INVASION: UPRISING (Invasion Series Book 3)

by Dc Alden

  ‘Your options are limited,’ George continued. ‘We can help you, get you out of the country.’

  ‘Or we can walk away,’ Bertie added. ‘I could go back and tell Spencer that Mr Gates had company. Sooner or later, she’d try again. She might even send someone else. Someone without George’s connections.’

  Al-Kaabi turned to George. ‘So, I take it you’re in this resistance movement?’

  ‘I’ve got friends, put it that way.’

  ‘And you’ll get us both out?’

  ‘It’s conditional.’

  ‘I thought it might be.’

  ‘Quid pro quo.’ George smiled. ‘You know how these things work.’

  ‘Military intelligence is heavily compartmentalised. I might not be as valuable as you think.’

  ‘That’s not my call.’

  Al-Kaabi squeezed Gates’ hand again. ‘Spencer is expecting a body. How will you get around that?’

  It was Gates himself who answered. ‘Since Faisal and I met, I’ve discouraged all visitors. It’ll be weeks before anyone comes knocking.’

  ‘By which time you’ll both be long gone,’ Bertie told them. ‘The Witch will assume that the whole thing has been quietly dealt with and just move on.’

  ‘The Witch,’ Gates echoed with a tired chuckle. ‘It suits her.’

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Al-Kaabi asked.

  George got to his feet. ‘First, we need to get Timmy somewhere safe. And you need to go back to work.’

  ‘No!’ Gates said, and Al-Kaabi held a finger to his lips.

  ‘He’s right, Timmy. It would look odd if I just disappear, especially now. It’s not a good time.’

  Bertie watched as George and Al-Kaabi ironed out their contact details and then shook hands. Gates showed the soldier out, and Bertie heard tender whispers in the hallway before the door closed.

  Gates stepped back into the room, his eyes red and puffy. George pointed back down the hallway.

  ‘Why don’t you go and pack your things, Timmy? A small bag, essentials only, okay?’

  Gates looked around the room. ‘I’m never coming back, am I?’

  ‘At least you’ll be alive.’

  ‘Where will we go?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  Gates’ eyes took on a faraway look. ‘I suppose not, as long as we’re together.’

  ‘I’ll pop to the kitchen,’ Bertie told him, ‘make us all a nice cup of tea.’

  Gates offered a tired smile. ‘You’re a darling, Bertie. And turn everything off on the cooker, would you? Safe to say that dinner is well and truly ruined.’

  Bertie gave him a wink. ‘No problem at all.’

  He arrived home almost three hours later, re-entering the property the same way he’d left, locking the gate behind him and re-crossing the manicured gardens. Shutting out the frigid wind, he hung his coat on a hook by the basement door and listened. The kitchen had closed, and the staff had retired to their rooms for the evening. Bertie passed unnoticed and went upstairs.

  The Witch was waiting for him in the drawing room. A fire burned in the grate, and Bertie wondered who’d set it in his absence. Maybe The Witch herself, he thought. Idle hands and all that. She closed the book she was reading and to Bertie’s surprise, gestured for him to sit opposite her. He eased into the wingback chair and waited for her to speak.

  ‘Is it done?’

  Bertie nodded sympathetically. ‘He didn’t feel a thing.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I watched him slip away, ma’am. Very peaceful.’

  ‘Poor Timmy,’ she said, wringing a balled-up tissue in her hand.

  Bertie studied her dry eyes and felt a rush of anger. How many people had she sentenced to death without a shred of sympathy? Too bloody many. The Witch removed her glasses and let them dangle from the chain around her neck.

  ‘And the suicide note?’

  ‘I left it on the pillow next to him.’ Bertie paused, then said, ‘It might be some time before he’s discovered, ma’am. It could be weeks, maybe a month.’

  ‘The deed has been done, that’s all that matters.’ The Witch took a deep breath and exhaled. ‘You’ve done this house a huge service, Bertie, and I’m very grateful. Now we must forget the sordid events of this evening and look to the future.’

  Bertie feigned a puzzled frown. ‘Forget what, Lady Edith?’

  The Witch cackled, a sound so rare it unnerved him.

