by Holroyd, Tom
What was the next step?
The next stage was to get as many people to the Burghs as possible.
What about the Safe Zones?
That was the decision that will stay with me for the rest of my life. By that second week the Safe Zone defences were still nowhere near finished. Building 30 miles of defences was no easy feat and was very time consuming. We needed to buy them time to finish or they would have been over run and we would have no secure base from which to re-supply the Burghs and eventually re-capture the country. We made the decision not to tell people about the Safe Zones until they were ready, in the hope that it would draw them and the infected elsewhere. Around 60 million people called the UK home and 99 per cent of that number where still tearing around the country in a blind panic. If they had gotten into the Safe Zones before the defences were ready that would have been it. The United Kingdom would have been reduced to a series of defended locations in a sea of infected; it would have been like the Dark Ages all over again.
So we steered people away as much as possible, held them at choke points and did our best to defend them. That was the point of this junction you know, the whole reason why 2 Mercian were here. We had recognised that unless we gave people a place to rest and stop on the way north the Scotland Safe Zone would be over run. So we set up a refugee camp in the grounds of Allerton Castle and the Battalion dug in next to the motorway. We gave them the best defences we could find, concertina wire, bastion walls and supplies. We knew that all the infected from Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and even London would be heading straight for them and we needed to hold them here for as long as possible.
What do you say to the accusations that the military abandoned those people, deliberately sacrificed them?
Look, everyone is entitled to their opinions and for those people who survived the battle or had relatives who died here, then I can understand their anger.
I guess that for all intents and purposes we did abandon those people but that was never the intention. The plan was always to evacuate them as soon as we were able. By the time we got the evacuation plan in order and the troops in place we were too late and could only save a fraction of the people left.
Could we move on please, I have to testify in front of Parliament on this next week and I don’t want to skew the testimony?
Ok. Can you tell me about the situation once the Safe Zone defences were completed?
It took about ten weeks from the first Senlac order being sent out to finish the defences. In that time the Royal Engineers had built two lines of fortifications consisting of bastion walls, ditches, moats and barbed wire that sealed the land access to Devon and northern Scotland. That was when we began the process of evacuating the refugee camps, temporary fortifications and all the refugee ships. That was a Herculean effort all by itself and the Royal Navy and RAF really earned their keep.
The real headache was the processing and clearing of all those refugees but thank God that was nothing to do with me. I was still fully focused on the defensive side of things and trying to stop the Safe Zone walls being breached.
Continental divide
RAF Lyneham
Group Captain Marcus Wilbur is the current base commander and a highly decorated officer. He spent most of the war flying the transport fleet but trained as a fast jet pilot on Typhoons. His first war time mission was highly covert and highly dangerous and he has only recently been permitted to talk about his experience.
My squadron and I had recently re-located to RAF Kinloss as part of Op Senlac and had been glued to the television for the past month watching the world go to hell on BBC 24.
It was in early May that my wingman and I were taken to one side by John Miller, the Squadron Leader and told that we had been selected for a top-secret mission. We were told to collect our belongings and report to hanger nineteen, which was in the most isolated part of the base. We jumped into a Land Rover and drove over to be met by a bunch of grim faced soldiers guarding the perimeter of the hanger. Of course, we were getting more and more suspicious by this point and it only got worse as we were ordered to surrender our mobile phones and our kit was searched. Once the soldiers were finished we were led to a series of small offices in the side of the hanger and told to dump our kit in the room that was clearly going to be our bedroom.
John was waiting for us in a make shift briefing room, he greeted us and introduced the man next to him as Mike from 22 SAS. At this point I was getting a bit concerned about what we were getting ourselves into as anything that involved those head bangers was going to be dangerous and probably damaging to someone else.
Sure enough I wasn’t disappointed. Mike began the briefing by outlining the current situation in the UK, the current rate of infection, the spread and more relevant the refugee problem.
Refugee problem?
Yes, I had no idea either at the time. You know how when it all went to shit on the continent and how anybody who could, jumped on to a boat and made for the high seas? Well, conventional wisdom has it that most of them sailed straight past Britain and onto Iceland because we were in the middle of our Panic and Iceland was apparently cold and safe. Truth is that the Royal Navy was in the Channel, forcing ships to move on and in some cases opening fire to add some persuasion, they never sunk anything but they apparently came close to it a couple of times. You see we didn’t need all these extra, possibly infected, people turning up on our shores and adding to the chaos and draining our resources. The Navy stopped that but what they couldn’t stop was the swarm of refugees and infected that was crossing through the Channel Tunnel.
