Exclusion Zone

by Exclusion Zone (retail) (epub)

  ‘Shit, the last time I saw him he was holding a pint.’

  The other ground crew were working on the new jet, checking and rechecking. One had his head under one of the engine covers, but alongside the spanners laid out in a neat row on the wing was his rifle.

  ‘I’m not sure how much I like this,’ Jane said. ‘It’s all getting a bit serious, isn’t it?’ She hesitated. ‘Sean? What if I can’t…’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘I was just thinking the same. Come on. We’ll be fine. We’ve trained for this for years. We won’t blow it.’

  Her eyes sought mine. She started to say something else, then shook her head and climbed the ladder to the cockpit.

  I followed her up, stowed my kit and connected my helmet. I left it lying on the seat, so that all I had to do if there was a call-out was put it on and fire the engines.

  We hurried back to the Q shed. For once, the TV screen was blank. The others sat or stood in silence, while Noel paced up and down the Ops Area, talking as much to himself as to the rest of us. ‘Keep yourselves topped up with food and fluids. You need to maintain your energy levels in case—’

  As he spoke, there was the dull crump of an explosion. A metallic voice echoed from the Tannoy. ‘Alert. Falcon call-out. Alert. Falcon call-out.’

  For a moment no one moved, then I dived for the alarm. The two red buttons set the sirens wailing all over the base. The amber button opened the doors of the Tempest shacks.

  As we sprinted for the door, the rising chorus of the sirens was punctuated by more explosions and the rattle of small-arms fire.

  A column of smoke, black even against the night sky, was billowing from one of the Tempest shacks on the far side of the runway. As I stood transfixed, my heart pounding, there was a second blast and another Tempest shack erupted in flames.

  There was another explosion in the sky above me and a burst of blinding white light. A flare drifted slowly down. In its harsh glare I saw a score of black-clad figures moving across the ground between the runway and the perimeter fence, firing as they advanced.

  Rees sprinted past, then Noel, struggling to keep pace with him. ‘Get to the jets,’ he said. ‘It looks like a Special Forces attack on the QRA aircraft.’

  I stood frozen to the spot.

  ‘Get moving,’ Noel yelled. ‘Now! Get airborne as fast as you can.’ He disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.

  Tracer slashed through the darkness as our own ground troops returned fire. There was the rattle of machine guns and the crack of rifles. Rounds tore at the ground around me and ricocheted from the walls of the Q shed. Still I stood frozen.

  ‘Sean, come on!’ Jane dragged at my arm, breaking the spell, and I ran with her, stooping and dodging towards the ramp.

  Ahead and to the left of the ramp I glimpsed a huddled group of figures. There was a flash and a roar, and the front of the Q shed, where I had been standing barely five seconds before, disintegrated. A giant bubble of flame expanded outward and then burst in a shower of burning fragments. A corner post and the tall steel safe stood semi-upright in the wreckage, all that was left of the front half of the building. The rest had disappeared.

  I saw figures writhing among the debris and heard terrible, unearthly screams. Then there were fresh bursts of automatic fire and I saw small, dark shapes lobbed through the air.

  ‘Down!’ I threw myself forward, flattening Jane beneath me as the grenades detonated and I heard the vicious whine of shrapnel shredding everything in its path above me. I took a ragged breath, shouted ‘Up and move!’ and ran for the ramp.

  Only the terror of what lay behind us drove me into the dark entrance, not knowing what was waiting there. I threw myself flat again and rolled sideways to the wall, but there was no answering gunfire. Scrambling to my feet, I sprinted up the slope, the breath tearing from my lungs. I paused for a second in the shadows at the top of the ramp and Jane flattened herself against the wall beside me.

  The Tempest shack was in darkness, but there was a dull, red glow from the jet’s already rumbling engines. Figures were huddled at either side of the entrance. As I watched, they began firing at the unseen enemy. Fire ripped back at them almost at once. The jet’s needle nose glinted in the light of the tracer rounds burning through the air. I had to fight the urge to bury my face in Jane’s shoulder.

