“Transmission for you, sir…!” An ex-USAF loadmaster shouted over the howl of the engines, tapping Thorne on the shoulder and handing him a miked headset connected to a wall jack nearby by a long, spiralled lead. The Hindsight CO snugged the gear over his head, adjusted the mike in front of his face, and spoke for a few minutes.
“About fucking time…!” He snarled nervously as he lowered the microphone stalk momentarily and nodded his thanks to the loadmaster.
“What’s happening?” Eileen asked loudly beside him.
“Just got notification from Nick that those squadrons of fighters we’ve been expecting finally fucking turned up. They got a call advising they’re expected in within the next ten minutes or so… thank you very fucking much, Air Chief Marshal!” He shook his head angrily at the poor timing of it all. “Could’ve been a bit more use to us by turning up yesterday…!”
Eileen reached up and rested a hand on his shoulder in support, seeing more in his stressed reactions than he’d have liked, had he known that his agitation was so visible. Thorne lifted the microphone level with his lips once more and continued to receive a running commentary of the battle from the bunker control room down on the ground.
At almost 28 square kilometres in area and aligned roughly north-south, Eday was the ninth largest island in the Orkney chain that was a narrow, irregularly-shaped landmass approximately twelve thousand metres long. Comprised predominantly of heather-covered moors, the island’s main economies consisted of limestone quarrying and the extraction of peat, and had never carried a population much greater than a hundred and twenty. It was known for its varieties of seabirds, and as the site of Carrick House, where the pirate John Gow had been captured in 1633. There were also a number of historic, chambered cairns scattered about the island, and toward its northern end was the standing stone site known as the Stone of Setter. There was little else on the island save for one or two small settlements and an observation post for air defence… little except for the covert installation known as ‘Alternate’ where Trumbull and Davies were now bringing their fighters in to land.
Alternate was little more than a concrete runway approximately 2,000 metres long running exactly north-south. Almost in the very middle of the island, the strip — although substantially longer — had been constructed in the exact position as that of grass runway 18/36 of Eday’s Realtime ‘London Airport’ (so named due to its proximity to the nearby Bay of London). There were few facilities to break the otherwise featureless landscape: just two large, circular hardstand areas, one or two large supply huts and an underground fuel tank, all constructed near the runway’s southern end.
Still under construction as Hindsight had arrived at the end of June, and only completed in the last few weeks, it’d been designed to provide an emergency landing strip should the main runway at Hindsight be disabled for any reason. Large sections of camouflage netting lay across the strip’s length when not in use, making it invisible to the prying eyes of enemy reconnaissance to all intents and purposes. At first warning of the impending raid, the skeleton ground crew stationed there on rotating shifts had commenced clearing the netting from the strip in preparation for the jets.
Davies brought the Raptor in from the north to touch down at about the same time Trumbull was settling the Lightning into a vertical landing over one of the southern hardstands. The six-man crew were well-trained and were already prepared with fuel hoses and two trolleys; one carrying replacement missiles while the other carried large crates of 20- and 25mm ammunition along with equipment to reload both fighter’s guns. It took three men to lift one AMRAAM at a time between them and secure it to the launch rails beneath the Lightning’s wings, each 3.6m long weapon’s weight of 150kg no easy lift. At the same time, two men controlled refuelling while the sixth turned a crank handle on the second trolley and replenished the empty ammunition tray at the rear of the F-35’s cannon pod.
Four missiles had been fitted to each wing’s inboard pair of twin-rail launchers by the time the Raptor came to a halt on the hardstand beside the F-35. It was another five minutes before the crew had finished rearming Trumbull’s aircraft and could turn their attention to the Raptor. Neither aircraft would receive a full complement of missiles: there was only space within Alternate’s storage shed to carry twelve of the AIM-120s and these were split equally between the two jets. It took less time to refuel the F-22 than it had to top up the F-35’s tanks. Neither aircraft had used up their entire fuel load in the short distance they’d travelled into combat and back that morning, however vertical landings did consume a substantial amount of fuel in comparison to the Raptor’s conventional approach.
Both of the Hindsight jets were turning back onto the runway at Eday in preparation for take off as the leading B-10As began to release their bombs, the huge bombers’ combination of altitude and range ensuring they were still too far away for the base’s pair of Tunguskas to effectively launch any missiles against them. As each aircraft’s bomb bays were cleared of ordnance, it banked tightly away to the south and headed for home as long range AA fire from the conventional heavy guns of HMS Proserpine began to burst in the sky around them.
There were only a few guns at the very eastern edge of the base able to fire effectively, but they were able to make the few shots they had pay, with Nick Alpert providing everyone with accurate readings on range, altitude and airspeed. One bomber fell to a direct hit from a 4.5-inch shell, trailing flame as it spiralled downward to eventually smash into the waters of the anchorage off Flotta and Hoxa Head. Four more were left damaged and trailing smoke as they desperately made off back to the east and the safety of Norway.
The first of the bombs hit a few moments later. None of those in the KC-10 and C-5M, circling high above the North Atlantic to the west, could see or hear anything of the destruction that followed, nor could Davies in the F-22 as he dragged the jet’s stick back and lifted it from the runway at Alternate, seeking altitude once more. Alec Trumbull was also too preoccupied with more immediate issues as he carried out a rolling take off of his own that consumed less than a third of the runway’s length and also consumed a substantially smaller amount of fuel in comparison to a vertical lift off.
Neither could the ground crew at Alternate get any clear sight of the attack: their view would’ve been obscured by the intervening island of Mainland, even if their vision had been capable of picking out details at a distance of 50km, which of course was impossible. Most of those placed best to witness what was going on at Hindsight and HMS Proserpine in general were those actually there on the ground, and unfortunately they were far too busy having bombs rained down upon them to take in the spectacle objectively.
Each B-10A heavy bomber had loosed more than thirty bombs from its weapons bays, the wobbling dark shapes plummeting downward out of the sky in elongating strings as the rules of ballistics and aerodynamics opened the distances between them in the sky as they fell. Other than active gun crews, almost all of the personnel at Hindsight were already in slit trenches and heavy air raid shelters, and even those at the guns were relatively well protected by high walls of earth, concrete and sandbags. In most cases, although material damage might be unavoidably high, there was an expectancy that human casualties would be comparatively light: there’d been adequate time to get everyone into positions that were a reasonable approximation of safety.