He scowled. The aliens, it was well known, used a space-based radar system to track everything that moved on the ground — and, if they didn’t like the cut of its jib, to blast it with a KEW from orbit. In theory, they could pick off an individual human, let alone their vehicles, but the American reports from Texas showed that only large masses of vehicles, or obviously military units, drew fire. They could have taken a jeep from one of the Jordanian military units that were trying to hide out in the desert — and had probably been ignored because they were more of a danger to each other than to the aliens — and driven down into Saudi, but that was too much of a risk. The aliens worked hard to shut down most human transport and an individual jeep might have attracted attention. No, they had to rely on the camels, even though they were mangy beasts.
A faint whistle from behind him caught his ear and he frowned, one hand falling to the AK-47 as he searched the horizon for threats. The remains of the Saudi Army, he’d been told, were cowering in the desert… but the reports were at least two weeks out of date. The aliens had probably rounded them all up by now. He saw, moving quicker than he had imagined, a line of vehicles buzzing across the sand, heading for the small village they’d passed through a couple of days ago. They came closer and closer, close enough to spook the animals, but didn’t seem inclined to stop and chat to the humans. Instead, they just kept moving…
It was the first time he’d seen the aliens close up and he was fascinated. Their vehicles didn’t look that different to human vehicles, but they floated on a cushion of air, rather than tracks. Judging by the way the sand moved and swirled around them, they were probably immune from sand getting into the engines as well, which made them even more deadly in the desert. Sean had done a few months with Arabic forces and, apart from the Iraqis, they tended not to worry about actually maintaining their engines and vehicles. They’d been defeated a long time before the aliens had landed… and they’d done it mainly to themselves.
The aliens themselves were the black-clad figures he’d seen in the webcasts from Texas, but there was an indefinable air of wrongness about them, even standing at their guns and ready to blast them if they had even looked like a threat. The images he’d seen hadn’t — they couldn’t — conveyed their alien nature; they’d gone, in a second, from men in suits to a genuine alien threat. He felt sweat trickling down his spine as they accelerated past the camels and their riders, heading onwards towards their destination… and leaving them in the dust of their passing.
Corporal Loomis spoke for them all. “Well, fuck me, sir.”
“Perhaps not,” Sean said, trying to get the image of the aliens out of his head. “I suppose if I spent longer than a few weeks in this women-less country you might start looking attractive.”
They bantered back and forth for a few minutes, before they sank back into thought. Sean, in particular, thought about his adopted father… and how he would react to the aliens. His mother had lost her first husband at an early age, four years after Sean had been born, and he’d grown up without a male role model. He’d run rampant across Birmingham, completely out of control, until his mother had married again, this time to a former Royal Marine who’d fought in the Falklands War. Sean hadn’t been impressed and had made the mistake of mouthing off to his new father, who had challenged him to a fight, beaten him with ease — he’d never had a serious opponent before — and informed him flatly that he was going to be brought up properly, or else. It had turned Sean’s life around and he’d actually scraped through school with some qualifications, but in some ways he’d remained a rebel. Instead of signing up with the Royal Marines, he’d become an infantryman… and then passed the dreaded SAS Selection course. His father — he couldn’t really remember his real father — had fought humans, not… aliens. What would he have thought of the mission?
He would want me to do my duty, Sean thought, as they found the hide. The Americans had sworn blind that it would be where they’d said, but it wouldn’t be the first time that American intelligence had been lacking, with even the best will in the world. The SAS team managed to enter the tiny underground bunker, sort out their equipment, and catch some rest. Having pitched their tents near the bunker, they looked — as always — like natives.
It would probably get a lot harder soon, Sean knew. The Saudis had never been very good at controlling their borders, despite a lot of high-flying rhetoric and promises that they’d made to the Americans. The Royal Family might have intended to cooperate, but in a land where every junior and most of the seniors were on the take, it was easy for anyone to get into the country. The aliens would probably replace the old system with one of their own eventually, but for the moment, they were where they needed to be. If the reports were correct, just over the horizon was their target, an alien prison camp.
Darkness fell. Sean and Loomis unwrapped one of the saddlebags and dressed, quickly, in their night-operations gear. The Americans had invented the outfits and the SAS had fallen in love with them as soon as they’d seen them. They not only acted like a chameleon, cloaking the wearer in a near-perfect disguise, but also kept their body heat within the suit and therefore rendering them invisible to infrared detectors. The aliens apparently used such methods in protecting some of their bases in America and there was no reason to assume that they wouldn’t do the same here. As soon as they were dressed, they slipped out, leaving the other two to watch the camels. It was still a long walk to the alien camp, but it wasn’t anything like as bad as they’d been through while training. The only surprise was stumbling over a pile of unburied bodies, all human, apparently shot through the head.
“Got to be insurgents,” Loomis muttered, barely loud enough to be heard in the cold night air. The desert rapidly became freezing at night. “They tried to reach the camp, were detected, and were simply shot.”
“No argument,” Sean whispered back. The alien camp was just over a sand dune. “Keep your voice down…”
They crawled the remaining few meters and reached the top of the dune, peering down into the camp. It was much larger than Sean had expected, a massive complex of wire, backed up by a set of guards patrolling around the outsides. A pair of watchtowers stood guard, spotlights flaring out from time to time, burning down into the camp. The prisoners had to be going neurotic trying to sleep; the lights were bright enough to shine through even tightly-closed eyes. They weren’t sending a spotlight over the desert, he realised, and understood why. They’d be watching with infrared sensors for intruders. Anyone stupid enough to come within range would be shot out of hand.
The prisoners didn’t look that good. Sean was reminded of what his father had told him about the Argentinean prisoners in the Falklands. They’d depended on the British to look after them. Once they’d been beaten and captured — and, in point of fact, surrendered by incompetent superiors who should have been able to win the final battle with ease — they’d acted like children who’d been beaten once and expected to be beaten again. They looked to be mainly lower-ranking soldiers, all Arabic, many of them wounded openly… and wounded inside. They’d been beaten… and, worse, they knew that they’d been beaten.
They crawled back out of sight. “You think we can save these people?”
Sean shrugged. “Do we have a choice?”
The two men made a final circuit of the prison camp. The aliens didn’t seem to have a lot of firepower gathered around the camp — he hoped that that meant that they were having problems keeping the cities under control — but they didn’t need it. Judging by the wiring and the guard towers, they could have slaughtered all the prisoners before they could escape, unless they had help from an outside force. The real question was simple; there were four of them, armed to the teeth, but would that be enough to break the prisoners out?