  I waited for a lull in the firing. ‘Ready? Go!’ We burst out of cover together, sprinting across the twenty-yard gap. I saw a gun barrel swing towards us and screamed ‘Don’t shoot!’ then dived for the entrance to the shack as firing erupted again to my left.

  A strong hand gripped my arm and pulled me further into cover. ‘The jet’s ready to roll,’ Taff said. Instead of a socket wrench, he was still gripping a rifle. ‘The faster you get airborne the better.’

  ‘The tower?’

  He nodded. ‘Under attack but still functioning. We’re hard-pressed here though.’

  As if in confirmation, there was the whine and blast of a mortar shell. We both flinched. ‘Get up there and help us out,’ he said. ‘When you’re ready, give me the nod and we’ll give you what covering fire we can.’

  Jane was already strapping herself in her seat as I scrambled up the ladder. Tension made my fingers clumsy as I tried to strap myself in. I forced myself to go slower, even though the firing seemed to get closer with every passing second.

  There was no time for preflight checks. We’d just have to chance it. If we waited to complete them, we’d never get airborne at all. The Argentine Special Forces – if that’s what they were – had already destroyed two of the Tempest shacks and were closing fast on this one.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Hell, yes,’ Jane said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  I gave a thumbs up to Taff, pressed the button to lower the canopy and pushed the throttles forward, holding the jet on the brakes.

  The engines began to roar. I saw Taff’s lips move as he shouted to the other crewmen and ground troops. As the canopy warning siren sounded, they exploded out of cover, pouring fire towards the enemy. I saw Taff raise his rifle to his shoulder and squeeze off two carefully aimed bursts. Then his body was punched backwards by a burst of automatic fire. Fibres blasted from his clothing hung in the air as he slumped and fell directly in front of the jet. He twitched and lay still.

  There was no way he could have survived, but it was still the hardest thing I had ever had to do. There was a lump in my throat as I released the brakes. We rolled forward a few yards, then there was a soft thud and the jet stopped. Taff’s body was jammed against the wheels.

  I rammed the throttles forward. The nose dipped and the engines screamed as the afterburners kicked in, and flame torched out of the back of the jet. The twenty-ton aircraft shuddered, jarred and then shot forward, crushing Taff’s body beneath its wheels.

  The sound of firing was lost in the din of the engines, but I saw the flashes of tracer – bright holes punched in the darkness – cutting through the night towards us.

  There was a sound as brittle as a hammer on glass and a bullet smashed into the fuselage a few inches below the canopy. I heard another, deader sound as a second bullet bit into the aircraft’s metal skin behind and below me. I held my breath, praying silently.

  I watched the runway blurring as we gathered speed, trying not to look at the jagged white lines of tracer sweeping nearer to us. The tower was blacked out, but in the faint glow from the radar screens I could see that several of its windows had been shattered.

  Jane was calling the ascending speeds, her voice cracking with tension. ‘Eighty knots… One hundred… One twenty…’

  The beam of tracer was almost upon us.

  ‘One fifty…’

  ‘Rotating.’ I hauled back on the stick. The microsecond’s delay in the aircraft’s response seemed endless, but then the nose wheel lifted and the landing gear came off the ground with a thud. I jabbed the buttons. ‘Gear travelling… and the flaps.’

  We shaved the perimeter fen
ce, climbing due east. The enemy fire fell away, then ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

  ‘Fortress, this is Falc—’ The words froze on my lips as the Missile Approach Warner erupted. Directly ahead of us there was a flash of light and the hot, dirty-white streak of a missile. The Argentinians were taking no chances. A patrol was lying up, aligned on the centre line of the runway, ready to shoot down any jets that escaped the ground attack. There was no more vulnerable moment in which to attack an aircraft than in the few seconds immediately after take-off.

  ‘Flares! Flares!’

  Jane responded instantly. Flares burst from the wingtip dispensers. I cast a despairing glance at the altimeter and airspeed counter. We had neither the height nor the speed, but I had no choice. I threw the jet into a hard left turn. As the G-force pinned me back in my seat, crushing me with my own weight, I heard Jane’s helmet rattling against the side of the canopy. I felt the G-pants inflating, clamping my thighs like a vice to force the blood back up my body.

