Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (18 page)

Despite these setbacks, the absence of Caliphate ACAs denied the warriors the absolute supremacy of the battlefield which had thus far marked the European campaign.  In addition, as noted above these were fresh units without noteworthy battle experience, who were expecting minimal resistance.  Stripped of their ACA superiority, these warriors found their enemy far more resilient than they had been led to believe.  Rapid response units from the British First Corps succeeded in preventing the two bridgeheads from linking up, although much of Hastings was destroyed in the process.  Of more significance was the fact that no further waves of Caliphate ACAs were forthcoming from the European mainland.  After the war, historians would identify overextended lines and the priority of terrorising local populations as the causes, but on that clammy July morning, NATO commanders were once again shocked by the turn of events.  As Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘A lot of my staff were smiling, so I told them to cut it out: people were still dying.  But inside I shared their elation and relief.  Where were the following waves of Blackswans and Lapwings?  Why were no more reinforcements being thrown into the battle?  In their position, I would have done everything to secure the bridgeheads.  They made an appalling tactical mistake that night, all the more shocking for their almost perfect military acumen up to that point.  One can only wonder why they didn’t invade days or weeks earlier.’

While the role of the historian is not to suppose what might have been, it is all but irresistible to consider the likely outcome had the Caliphate invaded the British Isles a mere forty-eight hours earlier - as it was quite ready to do - before the Falaretes were replicated and deployed.  In that scenario, it is far more likely the bulk of southern England would have buckled under the strain, and the Caliphate forces would have swiftly built up their bridgeheads and begun the subjugation of the British Isles.  As it was, in the first days of August the Caliphate’s tiny footholds were destroyed and a bloody and vicious battle of attrition developed over the English Channel.  NATO military leaders were not slow to comprehend and seize on this small but vital shift in the balance of power.  Falaretes were replicated and deployed in their tens of thousands over the next few days.  SHAPE curtailed some units’ training from the British First Corps and reassigned them to ensure every bluff and cove and piece of high ground on the south and east coasts of England boasted automated defensive batteries.  Meanwhile, monitoring stations eavesdropped on Caliphate communications to establish that, in the immediate future, the enemy reacted to the setback by devoting more arms and men, as soon as the latter could be brought up from southerly positions.

In the first week of August, NATO units accounted for more Caliphate warrior transports than had been destroyed in the war to date.  Colonel Trudy Pearce, in charge of defending the most at-risk sector in the county of Kent, wrote after the war in previously unpublished memoirs: ‘Nothing to do with the conflict could be described as “easy”, but the enemy took his time to learn.  He kept on throwing ACAs at us, some days the bombardment was continuous.  But our ability to replicate the defences meant that every time they came on, we resisted them.  We wondered how long they would keep it up until it occurred to them that perhaps their tactics no longer worked.  After a couple of weeks, I thought the English Channel would fill up with all the scrap metal getting blasted into it.’

Colonel Pearce is being overly modest.  Elements of her brigade performed with exemplary professionalism.  While super AI targeted and fired the Falaretes, Pearce’s troops made up fire companies and handled maintenance.  For example, high-altitude Caliphate ACAs maintained their attempts to jam communications over the forward battle area.  On 5 August the SHF burners took several minutes to burn through this jamming, with the result that the batteries around Dymchurch failed to engage the enemy and were subsequently destroyed.  Caliphate forces noted the breach in the defences and launched six warrior transport ships in a second invasion attempt.  Colonel Pearce took the risky step of countermanding the super AI, which predicted the enemy would land in a moderately forested area three kilometres inland.  Pearce instead instructed her fire companies to proceed to the town itself.  She later explained: ‘Although there weren’t many civilians left in Dymchurch, a built-up area would be the best place to cause confusion.  The super AI veered too much on the purely military angle in its forecasts, and the last two days had shown us that their tactics were going downhill.  It was only a hunch, but it turned out to be a good one.’

