Europe behind Walls E-Book

Laszlo Reti

• Herausgeber: Laszlo Reti
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 778

Beschreibung

Europe, 2033.

The Wall is up.

It protects the continent's southern and eastern borders against millions of migrants.

It is six metres high. Watchtowers, machine guns, snipers. Fire order in force. Thousands die every year trying to cross The Wall.

Europe had to choose between its old values and security.

Europe chose security.

Europe closed its doors.

In this world Zsuzsa Radnai, an agent of the European Immigration Office, is trying to protect what is really important to her. Like the others: the young teacher at the University of Pest, the American investigative journalist, and the Muslim terrorist.

Europe or Eurabia?

Freedom or security?

Laszlo Reti tackles the issues that are increasingly defining our daily lives and our future.

The first edition of the novel was published in 2o15, the first year of the migrant crisis, under the title Behind the Walls. Since then, many of the events predicted in the novel have already happened.

Leseprobe

Laszlo Reti - Europe behind Walls

Copyright © Laszlo Reti

First release: 2016

(entitled Behind Walls)

Contact the author:

www.retilaszlo.hu

[email protected]

Edited by

Laszlo Reti (2023)

Cover design

Laszlo Reti & AI

Electronic version

Laszlo Reti

Larkin Ltd.

ISBN: 978-615-6733-16-0

Laszlo Reti

EUROPE BEHIND WALLS

2024

1.

In the eastern sky a barely visible band was faintly shimmering. The sun had not yet risen, but it was not long before dawn. Looking westward, all that was visible was the pitch-black darkness that hid the desert, and only the stars twinkling high above gave a hint of where the land ended and the sky began.

Sheila Ward was a tough, thirty-one-year-old woman, the kind that most men say they can't stand. She was adventurous, courageous and had an inexplicable, persistent drive that drove her to take on difficult situations and solve them. She never specifically sought trouble, nor did she run away from it. Sheila was tall, and for a woman of her stature, very lean. Her brown hair was cut short and she usually wore rimless glasses, which gave her brown eyes a strangely distant glint. Her skin was so brown that one might have guessed that she had Arab ancestry. In fact, one of her grandmothers was Mexican, and the old lady's southern complexion came back to her through her granddaughter.

Sheila now came from above, from the barren, rocky hills surrounding the valley. A kilometre further on, her companion and the two horses they had ridden to get here were waiting. Accompanying him was a twenty-three-year-old photographer, by now completely inflamed, who refused to go any closer to the camp. Sheila had some sympathy for the man, but she had no choice but to continue the mission. If she had come this far from New York, she could not hesitate to make the final move. Realising that she could not make the photographer, who was shivering with fear beside the horses, go any further, she angrily took one of the boy's small cameras and left it in the small cave, which they had discovered before sunset. The horses were restless, so they were put into the cave as well, so they could not be discovered. Sheila finally set off well after midnight. She wore a khaki military jacket and trousers, her feet tucked into high heeled boots. She put a ski mask over her head to keep her skin from glowing in the dark. She was carrying a wrist-mounted GPS, a canteen of water, and an old Beretta pistol she had bought in Tripoli in a bazaar after landing at the port. She only used it once, firing it into the air in the solitude of the desert to make sure the battered gun worked.

Sheila moved with extreme caution. It took her three full hours to approach the camp, which was less than a kilometre from the cave. She stopped every few minutes and listened for a long time, analysing the desert sounds, listening to the wind, trying to find signs of human presence, but finding none. When she was only a hundred yards from her destination, she got down on all fours and continued on his way. The sand was cold under her palms as she carefully placed one hand after the other. The grains scattered under her fingers and her knees left a wide trail in the sand. It was at least another fifty yards to the nearest tent, and as Sheila glanced up at the eastern sky, she knew she had to hurry. Sunrise in the Sahara is very fast. She didn't want the light to reach her before she reached the tents. When the sun finally appeared on the horizon, she wanted to be back behind the first dunes, fifty metres away.

The woman in camouflage heard a noise and immediately threw herself to the ground.

In front of it, less than three metres away, a waist-high stone wall stood in the sand, the abandoned remains of an old caravan stop. As it sloped down, the stones blocked the tents. She listened.

Footsteps were approaching, the sand crunched under the feet of a figure approaching unsteadily. Sheila was struck with fear, realising she was trapped. She lay helpless in the sand, ten feet from the nearest hiding place, unable to move. If she could hear the sand whirring beneath the feet of the approaching figure, she could also hear it if she made a noise as she drank against the wall. She preferred to remain motionless.

A black shadow appeared on the left, stopping at the remaining wall of the long-demolished building. Soon there was a splashing sound and a contented sigh. Sheila lowered her eyelids halfway so that not even the whites of her eyes flickered, and stared at the trickle of urine dripping into the sand a few yards away.

It lasted maybe a minute and a half, but she felt like she couldn't even breathe.

When the sentry had finished urinating, he pulled the Kalashnikov sling slung over his shoulder and staggered back to the tents. Sheila was relieved, but had to force herself not to groan. She dared not make so much noise.

Now she moved slowly and, carefully avoiding the puddle, crawled forward to the wall to look out over it.

It was closer than she thought.

She was only twenty metres from the nearest tent. She counted six large tents, forming a roughly regular circle. The sentry had already walked through the area enclosed by the tents and was crouched down by the campfire. She took a jug, poured water from a balloon into it, and placed it on the coals. Even the gestures of preparing the morning coffee said Sheila was running out of time. She lowered her head and looked at the GPS strapped to her wrist. She set the screen to its lowest brightness, barely able to see the blinking numbers. She fixed the coordinates of the location, knowing it would be significant if she could tell the authorities exactly where she had been. It would be too little to say that she was east of In Amenas, somewhere near the Algerian border.

