Their Darkest Hour

Chapter Two

Over Norwich/Salisbury Plain/London

United Kingdom, Day 1

“You know,” Davidson remarked, “Becky has been quite jealous recently.”

Alex rolled her eyes. The two Eurofighters were heading south-east, high over Norwich. It was definitely shaping up into a routine patrol, which was part of the reason they were bantering together as they flew onwards. It helped them remain alert and remind them that they weren’t alone, even if they were flying single-seat aircraft. Fliers could forget about everything else while boring through the sky at just under supersonic speed.

“I thought you were dating Kate,” she said, mockingly. Davidson’s love life was the stuff of legends. Fast-jet pilots never seemed to have any difficulty finding female companionship while they were off-base. “What happened to the poor girl?”

“One of those Para bastards got his hands on her while I was looking the other way,” Davidson admitted. His girls never stayed with him for long. “I think they were talking about getting hitched, last I heard.”

Alex snorted. “And who does Becky have good reason to be jealous of?”

Davidson affected a hurt tone. “I’m shocked that you could think that I might cheat on her,” he said. Alex snickered and made a one-fingered gesture towards his plane. “She’s jealous of my Typhoon, Alex. I get into her and I take her to Heaven twice a day.”

“I always knew that you were terrible in bed,” Alex said, fighting down the urge to burst into giggles. “That joke is older than the CO’s CO. And if you keep moving from woman to woman, you won’t live long enough to get promoted into a desk job.”

“You make it sound as if they’d kill me,” Davidson protested. “I think…”

“Charlie One, Charlie Two, this is Sector Control,” a new voice said. Alex straightened up at once, feeling ice shivering down the back of her neck. “We are picking up a single contact on intercept vector; I say again, we are picking up a single contact on intercept vector.”

Alex glanced at her radar screen as… something blinked into existence. Dead ahead of the Typhoons, it was advancing towards them at Mach Four. For a moment, she thought it was a radar glitch, the kind of glitch that had caused panic during the height of the Cold War, or the years after 9/11. The contact remained alarmingly stable, refusing to vanish. She ran through the situation in her mind and realised that they’d be in visual range within two minutes. What the hell could travel at that speed? There were rumours of a hypersonic drone being test-flown in America, but what would it be doing over Britain?

“Acknowledged, Sector Control,” she said. “Be advised that we will attempt to make visual contact; I say again, we will attempt to make visual contact.”

“It could be a ghost,” Davidson said. He sounded excited. Alex had flown a real-life interception mission before, back when the Russians had flown a pair of Blackjack bombers over the North Sea to remind NATO that they existed, but Davidson’s military experience was limited to dropping bombs over Afghanistan. “You think we could be the first to see one with our own eyes?”

Alex glanced at her radar screen, and then peered ahead into the lightening sky. If she saw the craft… it was possible that someone higher-up would order them to avoid contact or to forget what they’d seen, if it was someone’s secret test project. They should come into visual range in seconds…

Her threat receiver lit up like a Christmas tree. “What the hell…?”

A streak of light lanced out of nowhere and struck Davidson’s Typhoon before he had a chance to evade. The weapon, whatever it was, hit its target so hard that Davidson’s plane was blown into a fireball before he had a chance to realise that he was under attack. Alex yanked her plane into an evasive course just as a second streak of light — a very fast missile, according to her on-board displays — slashed through where she’d been. They were under attack! She almost froze in shock — only her training kept her moving. The radar was reporting dozens of new contacts now, appearing from nowhere over the North Sea and moving towards the British mainland. One finger uncovered her firing buttons as she tried desperately to call for reinforcements. The QRA aircraft should have been in the air the moment the radar controllers on the ground realised that something had gone badly wrong.

“Sector Control, this is Charlie One…”

Her radio screeched, loudly enough to force her to turn it down in a hurry. Someone was jamming her, preventing her from calling for help. The unknowns, whoever or whatever they were, were angling towards her, slowing as they came. Whatever they were flying seemed to outmatch her Typhoon effortlessly — who the hell were they? Alex gritted her teeth and activated her targeting systems. An enemy craft came into her sights and she launched a pair of missiles right towards it. The craft started to turn, but it was far too late. One of the missiles struck home and the enemy craft exploded in a shockingly powerful blast.

Another missile was screaming toward her. Acting on instinct, she corkscrewed her plane through the air, realising that she was utterly outmatched. But running could be as dangerous as trying to fight. A black shape appeared out of nowhere in front of her and she plunged the plane down, catching sight of an angular aircraft that reminded her of the F-117 Nighthawk, only several times as large. She took a shot at it anyway — it couldn’t possibly be friendly — but she couldn’t tell if she’d inflicted any damage. Whatever was screwing with her radio was screwing with her radar as well.

