Read Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 Online
Authors: Chris James
In the early hours of 10 July, a fleet of fifty SkyWatchers took up station six kilometres above the North Sea. For the first time, these were fitted with SHF burners instead of arms. They were defended by three times the number of PeaceMakers flying holding patterns at lower altitudes, ready for the expected Caliphate counterattack. Across southern England, transport aircraft began loading their complements of exoskeleton-clad Marines and support units. The advance units took off at 03.00 and proceeded to cross the English Channel. At 03.31, the SHF burners activated and at once their highly focused beams created three-dimensional electromagnetic ‘corridors’ through the Caliphate’s blanket jamming of European airspace. Thea Lund, a young monitoring officer at a scanning station north of Oslo, later recalled: ‘Suddenly all ears were full of chatter, as though we’d pulled a curtain back a massive group of people talking loudly. The sounds went straight into the super AI which translated the gurgles and shrieks we heard, then compared them with the current situation. In about one second, the words flashed up on my screen: “Probability Operation Foothold has been compromised: 100%.” Just like that. I don’t think anyone expected the SHF burners to work that well.’
Lund was not alone. Within seconds, super-AI units with access to the SkyWatchers’ feeds reported the same conclusion. From Paris to the
George Washington
out in the Atlantic, NATO forces knew at once the US Marines were flying into a trap. Gen. Joseph E. Jones immediately aborted the mission and cancelled Operation Foothold. As his adjutant, Mason Underwood, noted in his diary: ‘It was a split-second decision - certainly the General didn’t have the luxury of consulting the other generals, however offended they might have been. In any case, the decision was obvious: sending those Marines into a theatre where they might cause some serious damage was one thing, but sending them to a certain death was another. There really was no alternative.’
In moments, the transports turned back for England, as the SkyWatchers detected waves of Blackswans emerging from south of Paris. The PeaceMakers dived to intercept them over the North Sea, and in the event only one transport was shot down, costing the lives of one-hundred-and-fifty Marines. Through the general surprise at the effectiveness of the SHF burners, which allowed NATO listening stations to continue to soak up Caliphate communications traffic, cooler heads sought the reason for the Caliphate’s foreknowledge of the deployment. As Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury wrote afterwards: ‘The traditional routes by which an enemy discovers your plans in advance were not available in this conflict. I did not for a moment believe Operation Foothold had been compromised by either betrayal or enemy subterfuge. Therefore, when the answer came, it led to a deduction no one wanted to admit.’
The answer to which Sir Terry refers concerned the realisation that China must have been supplying details of NATO plans to the Caliphate. The Super AI at England’s Ministry of Defence first identified a vanishingly obscure SPI (software patch inhibitor) which played a minor role in filtering NATO communications’ encryption codes. When the super AI at the US Department of Defense reached the same conclusion, the SPI was traced back to a communications software procurement transaction in February 2055, one of the few open tenders awarded to a Chinese manufacturer. At the post-war US Congressional hearings, the audience fell into silence when Senator Joseph Ross read out the relevant part of the committee’s findings: ‘We conclude, therefore, with certainty that the purchase of this software from the Chinese supplier Norinco allowed a fundamental breach of the security of communications which went undetected until the war with the New Caliphate revealed its existence.’
This security breach was not only an American problem: in 2058 the other NATO countries changed to the same system to allow more effective communications between their militaries. Thus, by the war’s outbreak the SPI quietly fed all of NATO’s communications traffic back to an address which was soon identified as being part of the Central Military Commission in Beijing. On each occasion NATO re-encrypted its communications (once a week in peacetime; every three hours during war), the SPI could rewrite its own filters to merge seamlessly with the management software and remain undetected.
The two days after the aborted Operation Foothold saw some of the tensest discussions between the West’s political and military leaders. English Prime Minister Napier had a private call with President Coll. According to Napier’s aide, ‘The boss was furious with the Yanks for not having spotted this sooner. She asked Coll how the US military could’ve allowed this new disaster. Coll seemed equally pissed off, and shot back that all of us used Chinese companies - and had done for decades - because they were cheaper. They rowed back and forth for some minutes, until Coll assured the boss that the situation was being rectified. After the call, Monica [a fellow aide] suggested the boss might need a glass of wine. I gave her a withering look, and fetched the boss a strong gin and tonic.’
