Over by Christmas Page 4

  “Get to cover. Stay quiet!” Mitchell hissed.

  But it didn’t matter. The shooting from the enemy had ceased. The shooting from the conscripts continued until they’d fired all ten rounds in their magazines.

  Mitchell picked himself up, and made his way to the wall. “Stay down!” he called, leaning forward, peering into the darkness. “Hold your fire.”

  “We should attack,” Ho said, following.

  “Not until we’ve put out the fires,” Mitchell said. “They’ll illuminate us too easily for any stay-behind snipers. No, hold position, wait for dawn. Check your troops, Captain. See to the injured.”

  Mitchell began with those on the perimeter, calming some, reassuring others, until he met Jo-Jo, coming the other way.

  “Sorry, sir,” Jo-Jo said.

  “What for?” Mitchell asked.

  “For the shooting,” Jo-Jo said.

  “Ah, it’s understandable,” Mitchell said. “There was only a slim chance the enemy would attempt a ground assault. What’s the damage?”

  “We lost the cannon, and Jimmy Cruise lost a finger,” she said. “That’s the worst of it. There’s a lot of bruises, and a few cuts, but it would have been chaos if they’d hit the shells. They watched us unload, didn’t they?”

  “Seems so, but they didn’t target the bridge,” Mitchell said. “That’s useful to know. They want to use that bridge.”

  “So they’ll attack again?” she asked.

  “Possibly. Go make sure everyone is ready.”

  Chapter 3 - Evidence of an Ambush

  The Drummond-Dumond Farm, France

  Dawn was slow in coming, but it arrived alone, without another attack.

  Mitchell climbed up onto the wall. “Stay down,” he called as a few of the sentries made to copy him. After ten seconds, he released his held breath.

  Captain Ho, alone among the soldiers, didn’t follow Mitchell’s order, and clambered up next to him. “They’re gone?” Ho asked.

  “Just like in every previous attack,” Mitchell said. “If I were you, Captain, I’d rest half the troops now, half from midday. Prepare for an assault at dusk. But first, send a couple of runners back to the train depot. Get a telegram sent to Calais, and request a working radio. Sergeant, with us.”

  “Your officer is a sailor, n’est-ce pas?” Jean-Luc asked Sergeant Johannes as the three of them trudged across the field.

  “He’s okay,” Jo-Jo said.

  “He’s not a soldier,” Jean-Luc said.

  “He ran the lighthouse on Anglesey,” Jo-Jo said. “Then he was promoted to command the trade-ferry from Llandudno to Dundalk.”

  “Ah,” Jean-Luc said. “A safe billet. So he has connections. There is a politician called Ho. The Minister for Refugees during the previous administration.”

  “His mum, I think,” Jo-Jo said.

  “She was ambassador from South Korea to London,” Mitchell said. “Joined the government as an independent back in the early days. Good sort. Reliable. I fought adjacent to her at the Battle of Buxton.”

  “When was that?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Second year after the Blackout,” Mitchell said. “A bunch of bandits got organised, and tried to take our harvest. We’d broken our backs picking wild-grown crops, no way were we giving them up. There were about a thousand of us, and three thousand of them, with barely a bullet between us. It was medieval. Your granddad was there, Jean-Luc.”

  “He often reminds me,” Jean-Luc said.

  “I’m the last person in the world who’ll condemn a parent for pulling strings for their kids,” Mitchell said. “And Captain Ho seems all right. He’s just a bit green. He needs time. We all do. A couple of months ago, we had a few thousand Marines, twice as many sailors, and a lot of experience eradicating pirates. Conscripted farmhands, factory-cog conscripts, and redeployed sailors don’t make an army. No, we’ve raised a militia. The generals in Twynham might find comfort in calling this a British Expeditionary Force, but I wish they’d read a bit more history and learn what happened to that army.”

  He led the pair to the lightning-blasted tree.

  “There are no bullet casings,” Jean-Luc said. “They weren’t here.”

  “I didn’t think they would be,” Mitchell said, turning around so he could scan the field and the farmhouse-bastion.

  “So why did you have us walk so far?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “For your health, Jean-Luc,” Mitchell said. “There’s never any harm in an early morning stroll. We’ll try the orchard.”

