The Fall of Night

Chapter Thirty-One: War in the Air

Over France

“Charlie-one, you are cleared for departure,” the controller said. “Good luck and good hunting.”

Flying Officer Cindy Jackson hit the thrusters and the Eurofighter Tempest raced down the runway, lunging into the air as if it were keen to come to grips with the foe. Her threat receiver showed no problems, as it had done for the five days since the war had begun with the treacherous attack on the airbases that were intended to defend Britain, and the download from the orbiting AWACS reported only limited air traffic as far east as Denmark. The civilian aircraft had been grounded, or shot out of the sky; the remains of the French and German air forces had been destroyed, along with much of the RAF. The handful of surviving aircraft had made their way to Britain.

“This is Charlie-one,” she said. “I’m going dark now; see you on the flip side.”

The Eurofighter Tempest was a new aircraft, one of only six in existence… and perhaps now only one of three. The project had been so expensive that the European Union had had to share it with the Japanese and Australians, something that was ironic as Japan and Australia had been having a handful of minor political disputes. It had been intended to create a fighter superior to the American Raptor… and, to be fair, the project had succeeded. If only the aircraft could be made cheap enough to equip an entire squadron, then Cindy would have been delighted; the RAF would have had a truly 21^st Century force.

She scowled down at her display as the aircraft raced further into the darkness. The politicians had cut the RAF’s budget, time and time again, and the result had been a fleet of aging aircraft and low morale, which had led naturally to low personal. Hundreds of trained RAF officers had taken the option of going to America, where the Yanks needed fighter and bomber pilots in their endless war, others did their duty with ever-diminishing resources. Cindy had been one of the latter — she loved her job — but even she had been missing a challenge. The thought gnawed at her, no matter how silly it was; had the Russian attack happened because she had been wanting a challenge?

The Tempest’s real strength lay in its stealth. Although it was capable of travelling at supersonic speed, it was almost impossible to detect on conventional radar sets, although some of the latest American equipment had been designed to detect some of the non-American stealth aircraft. The Americans had learnt a harsh lesson during their war with Iran; Russian radars were capable of detecting some of their stealth aircraft, and directing ground fire onto the targets. The Tempest could, in theory, fly through Russian air space without being noticed; in practice, it might not work quite as well as the scientists had kept claiming. She half-hoped that she would be detected; the chance to put a missile into a Russian fighter and avenge some of her dead comrades would be too good to miss.

She clenched her teeth as the memories returned. She had always been a tomboy; when other girls had been putting on make-up, she had been learning at her father’s knee — her father had been an engineer with a passion for flying. Her mother had died when she had been very young and her father had never remarried; his only child had taken care of him in-between acing her Standard Qualification Tests and living a nightlife that would have had the Romans green with envy. Her father had taught her far more than she had ever learned at school; by the time she was twelve, she had been doing advanced maths in her head, and knew what she wanted to do with her life. The opportunity had come when she had joined a flying club, and then the RAF itself; they had been delighted to have her.

The memories refused to vanish. She had lost her virginity at thirteen, had her first steady relationship at fourteen, lost the bastard at sixteen and since then had had a string of boyfriends and girlfriends, playing the role of the fighter jock to the hilt. She was fond of claiming that she had slept with more women then all of the men in the squadron put together; it was a way of relieving stress. The RAF could be dangerous; it didn’t help that the pilots knew perfectly well that many of the aircraft were older than they were. The Tornados had been intended to be removed from the RAF’s flight line years ago, but a handful remained; some of them had even served in the Gulf War. Like everywhere in Europe, Britain’s interest in its military had been waning for years…

She checked the download from the French AWACS. The French mission commander, a young Lieutenant barely out of diapers — as the fighter pilots called very young officers — had flown all the way from France to Britain as the chaos had enveloped France. The people who had briefed her had said that they figured the French would beat off and kick Algerian arse, but the Russian pressure from the east was growing ever stronger. As the Russians probed west from Poland and south from Denmark, it seemed likely that they would defeat the Germans as well and then crush onwards into France; intelligence didn’t believe that it was part of the Russian plan to allowed the Algerians any part of France.