NATO political leaders attended the Chiefs of Staff situation briefing on Wednesday 12 July, most of them via remote communications. Napier opened the meeting with the rhetorical question: ‘Is anyone here in favour of NATO declaring war on China?’ A fractious debate broke out with attendees talking over each other and little being achieved. NATO’s powerlessness had never been more exposed. The arguments were brought to a shuddering halt when an adjutant to Polish General Pakla relayed news of a public statement from Beijing. In it, the Chinese government announced the summary execution of seven members of the Central Military Commission, including the commanding general, for ‘compromising Chinese neutrality in international affairs’.
Amid the silence this news caused, it is likely many attendees wondered where the truth lay. The French President-in-exile vocalised the thoughts of many when he said: ‘So the Chinese know we have discovered their subterfuge. On the one hand, these executions may be to hide the fact that they were intentionally informing the Caliphate of our every move. On the other hand, the passing of such information might not have been sanctioned officially, but may have been the work of Caliphate sympathisers inside the CMC. I fear we will never know for certain.’
In the following days the young British diplomat who had secured a copy of Zayan’s data-pod before the war broke out, relayed information back to MI5 that a wide-ranging purge had begun, involving far more executions than Beijing admitted publicly. US spies inside Chinese conglomerates in various African states corroborated these data, and reported back to Washington the many indiscretions revealed by local Chinese political commissars after appropriate alcoholic lubrication. It requires little hindsight to understand that Beijing, fearing substantial international embarrassment, decided to remove any individuals who had knowledge of the passing of information on NATO movements to the Caliphate. Since the war, no new facts have come to light which shed any further details on the truth of the issue.
The 12 July situation briefing returned to more pressing military matters. France was expected to be completely overrun in three days; commercial and private ships and boats were at risk as they endeavoured to take refugees off the coasts of Belgium and Denmark; the Netherlands suffered significant civilian casualties due to the comprehensive breach of the Delta Works. Berlin would shortly be surrounded, and had planned a similar defence as Paris. In Poland, Warrior Group East had completed its encirclement of Warsaw the previous afternoon.
The following evening an extraction mission to remove SHAPE headquarters staff from Brussels to the British Isles ended in failure when 85% of the US Marines’ transports were shot down while still over the North Sea. Although at the time there was much recrimination, a more sober analysis proved that the key mistake had been the estimated time required: the Marines planned a rapid extraction, but bad weather over the North Sea allowed sufficient Caliphate ACAs to breach the protective screen of PeaceMakers, augmented with upgraded training Pulsar cannons, before the mission could be aborted. In the early hours of 14 July, SHAPE made its final communication, announcing it was under attack. The following afternoon Gen. Joseph E. Jones and his staff were listed as missing, presumed killed in action.
On Friday 14 July Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury was appointed Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe and promoted to Field Marshal. As he wrote later in
In the Eye of the Storm
: ‘I had expected Washington to insist on an American general to replace Jones, so I was as surprised as anyone when Napier told me of my promotion. In all honesty, it felt like being put in charge of a building which was crumbling in the middle of a controlled demolition. I had a congratulatory call from Studs at the USAF. He sounded upbeat as only an American can, but I caught an undercurrent of what I can best describe as being handed a poisoned chalice. The Americans would never abandon Europe, no one thought that, but a sense had begun to develop in many people that we were reaching what Studs would call the “endgame”. Nevertheless, I thought it was important to do what I could to frustrate the Caliphate.’
Sir Terry began by strengthening the defences around airfields in southern England. Many British media outlets demanded the general population be armed, which both Sir Terry and Napier resisted. Sir Terry refreshed the higher levels of the military by sacking certain generals he felt were not performing sufficiently, especially regarding the defence of the British Isles, and promoting colonels with specific skills. He took care to visit the remains of European forces that had reached Britain to urge them to continue the defence. Many of these troops spoke later of their respect for Sir Terry’s determination that the fight should not yet be seen as lost. According to one German captain: ‘This English fellow seemed oblivious to the strength of the forces ranged against us, and I marvelled at what on earth the British Army did to its soldiers that they could still look for victory in the face of certain defeat. Remarkable.’
XI. THE CALIPH DECLARES VICTORY
On the following Sunday, the Third Caliph made his notorious announcement concerning the victory of his forces. In a message aimed more at reassuring the rest of the world that the fighting was all but over, the Third Caliph proclaimed the following Wednesday, 19 July and in the Caliphate’s calendar the Prophet’s Birthday, as a public holiday for all Caliphate subjects to celebrate this final victory over the infidel and the righting of the heinous historical wrong. This would transpire to be premature. In the first case, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw still held out; and an enclave around the port of Hamburg had yet to come under the enemy’s control. In the second place, the Third Caliph spoke of the British Isles as those ‘little islands’ without apparently comprehending the wealth of troops and material now concentrated there. In addition, and as a sign of his benevolence, the Third Caliph told the world that attacks on the Nordic countries would cease forthwith, despite their perfidious aid to the infidel. The announcement concluded with a dark warning to the United States of America that future punishment for its support for Europe would remain under consideration.
