by Glenn Cooper
“Nothing from the house!”
“Not the barn!”
“It’s coming from High Seat.”
“Taking fire! Man down!”
“I see them! They look military!”
“There’s a helicopter up on the fell!”
Raab turned to the Assistant Chief Constable, who had the look of a man who was going to be ill. “We’re sitting ducks,” Raab said. “We either turn tail or engage the hostiles.”
A large-caliber round passed through the van well over their heads but they hit the floor nonetheless.
“What shall we do?” the Assistant Chief Constable croaked.
Raab said coolly, “Why don’t you give the order to return fire while I call the MOD to see if I can find out what the hell is going on here.”
Admiral Sage became unhinged and began screaming into his phone. It was immediately apparent to Kenney that he had no knowledge of the unfolding operation.
“It’s got to be the British Army trying to take control of the facility,” Sage yelled, “but I don’t know how the hell they found out about it unless there’s a leak at the Pentagon. The SecDef is meeting with the Joint Chiefs right now to formulate our own plan to present to the President.”
Kenney interrupted him. “Admiral, I’ve seen four cops go down by sniper fire in the past minute. You think they’d be taking out their own guys?”
“If it’s not them, who is it?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Jesus Christ, Kenney! Don’t tell me you don’t know,” he shouted. “Find out! I’ve got to break into the SecDef’s meeting. Call me back.”
Daniel Lightburn knelt on the floor of his bedroom and parted the curtains of a rear-facing window. His son Andrew crawled across the rug until he was next to him, “Are they comin’?”
Daniel motioned for him to keep his head down, and said, “Someone’s comin’ but it’s nae th’ police. I just saw a copper get his head blowed off.”
“What should we do?”
“Are the women underground?”
“Yeah.”
“You and me are gonna defend th’ house. If they come in, we blast ’em. Kheelan and Douglas are still in th’ barn, reet?”
Andrew nodded.
“Good. The bastards are coming down the fells, so th’ barn’s a good place t’ take ’em on. You scared, son?”
“Wee bit.”
“Don’t be. If it’s our time, it’s our time. Simple as pie.”
Nancy and Greg were just north of Lightburn Farm when the shooting began. Nancy pulled Greg down onto the cold grass and watched in amazement as tracer rounds came in showers off the fells. She saw the two officers who’d turned them back go down from long-range fire. By habit, she started to reach for her weapon which wasn’t there.
She couldn’t understand why it was taking so long for the police to return fire but the order must have been given because all of a sudden the officers started defending themselves with semiautomatic pistol and rifle fire.
“Someone knows about the Library, Greg, and they’re trying to get to it.”
He seemed too scared to lift his head. She heard a muffled, “Who?”
“I hope to hell it’s not us.”
“You mean Area 51?” he said.
She ignored the question. “We’ve got to get Phillip and Will out of there.”
Will had spent all day chained to his bunk beside Phillip and Annie. Haven and Cacia had come down to deliver meals and Kheelan and Daniel had both paid surly visits to check their bonds. In the morning, while waiting for his turn in the lavatory, Will had seen one of the writers, the oldest one. The old man had looked through him as if he didn’t exist.
During the morning, he had tried to keep things light for Phillip, making jokes and small talk with him and Annie, but the boy seemed to grow more choleric every time he and Annie exchanged a laugh or a smile.
In the afternoon, Will pulled in his horns and stayed quiet. While Phillip and Annie napped, he stared at his watch and counted down the hours until 5 P.M.
“Did you hear that?” Will asked, looking at the ceiling.
Though muffled, he recognized the prolonged and irregular staccato of automatic weapons—a firefight.
“It’s started,” Annie said, sitting up. “They’re coming to rescue us.”
“You think?” Will said. “I don’t hear shotgun fire coming from the house.”
“What then?”
“Beats me, but I don’t like it. It’s almost five. I hope Cacia’s okay or we’re kind of screwed.”
