Christopher Nuttall - The Fall of Night

“Captain, the Russian aircraft are launching missiles,” the sensor officer said. “I have at least nine missiles homing in on our location!”

“Evasive action,” Ward ordered, sharply. The Russians were trying to smother them; they were making up for problems in some of their targeting systems by overloading the British point-defence network. “You are cleared to engage the missiles with CIWS!”

The yammering of the guns could even be heard on the bridge… and then they stopped. “Weapons jam, weapons jam,” the weapons officer snapped. “Three incoming missiles…”

HMS Winston Churchill , the last of her class still in existence, took three hits along the superstructure. The Russian warheads punched though the thin hull and detonated inside the ship, destroying the entire vessel in a shattering cataclysm. There were no survivors.

“I have fourteen Russian fighters advancing towards you, nineteen more holding in reserve,” Lieutenant Jacques Montebourg snapped, over the command network. “They’re trying to draw the RAF out to play…”

“I love you too, Jacques,” Flying Officer Cindy Jackson said, as she banked the Eurofighter Tempest out over the south-east of England, waiting for the Russians to come calling. The Russians looked as if they had expected the RAF to come engage them right in the heart of their formation, and before the Americans had made their unexpected delivery, the RAF had planned to do just that. “We’ll hold position and wait.”

There were thirty fast-jet fighters left in the RAF, mainly Typhoons and Joint Strike Fighters from the Royal Navy; Cindy knew that it was their last shot. She’d had it made brutally clear to her; if the RAF could knock out the Russian transports, it might just save Britain from Russian occupation. The Russians themselves were coming forward towards the British fighters; a handful more were remaining with the transports, probably cursing their luck at being stuck shepherding the slower aircraft. Fighter jocks were all the same; the Russians had a three-to-one advantage, just in the battlezone alone, and they weren’t going to waste it. They were coming towards her aircraft at supersonic speed and…

Someone down on the ground flicked a switch. A dozen CADS and several light American launchers that had been prepared for auto-fire opened fire, mingled in with old Rapier and Javelin systems, sending nearly a hundred SAM missiles into the air. The Russians, caught by surprise, scattered; many of them had already become victims as the American-made missiles locked onto their aircraft and entered their terminal runs. Some Russian pilots punched out of their aircraft, choosing to risk capture rather than die in fire; others tried to evade until the very last moment.

“Go,” Cindy snapped. The RAF fighters hit their afterburners at once and streaked south-east at supersonic speed, their weapons systems already receiving the download from the AWACS as they passed over the hidden weapons and headed into the teeth of the enemy transports. A handful of Russian fighters, the surprised escorts, were desperately trying to come into position to take a shot at her, but it was too late; they were too late. The RAF fired a hail of missiles towards the Russian transports and bombers, ignoring the fighters; twenty-three Russian aircraft exploded in midair as the RAF blew through them and kept firing, engaging every last target they saw. Russian fighters were trying to chase them out again, but the Russian formation was falling out of shape; their fighter controllers had to be going mental just trying to keep up with the rapidly changing situation. She laughed aloud, jamming her hand down on the trigger for her cannons; a Russian transport aircraft and its parachute soldiers died under her fire.

Her threat receiver screamed an alarm, moments before a tail gunner put a handful of rounds into the Tempest, which screamed in pain. She heard noises she had only heard in simulations as the aircraft started to disintegrate around her, but she couldn’t eject, not in the middle of the battle. That would almost certainly be guaranteed suicide; the Russians had fired on ejecting RAF pilots before, another trick to weaken the RAF still further. She still had weapons and options; she still had some possible tricks she could pull…

And there was one weapon left. Pointing the remains of her aircraft towards another aircraft, she reached for the ejection lever… too late. Her Tempest crashed into a Russian transport and both aircraft vanished from the sky in a tearing fireball. No one ever found a trace of Flying Officer Cindy Jackson, or her aircraft.

General Shalenko gritted his teeth as the losses came in. They had expected losses, and they had almost wiped out the Royal Navy in exchange for losing several transports and ASW craft, but the losses in fighter craft were appalling. It hardly mattered; they had crippled the RAF and slaughtered the Royal Navy. They still had most of the transports intact and the soldiers were waiting now for a chance to come to grips directly with the enemy. He wouldn’t let them down; Russians knew that victory was worth the price.

He turned to his aide. “Give the order,” he said, addressing her directly. “Deploy the landing force.”

Battlezone, English Channel

The transport nearest his aircraft blew up in a massive explosion, tossing Colonel Boris Akhmedovich Aliyev’s aircraft across the sky, sending a ripple of muttered curses up from the parachutists as they braced themselves for their coming mission. They had prepared for it as best as they could, but Aliyev knew — they all knew — that it would be their most dangerous yet. Nearly the entire paratrooper force had been committed to the mission, under a GRU General; failure was not an option.

“That was a RAF aircraft ramming a transport,” Captain Boris Lapotev called back. Lapotev had been delighted to be at the controls of a genuine military transport again; the modified civilian aircraft would have been sitting ducks in the raging air battle, and the British would have known that they were hostile. All British civilian aircraft had been sent to the west of England, or to Scotland, where they laboured to evacuate as much of the population as possible. Aliyev knew enough about logistics to doubt that they had a serious chance of evacuating the entire population; it was far more likely that they wouldn’t be able to get more than a few hundred thousand out at most, assuming that the Americans and Canadians were willing to keep taking them in. “Poor, brave, stupid bastard.”

Aliyev shrugged. He had spent time fighting the Poles when they had rallied, only a few hours too late, to attempt to retake the airport. They had been brave as well, and determined; the few prisoners had all been heavily injured before the Russians had captured them. The civilians caught in the war zone had suffered badly; they would be repatriated to their home countries as soon as possible. Aliyev had promised them that and… well, he wasn’t an FSB butcher. He wouldn’t have hesitated to drive over them if they had been blocking his route, as the FSB had done in Warsaw, but he wouldn’t slaughter for no tactical purpose.

“Five minutes to jump point,” Lapotev said. Aliyev found himself tensing; he would be first out of the aircraft, as happened most of the time. Once they landed, they could expect to be attacked almost at once; if they were unlucky, the British might even shoot at them as they were falling out of the sky. It was early morning, but by now the British would be on the alert and gunning for the Russians with everything they had. “The air force is moving in first.”