Invasion

Chapter Thirty-Four

Anything less like a small group of soldiers would be hard to imagine. The four men rode on a set of six camels, using two of them to carry their baggage as they travelled across the desert, navigating by the stars. They wore Bedouin outfits, concealing most of their faces from the handful of others they encountered as they travelled east, ignored or sneered at by the inhabitants of the small villages they visited. A handful of villages were blackened ruins, the sight of a brief struggle against the alien infidels who had violated the Holy Land, but they passed on without pause. Their target was further to the east.

Sergeant Sean Gartlan peered into the heat haze as they kept moving. His face was tanned and slightly tinted, but he couldn’t have passed for an Arab for long, even though he spoke Arabic like a native. The three Corporals with him were even less Arabic, but as long as they kept their faces hidden, they should be fine. The locals tended to treat the wandering Bedouin with a mixture of awe — they travelled the desert, like their ancestors had once done — and contempt. The townspeople often disliked the wanderers, which actually provided the small SAS squad with a surprisingly effective cover. Once button-holed, it was easy for observers to miss important and yet vital details, such as the fact they were a tiny party. Sean had been careful to assure anyone who asked too many questions that they were merely on a wandering pilgrimage, but a quick check of their saddlebags would have revealed the weapons and ammunition. Openly, they carried AK-47s, enough to prevent robbery — particularly when they had nothing, not even women, with them — but the saddlebags contained more advanced weapons than simple tribesmen should possess.

It might not make a difference, Sean reflected. He’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d seen an astonishing variety of weapons in the hands of the enemy, from American-built M16s to Chinese-built knock-offs of Russian antitank weapons. There had even been a man in Afghanistan who’d possessed an intact Stinger from the war against the Soviets, one that he had never dared use, because it would have knocked his status down from Big Man to a lower level. The weapon, once it had been confiscated, had been so corroded that anyone using it would be lucky if they didn’t blow themselves to bits. Very few of the supporting aircraft had ever had to face a Stinger from that particular war, although some of them had had to face ore modern weapons, smuggled into the country for the insurgency. It was quite possible that anyone who searched them would think that there was nothing odd in their arsenal.

But of course that can’t be allowed, Sean thought, as they moved on. Navigating by dead reckoning wasn’t easy, but in some ways, he almost felt freer. There were no longer any satellite phones or radios that could be used by senior commanders to issue orders while watching over his shoulder, or to suddenly change the rules of engagement at exactly the wrong time. They were completely on their own… and, if they ran into thieves, would have to kill them or escape. They couldn’t lose their weapons, not before they’d used them on the aliens.

He scowled. The aliens, it was well known, used a space-based radar system to track everything that moved on the ground — and, if they didn’t like the cut of its jib, to blast it with a KEW from orbit. In theory, they could pick off an individual human, let alone their vehicles, but the American reports from Texas showed that only large masses of vehicles, or obviously military units, drew fire. They could have taken a jeep from one of the Jordanian military units that were trying to hide out in the desert — and had probably been ignored because they were more of a danger to each other than to the aliens — and driven down into Saudi, but that was too much of a risk. The aliens worked hard to shut down most human transport and an individual jeep might have attracted attention. No, they had to rely on the camels, even though they were mangy beasts.

A faint whistle from behind him caught his ear and he frowned, one hand falling to the AK-47 as he searched the horizon for threats. The remains of the Saudi Army, he’d been told, were cowering in the desert… but the reports were at least two weeks out of date. The aliens had probably rounded them all up by now. He saw, moving quicker than he had imagined, a line of vehicles buzzing across the sand, heading for the small village they’d passed through a couple of days ago. They came closer and closer, close enough to spook the animals, but didn’t seem inclined to stop and chat to the humans. Instead, they just kept moving…

It was the first time he’d seen the aliens close up and he was fascinated. Their vehicles didn’t look that different to human vehicles, but they floated on a cushion of air, rather than tracks. Judging by the way the sand moved and swirled around them, they were probably immune from sand getting into the engines as well, which made them even more deadly in the desert. Sean had done a few months with Arabic forces and, apart from the Iraqis, they tended not to worry about actually maintaining their engines and vehicles. They’d been defeated a long time before the aliens had landed… and they’d done it mainly to themselves.

The aliens themselves were the black-clad figures he’d seen in the webcasts from Texas, but there was an indefinable air of wrongness about them, even standing at their guns and ready to blast them if they had even looked like a threat. The images he’d seen hadn’t — they couldn’t — conveyed their alien nature; they’d gone, in a second, from men in suits to a genuine alien threat. He felt sweat trickling down his spine as they accelerated past the camels and their riders, heading onwards towards their destination… and leaving them in the dust of their passing.

