INVASION: UPRISING (Invasion Series Book 3)

by Dc Alden

  ‘Where the fuck is everyone?’

  After lifting off from their temporary airbase in Iceland, the B-21 Raiders climbed to a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet and headed south towards a rendezvous point 63 miles off the west coast of Ireland. There, in the roiled air above the restless Atlantic Ocean, Doolittle and Hornet took turns to drink from the extended refuelling boom of an orbiting KC-46 Pegasus.

  After topping off their tanks, the Raiders banked away and readopted their loose, one-mile separation formation. They flew east over the dark landmass of Ireland, climbing to an altitude of 54,000 feet before levelling out above the Irish Sea.

  Inside each aircraft, the array of high-definition touch-screen displays gave their two-man crews a complete tactical overview of the surrounding environment. They could see 3-D maps of enemy airspace, the radar cones of anti-air ground units, and they could predict the patrolling patterns of caliphate fighters. They saw drones and helicopters, missile units and rocket batteries, the overlapping sweeps of a wide variety of airborne detection systems, and the heat blooms of military convoys on roads far below them. None of it posed any significant threat.

  As they crossed the coastline of North Devon, each aircraft dialled back the power and dipped their noses into a gentle glide angle, their sophisticated auto-navigation systems making corrections based on the tactical information they were receiving from their on-board systems. Now the Raiders were practically noiseless and invisible in the night sky, so invisible that they passed within a mile of a flight of enemy fighters without being detected.

  The aircraft sliced through the bitter night air, heading due east now, passing Salisbury and Winchester before banking to the south and looping around Crawley to avoid the congestion of Gatwick airport, once a busy hub for British holidaymakers, now a major military airbase.

  After resuming their due east heading, the Raiders continued their downward glide, finally levelling out at 3,000 feet. Then they increased power, hurtling above the dark English countryside. With the autopilot engaged and the terrain-guidance software keeping them out of danger, the crews turned their attentions to the weapons systems, scrolling through their limited onboard inventory and selecting their weapons of choice: AGM–178’s, the US Air Force’s Joint Air-to-Surface Stand-off Missile. Doolittle and Hornet both carried two of the advanced cruise missiles inside their weapon bays, each one capable of delivering its 2,000-pound penetrator warhead to its target from a range of up to 250 nautical miles. The planners didn’t want to take the chance of such a long shot over a highly-defended swathe of British real estate, so they set the launch point to approximately 50 nautical miles.

  In the cockpit of Doolittle, the on-board infrared targeting systems were activated, and the software responded with an immediate IR acquisition signal, one they’d been expecting. With the weapons programmed, the bomb bay doors were opened. Doolittle launched both its missiles first, then banked hard to the south. Hornet released its own weapons ten seconds later and followed Doolittle towards their next waypoint, the town of Haywards Heath. Once clear of the area they would head west, undetected.

  Leaving chaos in their wake.

  As Henri Platt considered his dilemma, he had no idea that one of the sullen faces he’d glimpsed earlier was a former member of the Special Boat Squadron, a man who, in a past life, had had considerable experience with many types of explosives. He was also a current member of the British resistance and had recently taken covert delivery of an Active Infrared Beacon. For the past two days, he’d hidden in the ranks of the track maintenance team, the purpose of his presence known only to three other trusted personnel. He knew the train was coming, and knew of its cargo, so when word had reached his ears, the former SBS operator was waiting.

  The explosive charge was big enough to rupture the running rail’s expansion joint but small enough not to warrant any immediate suspicion. As the French drivers clambered down to the track and disappeared out of sight, the resistance fighter had climbed up the locomotive ladder and attached the magnetic transmitter directly above the driver’s window. After giving a quiet nod to the other workers, they moved away, slowly and casually, melting into the surrounding darkness and heading for the distant maintenance sheds with their deep, concrete inspection pits.

