Over by Christmas Read online

  “It’s about half an hour until sunset,” Mitchell said. “Did you want to send that messenger back to the train depot, Captain, or will you take your sergeant’s word on my identity?”

  “Of course, I trust my sergeant,” Ho said.

  Before Captain Ho could add a caveat, Mitchell cut in. “Capital. You’re here to protect this bridge. I assume your orders warn of an attack from the north, possibly on those trains parked further south.”

  “The previous ambushes did target locomotives,” Ho said.

  “Yes, but you’ve provided our enemy with an even more tempting target,” Mitchell said. “You’re aware they have mortars? One round hits the ammunition caisson here, and this farm becomes a crater. If they hit the caisson on the bridge, we’re going to spend the next month fishing rubble out of the canal.”

  “They won’t attack the bridge,” Ho said. “The general says they need the bridges and roads intact.”

  “I don’t know what the enemy’s plans are, so there’s no way a general does,” Mitchell said. “I’d advise you to move the ammunition. Jean-Luc, is there a cellar here?”

  “Of course.”

  “Move the shells below ground,” Mitchell said. “But be surreptitious. Don’t make it obvious what you’re doing. I’m going to scout the fields.”

  “Do you think the enemy are out there?” Ho asked.

  “I would be,” Mitchell said, striding away before Captain Ho could object.

  “Mind if I tag along, sir?” Jo-Jo asked, falling into step next to Mitchell.

  “I never mind company,” Mitchell said. He unzipped his bag, from which he drew an M4 carbine with a collapsible stock.

  “Nice gun, sir,” Jo-Jo said with envy.

  “Borrowed from an old friend,” Mitchell said. “How did you really end up back at the front, Jo-Jo?”

  “They offered me the promotion, sir,” she said. “Yeah, I know that makes it sound like the army’s desperate, but me saying no wasn’t going to magic up some more soldiers.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mitchell said. “Is everyone else here a conscript?”

  “Not all. Some were clerks or cooks. There’s even a tank driver.”

  “But no tank,” Mitchell said.

  “Not unless you know something I don’t,” Jo-Jo said.

  “Don’t hold your breath unless you can hold it until the summer.” He stopped, halfway across the frozen field. “These were all cabbages. Low to the ground. No cover here. I’ve been roaming the battlefields south of Calais this last month, piecing together scraps of evidence from all the attacks since the big one.”

  “There’s been three, haven’t there?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Three sets of simultaneous, night-time ambushes, and far too many skirmishes,” Mitchell said, scanning the terrain. “The bulk of our army is bogged down trying to secure a land route to the Mediterranean.”

  “Why?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Beats me, because it’s no way to beat the enemy,” Mitchell said. “But I’m not a general. Would they hide in that orchard? Ah, but I can see right through those trees. No, the trees don’t offer much cover without the leaves. This way.”

  An orchard had been planted in the corner of the second field. Further along the boundary line, a massive oak had been struck by lightning, and then by the wind. It had fallen, lifting its roots deep from the soil.

  Mitchell gestured beyond the lightning-blasted tree, motioning she should circle left, while he went right.

  There was no one there.

  “Each of these night-time ambushes follows the same pattern,” Mitchell said as he peered at the loose soil behind the fallen tree. “Three sets of attacks. Four in one night, then seven, then five, all timed to take place at the same time. Eleven-twenty, one-thirty, half past midnight. Each attack consists of around ten mortar shells being lobbed at a target, while five hundred to a thousand rounds of assault rifle ammo are fired. The attacks last under five minutes before our enemy vanishes into the night. And they really do vanish. The official report says they’ve sustained heavy casualties, but the reality is we’ve collected three corpses, and a few old-world rifles.”

  “How many people have we lost, sir?” she asked.

  “About seventy. Twice that number injured severely enough to be sent back to Dover. That’s not counting the daylight skirmishes. We do better there. But these night-time attacks are really taking their toll. Our enemy knows where to aim their mortars. That takes skill, but it also requires a spotter. Someone has to lie out in the frozen ground, watching the target.” He crouched down. “Here, I think.”