She took a deep breath, then got on all fours around the piece of wood and peered out from behind it. The tents now covered the guard. There were no other people in sight, the others must have been fast asleep. Eight or ten camels rested on the far side of the camp, and two ancient Land Rovers were parked beside the rocks. The wind blew from the camels, and Sheila's sensitive nose could smell the animals. She was glad, because they couldn't smell her. As a city girl, she had no idea if a camel could actually smell her perfume or sweat in the Algerian desert upwind, but the adventure stories she had read as a little girl had always been careful to watch which way the wind blew. In any case, the camels were, for the moment, completely calm.

Sheila started again in the cover of the wall, this time heading in the opposite direction. Suddenly she felt the sand under her palm feel wet.

She soon realised that he had dipped into the puddle of urine left behind by the guard.

- Damn it..." she hissed, looking for a dry spot where she wiped her palms on the sand.

Then she suddenly froze. She realised the absurdity of the situation: she was worried about some piss when she was trying to stalk a camp of a dozen kidnappers. She shook her head and got to her feet. Hunched over, she crept to the nearest tent and lay on her stomach beside the tarpaulin. She waited a minute, but nothing moved, no one noticed her presence.

With an awkwardly slow movement, she lifted the edge of the tent flap and stuck her head in. She had to wait a minute or two for her eyes to adjust to the darkness outside. Only starlight filtered in through the crack in the entrance.

Slowly, she recognised the details.

Two men slept at opposite ends of the tent. Both were breathing loudly and evenly, it was obvious that they had fallen into a deep sleep. In the middle, a figure crouched by the wooden pole holding up the tent.

Sheila froze, feeling for a moment that the huddled figure was watching her. But nothing happened. Gradually her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the details better. A woman sat beside the pillar, her hands tied to the iron pole. She wore no clothes. She was in a kind of catatonic state, rocking her body back and forth. She clearly had no idea what was happening around her. Sheila couldn't make out her features, only that her skin was quite pale, almost snow-white, and her hair blond.

She knew very well that one of the kidnapped tourists was a Swedish woman. She could have shuddered at the realisation that she had actually found them.

One of the men snorted in his sleep, and with wild movements turned over on his side, and then fell asleep again with a roar. Sheila felt the urge to quickly break free from her helpless position and run, but forced herself not to move. Slowly, the man calmed down and began to snore steadily again. Sheila thought about the camera she had with her, but realised she had brought it for nothing after all. It was useless in this darkness, and the click of the shutter might have alarmed the kidnappers. Quietly, millimetre by millimetre, she retreated and lowered the tent canvas. There was nothing she could do here.

She had what she were looking for, she had the evidence, she had the coordinates.

She knew what he had to do now: crawl back carefully, then run to Jerry, mount her horse and head for the village twenty kilometres away. From there, she would have to ask for help, then fly home and write the exposé on the criminal links between the North African kidnap teams and the tipsters of the European travel agencies, in the comfort of her home office.

But she didn't.

She wanted something more. Something tangible. Let's say, a photo. Or something else, anything, just something to make her article more credible.

She crawled to the next tent.

She crouched at the edge of the tarpaulin and listened. No sound came from inside. The guard on the other side of the tent rattled the coffee pot louder and louder. Sheila feared he would soon be the talk of the camp. She looked longingly back over her shoulder towards the dunes. There, safety awaited. Jerry, the horses and the escape. Then she turned back to the tent.

She have reached a decision. Just one more try!

She sat down on the ground and began to lift the edge of the rough tarpaulin. When she had enough room, she stuck her head in and listened. To accustom her eyes to the darkness inside, she waited patiently.

It was there in front of her all at once.

Two white spots. Two white spots that move from time to time. Sheila was frozen to death, motionless. It was very slowly that she became aware of the whites of the eyes of a man sitting barely two metres away. The figure had his back against a pole of the tent, his legs stretched out and was looking directly at Sheila. There was a long gap in the canvas roof, just above it, through which a little more starlight was coming in than in the previous tent.

The journalist just stared at the man, not knowing what to do next. She didn't dare move, because she couldn't decide whether the stranger was staring at her or simply looking in the direction of where she was, but not really seeing her in the dark. Sheila tried to imagine what could be seen of him from where he was sitting, and concluded that not much. She had just blessed her mind by putting on the black ski mask. Only her head was in the tent, and she had covered it with a black mask. No. The man could not see her.

She tried to look more closely at the staring figure. She had a feeling she had seen it somewhere before. He was a lean, bearded man, with a narrow nose and a sunken face. His face was visibly haggard, deep wrinkles framed his cheeks. His shirt was torn, his trousers were stiff with dirt. The man scratched his nose, and then Sheila saw the hempen bandage that held his wrists tightly together.

It's a prisoner!

She searched her memory for a long time and finally remembered where this guy looked familiar. Before leaving, she studied the kidnapped tourists carefully. Then she saw the photo of this man. Except that it was a cheerfully smiling Don Lawson, at least fifteen kilos heavier, looking serenely at Sheila. Yes! Lawson. Now she remembered his name. He was one of the Americans in the group.

Lawson let out a sigh and leaned to the side. He pulled a blanket over him and turned away. Sheila was now sure the American hadn't noticed her. The prisoner began to hiss. Sheila reached waist-deep into the tent and fished out the camera again. She raised the viewfinder to her eyes. She saw nothing. Using the flash had been out of the question, but she hoped that the camera might have a mode for situations like this. Infra, or some kind of night application, she had no idea, she didn't know anything about it. It wasn't designed that way. She brought the photographer in to do that part. But the cowardly rat backed out. In a rage, she brought one of his cameras, but she didn't really touch it. She didn't even think about taking pictures in the dark.

She put the camera away and looked around.