In many countries around the world, the Third Caliph’s announcement was greeted with a sense of relief that the fighting would soon end and those unaffected billions of people could breathe more easily. Aggregated data from media outlets in Asia, Africa and South America demonstrate a desire for peace and regret for the suffering, but stop short of any condemnation of the Caliphate’s actions. To the student of history, this constitutes a salient lesson in the power of managing global public opinion, something at which it is difficult to fault the Caliphate’s conduct until the end of the war.
But in the middle of that long, hot July, it remained an objective fact that the European democracies and NATO were all but destroyed. As the endgame approached, the result appeared unavoidable.
Complacency in victorious armies has many precedents. History is littered with examples of generals, popes and emperors who allowed their certainty of dominance to be their undoing. The war between NATO and the New Persian Caliphate, however, was the first in history to be fought with the assistance of super artificial intelligence. It bears repeating that all belligerents employed devices which had instant access to the intimate details of every military engagement known to history. In seconds, these devices could compare, analyse, conclude and advise on the most effective course of action to ensure the maximum military gain for the minimum loss. In theory at least, none of the combatants should make any tactical or strategic errors.
For the NATO powers, the pre-war mistakes made by their super AI - due mainly to a dearth of reliable information, it has to be stressed - had engendered a scepticism among the military and political leaders which would not be tempered for the duration of the war. Conversely, the Caliphate’s successes had transpired exactly as its super AI had predicted, although given its vast superiority in arms and men, it is difficult to believe even the most incompetent general could have failed to achieve anything other than total victory on the European mainland. Nevertheless, this led to an element of overconfidence which manifested itself in an unnecessary delay in invading the British Isles. On the one hand, Caliphate forces did require time to reinforce for the assault; on the other, most historians agree that the length of the pause proved Caliphate forces regarded the war as already won, and the subjugation of the British Isles as little more than a training exercise.
As G. K. Morrow states in
The Great European Disaster
: ‘By this stage London and Washington knew a great deal more about the Caliphate’s armies than they had hitherto. Whole brigades of Warrior Groups West and Centre had been rotated to give inexperienced formations a taste of battle and a chance to enjoy the spoils of war. Younger warriors awaited the order to advance, having heard of their comrades who had returned with material wealth and several Turkish, Greek, Italian or Spanish girls as their personal slaves. Respected palaces with harems of exotic creatures were being created back home, and eager teenage men sharpened their blades in anticipation of gaining a share of the booty before the war ended.’
The second half of July passed with the populations of the British Isles in a fatalistic mood. National media outlets advised readers and viewers on the best way to explain the situation to elderly or young family members. The British governments offered their citizens civil defence advice to protect their homes from blast and heat damage. Few members of the public were impressed. Typical was eighty-one-year-old retired accountant Oscar Pugh, who wrote to his younger sister: ‘Do you remember that time Dad showed us what bullshit he had to grow up with? What was it called - Protect and Survive? All about building a refuge under your stairs for when the Soviets attacked the UK with nuclear bombs. I swear, it’s the same old rubbish, Ginny. Now they’re telling us to paint our windows silver, when two shots from one of those lasers will melt the bloody glass - ridiculous! Still, it goes to show how wrong they were, saying that nuclear bombs had ended war. Why should these Muslims nuke us and irradiate the land when they don’t have to?’
While many civilians may have scratched their heads and guffawed at the government’s advice, military scientists gave due consideration to thousands of defensive ideas suggested by personnel from every branch of the services. One such idea had been under development since the Tense Spring. It originated from a private in 101 Logistic Brigade, since killed in action defending London. Designated the ‘Falarete’, it began as a simple, single-use tube which fired a nano-adjusted, carbon-composite net. The first version had been designed with the sole aim of defeating a Spider released from a Blackswan as simply as possible. Despite initial concerns regarding its potential, through the testing process engineers refined the design until they produced a defensive weapon which would cause the Caliphate material hindrance. In its final combat form, the Falarete evolved into a super-AI controlled device which fired a projectile at an approaching Spider. However, rather than carrying explosives to detonate against the Spider’s shielding, on contact the shot broke into a special type of netting which surrounded the Spider. The nano-bots in the carbon matched the molecule oscillation in the netting to the frequency of the shielding, thus allowing the netting to penetrate it. A preprogramed atom shift then caused the netting to self-combust at three thousand degrees centigrade, which detonated the munitions in the Spider.
