Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (25 page)

In the global media, the first day of Repulse was greeted with a similar surprise as that felt by Caliphate forces.  Western outlets predictably praised the operation, while in disinterested countries, reactions ranged for grudging respect to dark warnings that Repulse was a ‘dangerous and unnecessary provocation’.  Conspiracy theorists suggested the invasion might have been instigated by India in an effort to diffuse the growing tenor of confrontation on its borders with the Caliphate, missing the somewhat obvious conclusion that if India had been involved in NATO’s decision-making process, then the most effective strategy would have been a joint, simultaneous attack on both sides of the Caliphate’s territory.

As darkness fell across Europe in the evening of 1 August, it is reasonable to assume both sides felt a certain degree of surprise.  As would become clear in the next few days, the ripples spread far inside the Caliphate hierarchy.  But the first twenty-four hours allowed NATO forces to gain a foothold from which they would not be dislodged.  Throughout the night and the early hours of 2 August, NATO units continued the advance, gaining greater territory as Caliphate warriors either fell back, as tactical common sense insisted, or made entirely futile stands only to succumb to Pulsar lasers or NATO smart bullets.

IV. RELIEF ARRIVES

The supporting units which arrived on the first day included mobile trauma centres to process local survivors.  They did not want for patients.  Twenty-three-year-old Melvina Allen was a newly qualified psychotropic analyst who described her first day to the post-war English Parliamentary Select Committee hearings: ‘We landed in the afternoon.  The soldiers had organised the survivors in an enclosure and medics had given them basic medical attention.  We took them into isolation rooms one by one.  I wasn’t prepared that first day.  It was very difficult to get through to them.  All were young women who’d been repeatedly raped - something they’d endured just to get enough food to live.  I set out our range of psychotropic drugs which could erase their memories, which might help them start again, but it didn’t help.  One young woman, heavily pregnant, cried and said to me: “How can you make me forget this?  Is it supposed to give me hope?  Because it doesn’t, it only reminds me and I don’t want to be reminded.  Do you have some clever drug to treat that?”  I couldn’t do much [breaks down]… she and I cried together for a while, but the pregnancy was far too advanced for termination.  I learned a lot very quickly.’

The morning of 2 August dawned with little change in the hot weather.  By 11.00 the two spearheads of Attack Group South joined up forty kilometres southeast of Rouen.  Lead elements continued the drive west towards Paris, to solve the mystery of why contact with the city’s resistance had been so abruptly lost almost a year previously.  This created long, exposed flanks which NATO ACAs monitored closely, until the afternoon when a further three battalions of US Marines arrived to begin the advance south.  Given that the terrain was far less built-up than in the north, NATO forces spread quickly throughout the day.  Major Peter Basel, observing progress from his command post, said: ‘As data feeds came in from the forward units, I was reminded of a literary metaphor I’d read years before: “Spreading like ink flung across blotting paper.”  That’s exactly how our forces were retaking France; slowly but inexorably, village by village, town by town.  My adjutant kept trying not to notice the habit I had of clicking my fingers, so I kept my worries to myself but couldn’t stop thinking that it was all too easy.’

Major Basel’s fears would be realised soon enough.  Meanwhile, in Belgium the spearheads of Attack Group East continued taking ground to encircle the Delta Works.  Lead units of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry reached the outskirts of Antwerp in the mid-afternoon.  Here they noticed a new development.  Private Sam Davis explained, ‘Most of the buildings were blasted or otherwise damaged, but when we had to clear one that was fairly intact, we soon learnt to expect the worst.  In one, there must have been at least ten females, from young girls to women at least thirty, all with freshly cut throats.  These poor bitches had almost made it through the war, but when the warriors were forced to retreat, they decided to kill their captives first.’

