“Who the hell is piloting that Tornado! You lot are supposed to be long gone!”
“It’s Airman Tye, sir. I'm your new wingman.”
A fast-moving pair of blips on Reg’s radar screen told him danger was approaching. Two of the scarab attackers were giving chase and they were gaining fast. He might be able to save himself with clever maneuvering, at least for a while, but now he had to worry' about the young fool of a mechanic who had come to help. Burning with anger, he looked to his right and leveled an icy stare at the man in the Tornado’s cockpit.
Tye responded with an enthusiastic salute and a nod of the head.
“Listen to me,” Reg called. “Do you know if that plane has had its avionics update yet?”
“Installed it myself, Major,” Tye responded proudly a moment before a pulse blast sailed between their two planes.
“Major,” the young man shouted, “we’ve got aliens right behind us!”
“I see them,” said the Teacher as calmly as if he were conducting a routine training mission. “Now, here’s what I’d like you to do. Come up about twenty meters and fire off the port chaff.” To Reg’s surprise, Tye executed the order quickly and with great precision. As the enemy closed in behind them, a cloud of aluminum slivers exploded into the air. Designed to confuse the homing systems of enemy air-to-air missiles, the tiny magnetically-charged bits of metal adhered to the attackers. Blinded and confused, they broke off the pursuit.
“Excellent work, lad!” roared Reg. “Where did you learn to fly like that?” Then, before Tye could answer, Reg laughed and
said, “Forget I asked. I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
“Cummins! Where are you? Cummins, is that you?” The desperate voice on the radio belonged to Colonel Thomson. “For the love of God, man, where are you? Help us.”
“I’m here, Colonel. What is your position?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re ... everyone’s dead, everyone’s been shot down. We tried to fight them off, but they have shields and they were everywhere. Everyone’s gone.”
Another Englishman shouted over the airwaves. “Guide Dog, this is Sutton. Colonel Thomson and I are circling just north of the Red Sea, over the town of Eilat.”
Within minutes, Reg and Tye spotted their companions and flew to meet them. Of the thirty-eight Tornadoes that had gone ahead, only two remained. Thomson had calmed down considerably by the time they arrived.
“We’re all that’s left,” he reported.
“What happened,” Reg demanded. “You should’ve been out of the area long ago.”
“We ran into the whole goddamn Egyptian Air Force,” Sutton snarled. “They came roaring north, headed straight at us, and it was all we could do to get out of their way. We were in the process of regrouping when those little alien bastards came out of nowhere and chewed us to pieces.”
“What do we do now?”
“I’m afraid escorting you to Kuwait is out of the question. Not enough fuel. Looks like I’ll have to bring you boys home with me to Khamis Moushalt.”
“Where the hell is that?” demanded Sutton.
“Just follow me,” Reg answered. Continuing south from Eilat and hugging the edge of the Red Sea, the quartet soon crossed into Saudi Arabia. Partly out of habit and partly to restore a sense of purpose, Reg formed them into a staggered diamond formation. This lone sense of order in the aftermath of the devastating air battle attracted every lost pilot for miles around. One by one, they joined Reg’s armada until they were nearly fifty strong.
Soon, the group was flying over the dramatically contrasting Asir mountain chain. The green western slopes ran down to the Red Sea and were lush with vegetation, while the eastern slopes were devoid of life and marked the edge of a vast, inhospitable desert.
A few of the pilots had come mentally unglued. Through his radio, Reg could hear them sobbing like small children and jabbering uncontrollably in languages he didn’t understand. Trying to think, he blocked out the noise and almost missed the message coming from his home base. The voice was barely audible above the din. “Khamis Moushalt Airfield to southbound flight. Do you read?” “Affirmative, Khamis Moushalt. This is RAF Major Cummins.”
“Major,” said the flight controller, “please instruct any RAF pilots in your group to switch to the private band. Over.” Reg and the other Brits quickly complied.
