Their Darkest Hour

Chapter Four

London

United Kingdom, Day 1

“Anything we should know, sir?”

The military officer sighed. Robin had been busy organising what medical help he could for the wounded, after a handful of ambulances and policemen had finally arrived. They’d reported that London’s railway stations had been hit as well, causing massive casualties as well as jamming up the road network. The emergency services were overwhelmed trying to deal with the chaos. And they still had no idea what was going on. The radio seemed torn between increasingly hysterical bulletins and requests for the public to remain calm and in their homes. Judging from the level of traffic on the streets, Robin suspected that that particular request was going unheeded.

“Yes,” the soldier said. A handful of other armed soldiers had appeared, causing many citizens to start edging away from them. Robin wasn’t so impressed, if only because he’d spent his probationary period in Southampton, wrestling Royal Marines on Friday nights. “There’s a good chance that whoever did this to us” — he waved a hand at the pile of smoking rubble that had once been Buckingham Palace — “is likely to start landing ground troops. You’re looking at ground zero for their invasion.”

Robin stared at him. A terrorist attack was understandable, even if there had been a hideous failure in intelligence that should have allowed them to detect the plot in time to derail it. Even a handful of bombs detonated around the city was understandable; Islamic Fundamentalism had been suspiciously quiet over the last few months and the radicals knew that they needed to keep staging spectacular attacks to boost their cause. But an invasion… Robin had taken part in drills where the Met had been seconded to the military for a military emergency, yet no one had believed that Britain might actually be invaded. The nightmare of an uprising from the poorer — and Islamic — parts of the country seemed more plausible.

“We’re at war,” he stumbled, finally. “Against who?”

“We’re unsure as yet and we don’t have time to speculate,” the officer said, firmly. “I need you to get the civilians out of the area as quickly as possible — starting now. God alone knows how much time we have left.”

Robin allowed his eyes to trail over the gardens and the surrounding area. A small number of policemen and medics had finally shown up, allowing them to start treating the wounded — although only one ambulance had arrived, which had been pressed into service to take the worst cases to the nearest hospital. From what little he’d heard from other police officers, London was gridlocked. Everyone who had a car seemed to be trying to get out of the city and to hell with how it impeded the emergency services. The BBC wasn’t helping. It was either jammed up with static or raving about explosions in a dozen cities.

“I can’t get everyone out…”

“You have to,” the officer said, quietly. There was an earnest tone in his voice that somehow stripped Robin’s final doubts away. He saw a pair of soldiers carrying handheld antiaircraft missiles setting up a position on one side of the gardens. If the enemy intended to send in paratroopers, the British Army would give them a hot reception. “I don’t know how much time we have left.”

He strode off in the direction of his men, leaving Robin staring at his back. Robin’s training asserted itself and he began to bellow orders. God knew how he’d wound up as senior officer on scene — the mobile command centre had probably been stuck in traffic — but at least no one was arguing. The wreckage of Buckingham Palace had probably concentrated quite a few minds.

“Start moving the civilians out of here,” he ordered, sharply. “Draft able-bodied men as stretcher-bearers if necessary; start moving them at least a mile from this location.” He found himself grappling with a completely unexpected problem. If an invasion force — absurd as it seemed — was about to land in Central London, where was even remotely safe. “Take control of the traffic and get it moving away from here — commandeer any vehicles that can be used for moving casualties and put them to work. If anyone gives you trouble, arrest them and we’ll worry about charges later.

Time seemed to slow down as an endless flow of civilians, government civil servants and worker drones were pushed out of the area. Most of them saw the pile of debris and didn’t argue, but a handful seemed insistent that whatever was happening had nothing to do with them. Robin ignored their pleas, then their threats, and finally had a couple arrested and dragged away. The remainder finally got the message and headed away from Central London. A few who might have protested saw the soldiers and their obviously lethal weaponry and made themselves scarce. Robin nodded at two of the soldiers as he checked his radio again, but all he could hear was static. Whoever was jamming them had neatly shattered the Police in London. There were thousands of officers on the streets, cut off from their superiors and probably facing their own private nightmares. Dear God — if the country was really being invaded, what did the invaders intend to do with the Police?

He pushed the thought aside as he helped a pair of constables manhandle a wounded civilian down towards a waiting van. A team of doctors were at least trying to separate the minor wounded from those who needed a hospital immediately, but it was a terrifying nightmare. Hardly any of the civilians were used to violence and anarchy on such a scale and many of them seemed to be on the verge of coming apart. Robin might have joined them if he hadn’t felt responsible for managing the crisis. It was certain that no one senior to him had made it to Buckingham Palace. He remembered the explosions all over London and shivered. The invaders, whoever they were, might have taken out Scotland Yard. And if they’d done that, they would have fragmented the entire network.

