At a distance of fifty miles, the dome-shaped saucer began to dominate the skyline. It was plowing inexorably forward at approximately two hundred miles an hour, the embodiment of certain doom.
Faisal continued to lead them straight toward the obsidian tower that marked the prow of the destroyer until, at a distance of twenty-five miles, he banked away to the right. Group by group, the rest of the jets followed suit.
“Ten more minutes, Teacher,” Khalid radioed to Reg. “In ten minutes we find out if the Americans were successful. I don’t think the alien ship will reach Usfan before then.”
“I agree,” Reg said, “but that’s not going to leave us much of a cushion.”
“Not to worry,” Miriyam said. “I already did the math. We have twenty minutes until they get to Usfan.”
“Which means we have a little more than ten minutes to bring down the destroyer before it reaches Mecca,” Reg pointed out. He studied the massive alien ship before adding another thought. “Even with their shields down, our missiles might not be enough.”
“Luckily we are not the only ones here,” said Remi, the Ethiopian pilot they’d met the previous afternoon. “More and more jets are coming every minute.” It was true. There were at least a dozen groups of fighters in the area, but they looked pathetically small compared to the advancing city destroyer.
“There is no reason to worry,” Edward said, trying without success to mask the fear in his voice. “Today will be like the story of David and Goliath. We’ll find a way to knock down this giant with our small weapons.”
Yossi couldn’t let the opportunity to needle Edward slip past. “David was a Jewish hero, you realize.”
Edward laughed. “Yes, I know. But he’s like the Palestinians. We used to fight your Israeli armored jeeps with only bricks and stones.”
“And look how successful you were,” said one of the Iraqis. “You had to run away and live in Jordan.”
After a long pause, Edward spoke again. “You’re right. But today will be different. Today, the little guys are going to win.”
Pondering Edward’s prediction, the pilots maintained a tense radio silence for the next few minutes, hoping to hear from the Americans. At exactly 6:15, the moment the message was scheduled to arrive, the radio erupted with shouting. It was not the Americans; it was Faisal. He began issuing a long string of orders, speaking only in Arabic. The Saudi jets that had been flying at the rear of the formation accelerated past the international contingent to join the rest of their countrymen.
“Would someone care to translate?” Tye asked. “What’s going on?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Sutton grumbled. “They’re preparing to attack.”
Reg could see that Sutton was right. Faisal wasn’t going to allow the Americans any extra time, even though the destroyer was still miles from Usfan. As the Saudi F-15s positioned themselves, Faisal monopolized the airwaves, calling to his men in an urgent but controlled voice.
Reg thought a premature strike would be disastrous on two counts. Not only would it be a waste of scarce firepower; it might also draw the scarablike attacker ships into the air. If their shields were still operational, they would make short work of the few hundred jets that had massed for the counterattack. He shouted into his radio, trying to get the Saudi commander’s attention and urging him not to jeopardize this last, slim hope of bringing down the enemy ship.
Faisal ignored the warning and continued speaking to his men in the rhythmic, hypnotizing voice of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Although Reg couldn’t understand the individual words, he knew Faisal was exhorting his pilots to bravery and self-sacrifice, preparing them for martyrdom.
“I’d just like to point out,” Sutton said quietly, “that now would be an excellent time for us to get the hell out of here.” Ever since the Saudi watchdog planes had moved forward to join the attack formation, members of the international squadron had been quietly peeling away and flying toward their home countries. Nearly a third of them were gone. “Anyone out there interested in heading for Kuwait?”
No one answered. Everyone who was going to run had already done so. As Faisal’s speech built in intensity, Reg and the others kept their ears open, hoping to receive word from the Americans before the Saudis launched their attack.
“Khalid Yamani, can you hear me?” Reg called. “You’ve got to convince him to wait. Tell Faisal to give it five more minutes.”
There was no reply.
As Faisal’s speech reached a crescendo, he shouted a question to his men, and they responded with a roaring war cry. Then the entire squadron turned as one and broke into an attack run. They dived at a steep angle, picking up speed as they streaked toward the their target, the destroyer’s obsidian tower. To Reg, it was a horrible, incomprehensible sight. He sensed that a hundred men were about to give up their lives in exchange for nothing.
