Repulse: Europe at War 2062-2064 (6 page)

III. HEADLONG FLIGHT

Over the following days and weeks, such scenes were repeated a thousand-fold across the country.  In
The Great European Disaster
, G. K. Morrow devotes several chapters to piecing together the extent of the mayhem, and the few fragments of the disaster the NATO ACAs could capture before they were destroyed.  Much of this humanitarian tragedy does not bear repeating here, although English security files recently released prove that the British cabinet - and by extension other NATO leaders - were sufficiently informed on that Monday of the barbarity of the Caliphate warriors.

In the years immediately after the war, many media outlets accused Western governments of failing to do enough to aid the Turkish people.  However, even though NATO knew the extent of the disaster, it is difficult to see how it could have responded any more effectively, especially given that Turkey had officially left the organisation.  As many ordinary Turks realised at the time, the only hope of survival lay outside their country’s borders.

By the morning of Tuesday 6 February, US satellites had counted some ten thousand boats of all sizes, from rowing boats to commercial ferries, hurrying away from Turkey’s southern coast.  To the north, a further six thousand vessels had begun the perilous journey across the Black Sea.  Conditions remained calm throughout the week in the western Mediterranean, and many boats were able to island-hop to temporary safety, but on the Tuesday night a severe storm developed in the Black Sea, and thousands are known to have drowned.  At the time mystery surrounded why the Caliphate let the refugees escape in this manner, but later in the war brain-scanning interrogation of captured warriors demonstrated that the purpose of allowing these people to escape was to let them carry warnings to the rest of Europe.

In a previously hidden journal, a young engineering student called Berat Kartal recalled his flight from his home town of Usak to the coastal city of Izmir, one-hundred-and-twenty kilometres along roads packed with refugees like him.  When the Caliphate’s microwave bursts burned out sensitive digital components, Kartal had the wit to abandon his devices and collect a paper notepad and pen to record the scenes he witnessed.  Recently discovered in an attic in Düsseldorf, Kartal’s journal had lain undisturbed for over thirty years.  He made his handwritten notes as his journey progressed: ‘…the sun is setting and I have arrived in Güre, a small town of a couple of thousand.  Now its narrow streets are crowded with people like me, all running away towards Izmir.  There is one policeman who doesn’t know a thing as the communications have all been destroyed.  I have decided to keep cycling through the night.  I still have some water and won’t be able to get anything to eat here.  One old woman stands on a wooden crate by a road junction shouting that the Caliphate will kill us all.  It’s unnerving.  As I pushed my bicycle past her, someone shouted out that she was mad, and she shrieked back that one of her sons told her Caliphate warriors were killing non-believers with powerful lasers mounted on vehicles, burning them to a crisp.  I was happy to finally pedal away.’

As Kartal’s journey continued, he recorded more scenes of distress and suffering.  He finally reached the outskirts of the port city of Izmir on Thursday 9 February, by which point the disintegration of Turkey as a nation state was much advanced.  Kartal found this out in the district of Bornova, where, ‘… a group of policemen have established a refugee centre on a school campus close to a hospital.  I spoke to a young family while queuing for water from a bowser, and they directed me to a notice board with pinned sheets of paper at the hospital’s main entrance.  I got some water, went back to the entrance, and muddled through the people to read.  One A4 sheet which caught my eye gave official advice for citizens to shelter as far away from built-up areas and important and historical buildings as possible, because Caliphate ACAs were expected to attack those places.  I caught snatches of conversation in the crowd around me, some of whom were telling anyone who’d listen that Caliphate warriors had already reached Ankara.  Feeling sad, I left and made my way to the port.  I’m writing this sheltering under a tarpaulin in a warehouse, by penlight.’