Although not exclusive to either front, more of these atrocities took place in the eastern theatre than in the southern.  G. K. Morrow in
The Great European Disaster
catalogues in detail the discoveries of some fifteen thousand young women whose deaths were recorded as having taken place in the forty-eight hours before their discovery.  In addition to these events, in the rear areas military and civilian investigators began unearthing evidence of mass graves which Caliphate forces had seldom troubled themselves to disguise.  The first and probably most notorious was at a school on the outskirts of Ghent.  A journalist for
The Times
media outlet described the scene to his readers: ‘The building itself is such a blackened, roofless shell as can be expected in any warzone.  But on closer inspection, it harbours a shocking discovery.  Within the walls are the remains of hundreds or possibly thousands of people.  The rain has whitened bones which were fused together somehow.  I ask a sergeant close by what has caused this.  He shrugs his shoulders and replies “Lasers”.  One cannot begin to imagine the fear and terror which made up these people’s last moments on Earth.’

The following weeks and months would bring many such disturbing revelations.  The reaction in the global media in the first few days of August brought some pressure on the Caliphate.  Chinese outlets were careful to condemn the discoveries without blaming the Third Caliph by, for example, suggesting these were the actions of ill-disciplined warriors.  But in general, Europe’s plight found little sympathy.  Typical of many disinterested nations’ approaches was that taken by the Defence Minister of Rwanda.  In his country’s most popular media outlet, he wrote: ‘How strange it is that the European finds it distasteful to be obliged to die in humiliating circumstances, while the rest of the world looks on in indifference.  Although we might feel sympathy for Europe’s suffering, it is curious that those people seem to have trouble grasping the fact that the rest of the world does not really care.  This is hardly a surprise, when historically those same countries now in pain often turned their eyes from the suffering endured by others.’

V. COUNTERATTACK

On 3 August, Caliphate forces made their first material counterattack, employing a development which NATO’s super AIs had given a small probability of materialising.  At 07.28, the SkyMasters high above the battlefield noted the launches and approach of thousands of Caliphate ACAs converging on the spearhead fifty kilometres from Paris.  However, at the same time another wave of Blackswans left Spain, sped out over the Atlantic Ocean, and then turned onto a northwest heading.  The SkyMasters correctly assumed this wave intended to assault NATO rear areas, and sent instructions to scramble reserve Scythe squadrons in southern England.  Caliphate forces intended that this pincer movement would split the defences; however, in the event less than 15% of Scythes assigned to protect the forward units had to be sent back to defend the support units.

A fierce aerial engagement took place above the battlefield to the west of the French capital.  Captain Sabine Oberst, on that morning a twenty-five-year-old infantrywoman, spoke over thirty years later about what happened: ‘We felt confident, but not overly so.  Things had gone very well up to then.  We were in our transports heading up a hill in front of a town called Conches-on-Ouche.  I was at the displays in the rear of the vehicle, on-point monitoring the tanks up ahead.  The battles in the sky had been going for about a quarter of an hour.  Perhaps I should have got us to cover, I do not know.  The tanks began tracking Blackswans coming in to attack them.  The Blackswans released their Spiders, so the tanks fired their Falaretes.  That should have been the end of that, but the Falaretes did not destroy the Spiders.  I remember thinking there must be some kind of mistake, but it was not a mistake.  The tanks resorted to their field guns, but I knew at once there were not enough time [sic] for them to breach the Spiders’ shielding.  The tanks began going offline and the last thing I remember is shivering in realisation or fear or whatever it was.  But that is how quick events happened: just seconds from the tanks going offline to our transport being hit.  The next thing I knew, I woke up in a casualty clearing station behind the lines with a GenoFluid pack wrapped around the stump of my missing arm.  According to my CO, the only reason I made it out was because the monitoring screens were at the rear of the vehicle.  No one else in it survived.’