She counted four more people sleeping on the side walls of the tent. The abducted group numbered ten. Five were lying here, the sixth, a Swedish woman who had apparently been sexually exploited, was in the next tent. Four more were missing. Sheila hoped they were still alive, but she had already decided not to look for them. What she wanted to know, she already knew. And she still had to get out if she was to help them.

A bag was lying in front of her. With a sudden idea, she pulled it towards her and poked it. A name tag holder fell into her hand. It was a simple plastic case. She pocketed it. If she couldn't take a picture, this would do as evidence. It was obvious that desert robbers don't carry business cards, so the cards could only belong to one of the hostages. She'll see whose name is on them in daylight.

Slowly, she pushed herself out of the tent and crouched in the cover of the tarpaulin.

She turned cautiously and looked towards the dunes. It was dawn. The contours were still blurred, but she could see better than she had fifteen minutes earlier. In fact, that was why she did not immediately walk to her death.

Because then she saw it.

He was in front of her, just a metre away, looking at her.

The curled-up horned viper was inactive, slowing down in the cold night, but Sheila had no way of knowing that. She was paralysed with fear, and involuntarily a low scream escaped her lips. A tiny scream that was almost instantly choked back, but not soon enough to be perfectly silent.

She wanted to jump up and run, run, run, run, away from this deadly animal, up the dune, and just scoot towards the cave. Away! But her body would not obey. She crouched, unable to move as her senses sharpened. She could see the snake so clearly she could almost count its scales in the dim light. Her hearing had also become super-sensitive. She heard the guard on the other side of the tent put down the coffee pot with a ringing bell and pick up the Kalashnikov. She heard the clang of metal as the unkempt desert robber took the weapon in his hand. In her nose she could definitely smell the coffee. It crossed her mind that this was probably the last scent she would ever smell. Coffee. How ironic. She never liked coffee. And now she was dying with that smell in her nose.

The snake did not move.

Sheila squatted down in a spasm.

Footsteps approached from the tents.

The guard appeared at the corner of the screen wall and headed towards Sheila.

When he saw the cowering figure, he immediately raised the machine gun to his shoulder and stepped forward with determination.

Right on the snake's tail.

The viper jumped up and strained its spine, and charged towards the guard. The man's legs were grazed, teeth piercing the thin cloth and injecting poison into the bloodstream. The man cried out and dropped the weapon. He stared down in horror, even forgetting to step away from the animal, before the snake struck again in pain.

The paralysis in Sheila's body suddenly dissolved and she jumped up.

The guard cried out and stepped back, but for some reason the snake was not going to let it go this time, and went after him again. The man lost his balance and sat on his buttocks, spread-eagled. The third bite hit him in the thigh. Terrified, he grabbed the Kalashnikov and began to thrash the snake writhing between his legs with his tusks.

Sheila rushed. She had never run so fast in her life. She reached the top of the dune in no time. That's when the shots rang out. The night was broken by a long, unending series of clicks. Sheila threw herself to the ground, and with her last momentum rolled over the ridge of the dune. Rolling, she saw for a moment that the shots were not aimed at her. The robber emptied the entire magazine into the snake, and was still pulling the trigger when the magazine ran out.

There was screaming, shouting and one or two sporadic shots from the camp.

The suddenly awakened hostages, and the waking robbers, didn't know what had happened, so everyone reacted as best they could. The prisoners shouted, the captors fired. They didn't know who they were shooting at. In a second, it was chaos.

Sheila forced herself to crawl back a metre and take another look at the camp from the top of the dune.

Three or four of the robbers were already lying on the ground beside their companions, prodding the lifeless body of the snake with their long guns. The guard on the ground gasped loudly, grunting and foaming at the mouth. Sheila understood that she could not speak. She would not be able to tell that she had seen a man in the camp. The shooting stopped. The robbers apparently attributed the panic that ensued to the snake bite.

Sheila did not wait any longer.

She crawled lower, then stood up at the bottom of the dune and started running.

It took her less than three minutes to reach the cave.

In the narrow gorge leading to the hiding place, Jerry came galloping along.

She stood in the middle of the narrow road and waved to him with both hands. The horse could not pass her, the rock walls on either side were too close.

- Let go!" the photographer shouted, desperately trying to steer the horse past Sheila, but she caught the bridle.

- Jerry!

- Get out of the way!

- Hey, shut up! They'll hear you!

It finally broke through the fog of panic that had settled on his mind. From the saddle he looked down at the journalist.

- What happened?

- I found the hostages.

- Discovered, eh? You've been shot!

- Of course not! One of the guards was bitten by a snake. They fired at it!

- Is that why they were shooting?

- Therefore.

- Were you not discovered?

- No, I don't! Where are you going?

He fell silent and looked at her strangely.

- I just...

- You were going to leave me here?

- No. No! I was coming to you.

- So where is my horse?

Jerry just watched, then tugged on the strap. At that moment Sheila pulled out the Beretta and pointed it at him.

- Stop!

- We have to get out of here!

- You were going to leave me here.

- I thought you were killed!

- You didn't even try to make sure!

- Look...

- Get off!

- Sheila!

- Get off! I'll take this horse. You go back for the other one. And I never want to see you again!

- You wouldn't dare shoot anyway.

- Try it. Anyone would believe the robbers killed you.

Jerry was startled.

- Sheila, please...

- I don't trust you. Get off that fucking horse!

- Please...

- Come on!!

Jerry climbed off the back and backed away. Sheila jumped up into the saddle.

- You can't leave me here.

- Find the other horse!

- When I get back, I'll report you, bitch!

She shrugged.

- Then you will have to tell the whole story. Stay away from me, I advise you!