“Sergeant,” a voice bellowed. He turned to see the officer he’d spoken to before, looking grim. “How quickly can you get the rest of the civilians out of here?”

Robin blanched, reading the bad news in the officer’s face. “Too long,” he said. They’d managed to get most of the people on the move, but the traffic wasn’t taking the hint and heading away from Central London. Entire streams of people were being pointed away from the Houses of Parliament and being told to run. It was all a horrible ghastly mess. “How long do we have?”

“Maybe five minutes, maybe less,” the officer said. “Radar has picked up enemy craft heading towards London. The chances are that they’re coming here. You have to get the civilians out of the line of fire.”

Robin nodded and blew hard on his whistle. “Everyone away, now,” he bellowed. The other policemen took up the cry. “Move… now!”

He looked up at the officer, who had one hand on his pistol. “I’m qualified to fire in the line of duty,” he said, quietly. “I could stay…”

“You’re needed elsewhere,” the officer said. The sound of thunder — no, it wasn’t thunder — echoed in the air. “Go!”

Fatima had never felt so pressured in her life. She’d been on duty at the hospital when the police had sounded the alert and had been rounded up to go to the remains of Buckingham Palace. Seeing the rubble had shocked her, but there hadn’t been any time to sit down and cry — not when there was work to be done. Hundreds of people had been wounded and there weren’t anything like enough medical supplies to treat them all. From what she’d overhead, the emergency teams that should have been first responders to any crisis had been caught in traffic, as had most of the ambulances in London. Her mobile phone was useless and the pager she’d been given as they ran out the door had gone blank. She had been forced to improvise splints and bandages for half of her patients.

“Lie still,” she said, sharply. The wounded man in front of her had been one of the guards in front of Buckingham Palace when the bomb — or whatever — had blown it into a pile of rubble. His leg was clearly broken in two places and it was quite possible, judging from the bruises, that he had internal injuries as well. She’d bandaged him up as best as she could, but he really needed an operation. It didn’t look as if he was going to get one any time soon. “I said, lie still!”

“They need me,” the man insisted. He sounded delirious, or perhaps he was going into shock. Fatima put her hand firmly on his chest and held him down gently. “I need to…”

“You need to get better,” Fatima said. She’d heard stories of what happened in Pakistan and other less-developed countries when bombs exploded without warning, but she’d never expected to see it in Britain. Someone should have taken control at once and started coordinating all of the emergency response teams. Instead, everything was chaotic and the only people who were trying to establish order were a handful of policemen, who looked as frightened and helpless as the rest. “You can’t go back to your unit with a broken leg.”

She wanted to give him something for the pain, but there were no painkillers left. A pair of civilians pressed into service as stretcher-bearers appeared and gently lifted the wounded man onto a makeshift stretcher. Fatima checked his leg carefully, warned them to ensure that their charge didn’t try to sit up, and then waved for them to go. There was no time to rest — she had to deal with the next wounded person. It seemed that there was no end to the wounded; men, women and children, half of them looking as if they didn’t quite believe what had happened to them. This was Britain, not some Third World country where the natives killed each other at the drop of a hat. Disasters weren’t supposed to strike the British mainland.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she jumped. “You need to get on your way,” a policeman said. He looked about as worried as Fatima felt, but he seemed to have it under control. “You need to escort the patients back to the hospital. This place isn’t going to be safe much longer.”

Fatima looked up. All over the area, policemen and soldiers were shouting at civilians to move. The wounded were being carried off, followed by those who could walk on their own and the remaining medical staff. She started to follow them automatically, and then stopped dead. This was London. What the hell was going on that meant they had to risk moving so many wounded people at once?

“All I know is that this place is about to get very unsafe,” the policeman warned. He was holding something back. Fatima had done a course in reading people back when she’d been studying to be a doctor. “I think you’d better start moving — now.”

