volumes of data.  However, a typical conversation of the time took place between Fai T’ang, a fifty-year-old successful businessman, and Lan, his twenty-three-year-old socialite daughter.  When he complained to her that: ‘… the company will have to bear substantial write-downs on our property in London and Paris if this madness is not resolved peacefully, and soon,’ his daughter replied: ‘Please don’t fret, daddy, it doesn’t affect the Middle Kingdom at all.  Besides, we have lots and lots of property in Brazil, and the people there are so much friendlier…’

On Monday 10 April, Tehran issued the first of a series of statements calling on NATO to surrender to avoid further bloodshed.  These had little impact in the democracies, but served as useful propaganda in swaying powerful but broadly disinterested states around the world.  Throughout April and May, the Caliphate kept up a steady barrage in the world’s media, including selective use of historical facts, to justify its actions.  In contrast, NATO mainly utilised the weakened UN.  Although the UN adopted many condemnatory resolutions during the Tense Spring, most members stopped at voting for those which censured the loss of life, but either abstained or voted against any insistence that Caliphate forces should withdraw to pre-war positions.  Despite the democracies’ best intentions, these debates and votes can be seen, with the benefit of hindsight, merely to presage the UN’s eventual dissolution at the end of the war.

VII. IRREGULAR RESPONSES

Apart from the Caliphate’s advances through Spain, Italy, Greece and the Balkans, the most urgent situation was the starvation of southern Italy.  As Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury noted with honesty in
In the Eye of the Storm
: ‘Once Caliphate forces made the corridor through to the Adriatic, they effectively turned the south of the country into one, massive concentration camp, where their ACAs could kill the people at will as they starved.  We had no answer.  The politicians all came under huge pressure to do something - anything - to relieve the Italians trapped there, which they put onto us.  But I explained to them that any naval relief effort must be destroyed.  We no longer had the ships to make any kind of difference.  The Americans were adamant that they needed their ships to protect the Atlantic Convoys, and in any case we had to give absolute priority to reinforcements for the coming battle for the rest of Europe.  At one point, Liam [Burton, English Defence Minister] suggested air-drops, and we all laughed.  The truth was that the Caliphate knew we couldn’t do anything, and they were right - the Italians were on their own.’

As often happens during times of war, solutions came not from the brightest or from those charged with finding them, but from people of modest backgrounds who saw things more plainly.  Giuseppe Rossi was a grizzled, fifty-five-year-old newly retired Italian merchant mariner when the war broke out.  He watched events unfold from his small flat in the Mogliano Veneto district of Venice and resolved to bring relief to his countrymen, whatever the cost.  Over the next four months, Rossi and several others made dozens of trips in small boats from Venice down the coast of Italy.  Few begrudged Rossi his post-war celebrity, and during one interview he explained how he had been so successful: ‘I got a small trawler, a new one with the sleekest lines to avoid radar detection.  The next step was to rip out all of the electronic tomfoolery - the satellite ID system, the geo-navigation system, the auto-distress backup.  No one on board could have any kind of communications device.  Every scrap of technology had to go.  I even got an old friend to replace the engine management system because it relied on the manufacturer’s satellite control.  We rigged up a simple, mechanical system in its place.  By running absolutely dark and giving out no electronic noise whatsoever, those blasted Caliphate machines would have no way to find us.’

From mid-April until Venice was overrun in July, Rossi and a skeleton crew risked their lives almost nightly to transport much-needed supplies to southern Italy.  Rossi went on: ‘We stayed clear of the obvious places like Bari and Brindisi, and began offloading our gear in small villages, trusting the locals would find it.  After a couple of weeks, we made contact with some of them, and then could coordinate times and locations, never landing at the same spot twice.  It was heavy work.  We got help from the local authorities in Venice only once we could prove where we were taking the stuff.  Then it was a case of unloading boxes of GenoFluid packs and rehydrate phials.  Later, in May, we got some replicators.  At first, these were the standard burger-and-chips models, but once we shipped a new bakery model.  The Venice authorities weren’t too happy because they had thousands of refugees streaming through the place and needed to feed them, but the looks on the faces of those starving people when we carried it ashore in Rodi was worth all the gold in the world.’

As Rossi and his exploits became better known, more mariners joined with their own, low-radar-profile vessels.  But mistakes would still cost them.  Rossi related one such incident after the war: ‘It was in June, a few weeks before we also had to give up.  We had precious little darkness and they blew up Piero’s ship just before dawn.  By then we used to travel in a spread-out convoy, thirty kilometres apart, and we saw the explosion over the horizon behind us.  When we got back I wanted to know how the Caliphate had found him, so I checked his crew’s records.  Sure enough, his first mate - a lovely lad called Rocco - had a medical implant in his body.  Turned out he was genetically predisposed to tumours, see?  So the implant was in constant touch with his doctor, ready to warn if any little tumour took on a cancerous profile.  One of the Caliphate’s ACAs must have picked up the signal, and that was the end of all of them.  We didn’t make any more journeys for a few nights afterwards, to let the Caliphate think it was a one-off.’  It was also fortunate for Rossi and the other crews that the authorities chose not to advertise their activities.  When Warrior Group Centre linked up with Warrior Group East and Venice was surrounded, Rossi and several of his compatriots withdrew and joined the refugees in southern Italy, finally to survive the war.

