Invasion (17 page)

At H-Hour plus three, the terror attacks stopped. In major cities across Europe, the sleeper teams broke off their engagements and melted away into the side streets, leaving their dead and wounded where they lay. The element of surprise had been invaluable and a large percentage of military and police forces across the continent had been decimated. Those that survived tried to re-establish some semblance of order amid the chaos, but it was too late. The chain of command had broken down and, with it, any hope of an organised response to what was now becoming a conventional war on a huge front. The destruction of European
life was underway and the governments of the West were powerless to do anything about it.

For the Arabian intelligence
officers on the ground, the reports coming back were almost too good to be true. Over eighty per cent of military targets had been hit successfully. Over sixty per cent of power and utility targets had been captured intact and the main motorway and high-speed rail routes were all secured. Reports from Forward Air Controllers reported that the skies were now clear. Only Schiphol airport in Holland had suffered major damage when a Japanese Airlines Boeing 7E7 Dreamliner collided on take-off with a FedEx cargo plane on final approach. Burning wreckage had severely damaged one of the main runways and several planes on the ground. For the next twenty-four hours, Schiphol would be out of service.

Meanwhile, preliminary contact reports were collated from each sector of operations and uplinked via UHF radio to the senior Arabian Intelligence Officer in Europe. He, in turn, sent the encrypted data east via an Arabian military communications
aircraft orbiting high above the Mediterranean Sea. The data was checked and re-checked. Europe was reeling, like a tired boxer leaning against the ropes, bloodied and breathless – but still dangerous. Her scattered forces retained the ability to fight back, if they could somehow regroup and reorganise. To the east, Turkish troops were already deep inside Greek territory and naval units had bombarded the city of Athens. The war had been underway for nearly three hours and it was now time to commit the main body of Arabian forces. The orders were encrypted and beamed to a thousand field commanders waiting in command and control centres dotted across the Arabian continent, where they were decoded and verified.

The first shots had been fired, the first blows had been struck. Now it was time to finish the fight. The order was given.

Invade.

Thousands of aircraft, circling high over North
Africa and Turkey, finally received the signal. Following pre-planned
flight paths, they dipped their wings and increased power, bringing their aircraft around to new headings. These were the Pathfinder Units, numbering tens of thousands of paratroopers, light infantry, small armour, engineering, communications and intelligence troops. All had a multitude of tasks and objectives. The main priority for the paratroopers was to secure the airfields, bridges, road, rail and other major transportation junctions and control centres and relieve the sleeper teams that held them. In sticks of twenty, the planes trimmed their engines and began a slow descent towards the European mainland. Below and ahead of them, squadrons of Arabian F22 Raptor fighter jets went to full afterburner, their APG-77 Active Element Radars scanning the skies before them.

Above the Spanish mainland, six Typhoon Eurofighters of the Ejercito del Aire Espanol had managed to make it airborne, although only three planes had working missile systems beneath
their wings. The others had been in such a hurry to get away from their besieged airbase that the ground crews had been unable to deploy their weapons. Now they patrolled the skies above the city of Granada, desperately trying to contact a command network that had failed to respond. Below them, in the city centres, huge plumes of black smoke funnelled up into the evening sky. A few minutes ago, an unknown voice had broadcast over the military comms net ordering them to land their aircraft, immediately, at the civilian airport at Malaga. Were they mad? The pilots had politely, yet firmly, refused.

Eight Arabian Raptors
approached the Spanish coastline from the south. Their Beyond Visual Range weapons systems alerted them to the presence of the Eurofighters
and each aircraft launched a single AIM-160 guided missile from its internal weapons bay. The missiles dropped from beneath the bellies of the Raptors, falling
six metres until the solid-fuel rocket motors
ignited, rapidly accelerating the weapons to Mach three and streaking them towards their oblivious targets.