He sounded so earnest that Fatima picked up her bag before quite realising what she was doing. She could hear the sound of thunder in the distance and see plumes of smoke rising up into the sky. Something was clearly badly wrong… shaking her head, she started to follow the wounded. They’d need her when they reached their destination, wherever that might be. It seemed as if the police and soldiers were closing off all of Central London…

“I think that’s most everyone out,” Constable McEwen reported, grimly. The sound of thunder was growing closer. Robin hadn’t been able to stop himself from scanning the horizon, looking for incoming aircraft. God alone knew what was heading their way. “Sergeant…”

“Time for us to leave, then,” Robin said. The armed policemen might be a help, but it was far more likely that they’d just get in the way. It wasn’t as if they’d trained with the soldiers — hell, all the plans to hold major exercises had been curtailed by the shortage of cash. He remembered his wife, suddenly, and shivered. At least Helene was out of London, safely away from the chaos that had gripped the city. God alone knew how long it would be before the more rowdy element of the city’s population decided that it was a great opportunity for looting, raping and burning. “Get everyone back to the cordon and keep moving the civilians further away…”

He covered his ears as something screeched by overhead. A tiny black dot, seemingly flying as low as it could over London, flashed by and headed into the distance. No missiles arose to challenge it, although Robin had no way of knowing if the soldiers had held their fire or if they didn’t have enough antiaircraft missiles to spend them freely. Given how much it cost to produce equipment for the Met, he suspected the latter.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, as he started to run. He’d hoped that it was nothing more than a terrorist bombing, even though the officer he’d spoken to had seemed certain. “It’s really happening.”

Trooper Chris Drake perched on the roof of the Ministry of Defence’s Old Admiralty Building and peered down towards Green Park. Smoke was rising up from all over London, suggesting that the enemy — and he still found it hard to believe that the brass took the stories of little green men seriously — hadn’t concentrated their attentions on Buckingham Palace. From what he’d heard before the CO had dispatched him and a handful of others to vantage points where they could see for some distance without being seen, the enemy had bombarded the railway stations and several junctions. The result of one attack away from the Palace was easy to see. Westminster Bridge had been hit by… something that had knocked it effortlessly into the water. Chris didn’t need to be a CO to know that that ensured that it would be harder for any reinforcements to reach Whitehall. Of course, if some of the other stories he’d heard were true, there was little left to reach Whitehall.

He’d seen action in Afghanistan, but he’d never expected to have to fight a war in England — no one had. Some of the lads had been worried about their wives, girlfriends and children and in truth Chris knew that he couldn’t blame them. The CO had worked hard to keep them focused on the incoming threat, but without it Chris suspected that some of his comrades would probably have seen to their own families. They’d expected months — perhaps years — of warning before Britain itself came under threat. No one had expected an attack that had crushed them under its treads within a few hours.

The sound of engines pulled his attention back to the here and now. One of the tech guys down on the streets below had been able to rig up a passive detection system — or so he’d heard — but radar coverage was a thing of the past. It was possible that their enemy — little green men or whatever — would manage to get tactical surprise, even though the troops were dug in about as well as they could given the short notice. He started scanning the skies with binoculars, looking for trouble. Who knew what alien landing craft would look like? Flying saucers, or something humanity might have built itself, or maybe even tiny blue boxes that were bigger on the inside. There were just too many possibilities.

When he finally caught sight of the craft heading towards London, he was almost disappointed. They were big, all right; larger than any aircraft he’d seen in his career, massive shapes that seemed oddly unsteady in the atmosphere. The wings seemed too stubby to keep the craft in the air, although the roar of their engines suggested that whatever was powering them was more advanced than anything on Earth. In fact, they reminded him of something out of Thunderbirds. Despite himself, he felt a little relieved. They might not be as badly outmatched as he’d feared. The thought of facing the aliens from Independence Day had scared hell out of the soldiers.

The craft roared closer, moving with deceptive ungainliness. He formed a mental picture of a SAM blasting one of them out of the air, but realised quickly that the CO would want to hold off on that if possible. God alone knew how much damage a crashing alien transport would do to London, or to the civilians who happened to be caught in the blast. He reached for his radio, checked the channel quickly, and keyed the switch twice. They’d discovered that they could beat the jamming to some extent, if they used higher frequencies. Chris suspected that the aliens might be relaxing the jamming — whatever they used to coordinate might not be too different from what the humans used — but it hardly mattered. The entire city would have seen those craft making their final approach.

They flew over Hyde Park and started to shower tiny objects down towards the park below. Chris peered at them through his binoculars, trying to make out shape and form. They looked like paratroopers, but there were no parachutes. He wondered if they’d smash themselves into bloody ruin on the ground below, before realising that they had to have some way to slow their fall. Some of the SAS operatives had talked about opening their parachutes at terrifyingly low levels, barely slowing their fall before they touched down.

Other paratroopers were falling now, heading towards St. James Park. Chris leaned forward as the first of the black objects touched the ground and straightened up. The sight was so surreal that, just for a moment, he was convinced that he had to be dreaming. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it was true. The aliens had landed.