“Hello, Major,” Colonel Whitley said. “You’re still alive!” “Yes, a few of us survived. But only by the skin of our teeth. They destroyed Jerusalem. Wiped it off the map.”
“Yes, I know. The attack was simultaneous and worldwide. All thirty-six of their ships fired at once. London, Paris, New York, Moscow, all of them. They’re all gone.”
“London,” Tye repeated softly, expressing a huge amount of grief with a single word.
“Listen,” Whitley went on, “I’ve been talking with the American commander. He’s got thirty F-16s ready to escort you in. Add our six instructors, and you’ve got thirty-six. Will that be enough to hold off those aliens?”
“Don’t bother,” Reg shot back. “If the aliens come after us, more planes won’t make any difference.” He began explaining the shields they’d encountered on both the city destroyer and the scarab attack craft, but Whitley cut him off.
“What do you mean if they come after you?” Whitley asked. “You’d better have a look at your long-range radar.”
Reg studied his screens and saw that they were clear. For a moment he hoped that the colonel was mistaken, but his heart sank into the pit of his stomach when he noticed a cluster of blips creeping into view at the top of the screen. It was a squadron of at least two dozen alien attackers.
“We are officially dead meat,” Sutton groaned. “It’s over.” “Our intel officer here in the tower has been monitoring your situation for several minutes. He’s convinced the enemy is following you.” Whitley paused to let the pilots draw their own conclusions. “Change your mind about that escort?”
“Negative!” Reg shouted. “I’m telling you that won’t do any good.”
“Then we’ve got a major problem,” Whitley said, “because there’s no way the Yanks can get all their planes off the ground before you get here. They’ve got over two hundred birds parked on the tarmac and if you bring—”
“I understand,” Reg interrupted. “We’ll turn to the east and lead them away from you.”
“Very well,” Whitley said after a brief pause. “Good luck, Cummins, and good luck to the rest of you men.” Then he was gone.
Reg switched back to the common frequency and issued the new orders. “Turn away from the coast and proceed due east. We have a large force of alien attack craft closing to our rear. Turn east immediately.” Most of the pilots were still too shocked and confused to oppose the order, despite the fact that there was nothing but empty desert in that direction. The entire group turned away from the water. All except for three planes. Reg’s ordered them to rejoin the formation several times before deciding to chase after them. He called for Tye and Sutton, both of them decent pilots despite their lack of training, to form up on his wings.
Two of the renegade jets were Iraqis, the last people on Earth Reg wanted to shoot down. “Iraqi pilots, you are headed in the wrong direction. Our flight is heading east.”
One of them shouted back that Reg could go to hell. He said that he and his partner were low on fuel and that there was nowhere to land in the desert.
Reg considered explaining the situation to them, hoping he could persuade them to cooperate. But there wasn’t enough time so he adopted a more efficient approach. “British Tornadoes,” he said, “you are red and clear. Lock on and fire at will.”
“No! Wait!” cried the Iraqis. “We agree to follow you. We are turning!” Cursing energetically in Arabic, the two men reluctantly set off to the east. Reg sent Tye and Sutton with them to make sure they rejoined the rest of the group. Then he closed quickly on the last southbound plane, a twenty-year-old Chinese J-7 with Egy
ptian markings. The pilot was muttering unintelligibly into his radio mouthpiece and didn’t respond to Reg’s repeated warnings.
Hoping to snap the Egyptian out of his stupor, Reg flipped his Hawk over and moved up until he was right on top of the J-7. The canopies of the two planes were separated by only a few feet. The Egyptian looked up and saw the Englishman hanging upside down above him pointing to the east, but the strange sight failed to register in his grief-stricken mind. He continued along the same path, muttering the whole while.
Reg saw no harm in letting the man go his own. In his present condition, there was little chance of him leading the aliens to Khamis Moushalt or any other airfield. But Reg felt badly about leaving him, so he shot ahead and attempted to take the Egyptian “by the hand.” He maneuvered himself directly in front of the other plane and began a gradual turn to port, hoping the disoriented pilot would unthinkingly follow him. But something went horribly wrong. A warning buzzer sounded, and when Reg twisted around, he saw an R.550 Magic missile streaking toward him. homing in on his heat exhaust. Reg screamed and jerked the controls hard to port, lifting as he went. The missile chased after him, quickly closing the distance.