  “Someone was watching us?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Yep. Doesn’t mean they’ll attack you, or that they’ll attack tonight. But they would have seen the artillery pieces. You’ve been marked as a potential target. Hmm. I wonder whether they hoped to cross the bridge. If they did, now you’re here, they won’t be able to. In which case, you’re an even more likely target. Well, this is what the generals wanted.”

  “It is?” she asked.

  “Yep. A bastion to hold the bridge and draw their fire,” Mitchell said. “Come on. We’ve got some work to do before dark, and some more afterwards. Just don’t look back.”

  “You think we’re being watched still?”

  “Unsure, but let’s assume it.” He trudged back towards the farm, counting under his breath. “Assuming someone sets up a mortar at the tree, our soldiers could run from the farm in three minutes, and straight into assault rifle fire. That’s how we lost seventeen at Ardres.”

  “We can retrain the cannon on the tree,” Jo-Jo said.

  “No, I’ve got a different idea,” Mitchell said. “Find a couple of wheelbarrows. Load them with kindling. After dark, wheel them out into the field, at least twenty metres from the farm, and ten metres apart. At about nine, light them. We don’t want a bonfire, just a few small blazes which burn themselves out. We’ll have no lights on in the farm, so that might confuse their aim. Your unit has a radio set?”

  “Yes, sir. Hasn’t worked for days. It got dumped in a puddle. Someone tried washing the mud out of its innards. Should I send a runner back to the train depot?”

  “No, it’s getting too late,” Mitchell said. “Besides, the purpose of a bastion is to be a target. The generals shouldn’t need us warning them we’re in danger of attack. Secure the shells below ground. Don’t fire the guns. Get everyone hidden with some bricks at their backs, and orders not to shoot.”

  “We’re not allowed to fire back?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Our enemy isn’t a cohesive unit,” Mitchell said. “They’re a gang of killers who rampaged through Europe in the hope of looting Britain. Someone is holding them together, arming them, supplying them, organising them. But these bandits will only follow as long as they get victories. They want blood. If we don’t return fire, they might attempt to take the bastion.”

  “And we’ll massacre them,” Jo-Jo said.

  “Here’s hoping.”

  16th December

  Chapter 2 - The Seasonal Search for Inspiration

  The Drummond-Dumond Farm, France

  To My Dear Anna, Happy Christmas, with all my love, Dad.

  He looked at the words he’d written on the card. It wasn’t enough, but he didn’t know what else to say. Letters were easy. You began with the crime du jour, and ended by posing the question of who’d done it. He often wrote a letter or three to Anna while he was out in the wastelands, even if he was unable to post them until he returned. Cards? He hated cards, but it was the season.

  It was also, according to his watch, a new day by a whole twenty minutes. The attack had yet to come. It still could, but with each passing second, the odds dropped. Jean-Luc snored gently in the corner. But that young man had grown up on a scavenging cart. He’d sleep through an earthquake.

  The previous attacks had come within an hour of midnight, leaving the enemy plenty of time to run and hide before dawn. Mitchell would give it until one. If
the attack hadn’t come by then, he’d sleep. Which left him an hour to finish writing the card.

  Seeking inspiration, he looked around the second-storey room, which he’d claimed because it still had thick curtains to hide the light from his electric torch. One wall was painted pink, one green, one yellow, one mauve. The colour scheme matched the bedroom across the hall, so it was a choice rather than a necessity, probably decorated by someone too young to remember pre-Blackout reality real estate shows. The ceiling was white, and the floor-rug was damp, feeding a mould halo around the room’s second door. That door had been built around an old window frame, and now opened onto a walkway leading to the roof of a barn.

  The double-bunk told him this had been a bedroom. The near identical locker-cupboards suggested it was a room for salaried staff rather than paying guests. The curtains were heavy, threaded with gold. Probably salvaged from some rambling chateau. The desk was a globally ubiquitous Swedish flat-pack, though with a replacement hand-lathed leg etched with an apprentice’s best scrollwork.