Phillip tried not to look scared but Will could tell he was.
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” Will said. “We’re going to get out of this fine and we’re going to have some great stories for Mom.”
The police dived for cover as rounds crashed into car doors and tree trunks. The unarmed Community Patrol Officers could only cower and try to survive while the SWAT members engaged an unseen foe, blindly firing bursts up to the fell.
Inside the incident van, the Assistant Chief Constable shouted at the driver to move the vehicle up the road out of the line of fire but as the driver took his place at the wheel a round shattered the glass and his head.
Two MI5 men scrambled into the van and hugged the floor as they made their way to the Chief Constable who was on the carpet with his mobile at his ear.
“I’m getting shunted from office to office at the MOD. Nobody seems to know anything,” Raab bellowed.
“I’m awaiting a callback from our HQ,” the MI5 officer said. “They don’t know anything either.”
“I’ve requested emergency backup from all the SWAT units within a fifty-mile radius but it’s going to take a while.”
Another large-caliber bullet tore through the last piece of glass in the van.
The MI5 man crawled closer to Raab’s ear. “If we don’t get out of here we’re all dead.”
The loudest noise any of them had ever heard sent everyone at the farm onto their bellies, hands to ears. It was the sound of a million screams.
Three RAF F–35C Lightning IIs roared overhead a mere two hundred yards off the ground. They had approached at Mach 1.2 from the Stainmore Gap and plunged south directly over the twin fells of Nine Standards Rigg and High Seat.
In the sliver of a second of airtime spent over the farm, the lead plane had taken a hundred infrared and thermal ultrahigh-speed photos of the ground activity, and as the planes banked for a second pass, the images were already on command screens at their base at RAF Boulmer, Northumberland and at the Ministry of Defense in London.
Group Captain Mike Rogers at RAF Boulmer was on hands-free with the MOD in Whitehall. The Chief of the Defense Staff, General Sir Robert Sandage, stood over his imaging techs shoulder to shoulder with the Minister of Defense, George Cotting.
“I see perhaps a dozen hostiles on 337,” Rogers said, referring to the ID number of one wide-angle thermal image.
“I agree, yes,” Sandage replied. “They were dropped there somehow. Have you got anything on that?”
“Hang on, sir,” Rogers said. “We received a block of images in a burst.” At Whitehall, the line went quiet for a few seconds until Rogers came back on excitedly, “Look at Image 732!”
A tech in Whitehall called up the photo. It showed a helicopter hovering off the slope of High Seat fell.
“Whose is it?” Minister Cotting asked.
“We won’t see any markings from an overhead view,” Sandage said. “Run it through our database, would you, Major,” he calmly asked the tech.
The technician swiped his trackpad and called up an image-recognition program, which took seconds to find a match with one-hundred-percent probability. He projected it on the screen: the chopper was a stealth Mi–23/180.
Minister Cotting was the first to react verbally. “My God! Get me the Prime Minister.”
The black-clad ground troops moved methodically down the fell toward the farmhouse, untouched by the random SWAT
team fire and seemingly unperturbed by the RAF flyover. Two men who were ahead of the pack veered off toward the barn. They crept up to it and found the main door unlocked. One of them rolled it open just enough to enter and the other followed, his hand on the lead’s shoulder.
“Shoot!” Kheelan shouted at his nephew Douglas from behind a bale of hay.
Shotgun blasts shredded the intruders and peppered the barn door with holes.
Kheelan pumped another shell into the chamber and cautiously approached the bloody men.
“I never shot no one before,” his young nephew said, shivering.
“Watch th’ side door,” Kheelan said, ignoring the lad’s feelings.
He pushed his boot under one of the prone bodies. With a grunt he flipped it over and shined his torch on it.
He blinked a few times at what he saw, but all he managed to say was, “Fuckin’ hell!”
The Defense Minister stepped back to the command console, decidedly paler in complexion.