  The cruise missiles were not stealthy, nor were they particularly fast, but they flew very low and were very hard to hit. All four weapons were now rumbling across the undulating Kent countryside, jinking left and right, up and down, their terrain-avoidance systems mapping the ground ahead, making corrections, homing in on the sweet music being played by the IR transmitter clamped to the cab of the distant locomotive.

  A lucky sweep from a military ground radar briefly painted the missiles, and a dated yet still-lethal Chinese-made PGZ-95 self-propelled gun opened up with its 25-millimetre cannon, but the rounds fell away behind the near-invisible missiles that were now flying at over 500 miles per hour towards their target. Obeying their internal programming, Hornet’s trailing weapons banked to the south and towards the nearby coast.

  On the ground an emergency call went out, and other caliphate SAM crews began bombarding the air with their search and targeting radars, desperate to stop the missiles that they could neither see nor engage effectively. Yet someone on the ground had interrogated the brief radar track. They crunched the data, the speed and course of the missiles, then sent out a general alert.

  Enemy aircraft inbound towards Eurotunnel Terminal.

  Henri scratched his head as he looked across the vast terminal. Way in the distance he could see the lights of the control tower, and around the periphery he saw a few more along the access roads. He saw people too, his crew, the soldiers, but no locals. It was as if everyone had just walked away.

  ‘Where d’you think they’ve gone?’ Jean-Michel asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he told his co-driver.

  ‘Lazy bastards.’

  ‘I’ll get on the radio, try to find out what’s going on.’

  Henri had taken less than ten steps when a mobile gun opened up on the hill behind him. He yelped with fear as the strobe-like gun barrels lit up the rail yard, the ripping sound of the outgoing rounds deafening. Henri cowered on the tracks, his hands clamped over his ears. The noise and light intensified as other guns surrounding the terminal opened up, and from beyond a nearby hill, he saw several missiles screeching into the air, their rocket motors glowing like Roman candles and leaving trails of thick white smoke. The noise was tremendous, and sirens wailed menacingly, compounding Henri’s terror. He felt a firm hand grab his arm and drag him to his feet.

  ‘Run, Henri!’

  He struggled up and followed Jean-Michel, the rail yard lit by the flickering strobes of the surrounding guns. His co-driver was leaping like a Springbok as he ran towards the vehicle embarkation platforms and Henri followed, arms and legs pumping, his breath ragged, watching the tracks, the gravel, the sleepers, a myriad of trip hazards that might mean the difference between life or death. The roar of gunfire was deafening now, the night lit up like a macabre firework display as outgoing rounds and missiles lanced through the sky. He knew he didn’t have long, seconds maybe, and he was still a hundred metres short of the closest platform.

  He saw Jean-Michel standing on it, his arm waving, his mouth screaming, his words drowned by the roar of guns, sirens, and missiles. And then Henri was there, scrambling onto the platform, being shoved across it and down onto the tracks on the other side. He fell to the gravel, cutting his hands, but he didn’t feel it. Jean-Michel dropped beside him and dragged him beneath the concrete lip of the platform. They pressed themselves against the wall, and Henri curled up tightly, his eyes squeezed shut.

  The gunfire intensified.

  Then the world exploded.

  Doolittle’s AGM-178 cruise missiles rocketed across the M20 motorway at an altitude of 60 feet and a speed of 492 miles per hour, unscathed and unstoppable. They were too low and too fast to be hit by anything the ring o
f anti-air defences scattered across the terminal could throw at them. The missiles roared across the perimeter fence and thundered past the windows of the Eurotunnel control tower, heading directly for the IR transmitter still pulsing its signal from Henri’s train—

  The weapons nosed into the target and exploded, a combined detonation of 4,000 pounds of high explosives that obliterated the train in a furious blast of heat and pressure that instantly engulfed the hundreds of missiles and bombs inside the train’s boxcars. The additional pulse of destructive energy annihilated what remained of the train into a billion shards of metal and wooden splinters that flew across the terminal in a lethal wave of death for hundreds of metres.