It is likely that the camp to which Kartal refers was the Devlet centre, the full tragedy of which G. K. Morrow laid bare in
The Great European Disaster
and which was indeed attacked the following day. Matters improved for Kartal the next morning when he managed to gain passage on a small, local ferry whose captain was on his twenty-third voyage of the week, determined to rescue as many of his countrymen as he could.  Although Kartal found himself obliged to leave his bicycle and pay what money he had, the next entry in his journal reveals his pleasure at enjoying his first hot meal - a bowl of
iskembe
soup - in a week.  The small, heavily laden ferry arrived in Athens on Friday evening, but this was only the beginning of Kartal’s remarkable odyssey across Europe in the midst of war, and more will be heard from his journal below.

Although numbers are difficult to estimate, the accepted figure is that some two million Turkish people lost their lives in the first month of the war, and many more during the country’s assimilation into the Caliphate.  While the anecdotal evidence of rape and murder provided by Morrow seems overwhelming, it is also important to consider that Caliphate warriors and the following
majlis
-led administration units, who were quickly installed in the conquered provinces, welcomed numerous sympathisers.  Tales abounded of families, villages and towns torn asunder by divided loyalties and questionable morality.  It is likely that many of those who survived the onslaught chose to cooperate with the new regime out of expediency; it is equally probable that more than a few of them nevertheless fell victim to a Caliphate laser or warrior blade if their motives were doubted.

Writing in
A History of Warfare in the 21st Century
, Victoire Tasse used the available evidence to draw salient historical parallels: ‘… in the subjugation of Turkey in February 2062, the invaders utilised the most extreme barbarity that would not have been out of place in the wars of the previous century.  Witnesses spoke of Caliphate warriors bartering captured girls as young as ten, deciding which should be kept to be abused as spoils of war, and which should be sent to the Caliphate as slaves.  Men of military age were often burned to death out of hand, first having been forced to dig shallow ditches.  Vehicle-mounted lasers were used as the cheapest method of execution.  The invading forces did not even require slave labour, as construction replicators arrived in the follow-up waves and proceeded to rebuild roads and buildings destroyed in the invasion.’

Thus, as the Caliphate assimilated Turkey in its dark, all-encompassing embrace, so did the available data shrink to almost nothing.  US satellites made forays over the region later during the war, with some success in determining the number of casualties, but as soon as Caliphate ACAs took control of Turkish airspace, a cloak of blackness descended over a once-proud country.  Nevertheless, to fully understand why Turkey’s plight unfolded as it did, it is necessary to return to that fateful Monday, 6 February 2062, and to the chaos into which the Caliphate’s assault had plunged NATO leaders.

IV. ISRAEL IMMOLATED

An emergency NATO meeting was hurriedly convened and commenced before the last ship in the
Franklin D. Roosevelt
carrier group had settled on the bed of the Arabian Sea.  Various country leaders, chiefs-of-staff and heads of security rushed to take part.  This meeting was fraught, disjointed and disorganised.  The suddenness and fury of the Caliphate’s attack on the navies and Turkey had NATO’s leaders in disarray, and comprehensive shock punctuated urgent suggestions met with damning rejections.

Various NATO scenarios called for a comprehensive nuclear attack on Caliphate territory, but all super-AI projections estimated the likelihood of success of using this last, desperate option at less than a tenth of 1%.  Each scenario of war with the Caliphate had forecasted a conflict lasting months or years.  Now, however, within a few hours of the initial assault, Western leaders were faced with the imperative to stop Caliphate forces by any and all means available to them.  Frenetic diplomatic activity surged as the NATO powers contacted Moscow and Beijing to try to establish what they knew of the Caliphate’s actions.  Despite the accusations and counter-accusations hurled around the world’s media at the time, there is little evidence to suppose that Russia or China had any foreknowledge of events.  In 2069 a series of communications between Beijing and Tehran were leaked which showed the shock and confusion among the Chinese at the initial attack on the Western navies and Turkey.  Although a few commentators questioned their veracity, English files recently released under the thirty-year rule demonstrate that these and many more similar communications were provided to the NATO powers at the time, and thus on balance can be considered authentic.

