Free The Fall of Night by Christopher Nuttall

anything of the sort when some security matters were handled by EUROFOR and others by PJHQ, while Brussels kept attempting to expand their authority.  It didn’t help that a united front of French, German and British officers had pointed out that there was no need to spend billions of Euros on a new headquarters in Brussels; the PJHQ alone could have provided all of the coordination that EUROFOR could have required.  The French headquarters – the public one, that everyone knew about, and the secret one that no one was supposed to know about – could have accomplished the same tasks; the European Defence Commission had insisted on its own headquarters and the various governments had given in.  It was empire-building at its worst; that money could have mended a few defects in EUROFOR’s actual line of battle.
     
    He shrugged.  It wasn’t something he could do anything about.  “Is there anything I should know about?”
     
    “There’s a torrent of Jihadists invective coming from Algeria and to some extent from Libya, thanks to some frog who wanted to cut the balls of every Algerian or something like that,” Drury said.  Langford felt a flicker of sympathy for the unnamed Frenchman.  “It’s all the usual stuff; the Frenchman must die before the Eiffel Tower comes crashing down and exterminates the French when it hits the ground.”
     
    “Pretty big explosion,” Langford observed dryly.  The image made him smile; the French had tougher laws on terrorism than the British, although they were mild compared to either the American or Russian laws.  “Anything else?”
     
    Drury shook his head.  “The French Air Force has requested that we provide an AWACS and a couple of fighters for a drill in a week,” he said.  “The French think they have a new way of detecting aircraft at very low level and want us to be the aggressors in a raid on France.  The Chief of the Air Staff was very interested and wants us to agree.”
     
    “That is within my purview,” Langford said.  Unless something went very wrong, the government wouldn’t have to know about it at all…and the RAF’s training standards had been slipping badly, recently, due to the torrent of complaints about the noise of low-flying aircraft.  “Anything on the Threat Board?”
     
    “Only some suggestion that the Russians are considering a move into Ukraine,” Drury said.  “EUROFOR HQ is handling the matter, but they don’t anticipate trouble; in any case, it’s out of our hands.  Major-General McLachlan says that the Poles are worried, but EUROFOR HQ is convinced that the Russians are going to wait until after the elections before they move, if they move.”
     
    “Then I see no reason why we should not go along with the French request,” Langford said.  The French commander had skirted the edge of what could be done without EUROFOR’s knowledge; it was fitting to show that not everything needed EUROFOR to go along with it.  “Coordinate it with CAS, but unless something new appears, then we should try to beat the French at their own game.”
     
    He smiled at Drury’s expression and headed into his office, taking the time to pick up a cup of coffee before reading through his secure emails.  There was little of importance, but seventy percent of his work was never important; hurry up and wait applied even more to the PJHQ than it did to soldiers in the field.  They, at least, got to shoot at the enemy.  The entire Falklands situation seemed to be calming down now that a major task force, including the Prince of Wales , was on its way to the area.  That was nearly a third of the Royal Navy…and the politicians would probably claim that it was all a wasted deployment.
     
    “Damned Argies,” Langford muttered.  Every so often, Argentina would shake its fist and make threatening moves in the direction of the Falklands, and British forces would be forced to react.  Even the Liberals who were in power knew better than to