“Khalid, if you can hear me, break off,” Reg said desperately. “Get out of there before they launch their attack ships. Save yourself for the real battle.” To Reg’s surprise, Khalid answered.
“Too late, Teacher,” he said in a calm but tremulous voice. “Together, we will either shoot these infidels down, or we will die in glory. All things are in the hands of Allah.”
“The words of a doomed man,” said Miriyam.
Reluctantly, Reg admitted to himself that she was right. There was nothing more he could do for Khalid. “Let’s start climbing,” he told the others as he pulled back on his controls. “As soon as they launch, we’re going to have company up here.”
“Alien fighters?” Edward asked.
“And plenty of them.”
As Reg turned, he couldn’t resist taking one last glance back at the diving squadron. When he did, he noticed something out of place. One of the Saudi jets lagged behind the others before turning sharply in a new direction. Reg thought he could guess who was piloting the rogue jet.
“Commander Faisal,” he said, “it looks as if you have broken formation. Where are you headed?”
There was no answer. The squadron continued to plunge toward the mammoth alien airship.
Reg shouted, “I repeat: Saudi commander, you have broken formation. You are currently running in the wrong direction.”
This time Faisal answered. “Do not interfere!” he screamed. A moment later, he had gathered himself and continued in a calm voice. “I’m afraid you are mistaken, major. You must be watching the wrong plane.”
Reg stared down at the tiny shape of the wayward F-15 and decided to bluff. “Negative, Faisal. I’m directly above you. Close enough to read your wing markings. You are running away from the engagement.”
After a moment of hesitation, Faisal answered. “Stay out of this, Cummins! I am not running. I am… I am positioning myself to observe the attack.”
“Admit it, Faisal!” Reg shouted. “You’re saving yourself because you know what’s going to happen to those men. Order them to it break off.”
“Damn you, Cummins, stay quiet! Cooperate with me and you will be rewarded.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I will personally shoot you out of the sky.”
Reg, boiling with anger, resisted the impulse to swoop down on Faisal and unload every piece of ammunition he had aboard his aircraft. Instead, he sucked in a deep breath then growled into his headset. “I wouldn’t advise it. You’d only be wasting another one of your king’s planes.”
Faisal scoffed. “King Ibrahim is no longer a factor. The Saudi Air Force is now completely under my command and it is my will that—”
Reg cut him off and switched back to the previous frequency. “Khalid, look around. Faisal’s gone. He knows you’re doomed and he’s saving himself. Get out of there now!”
Khalid and several of his fellow pilots began speaking to one another and quickly realized that Reg was right—Faisal had deserted them. Khalid swung into a turn, shouting instructions in Arabic.
“What’s he saying?” Reg demanded.
Edward translated. “He’s calling on the other pilots to follow him.”
Only twenty of them did. They wheeled out of the attack formation and began looping around to rejoin Reg’s squadron just as the Saudis fired on the destroyer. They unloosed a huge barrage of Sidewinders and Sparrows, which sliced through the late-afternoon sky, all headed for the same target area. Taken together, the missiles carried enough explosive charge to flatten a medium-sized city, but when they came to within a quarter mile of the destroyer, they all detonated harmlessly in midair. The protective shield was still in place. It became visible momentarily as it rippled gently under the impact. Shouting and cursing, the Saudi pilots fought to turn their planes in time to avoid crashing into it.
A moment later, Reg’s fear became an ugly reality. A large portal suddenly appeared near the top of the gleaming black tower. Where a moment before there had been only a smooth, polished surface, there was now a gaping orifice leading onto a wide tunnel. Within seconds, hundreds of alien attacker ships darted into the open air like hornets spewing from a disturbed nest. They scattered in every direction, but the main force shot down the face of the tower to engage the Saudi squadron. In the dogfight at the base of the tower, the Saudi jets were outnumbered five to one by their shielded enemies. The slaughter was under way.