  ‘Yes, very good, Bertie, very amusing.’ The smile faded from her thin lips, like a curtain being drawn. ‘Breakfast at six-thirty, please. I have a long day in court tomorrow.’

  She slipped her glasses back on, picked up her book and settled in her chair. Bertie got to his feet and left. As he stepped down into the basement and closed the door to his cramped room, he allowed himself a satisfied smile. The evening had proved to be a successful one and lying to The Witch’s face while she lapped it all up felt good. One-nil to the home side.

  He brushed his teeth, undressed, and climbed into bed, curling up beneath his quilt. Tiredness plucked at his consciousness, and as his eyes closed and his mind drifted, he imagined a day when he would confront Edith Spencer with the truth of his deception, with his membership of the resistance, of Timmy Gates’ survival…and of her impending doom.

  He imagined the look of horror on her face.

  In the darkness of his room, Bertie smiled.

  9

  The North West Frontier

  Eddie got his first look at the frontier from the shadows of a hilltop forest. He’d seen footage on TV and videos on the Internet, but none of it prepared him for the reality of the brutal scar that carved across the undulating landscape. It was probably the ugliest thing that Eddie had ever seen.

  ‘Jesus, look at that,’ he muttered, sweeping the hi-power spotter scope across the unsettling vista. To the south, down in the distant valley, the English town of Haltwhistle had been completely destroyed. All that remained were grey stone teeth of demolished buildings jutting out of the weed-strewn rubble, as if a giant had stomped its way through the village, leaving a flattened, broken landscape in its wake. Some of the town’s outlying farms and houses still looked intact, but a twist of the magnification ring revealed collapsed walls, burned timbers, and sunken roofs. Nothing had escaped the deliberate destruction.

  ‘You could hear the bastards from 20 miles away,’ their guide told them, a grizzled colour-sergeant in the reformed Black Watch regiment. Dark bars of camouflage cream divided his narrow face, and his uniform and equipment was an ad hoc mix of British and American issue, all of it well-worn and weather-beaten, a second skin that every combat vet tailored to his own spec. Eddie could relate. Like the rest of the guys who’d never fired a shot in anger until he’d set foot in Ireland, he’d adapted his set-up. Tactical vest, body armour, assault pack, weapons, nothing he wore or carried was the same as when he’d waded ashore on that darkened beach.

  His right hand went to the handle of the knife he wore on his tactical vest, just to the right of his magazine pouches. It used to be lower down, on his utility belt, until that day in the abandoned house in Ennis. The guy had literally run into him, a big, bearded Haji, older and heavier. They’d both gone down, the guy on top of him, both of them grunting and cursing as they’d wrestled on the floor. Eddie’s M27 was trapped against his body so he’d pulled his pistol, but the Haji had grabbed the barrel, twisting it and nearly breaking Eddie’s finger. That’s when the panic had set in, Eddie remembered. He’d scrabbled desperately for his knife, but he couldn’t pull it because the handle was trapped beneath him. Then came the gunshot and the fine mist of blood, and Digger had dragged the dead Haji off him and screamed at him to get up and keep moving! It’d been a very close call. Now Eddie wore his knife where he could get to it in a pinch.

  ‘They used the old A69 cross-country route as the line of demarcation,’ the colour-sergeant was explaining, ’then they drove two massive engineering crews towards each other fro
m both coasts. They rolled right over every town and village in-between, then dug up the road to form the vast no-man’s-land you see before you.’

  ‘Must’ve been big crews,’ Mac ventured.

  ‘A couple of thousand in each one,’ the colour-sergeant told him, ‘though half of it was slave labour, which meant we couldn’t drop any munitions on the bastards. We tried sniping the architects and other HVTs, but they shot a bunch of prisoners in retaliation, so we just had to sit back and watch.’

  He folded his arms and shook his head.

  ‘Anything that stood in their way, they just bulldozed straight over the top of it. In the bigger towns, they blew up entire buildings to form giant barricades. What they left behind is sown with trip flares and anti-personnel mines, and they dammed every river along the route with rubble, flooding the surrounding lowlands. Like they did down there. Take a look.’