Corporal Loomis spoke for them all. “Well, fuck me, sir.”

“Perhaps not,” Sean said, trying to get the image of the aliens out of his head. “I suppose if I spent longer than a few weeks in this women-less country you might start looking attractive.”

They bantered back and forth for a few minutes, before they sank back into thought. Sean, in particular, thought about his adopted father… and how he would react to the aliens. His mother had lost her first husband at an early age, four years after Sean had been born, and he’d grown up without a male role model. He’d run rampant across Birmingham, completely out of control, until his mother had married again, this time to a former Royal Marine who’d fought in the Falklands War. Sean hadn’t been impressed and had made the mistake of mouthing off to his new father, who had challenged him to a fight, beaten him with ease — he’d never had a serious opponent before — and informed him flatly that he was going to be brought up properly, or else. It had turned Sean’s life around and he’d actually scraped through school with some qualifications, but in some ways he’d remained a rebel. Instead of signing up with the Royal Marines, he’d become an infantryman… and then passed the dreaded SAS Selection course. His father — he couldn’t really remember his real father — had fought humans, not… aliens. What would he have thought of the mission?

He would want me to do my duty, Sean thought, as they found the hide. The Americans had sworn blind that it would be where they’d said, but it wouldn’t be the first time that American intelligence had been lacking, with even the best will in the world. The SAS team managed to enter the tiny underground bunker, sort out their equipment, and catch some rest. Having pitched their tents near the bunker, they looked — as always — like natives.

It would probably get a lot harder soon, Sean knew. The Saudis had never been very good at controlling their borders, despite a lot of high-flying rhetoric and promises that they’d made to the Americans. The Royal Family might have intended to cooperate, but in a land where every junior and most of the seniors were on the take, it was easy for anyone to get into the country. The aliens would probably replace the old system with one of their own eventually, but for the moment, they were where they needed to be. If the reports were correct, just over the horizon was their target, an alien prison camp.

Darkness fell. Sean and Loomis unwrapped one of the saddlebags and dressed, quickly, in their night-operations gear. The Americans had invented the outfits and the SAS had fallen in love with them as soon as they’d seen them. They not only acted like a chameleon, cloaking the wearer in a near-perfect disguise, but also kept their body heat within the suit and therefore rendering them invisible to infrared detectors. The aliens apparently used such methods in protecting some of their bases in America and there was no reason to assume that they wouldn’t do the same here. As soon as they were dressed, they slipped out, leaving the other two to watch the camels. It was still a long walk to the alien camp, but it wasn’t anything like as bad as they’d been through while training. The only surprise was stumbling over a pile of unburied bodies, all human, apparently shot through the head.

“Got to be insurgents,” Loomis muttered, barely loud enough to be heard in the cold night air. The desert rapidly became freezing at night. “They tried to reach the camp, were detected, and were simply shot.”

“No argument,” Sean whispered back. The alien camp was just over a sand dune. “Keep your voice down…”

They crawled the remaining few meters and reached the top of the dune, peering down into the camp. It was much larger than Sean had expected, a massive complex of wire, backed up by a set of guards patrolling around the outsides. A pair of watchtowers stood guard, spotlights flaring out from time to time, burning down into the camp. The prisoners had to be going neurotic trying to sleep; the lights were bright enough to shine through even tightly-closed eyes. They weren’t sending a spotlight over the desert, he realised, and understood why. They’d be watching with infrared sensors for intruders. Anyone stupid enough to come within range would be shot out of hand.

The prisoners didn’t look that good. Sean was reminded of what his father had told him about the Argentinean prisoners in the Falklands. They’d depended on the British to look after them. Once they’d been beaten and captured — and, in point of fact, surrendered by incompetent superiors who should have been able to win the final battle with ease — they’d acted like children who’d been beaten once and expected to be beaten again. They looked to be mainly lower-ranking soldiers, all Arabic, many of them wounded openly… and wounded inside. They’d been beaten… and, worse, they knew that they’d been beaten.

They crawled back out of sight. “You think we can save these people?”

Sean shrugged. “Do we have a choice?”

The two men made a final circuit of the prison camp. The aliens didn’t seem to have a lot of firepower gathered around the camp — he hoped that that meant that they were having problems keeping the cities under control — but they didn’t need it. Judging by the wiring and the guard towers, they could have slaughtered all the prisoners before they could escape, unless they had help from an outside force. The real question was simple; there were four of them, armed to the teeth, but would that be enough to break the prisoners out?

“Time to get back to camp,” Sean muttered. “We’ll get the other two and move tomorrow.”