“Where are those damned Americans?” Reg growled as he watched the scarab fighters annihilate the Saudi forces.
Khalid and his small band of renegades were racing toward the international pilots’ position. A group of perhaps fifty aliens fell in behind them, knitting through the air fluidly in their distinctive over-and-under formation.
“Should’ve headed for Kuwait when I had the chance,” Sutton said when he saw them coming.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Reg shouted. “Head west, directly into the sun. Now!”
“What about Khalid? Shouldn’t we help them?”
“No. There’s nothing we can do. Follow me!”
The sun was just above the horizon but still blindingly bright. As Reg flew toward it, a strange clicking disturbance sounded in his earphones. Fearing that it was the sound of alien homing devices, he ordered his fellow pilots to shed altitude and pick up speed. Then, like a trumpet blast, Thomson’s voice burst onto the airwaves.
“They’re down!” he bellowed. “The shields are down! The Americans are telling everyone to attack immediately, before they go back up!” All at once, Reg recognized that the clicking sounds were Morse code.
“Thomson, are you sure the message is accurate?”
“Yes, yes! We’re getting reports of damage to the alien destroyers. It’s not just the Americans. Everybody’s hitting them.”
A lethal smile crossed Reg’s lips, and his fear evaporated. His hands, which had been shaking, steadied themselves. He knew that the absence of the shields was no guarantee of victory, but he relished the idea of meeting the aliens in a fair fight. A moment before he whipped his Tornado into a sharp turn, he spoke calmly to the others. “You heard the man, ladies and gentlemen. It’s party time.”
As the international pilots hurried to defend Khalid and his besieged cohort, there was a flash of green light in the distance and cheering on the airwaves. One of the jets had scored the first kill against an alien attacker.
“Bloody amazing!” said Tye. Hearing that the shields were down was one thing, but actually seeing one of the invincible aliens bite the dust was quite another. Suddenly the pilots were like a pack of wolves with the taste of blood in their mouths. They jammed their controls forward and rocketed toward the conflict.
“They’re on our tails,” Khalid yelled. “Help us!”
“Fly directly into the sun!” Reg shouted. “We’re headed straight toward you.”
“Where are you? I can’t see you!”
“That’s the point, Khalid. You can’t see us, and, hopefully, neither can they. When I give the order, I want you and your boys to break into a vertical climb. Straight up, you got that?”
The F-15 Eagle flying just behind Khalid’s was vaporized by one of the alien pulse blasts. “Yes, yes, I understand. But hurry!” Khalid’s group continued to fly blind, weaving and jigging, as the alien contingent behind picked off one after another of them.
“Almost… almost,” Reg repeated calmly. Then, when the nose of his plane was less than a mile from Khalid’s, he gave the order.
“STRAIGHT UP! NOW!”
Dogged pursuers, the alien ships followed the Saudis upward, losing speed and exposing their undersides as they did so. Without realizing it, they’d lined themselves up like ducks at a shooting gallery. They never saw the international pilots coming. In a matter of seconds, more than half of the alien column was destroyed. A flash of jade green light accompanied each kill.
“Go in groups,” Miriyam shouted. “Hunt them down.”
It was good advice, but Reg knew he was good enough to be a group of one. After assigning Tye and Sutton to chase down one of the nearest alien craft, he set his sights on another. He quickly tucked himself behind the targeted ship and began angling for a proper shot. The alien pilot ignored him, turning to attack a pair of Iraqis. It was obvious to Reg that whoever—or whatever—was flying the attacker, no adjustments in tactics were being made to compensate for the loss of the shields.
“Not much of a thinker, I see,” said Reg, launching a Skyflash missile. It struck the alien ship squarely, blowing it to jade-green smithereens. It was the precise shade of green that Reg had seen cast on Jerusalem moments before the city was destroyed. Must have something to do with their energy source, he noted.
All around him, other pilots were bringing down alien ships. He heard the Ethiopian, Remi, shout, “Now go back to hell where you came from,” a second before he destroyed the alien he was chasing. When Miriyam and Yossi fired simultaneously at the ships they were following, two more green flashes lit up the sky.