  Eddie twisted the focus ring on the spotter scope. Beyond the flattened town, the early morning sun sparkled off a vast body of water. Partially submerged beneath it, an unending sea of razor wire and rusted metal stakes stretched all the way across the flooded fields to the dark, rising ground beyond. It reminded Eddie of a World War One battlefield. The colour-sergeant pointed to the hills.

  ‘Up there they’ve got surveillance posts every quarter mile or so, plus tethered blimps, drones, CCTV, and thermal imaging, which gives them a lot of overlapping coverage. They deploy human patrols too, both foot and mounted, and the engineers are always beefing up potential weak points and re-sowing mines.’

  Eddie took another slow, visual sweep. What was left of the town was also under assault by Mother Nature; grass, brambles, and blooms of purple heather sprouted through the cracks and fissures of collapsed roofs and broken roads. It reminded him of the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Glasgow and Edinburgh, two ruined and desolate cities they’d skirted on their journey south. Eddie realised he’d yet to see a single living creature down there. Even the birds seemed to avoid the area. Nothing moved in the sky except for a single, distant drone, sweeping the ground to the east. Ours or theirs, Eddie didn’t know.

  ‘Fifty miles,’ muttered Steve next to him, pointing towards the enemy-held hills.

  Eddie turned and looked at him. ‘What’s 50 miles?’

  ‘Sarah and Maddie. I worked it out on the map. That’s how far the house is. Give or take.’

  ‘Don’t think about it, mate.’

  ‘That’s like asking me not to breathe.’

  Eddie didn’t respond. Since landing in Scotland, Steve had lost whatever spark he had left. His smile wasn’t as ready, his bad jokes now few and far between. He hadn’t seen his family for almost three years. Maddie, his bonnie lass, would be nearly ten. How Steve had coped with the uncertainty was hard to imagine, but he wasn’t the only one. Countless others had been left behind during the evacuation, but how much longer Steve had to wait until he was reunited with them was anyone’s guess.

  ‘So, when do we go over?’ Digger asked the colour-sergeant.

  The man’s hard eyes narrowed. ‘What’s the rush, wee man? Had enough of life, have ye?’

  Digger bristled. ‘I’m not scared of dying.’

  ‘Open your eyes, son. No one’s getting across that frontier any time soon.’

  Eddie glanced at Steve and registered his painful wince. Another body blow for the poor guy. The colour-sergeant whistled to the rest of Nine Platoon strung out along the tree-line. ‘That’s it, orientation’s over. Make your way back to your transport.’

  Eddie was glad to be going. He’d seen enough.

  ‘The North-West Frontier,’ Mac said, as their truck bounced and swayed back down the track on the other side of the hill. ‘It’s got a familiar ring to it.’

  Eddie had to think about that one. ‘That’s Pakistan, right? Or Afghanistan?’

  ‘Someone stayed awake at school.’

  Mac was buzzed to be back home, or hame as he called it. He also liked to remind any Englishman in earshot that Scotland was now bigger by 1,200 square miles, courtesy of the caliphate’s redrawn border. The only decent thing them bastards have done since they’ve been here, he never tired of telling everyone.

  It took nearly an hour to get back to the Second Mass HQ at Otterburn, some 30 miles to the north. The military camp had been extensively damaged during the invasion, and in the months that followed, before they withdrew behind the frontier, the invaders had ransacked it for anything useful, but apart from a few burned-out buildings, most of the infrastructure had survived. The battalion’s 600 men and vehicles had been widely dispersed across the installation, and on the rising ground above the camp, camouflaged beneath the trees, an American Patriot battery provided anti-missile cover. Since the Second Mass had moved in, there’d been no incoming, even though they drilled for it most days. There was always the risk of a low-level aircraft attack too, and the Royal Artillery had their backs in that regard, providing air cover from the surrounding hills with their Stormer armoured vehicles and Starstreak missiles. Eddie slept pretty well at night.

  Nine Platoon spent the rest of the day in a classroom, refreshing their first-aid skills, and after six it was their turn to eat. They queued up at the temporary cookhouse and took their food – chicken curry with rice and naan – back to their accommodation. They were billeted in a small, red-brick block at the western edge of the camp, close to the vast, empty training area beyond the chain-link fences. They shared a four-man room with no beds, but they had their roll mats and brand-new US-issue cots. There was no natural light because the window had been blown out. Sandbags now filled the shell hole in the wall, with battery-powered storm lamps providing light, and down the hall, they had flushable toilets, hot water, and working showers. It wasn’t five-stars, but it was pretty decent.

