by Dc Alden
Bashford indicated several icons spread out over a large area, forming a rough half-circle near the edge of Salisbury plain.
‘These anti-aircraft detachments are our most easterly units’ he continued. ‘They’ll move every two hours, rotating around the positions you see here. Occasionally, the units will synchronise a sweep pattern at random intervals and blast the air to the east with their search radars. With luck, the Arabians will think that we have a major anti-aircraft capability and hold off any pre-emptive strikes while they figure out a plan. Hopefully, this will buy us a bit more time to make our preparations for departure. Non-essential troops will begin a phased withdrawal towards Teignmouth this afternoon. As night falls, the remainder of our forces will head to the docks. By sun up, all four ships should be fully loaded and deep into the Irish Sea.’
Harry studied the map. It all seemed fairly straightforward. ‘Sounds like a decent plan, General. I just want to make it clear that our primary objective must be the preservation of life. And what about here, at Alternate One?’
‘A skeleton staff will stay behind and maintain the complex. If it’s discovered, they’ll use explosives to destroy the command and control sections, then make a run for Scotland.’
‘What about stragglers,’ enquired Noonan. ‘Those who won’t make the deadline for the pull-out. What happens to them?’
Bashford shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘We have to have a cut-off point. Anyone who hasn’t crossed the defensive line and reported in will be on their own. It’s a tough call, but the safety and security of the main force must be paramount. However, the rear party here at Alternate One will keep an eye on the roads, send people north if possible.’ He studied his watch, a worried frown creasing his forehead. ‘Time now is ten o’clock. Last light is approximately nine-thirty this evening. Prime Minister, your party must be ready to depart then. Let’s pray the Arabians decide to ignore us for the next twenty-four hours.’
Harry studied the screen with its overlay of multi-coloured icons and symbols. It was a decent enough plan and he was suddenly reminded of Dunkirk during the Second World War. Back then, thousands of British and Allied troops had crammed the beaches of northern France to escape the advancing German armies. Although most got away, over five thousand troops were machine-gunned on the beaches or blown up as they boarded the flotilla of small boats that crossed the channel from England to rescue them. Is that what it would be like here? Harry wondered. Would the Arabians send their forces west before the rest of them had a chance to escape? Bashford had estimated that there were roughly thirteen thousand troops to evacuate. Harry prayed that the plans would run like clockwork, and the Arabians would ignore the desperately inadequate and unprepared forces to the west.
In the Prime Minister’s quarters, the orderly scooped up the filthy black trousers and combat jacket and dumped them into a green refuse sack. His orders were to dispose of the clothes and any other items, then clean the room. In the bathroom, he emptied a wastebasket, briefly noting the open pack of disposable razors and the partially squeezed toothpaste by the sink. He gave the room a final once over then left quickly, picking up another rubbish sack in the corridor outside.
The orderly was eager to finish his duties so he’d be available for the first draft of evacuees. Earlier, Alternate One personnel had paraded in the main cavern where volunteers had been sought to stay behind for the duration of the withdrawal and monitor enemy movements. The orderly had no such intentions. He kept his arms firmly by his side as a large percentage of his stupid colleagues raised theirs. As luck would have it, the orderly had been assigned a place on one of the first transports out of the complex. If that were missed, a later passage would be allocated; if transport were still available. For the orderly, missing his slot was unthinkable. He had every intention of leaving this place at the earliest opportunity.
He’d overheard the muted conversations amongst the senior officers, noted the fear in some of the voices. Things didn’t look good. The cities were in chaos and enemy soldiers were pouring into the country in ships and planes. Thousands had been killed. Privately, the orderly was terrified.
Clutching his rubbish sacks, he made his way along the warren of passageways to the service shafts, a series of sloping foot tunnels that led to various levels of the complex. He should have headed downwards, towards the lower chambers, where the waste and refuse was catalogued and incinerated, or recycled and packaged for later disposal. But that would have meant adding an extra thirty or forty minutes to his workload and he already had enough on his plate. Instead, he headed upwards.
He moved quickly through the tunnel system, away from the centre of the complex. It was quiet up here, he noted, but still patrolled. He’d have to be careful. After a minute or so he could smell the damp pine of the forest outside. Nearly there.
He negotiated a sharp corner and daylight flooded the tunnel. To his right, a wide opening had been carved out of the rock wall, a discreet observation point that overlooked the valley below. The orderly dropped the rubbish bags at his feet and peered over the rocky lip. In the wide firebreak to his left, he could see the entrance to Alternate One, the huge sliding door locked in place. Beneath the camouflage netting he saw no movement, no guards or patrols, which was to be expected as the whole facility was being rapidly emptied. He glanced to his right, where the densely packed pine forest sloped away into the valley. The tunnels around him, the forest below, were all silent, devoid of life. This was his chance.
He lifted the bags one at a time and dropped them over the edge, watching them as they hit the treetops and disappeared between the branches. He turned away quickly and headed back to the main complex. As he hurried along the tunnels he glanced at his watch. Good, still plenty of time. He would make his transport now, no problem.