  “The soldiers reported receiving fire up and down the line, sir,” Jo-Jo said.

  “They’re wrong,” Mitchell said.

  “Would you bet your rifle on it?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “And what are you going to fight with when I win?” Mitchell replied. “The spotter knew we might find their perch behind that fallen tree. Perhaps they were even watching us as we went for our walk last night. Either way, they picked a different location from which to spring the ambush.”

  Brass casings littered the icy ground beneath the orchard’s leafless trees. But they weren’t all the enemy had left behind.

  “Can I have one of these rifles, sir?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “AKMs,” Mitchell said. “The most common assault rifle in the world before the Blackout. Soviet design, originally, and not that common this side of the Alps.” He picked one up. “Magazine is empty. Check the others, Jo-Jo.” He took out his phone and began taking photographs of the brass, and then of the bootprints left in the mud.

  “The mag’s empty, sir,” Jo-Jo said.

  “So is this one,” Jean-Luc said, checking the magazine of a different Kalashnikov.

  “Figures,” Mitchell said, walking back between the trees. It had originally been a small copse planted in the corner between two fields. After the Blackout, by design or by nature, the grove had grown to nearly a hundred sturdy trunks, twenty long by around five deep. The enemy firing line had been run from the front-most trees facing the farm. The mortar team had fired their artillery piece from the rear. Like with the rifles, the mortar had been left behind.

  “That’s a SAMOVAR,” Mitchell said, taking a photograph of the mortar tube. “We suspected this was the type of mortar they were using, but weren’t sure. It’s another Soviet design, but manufactured and sold by the Russians to about half the world. That’s good.”

  “What’s good about it?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “The enemy aren’t making new weapons of their own,” Mitchell said. “Whoever is backing these people is doing it with old-world salvage, and that won’t last forever.”

  “Blood!” Jean-Luc called out. “Over here. This tree.”

  “Let me see,” Mitchell said. “A lot of blood,” he added, taking another photograph. “There’s a trail of it coming from… yes, from the frontline. The blood formed a pool here where the injured sat against the tree. These are drag marks, leading through the field, heading that way. Two people helped one injured person away. C’mon.”

  He began striding out across the mulch-littered field. The dragged body had left an easy-to-follow trail through the abandoned crop of unharvested cabbages. December’s thaw-frost cycle had destroyed the roots of the ground-level plants, leaving the leaves withered, speckled black and orange, and spotted with frozen blood.

  “Before now, they’ve left a few rifles behind,” Mitchell said. “Never a mortar. Every magazine was empty, wasn’t it?”

  “Sadly, yes,” Jo-Jo said.

  “And there were no spare magazines on the ground,” Mitchell said. “If they left the mortar and the rifles behind, they wouldn’t have picked up their empty magazines. They didn’t reload. Counting the spent casings will prove it. The foot-soldiers were given one rifle with one pre-loaded magazine. And no one here had spare ammo.”

  “So the enemy is short of ammunition?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Evidence suggests not,” Mitchell said. “As they retreated, they began by dragging the body away from the orchard. But it was dark, they couldn’t tell where they were going, so followed the line of the furrows, thus they travelled a straight line. This is where they realised they were heading the wrong way, and turned ninety degrees, angling to that hedgerow, over there.”

  “There’s a body,” Jean-Luc said.

  Jo-Jo raised her rifle, though she lowered it as they neared. “Dead, sir.”

  “Check what’s beyond that hedge,” Mitchell said.

  “Looks like an old road,” Jo-Jo said.

  Mitchell stopped by the body. “Let’s see. A woman. About thirty. Brown hair. Pale skin, even before the blood had left her body. Lightweight boots made of a breathable plastic that would cost about the same as a horse back in Twynham.”

  “Non, un vélo,” Jean-Luc said. “A good bicycle, but not a horse.”

  “Depends on the horse,” Mitchell said. “The coat’s lightweight, grey, and civilian. It hangs low below the hip, and the waist is tapered. Trousers are military. They have access to both civilian and military stores somewhere that had very cold winters.”