  The jet slipped sideways and down, the wing slicing perilously close to the ground. I tasted bile in my mouth and fought down the wave of nausea. I held the turn even as my vision faded to grey. I knew the danger signals. I ground my teeth and grunted with the effort of forcing the greyout away. The grey and white world flickered for a moment and then colour flooded back in.

  I held the turn another second, then levelled the wings and looked behind, forcing my head round. There was a kink in the trail of the missile as it switched course to track us. I pushed the stick forward, forcing the jet even closer to the ground. We were skimming over the banks of peat, so low that I imagined the stems of tussac grass whipping the underside of the fuselage.

  The Tempest’s engine intakes had been modified with radar absorbent material to make them less visible, but there was nothing I could do to mask the heat of the jet pipes from an infrared seeker head. If I throttled back to lose the heat signature that the missile was tracking, we would crash. We were too low even to manoeuvre. If I tried another steep turn, the wingtip would spike the ground and catapult us into oblivion.

  I forced the throttles all the way forward, but the missile, still accelerating, was flashing towards us as if we were stationary. ‘Flares! Flares! Flares!’

  The klaxons were still shrieking their warning and my mouth was already framing the word ‘Eject’ when I saw an outcrop, a stone run white against the black of the peat.

  ‘Flares!’ I nudged the stick right and risked touching the ground with the wing as I threw the jet round the outcrop. The grey of the wingtip and the boulders just beneath me seemed to merge, so close that I could see no space between them. Then a gap opened, widening as we swung round the outcrop.

  The missile trace disappeared from sight behind me, lost for an instant in the white-hot glow of the flares. A moment later a massive fireball erupted in our wake. There was no sound, only the blinding flash burning into my retina. The klaxons died back into silence.

  I counted to three. Then I let out a long breath. My gloves were already sodden with sweat. ‘All right, Jane?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her voice was as shaky as mine.

  ‘Then let’s get those bastards.’

  I pulled the stick back, climbing to five thousand feet, then banked the jet and began a shallow dive back towards the airfield. ‘Arming weapons.’

  The Sidewinders under the wings were heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, useless for ground attack, but the Tempest was also carrying six CRV-7 pods under the fuselage. I had never even fired them on a range, but I had simulated their use enough times, and I still remembered the words of the instructor at the briefing where they were introduced: ‘Air-to-surface missiles, gentlemen, with fragmentation warheads optimised for low-level attacks on light armour and soft targets…’

  I aligned the jet on the eastern end of the runway and began raking the ground short of it for the aiming marks I had memorised as the missile was launched. I had to make the first shot count. If I missed, I’d be giving the Argentinians another free shot at us; I wasn’t convinced they would miss a second time.

  I rammed the throttles forward again into full combat power and increased the angle of the dive. The vibrations from the screaming engines rattled the fuselage and shook my hands on the stick. The Argentine patrol was invisible, somewhere in the wasteland of peat and tussac grass.

  I saw my markers, a solitary boulder and a small kidney-shaped pond. The missile had been launched from the midpoint between them. I lined up the sights, staring into the head-up display as the Death Dot and the aiming point moved together with agonising slowness.

  The Missile Approach Warner clamoured again and a streak of flame and smoke shot upwards. ‘Flares!’

  Although there was little chance of the SAM homing successfully in a head-on shot, I threw the jet left and right and the missile flashed past.

  I held the dive until the last minute, my finger poised on the trigger. As I fired, I hauled the stick back and we bottomed out and began to climb. The missile blasted away underneath us, in a trajectory calculated by the Tempest’s computers. It ended in a blinding flash. The ground seemed to dissolve as the fragmentation warhead shredded everything in its path.

  ‘Keep checking down and back,’ I said, but there was no warning from the klaxons, no sign of another missile launch. The boulder and the small pond were still there, but between them was a massive smoking crater.

  I shifted my gaze forward again, already thumbing the radio as I looked out across the airfield. The blast of explosions and the arcs of tracer still lit up the night, counterpointing the constant glow from burning buildings. ‘Falcon Three to Fortress, do you read?’