Sheila Ward dug her heel into the side of her horse and spurred away. As she looked back, she saw Jerry galloping toward the cave. She turned in the saddle and concentrated on the task ahead. SHe sped on. With one hand, she felt in her pocket for the name tag she'd gotten as evidence.

Now she just need to get to the city and then she can make the call.

2.

The IVECO was rolling along the bumpy dirt road. The driver did not skimp on the accelerator, the SUV occasionally lifted off the ground, only to bounce back down hard and heavy and continue its journey. Sweat glistened on the back of the Belgian corporal's neck in the light from the car's interior. He had strapped the helmet a little loosely over his head, so that he had to push up the brim with his index finger from time to time when the hard metal flange was almost beating against the bridge of his nose.

Two of them were travelling in the huge military car. Next to the driver was a tall, lean woman in her fifties, also wearing a camouflage uniform, but with a Velcro label on her shoulder, the Hungarian tricolour instead of the Belgian one. The woman's grey hair was cropped short, and the deepening wrinkles at the corners of her mouth tightened with every major bump. The woman's grey eyes were tired and dull, yet she scanned her surroundings with a tense attention. The name Radnai was emblazoned across her breast. She clutched a machine rifle between her knees, her left gripped the black barrel of the silencer's iron cylinder tightly, her right gripped the handle above the door. She wore a burgundy beret instead of a helmet.

The Belgian corporal finally steered the IVECO onto straighter and smoother ground and accelerated further. In the distance, the Macedonian mountains, bathed in the light of the full moon, shone eerily in the distance. Only thin bushes lined the wind-swept, steep hillsides. As they drove through the gorge, the car remained in darkness, but on either side, the moonlight shone white on the high mountain slopes above. The military jeep was doing seventy-five and almost burst out of the gorge onto the plateau. The cliffs on either side disappeared and they found themselves on a plain two kilometres wide. The Belgian slowed and pointed ahead.

- Those mountains over there belong to Greece.

- I know, Lucas, I've been here before.

- Excuse me, Major. I didn't know.

She didn't answer, just stared out the window.

She was gripped by a familiar anxiety. She already knew that feeling. This was her seventh deployment in the field, but the feeling hit her like the first time.

She remembered how her stomach had clenched when she had walked into the exam room of that dreaded professor thirty years before to pass Roman law. Exam cramp. There is no better word for it.

- We're almost at the camp," Lucas said, but more to keep him quiet.

Major Radnai nodded silently and stared out.

At the next bend, the Wall appeared.

The Major had seen it many times before, but it still made her throat constrict.

It was built six and a half metres high. It was an iron structure made of cast concrete elements, which extended horizontally into the ground for two or three metres on each side. Like a big letter T upside down. The recessed edges served to prevent the wall from being breached by cars. So it would have been useless for anyone to drive a car against it. Zsuzsa knew very well that it was a replica of the Berlin Wall, erected overnight at the height of the Cold War. Or rather an improvement. This wall was six and a half metres high and stretched for thousands of kilometres. By comparison, its Berlin predecessor was an anaemic model.

Barbed wire was stretched across the top of the wall, stretched out in rows. Guard towers, twelve metres high, were inserted into the wall every one hundred and fifty metres. At the top, two or three soldiers guarded the perimeter in six-hour shifts in air-conditioned glass-covered cages. Each booth was equipped with machine guns and mortars, and of course sniper rifles, night vision goggles, drones, video recorders, thermal cameras and hand grenades. And, of course, plenty of ammunition.

From the plateau where the IVECO was driving, the wide white strip in front of the Wall was clearly visible. Zsuzsa Radnai knew very well what she was seeing.

The minefield was also signposted, warning anyone passing by by chance not to stray onto the flat, fifty-metre-wide sandy field. Although everyone knew there were no such things as accidental passers-by".

Only those who were called by duty came here.

Or the one who wanted to get in.

And the two groups were mortal enemies.

To the right and to the left, both the Wall and the white minefield strewn with sand stretched into infinity. They closely followed the topography of the terrain, climbing to the tops of mountains and descending into valleys. Fifteen kilometres further on, the Wall and its companion, the minefield, clung like a thin strip of rock to the summit of Kozuf, more than six metres high. Zsuzsa remembered that not so long ago there had been ski slopes there, now cut in two by a series of concrete blocks. Because history has decided that a ski slope is less important than the survival of a multitude of peoples.

And on the other side of the Wall was Greece. Or what was left of it.

Pericles' once world-leading state was now in anarchy. Zsuzsa thought for a moment about the time when she used to spend nights in Athens and Thessaloniki during summer holidays. And it had been ten years since she had last been on the other side. And she had no desire to go there. For eleven years, Greece has not been what people knew it to be in the second half of the twentieth century. It was enough of what had happened there to make her not only freeze to death as a woman, but also to make her throat clench with fear as a police officer.

- There's the camp! - Lucas pointed ahead.

The orderly silhouette of Camp 22 loomed before them. An orderly cluster of tents, barracks, watchtowers and barbed wire fences, a mile and a half square.

Zsuzsa pulled herself up from her seat and cleared her throat.

- Where are we going exactly?

- Immediately to headquarters. Captain Wagner will see you now.

- What is Captain Wagner's job title?

- He's the district commander, ma'am. He's in charge of about fifty kilometers of border to the right and left.

- That's a lot.

The corporal shrugged.

- The Wall is long, the men are few. That's all there is for one district.

- You have plenty of natural obstacles to help you.

- We would be dead if it weren't for these mountains. The cliffs, the deep canyons, the rivers... they're all very welcome.

The IVECO stopped at the checkpoint. While a soldier was scrutinising their papers, Zsuzsa noticed that a 12 mm gun barrel was staring at them unblinking from a machine gun nest surrounded by sandbags, built ten metres away. The third member of the guard was looking down at the SUV with a hand-held mirror. The icing on the cake was that an explosives-sniffing dog was sniffing around the chassis. The Major never really understood the latter: where else could you smell explosives but in a military vehicle?