The Spanish pilots, scanning the ground below them, jerked their heads around when on-board threat detector systems suddenly
lit up and electronic alarms screamed inside their helmets. For three of the pilots, their flight careers ended abruptly when their aircraft disintegrated under the impact of the powerful
air-to-air missiles that seemed to come from nowhere. For the remaining three pilots, training and instinct had momentarily
saved their lives. On hearing the alarms, each pilot had either banked, climbed or dived for the ground, punching out masking flares and chaff to distract the missiles. Yet, despite their well-honed skills and swift reactions, none of them made it.

The first fighter banked hard to the north and went to full afterburner. The missile caught him six seconds later and obliterated his fighter from the sky. The second pilot pulled back on his stick and pushed his thrusters to the stops, sending the plane into a near vertical climb. At eight thousand metres, just before the missile exploded behind his starboard wing, the pilot noticed his radar light up to the south with hundreds of surface returns.

The third pilot, on hearing the cockpit alarms, immediately
banked hard to port and headed for the ground. He pulled up a mere twenty metres above the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains and continued southeast at top speed, crossing the coastline above Roquetas de Mar at an altitude of fifty metres and over two thousand kilometres per hour. Four kilometres out to sea, the missile lost its track and dived into the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Madre de Dios, that was close, gasped the pilot. He looked down at his threat display. There was something else out there…

Two F22s thundered past the Spaniard’s wingtips
at a closing speed of over Mach three. The turbulence tossed him around the sky and he desperately fought for control of his aircraft, until he glanced out of the cockpit and his saw his port wing shredded. One of the planes must have fired his cannon before the Spaniard had even registered him. He noted the fuel leaking from the twenty-millimetre shell holes and knew that his crippled Eurofighter was dying beneath him. Alarm buzzers rang in his ears and a glance at his instrumentation
confirmed the worst.

With practised ease, he slowed the aircraft and eased it into a shallow climb. Reaching down between his legs, he pulled the ejection system handle, which exploded his canopy upwards and fired him out of the cockpit, his parachute deploying in less than two seconds. As he drifted down towards the blue waters a hundred metres below him, he wondered how long it would be before he was picked up. The emergency transponder would already be transmitting so it shouldn’t be too long. Then, maybe he would find out who Spain was at war with. The pilot’s question
was answered sooner than he thought.

The parachute spun him around to face
due south towards the North African coast. Several kilometres distant, hundreds of ships of all shapes and sizes dotted the sea, their wakes clearly visible even as the sun dipped towards the horizon. And they were all headed north.

The sea rushed up to meet him and he splashed down, his buoyancy aids immediately deploying and the water around him staining with red marker
dye. As he bobbed up and down on the surface, he saw an inflatable powerboat bouncing across the waves towards him. Well, at least he wasn’t going to drown. He watched
as the boat drew closer and he thought of his wife and daughter at home in the small town of Albaicin. He closed his eyes and wondered what was happening there. Maybe this was all a very intense dream. In a moment, he’d wake up next to his sleeping wife and their precious daughter gurgling away in her cot. He’d get up, make some coffee and sit on the shaded terrace that overlooked the old Arab Quarter and he would thank the Lord, as he did every day, to have blessed him with such a life. He heard the boat’s engines wind down and his eyes snapped open.

As the inflatable slowed alongside him, the Spaniard looked up at the hard, unsmiling
faces of the Arabian Marines. So, it wasn’t a dream after all. Strong hands reached over and pulled him roughly into the boat and he found himself staring down the barrel of a machine pistol. At that moment, the Spaniard doubted he’d ever see his family again.

In northern Europe, sixty Russian armoured fighting divisions with close-combat air support swept across the Polish border and headed for the German frontier. The Poles, a proud but militarily weak nation, were swept aside. The German town of Cottbus, forty kilometres from the Polish border, was one of many frontier towns that had been bombarded with long-range Russian missiles. The tactic was to induce terror, confusion and chaos. With no power, no phones, no TV or radio, the terrified civilian population sought cover in their own homes as German police and army installations came under ferocious attack from sleeper units. To compound the turmoil, long-range missiles
launched from the east began to rain down on strategic targets all along the border as German resistance to the onslaught began to crumble. The Arabian tactic had worked.