“And Israel scores two!” Yossi shouted like the announcer at a soccer game.
“Saudi pilot,” Edward warned, “you have an enemy to port.”
Reg looked above him and saw that Khalid was in trouble again. He responded at once, climbing to put himself in position. But before he arrived, Khalid had executed a wing-over roll, doubled back on his enemy, and destroyed him.
In his steady, workhorse way, Sutton was destroying alien ships and keeping Tye out of harm’s way. There was nothing spectacular or daring in the way he operated his plane, but his pursuits were patient and relentless. Rather than use up his supply of missiles, he was doing all his damage with the Tornado’s 27mm cannons. He didn’t call out his kills as many of the others were doing, choosing instead to go quietly about his business.
Tye, on the other hand, a mechanic who had never fired a missile before, began celebrating loudly after one of his missiles connected with an enemy target. It didn’t matter to him that he’d used up nearly all his ammunition, or that the attacker he’d destroyed wasn’t the one he’d been aiming at. Just killing one of the bastards was enough. He went on whooping and cheering until Reg reminded him that the battle was only beginning.
In Hebrew, Farsi, Turkish, English, Amharic, Yoruba, and several dialects of Arabic, the pilots cursed and taunted their nonhuman enemies. As the last few alien ships were being hunted down, Reg took a moment to watch the other pilots at work. One of the Iraqi pilots, he noticed, was especially effective, gunning down one attacker after another.
“This one is the bread!” the Iraqi yelled as he dropped his MiG-29 behind his next target.
“I think you mean toast,” Tye corrected him.
“Yes, the toast!” the boyish-sounding Iraqi agreed as he unleashed a volley of armor-piercing shells. “This one is the TOAST!” The large-caliber bullets ate away at the attacker’s shell until it exploded into a messy green blur of debris.
Once the last attacker had been shot down, the group turned its attention back to the city destroyer, which was moving inexorably forward, undeterred by
the loss of its shields. It had already swallowed Usfan in its shadow and was closing in on Mecca. If the ship could not be shot down, or driven away from the city very quickly, hundreds of thousands of lives would be lost, and one of the earth’s most important cities would be obliterated.
As Reg led the way toward the front end of the city-sized craft, he watched the bombing attacks already under way. A group of MiGs was circling the crown of the destroyer’s domed roof completely unopposed, strafing and bombing at will. Their missiles gouged deep craters into the armored surface, but it was not nearly enough. The ship was so large that the damage was inconsequential.
As Reg studied the problem, some of the pilots in his group raced ahead and fired a salvo of missiles. They struck squarely and caused spectacular explosions, but the problem was the same. The exterior shell was not penetrated, and the destroyer continued to move calmly forward as placidly as a bull moves through a swarm of flies. It only decelerated when its prow approached the northern outskirts of Mecca and began to seal off the sky over the crowded city.
“It’s impossible,” Sutton announced with characteristic pessimism. “We just don’t have the firepower.”
“He’s right. At this rate, it’ll take us a week to knock this thing down.”
“Only a few minutes until it fires on the city. We’ve got to do something quickly.”
“Let’s use everything we’ve got, then go and find some more weapons.”
“Where are we going to find them?” Miriyam asked. “All the bases are destroyed. I’ve only got two Sidewinders and a Python left.”
Remi, the Ethiopian pilot, suggested using the last of their armaments against the skyscraper-like tower. “It looks like a control tower,” he pointed out. “If we can damage it, they won’t be able to steer. Even if they fire on Mecca, maybe they won’t be able to go on to the next city.”
Behind Reg, the team raced toward the leading edge of the megasaucer and watched its seventeen-mile-wide shadow darken the city below. There was bad news waiting for them when they arrived. Remi’s idea, although logical, wasn’t working. A group of Egyptian and Sudanese jets were skirmishing with a swarm of the scarablike attackers, and firing on the tower without effect. The structure, anchored into a wide dimple in the ship’s surface, was made of a material that absorbed the missiles’ impact without breaking apart.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 61