Final tests of the Falarete were concluded at Aldermaston in the third week of July. Sir Leigh Rose, the Head of British Civil Defence, consulted Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury, and the latter gave orders for extensive deployment for both military and civil defence. The plans were transmitted to every city, town and village in England, Scotland and Wales whose local authority was equipped with super AI. Nearly all municipalities employed at least one replicator in their peacetime functioning, and the design of the Falarete was simple enough that the weapon could be produced by replicators which were up to five years old.
Twenty-three year old Max Cooke, a security guard at Staines town hall now promoted to fire watch officer, described the work involved in setting the Falaretes up: ‘The council’s replicator was in the basement. Alex [his superior] called me down and I saw the thing churning out tubes which looked like lengths of silver drainpipe, about a metre long with a circumference of ten centimetres. They were sealed at one end but open at the other, and stencilled over them were the words “Handle with care”. Alex told me we had to carry them up to the top floor - which was empty anyway because of the fire risk - and point them out of the windows. Each tube had brackets at both ends and they slotted together to form rows. The replicator then turned out a larger frame for the tubes to sit in. I was quite impressed once me [sic] and Alex had assembled the whole thing. Each frame held ten tubes side by side, and Alex got the replicator to turn out enough frames and tubes for each window on the top floor. The only thing that shocked me was when Alex produced several small black rolls of something he called “cable”. To my amazement, the Falaretes had to be directly connected to the super AI with this stuff - it even had little bits of metal on the ends which fitted neatly into a port on the frame at one end, and another port on the super AI at the other. Incredible.’
Cooke and his superior were two of thousands of civil defence members who, between 26 and 28 July, replicated a forest of Falaretes across innumerable rooftops, church spires and other tall buildings which had survived the war to this point. Despite Cooke’s laconic recounting of that night, it bears emphasising that the Caliphate’s final attack of the campaign was expected at any moment. As Sir Terry Tidbury wrote: ‘I now see those last July days as the Third Caliph’s personal gift to all of us. Our SHF burners gave us the intelligence that Warrior Group West was fully reinforced and ready to attack as early as the 22nd. It seemed the Caliph himself had to give the order, and he was busy with planning parades and celebrations or whatever else in Tehran. Their super AI must have warned them against any delay, but delay they did. And what a difference it made to the entire war.’
In the early hours of Sunday 30 July hundreds of waves of Blackswans began what the Caliphate regarded as a mopping-up operation. NATO forces had a different opinion. The delay had also allowed other NATO defences to be built up to levels previously unseen. At South-East England’s main civil defence tracking station in Greenwich, London, staff had an ideal view as the battle unfolded over the North Sea and continued inland. Monitoring the displays was a twenty-five-year-old technician called Jill Baker. She recalled: ‘We had a number of live feeds from the SkyWatchers higher up and the PeaceMakers closer to the enemy. By this time, we also had full identification on each type of Caliphate ACA. The super AI controlled all of our machines. The Blackswans and Lapwings came on in their saturation waves, the same tactic the Caliphate had been using since the start of the war. We used a new tactic: attacking the flank of a wave with our own “mini-saturation” formation. It worked fairly well. If six PeaceMakers could overwhelm and destroy a Blackswan on the edge of a wave in less than three seconds, we regarded that as a success. Often the Caliphate’s own super AI rolled the wave formation to surround the PeaceMakers, which caused quite the most geometrical theatrics. It looked like the ACAs were dancing around the sky. But over the first fifteen minutes, the new tactic destroyed more of their machines than we’d ever been able to before.’