Terror reigned.

On the outskirts of Nicosia on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Greek-Cypriot farmers looked up in curiosity and then with mounting disbelief
as waves of Turkish planes droned overhead and the sky filled with blossoming white canopies. Rooted to the spot, they watched
as heavily-armed paratroopers began dropping into the fields around them.

With the help of their large Muslim populations, the Balkans were quickly swallowed up and the Italian ports of Bari, Pescara and Ancona lay in the path of
the advancing Arabian warships and troop transporters. On the Italian west coast the ports of Naples, Civitavecchia and Livorno were also hit by sleeper units, who blockaded the vehicle entrances to the ports and engaged Italian security forces with small arms, grenades and rocket fire. They had been briefed that their wait would be relatively short. Hold the port for twelve hours. Arabian Naval forces would arrive before then.

At sea, the flotillas of ships carrying troops, supporting
armour and heavy weapons changed course and steamed at full speed to their destinations. Initial reports were good; all the target ports had been secured and were being held comfortably. With the continuing attacks
across the continent, any organised opposition would be tied up elsewhere. It would only be a matter of time before all resistance collapsed.

As quietly as possible, Alex peered around the bedroom door and checked on Kirsty. Thankfully
she was still sleeping and, as he watched, she murmured something unintelligible and rolled over. After a few moments, she settled down again.

When he’d
failed to ease her frantic sobbing, Alex had gone back down to his own flat and grabbed a sleeping pill from the small supply he kept in his medicine cabinet. It was a mild dose, something Alex used for those times when his shift pattern at work robbed him of the ability to get some decent sleep. He’d given her the pill and Kirsty had gulped it down with a glass of water. Shortly afterwards, she had begun to calm down and Alex had helped her to her bed and covered her with a quilt. The sedative wouldn’t keep her under for long, but at least it would give Alex time to find out what the hell was going on out there.

Since he’d
been inside Kirsty’s apartment,
Alex had heard a myriad of different sounds. The one he expected was the reassuring wail of a police patrol vehicle making its way at speed to his location, followed by the paramedic teams and even the Met helicopter. What he hadn’t expected was a complete and total lack of response. His cell phone was dead, the phone lines to the apartment block down. Add to that the loss of power and an airliner being shot down with surface-to-air
missiles and things weren’t looking too rosy.

So he stayed in Kirsty’s flat, comforting
her as he waited for backup. He’d heard some sirens, but they seemed distant and eventually they, too, had stopped. Alex didn’t understand it. He knew that large numbers of emergency personnel would be attending the crash site, that the street outside should be crawling with police and anti-terror units. Instead, nothing. He was worried about the contamination of the crime scene outside. Would there be civilians trampling all over the place, poking around, disturbing evidence? Alex had pleaded with Kirsty to let him go and check, but she’d wrapped her arms around him like a vice and wouldn’t let go. So he’d sat there behind the sofa, listening
to the sounds of a city descending into chaos.

He’d heard shouting from outside in the street and then screaming. He’d heard car horns being hammered and vehicle alarms being tripped. Somewhere
– Alex thought it might be from the elevated section of the M4 motorway at Brentford – he heard the screech of tyres and sickening crunch of multiple high-speed vehicle impacts. He’d heard shots too. He couldn’t make out where they were coming from, but it didn’t seem that far away.

There was something else: aircraft. He hadn’t noticed any other traffic on final approach to Heathrow. Obviously, the shooting down of the
airliner had an impact on flight security procedures, but the Airbus couldn’t have been the only plane in the sky on final approach. There
had to have been scores of others. Surely Heathrow hadn’t been completely shut down? Not all five terminals? He’d wanted to get up and find out what was going on, but Kirsty had held him tighter and begged him not to leave. Against his better judgement, he’d relented, staying by her side. Some first date, he thought.