VIII. FLEEING THE STORM

Private individuals in all theatres of the war made similar, irregular attempts either to help stricken populations or to save people caught in Caliphate-occupied regions.  It bears stressing that the speed of the Caliphate’s invasion and advances meant that its warriors and administrative support personnel could not be certain they enjoyed total command over the territory through which they had advanced.  The most punitive control existed in cities and large towns, while Blackswans and Lapwings were freed to roam over wild and less populated areas, controlled by super-AI units whose only order was to kill all sighted humans.  Nevertheless, at many times and in numerous places the skies remained clear.  Even though the Caliphate could deploy thousands of ACAs, each required regular maintenance, of which surviving local populations soon learned to take advantage.

Undoubtedly the most fortunate were those in Spain.  Tens of thousands fled west towards Portugal to escape the invaders.  Throughout the Tense Spring ships from as far afield as the US, British Isles and South Africa took refugees off at points on the Portuguese coast while also delivering medical and food aid.  Estimates suggest up to half a million refugees were saved by this route.  Inside the Mediterranean basin, opportunities to escape were fewer.  The Caliphate’s near-total control of the area meant that populations had to endure being cut off.  Islands such as Sardinia, Corsica and Malta were better equipped with both medical supplies and food replicators, but as the war progressed greater hardship would follow.  Unknown numbers tried in vain to escape north to France or the parts of Italy and Slovenia which remained free, but if a vessel emitted the slightest electronic activity, this invariably led to its swift destruction.

One notorious case involved a young Corsican woman called Elisa Vessani, who washed up in a half-inflated life raft on 3 May outside the French town of La Ciotat.  Injured and severely dehydrated, when she partially recovered she told investigators she had been a passenger on a large yacht which was part of a flotilla of about thirty such pleasure and small commercial vessels.  According to Vessani, the flotilla had left Ajaccio the previous Saturday, 29 April, carrying up to three thousand people who had decided to run the gauntlet of trying to escape.  Their motivations were not entirely selfish: knowing the island was cut off, they realised that sooner or later food and medical supplies would begin to run out, so considered that by removing themselves they gave those who remained more time.  Vessani described the flotilla’s destruction as taking place in fewer than five minutes.  (After the war, a joint effort by European governments to record each victim of the conflict saw super-AI equipped submersibles traverse the Mediterranean seabed seeking such vessels until as late as 2088.)  Further east, occasional boats containing Turkish refugees were still arriving in the Crimea and along the Ukrainian coast late into the summer.

Elsewhere in Europe, the Tense Spring saw the implementation of a whole range of defensive measures.  Stockpiles of PeaceMaker ACAs and battlefield Pulsar cannons bristled around all of Europe’s capital cities.  Super-AI-controlled defensive systems prepared to meet the challenge of saturation attack.  The production of medical supplies increased at least tenfold in all countries, and hospital managers reconfigured their facilities to better handle victims with blast and burn injuries.  Again, necessity forced controversial choices.  The politicians clashed with the military over the most appropriate use of their limited resources.  British Prime Minister Napier’s aide Crispin Webb confided to his diary after one such tense meeting: ‘The boss got angry when the generals insisted on moving some of the city-screening ACAs to support the military’s defensive positions in France, Germany and Hungary.  She demanded that the protection of civilians have equal priority with military needs.  One of the French generals sneered that if the soldiers fell, then so would the civilians.  The German Chancellor and the French President eventually thrashed out a compromise of sorts.  No one seemed happy.  For myself, all of the numbers are way too low compared to what the Caliphate can throw at us.  We’re going to need a ton of luck when it all goes to rat-shit, that’s for sure.’

IX. THE ATLANTIC CONVOYS

Although history has come to record this period as the Tense Spring, April and May did not pass without confrontation.  The second and subsequent relief convoys from the US came under sustained attack from mid-April onwards.  Losses remained low, however, compared with the absolute destruction in the Mediterranean in February.  The US naval carrier group led by the
USS George Washington
provided effective screening for the merchant ships across the Atlantic.  As the
George Washington
’s tactical officer explained to the US Congressional hearings after the war: ‘When they first came into attack, I think we all expected the worst.  But we utilized the laser coherence-length variation the British discovered, spaced our ships out a little more, and destroyed three hundred ACAs for the loss of one frigate.  It was way better than what we’d hoped for.  I think it gave everyone a boost.’

As would become clear later, in April and May the Caliphate considered the Atlantic to be a secondary theatre not worthy of serious attention.  In those two months, the bulk of its ACAs were concerned with the pacification of local populations in the newly conquered territories, and the few hundred Blackswans it sent out into the ocean to interfere with reinforcements had little impact, with merchant losses remaining at less than one hundred thousand tonnes.  One important development involved the
USS Gladiator
, which after an action on 3 May, during the passage of the fifth convoy, sent down submersibles to recover Spiders from destroyed Blackswans.  Four of the unmanned craft were destroyed on contact, but the fifth, which had reached a depth of five hundred metres, secured a Spider and returned to the ship.  Careful examination ensued, and, among many other benefits, the resulting conclusions would allow NATO’s surviving submarine fleets to operate with more confidence in the future.  While Caliphate forces no doubt felt assured of their technological and numerical superiority, their failure to give sufficient attention to the reinforcement conveys allowed NATO personnel a small glimmer of hope: it was possible to survive a Caliphate ACA attack.