The fire companies, this time supported by Abrahams tanks from the US 22nd Cavalry Division, arrived in sufficient time to redeploy Falaretes.  One company suffered when a single Lapwing succeeded in avoiding the defences for several minutes.  However, four of the six warrior transport craft were shot down before they could retreat.  When they crashed to the ground, there followed one of the most controversial events of the war, as NATO troops proceeded to ignore orders and slaughter all Caliphate warriors who survived the initial impact.  One of the commanding officers on the scene that night, Captain Ethan Lamb, answered questions at the Parliamentary Select Committee hearings after the war.  When asked why he had not better controlled the troops under his command, he said: ‘In my opinion, I controlled my troops as much as was required.  Let’s say feelings were running high.  Given the way the enemy had conducted themselves up to that point, I saw no particular reason to treat them any differently from the way they treated us.’  He was reminded that England was still a signatory to the Geneva Convention, and even though the Caliphate was not, did he not feel any responsibility to uphold the accepted rules of war?  Capt. Lamb answered: ‘Among the troops under my command, nearly every single one had lost someone to the Caliphate’s attacks: parents, siblings, relations, friends.  We saw these warriors as partly responsible, so I don’t think we would’ve just taken their sabres and given them a cuff around the back of the head, you know?’

Another questioner on the committee brought up the subject of the moral high ground: that the armies of the democracies had been fighting for values which dictatorships around the world not only opposed, but actively tried to eradicate in their own societies.  Capt. Lamb responded: ‘You sit here in this nice warm room and dare to lecture me on morality?  Let me tell you a secret: the enemy did not believe in morality or mercy or anything other than killing all of us.  The best way to stay alive was therefore to kill all of them first.  I appreciate that with your backgrounds of privilege, you have the time to think about things which don’t matter a jot in the heat of battle, but I’ll say this much: it’s possible to act like a barbarian to teach the barbarian a lesson, to go down to his level, and then, afterwards, to return to the civilised world.  It’s not easy, but it can be done.’

The vast majority of public opinion and the western media agreed with Capt. Lamb.  Certainly in the days following the massacre at Dymchurch there was much celebration at the destruction of the equivalent of an entire Caliphate battalion.  The only opposing sentiment came from
The Guardian
media outlet, which editorialised: ‘Any celebration of mass killing, however justifiable on the surface, is not something to be applauded.  The NATO countries have always striven to base justice on the rule of law, not the rule of the mob or the dictator.  In this massacre, we can see something of the Caliphate’s mentality reflected back in ourselves.  However despicably the Caliphate warriors have behaved - and one would have to go back centuries to find a comparable menace - we stand or fall on our identity with the rule of law.’

However, such sentiments were not common. Private Unity Reeves, one of Capt. Lamb’s troops, wrote to her older brother: ‘I’m sorry, but I can die happy now.  It was brutal, but it was what those bastards deserved.  My god, to hear them scream in pain, to point the barrel of my gun at those filthy, disgusting savages, and pull the trigger, knowing that I’m helping the war effort, helping to protect people.  God, I want to keep on doing that, keep on until they’re all dead.  Our CO says we’ll be the first in line if any of those bastards tries to land here again.  I can’t wait for them to try.  I just can’t.’  Private Reeves would get many more opportunities to exact her revenge, until she was killed in November 2063 during Operation Repulse.

III. THE CALIPH DITHERS

In addition to the swing in NATO’s military fortunes, its scientists made a number of breakthroughs in August.  A prototype muon-catalysed fusion power source for the next generation ACAs began initial tests in the Arizona desert.  Some of NATO’s brightest minds at NASA’s JPL facility in California set to work to design and produce an ACA capable of defeating the Caliphate’s machines.  Senior assistant Janis Bagget recalled the atmosphere: ‘At first we didn’t think the war would last long enough.  We all thought Europe would be finished in days so we were mulling the potential threat to the mainland US, but then it changed, and it looked like the British Isles might be able to hold out for a while.  The request from the armies was simple: they wanted a machine that was faster, better-armed, and with stronger shielding than any of the enemy’s devices.  This gave us a lot of problems to fix.  How do you trade manoeuvrability with armaments?  Do you go for Mach 9 and have a little less punch, or call it quits at Mach 7 so you can cause more destruction?  We also needed to make sure the weapon could react more quickly when in battle with a Caliphate machine.  Analyses of how the enemy’s machines moved had everyone scratching their heads - we needed to improve on their acceleration and deceleration rates by at least 5% on all axes.  Finally, we had to power up the shielding to the absolute max, which also gave us yet more weight and manoeuvrability conundrums.  The real issue at the time was that this was the first muon-catalysed fusion unit we’d developed, and we had no room to get it wrong.  We had to design the best, right from the start.  So, what the armies ended up getting was two versions of the same ACA: one armed with a laser, the other with smart missiles.  During the design, our director came up with the codename “Heat Ray” but then someone high up in NATO decided it would be called the “Scythe”.’

