Invasion

by Dc Alden

  ‘Wait… wait… shut down now!’

  The radar operator obeyed the command and flicked the switch off yet again. He’d done it so often that his thumb was beginning to ache badly.

  There were three of them, British soldiers of the Royal Artillery, cooped up inside their MAAT-V air defence vehicle since yesterday. Apart from the odd break to urinate and stretch their legs, they had remained inside the stuffy confines of the armoured vehicle and waited.

  Their tracked vehicle was parked in a small but well-camouflaged depression on the eastern edge of the Salisbury Plain training area and, as far as they knew, they were the only unit for miles around. That was fine with the Commander. They were tasked to operate independently, such was the nature of their particular function.

  Along with other mechanized units, they’d rumbled out from Tidworth Garrison two nights ago and scattered across Salisbury Plain for a weeklong air defence exercise. Now that exercise had become frighteningly real.

  Around six o’clock the previous evening they’d lost contact with their exercise coordinating officer, after which they’d been unable to get in touch with anyone, either on the military net or on their personal cell phones. Something was seriously wrong, but they decided to stay put. Sooner or later someone would get in touch with them.

  It was just before sunset when the Commander heard the familiar sound of an army Land Rover bouncing along a nearby track. He ran through the trees to intercept it, nearly getting himself run over in the process. The panicked driver had told him that Tidworth garrison had been attacked. Car bombs had been used inside and outside several different barracks and that there were firefights breaking out all over the place. The order to head west had been given and all units and personnel were to make their way towards a marshalling area south of Bristol. The driver scribbled the coordinates on a notepad and ripped the sheet off, stuffing it into the Commander’s palm. The Land Rover sped away in a cloud of dust.

  The Commander had informed his shocked crew. Only one of them was married and, despite the protests of his comrades, he’d decided to head back on foot to his home on the outskirts of Tidworth and find his family. None of the others could’ve stopped him.

  Now they were three: Commander, radar operator and driver. They were to proceed west, which meant the threat was from the east. Four hundred feet away, camouflaged amongst a stand of Scots pines, their air-search radar mast confirmed that threat. The crew had watched with barely concealed anger as enemy aircraft entered British airspace unchallenged. They recorded the mass landings at Heathrow to the east, the high-flying military transports that passed overhead on their way north to God knew where. How could this happen? Where were our lads? As the hours ticked by, it became frighteningly obvious that British forces had been neutralised. Everyone else, according to the panicked jeep driver, was headed west. So be it.

  The commander reached another decision. They were well camouflaged and all the air traffic was currently east of their position. They would stay where they were until first light, recording enemy flight details – course, speed, altitude, probable destinations, aircraft type – dumping the data onto their computers’ hard drives. When they headed west, they would go armed with something the top brass could use. The Commander was a courageous man; to scuttle away without gathering some intelligence seemed pointless and a little cowardly. So they stayed in place overnight, their instruments quietly recording huge volumes of data. The sun had just risen in the east when they spotted the Big Eye.

  As luck would have it, their air-search radar had been flipped to passive when the Big Eye’s massive emission sweep washed over them. The Commander immediately recognised the radar signature and screamed for all systems to be shut down. As they sweated inside their vehicle, the men listened for the scream of an incoming missile. It never came. After a few minutes the crew began to breathe again. The Big Eye had ignored them, continuing its search elsewhere.

  Although they were shut down, there were other ways to maintain their operational effectiveness. The Commander ordered the radar operator to switch his search radar on and off intermittently, as quickly as he could. Using this tactic, they could still operate while limiting their electronic exposure, although things would have to be done manually. To that effect, the driver left the vehicle and ran through the scrub to the stand of pines, using the cranking handle at the foot of the mast and manually twisting the radar dish to sweep the eastern horizon.

  ‘There it is again.’

