Invasion (53 page)

Using his remaining strength, Gibson pulled the pin from a grenade and lobbed it over the lip of the trench. He was rewarded with a scream of agony as the weapon exploded and forest debris rained down on top of him. There were more footfalls above him, harsh voices whispering in the darkness. He tried to bring his pistol up but his arm wouldn’t respond.

Mike Gibson knew the end was close and he was surprised to discover he was frightened. What lay ahead he couldn’t possibly know, but he was about to find out and the thought chilled him. His paratrooper grandfather had died in similar circumstances, killed while attacking a trench during the Falklands War. Now Gibson was about to die defending one and the irony of the moment wasn’t lost on him.

The sound of battle suddenly
faded as a childhood memory jolted him; he was home again, a child, squatting on a patterned carpet as his chubby fingers fumbled with a pile of coloured building blocks. He saw an electric fire, felt the warmth of its single bar on his bare legs. Above the fireplace was a photograph, a man in uniform with a maroon beret, staring proudly out into the living room. In the background a radio played, and he saw his mother standing in the kitchen, humming softly as she chopped vegetables. Then she turned and smiled, and suddenly Gibson wasn’t afraid anymore.

He opened his eyes as a silhouette loomed above him, then another. He tried to raise his pistol, hoping that someone, somewhere would remember Mike Gibson. His life ended in a blinding flash.

When the order came, forty-eight RAF fighter-bombers thundered south on afterburner, hugging the earth at a dangerously low level. They were split into eight groups of six aircraft, each formation headed for the sectors where Arabian forces had broken through the defence line in significant numbers. It would be a deadly game they were about to play. The PADS were still operating on automatic mode and the fighter-bombers
had to ensure that they didn’t fly above four hundred feet or else they would fall prey to their own missiles. The pilots pushed on, rumbling across the pre-dawn landscape. Towns, roads and forests flashed below them, barely visible in the darkness.

And then, quite suddenly, they were over the front line.

At Keegan Fell, the Arabians were still clearing
the trenches. The main road that dissected the border was being hastily repaired
by Arabian combat engineers, as more than fifty tanks queued
along the broken tarmac to head north. The terrain around the road had proved too waterlogged and pitted for the fifty-tonne monsters, so they waited on the hard standing for the engineers to finish their work.

Around the tanks, thousands of troops were headed up the face of the Fell and dropping down into the trenches. Already, the infantry were reforming, preparing to head further north. Recce units had pushed forward and checked the roads, reporting that they were clear and serviceable. At the top of the Fell, mud-caked Arabian troops shuffled up the ramp of the LDD and filed inside, ready to head deeper into enemy territory. The sudden, ear-splitting scream of the lead British jet had everyone in the open running for cover.

One by one the pilots released their munitions. Cluster bombs, smart weapons, bunker-busters, dumb iron bombs – everything that could be dropped was dumped onto the enemy forces below. The fighter-bombers flashed above the front line, spilling their deadly cargoes in their wake before turning north on full afterburner. Keegan Fell erupted in a huge sheet of flame as bombs carpeted
the summit.

The lead pilots thundered over the tank column below, marking the target with strobes for the following aircraft. The tanks, forming a line over two miles long, tried desperately to get clear of the road. Most made it, but at least twenty tanks were destroyed by low-flying bombers and cluster munitions. The survivors up on the Fell managed to fire a few hand-held SAMs, but they were too late. They watched with mounting rage as the bright blue exhausts of the British planes shrank to tiny dots and disappeared over the northern horizon.

The trench system was devastated and hundreds had been killed or wounded in the attack. Rescue teams fought hard to dig out the casualties from the mud and smoking craters that dotted the rugged contours of the Fell.

On the flat ground behind the ridgeline, the Arabian infantry corporal muttered a silent prayer of thanks
as he looked out over the hellish scene below. Yes, they had been victorious, but the Infidels had made them pay for every foot of ground. He cursed the British pilots, the Yankees who helped them, his own comrades who’d been too slow or too stupid to shoot them down. Still, at least he had the luxury of being able to curse. Lucky for him he’d been sent over the ridge with his section to check for enemy activity. The cowards were on the run, he was told. Pursue them, and kill as many
as possible.