The day passed slowly. He’d taken the time to prepare an excuse for lurking near the camp — although, officially, he wouldn’t know that the camp was there — and was surprised when the aliens didn’t even bother to come and investigate why they were there. He’d seen the same problem in Iraq, when there had been too many armed men to investigate and arrest them all, but he hadn’t realised how nerve-wracking it had been for the other guys. The thought made him smile; the grass was always greener on the other side of the hill. He’d been hunted through the Middle East before, but he’d always known more than his enemies, until now. When night fell, they were ready for the fight; indeed, they welcomed it.

“Take your positions,” he hissed, as they reached the same ridge. They had to take out the towers and the IFV almost at once, or they were all dead. “I’ll give you fifteen, then open fire, so get into position by then!”

He crawled away from the others towards the firing position. The MILAN missile was easy to set up, and he’d practiced doing it in near-complete darkness, but it was still a dangerous job. A single clink at the wrong time could have brought the aliens down on his head. He couldn’t believe that they didn’t bother to patrol far outside the camp, although he suspected that they weren’t impressed with the quality of the opposition so far. The insurgents in Saudi would have a learning curve before they became more than a nuisance. He pointed the weapon carefully at the tower and checked his watch. Bare seconds to zero hour.

Precisely on time, he launched the missile. The MILAN was intended to punch through tank armour and detonate inside the vehicle; it had no problem at all blowing the guard tower apart in a blast of fire. He’d actually been worried that the weapon would fly through the guard tower, but it exploded and knocked out one of the main alien defences. A heartbeat later, the second tower and the IFV followed the first into destruction, while the handful of alien infantry struggled for position. Patel, the sniper, picked them off one by one before they could get into cover. Dan Mills had trained Patel, after all, and no one would bet against him.

“Cover us,” he snapped, and ran down to the alien gates. They’d rigged them to be impossible to open from the inside, but with some packs of explosives, it was easy to bring the first set crashing down. He shouted orders in Arabic — he’d decided that explaining who they really were would be too confusing — as he started work on the second gate, freeing a few hundred prisoners. Most of them streamed out and headed into the desert, a few of the quicker-thinkers picking up alien weapons as they moved out. They’d be a pain in the ass to the aliens if they could get back to their home cities and villages. He tore open the remaining gates and watched as the prisoners fled.

A strange thrum-thrumming noise announced the arrival of the alien helicopters as they swooped in from high above. They were barely visible in the darkness… and, because of his protective suit, they couldn’t see him. They could see the escaping prisoners, however, and he winced as bright streaks of light flared out in the darkness, their machine guns scything down the prisoners before they could escape. He swore, watching helplessly, just before Loomis fired a Stinger at the alien bird. Unlike the ones in Afghanistan, it worked perfectly, blowing the helicopter out of the sky. The second helicopter launched a spread of missiles towards Loomis’s position, but Sean knew that he would have abandoned the useless remains of the Stinger and fled to another position. Until the aliens got some more of their soldiers up to round up the remainder of the prisoners, it would be impossible to prevent at least some of them from escaping.

And, if some of them were real men, the aliens would have a problem on their hands.

He blew his whistle as he retreated out of the camp, knowing that the other three would be abandoning their positions and falling back with him, back towards the camels. The aliens would be on their way from their nearest base and no one knew how long it would be until they arrived. He could have wished for better intelligence; the aliens had learned enough from Texas to almost isolate the Middle East from the remainder of the world. If it hadn’t been for the invasion, the general death and slaughter and aliens intent on replacing Islam with their own religion, parts of the population would probably have been quite happy with that.

They could see the approaching lights of an alien rapid reaction force as they headed back over the sand. Through a dark coincidence, the aliens were going to pass close to their position, so they fell to the ground and hugged the sand as the aliens raced closer. Sean thought, for one terrifying moment, that the aliens were going to actually drive over them, but instead they veered off down towards the camp. He heard the sound of shooting, lots of shooting, in the distance, but he was sure that at least some of the prisoners would have made it.

“Shit,” Loomis said.

Sean followed his gaze and swore. The aliens hadn’t been as stupid as he’d thought. They’d put two and two together and, while on their flight to the camp, had fired a spread of missiles into the tents and the camels. The poor beasts were dead now… and the aliens probably thought that the tribesmen were dead as well. Getting somewhere where they could wreck more havoc was going to be harder than he had thought.

“Get into the hide,” he ordered finally. They’d be detected easily if they were walking on the desert in daylight. “Tonight, we’ll head for Riyadh.”

“If nothing else,” Loomis said, as they bedded down, “we put one hell of a dent in their pride.”

”Sure,” Sean said. “All we have to do now is make sure that someone knows what we did. Anyone up for the quickie book deal? Alien Two Zero?”