“Damn it! Somebody finally caught me with my guard down.” Although he’d been “fired” at hundreds of time in training exercises, he’d never been “killed.” Then again, he’d never made himself into a sitting duck the way he had for this demented Egyptian.
Reg continued to turn as tightly as his Hawk would allow, the G force crushing him against the right-hand wall of the cockpit until he was headed back toward the J-7. Although he hadn’t planned it, he realized that looping around had provided him with one last card to play, one last slim hope of avoiding being blown apart. He steered himself onto a collision course with the Egyptian, speeding toward him almost head-on, as the missile continued to hunt him down. He bore down on the plane until he was close enough to see the man’s eyes looking back at him blankly. Then, at the last possible moment, he swerved and felt the concussion behind him as the Magic missile destroyed the plane that had fired it.
Without celebrating his narrow escape, without even glancing back at the falling debris, Reg sped east to catch up to the others. Of course, he was glad to have survived the encounter. But as he looked north and saw the squadron of alien attackers becoming visible in the distance, he realized that his being alive was probably only a very temporary state of affairs. Only a moment after struggling to save himself, he found himself hoping the aliens would chase him out into the desert and hunt him down.
But that didn’t happen. The scarab planes resisted the temptation to snack on Reg’s small band of refugee pilots and instead continued south toward the feast awaiting them at Khamis Moushalt. As he headed deeper into the desert, Reg switched over to the private frequency and heard the tower operator desperately calling out the alert. “Incoming! Incoming!”
2
Retreat
Leaving the Red Sea behind them, Reg and his motley crew of survivors headed out across one of the most inhospitable environments on the face of the Earth, the great sand desert of the Arabian peninsula. Stretching out to the horizon in all directions, it was an ocean of gently undulating sand dunes, some of them a hundred meters tall. Shaped by the wind, they looked like the cresting waves of the ocean that had once covered the land. The Arabs called it Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. It was a place the fiercest Bedouin tribes feared to cross, even in the ubiquitous Toyota trucks that had long since replaced camels. The international borders running through the area had never been precisely delined. No war had ever been fought for its control. It was one of the only places on the face of the planet that no one wanted.
The shouting, arguing and whimpering that had filled the radio waves subsided as the pilots headed deeper into this awesome and pitiless landscape. Fuel levels were running dangerously low and the warning systems aboard the planes began to sound. It appeared as though they had eluded one enemy only to run headlong into the arms of another. Instead of a swift, explosive death from an alien energy pulse, they now faced a slow, painful one in the desert. Their only hope was to find one of the tiny oases that dotted the desert. But the Empty Quarter was roughly the size of Texas, which meant they were looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks.
Reg had visited a few oases. They were not grass green patches of land full of swaying palm trees that most Westerners imagined. Instead, they typically consisted of a few tiny buildings and an oil derrick or two. A few of the places were marked on Reg’s onboard maps, but without satellite navigation systems the maps were useless. The Empty Quarter offered no permanent landmarks by which to navigate. It was a place that gave up no secrets.
One by one, the jets began to run out of fuel and fall from the sky. The first to go down was a Jordanian. Before he ditched his plane, the terrified pilot begged his countrymen to remember the coordinates and send rescuers for him as soon as they could. They promised they would, but everyone knew it wasn’t going to happen. Moving deeper into the desert with each passing minute, the pilots scoured the landscape with their eyes and called for help over their radios. Four more pilots were lost to lack of fuel, and Reg began to feel the panic level rising in his chest like the waterline in a sinking ship. The red warning light on his own fuel meter began to blink. It was only a matter of time.
Just when all seemed lost, a Libyan pilot spotted what looked like a column of smoke rising on the horizon.