“What did the P.M. say?” General Sandage asked.
“He told us to engage.” From the bewildered expression on Cotting’s face, it was evident he hardly believed what was coming out of his own mouth. “How long will it take to get the SAS in there?”
“Too long,” Sandage said. “The 22 SAS Regiment is at Credenhill in Hereford. I’m all for sending them, but we can get 1 Lancs there faster. They’re in Yorkshire. In the meanwhile, I suggest we let the Lightnings have a go.”
Right after the Lightnings made a second pass over the farm, the squadron leader received an order on his headset from RAF Boulmer.
“This is Group Captain Rogers. I am ordering you to immediately engage and destroy the hostiles.”
The squadron leader banked left and with a catch in his voice asked Rogers to repeat the order.
When the order was confirmed, the pilot advised his wingmen to arm their weapons systems and assume attack mode.
Kenney was watching the aerial display through his scope and called out to his men, “They’re coming around again.”
There were a series of booms from 40mm cannon fire immediately followed by a huge thunderclap and bright explosion midway up the fell as the helicopter burst into flames and pitched into the hillside.
“This is unbelievable,” Kenney called out. “We’ve got a goddamn war going on!”
The Lightnings pursued the ground troops with machine-gun fire and each time a shower of tracers slammed into the ground the crouching police let out a collective cheer.
Nancy was too engrossed in the aerial display to feel the cold and wet from the ground seeping through her clothes. Greg started to rise to his feet to get a better look but she pushed him back down.
“Just pray they think we’re the good guys,” she shouted to Greg. “Otherwise, we’re going to get lit up.”
With every pass of the Lightnings, the invaders made an effort to train small-arms fire against them but the jets streaked by far too quickly. The air-to-ground assault froze the troops in their positions about a hundred yards from the farmhouse and there the battle stood for twenty minutes or more when a new sound was heard over Mallerstang, the persistent thump of rotor blades.
Five AW159 Wildcat Lynx helicopters emblazoned with Union Jacks swooped out of the gloam and landed on the road beside the police positions.
A full company of 1 Lancs of the First Battalion, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, flooded the field of battle. The British Army regulars stormed the perimeter of the farm, effecting a pincer movement to the north and south. They methodically encircled the remaining special ops troops and fifteen minutes later, the last of the black-clad intruders was dead.
During the firefight stray rounds whistled over Nancy’s and Greg’s heads but a minute after the last shots were fired, she rose to her knees to assess the situation.
It was clear to her that the British forces had succeeded in the operation—against whom was the question. In the chaos of the battle’s aftermath, as men were shouting for medics and the police were using bullhorns to warn the soldiers away from the farm buildings, Nancy decided to make her move. It was almost 6 P.M. but she still had her own mission to accomplish.
“Come on, Greg, let’s go. I think we can make it.”
She literally pulled him off the ground by his sleeve and tugged him through the dark field. Everyone was focused on the battleground and no one seemed to notice two civilians making a dash to an unassuming stone building a good distance from the farmhouse.
With fifty yards to go, Nancy tripped on something and went down hard. Greg helped her up, but looking back, she saw what had wrong-footed her, a piece of smoldering wreckage from the destroyed helicopter.
There was some kind of writing on it. In the dark, she couldn’t be sure but she asked Greg, a proud polyglot, if he could make it out. He stooped over it, scared to touch the charred piece of metal.
“Can you read it?” she asked.
“It’s Chinese!” he said. Then, with a voice bubbling with fear, he told her, “It says People’s Liberation Army.”
Chapter 26
Kenney was scanning the battlefield with his night scope, sweeping from one hot spot to another, giving a running commentary to Lopez and Harper while simultaneously listening to intercepted traffic on the police and SWAT team’s radio transmissions.
“Man alive, the army’s just beaten the tar out of the guys in the helicopter. It’s the power of numbers, boys. The Spartans may have been kick-ass fighters, but eventually the three hundred got reduced to zero by the Persians.”