The battle between machines over the North Sea now moved to land as remnants of the leading Caliphate waves crossed the coast at points from Harwich south to Deal, and around southern England. Blackswans raced ashore first at Dover, followed over the next ten minutes by more at Hastings, Worthing and Portsmouth. Hayes describes what happened next: ‘I remember a lot of us weren’t impressed with the Falaretes. Yes, they could be a stopgap till we developed and manufactured an ACA to match the Blackswan, but for me it seemed such an odd thing to have made it through the development process. The Blackswan was a very advanced machine: each one chose the best place and time to release its Spiders according to its primary, secondary and tertiary targets, and depending on the immediate threats it faced. That’s why knocking a Blackswan out at sea was the best option because, if land was out of the Spiders’ range, the Blackswan self-destructed. For the third time in this war, we had hundreds of these ACAs flying towards military, municipal and historical targets - and suddenly they began detonating in the sky. Where our missiles had been unable to breach the Blackswans’ or the Spiders’ shields, now they were dropping like flies. Everyone’s mouths fell open as the number of enemy machines still on target kept coming down. The Falaretes worked better than anyone had expected.’
This is a fair assessment, but belies the complexity involved. Falaretes made the greatest impact when sited on open ground, either in parks, streets or on roofs. Where they were located inside buildings, their range became restricted (Staines town hall, mentioned above, lost part of its roof when the super AI launched a Falarete at a Spider which had flown past the window opening). In addition, they required the finest timing. Obviously a mere human could not hope to aim and fire a Falarete given the speeds involved, but each super AI, linked to Britain’s tracking stations, also had to judge where and when a Blackswan would release its Spiders, and use the few seconds between a Spider’s release and its impact on the target to launch a Falarete. In this the success rate exceeded expectations by a significant margin, with over 90% of all Spiders destroyed before they could reach their objective.
However, there were also disappointments. One Lapwing succeeded in entering a tunnel in the London Underground, where it proceeded to incinerate over a thousand people who had taken shelter inside before its activity caused the tunnel to collapse on it. A number of coastal towns suffered disproportionately when the Caliphate’s super AI adjusted ACA attack vectors to take account of the Falaretes’ presence. It redirected its few remaining machines to approach at sea level to keep them below the Falaretes’ field of fire, and buildings located close to beaches endured substantial damage. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the resounding success of deploying the Falaretes: in the 30 June attack, casualties in England totalled over two million; by the end of the attack a mere one month later, fewer than thirty thousand civilians had been killed or injured.
The night’s action was not yet over. As Jill Hayes said afterwards: ‘We were so concerned with the battle between the machines that we almost missed the next stage. This wasn’t just another terror attack like the ones before it; this was the invasion. In the amazement at the success of the Falaretes, it took a moment to realise that, before the aerial battle had ended, the Caliphate had launched waves of warrior transport aircraft from Normandy. These things didn’t fly anywhere near as quickly as the ACAs, obviously, so we had more time to estimate their potential landing points. Once we knew for sure warriors were on their way, all hell broke loose.’
Despite the fusillades in the sky, US Marines and elements of the newly reconstituted British First Corps boarded their own transport craft and waited. Four Caliphate transports touched down between Hastings and Bexhill on the south coast at 03.59, carrying nearly five thousand warriors and support personnel in total. Two more arrived at Battery Hill behind Fairlight Cove a few kilometres to the east some seven minutes afterwards. All six transports had been protected by dense screens of Lapwings while over the sea, but these came under withering Falarete fire which destroyed 96% of the Caliphate machines. Reinforcement ACAs from both sides raced in to provide support. As the PeaceMakers had less distance to travel, they arrived first. Five of the six warrior transports had begun disgorging their cargoes when the NATO ACA reinforcements launched their missiles. After three hits, the transports’ shielding burned out and the vast craft took direct damage. New arrivals of Caliphate ACAs suffered under renewed Falarete fire.
Eleven minutes later, flesh-and-blood troops reached the scene and battle was joined. For the first time in the war, NATO forces found themselves evenly matched against this most destructive enemy. Nevertheless, containment of the warriors’ bridgeheads was not secured without difficulty. The 12th Marine Expeditionary Unit suffered over 40% casualties in the first hour as problems with their exoskeletons allowed Caliphate warriors to gain the advantage. As one of the survivors of the engagement, Private Caleb Barnes, later explained: ‘The exo-suits couldn’t take the punishment we expected them to be able to take. The goddam ragheads were equipped with smart bullets which zeroed in on the joints. That weren’t no surprise [sic], but what screwed us was the bailout function. See, when the joints get hit, if the system can’t reroute you just press the bailout button and the suit falls away. Problem was, their smart bullets welded the joints real good, so the bailout didn’t work. This weren’t the worst of it. As long as you had ammo, you’d be okay. But when you shot off all your ammo, then your time was up, no two ways. I saw a lot of my buddies stuck in those suits while the ragheads sprinted up to them, took out their sabres, and sliced them up like a side of beef. Goddam bastards.’