“Time to get back to camp,” Sean muttered. “We’ll get the other two and move tomorrow.”
The day passed slowly. He’d taken the time to prepare an excuse for lurking near the camp — although, officially, he wouldn’t know that the camp was there — and was surprised when the aliens didn’t even bother to come and investigate why they were there. He’d seen the same problem in Iraq, when there had been too many armed men to investigate and arrest them all, but he hadn’t realised how nerve-wracking it had been for the other guys. The thought made him smile; the grass was always greener on the other side of the hill. He’d been hunted through the Middle East before, but he’d always known more than his enemies, until now. When night fell, they were ready for the fight; indeed, they welcomed it.
“Take your positions,” he hissed, as they reached the same ridge. They had to take out the towers and the IFV almost at once, or they were all dead. “I’ll give you fifteen, then open fire, so get into position by then!”
He crawled away from the others towards the firing position. The MILAN missile was easy to set up, and he’d practiced doing it in near-complete darkness, but it was still a dangerous job. A single clink at the wrong time could have brought the aliens down on his head. He couldn’t believe that they didn’t bother to patrol far outside the camp, although he suspected that they weren’t impressed with the quality of the opposition so far. The insurgents in Saudi would have a learning curve before they became more than a nuisance. He pointed the weapon carefully at the tower and checked his watch. Bare seconds to zero hour.
Precisely on time, he launched the missile. The MILAN was intended to punch through tank armour and detonate inside the vehicle; it had no problem at all blowing the guard tower apart in a blast of fire. He’d actually been worried that the weapon would fly through the guard tower, but it exploded and knocked out one of the main alien defences. A heartbeat later, the second tower and the IFV followed the first into destruction, while the handful of alien infantry struggled for position. Patel, the sniper, picked them off one by one before they could get into cover. Dan Mills had trained Patel, after all, and no one would bet against him.
“Cover us,” he snapped, and ran down to the alien gates. They’d rigged them to be impossible to open from the inside, but with some packs of explosives, it was easy to bring the first set crashing down. He shouted orders in Arabic — he’d decided that explaining who they really were would be too confusing — as he started work on the second gate, freeing a few hundred prisoners. Most of them streamed out and headed into the desert, a few of the quicker-thinkers picking up alien weapons as they moved out. They’d be a pain in the ass to the aliens if they could get back to their home cities and villages. He tore open the remaining gates and watched as the prisoners fled.
A strange thrum-thrumming noise announced the arrival of the alien helicopters as they swooped in from high above. They were barely visible in the darkness… and, because of his protective suit, they couldn’t see him. They could see the escaping prisoners, however, and he winced as bright streaks of light flared out in the darkness, their machine guns scything down the prisoners before they could escape. He swore, watching helplessly, just before Loomis fired a Stinger at the alien bird. Unlike the ones in Afghanistan, it worked perfectly, blowing the helicopter out of the sky. The second helicopter launched a spread of missiles towards Loomis’s position, but Sean knew that he would have abandoned the useless remains of the Stinger and fled to another position. Until the aliens got some more of their soldiers up to round up the remainder of the prisoners, it would be impossible to prevent at least some of them from escaping.
And, if some of them were real men, the aliens would have a problem on their hands.
He blew his whistle as he retreated out of the camp, knowing that the other three would be abandoning their positions and falling back with him, back towards the camels. The aliens would be on their way from their nearest base and no one knew how long it would be until they arrived. He could have wished for better intelligence; the aliens had learned enough from Texas to almost isolate the Middle East from the remainder of the world. If it hadn’t been for the invasion, the general death and slaughter and aliens intent on replacing Islam with their own religion, parts of the population would probably have been quite happy with that.
They could see the approaching lights of an alien rapid reaction force as they headed back over the sand. Through a dark coincidence, the aliens were going to pass close to their position, so they fell to the ground and hugged the sand as the aliens raced closer. Sean thought, for one terrifying moment, that the aliens were going to actually drive over them, but instead they veered off down towards the camp. He heard the sound of shooting, lots of shooting, in the distance, but he was sure that at least some of the prisoners would have made it.
“Shit,” Loomis said.
Sean followed his gaze and swore. The aliens hadn’t been as stupid as he’d thought. They’d put two and two together and, while on their flight to the camp, had fired a spread of missiles into the tents and the camels. The poor beasts were dead now… and the aliens probably thought that the tribesmen were dead as well. Getting somewhere where they could wreck more havoc was going to be harder than he had thought.
“Get into the hide,” he ordered finally. They’d be detected easily if they were walking on the desert in daylight. “Tonight, we’ll head for Riyadh.”
“If nothing else,” Loomis said, as they bedded down, “we put one hell of a dent in their pride.”
”Sure,” Sean said. “All we have to do now is make sure that someone knows what we did. Anyone up for the quickie book deal? Alien Two Zero?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
No military force can remain on guard indefinitely.
Forty cycles — or six weeks, as humans reckoned time — after the first landings, WarPriest Allon felt that he had some grounds for relief. The first and second human insurgencies within the cities had been dangerous, and there was a constant series of attacks out in the countryside, including some that had been embarrassing, if not disastrous, but the grip on the occupied zone was fairly secure. The warriors had learned, quickly, that not all of the collaborators could be trusted, but they had enough to keep a lid on trouble. The occupation forces had been moved towards the human-controlled area, prepared for their advance further into the country called America, and enough forces had been deployed in the rear area to ensure security.
It had taken him longer than he had expected to obtain the High Priest’s consent to the advance, but really… there was little choice. A constant stream of soldiers, weapons and other equipment were flowing into the occupied zone from the remainder of America… and some of them were deadly indeed. The warriors patrolled the border, but it was a vast area of land and they discovered, quickly, that isolated units tended to come under attack. In fact, smaller units were used as bait to draw larger units into a bigger trap, sometimes leaving them with heavy casualties for nothing. There seemed to be an unlimited number of humans willing to fight directly, while he knew that his own strength was limited. With the massive landings in the Middle East and the insurgency there, the High Priest was unlikely to be willing to risk the foothold on America.