He paused to listen to a relay between a SWAT commander and Incident Control.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Harper told his men. “They’ve just IDed two of the corpses. They’re PLA!”
“Palestinians?” Harper asked.
“No, you dumb shit! Not PLO. They’re Chinese!”
“What do the Chinese want here?” Lopez asked.
“It ain’t the Moo Shi Pork. It’s the damned Library. Looks like they know it’s here and looks like they’re trying to get ahold of it. I’ve got to call Groom Lake.”
Just then, something to the north of the farmhouse caught his attention. Two solitary figures were making their way to a small stone building on the periphery of the farm. He zoomed in. No uniforms. Civilians.
“Hey, Harper, see if Davis has his mobile turned on.”
Harper started tapping on his tablet.
“Yeah, it’s on.”
“Put it on a map.”
Harper followed the order and handed the device to Kenney.
The blinking yellow dot was approaching Lightburn Farm.
“Hello, Greg,” Kenney said, looking through his scope. “Nice to meet you, you son of a bitch. Now who’s your little friend?”
The wait was agonizing.
Even though the sounds were dampened, there was no mistaking that all hell was breaking loose above their heads. At each burst of gunfire Will gritted his teeth and pulled at his handcuff. What he hated most was his inability to shield Phillip. A father’s job was to protect his son and he hadn’t done that, had he? And even in the best of times, what kind of father had he been? The kind who spends his time living on his boat while his family fends for itself in another state. He was mad at himself but this wasn’t the time for self-analysis.
Instead, he was brimming with questions.
Where was Cacia?
Was the house under attack?
Had she been killed or wounded?
It was six o’clock. If Greg had made it to Pinn had he been able to navigate the mayhem and get to the meeting point?
The door to their detention room creaked open.
She was there, tears in her eyes.
Will said, “Cacia.”
“It’s horrible.” She could hardly stand.
Annie and Phillip seemed stricken by her agonized look.
“So many dead,” she said. “Why?”
“Who’s dead?” Wil
l asked. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“Some men came off th’ fell firing at t’ police and killing ’em. The police fired back. Then airplanes came and fired ont’ th’ fells. Then British Army men came by helicopter and killed all th’ men up on the fell. Kheelan and Douglas killed two of ’em in the barn. So much killin’! Why?”
“Undo my cuff,” Will said softly.
When she did so, he rose and held her tightly, letting her cry into his shoulder. Annie chose to look at the floor.
“Who were the men on the fells?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“All right, Cacia, here’s what we need to do. The fellow I told you about, the one who can help us—I don’t know if he was able to make it here, but we’ve got to see. Unchain Phillip and Annie and let’s go there.”
She stepped back and wiped her face with her palms. “Daniel and Kheelan are in a lather. There’s no telling what they’ll do. If they come down ’ere and find everyone missin’, I don’t know what’ll happen.” She pointed at Phillip and Annie. “It’s safer for th’ two of you to stay put. I’ll take you to the stairs, Will. We’ll see if your man’s here, but so ’elp me, if this was a trick t’ let th’ police in . . .” She took a pistol from a deep pocket in her sweater. It was old and small, a relic of the Second World War.
“It’s not a trick.”
She put the pistol back. “Okay then, let’s go.”
Will winked at Phillip for reassurance and followed her out. They climbed the stairs slowly, straining to hear if there was any sign of the police or the army on the other side of the trapdoor. It was quiet. At the top of the stairs, Will gripped the latch, turned it, and pushed against the hatch.
It lifted a few inches.
It was dark but he saw a pair of tasseled loafers a few feet away. Greg’s usual style.
Will threw open the hatch, letting it fall fully open on its hinges and climbed to the third from last step, high enough for his torso to be above floor level.
It was Greg, blinking at him in the dark.
“Is he there?” Cacia called out a few steps behind.