- You are free to go!

Lucas shifted into tenth gear, then began to slalom at a brisk pace between the zigzagging concrete blocks. Ever since the incident at the entry point near Bari in '21, where thirty-nine soldiers were killed by a truckload of explosives as a result of a bomber breaking through the barrier, the demand for concrete blocks had soared.

The SUV braked next to the command container. Zsuzsa entered with firm steps. At the battle station, one wall was covered with communications equipment, in front of which four operators monitored the area's transmissions. In the centre stood a large metal table with a huge digital map of the area. The table was surrounded by six men. A German captain in his forties was pointing at something on the map when Zsuzsa entered. The man with the name Wagner across his chest looked up.

- Yes?

- Major Zsuzsa Radnai, Immigration Agency, reporting for duty!

Wagner shook her hand and introduced the group around the table. Four of them were commanders of the intervention sub-units, the fifth, a Slovenian lieutenant named Milivoje Khrin, was in charge of media communications.

- You're late, Major.

- It was difficult to land the plane.

- And does that affect anything?

- No. I checked our latest data in the car. The team was still five kilometres from the Wall - he glanced at the clock. - They'll try again in about two hours.

- Are they that slow?

- They are so careful.

- What do you know about them?

Zsuzsa took out a military tablet and connected to the map on the table. The image of the tablet appeared on the large projector and she began to explain.

- According to the Agency's intelligence, they will attempt to enter after midnight tonight. A truckload of people, mostly Yemeni.

- Their age, gender?

- As always. Twenty-somethings, men and soldiers.

- How many can there be?

- We expect a maximum of twenty people. But they're all armed, and they're planning to bring in six or seven crates of explosives.

- How's the stuff?

- Still the well-known Czech Semtex. It may have come from a ship hijacked off Cyprus three years ago...

- They will never run out.

- Three hundred tonnes is three hundred tonnes. Let's be glad they're fragmented.

- What else can they do with that?

- What? Let's say they sail into the port of Marseille and blow the whole thing up on the quay. Compared to that, 911 would just be Tesz-vesz City.

Wagner scratched his head.

- What is the plan?

- That's your area, I'm an intelligence officer, Captain. The point is, these people are not allowed to enter the Union.

- Do we know where they want to break through?

- Yes - the Major pointed to the map. - Here, as I reported on the phone. Tower 3445. Whether to the right or left of that, we don't know. Have you raised the alert?

- Of course. In that tower, and in five more in each direction, there are now triple guards, and between the towers we have placed four platoons behind the minefield. 'The sub-units are led by the gentlemen,' Wagner poked him in the back.

- Then I suggest we go out into the field! Time is short.

The communications officer looked up in surprise.

- Are you coming out too, Major?

Zsuzsa turned to the lieutenant with cold amazement.

- Why not go out? You think I'm just wearing this for decoration - she pointed to the SCAR-L rifle propped up by the door.

Wagner nodded sternly.

- All right, you can come out with us, but you have to take care of yourself. We can't pester you.

- Just because I'm a woman and I turned fifty two days ago doesn't mean you have to pester me, Captain! Do you want to tease me some more, or can we get on with our business, gentlemen?

The sub-unit commanders suppressed a grin, and at Wagner's beckoning, they slipped out the door. The German stepped closer to the woman.

- I didn't mean to offend you, Major.

- It did not hurt me. Look, I know you're prejudiced against immigrants because most of us wear the uniform for decoration. We're basically intelligence agents.

- Do you have previous qualifications?

- Van. I worked as a cop for twenty-four years before Immigration called me.

- I see. I was a cop.

- Robbery, murder. Believe me, I've seen some of it.

- Then maybe more than me. Let's go!

Twenty minutes later, Major Radnai, under the care of the psychic Lieutenant Khrin, was standing in Tower 3445, scanning the terrain opposite with night vision. It was dark on the Greek side, with only the lights of a village flickering eight kilometres away. The moon's light made strong silhouettes, and the ten-metre-wide carpet of barbed wire that covered the ground up to knee height was visible on the other side. It was laid by Union soldiers during the construction of the Wall. Although the Greeks protested against it all the time, the member countries whistled in protest. Greece has been plunged into anarchy for many years. Sunk in an unmanageable whirlwind of migration. By now, there was no central government in the former sense. The country was divided into smaller provinces, each of which was ruled by warlords who had grown out of immigrants. Legally, it was Greece on the other side of the Wall, but in reality it was a shapeless, writhing wasteland of people. Where there was no justice and the law was always ruled by the strongest - although, Zsuzsa thought, the EU could no longer boast of moving forward towards a Future with a capital 'Future', with the protection of human rights as its banner. The rights of the individual and reality were not compatible, so a choice had to be made between them.

- 'Movement at eleven o'clock,' reported the sentry in a monotone.

Zsuzsa turned the lens that way.

She saw two lorries and a third, much bigger than the other two.

- What the hell..." she muttered to himself, then looked up.

- Top left! - the soldier reached over and adjusted the instrument.

Zsuzsa looked into the device. She could now clearly see the vehicles on the thermal camera image. They were approaching fast. She put the communicator to her mouth.

- Attention! They are here. Repeat: they are here.

- What do you see? - Wagner's voice crackled in the earphones as he nestled in the adjacent tower.

- There are more than we expected. I see three vehicles.

- There are always more of them, Major. That's why I over-planned.

Major Radnai acknowledged the German's foresight with a half-smile.

- Three trucks... they're only a hundred meters away, they're about to come out of the trees into no man's land.

- What is the number?

- In the first... I see twenty-one thermal images, in the second... twenty-six.