He turned to wave his crouching section onwards when he stopped in his tracks. The bomb crater near the tree line wasn’t a large one, probably the result of a mortar round, but the wires that protruded from it headed off into the trees. He looked back towards the Fell. The wires were also headed in the direction of the British trenches. Strange. The Arabian ordered his section to fan out into the trees, while he splashed into the water-filled crater and ran the mud-caked lines through his fingers. Were they telephone
wires? He plied and twisted the thick black sheathing; too strong for telephone wire. What
was it then? He tugged it hard. The wire was buried deep but it finally sprang free from the mud, disappearing into another crater
nearby
. The corporal followed it and discovered another tangle of wires, all headed in different directions, twisting all over the Fell.

His eyes suddenly widened.

‘Now.’

Four miles to the north, inside a tracked command vehicle, the combat engineer pushed a green button on his control panel. The three soldiers inside the vehicle watched through their vision slits as the night sky to the south lit up with the pulsing intensity of a nuclear detonation. Seconds later, the shockwave passed over them, rattling the windows of nearby houses and dislodging tiles from roofs. Beneath their feet the ground shook for several seconds.

The Royal Engineer captain breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God the wires had survived. It had been a time-consuming and laboriously long operation, burying over two hundred tonnes of explosives
at a dozen predicted choke points along the length of the border, linking it all up to the electronic triggering systems, then testing and retesting the links. Some of it would work, had worked, but other links would have been broken by the storm of artillery and rockets. Thankfully, the Keegan Fell site had worked perfectly.

When the Arabian forces had attacked, when there was no hope of holding them, the pre-arranged
signal had gone out. As the sound of massed whistles shrilled along the border, the defenders
had fled their positions and headed north. Even now, jeeps and trucks were passing their position, roaring through the village in blacked-out convoys. It wasn’t a great plan, but hopefully it had saved a lot of lives and would slow up the Arabian advance in the process. To the south the sky still glowed, now a deep red. It was time to move.

The camouflage nets were rolled up and lashed down, then the command vehicle roared into life. It lurched out from its hiding place in the car park of a village pub and rumbled along the narrow country lanes, chasing a speeding troop truck, its rear filled with smiling, muddy soldiers. Ten miles to the north
was the town of Jedburgh. There they would dump the tracked vehicle and find a truck themselves, something that would transport them into the Highlands that much quicker.

Behind them, Keegan Fell had disappeared off the map. On open ground below the Fell, the advancing Arabians slowly picked themselves up out of the freezing mud. They’d
spent the last twenty minutes trudging across the battlefield in long columns, laden down with equipment and heading towards the ridge in front of them. They had missed the earlier battle and, as they filed around the deep craters, slipping and stumbling on the chewed-up earth, they saw the piles of dead bodies and screaming wounded and were grateful that they had been selected for the second wave. Then had come the blinding
flash and the world had erupted in front of their very eyes. A wall of mud had covered the leading troops and it was several minutes before anyone moved.

When they did, they saw that two massive chunks of earth had been scooped out of the ridge top and the trees up there were gone. It resembled the aftermath of two huge landslides. The LDD that had squatted on top of the Fell was now on its back at the foot of the slope, half buried in mud. Hundreds of troops had been instantly wiped out and hundreds more buried under the giant wave of earth, mud and trees that rained down over the whole area.

At other strategically
crucial points along the border, similar detonations
shook the earth and stopped the Arabians in their tracks. From inside his command vehicle, General Mousa ordered his forces to hold their positions until engineers could be brought up in strength to clear the whole line. The combined air attack and explosive traps had cost the Arabians dear and brought the advance to a grinding halt. Intelligence from the Big Eyes reported the presence of hundreds of PADS still operating
far behind the front line. Until these were taken out the Arabian troops would remain in position and hold at the border.

For now, the battle was over.

The US Navy Sea Dragon helicopter circled the wide valley once before making its final approach, flaring and landing a few yards away from the strobe marker that pulsed near the centre of the snow-encrusted
field. Overhead in the dawn sky, a flight of four fighter jets rumbled unseen around the horizon. Just inside the tree line of the surrounding forest, Harry stood under the damp canopy of pine branches and watched the helicopter settle a short distance away. So, this was it.

His gaze wandered beyond the aircraft, to the dark sky behind the eastern peaks of the valley. On the other side of the country, Russian naval forces were already probing the Scottish coastline, filling the void left by the Royal Navy after their escape towards Iceland. Surprisingly, to the south, the bulk of the Arabian forces had remained in their pre-battle positions, just short of the border. No one knew why, only that they were grateful for the opportunity to evacuate more troops out of the country.