  The wasted effort that had gone into replacing the table leg was made even more depressing by the graffiti on opposite walls. Latin on the green, Arabic on the pink. He couldn’t read either language, and from the hesitant strokes and splodgy mid-word corrections, neither could their authors. He knew the translations well enough. The Latin was the first few verses from the Gospel of Saint Sebastian, summarising the blood-and-pain doctrine of the knights. In Arabic were the twelve missives of the first emir, supposedly dictated by an archangel the day before the Blackout. Mitchell had seen both sets of scrawls in about a tenth of the properties the enemy had overrun. Did it represent the percentage of true believers among their foes, or just those who’d learned their source text by rote? It didn’t matter, and certainly wasn’t interesting enough to go in a Christmas card. No, what would be of interest to Anna was news of the investigation, but he had little new information to share.

  He categorised the crimes, and their perpetrators, into two groups; the lesser, though hideously violent, butchery to the south of Calais, the synchronised night-time attacks, and the daytime ambushes by lone, and increasingly starving, renegades; and there was the big crime of the insurgency itself. Someone had organised a truce between these rival terrorist cults, and was still supplying them with equipment. Cut off those supplies, and the enemy would wither. His goal was to locate the supply depot. Isaac thought Switzerland, based on an old hunch. Mitchell thought the Black Sea, based on how some of the captured Kalashnikov assault rifles had been manufactured in Bulgaria, some in Albania, and others in Turkey.

  It wasn’t much to share with his police officer daughter, but if he knew more, he’d be heading there, not sitting in an abandoned farmhouse only a few miles from the coast.

  Perhaps the spy he and Isaac were meeting in Belgium would have learned the location of the enemy warlord. Probably not. If the spy was even still alive. Their secondary mission, though the admiralty thought it the most important, was to survey the damage to Nieuwpoort’s harbour and ascertain whether it would make a suitable naval base for the springtime offensive. Mitchell didn’t know when, how, or where that offensive would be launched, but nor had he known they were building a bastion on this bridge. Despite the implied seniority of his new rank, he was still just a lowly copper in pursuit of a suspect.

  After Belgium, he could sail back to Kent with Isaac. If he was in England, he might as well report in to Twynham. While there, he certainly could see Anna, at least for a few hours.

  In her last letter, Anna had said she was going to spend Christmas with Ruth and Maggie in Dover. That was unlikely, the words offered merely as reassurance to an anxious and absent father. Anna was back at work, and leave had been cancelled for absolutely everyone.

  Ordinarily, he wouldn’t worry about her being alone, but she was still in a wheelchair after having been shot. In each of her letters, she said she was almost back to full strength, but that was more daughterly reassurance. With Ruth and Maggie in Dover, Isaac as often at sea as on land, and himself as often behind enemy lines as their own, Anna was alone in Twynham.

  It was good she had work to fill her days, even if it was paperwork at Police House. Between the coup, the corruption, and the collapse of the Railway Company, a cloud of suspicion hung over most members of the police. The military now had priority for recruitment, and so the police were massively understaffed, just when they also needed a military intelligence division. She’d be busy. But still…

  From outside came a gunshot, and a muted, “Hold your fire, damn you!”

  He capped the pen, and closed the card, putting both back in his bag; there wasn’t much else in there except food, ammo, and eight grenades; four smoke, four shrapnel, and all from the prototype batch. In another month, they’d be producing enough to issue four to each soldier. Hopefully. The ammo was new-made by Isaac, recast from the government-issue rounds. The rifle was an old-world carbine, also from Isaac, also from a cache the man had claimed didn’t exist.

  The soldiers outside carried the ten-round, semi-automatic, government-issue rifle modelled on the old M1 Garand in service a century ago. Why? Expedient bureaucracy. With pirate raids, separatist enclaves, and escaped zoo animals, farmers needed a hunting rifle they could also use for defence. Most of the refugees who’d fought their way to Britain had arrived armed. With such an abundance of weapons, gun control was impossible, so they’d adopted ammunition control instead. By issuing a new standard cartridge which didn’t fit in old-world, fully automatic weapons, they made those old guns useless. Theoretically. Until someone dismantled the new cartridges to make their own, retooled the barrel of an old-world gun, or found some forgotten stash of Kalashnikovs and bullets as their enemy had done.