- Twenty-six?!

- Yes. These are... oh, shit! Women and children!

- That was not the case. What about the third car?

- There is only one person in this... what the...

- What happens?

- This... this is a bridge-loading truck!

- What's that for?

But events have accelerated. The bridge-loader sped out of the trees, turned in a wide arc, and the driver shifted into reverse, but so violently that you could hear the gearbox rattling in the tower. The car began to reverse towards a point on the Wall exactly halfway between the two watchtowers.

- He wants to cover the barbed wire field," said the guard calmly.

Wagner's voice rang out from the high-powered speakers mounted on top of the Wall.

- The Union Border Police is here! Turn back immediately or we will open fire!

The captain repeated the text in Arabic, then twice more in both languages. But no one expected any results. The point-loading truck did not budge . It reached the edge of the barbed-wire field, and the hydraulics slowly opened the rear element. The thirteen metre point hit the ground with a thud, flattening the bulging barbed wire arches. The heel of the heavy metal structure slammed into the wall , which shuddered in the impact.

- Fire!

Wagner had already issued this order calmly.

The machine guns of the two adjacent towers began to scan the terrain in short bursts, overlapping each other. Some of the shells also hit the truck, but the aim was not to kill the driver, but still only to scare him away.

The lorry, now free of its considerable weight, almost leapt forward under the effect of the acceleration. It lurched towards the forest, but suddenly turned back with a sharp turn and began to drive towards the point it had itself laid down. Zsuzsa saw the car accelerating. Her experienced eyes immediately saw what was coming.

- Assassin! - she shouted into the communicator.

The lorry jumped onto the pontoon and sped full throttle towards the Wall. It covered the distance in moments and then smashed nose first into the Wall. At that moment a white flash blinded the soldiers, and a second later the sound of detonation reached them. Major Radnai stared in fascination at the orange-red fireball billowing skywards, speckled with clouds of sooty smoke.

The officer shook himself and looked at the Wall. A twenty-metre stretch of the structure had collapsed. The shockwave had pushed up and swept away the barbed wire, opening a path across the sandy strip towards the gap. The minefield on the inner side was pelted with large and small pieces of the wall, which blew up dozens of landmines. Zsuzsa could see that, if the minefield had not completely disappeared, at least ninety percent of it had been destroyed.

A lorry broke through the smoke and pushed through the Wall, then another, and turned towards the Macedonian hills and drove into the minefield.

The machine guns of the turrets were now aiming at the wagons, and were tearing through the cab and tarpaulin in precise rows. The first carriage ran into a mine, tipped over and then, leaning on its side, slid a few more yards in the sand. The second one dodged the wreckage, the tarpaulin was raised, and the men on the platform opened fire with their Kalashnikovs on the border guards defending the forest. The first fatal shot was fired at a Serb soldier, but his comrades, now fuelled by revenge, fired back with precision. Death came in the back of the truck. The driver of the truck jerked the steering wheel into a wide arc and braked next to the already sideways vehicle. The intruding gunmen jumped from the truck and, seeking cover in the cover of the two cars, began firing.

Meanwhile, children and women in a state of shock crawled out of the car that had hit the mine and began to stagger towards the forest. Aiming at the ground, the border guards beat up the sand in front of them in long lines to make them turn back. One woman stepped on a mine. Her body was thrown up like a doll by the explosion, and as she fell back to the ground she began to scream and clutch at the stumps of her legs. The others, startled, turned back and began to rush towards the Wall, but then the gunmen hiding behind the wagons fired at them. The civilians were caught between two barrages of fire.

The screams of the wounded woman were constantly accompanied by the banging of the guns.

Then suddenly she got a shot in the forehead and fell silent. Zsuzsa had no idea from which side the fatal bullet had come.

- They will use them as cover," she said into the communicator.

- It's not the first time we've seen this - came Wagner's hoarse reply

- I'm going down!

Zsuzsa ran towards the stairs, grabbed the SCAR and raced downstairs. As she kicked off the tower's side door, she noticed that the Slovenian lieutenant was right behind her.

- You should not do that! - Khrin shouted over the noise of the guns.

- Then stay here!

Radnai raised the gun to his shoulder and in the shadow of the Wall, he was caught in the back of the gunmen who kept firing. On the other side, Wagner understood her plan, and he too sent some men on their way at the base of the Wall.

In the meantime, only six or seven of the gunmen who broke in were left standing. They rushed out from their hiding places and headed for the forest, leading the women and children in front of them. The border guards were discouraged and many stopped firing. The gunmen, hunched over and firing, advanced under cover of the children. The noise was hellish. Gunfire, the occasional exploding mine, constant screaming and sobbing.

One of the border guards, who had also received sniper training, skilfully took down an intruder in cover and then, emboldened by this, targeted another. When he fired, the man was in the cover of a child. The little boy fell instantly from the chest shot. Stunned, the border guard lowered his gun.

- Jesus!

- More precisely, damn him! - the sub-unit commander shouted, and kept firing himself.

Zsuzsa finally got into position near the Wall and turned towards the minefield. She walked hunched over, SCAR slung over her shoulder, and kept scanning the barrel so that if one of the gunmen happened to turn and spot the team behind them, she could fire immediately. The Major carefully followed the truck's track, for it was the only place where he was sure there were no mines.

Zsuzsa approached ten metres away from the slowly moving refugees, who were pushed in front of her by the gunmen. The border guards kneeling in the forest spotted their own men behind the intruders and ceased fire. Zsuzsa counted six gunmen. She motioned to Khrin to take the two on her left, then assigned two targets to the soldier who appeared on the other side.

When he had them, the Major stopped, took aim and with a single shot, shot the gunman in the back of the head, who was pushing a woman in front of him. The man fell face down in a pool of blood. His companion, who had been walking beside him, would have turned back in surprise, but he was shot in the temple.