Caught amongst the uppermost branches of a particularly tall pine, Harry Beecham’s borrowed combat jacket swayed and twisted in the morning breeze. As the morning sun crept above the jagged spires of the hidden valley, the tiny transmitter, still clinging stubbornly to the material of the sleeve, continued to announce its presence to anyone that cared to listen.
LARVE
The umbilical cables were detached from the craft’s fuselage and the battery cart wheeled away in preparation for the flight. All on-board systems had been checked by the Arabian ground crew and the remote pilot in the control centre had been given the green light for take-off.
The craft was a UAV, its technical name LARVE, a Low Altitude Reconnaissance Vehicle. At four metres long with a wingspan almost double that, the LARVE squatted on runway zero-one-four at Heathrow airport like a giant black insect, its fuel-efficient jet engine idling quietly while it awaited its launch command. Half a mile away, parked beneath the airside awning of Terminal Two, sat the command vehicle. This was the LARVE’s mobile flight operations control centre and, inside, the pilot and his team gave the LARVE’s systems a final check. Everything was on-line and functioning correctly. The bird was ready for take-off.
On receiving its remote command, the LARVE began rolling along the runway. Inside the mobile control centre, the pilot watched the live output from the digital camera mounted in the nose of the aircraft as the runway rolled beneath it, quickly gathering speed. With a gentle pull on the controlling joystick, it lifted off the tarmac and climbed into the sky, heading due west.
For the pilot, the brief was a fairly general one; enemy forces had escaped to the west and Central Command needed an intelligence-gathering platform in the air and onstation to start monitoring enemy traffic. The pilot was aware that a Big Eye and two fighters had already been shot down earlier and correctly assumed that the powers that be didn’t want to lose any more aircraft, hence this hastily-arranged mission. Once over enemy territory, the LARVE’s nose-camera would relay real-time images back to Heathrow in an effort to pinpoint enemy troops and equipment detected via the electronic, thermal and magnetic returns the aircraft would record on its travels.
The
LARVE was normally a night bird, designed to operate stealthily above any conventional battlefield or behind enemy lines, where it would hide beneath enemy radar, casting out its own electronic net and relaying data back to its pilot as and where it found it. Electronically indiscernible due to its almost wholly plastic body and super-cooled engine, the LARVE could be controlled from hundreds of kilometres away by its remote pilots, an aerial surveillance platform that was to all intents and purposes invisible to the enemy forces it was sent against. Invisible at night, that is.
Now, in the bright light of a summer’s day, the LARVE climbed to six hundred metres, where its pilot programmed in a search pattern and flipped the craft into autopilot mode. Once activated, the UAV flew itself, making course, height and airspeed changes dictated by its pre-programmed search pattern. As the LARVE headed further west, the pilot back at Heathrow didn’t have to wait long for the data to start flowing. The first contacts were Arabian, a huge column of armour, troops and support vehicles moving northeast up the M3 motorway.
As the LARVE crossed Salisbury Plain it began picking up enemy signals, air-search radar sets and electronic returns from other vehicles scattered across the huge training area. Back at Heathrow, the pilot processed the incoming information and uploaded it into the battlefield command system.
The LARVE continued westwards. Above the town of Frome, in Somerset, it ran into a virtual wall of electronic noise, the combined energy of scores of air-search radars forcing the LARVE to set and reset its instruments in an effort to pinpoint the many separate radar sources that probed the air around it. At Heathrow, the pilot’s headset warbled an alarm; something on the ground had launched an anti-aircraft missile. Calmly, the pilot watched the incoming blip on his screen. The pilot clicked his tongue in annoyance. He’d warned his superiors that this would happen in daylight but, of course, his objection had been overruled. Still, the pilot had every confidence his craft would evade the missile, but he programmed in a new and more evasive flight pattern anyway, just as a precaution. The LARVE dropped its nose and headed for the deck. The new program called for a low-level high-speed probe, and the sophisticated craft responded immediately. Behind it, the missile continued its futile search into the sky.
The pilot shifted in his seat. The camera continued to broadcast its live feed directly back to the control centre and the pilot watched his large monitor with some interest as the English countryside raced by a mere twenty-five metres below the nose of the aircraft. Green fields gave way to a town here and a village there, and he saw the people of England, their pale faces flashing below as they watched the LARVE skim above the rooftops. As it raced over the village of Bathway, a burst of anti-aircraft fire ripped like lasers across the sky ahead, forcing the craft to bank and drop height, quickly leaving the danger behind. It interrogated its advanced mapping system. In the distance, a major road cut through the countryside. The LARVE was programmed to monitor vehicular traffic and instantly changed course towards it.
At Heathrow, the pilot sat a little straighter as the UAV’s on-board sensors suddenly recorded a large enemy convoy ahead, moving southwest. The LARVE mapped the convoy, uploading its speed, direction, vehicle numbers and composition back to the control centre. The pilot’s heart raced with excitement. The convoy was huge, consisting of all manner of military vehicles headed south. Small puffs of smoke from the ground indicated that there was some ground fire directed at the LARVE, but its parallel course along the road was partly shielded by trees and its speed made it a difficult target. Satisfied that all available data had been recorded, the LARVE banked sharply and flashed across the heavily congested road, continuing westwards and leaving the convoy behind in seconds.