  Still inbound from the south, Hornet’s cruise missiles thundered across the coastline and the rooftops of Folkestone before nosediving towards the GPS coordinates that put their aiming point directly at the mouth of the Eurotunnel. The missiles dived into the fireball below and pulverised the tracks and marshalling yards, bringing down thousands of tons of earth and concrete and sealing one of the cross-channel tunnels.

  The explosions sent shock waves rolling across the countryside, causing vehicles to swerve and crash on the M20 motorway, and shattering half the windows in Folkestone. The flash of the explosion lit up the night sky for miles, and the tremor rippled across the channel to the coast of France.

  Those that saw it, trembled.

  Jean-Michel helped Henri climb up onto the shattered platform, and the older man stared open-mouthed at the giant crater gouged out of the ground for hundreds of metres. Thick smoke drifted on the air and the entire world looked like it was on fire. Of his train, there was nothing left.

  A short distance away, smoking on the platform, was a twisted shard of metal taller than Henri, and he realised then how lucky they’d been to survive. The tunnel they’d almost cleared was now blocked by a mountain of earth, and every signalling tower and gantry was scorched, buckled, or missing.

  ‘Look.’ Jean-Michel pointed, and Henri saw the terminal control tower in the distance, its upper floors ablaze. As for people, he couldn’t see another single living person, and given the tremendous force of the explosion, Henri wasn’t surprised.

  ‘You saved my life,’ he told Jean-Michel.

  They looked at each other, their faces blackened and bloodied, their clothes ripped. Jean-Michel didn’t answer, he just tapped his ear with a finger.

  ‘Can’t hear you, boss. I think my eardrums have burst.’

  Now it was Henri’s turn to act. He grabbed his saviour by the arm and steered him towards the other side of the platform. They jumped down, and Henri led the way towards the mouth of the surviving tunnel, stumbling and weaving through twisted metal and smoking craters. When they got there, he could see debris had partially blocked it, but not enough to stop two guys on foot.

  Jean-Michel tugged his sleeve. ‘Henri! Where are we going?’

  He leaned close to Jean-Michel’s ear and pointed to the gaping black cavern. ‘We take the service tunnel and get the hell out of here. We’re going home, Jean-Michel.’

  His co-driver nodded, relieved, thankful. ‘Sounds like a plan, boss.’

  They clambered over the rubble and into the tunnel, leaving the desolation behind them.

  They’d just survived the first shot of a new war, one about to erupt far to the north.

  23

  Battle Cry

  Twenty-seven miles off the rocky coast of Northern Ireland, the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy was turning back into the wind to recommence flight operations. Earlier, six E/A18 Growlers had taken off from its pitching, rain-lashed deck and were now orbiting over Scotland, ten miles behind the frontier. The Growlers were the navy’s Airborne Electronic Attack aircraft, and they flew fuel-efficient circles as they waited for the order to begin their assault, although theirs wouldn’t involve any ordinance. The Growlers’ job was to suppress enemy radar and disrupt communications, and their onboard scanned-array radars were already tracking targets to the south, both in the air and on the ground.

  Two hundred miles to the east of the Growlers, cruising at 46,000 feet above the stormy Atlantic Ocean, sixteen B-52 strategic heavy bombers were inbound to the battle zone. The venerable B-52, with over 60 years of operational service, remained a key strategic asset in the US Air Force’s weapons delivery inventory, and tonight they carried a formidable payload. The aircraft had lifted off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and flown north, crossing the Newfoundland coastline before heading out into the bleak expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Their target was the frontier itself, and their mission was to obliterate the defences and carve a path between Alliance and enemy territory at two specific points on the map. To accomplish their objectives, each aircraft carried a 70,000-pound payload of precision-guided bombs. Their operation was called Rolling Thunder, and the unsuspecting enemy troops along the frontier were about to find out exactly what that meant.

  Fifteen miles to the north of the frontier, US Army and British artillery units were racing from their jump-off points to their pre-planned firing positions. Small convoys of self-propelled guns and high-mobility artillery rocket systems rumbled at speed through deserted towns and villages, determined to stay one step ahead of the enemy surveillance drones and aircraft that might get a lucky break and pinpoint a target.