Khrin and the other soldier killed their own.

There was silence.

The migrants stumbling towards the forest fell to their knees, the women looked on in horror, the children sobbed.

Slowly Zsuzsa walked around them, taking a good look at each one. She knew that there had been suicide bombers in such groups more than once, and she didn't want a fanatic to blow himself up now.

Slowly, she walked around the intruders kneeling on the ground and stood facing them.

- Back!" she shouted, and then repeated in Arabic.

The woman closest to her reached out her hand to her, but Zsuzsa just shook her head and repeated the request twice more.

She got up and walked towards the forest. The Major did not hesitate. He fired two rounds at her feet, then fired the entire magazine in a long burst into the sand in front of the migrants, drawing a line.

- Get back!

The surviving members of the team finally understood that they were not going to get in here and now. Sobbing, they moved towards the gap in the Wall, supporting each other.

Five minutes later, the last of them clambered over the ruins and was on its way back on Greek soil. Wagner had posted guards and machine guns on either side of the gap, but a team of stragglers was already coming from the camp to begin the recovery. By noon, the Wall would stand.

Zsuzsa used the barrel of her rifle to pull aside the dress of one of the dead women, then turned to Wagner, who was approaching.

- Be careful with this worm! She's wearing an explosive vest.

- It was a godsend that someone caught it.

- It was a coincidence, but it came in handy.

The man looked Zsuzsa over and then offered his hand.

- You have done a good job. You're welcome to join my team, Major.

- Thank you, but we both know I have to go. I have my own job.

- Where are you going?

- Back to Budapest. A few days rest, then I'll start again.

- She took it all well," the captain pointed around.

- I have been in this situation before. You know, there are some things that make a person.

- And what is it that has made you happy?

- You don't want to know! It's better for you, Captain.

3.

Eötvös Lóránd University is one of the oldest continuously operating universities in Hungary. The extensive, multi-site higher education institution has been home to the Faculty of Humanities for decades. Everyone thought it would stay that way forever - but the inexorable changes in geopolitics intervened. In 2021, after long and serious internal struggles, the decision was made to create the now independent Department of Arab Studies from the former Department of Semitic Philology and Arabic Studies, in response to increased student demand and growing realpolitik pressure. To accommodate this new unit, the university administration then pinched space from the humanities. As the Rector put it at the time in a closed internal meeting, there was no alternative but for the university to follow the changes in the world and try to find the laws of the world in order to make the most accurate predictions. So the department became autonomous, and in the eleven years since its creation it has multiplied many times over, and has now completely displaced the humanities. A year ago, the process of becoming an independent institute was already on the agenda, a move that provoked fierce opposition from the parties that formed the governing coalition, which were considered far-right only two decades ago. But extremism is a relative concept. What was considered extremism in big politics in the first and second decades of the millennium has become a mainstream trend in less than twenty years. No one could now describe the Hungarian government as extremist. After all, how is something or someone extreme? In Europe, this line was no longer considered extremism - it was the general political world view.

It was already dark in Budapest, and the November evening had come early. The condensation glistened damply, and the spots of light filtering through the windows of the tram stop at Astoria illuminated the pavement dimly. A group of young men smoking cigarettes at the main entrance to the university building were chatting. They were evening students of the now vast Arabic Studies Department. The time was already towards seven, and they were taking a break.

The smoking group had two important characteristics in common. First, about two-thirds of the group were Arab or at least Middle Eastern in appearance. Secondly, there was not a single woman among them. The conversation was in Arabic. One of the listeners, Yasser Dyab, looked up at the clock on the façade of the newly renovated Astoria Hotel, then reluctantly threw away a stubby cigarette butt and gestured towards the entrance.

- Let's go back. The second part could have already started.

Yasser's friend and fellow listener Hamid Mobayed pulled a sour face.

- I don't really like what this Malki or whoever is saying.

- Me neither, but I still need the credits.

The two young men entered the building and the others started to follow them. The cigarette butts sizzled and landed in the rainwater that had stopped at the curb.

- It's simply outrageous that such things can still be presented in a university today! - Hamid snarled.

- Don't take it so much to heart! You know what's going on these days.

- It is still pure Nazism.

- I agree," Yasser nodded as they scrambled up the stairs to the upstairs auditorium.

- For decades, Europe fought fascism, only to voluntarily and songfully settle the continent for itself ninety years later on the basis of exactly the same ideology. We are back where we were a hundred years ago. The fascist takeover had already taken place, but the world war had not yet started. But the concentration camps are already standing.

- It's not our problem. Just give us the credit.

- Of course it's our problem! We want to live here, don't we?

- Not me. But you know that. I do want to go home.

- You'll come to your senses! You will.

The two young men fell silent and entered the steeply sloping auditorium. There were about forty people in the ten rows of benches, occupying barely a third of the seats. Even so, a few were spread out on either side of the stairway that ran down along the wall, unwilling to cut through others to sit in one of the empty seats further in.

A few minutes ago, the speaker had already started the second half of his presentation, and he was not bothered at all by the fact that some people were still arriving.

Yasser and Hamid sneaked down the staircase next to the wall and sat down on the two empty chairs at the edge of the third row, which they had darned with the notebooks they had left for themselves at the end of the previous class.

The projector on the left showed the opening slide of the presentation The 2015 refugee crisis as the beginning of the New Europe: facts and opportunities - Part II. Lecturer Dr. Zakariás Malki, Assistant Professor, Department of Arab Studies, ELTE".