Ahead, the ground gave way to rising hills and steep limestone bluffs. The LARVE’s avoidance radar corrected its height and it climbed over the undulating countryside. At Heathrow, the pilot watched in fascination as the hills gave way to a desolate, high plateau. England really was quite beautiful, he admitted to himself. As the LARVE continued onwards, the pilot noticed a sudden drop in enemy transmissions and reprogrammed another sweep to the south. The craft banked again, climbing above a steep-sided bluff and the rocky fingers at its peak. It flashed above the summit then dropped into a pine-covered valley, skimming across the treetops.
Harry Beecham’s discarded combat jacket still clung to the pine tree, swaying as the uppermost branches bent before the stiff morning breeze. Trapped in the folds of its sleeve the transponder, its battery almost dead, continued to broadcast its presence. Above it, something black flashed across the treetops.
What was that?
The pilot’s fingers flew across the keyboard, isolating the new signal. A transponder? His sophisticated instrumentation began to decipher the broadcast. Strength two-by-five and weakening. He hit the manual override and brought the UAV around for another pass over the valley. Definitely a transponder, early model though; more like a solid signal transmitter, but certainly Arabian in origin. How on earth did it get out here? He entered the data into his computer and, seconds later, the information was displayed on his screen. Mark Three Dedicated Signal Transmitter, a type issued to early infiltration units. The pilot cross-checked it with signals already identified and logged in the battlefield command database since the beginning of combat operations. Well, well, the same coded frequency had already been recorded in London. Where, exactly? His fingers danced across the keyboard. Ah. Whitehall.
‘UAV is making another pass, Sir. Seems to be flying a racetrack pattern above the valley. Anti-air has it locked on.’
All eyes in the control room turned to General Bashford. Un-bloody-believable, he raged inwardly. Twelve more hours and the vast majority of troops this side of Salisbury Plain would be on board the ships or approaching the docks. But the Arabian probe over their heads had sniffed something and had returned for another look. Now it was circling above them, no doubt transmitting whatever data it had back to its base.
Bashford had two choices. The first choice was to order the anti-aircraft crews on the hilltop to destroy it, thereby announcing their presence to whoever was controlling the damned thing; or secondly, leave it alone and pray to God it would fly off somewhere else. But if it happened to fly south it would surely spot the evacuation convoys. If it approached Teignmouth and found the ships, well, that was unthinkable.
‘Take it out,’ ordered Bashford.
The pilot cursed loudly as the LARVE’s nose-camera feed suddenly went blank and all electronic contact with the UAV was lost. Quickly, he rewound the footage on his display, advancing it frame-by-frame a few seconds before loss of signal. There. A flash and a puff of smoke from a nearby hilltop; a missile perhaps, or more likely an electronic weapons system. Either way, his probe was lost to enemy fire. He uploaded that information and the accompanying data into the command system and flagged it as a priority. Someone high up would have to be informed.
General Mousa awoke to the sound of persistent knocking. He’d been sleeping for just over an hour and was momentarily disorientated by his surroundings. The bed that he lay on was huge, the bedspread thick and finely woven, the walls decorated with the paintings of long-dead Infidels whose pale, stern faces remained impassive as the knocking continued. Of course, Buckingham Palace. Mousa thought the experience a surreal one. He glanced towards the huge door that led to the corridor outside.
‘Come!’ he bellowed, swinging his legs off the bed. He hadn’t even bothered to get undressed, allowing himself only the luxury of removing his paratrooper’s jump boots. He began to lace them up as Major Karroubi entered the room.
‘General, we have just received this from a UAV team at Heathrow.’ Karroubi handed Mousa a signal slip, which he scanned quickly.
‘It’s him,’ said Mousa. ‘It’s Beecham. The signal is the same as the one recorded beneath Downing Street. Whoever planted this transmitter was able to attach it to something or someone in his proximity. A map, quickly!’
Karroubi had a
nticipated his superior’s request, rolling one out across a nearby table. Mousa stabbed at it with his finger.
‘What is this place, Major?’
‘Intelligence suggests a previously undisclosed military bunker system. According to our data it’s a local tourist spot, although the grid reference of the transmitter is marked on local maps as a danger area.’
‘A ruse to keep prying eyes away.’
‘I agree. Beecham must have headed there.’
Mousa was lost in thought for several moments. ‘Where is my infantry battalion?’
‘Still in position, just south of Salisbury.’
‘Get the reconnaissance units moving west. I want to know what kind of resistance to expect. Alert my Air Force liaison officers and get the field commanders on-line too. I want a full conference briefing in thirty minutes. This may be our chance to crush any remaining resistance and capture Beecham in the process.’
Karroubi hesitated, a worried frown creasing his face.
‘What is it?’ Mousa demanded. ‘Spit it out, man.’
‘The Holy One’s orders were clear, General. We are to ignore Beecham-’
‘An opportunity has presented itself, Major. We cannot waste time waiting for approval.’
‘But-’
‘The responsibility is mine alone. Do as I say.’