  He took out the night-scope. That was his own, salvaged years ago near Paris when he’d been travelling with Jean-Luc’s mother, with Isaac, and with the forlorn hope that a normal world could ever be restored. He attached the scope to the carbine, turned out the light, and went outside to check the perimeter.

  “Sir, sir!”

  Mitchell’s eyes opened. “Jo-Jo? What is it?” he asked, reaching for his holster even as he threw off the blanket.

  “I’ve seen a light in the east,” Jo-Jo said.

  “Please tell me it’s a star showing the way to Bethlehem,” Jean-Luc said, already on his feet, his carbine in hand.

  “Wish I could,” Jo-Jo said. “Nah, it was electric. There and gone in a second. But it was there. Near that fallen tree.”

  “What time is it?” Mitchell asked.

  “Three o’clock, sir,” Jo-Jo said.

  “It’s getting late for an attack,” Mitchell said. “But we’ll take no chances. Have you told Captain Ho?”

  “I came straight to you, sir.”

  “Wake the captain, then wake everyone,” Mitchell said. “But do it quietly. No one fires without my order. The barrage usually lasts five to ten minutes. Remember, no one returns fire. If they advance, when they’re halfway across the field, we’ll mow them down. Jean-Luc, support the northern flank. I’ll cover the south. Go.”

  Carbine in hand, he left the room via the door leading onto the extension-walkway. He kept low, below the windows until, halfway across, he reached the partially broken frame between the two empty bookshelves. The wheelbarrow fires had long since burned out. Below, the encampment was dark. Above, heavy clouds lumbered across the sky, cutting visibility to virtually nil. He could discern the trees along the canal, and so their enemy would be able to make out the silhouette of the farm buildings. Yes, that would be an easy target for the enemy. So would the bridge. He rested the carbine on the broken sill and peered through the night-scope, searching for the lightning-struck tree. There was no movement; there was certainly no light.

  Jo-Jo might have been mistaken. Or there could be a refugee out there, waiting for dawn when their approach wouldn’t result in a bullet. What he needed was flares. Mortars of their own. Better rifles. More ammu
nition. Radios. More night-scopes. His own flickered and then went dark. He needed more batteries, but those were scarcer than bullets. They needed so much, but if they had a single old-world armoured regiment, they’d drive the enemy east until they crushed them against the mountains.

  He lifted his rifle from the window and was two steps towards the barn when the first shell exploded. The detonation shook the walkway, causing him to drop to one knee, but the blast had erupted to the south, outside the wall. Before he’d picked himself up, a second shell landed on the far side of the compound.

  He scurried on, in a low crouch. Bullets tore through the air, slamming into wood and glass, but nowhere close. As he reached the edge of the walkway, a third shell landed in the courtyard below. Shrapnel ripped through the walkway, and Mitchell was thrown forward, and onto the flat platform beyond. As he landed, he rolled, away from the walkway and across the platform, and then off it, falling down onto the gently sloping roof.

  A fourth shell landed near the perimeter, but the barn was now between him and the blast. Mitchell slid along the roof. As his legs slipped over the edge, he managed to catch the gutter. He fell, dangling by one hand, but the gutter wasn’t strong enough to take his weight. As the next shell landed, much further away, the bracket gave, the gutter bent. He dropped, down into the farmyard.

  Swearing as an alternative to screaming, he crouched close to the barn’s wall. He listened to the explosions in the south, then in the north, but now the blasts erupted beyond the walls. The mortar team couldn’t see their target, but the scout had seen the caisson of shells. That was what they were trying to find. They wouldn’t, but he didn’t view that as a cause for celebration because the conscripts were now returning fire.

  “Cease fire!” Captain Ho yelled, running from the farmhouse towards the outer wall.

  Mitchell didn’t waste time with words, and rose to a sprint which he turned into a dive, knocking Ho from his feet just before a shell exploded, though on the far side of the barn.