According to Mike, the Government had tried repeatedly to get the French to seal their end but they were either too busy or not interested, most probably both. Not really surprising seeing as they were in a worse state than we were. Not only did they have a large native population going nuts to contend with, they also had all those refugees from the rest of Europe pouring over their borders and running for the perceived safely of the coast. I imagine that the last thing on the French government’s mind was a pipeline that was conveniently diverting loads of refugees away from Brittany and their Safe Zone. It was however, right at the forefront of my mind as we were being informed that we would be part of the mission to close the French end.
Why the French end of the tunnel and not the British?
I asked the same question. It turns out that the original plan had called for just our end to be sealed with concrete barriers but the analysts reasoned that enough determined refugees or hungry Gs could force the barricades. They couldn’t take that risk so the decision was taken to seal the French end as well.
The plan was for a small SAS team to fly into France and mark the target with a laser designator, we would then drop a Paveway bomb onto the tunnel entrance and seal it. It sounds so simple doesn’t it but a hundred things could go wrong.
First of all, the SAS team could be over run, after all we were asking them to go into a country swarming with Gs and avoid detection long enough to designate a target for us to hit; then get out again in one piece, all without getting caught by some by now very pissed off Frenchmen.
On top of that was that we were about to fly a bombing mission into another country’s airspace and into the teeth of their air traffic control and military radar network. I had some serious concerns, not least of which was “Am I about to start a war with France?”
Thankfully though the SAS are nothing if not meticulous in their planning and we spent four days just working through the plan; going over every single eventuality and solving every problem that was thrown in our way. By the time we finished we all knew the plan inside and out. After that it was time to practice before the show and we had been given two flight simulators to play with. We spent another two days just running and running the mission until I could do it in my sleep. Thank God though because getting a bomb toss right is not easy.
What is a bomb toss?
It is the bombing technique that we
had decided on for this mission. The easiest way to bomb a target was to fly over it at high altitude, release the bomb and then let it lock onto the laser and ride it all the way to the target. Problem was that we couldn’t just do a high-altitude pass over France and then try to explain to the French that we just happened to be in the area when their tunnel mysteriously exploded. No, what we needed was a way of getting a bomb to the target without anyone ever knowing we were there, so a bomb toss.
The technique is quite tricky because you have to approach the target at high speed and a very low level to avoid radar detection. When you reach your release point you then pull up to about 70 degrees and release the bomb. The speed of the plane and the angle of release basically lobs the bomb in a long, high arc so that it drops straight onto the target. It’s basically like an underarm throw. Quiet, efficient and more importantly; did not require me to fly straight into the French Anti-Aircraft network.
Anyway D-Day finally came around. The SAS had left two days earlier to get into position, we were given our final brief and then the go order came from Command. My wingman and I lifted off from Kinloss just as it was starting to get dark and flew towards London for the first stage of our journey. Thankfully we were flying high so we didn’t have to see the streams of refugees and infected heading north. What we could see where the fires; thousands of campfires twinkling like stars across the entire country and here and there the bonfires of a town or city burning.
It was pitch black by the time we flew over London and linked up with the re-fuelling tanker. We had chosen London for the meeting because the huge column of ash and soot that was still rising off the ruins was the perfect cover from French radar. It did make the re-fuelling process bloody difficult as we spent most of the time being buffeted around by thermals and trying to avoid sucking too much ash into our engines.
With our tanks topped off we dropped down to 50 meters above the surface of the Thames and followed the river out into North Sea. We shot past a number of refugee ships steaming north and then turned into the Channel. In the distance we could see the running lights of the Royal Navy piquet line as they herded the refugee ships away from the coast.
Twenty miles out my wingman peeled off and began a slow racetrack holding pattern in the channel. He would come in for a second run if my bombs failed to hit the target. I keyed my radio “Fishing”, the code word for my final approach. Seconds later came the return “Line”, the laser was now active and on target.
At ten miles out I increased my speed and prepared for the toss. Five miles out I pulled the nose of the jet up and held it for two seconds before I hit the bomb release, felt the plane lighten as the Paveway was tossed into the sky and continued my roll, coming full circle and back down to the wave tops before I shot off north. I reckoned I had probably breached the French radar for about a second and then hopefully vanished.
I imagined the bomb sailing into the night sky, totally silent, no rocket motor or flame to give it away, covering five miles in a few moments as it reached the peak of its arc before the nose tipped downwards and its computer brain began sniffing for the laser mark. It would acquire its target and lock on as it began its final dive before smashing into the mouth of the tunnel and 1000 lbs of high explosives detonating in an instant and sealing it.
The net came alive again with the code word “Catch”, mission accomplished. I collected my wingman and we headed for home for our post mission analysis. According to the Squadron Leader everything had gone according to plan and the mouth of the tunnel was now just a smoking hole in the ground. Of course, what we didn’t realise was how pissed off the French were.