  Inside the Big Eye’s control cabin, a female operator noted the tiny emission flare on her screen and muttered under her breath. She punched her overhead alert button. Behind her, a senior operator stood up from his own console and watched the radar sweep on the operator’s display.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Radar signature, type unknown. Very faint but recurring intermittently. Low output, no electronic signature as yet. Designate possible air-search radar. Request side-band sweep.’

  ‘Negative,’ snapped her supervisor. ‘Priority is airborne traffic to the west. Maintain your watch.’

  Fool, the operator cursed silently. It was because she was a woman and women in Arabia were still seen as second-class citizens, even in the military. Her supervisor was one such man who liked women to do his bidding. He had said so on many occasions, particularly when there were other men within earshot. During one incident, the pot-bellied toad had leaned over her console and quietly informed her in a gust of bad breath that he would take great pleasure in bedding her, a mental image that made the operator reel with nausea.

  The supervisor was jealous, of course, because the operator was excellent at her job and he was a fat slob who was only on the Big Eye because his wife’s cousin was a senior Air Force Colonel in Postings and Assignments. Well, she would have his job one day. In the meantime, she did as she was ordered and concentrated on filtering the reams of electronic data the Big Eye was gathering as it continued on its westward course.

  Twenty-three thousand feet below the Big Eye, the radar operator flipped his power switch every couple of seconds. As the minutes passed, the Commander began to see a pattern emerging. As a rule, Big Eyes tended to stay away from danger. They were unsuitable for missile evasion due to their conventional aerodynamics and the sheer cost of the aircraft. The loss of a Big Eye would be a serious blow to any air force. And this one was headed straight for them.

  The milli-second radar sweeps had given them course; now, they had both speed and altitude. It was an opportunity too good to miss. He scooped up his radio and a minute later the panting driver dropped into his seat and fired up the turbo-charged diesel engine.

  ‘Snap shot! Activate all systems! Prepare to launch!’ As the radar operator’s fingers ran along the control panel, the Commander muttered a silent prayer of thanks that their exercise load-out included six Sentry ground-to-air missiles. Four feet above his head, the roof launcher swivelled around and extracted two of those missiles from their magazine tubes. The camouflage net covering the vehicle shimmered as hydraulic arms swept it up and over the MAAT-V, dumping it onto the rear of the roof.

  ‘Designate target Bandit One, tracked and locked. Ready to fire!’

  ‘Fire!’ shouted the commander.

  ‘Missiles away!’

  Above them, the missiles roared out of their launch tubes, enveloping the tracked vehicle in a cloud of white smoke.

  ‘Shut down all systems! Let’s move!’ yelled the commander. The driver slammed the vehicle in reverse and roared backwards out of the small depression. He spun the vehicle around and raced toward their next fire position. Their manoeuvrability would make it hard for any enemy aircraft to get a lock-on. Then again, they’d never taken on a Big Eye before…

  ‘Missile launch!’ yelled the female operator. ‘Two missiles inbound! They have lock!’

  It was the suspicious blip she’d seen only moments before, of that there was no doubt. The side-band sweep she’d recommended would have certainly iden
tified the threat but, as it stood, the Big Eye’s automated systems took over and it was now out of the operator’s hands. She pulled her safety belt a little tighter.

  The Big Eye automatically fired an air-to-ground missile, launched from the weapons bay beneath the cabin, its target the coordinates of the missile launch. Chaff pods were fired in self-defence, exploding a million tiny strips of aluminium into the air and creating a huge radar return for the incoming missiles. In the cockpit, Captain Al-Sadir banked the plane south and dived for the ground, launching flares in his wake. He’d never had to evade a missile before. Sure, he’d done it in the simulator, punching a few countermeasure buttons until the threat had disappeared, but that was just an exercise. Nothing had prepared him for the gut-wrenching fear of not one but two anti-aircraft missiles headed for his superheated engines. He pushed the throttles to the stops and began to pray.

  The MAAT-V crashed into deep undergrowth and lurched to a halt.

  ‘Status!’ shouted the commander.