A brilliant flash of light caught her attention, from the west. Something had exploded on the ground, but what? The entire country couldn’t be under attack, could it? The RAF hadn’t had any reason to think that someone intended to attack Britain — or if they had, the senior officers had never bothered to tell the pilots. Her threat receiver screamed again, too late. The entire aircraft buckled around her…

Desperately, moving so quickly that she hadn’t quite realised what she was doing, she pulled the ejection lever and exploded out of the aircraft, into the suddenly-hostile sky.

The first of the French tanks were coming into view, a trio of AMX-56 Leclerc Main Battle Tanks. There were a handful of soldiers flanking them, watching for antitank teams that could target the heavier vehicles with Javelin missiles, but Gavin could tell that a number of Frenchmen were missing. The French hadn’t been engaged so far, which suggested that Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Luc Baptiste had a plan of his own. Who knew what those missing French soldiers would be doing while the British attempted to take out the main force?

A streak of light slammed down from high above and struck the lead French tank. It exploded in a colossal fireball, the turret actually being blown into the air. Gavin stared in utter disbelief. What the fuck? Had someone in the Royal Artillery accidentally loaded live ammunition into the big guns? A second missile struck a tank, followed by a third that missed, almost toppling its target over through the colossal force of the explosion. Heedless of his personal safety, Gavin pulled himself back to his feet, his mind spinning with the sheer impossibility of the situation. They were under attack! They were in the heart of the British Army’s Training Area and they were under attack!

He glanced back towards where the Challengers were positioned, hoping that their crews had enough sense to bail out before they were targeted too. Their unknown opponent — once might have been a dreadful accident, but two or more suggested deliberate malice — had to have gained control of the air. They could presumably detect any moving tanks… but who were they? There had been no report that Russia was planning anything drastic and the only other nation that might have had the capability to attack Salisbury Plain and the garrisons surrounding it was the United States. The thought that they might be at war with America was absurd.

Something caught his eye and he glanced to the east, towards Tidsworth Garrison. A streak of fire was falling from the sky towards the Garrison. It dropped below the horizon, seconds before there was a brilliant flash of light, followed by a massive fireball. The sound of thunder reached his ears seconds later. It looked almost like a baby nuke! Other fireballs were rising too. It didn’t take his intimate knowledge of the training area to know that they were rising from the location of many of the other garrisons surrounding Salisbury Plain. He spared a brief thought for the men and equipment that had presumably been destroyed in the blasts, and then started to run for the command vehicle. The tactical command centre had been buried well behind the ambush point; it should — should — have escaped detection.

He waved a hand at Sergeant Gibbon as the Fijian soldier appeared from the concealed tanks. “Get a crew down to check out the French and get them under cover,” he barked, trusting the Sergeant to deal with the situation. A number of young soldiers looked badly shocked, holding their personal weapons as if they were unsure what to do with them. He silently blessed his own insistence on issuing loaded weapons to the men, even on training exercises. It had been intended to ensure that the tankers were used to carrying them, but he had a feeling that they might be needing them to fight. “And then send a runner to each of the garrisons. I need to know what we have left in the fight.”

The tactical command vehicle was half-buried under a small mountain of earth. Gavin pulled at the hatch and it opened, revealing a cramped compartment with the latest in communications and coordinating gear. He hadn’t been too impressed with the entire concept when he’d first heard of it — the command vehicle wasn’t even as well-protected as the wretched Snatch land rover — but it might have proved itself useful today. A pair of operators, both looking as if they were on the verge of panic, glanced up at him in relief.

“Report,” he barked. “Who the hell hit us?”

“Sir, I don’t know, sir,” the lead operator said. He looked far too young and nerdy to serve with the army, but his skills at pulling information out of the ether were remarkable. “All of our communications links have gone down!”

Gavin swore. They had a laser link to the British-owned satellite communications network and various NATO systems. If they were all gone, it meant that their unknown opponent had somehow taken them all out seconds before launching the attack on Salisbury Plain. It was simply impossible to jam a laser signal, or even detect it. He keyed the radio and cursed when a wash of static blasted from the speakers. They were being jammed. His unit — and every survivor from the garrisons — had been cut off from higher authority. They were on their own, unable to coordinate with PJHQ or the MOD in fighting off the attack on British soil. But who were they fighting?

There was another screech of static, followed by a sudden shift into the BBC. “…Receiving reports of massive explosions in London,” a voice said. “We have been unable to reach…”

The signal washed out of existence. For a moment, Gavin was sure that he could hear voices hidden in the static, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The BBC had been unable to reach whom? The Government? He’d met the Prime Minister during a meeting at PJHQ and he hadn’t been too impressed, but he was legal authority. And if they were at war… Dear God, just who the hell were they fighting?