“Time to move,” she muttered to herself. The Russians had been busy; her threat receiver warned of at least seventeen large and powerful ground-based air-search radars, sweeping the sky for threats, almost certainly backed up by ZSU missile launchers and fighters further to the east. If the Russians had managed to overrun a Danish fighter base that could be repaired quickly, they might even manage to have fighters operating from Denmark, which would reduce their reaction time significantly. American satellite information revealed that the Russians were using commandeered civilian ships to expand their foothold; most of Denmark had fallen before they even knew they were under attack. “Here goes nothing…”

The Tempest lowered itself still further as it approached Denmark. The aircraft was supposed to be silent, but Cindy had never fully trusted the assurances that it couldn’t be heard from the ground. There were two known ways to stealth an aircraft — although there were persistent rumours that the Americans had invented a third, but if there was an aircraft that stealthy no one had seen it — and the Tempest used both of them. The aircraft was designed to both redirect radar energy away from the enemy sensors, through the shape of the design, and absorb radar energy through its coating. In theory, even if the Russians caught a sniff of her presence, they would have problems actually locating her enough to launch missiles at her; the radar return would have shown her as further away than she actually was. In practice… there were a lot of radars operating in the region she was heading towards, and the Russians would have almost certainly linked them all together into one coordinated system. If they got a response, they might well be able to determine her rough location…

Her display blinked up a warning; there was a small group of medium-sized freighters under her, heading towards Britain. She wasn’t surprised; the news of the Russian advance was now common knowledge throughout Europe, even though most of the media channels had gone down, and thousands of Europeans were trying to escape. Those lucky enough to be near the shore were trying to get onto ships; she’d heard that someone on the French side had detonated a bomb in the Channel Tunnel and blocked all ingress. She didn’t want to think about what it would have been like for anyone caught under the seabed when the bomb detonated. The Royal Navy was badly overstretched; some of the freighters would probably try to dump their human cargo near Britain, forcing them to swim to shore or die, and then head back to collect more refugees. Other Captains, older and wiser, were heading for the United States; they didn’t want to be caught by the criminal gangs or the Russians. The Russians would probably have been nicer; they would only have pressed the Captains into service.

The entire North Sea was one vast no-man’s-land. She’d watched the satellites reporting on the small Russian fleet of ships that had landed in each of the major Norwegian ports, permanently closing them to shipping, but not expanding any further. It didn’t take a genius to understand why; the Russians might have been nervous about the prospect of American intervention landing in Norway, but they couldn’t have the manpower to take all of Norway at the same time as Germany and the rest of Europe. The ports might even be retaken by Norwegian forces; the delay was all that mattered to them. Russian and British submarines hunted each other through the North Sea; there had been hundreds of tiny encounters that had resulted in the loss of one or more ships for both sides.

She focused her attention on her sensors as she came up on Denmark. She had taken the precaution of avoiding ports as much as possible, but it was still an intimidating sight on the display screen; the Russians were being busy. Their radars revealed the presence of other aircraft to her sensors; there were hundreds of aircraft in the air, many of them either coming from Russia, or leaving Denmark to return to Russia. She did the maths in her head; the largest troop transport aircraft the Russians had built could carry one thousand soldiers, if they didn’t mind only limited equipment. A hundred of them could land a hundred thousand troops in a single flight… and the Russians built their equipment to last. It might not be as advanced as the European or American equipment, but most of it would hold out long enough to land thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers behind the lines. The ships… there were hundreds of ships, some of them military, but most of them civilian…

The sheer scale of the invasion terrified her. The Russian radars didn’t seem to have seen her, but she could detect Russian fighters on patrol and banked to avoid them as her sensors faithfully recorded everything they saw. Denmark itself was dark, with only a handful of lights showing, but she could see the glare of lights from the Russian-captured ports from a far distance. The unloading was going on throughout the night; she wondered if they had captured enough civilian traffic to help them move all of their supplies to their units. Hamburg had either fallen or was on the verge of falling; when it did, the German units that had survived would be destroyed.

It wouldn’t be long before the Russians reached the Netherlands and Brussels, she decided. Under her breath, she muttered a curse on the European bureaucrats who had driven EUROFOR to disaster as she hunted for more intelligence. She would have liked nothing more than to have led a force of Eurofighters and heavy bombers into the area to wreak havoc, but that was impossible. Thanks to the politicians, the RAF had lacked the firepower to do that even before the missiles had taken out most of the force. The remaining units were being conserved; everyone knew, even though no one had spoken of it directly, that Britain itself was under direct threat for the first time since 1940.