Finalising the design, constructing and testing prototypes, then refining and retesting the battle-ready Scythes would take many months, while the key concern at SHAPE centred on the Caliphate’s ability and willingness to reinforce.  David Benn in
The Rise of the New Persian Caliphate
wrote: ‘August 2062 saw a gradual decline in the Caliphate’s attempts to subdue the British Isles.  Washington and London made positive public statements that the islands remained unbowed, but sensibly stopped short of gloating.  The Third Caliph, having already expended some two million ACAs on those “little islands” and not having a single warrior afoot them for his efforts, dithered as global public opinion shifted towards a position which can best be described as “enough is enough.”  The world’s most important indices in China, India and Brazil stabilised as the fighting died down, and rumours began to sweep around the largest economies that the conflict would soon be over.’

To a degree, Benn is correct.  An analysis of aggregated media records from the period show that after eight months of war in Europe, many outlets in the dictatorships favoured a cessation of the violence.  It is of course important to bear in mind that much of these media only repeated their governments’ opinions.  It is equally reasonable to conclude that many states in the world still felt some discomfort from the Caliphate’s abrupt arrival on the world stage as a military superpower.

After the war, historians reached a general consensus that for some weeks at least, the Third Caliph instructed his forces to concentrate on securing all of mainland Europe.  Evidence came to light of executions at the level of battalion and group commander in Warrior Group West.  In addition, by this point NATO’s knowledge of life inside the Caliphate had expanded rapidly.  Brain scans of injured warriors coupled with the ability to eavesdrop on Caliphate military communications built a picture of a medieval hierarchy serviced with twenty-first-century technology.  Memories extracted from the brains of warriors included images of much brutal justice: hands cut off, beheadings, floggings, and the stoning of women.  The boys’ mothers do not feature in their lives after the age of six.  Selected recollections involved fathers, uncles and village headmen lecturing these boys on the necessity of violence, on the need for intolerance, and on how every person outside the Third Caliph’s domain was an infidel.  This went on until, at length, their military training included lectures on absolute misogyny. Thus it was that the Third Caliph created an army of three million warriors, armed with fourteenth-century morals and twenty-first-century weapons.  When these data were made public, it is not surprising that events such as the massacre at Dymchurch enjoyed much sympathy in the democracies.

IV. A LAST ESCAPE

The first full twenty-four-hour period without Caliphate forces attacking the British Isles came on 8 August, due mainly to a low atmospheric depression which drove storms down from the North Sea for the next several days.  In low Earth orbit, NATO and Caliphate satellites traded laser pulses.  NASA and the US Air Force had combined efforts to increase the strength of shielding on SkyWatchers to the point where their SHF burners were able to track snatches of enemy movements far below on the battlefield.  These identified strengthening forces around Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Hamburg.

Young Turkish engineering student Berat Kartal, last seen settling down for an uncomfortable night in a field outside Munich, had by this time reached Hamburg.  His previously unseen journal makes progressively more disturbing reading.  He details his odyssey north through what had been the most powerful country in Europe, now laid low by an unstoppable enemy.  His entry for 17 July, in the midst of the Battle for Europe, ends a break in the journal of several days: ‘I am resting on the edge of a town called Schweinfurt, before I make the effort to enter it.  I must note down the destruction around me.  German authority seems intact - there are many police and doctors and emergency responders to be seen - but everything is broken down: monorails, railways, super-AI highways and all the vehicles on them are just so many lumps of twisted metal now.  In the middle of a crowd of thronging refugees two days ago, I overheard the Turkish language and cautiously addressed an overweight middle-aged man with a small, timid wife whose face wore deep frowns of concern.  He complained of a problem with his knees which prevented him from walking fast or far, and the one doctor he had been able to see refused him a GenoFluid pack because his problem was not sufficiently serious.  They could barely cover two kilometres a day, whereas I knew one needed to walk at least fifteen every single day to stay ahead of the invaders.’