Dr. Malki walked in front of the rows of benches and spoke in a booming, calm voice. The young man was twenty-seven years old, and to look at him, no one would have called him a university lecturer. He was one hundred and eighty centimetres tall and weighed barely seventy kilos, so he looked decidedly thin, with a checked shirt hanging over his pointed shoulders as if he had been thrown over a hanger. His build would have made him look like a long-distance runner. He wore a short black beard, and his hair of the same colour clung to the top of his head. His dark eyes were intelligent, and the Lennon-style glasses pushed up to his nose gave the impression that he was wearing them for decoration. He delivered his lecture in a deep, slowly wavering voice, in English.

- As I asked at the beginning, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. This is a form of education where everyone learns more from a good question and a good conversation than if I just babble on for an hour. In the last part, before the break - he looked around and smiled - before we were so short of people...

Malki got the giggles of the students. A skilled performer, he knew exactly what to throw in every ten minutes to shake up his audience. Even the most interesting topic cannot keep a grown man busy at dinner time - whatever else some educational researchers might claim. The assistant lecturer continued.

- In the previous lesson, we reviewed the migration surge that led to the fall of Angela Merkel and, as a consequence, the fall of the European Union as it then stood.

Yasser raised his hand and Malki turned to him.

- Yes?

- Teacher, you spoke in the previous lesson about the fall of the Union and you repeated it again. But the Union exists. It is still functioning today, and this country, Hungary, is a member. Why do you call what happened a failure?

Malki punched the air and pointed towards Yasser.

- Great question! Well, let's see why I think that Merkel has failed the European Union! When the SPD started to increasingly castigate the Chancellor for her otherwise completely misguided refugee policy, the CDU got fed up after a while. Yes, but instead of listening to their coalition partner and banning their own president, the grey eminences of the Christian Democrats, in support of Merkel, who was looking for an escape route from her own bad decisions, quit the coalition. This also suited the SPD at the time, as they were already looking for an opportunity to back out from behind Merkel and thus, as it were, wash their hands of the situation and come out clean in the run-up to an early election. But they both miscalculated and were dealt a huge blow when the far right came to power with the unwitting help of the Greens. The consequences are well known. And this wave then swept across Europe in the same way as the revolution in 1848. In comparison, it is worth examining what the EU's core values were when it was founded. This is important because we know that they were finally set in stone at the Nice summit in 2000. This became the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The Charter listed in seven chapters, in a total of fifty-four articles, what the European people, and therefore the European Union, consider to be unquestionable fundamental values. Once again, I stress the most important word: unquestionable. I am sure you have all read the Charter, or at least heard of it, but let us quickly run through the most important European values. The seven chapters alone show the way forward...

Malki started counting on his fingers.

- Dignity. Freedoms. Equality. Solidarity. Citizens' rights. Justice. And finally, the not-so-essential general provisions. If you look at just the first six, these are the values, the symbols on which Europe was built. And why do I say that the European Union has failed? Because it is precisely these values that it has abandoned over the last decades because of the migration crisis. The flood of people that started in 2015 could not be managed by the methods of liberal democracy. Let me give you concrete examples of this from within the six core values I have just listed. For example, within the requirement of dignity, what do we find? Among other things, the right to human dignity and the right to human life. What are we doing today, and doing it in a perfectly legal way? We deprive migrants of their human dignity and, if necessary, we use military force to push them back outside the Wall. The guards of the Wall have a valid order to fire. It's news every day, so we lose count of the number of places where they open fire on people trying to climb or breach the Wall. And there are dead everywhere. So much for the fundamental right to life. Or what about the second pillar of the Charter? Let's look at two very important fundamental values there too. For example, the right to asylum and the right to protection against expulsion. This, as we know, has been practically non-existent in the EU for a good twelve years. Another important value that exists in name only...

Malki looked around the silent audience, then folded his hands behind his back and started pacing.

- But let's move on! Equality. Or rather: equality!? Within this, there is for example the prohibition of discrimination. I do not think I need to go into this in any depth. Most of the better quality nightclubs in Europe today do not serve migrants. The better hotels do not rent out rooms. Micro-communities, like a village or a district, are pushing out immigrants, who are thus constantly ghettoised...

Yasser interjected.

- So you are saying that because many of the Charter's core values are not working, the Union itself is not working?

Malki spread his arms.

- What else could this situation mean? Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen! If we create a social order based on declared fundamental values, and then we ourselves do not abide by them, that order has failed. The European Union has failed.

- Could you even have kept to your core values in this situation?

- You should have complied! Because that's what makes it what it is.

- But then we would no longer be Europe in the current sense.

Malki nodded in agreement.

- That's right. It would have been gone by now, and the whole continent, or at least most of it, would have sunk into anarchy. Look! I am not saying that the EU has not done what it should have done to protect its own existence. But that is why this Union is no longer what it was created to be. It is something else.

- What?

- Well, if the measures in place today had been introduced at the same time in, say, 2015, what do you think the liberal press would have called the new system? Or, indeed, any press?

There was a silence, then Hamid's voice rang out firmly.

- They would have said it was fascism.

Malki pointed to the young Syrian man.

- And there's the point! Take note of this and make a note of it! No democracy has been able to deal sensitively with that crisis, because its own rules and principles make it incapable of effective action, and it is dying of its own damn freedom. Whether you like it or not. The only way out of that situation was dictatorship. Not in the sense that decisions were made under the leadership of one person, but in the sense that decisions of the joint body could no longer be appealed against. Once the decision was taken, there was only ruthless implementation, and anyone who resisted had to be trampled underfoot in the interests of the majority. For now our lives were at stake!

The auditorium was silent. Malki ran his gaze over the audience.

- It feels bad, doesn't it? With a little exaggeration, you could say that the time of the Fourth Reich has come. The Union has already thrown away its own values for the sake of its security. And subordinates everything to it.

Yasser raised his hand.

- I'm sorry, but is this what the people... is this what the free people of Europe really wanted?