Two hundred kilometres north at Ostend, a similar drama unfolded.  With the port now fully repaired, merchant vessels operated to a precise schedule to bring in manufactured equipment, fresh food and other supplies.  Private Simon Parker of the 12th Guards wrote at the time of the same sense of initial disbelief as Captain Wood.  He was on sentry duty when: ‘… my Squitch told me to take cover from the Blackswans before they released their Spiders.  I thought that was bullshit, frankly speaking.  We’d deployed something like two-k Falarete batteries around the port, so even if any of them got past the Scythes - which I couldn’t see happening - they wouldn’t last long. I still can’t believe the Falaretes didn’t work.  They hit the Spiders but nothing happened.  Then a Spider came right down near me.  That was a thing to see - I thought that was my lot.  But the claws came out of the bloody thing and it clattered along the wharf.  Then it disappeared over the edge and below the waterline before exploding.  After the explosion, I came to pretty quickly, I think.  Smoke and dust were everywhere.  My Squitch told me my leg was broken.  I told it to shut up.’

Such is the nature of any war that if one component of a carefully constructed set of military means fails, the results are often punishing.  NATO intelligence quickly established that the Caliphate had developed and deployed a modulator as part of the Spider’s shielding.  In effect, when the Falarete embraced the smart-bomb with its net, it was prevented from matching the frequency of the shielding by rapid, miniscule adjustments which the Spider made to the latter.  However, in what would become one of the most widely appreciated achievements in the war, scientists at Aldermaston analysed how the modulation to the frequency of a Spider’s shielding worked.  Within less than an hour, they had developed a countermeasure which utilised redundancy in the Falarete’s guidance system.  This patch would allow the net to match the Spider’s shielding modulation because, although the adjustments were random, they were limited to a narrow frequency range.  The practical upshot was that each net would require up to half a second longer in a confrontation to match frequencies and destroy the Spider.  The patch was transmitted to all deployed Falaretes within fifteen minutes.  Thus, a mere two hours after the attack during which the Caliphate had introduced a potentially war-changing tactical improvement, NATO had countered it successfully, for the cost of fewer than five thousand casualties.

VI. OPERATION THUNDERCLAP

Despite the dexterity shown by their forces, the NATO warlords harboured growing doubts about Repulse.  In
In the Eye of the Storm
, Sir Terry Tidbury described a meeting with the chief of the US Air Force and Chief Air Marshall Erskine in Whitehall on 4 August: ‘After softening them up with a little praise for the way their people had dealt so professionally with the shielding problem, I told Don and Jim that intel suggested Repulse had enjoyed a great deal of good fortune so far.  We discussed the broader picture for a while and Jim lamented how difficult it was to penetrate Caliphate territory, as though we weren’t dealing with humans at all.  We agreed a war between the Caliphate and India would benefit Repulse but was also unlikely.  I suggested that the only reason the operation had gone this well so far was because many Caliphate ACAs had been transferred to the border with India.  If things should calm down there, we might find our forces coming under greater pressure.’

In this Sir Terry is only partly correct.  After the war, aggregated data indicated that Tehran moved over a million warriors from Europe to prepare for a possible invasion of India, replacing them mostly with inexperienced men, but few ACAs.  As would become plain, the manufacturing facility at Tazirbu had increased its production of Blackswans and Lapwings to meet the new threat to the Caliphate.  During the warlords’ meeting on 4 August, Sir Terry recorded: ‘The Air Chief Marshall said that for Repulse to succeed, we needed to hit the Third Caliph on his own ground, but that after what happened to Israel, he was hanged if he knew how to do that.  I think he wanted me to ask him for ideas as to how the air forces might make it happen, but instead I told them that the issue was already in hand.  Both men raised their eyebrows in curiosity, but that was as much as I felt comfortable divulging.’

In the early hours of 4 August,
HMS Warspite
arrived off the North African coast to deliver Hastings, his team and their equipment.  Writing in
Sightseeing in Tazirbu
, team member Captain Rory Dixon described their disembarkation: ‘I fancied the submariners regarded us as doomed creatures, aware as they were of the antiquity of most of our equipment.  The ship surfaced and I and the team were out in less than seven minutes, beating the times we had set during training.  The sky was already paling with the onset of dawn, the air warm but the swell slight.  The inflatables carried us the two kilometres to the shore, where it took nearly half an hour to locate and bring in the large equipment which
Warspite
had launched through her tubes.’