  ‘Incoming missile, going wide. Standby.’ A quarter of a mile away, the Big Eye missile exploded against one of the many rusted hulks on the Salisbury Plain firing range. ‘Missile impact. No other inbounds.’

  ‘How are our birds doing?’

  The radar operator scanned his instruments. ‘Bandit One is diving to the south. Missiles still have lock.’

  ‘You fool!’ shouted the female operator, unable to control her anger. ‘I warned you about that signal!’

  Her superior, strapped tightly into his chair across the aisle, turned away from his subordinate. He was ashen-faced, the sweat pouring from his brow. Like the captain, he was another who had never dreamt of facing the reality of an incoming missile; but now here he was, the g-forces pressing him into his seat as the plane made a steep dive for the ground. His thoughts turned quickly to his own death. He wasn’t ready to die, not yet. As the aircraft shuddered around him, he cursed everything – his bad luck, the bitch of an operator, his wife’s cousin in Postings who said the Big Eye was the safest plane in the air. Stupid bastard.

  The Big Eye’s airframe groaned as it twisted in the sky, the cabin instruments shaking as it dropped like a stone towards the ground. Panic gripped the supervisor then. He choked back a shameful sob as he urinated involuntarily inside his flight suit, a dark, wet stain spreading down his left leg. Across the aisle, the female operator turned away in disgust and gripped the arms of her flight seat tightly.

  ‘Two more Bandits inbound from the west, fifty miles out! F-22s! I have lock on both.’

  ‘Fire!’ shouted the commander. The MAAT-V rocked on its tracks as two more missiles blasted out of their launch tubes.

  ‘Move out!’

  In the cockpit of the Big Eye, Captain Al-Sadir had only seconds to act. His crew watched with mounting alarm as the incoming missiles bore down on them, ignoring the Big Eye’s countermeasures. It was no use. He looked across at his co-pilot and nodded. They both reached under their seats for the ejection handles as the plane thundered towards the ground and the chasing missiles ate up the distance between them.

  ‘Eject!’

  Both pilots pulled the yellow and black striped handles simultaneously.

  Behind the cockpit, the control cabin automatically sealed itself airtight and two hundred explosive bolts separated it from the Big Eye’s main fuselage. Six solid-fuel rockets then fired it upwards and away from the diving airliner. Moments later, the missiles screamed beneath the tumbling fuselage and detonated twelve metres short of the Big Eye’s starboard engines, punching a thousand fragments of white-hot metal into the wings and obliterating the Big Eye from the air. The remaining wreckage of Bravo Echo-Niner crashed to the earth, just south of the village of Woodcott in Hampshire.

  From the roof of the wingless fuselage, four large parachutes deployed and the cabin snapped upwards as it decelerated. Inside, each operator’s face beamed in relief. The Big Eye crews were aware of the escape pods, the astronomical cost of the equipment and the highly-trained personnel necessitating the implementation of a system to be used as a last resort. But no-one had ever experienced a live test before now.

  The senior operator fished a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his sweating brow. He glanced down at his flight suit, soaked with his own urine. The crew had all seen it, including the bitch. She would make sure that nobody forgot this incident. He could shut her up, of course, but that could lead to more trouble. No, perhaps a transfer might be better. Besides, he'd had enough of flying.

  As the ground rushed up to meet them another inflatable deployed, this time underneath the fuselage. They landed in a potato field with a gentle thud as the parachutes fluttered and settled over the aluminium roof.

  The Raptor pilots saw the incoming missiles and turned to evade. They had only seconds to react as the F-22s and the British missiles accelerated towards each other with a closing speed of over Mach five. The flight leader heard the threat warning inside his helmet and broke left, heading for the deck.