Now, with Kirsty still in the grip of a fitful sleep, Alex decided to recce the immediate area. He closed the apartment door quietly and went out onto the darkened landing. He drew his pistol and walked slowly down the stairs, his back tight to the wall. Keeping to the lengthening shadows, he moved silently until he reached the main lobby. Outside, through the glass entrance
doors, he could see the terrorists’ mini-van and their bodies still lying on the road. Alex watched carefully for several minutes but the street appeared lifeless

It was getting dark, the sun already dipping below the horizon. Alex was about to step outside when a sharp light washed across the road. A car was approaching. Maybe
it’s a patrol car, thought Alex. Encouraging
though the thought was, he decided to stay put. After the events of the last few hours, Alex had no doubt that his colleagues in uniform would be operating on a hair-trigger.

He watched as the lights grew brighter, heard the soft purr of powerful engines. Then they came into view, moving slowly from left to right, a three-car convoy of BMW saloon cars. The windows were down, the occupants all young black men, weapons brandished in their hands. They cruised past slowly, assuredly, and Alex noticed the cars
had no registration plates. Stolen then, probably from a dealership.

Music thumped on the air as the convoy cruised slowly past the mini-van and the bodies. Brake lights glowed in the mounting darkness. He heard doors open, voices, then laughter as the bodies on the ground were picked over for items of interest. There were maybe a dozen young men gathered on the street now, jeans and tshirts, pistols jammed into low-hung jeans. Gang bangers, Alex realised, taking advantage of the chaos.

He stayed where he was, hidden, watching and listening. The laughter was coarse but Alex noticed the men were fully alert, their heads swivelling around the street, hands resting on pistol butts. Whatever had happened out there, there was no one to stop them and they knew it. Worse still, Alex got the impression that
if challenged there’d be a fight. He waited a while longer, until the men got bored and moved on to more lucrative pastures.

Eventually Alex ventured out from his hiding place. He stood in the dark, head cocked to one side, listening for the slightest sound. Nothing. He wondered how far the trouble extended, or was it just West London that was suffering? And what about the power cuts? Again, were they just local? He had to find out what was going on.

He climbed the stairs and went back into Kirsty’s apartment, peering around the bedroom door. Kirsty was still sleeping, the gunfire outside unable to fully penetrate the double-glazed bedroom window or her pill-induced slumber. He crossed the living room floor, crunching broken glass underfoot,
and stood on the balcony, careful to avoid the splintered wooden decking. He looked out across the darkness of the river. Huge flames lit up the area where the plane had hit, the fires still raging unchecked. Even from a distance the devastation seemed enormous. But what he needed to do was to get higher, to see how far the chaos had spread. He had an idea.

On the top floor was a padlocked
access door that led up to the roof. A minute later, with the aid of a crow bar from his toolkit, he found himself on top of the building.

Outside, the air carried the tang of burning aviation fuel and a pale moon bathed the darkened suburbs in a silvery glow. He walked towards the edge of the building and stopped, looking east towards the city. A chill ran through his body. As far as Alex could see, the whole of London was blanketed in darkness, lit only by the fires that seemed to rage around the horizon. To the south and west just emptiness, the moonlight glinting off the rooftops
as they marched into the distance. Fire and darkness. Closer, he could make out the elevated section of the M4 motorway where vehicles burned unchecked.

The sky over Hammersmith suddenly lit up in a pulse of intense white light, followed by a huge fireball and a shower of sparks. A low rumble reached Alex’s ears. Jesus Christ! Another
flash lit up the skyline to the east, followed quickly by three more. Seconds later, several dull thunderclaps rumbled around the horizon. Alex felt his legs go weak. In that moment he realised that, for some reason beyond his comprehension, the country had been plunged into war.