  He took a photograph of the face, and then of the dead woman’s boots before drawing his knife and peeling back the partially frozen bandage on the woman’s thigh. “Single shot. That’s about an inch below her hip. Must have nicked the artery. She was standing when she was shot. The shooters were lying down. There were eight rifles, right?”

  “In the orchard? Yes, sir,” Jo-Jo said.

  “The bandage is hastily applied. Maybe by herself,” Mitchell said. “They carried her away, but by the time they reached here, she was dead. When they realised, they left her.” He cleaned his knife in the mud, resheathed it, and flicked back through the photographs he’d taken last night by the lightning-struck oak. He held up an image of a b
oot-print next to the soles of the dead woman’s shoes. “Do you see this?”

  “They don’t look like a match,” Jo-Jo said.

  “Exactly,” Mitchell said. “I took that photo yesterday, by the fallen oak. That print was left by the scout, and is at least four sizes bigger.”

  “So she isn’t the scout?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Nope, she’s the leader,” Mitchell said. “She made sure her people kept firing. That’s why she was standing up, and so got shot in the hip. She made it back to the rear of the orchard. Either she tied the bandage or one of the mortar team did. Those two dragged her here, which is why they left their mortar behind. With no more ammo, and no one giving orders, the foot-soldiers left their useless rifles behind and fled.”

  “They fled after they had fired every mortar shell and every bullet,” Jean-Luc said. “If she was the leader, she could have ordered them to take her to safety the moment she was shot.”

  “Yep,” Mitchell said. “Our enemy is underequipped and utterly evil, but that doesn’t make them cowards.” He put his phone away, and opened the woman’s coat. Beneath was a bright blue turtleneck, again old-world and very definitely civilian. At her waist was a belt on which both knife and handgun remained. “They didn’t loot her body. They were in a rush,” Mitchell said. “Glock 17. Two mags. Here you go, Jo-Jo, an early Christmas present.”

  “Seriously? Thanks, sir,” she said.

  “I’d clean it before use,” Mitchell said. “What else do we have? A multi-tool, a small box containing a used bar of soap. Ah, I think this might be a map.” He unzipped the jacket’s inside pocket. “No, not a map. It’s a bundle of old leaflets. Seem to be a dozen copies of the same one-sheet pamphlet. Seventeen languages. Where’s the English? Ah. It seems to be a set of rules about when you can use showers and do laundry.”

  “What does that mean?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “Nothing. It’s toilet paper,” Mitchell said. “Jo-Jo, return to the farm. I want this body recovered, and collect the mortars and the rifles. We’ll send them back to Twynham for a more thorough examination. Jean-Luc, with me.”

  “You’re going to follow them alone?” Jo-Jo asked.

  “He is not alone,” Jean-Luc said. “He is travelling with the grandest army!”

  “They’re long gone,” Mitchell said, and pushed his way through the hedgerow. “But I want to see whether they left any other bodies behind.”

  While the sprawling hedgerow had added height to the embankment, decades of storms had taken away depth, filling the single-track roadway with field run-off. Though the frost lay thick, so did the footprints, heading away from the farm.

  “What soldier leaves their rifle behind?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “One who knows they won’t get any more ammo,” Mitchell said, photographing the footprints. “The mortar team was trained. So were the scout and the leader. The rest are just barbarians. Brigands. Expendable. Here to stop us from charging the mortar. Only one magazine each; that’s an interesting tactic.”

  “Why interesting?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “Because I think it’s the clue as to how we’ll stop them,” Mitchell said.

  Just over a kilometre from where they’d found the corpse, they found the next clue: tyre marks.

  “No hoof prints,” Jean-Luc said as, once again, Mitchell took photographs.

  “They drove,” Mitchell said. “Someone should have spotted this sooner. Ah, but I didn’t, so I can’t blame others. Between the rain and snow, and dealing with the injured, tracks have been easy to miss. So what, precisely, did I miss? Two different widths of tyres. One set is narrow, one is wide. The drivers would require training, too. Bet they didn’t do that around here.”

  “My mother can drive,” Jean-Luc said.