“A single bombing run,” she muttered, wistfully. The Argentines had tried that during the Falklands War — she wondered if they would try again with the British distracted by the Russian War — and they had caused real problems… and would have caused worse if they had had worked the tactic out properly. She would have volunteered for the flight; a single very low-level bombing run, right over those ships and ports and airports that had been pressed into service. She might even have got very lucky and hit an ammunition ship; an Italian port had been wrecked by just such an explosion, back in the Second World War. “Why not…”

She banked the aircraft around, heading for Germany; the Tempest felt almost disappointed to be taken away from a possible encounter with the enemy. The German countryside was dark and almost completely unlighted; the only bursts of light were explosions as Russian bombers prowled, looking for targets that they could drop heavy bombs on. What they lacked in precision they made up for in enthusiasm; they dropped very heavy bombs without wringing their hands over the civilians who got caught up in the blasts. If those civilians had demanded a real defence capability…

Ping! The moment of lock-on was a complete shock to her; she banked the Tempest without thinking about it. The Russian Mainstay had somehow gotten a sniff of her and was bringing up more search radars, hunting for her… and three of its friends were also bringing up their own radars. They had to suspect that she was a stealth aircraft — a non-stealth aircraft would have been detected well before — and would be sharing data; the green sweeps of their radar waves passed across the Tempest… and locked on. The sheer power was burning through her coating and ECM; the scattered bursts of radar energy would force them to triangulate her position, but they could do it. No… they would do it; she had no doubt at all that they would succeed.

“Lock-on,” the flight computer warned. It had the voice of her father, something that she had considered funny at times, but now it just seemed sick joke. If only the lawsuits forbidden the use of voices without permission hadn’t gone through… “Alert; Russian radars have locked on…”

“Tell me something I don’t fucking know,” Cindy snapped. The Mainstays might carry some anti-aircraft weapons themselves — the Russians were paranoid, with reason — about their AWACS — but she was well out of their missile range and there was no way that such an aircraft could intercept her themselves. No, they would send in the fighters, unless through sheer ill luck they had set up a passive ZSU system below her. “Find me their fighters…”

“Alert; enemy fighters detected,” the flight computer said. “Three fighters; flight characteristics suggest MIG-41 Flatpack aircraft. Suggest evasive action.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Cindy snapped, remembering the one time she had sworn as a teenager in front of her father. He had forced her to wash her mouth out with soap. Enemy radars were coming on all over the area and the Russians would have a fair chance at getting a shot at her, even if she fled at once. She checked the weapons the Tempest carried; she might well have to fight her way through the Russians if they attempted to engage her. “Order; prepare data dump.”

Everything that the Tempest had recorded had been saved firmly in its computers. If she believed that escape was impossible, she would have triggered the transmission and sent everything back to the AWACS orbiting far over the North Sea, betraying her presence in one burst of radio activity. As she turned the aircraft and hit the afterburners, the Russians closed in, while their radars kept a firm track on her flight path. They didn’t look as if they were going to be reasonable about it and let her go.

“Bastards,” she muttered, as the flight computer reported missile locks from the Russian fighters. She jinked rapidly, breaking the locks, and threw the Tempest into a long dive and turn, coming up facing the Russian fighters. She uncovered the firing key and depressed it, trusting in the ASRAAM missile to achieve a more permanent lock-on using its own systems. A Russian fired at the same time and she dodged the Russian missile, even as her missile scored a direct hit and blew the Russian aircraft out of the sky. The third Russian aircraft achieved lock-on and fired; she evaded through a series of daring and desperate manoeuvres, feeling her body ache as the gravity forces pulled at her. “Real bastards!”

Her flight computer was screaming at her; the fight was inching out over the North Sea and they had to make their meeting with the tanker, or else they would run out of fuel and fall out of the sky. The Tempest was so classified that she couldn’t allow it to fall into Russian hands; the MOD had ensured that the aircraft had a self-destruct linked to the ejection seat. She glared down at her threat board, finding a Russian fighter trying to lock on to her, and launched her second missile at it. The Russian fighter jock threw his aircraft into a crazy dive and avoided the missile with ease. She forced herself to think; how many missiles did the Flatpack carry? She couldn’t remember…

The Russian fighters broke off. For a moment, she wondered if it was a trick of some kind, or if they had run out of missiles and she hadn’t noticed, and then she saw the three Eurofighter Typhoons flashing towards her position. They had been escorting the AWACS; the controller had vectored them towards her, just to save her from the Russians. It had been a risk, but none of the remaining RAF fighter pilots would leave a comrade in trouble; they had too few pilots to lose one when she could have been saved.

“It’s good to see you,” Cindy said sincerely, as the Typhoons fell into escort formation around her. She would be running on vapours by the time they met the tanker, but she was certain, now, that she would escape the Russians. There would be other chances to even the score a little, before the close of play. “That was a tight spot there.”

“Tight as a virgin’s cunt,” her rescuer agreed. Cindy laughed bitterly. “At least you managed to hurt the bastards. We don’t even get to do that.”