  The Alliance also possessed another invaluable surveillance platform in their inventory; the Mark One Eyeball. On the ground, members of the local resistance were observing military installations and their movements and sending that intelligence to Alliance forces via satellite transmitters. That same intelligence went out to the guided-missile cruisers nosing south into the Irish Sea, and coordinates were programmed into the ships’ targeting systems for their onboard Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles.

  Closer to shore, rolling through the dark waters of that same sea, two America-class amphibious assault ships stood ready to start their own operation. Their target was the flat, rural coastland just south of Whitehaven in enemy-held territory, and their aim was to seize the town and create a beachhead for the rest of a Marine Expeditionary Brigade. To accomplish that mission, the assault ships each carried twelve Osprey MV-22 transports, six F-35 Lightning fighters, four CH-53 heavy transport helicopters, eight Viper attack helicopters and six Seahawk utility choppers. Below decks, 3,000 US Marines waited impatiently to be ferried ashore. A smaller force would head for the nuclear power station of Sellafield, a few miles further south along the coast where the SEALs of DEVGRU were already ashore and waiting for the green light to engage.

  While hostile satellites were looking elsewhere, thousands of troops moved into the tunnels at Morpeth and Gretna. Like the soldiers of the Second Mass, and the other battalions of the King’s Continental Army, the spearhead battle groups were all British. Behind them, the Americans were sending two combat brigades through the tunnels in support, because the brutal fact was, the British didn’t have the numbers to win the fight. Over 1,700 English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish troops had been killed during the campaign to retake Ireland, and if the After-Action Reports were anything to go by, the liberation of England and Wales would be very costly. It was the Brits who would bleed first, and rightly so.

  As the clock wound down towards midnight, the Maglev shuttles hummed back and forth between Morpeth and Newcastle, Gretna and Carlisle, passing unseen and unheard deep beneath the vast frontier that stretched across the country. The troops they ferried made their way into the storm drains and tunnels that intersected with covert egress points above, moving quickly and quietly through the streets to their pre-planned RV points.

  In Newcastle, 15,000 troops had entered the city, many of them using the tunnels of the Tyne and Wear Metro to seize and hold strategic locations north of the river where the rooftops bristled with soldiers armed with Stinger and Starstreak man-portable anti-aircraft weapons, while other high-vantage points suddenly sprouted communications masts and satellite dishes.

  Below the rooftops, but still
enjoying good visibility across the city, drone operators already had their birds in the air, flying high and quiet, watching the streets to the south of the river. Down on the ground, mobile network infrastructure was disrupted, and the city’s telephone exchange was quietly infiltrated. Its trunking networks were rerouted through to a specialist team whose job it was to monitor the calls, to listen for curious, panicked, or traitorous voices, and silence them. From a communications perspective, the north of the city had been cut off from the outside world.

  To the east of the city, a team of operators from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment killed the bored soldiers guarding the entrance to the Siemens power station on Shields Road and took control of the city’s power supply. One by one, the streets across the river were plunged into darkness, allowing the troops to move faster to their rally points.

  As for the people of Newcastle, the nine o’clock curfew saw most of them at home. For those working into the night, the blustery rainstorm sweeping across the city kept them inside too, and the few vehicles that navigated the slick streets were distracted by the deteriorating driving conditions, unaware of the troops watching them from darkened buildings, alleyways, and car parks.

  Those that came into direct contact with allied troops, by luck or design, were both elated and terrified. They were told to go home, barricade their windows, and stay there. As for the others, who’d gratefully accepted the invaders’ 30 pieces of silver – like the police car that picked out a fast-moving squad of troops with its headlights – the outcome was very different. Instead of surrendering, the police officers had lit up the scene with their blues and twos while attempting to call it in over the radio. Both police officers had died in a hail of suppressed small-arms fire. Bodywork punctured, its windows shattered, the car was left in the street, doors open, the hissing engine leaking precious fluids, the bullet-riddled cops leaking the same. There was no time to hide the car and no longer any point.