Christopher Nuttall - The Fall of Night

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” he said, as he saw what the Russian had done. Instincts took over and he threw himself backwards as the grenades detonated; screaming red hot pain cascaded through him as the fragments of shrapnel burned through his legs and chest. He couldn’t feel his legs; the pain was too great to allow him even to think; the sense that someone was talking to him, someone very close, was confusing his mind. He couldn’t even focus enough to rally and kill Russians…

“Hazel,” he said, or thought he said, and blacked out.

Inglehart saw Robinson fall and cursed the Russians as he wounded one with a gut-shot, blowing the Russian’s head off with a second shot. He had liked Robinson; he had known him since he was a nervous common soldier, to becoming a commissioned officer, to becoming a competent Captain… and then the man who had saved all of their lives. He threw a grenade at a nearby group of Russians and knelt by his Captain — he could never think of him as a Colonel — examining the wounds; they were bad. The ruined legs alone would cripple him for the rest of his life…

The choice wasn't hard to make. The Russians had fallen back; Inglehart knew what that meant, a bombardment. He shouted orders to two of the medics, ordering them to carry the Captain out of the battlezone, and turned back to face the advancing Russians. He owed Robinson his life; he could have fled, but in the end… he had accepted the price of duty a long time ago, when he had first taken service in the army, a long time before Robinson had ever joined himself.

Inglehart was proud of Robinson; he was proud to be a Sergeant in the greatest army in the world. It had been a long career, watching the army rise and fall, seeing newer officers prove themselves or fail under the supreme test of combat. It had been a good life, all in all; wine — or rather beer — women and song, all spent with the finest bunch of bastards on the face of the planet. He wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Inglehart kept fighting until they overwhelmed him. He died surrounded by the bodies of his foes.

“They’re punching through the main defence line,” the aide reported. Langford could hear a hint of panic in her voice; they were on the verge of being trapped in the HQ if the Russian advance was not checked. “They’re moving to outflank Dorking itself.”

Langford scowled. The Russians had managed the penetration quicker than he had expected; he had anticipated the bombardment of Dorking, but not the almost suicidal tactics the Russians had used to break through. Time was on their side; was there some reason why they had forced the issue as much as they had, apart from sheer bloody-mindedness?

It didn’t matter. “Contact Major Ryan,” he ordered. The time had come to play the last card in his hand, the only card he had held back for the final battle. There had been no other choice, not until now; the last card had to be played, or abandoned along with the war. “The tanks will advance and engage the enemy.”

Near Dorking, United Kingdom

“Advance!”

Major John Patrick David Ryan settled himself firmly in his command tank as the Eurotank — perhaps the last Eurotank left in existence — began to move forward. The command Eurotank had been designed as a larger version of the original, with space for the officer in command of the regiment to direct his tanks as he saw fit; the British Challengers that moved forward were older and slower, although tougher. The design was more than thirty years old — some of the tanks were older still — but they could still hold their own.

He held his breath as the final tank lunged forward. Hiding the tanks had been a nightmare; it had been hard enough moving them around without the heavy vehicles smashing up roads and motorways, although that, at least, was a positive bonus when slowing the enemy down was part of the mission objectives. The tanks had normally been moved around the country on trains and tank transporters, but there had been fewer exercises for coordinating such activity before the war began, and now it was almost too late. Had they been kept in Scotland, he wasn't sure that they would have managed to get them down to England in time to fight; the devastation the Russians had caused to the British infrastructure had been serious. They had been competing with various companies and government-run commissions, always hard men to beat, but the Russians had aimed to destroy, rather than milking a crumbling edifice of every last pound before it was too late.

It wouldn’t be long before the Russians saw them and responded; it was all-too-possible that the Russians had seen them hiding the tanks, despite their best precautions. He had kept his men away from the vehicles right up until the final moment, just in case the Russians caught sight of them, but it seemed as if the American data had proven itself and the Russians were completely unaware that they still existed. The Russians had destroyed enough tank parks and storage silos; he hoped that, perhaps, they were starting to wonder if they had destroyed all of Britain’s tanks. They had certainly given it the old college try.

The Americans had supplied them with microburst communications equipment and they used them exclusively; the Yanks were pretty certain that the Russians would be unable to track them through their microburst emissions. He would have preferred more tanks, even outdated early-model Abrams tanks, but it had been impossible to have those shipped over for the war. – A handful of American EW gear had also been sent over; the Russians would be finding all manner of problems with some of their systems, problems that would make them wonder if they were having glitches, or if something was definitely out there, hunting them. The sensor ghosts would make tracking the second part of the plan difficult; a lot of men were about to die. Ryan could only hope that their deaths would be worth something.

The Russians had been forcing armoured columns up the British roads, springing ambushes and bringing up vast firepower to confront the British defenders, before trying to crush the entire British Army. The line had broken up ahead and, as Russian doctrine ordered, the Russians had thrown the better part of one of their armoured units into the gap, trying to push it open wider. They had to distrust the strange mixture of patchwork fields and houses on the outskirts of Dorking; scouts reported that the Russians had blasted a number of houses with heavy tank shells for no apparent reason.

The latest microburst update flickered onto his screen; the Russians had launched their main push into the region, breaking into vacuum. His force was ambling onwards, picking up speed; they would be in a perfect position to ambush the Russians in moments. All they had to do was remain quiet… and hope that the Russians neither saw them, nor heard the rumble of the tank’s diesel engines. It wouldn’t be long now.

Colonel Bogdan Aleksandrovich Onishenko glared around him as the T-100 rumbled past yet another perfect ambush site, one hand on the holster he wore at his hip. He didn’t like Britain; it went from strange countryside to patchwork fields to quite large habitations, all within the space of a few miles. Onishenko had been in tanks since he passed through basic training; he knew enough to know that the British were sneaky and very good at improvising. So far, there had been no real resistance once the main defence line had been breached, but the British would be scrambling to establish a second line as soon as possible, perhaps even before his unit could really put the boot in.