He jumped out of the command vehicle and sighted a number of soldiers being alternatively bullied or cajoled into work by Sergeant Gibbon. A handful of men wearing French uniforms were with them, some badly wounded. The French hadn’t been the only ones hit on the training area, he noted absently. It was easy to see which British units had been hit as well.

“Sir,” a soldier yelled. It took Gavin a moment to place him as the commander of a Rapier missile launcher that had been deployed to provide some protection to the tankers. If they’d had armed weapons… but no one had expected an attack from nowhere. “Sir, we got some data before they hit us!”

Gavin looked over at him. It was hardly the proper way to file a report, but under the circumstances he didn’t care. The Rapier was supposed to be monitoring every aircraft flying over the range, including a handful that had been tasked to play enemy aircraft during the exercise. They should have picked up something…

“Sir, the attackers came out of nowhere,” the soldier said. “But just before they started firing and we lost the network, the UKADR sounded an alert. So did the NATO network. Sir… some of those craft seemed to come from outer space.”

“Aliens?” Gavin said, in frank disbelief. It was impossible. And yet it made a certain kind of sense. Who else would have the power to take out the satellites, drop bombs — kinetic strikes, perhaps - onto the garrisons and presumably hit London as well? It was impossible, but… he pushed his doubts aside. “Sergeant, pass the word. We’ll regroup at Point Alpha — get the military police to sort out who we have left alive and what equipment we have that still works.”

“Sir,” Sergeant Gibbon said. There was a pause. “What about civilians, sir?”

Gavin winced. Salisbury Plain was a designated place of natural beauty, which meant that civilians could and did get underfoot most of the time. The military was supposed to have jurisdiction over the Live Firing Range, but the word from higher up was to be gentle, if possible. Gavin shook his head. The civilians would have seen the explosions — hell, perhaps the little green men or whoever would have targeted the towns around Salisbury Plain as well.

“Tell them to go back to their homes,” Gavin ordered, finally. They’d never prepared for alien invasion. The possibility had never even been considered. “And see if the civilian telecommunications network is still working. We need to know what’s left of our country.”

***

The ground came up to meet Robin’s face before he quite realised what was going on. He hit the ground hard enough to stun him, his body armour taking most of the shock below the neck. Everything seemed to have gone absolutely quiet. Dazed, unsure of what had happened, he started to push himself upright. His jaw felt as if it had been struck by a glass bottle and… what the hell had happened? There hadn’t been any warning that someone was behind him, yet what else could have sent him falling to the ground?

He staggered to his feet and looked back at Buckingham Palace. It was gone. He was so dazed that it was several seconds before he realised that something was terribly wrong, and several more seconds before he realised what had happened. Buckingham Palace, the home of the British Monarchy, was a smouldering pile of rubble. Many of the protesters who’d been outside had been hit by flying debris and were badly injured — or dead. They seemed to be whispering, making shapes with their mouths that never became words, almost as if they were miming. He couldn’t hear anything, apart from a faint ringing in his ears. It took him several moments to realise that he’d been deafened by a sound so loud that it hadn’t really registered on him. He could only hope that it was temporary.

Pulling his radio off his belt, he keyed the emergency switch. Every copper within five miles should start converging on his position, as if they wouldn’t be on their way already. This was Buckingham Palace; surely, someone at Scotland Yard would have noticed the destruction of the King’s residence. They’d have the fire brigade, ambulances and entire regiments of policemen on their way right now. They might even get to the Palace before some fucking terrorist wannabe started singing their own praises on YouTube, claiming that it was another strike against the oppressive state. Who knew? Maybe the Government would be so angry that they’d take off the gloves and just hit back.

He stumbled towards the protesters, intent on doing what he could to help, when he realised that Buckingham Palace hadn’t been the only target. Smoke and flames seemed to be rising into the air from all over London. He’d thought that it was a terrorist attack — even though he couldn’t understand how they’d managed to get a bomb into the Palace — but this was on a different scale altogether. There were at least seven different plumes of smoke… he rubbed at his ear, cursing the growing ringing. It was impossible to call for help if he couldn’t hear the reply. How could terrorists have pulled off such an attack?

The first protestor, a young girl barely old enough to drink, had been crippled by the blast. Robin did what he could for her, praying that the ambulances would be on their way. But if London had been hit several times… he’d been in enough crisis situations to know that it took time to get organised, time to throw off the shock and take control. How long would it be before someone took command and started funnelling help to the wounded? And what if the unknown attackers had taken out the Government? One of the plumes of smoke seemed to be coming from the direction of Whitehall.

And if they’d taken out the government… he shuddered, unable to face the implications. If they’d taken out the government, they’d committed an act of war.

But who were they?