“That looks like an oil fire,” said Tye.
As the group turned and raced in that direction, one of the Israelis, a man with a froggy voice, quoted from the Bible. “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud.” Then he asked, “Are you a believer, Major Cummins?”
“Let’s just say I believe we’re going to need all the help we can get,” Reg replied.
The source of the smoke came into view. A crashed tanker plane was burning out of control. The jet fuel it had been carrying had spilled over a wide area and was belching a mushroom cloud of black smoke high into the hot, motionless air.
It took Reg a moment to recognize the place, though he’d flown past it with his students more than once. It was an oil-drilling station set atop a barren, rocky plateau. It was surrounded by a ring of stony hills that kept the ever-shifting dunes from burying the plateau in sand. Since Reg had seen it last, the site had been transformed. It was now a small military airfield. Over a hundred Saudi combat planes were parked alongside a freshly repaved landing strip.
“I don’t believe my eyes!” Tye shouted. “We’re saved.”
“It must be a mirage,” Sutton said. “What is this place?”
“My guess is that this must have been a designated fallback position for the Saudi military,” Reg said. Then he added, “Would’ve been nice of them to let us know about it.”
“Why haven’t the bastards answered our distress calls?” Thomson fumed.
“I suggest we go down there and ask them.”
None of the pilots bothered to request permission to land. Jostling for position, they lined up nearly nose cone to tail fin and descended toward the runway at the same time.
When Colonel Thomson saw the situation he was in, he shrieked and rolled out of formation. His fuel gauge had long since run to zero, but he decided it would be safer to risk another loop around. He hadn’t flown a fighter jet for more than a decade and was more than a little rusty.
Earlier that morning, before dawn, he’d been in his office on the island of Cyprus, packing his personal effects neatly into cardboard boxes. The entire base was closing and he was preparing to be transferred to an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. Then the surprising news arrived that the colonel would instead be flying a Tornado jet fighter to Kuwait. He was given ten minutes to report. He poured himself a capful of whiskey and looked around the office, deciding what to bring. The first thing he picked up was the photograph of him standing between a pair of much taller men, President Whitmore and the Italian pr
ime minister, but he quickly tossed it aside. He ended up taking just three things: a recent picture of his wife and three daughters, which he creased and slipped into his wallet; a red, dog-eared copy of The Traveler’s Guide to Handy Phrases in Arabic, and a pearl-handled revolver his father had given him years before. He loaded the pistol, tucked it inside his jacket and left without closing the door behind him.
“Thomson, you were on a good approach,” Reg said. “Why’d you pull up?”
“A man needs room to land a plane!” the colonel yelled back. “I’m not a damned stunt pilot!”
Resisting the urge to ask the colonel exactly what kind of pilot he was, Reg coached him into a passable landing. Tye and Sutton, on the other hand, handled themselves like seasoned veterans, landing their Tornadoes almost flawlessly.
When he lined up for his own landing, however, Reg’s luck finally deserted him. His Hawk sputtered and flamed out as the final dregs of jet fuel were consumed. Quickly sizing up the situation, he saw there was no way to make an unpowered landing. Too many jets were still on approach and he was losing altitude fast. But there was an even more pressing problem. He was heading toward a row of gleaming Saudi F-15 Eagles parked near the foot of the runway and was going to demolish them if he didn’t do something. Acting on instinct, Reg jammed his yoke all the way forward, tilting the nose of his plane straight down. The Hawk plummeted toward the ground like a heavy stone. A moment before he crashed into the plateau wall, he hugged his arms and legs close to his body and activated the explosive bolts of his ejection seat.
The clear canopy ripped away, and Reg hurtled out of the doomed jet fighter, flying parallel to the ground at a sickening rate of speed. The silk canopy attached to his harness acted as much as a drag chute as it did a parachute. As he shot through the air like a human cannonball, Reg caught a momentary glimpse of the dumbfounded expression on the face of a Syrian pilot who was flying in the same direction.
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 3