  “Right. But after a twenty-year break, she’d need a refresher course. Maybe only for a few hours, but it wouldn’t be around here. Where did the truck come from? The driver, mortar team, scout, and squad leader were brought in from there. The rest, the eight foot-soldiers, were recruited nearby. Not just for this attack on us, but we can assume they used a similar set-up for each of the simultaneous mortar attacks.”

  “Do you think there were other attacks last night?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “Probably. We’ll find out soon enough,” Mitchell said. “So forget the foot-soldiers, and focus on the drivers, on the truck, and on the diesel required to power it. There’s no way this came from Britain. This wasn’t stolen from us, and it’s not biodiesel taken from the Railway Company’s stores. They must have an oil well, a refinery, and a method of transporting it here, to the front. Could be a tanker. Could be carrying it in barrels. That’s good.”

  “How is this good? They are making something new.”

  “Because they have a supply line,” Mitchell said. “They have a logistics network. It ties them down. We can find it. Follow it back to the refinery. And that is where we find the mastermind who’s organising this bloodbath. We don’t know what happened last night elsewhere along the front, but before last night, the most simultaneous attacks were seven. Seven attacks. Seven trucks. Look at these tracks. The front and rear tyres don’t match. Either they didn’t bring spare tyres, or had no choice but to make do. That’s good news, too. Our enemy is stretched thin. Their resources are scarce. That’s why we’ll win.”

  “If we can find them,” Jean-Luc said.

  “Yep. The truck turned around here, at this crossroads. They drove up this road, then returned that way just after the attack.”

  “I didn’t hear an engine,” Jean-Luc said.

  “The wind was coming from behind us,” Mitchell said. “We’re in a dip, and we’re a good distance from the farm. This must be their strategy with every attack. We should have realised, but now we know.”

  “So now will you send the soldiers to follow these tracks?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “Not the soldiers, no,” Mitchell said. “It’s unlikely we’ll catch the truck, but that doesn’t mean we won’t pursue.”

  “And this we, it is you and I?”

  “Yep. We’ll head east for a few days, then loop back west, and head straight to Belgium.”

  “We are not going to Dunkirk?” Jean-Luc asked.

  “Sorry. Your hot shower will have to wait,” Mitchell said.

  They returned up the track, and found a group of soldiers by the body, led by an officer who wasn’t Captain Ho.

  “Henry Mitchell, why am I not surprised?” she said, though with a smile. Grey haired, knocking seventy, and wearing a much-mended uniform from two decades ago, Major-General Alice Lewis was the second in command of the European theatre. Twenty years ago, she’d been a major who was six months into a budget-cut-retirement, failing to enjoy a Mediterranean cruise. She’d taken command of the civilian ship, and ensured the survival of most of the passengers when it ran aground in Spain. Two years later, now in a naval captain’s uniform, she’d been part of the force which had liberated Gibraltar from murderous pirates.

  “You know me, General, always looking for trouble,” Mitchell said. “And I wouldn’t be much of a detective if I didn’t find it. Why are you here?”

  “When the bastion didn’t report in, we assumed it had been overrun,” she said.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Mitchell said, scanning the crowd for Captain Ho. The young sailor wasn’t there. “Thanks to Captain Ho’s quick thinking, we suffered no fatalities.”

  “Then you’re the lucky ones,” Lewis said.

  “How many other attacks were there?” Mitchell asked.

  “Three,” Lewis said. “Including one on Calais itself. They hit the crematorium.”

  “But that’s next door to the aid-station,” Mitchell said.

  “I know,” Lewis said. “At least eighteen were killed. Seven patients, eleven medical staff.”

  “Do you have any names?” Mitchell asked.

  “Not yet,” Lewis said. “The death toll will rise. We lost a further five soldiers who attempted a counterattack. They were mown down. Four attacks last night, and so far it appears this corpse is our only small victory.”

  “Not that small,” Mitchell said. “I think she’s the squad’s leader. After she was injured, the enemy fled, leaving their rifles and the mortar behind. There are tyre marks further down that road. The enemy drove here. They have a refinery, tankers, somewhere to train drivers, mechanics, and a supply route to get the fuel here to the front. They have a base, General, so we finally have somewhere we can counterattack.”