  The curry was decent too, and no one spoke as they chowed down. It was Eddie who eventually opened the conversation. ‘That was some sight today, eh?’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ Mac agreed. ‘Using slave labour too. Bastards.’

  Steve looked up from his mess tin. ‘One of the Black Watch guys said a lot of ‘em were squaddies and cops. They dressed ‘em in caliphate uniforms too.’

  ‘If we hadn’t got out, my dad would’ve been one of them,’ Digger mumbled, his mouth full.

  Eddie glanced at the others. When Digger spoke about his dad, things always got uncomfortable. Mac was always quick to defuse, though. The big Glaswegian smiled and tapped the side of his head.

  ‘A smart guy, your pa. He saw what was coming, got you and your ma to safety before it all went to shit.’

  ‘His luck ran out though, didn’t it? Only one missile got through and it had to hit his ship.’

  ‘Aye, rotten luck,’ Steve agreed. ’How’s your mum taking it?’

  Digger sneered. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Take it easy, nipper—’

  ‘Don’t tell me to take it easy. You’ve been sulking like a bitch ever since we got to Scotland.’

  ‘Hey! That’s enough,’ Mac warned them, spitting grains of rice. Digger continued the assault on his curry. Mac put his spoon down. ‘Listen, we had it pretty rough in Ireland, more than others but not as bad as some. We’ve seen a lot of shit, and if any of us are having trouble dealing with it, there are people we can talk to. There’s no shame in getting help—’

  ‘Subtle as a brick in the face.’

  Mac stared at the youngster. ‘That’s right, I’m talking about you.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Digger told him.

  ‘We’re worried about you,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Worry about yourself.’ In the silence that followed, Digger looked at each of them. ‘I get it. This is an intervention, right? I’m angry about my dad, so what? You would be too.’

  ‘We need to know we can rely on you,’ Mac said. ‘You’re taking too many stupid chances. You want payback for your dad, fine, but you can’t go solo on us, Digger, so I need to know right here and now that you’ll think before you
act. Be a team player.’

  ‘Or what?’

  Eddie felt the tension ratchet up. Mac pointed a finger at him. ‘Or I’ll—’

  ‘Relax, I’m kidding.’ Digger grinned, but it didn’t last long. ‘Stop worrying, all of you. I’m dealing with it. And I won’t let you down, you’ve got my word on that.’

  Mac nodded. ‘Okay, son. But know this; if I think you’re going off the rails, I’ll yank you from this section without a second thought, got it?’

  This time Digger didn’t smile. ‘Understood, boss.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  They went back to eating their food. It was Steve who broke the awkward silence.

  ‘So, what d’you think’ll happen next?’

  Mac shrugged. ‘Christ knows. I guess they’re trying to work out how best to open up that frontier.’

  ‘Tactical nuke,’ Digger mumbled through a mouthful of curry.

  ‘Beecham won’t use nukes on UK soil,’ Mac told them. ‘I think we should wait it out, see what happens with China.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ grumbled Steve. ‘When I found out that my girls didn’t get evacuated, I’ve done nothing but hope and pray they’re all right. Sarah’s a smart girl, and my parents are no fools either. They’d be okay, make the right choices. I’ve always believed that, but now I’m here, this close to them…’ Steve winced, as if in pain. ‘What I’m trying to say is, I’ve got an awful feeling. That maybe they didn’t make it.’

  Mac tossed his mess tin to one side and crouched in front of Steve. He gave his shoulder a squeeze. ‘They’ll be fine, mate. Don’t take any notice of my big mouth. I’m sure they’ll find a way to get us over that border.’

  ‘We could go around it,’ Digger chipped in. ‘Get the navy to kick their Haji arses all the way back to France.’

  Eddie shook his head. ‘You could walk from England to Norway without getting your feet wet, they’ve got that many mines out there. Not to mention the missile batteries around the coast. Same goes for the English Channel. The navy would get cut to pieces.’