  ‘Roger, Falcon Three, we’re still on the air. We seem to be holding them, but heavy machine-gun and mortar fire are causing us big problems. Stand by for a Forward Air Controller.’

  A moment later a new voice came up. ‘Falcon Three, this is Wingback.’ I seemed to recognise the voice, but was too preoccupied with the detail of what he was saying to pursue it. ‘Enemy heavy machine gun is four hundred yards north-west of QRA area. Make your attack run over the top of the tower from the south-east and we’ll guide you on to it.’ Despite the detonations underpinning the sound of his voice, he could have been discussing a cricket score. ‘Marker for our position is red smoke. The target is approximately one hundred and twenty yards from us.’

  I circled wide around the base. There were blazes flaring all around the airfield, among the smaller flashes of continuing ground fire. I glanced out of the other side of the jet towards the mountains. There were specks of fire by the Rapier missiles sites on the nearest peaks. It was an ominous sign. If the Argentinians were planning to launch an aerial assault, the sites were prime prior targets.

  I pushed the thought away as I banked the jet around for the attack run. I forced the throttles back into combat power and we rocketed down towards the airfield. ‘Weapons armed.’

  I aligned the jet on the dark mass of the tower. As we flashed over it, ground fire stabbed at us out of the night. I forced myself to ignore it, concentrating only on the cone of my forward vision, framed by the intersecting lines of the head-up display.

  The radio crackled. ‘We see you, Falcon Three. Smoke on now.’

  For a moment I saw nothing, then there was a smudge of red ahead of us. I adjusted course slightly, flying down the tunnel of ground fire.

  The Death Dot and the aiming point in the head-up display intersected at the base of a column of tracer. I pulled the trigger and a stream of missiles leapt from the pods.

  I hauled on the stick, sending the jet soaring up and away to the left. I glanced behind and saw the glint of the reflector strips on the back of Jane’s helmet as she looked down and back. There was a fierce double flash from the ground and the line of tracer abruptly winked out.

  ‘Beauty,’ she shouted. ‘Right on the money.’

  I was already reaching for the radio. ‘Wingback, next target?’

 
; ‘Mortar on the low ridge three-quarters of a mile north-north-west of us. It’s maybe ten degrees left of the end Tempest shack – or what’s left of it. Come in on that bearing and we’ll put down two lines of tracer fire to intersect on the target.

  ‘Okay, Wingback, here we go.’

  ‘Fuel’s okay. Captions are clear. Go for it, Sean,’ Jane said. ‘Let’s make it three out of three.’

  I could feel sweat soaking my flying suit, but the adrenalin was holding exhaustion at bay. I felt hyper-alert, almost omnipotent.

  As we flashed in over the base we were again greeted by a blizzard of ground fire from the enemy positions. ‘Mark those sites, Jane, we’ll go for them when we’ve seen this mortar off.’

  Even the sight of a handful of rounds punching up through the wing didn’t faze me. The warning panel stayed clear; there was only superficial damage. As we hurtled towards the still-burning Tempest shack, I saw two dotted green lines stitched across the darkness. They wavered, then held firm, intersecting on the dark outline of a low ridge.

  I waited for the lock on the target, holding the jet level despite the temptation to yank the stick as fire slashed towards us from the ridge. The dot on the screen slid on to the aiming point. I jabbed the trigger and hauled the jet into a screaming turn.

  Once more there was a grunt from Jane as she fought against the G-force. There was a pause and then we both saw a blinding flash of light below us.

  The laconic voice of Wingback came straight through on the radio. ‘On target, Falcon Three, enemy troops appear to be falling back from the tower, but they’re still holding a line north and west of the QRA area. We’re ready to push out, but any fire you can bring to bear on them would be appreciated. We’ll give you more smoke to mark our positions.’

  The tower cut in. ‘Falcon Four is also available, Falcon Three; co-ordinate with him.’

  I had not even seen Rees and Noel get airborne and I scanned the sky anxiously for a sign of them.