  His wingman wasn’t so quick to react. The first missile detonated directly in front of his cockpit, exploding the jet fighter in mid-air. The other missile turned towards its target, now fleeing north at Mach two. The Sentry’s solid fuel rocket was capable of speeds in excess of Mach four; short of a miracle, the fighter ahead had little chance of escape and the pilot knew it. The blip on his scope was gaining horribly fast. He jinked the aircraft up and down, left and right, firing chaff pods and flares as he went, but the deadly missile kept coming. The pilot banked hard to the right and headed east. If he was going to eject, he’d make sure that he’d be picked up by Arabian ground forces. He went to full afterburner, flashing over the asphalt ribbon of the M4 motorway ninety metres below him.

  He called in a brief mayday. As the missile closed to within a mile of the Raptor’s engines, the pilot ejected from the doomed fighter. After a short, rocket-assisted flight, his parachute canopy deployed above him while, below him, his aircraft was blown from the sky. The fireball arced down towards the motorway below, narrowly missing the deserted highway.

  Despite losing his beloved aircraft, the pilot was pretty pleased with himself. He’d survived his first encounter with an experienced SAM crew, his warning systems had proved more than adequate and his reactions were honed to perfection. He hoped his wingman had fared as well as he had.

  As he floated down to the green fields below, the pilot gazed around him. The sun was climbing into the morning sky and it bathed the green and yellow fields below in a soft golden light. England really was a pretty place. Once the invasion was complete he could look forward to a short period of leave, when he would take in the sights of this historic land.

  Amongst the small stand of Scots pines, the MAAT-V crew quickly broke down their radar mast and loaded it aboard the vehicle, while the commander reflected on their recent engagement. Three kills, two Raptors and a Big Eye. Not bad at all. If it was going to be that easy, they might have a chance of holding the line somewhere, maybe fight back. But they’d need more ammunition for that.

  Head west, that was the order. With the skies now clear, the mast was quickly stored away and the MAAT-V was prepped to go. The commander plotted a course across Salisbury Plain, crossing the county border into Somerset somewhere south of Trowbridge. Hopefully they’d locate other stragglers and link up, maybe find out what was going on elsewhere. The driver engaged gear and the MAAT-V lurched away from the copse. They headed west across the Plain, keeping to the woodland tracks.

  Lucas rolled the Dark Eagle out of the barn and into the field. He eased the aircraft a few feet into the air, while Stanton used the on-board instruments to scan the horizon for enemy aircraft. So far, so good. They climbed higher, increasing the range of their sweep. Still nothing.

  ‘Hang on.’ Lucas increased power and dipped the nose, literally brushing the treetops of a small copse to the west. ‘We’re in the clear for now,’ he told his passengers. ‘We’ll stay low, avoid the town
s and villages. We should be home and dry within the hour.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ whispered a very relieved Harry.

  Central London

  Inside the command centre beneath Buckingham Palace, General Mousa’s already dark mood turned black. Heathrow had just confirmed the loss of the Big Eye and the two Raptors. The only good news was that the Big Eye’s crew had managed to survive unscathed. A helicopter was on its way to pick them up.

  ‘Have them detained at Heathrow and interrogated. I want to know who’s responsible for this farce.’ Mousa turned on his heel and stormed out of the command centre. It was time to report to the Holy One.

  Upstairs in the Palace’s private quarters, Mousa had one of the King’s suite of rooms rigged out with a battlefield command terminal and a secure communications link, while outside his paratroopers guarded the corridor. Mousa powered up the terminal and punched in his personal security code. On the screen, a small video window opened to reveal an ornate, but empty, chair in front of a rough-hewn rock wall. Mousa knew he was looking at the Holy One’s private chambers deep under the Jabal Sawda Mountains. A few seconds passed and the Holy One entered the screen and sat down. He looks tired, thought Mousa.

  ‘You look tired, my friend,’ echoed Khathami.

  Mousa ignored the comment and bowed his head. ‘Holy One, I apologise for not contacting you sooner, however a situation arose that required my fullest attentions. I wanted to rectify that situation before I made my report.’ Mousa paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘However, events didn’t turn out as expected. The Infidel Prime Minister is still at large.’