As the morning in Europe progressed, various countries’ super AIs spat out probabilities and theses regarding how the Caliphate could have produced such devastating military power, and a range of potential responses.  In all offensive scenarios, the conclusion was a full-scale nuclear attack on the most populous Caliphate cities, unless and until the location of its arms manufacturing facilities could be identified.  English Prime Minister Napier and President Coll both rejected the nuclear option outright assuming, correctly, that global opinion would then fall too much in favour of the Caliphate.  In
In the Eye of the Storm
, Gen. Sir Terry Tidbury conveyed the sense of frustration: ‘I wanted to smash the damn super AI for its ridiculous suggestions.  This thing was supposed to be cleverer than the sum of human knowledge.  None of the politicians had studied military history, and it seemed the computers hadn’t a clue, either.  The Caliphate had made a textbook-perfect surprise attack, and it would take it weeks if not months to consolidate its position in Turkey.  The politicians really needed to calm down: for now, our enemy had the initiative, and we had to think clearly as to what defensive measures we could take.  Until we knew something more of his intentions, or in fact anything beyond the new reality we had that day, we’d remain a long way off taking any offensive steps.’

At 09.21 GMT on the morning of 6 February, the Caliph made his announcement from Tehran, which for all its asininity bears repeating in full here: ‘The Persian Caliphate announces the assimilation of the nation state formerly known as Turkey.  The government of that territory had requested its accession for later this year, however it has been necessary to act now due to pre-emptive steps taken by the war-like, infidel states of Europe and America.  The Caliphate regrets having been forced to neutralise the aggressor infidel, which he brought upon himself.  Nevertheless, the Caliphate reiterates its commitment to regional and global peace, and will continue to expand only to those Muslim states who freely request to join.’

While bordering on the ludicrous given the events that would follow, this statement gives an important indication of the Caliphate’s standing in the world at the time.  In addition to China and Russia, many countries around the globe, including the economically strongest such as Brazil, India and Japan, regarded the Caliphate as a success story.  For twenty years it had brought stability and peace to a Middle East which had suffered decades of strife.  The well-known Brazilian diplomat Vinicius Novo, writing in a leading Brazilian media outlet, said the day after the attack: ‘While no one approved of the violence, the Caliphate enjoyed a great deal of goodwill for the way it had managed its affairs, and although there was concern, obviously, for this clearly aggressive action to assimilate Turkey, I sense at the UN that NATO really has brought these problems on itself.  It was provocative, to say the least, to station navy battle groups so close to Caliphate territory.  Yes, the Caliphate could have given fair warning to NATO, but if it felt threatened, it’s also understandable that it acted in the way it did - after all, we don’t have to look too far back into history to a time when, whenever NATO felt threatened, it acted with the most extreme violence against its perceived enemies even though such violence was seldom justified.’

In a similar vein, a member of the Indian Defence Minister’s staff said contemptibly to his superior: ‘The NATO countries shouldn’t go around behaving like they’re still the most powerful militaries in the world.  Europe simply doesn’t get it that it’s a backwater and has been for at least twenty years.  The only people who want to go there are tourists.’

It is relevant to the beginning of the war to note the global perception of NATO at that time, as its leaders were obliged to keep one eye on public opinion in more populous countries.  For example, when the US tabled a motion at the UN to condemn the Caliphate’s aggression, thirty-four countries rejected it and a further fifty-one abstained.  For many billions of people in Asia and South America, Turkey’s assimilation was a local issue which the country had brought on itself.  This was one more problem which President Coll and Prime Minister Napier had to consider before resorting to a nuclear attack, especially given that they had no certain knowledge of the location of the Caliphate’s centres of weapons production.

Calmer and more expert military wisdom prevailed as the day wore on.  Appropriate decisions, tactical rather than strategic, were made to accelerate and increase armaments production, and to strengthen the defensive ACA shield along Europe’s borders.  Through Beijing, stern diplomatic warnings were relayed to the Caliphate that any attempted attack on a European country would result in a full-scale counterattack in which NATO could not rule out extensive use of nuclear weapons.  Coll instructed the reactivation of mothballed weapons’ research programmes.  All members agreed at once to increase recruitment to their armed forces.  Tellingly, even on this first day of the war, most NATO leaders appeared to accept that the coming maelstrom would not likely be restricted to a war of machines.