Harry glanced to his right. A short distance away, General Bashford stood quietly beside his senior staff officers, locked in whispered conversation. Most of the British military forces had escaped across the sea, packed into US Navy logistics
ships and transport aircraft. The airports were now abandoned, the runways silent.

The cause was lost, as Bashford had known from the start it would be, but in the final reckoning the General had found it hard to accept. It really was time to leave, Harry had privately urged him. They’d had a good run, he reminded the soldier; they’d had given the enemy several bloody noses and saved countless lives, but the stark realities of their situation had to be faced. The game was finally up.

But not for everyone. Lord Advocate Matheson and his small administration had decided to stay behind, along with several
senior officers
and over four thousand soldiers, most of them from the Scottish regiments. Matheson was taking his people further north, where the rugged beauty of the highlands offered many places from which to launch a guerrilla war against the invaders. The Scots promised to make the enemy pay in blood for every inch of Scottish soil.

Harry had felt a chill run down his spine as
Matheson’s
senior military commander, a colonel in the newly reformed
Black Watch, declared his murderous intent to the room at Fort William. Despite himself, Harry pitied those who found themselves on the receiving end of that cold fury. They’d left the command bunker shortly afterwards, driving in a small convoy to the coastal valley, where they now waited.

Harry shivered in the cold air as he watched four
heavily armed
US Marines leap from the helicopter and jog through the snow towards the trees. The lead
Marine was a tough-looking man in his mid-forties, with black paratrooper’s wings sewn above his breast pocket. He had a no-nonsense air about him and, as he approached Harry, he threw up a quick salute.

‘Prime Minister, my name is Captain Van Buren. I’ll be your escort out of here. The Arizona
is waiting offshore, so I would advise we move quickly. Are you ready to leave, Sir?’

Harry took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Thank you, Captain. Yes, I think we are.’ He turned around and shook hands with the officer of the patrol that had guided them through the forest to the pick-up point. These were some of the men who would be staying behind and Harry had the utmost admiration for their bravery. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘You too, Sir,’ replied the officer. Without waiting, the soldier turned away and faded back into the trees with his patrol. Harry, Bashford and the others watched them go, then headed out into the valley.

Leading the way, Van Buren strode towards the helicopter, its rotors lashing the field in a violent downdraught. Harry followed, bent against the blizzard of snow and ice. When everybody
was safely aboard, the helicopter quickly lifted off the ground, dipping its nose and banking towards the western end of the valley. Gradually, the massive aircraft gained altitude and cleared the ridgeline, then headed in a
north-easterly
direction, a route that would take them out over the Atlantic towards the waiting aircraft carrier.

Harry looked down at the passing treetops below and all the emotions of the last few months came rushing up to meet him. He cuffed a damp eye with his sleeve; so many lives lost, so much destruction. It was difficult to comprehend that just a short time ago Harry’s major concern was the economy and how to fix it. He had a wife then, and a home.

In a modern world it was so easy to take things for granted, to go about one’s daily business, to make plans for a future that
no one
truly believed was uncertain. People always assumed that bad things happened to
others, not themselves. But bad things had happened, terrible things, and nearly everyone in the country had been affected. No, Harry corrected himself, this wasn’t just a British problem; the whole of Europe had been affected and the crisis had yet to play out globally. Only God knew where that would lead. He was still dumbfounded as to how such an audacious plan had ever succeeded, but succeeded it had and Harry would be left to ponder over the reasons, the failures, in the years ahead. For his own reputation he didn’t much care. What’s done is done, he realised, but for those left behind, they were already paying the price, living under the yoke of Arabian rule.

The Sea Dragon thundered low across the coastline, where rolling green waves pounded themselves to white spray on the jagged rocks below. They
skimmed above the water, climbing as they headed out to the safety of the sea. Harry rested his forehead on the perspex window and watched the white-capped waters roll beneath them. The sun had risen behind the aircraft, its light smothered by heavy grey cloud cover. Ahead the sky was still dark, the ship that would transport them across the ocean as refugees
still hidden by the stubborn cloak of night. Harry closed his eyes and offered up a silent prayer, for the wife he could not bury, for the countless others who’d died, and for the living who were still caught up in this nightmare. He prayed that they would find some kind of peace in the years to come and, in that uncertain future, Britain would be a free nation once again.

He opened his eyes. As the coastline receded to a dark line on the horizon, Harry Beecham whispered farewell to the land of his birth, knowing he would never set foot on her soil, or breathe her air again.