Apparently they had cottoned on pretty quickly as to what had happened. Let’s face it, it doesn’t take the brains of an Archbishop to guess who might have blown up their nice shinny tunnel and they were pissed. Trouble was there was nothing they could do about it; there was no proof, thank God, and both France and Britain had seen what happened with Pakistan and Iran when two nuclear nations got angry with each other. They apparently ranted and raved at what was left of our Government but ultimately realised that their only other course of action was to start a war and I think they realised that no one would benefit from that.
The only reason I am allowed to talk to you about this now is that we have all kissed and made up. We admitted what we did, apologised, paid the French for the damage and helped them rebuild the tunnel. I guess we are back to business as usual; although I doubt they will let us forget what we did, I mean look at how long it took them to get over us sinking their fleet in World War Two to stop the Nazis getting hold of it.
C’est la vie mon ami!
Axe to grind.
Canterbury,
Steven Maher is the chairman of the Justice for Junction organisation dedicated to finding the “truth” about the death of an estimated 600,000 people at Junction 47. Steven has a personal reason for this crusade, his parents died in the Allerton Castle camp during the Great Panic and he is currently campaigning for the members of the Military Command to be tried for war crimes and mass murder. He has agreed to this interview on the proviso that he be allowed to get across his view of events without any post interview editing on my part. We are currently stood on a small hillock overlooking what used to be the Allerton Castle camp. There is very little left of the perimeter wall or the thousands of bodies that once littered the landscape. One of the Government’s first acts following VB Day was to build a national memorial on the site. A one-hundred-foot-high artificial hill covers the site of the original mass grave dug by the Army during the Restoration. A beautiful stone Angel stands atop the hill looking over the single biggest loss of life in UK history
Before we start I just want to state that the official position of Justice for Junction is that the Government and the Military deliberately abandoned hundreds of thousands of people to die so that they could save themselves.
What evidence do you have to support your claim?
It’s not a “claim”. It’s a cold hard fact. Thousands of people did die here and the Government did nothing to help them.
Ok, but what evidence do you have?
I have the eye witness testimonies of some the survivors, the findings of the Olsen Review, UAV footage from the attacks and the archaeological evidence recovered from the camp.
Shall we start at the beginning? Could you describe the situation as your evidence describes it?
Yes, good idea, Ok.
The military’s plan was to hold as many refugees as possible in one spot to act as an irresistible target to the infected which would distract them from the real prize which was the Safe Zone being constructed in Scotland. It was straight out of the pages of Redeker.
What is your response to those who say that the Redeker Plan was a necessary evil and it ultimately won the war for many nations?
I have heard that argument before, that you couldn’t save everyone, like a lifeboat being capsized by too many people. It just bullshit, why couldn’t they save everyone? It’s what the Government is meant to do.
What was the camp at Junction like?
Well as I said in order for the Government’s plan to work the Camp needed to be appealing enough for people to want to stop running and settle in. From all the accounts I have read they spared no expense in their deception.
The entire camp covered about four square miles and had a twenty-foot-high perimeter wall. You can see remnants of it over there. (He points to a line of collapsing gabion walls half visible in a nearby field.)
The Army used portable bastions, these collapsible, chain link boxes that they filled with earth, to make the wall and built towers every 100m. You can see how there was no wall walk or way of seeing over so once the people were inside they could not get out again. It was like a giant trap.
But surely it is better that people don’t look over the wall as that would just attract more infected.
That’s just bollocks, half a million people in a camp would have made more
than enough noise to attract them and that’s not even mentioning the smell.
Tell me about the facilities in the camp.
Well as I said they spared no expense. After building the wall they put in tents, paths, wells, latrines, field kitchens all the like. You can just imagine how appealing it must have been to all those people. Running for their lives and all of a sudden you come across this haven where everything is provided for, it’s no wonder almost everyone stopped here.
As soon as enough people arrived the Army handed over the administration and security to a hastily elected civilian committee and left. Now, the Army will say that they re-deployed to help secure the Fort at Junction but I know for a fact that the vast majority of them left and drove off north.
What was the situation like with the civilian committee in charge?
Things got very bad, very quickly. Without the Army to keep control there was a general break down of law and order. It is not surprising that with so many people crammed into a camp, living on top of each other that things degenerated so rapidly. There were fights over food, supplies, living space almost anything you could think of. If you had something that someone else wanted, then you had to fight to keep it and that included your own dignity. The latrines backed up because no one would clean them, the wells were fouled by all the shit on the ground. That then led to rats and diseases. One of my sources survived an outbreak of Cholera that swept through the camp and killed thousands. They just dumped the bodies outside the wall and made space for more people. You remember the New Orleans flood back in 2005 and the situation in the Superdome. The camp was a hundred times worse than that. There were gangs, muggings, theft, rape; the worst parts of humanity came out in this place. It must have been hell.
