He had been tempted to play music as they advanced, something to both warn the insurgent gangs and reassure his men, but had dismissed the thought. They needed to remain alert; this was unconventional warfare, but equally as dangerous as anything else the British army had ever done. They had plenty of experience; the only question was if they would have the resources to do it properly. One by one, buildings were checked, searched, and secured by the police; a handful of people who had been found hiding, terrified, had been cuffed and sent to the rear. He didn’t have time to play it gently; experience had taught him that people who looked harmless often weren’t when it came to the crunch.
A gunshot rang out, and then another; the bullets sparked off the armour of the lead Floid. Roach felt his lips twitch; it wasn't an unrealistic computer game, where enough hand-weapons could make a real difference to a tank, but real life. He would have loved to have brought a Challenger tank or even a Eurotank along; the insurgents would probably have taken one look and surrendered. It would have been a shame about the roads, but…
“Enough,” he snapped. The entire building seemed to be infested with armed men. He nodded to the driver of the lead Floid. “Bring it down!”
The vehicle inched forward, more and more bullets pinging off its armour, and pressed against the side of the market. It had a far more powerful engine than it really needed; all of that extra power was used in pushing against the weaker wall. It slowly buckled and twisted inwards, shattering as the driver hastily yanked the vehicle backwards to avoid being crushed under the rubble. The entire building was weakening rapidly; a handful of people fled out with their hands in the air. They were rapidly cuffed, marked as known insurgents, and sent to the rear. Others came out firing and were shot down before they could find their targets and hit a single soldier.
The hours ticked on. One by one, the strongholds of resistance were reduced mercilessly; those that refused the call to surrender were attacked until they either surrendered or ended up dead. Roach wasn't in a taking prisoners mood; some of the bodies they encountered hadn’t been killed by his men, but had taken some time to die at the hands of the insurgents. He had had to threaten one of his men with his gun to prevent him from shooting all the prisoners after they found a raped woman’s body; it didn’t help that he shared the man’s rage.
An explosion made him blink. He had been rotating his own people though the battlezone, inserting more soldiers as they arrived; somehow, he had ended up as local military commander. He wasn't sure if that meant that he was the senior officer — and that was worrying as he was only a sergeant — or if someone had decided that he was doing a good job and leaving him in place. The radio buzzed and he answered it absently; it felt as if they had been fighting for hours.
“Sarge, you have to come see this,” one of his soldiers said. “We just stumbled across it in this dump.”
Roach nodded and headed over to the half-wrecked building. The remaining insurgents had been trying to escape for hours, heading right into the teeth of the policed cordon, where they had been either forced to surrender or die. There was fighting in other parts of London, but this particular fire was well on the way to being put out.
“Here I am,” he said, as he entered the building. It had once been a gay bar and had been savagely destroyed on the first night of the war. Dead bodies were scattered everywhere; a handful of trained people were trying to find identification on them, identifying them for posterity. “What do you have to show me?”
“This,” the soldier said. He pointed to a pit in the floor; Roach looked into it, expecting to see bodies, and saw, instead, guns. Lots of guns, many of them of Russian design… and modern. Not AK-47s, but modern weapons, including a Yank missile launcher. If they had been used by trained people, Roach realised, they could have made the Battle for Brixton much more violent…
He scowled. There were enough weapons to take half of London.
“Now, that's curious,” he said. He assumed a detective pose. “If these weapons were here, why didn’t any of the gangs use them?”
“My name is not Watson, sir,” the soldier said. “Perhaps they didn’t dare use them…”
“I doubt it,” Roach said. “If they didn’t use them, then they didn’t know they were here to use, which means… someone else put them here.” He skimmed through the collection of weapons. “I wonder what’s missing from here… and who took it… and where it went; those are the questions we have to answer.”
Chapter Thirty-One: War in the Air
If you don’t know who the greatest fighter pilot in the world is… it isn’t you.
Over France
“Charlie-one, you are cleared for departure,” the controller said. “Good luck and good hunting.”
Flying Officer Cindy Jackson hit the thrusters and the Eurofighter Tempest raced down the runway, lunging into the air as if it were keen to come to grips with the foe. Her threat receiver showed no problems, as it had done for the five days since the war had begun with the treacherous attack on the airbases that were intended to defend Britain, and the download from the orbiting AWACS reported only limited air traffic as far east as Denmark. The civilian aircraft had been grounded, or shot out of the sky; the remains of the French and German air forces had been destroyed, along with much of the RAF. The handful of surviving aircraft had made their way to Britain.
“This is Charlie-one,” she said. “I’m going dark now; see you on the flip side.”
The Eurofighter Tempest was a new aircraft, one of only six in existence… and perhaps now only one of three. The project had been so expensive that the European Union had had to share it with the Japanese and Australians, something that was ironic as Japan and Australia had been having a handful of minor political disputes. It had been intended to create a fighter superior to the American Raptor… and, to be fair, the project had succeeded. If only the aircraft could be made cheap enough to equip an entire squadron, then Cindy would have been delighted; the RAF would have had a truly 21st Century force.
She scowled down at her display as the aircraft raced further into the darkness. The politicians had cut the RAF’s budget, time and time again, and the result had been a fleet of aging aircraft and low morale, which had led naturally to low personal. Hundreds of trained RAF officers had taken the option of going to America, where the Yanks needed fighter and bomber pilots in their endless war, others did their duty with ever-diminishing resources. Cindy had been one of the latter — she loved her job — but even she had been missing a challenge. The thought gnawed at her, no matter how silly it was; had the Russian attack happened because she had been wanting a challenge?
The Tempest’s real strength lay in its stealth. Although it was capable of travelling at supersonic speed, it was almost impossible to detect on conventional radar sets, although some of the latest American equipment had been designed to detect some of the non-American stealth aircraft. The Americans had learnt a harsh lesson during their war with Iran; Russian radars were capable of detecting some of their stealth aircraft, and directing ground fire onto the targets. The Tempest could, in theory, fly through Russian air space without being noticed; in practice, it might not work quite as well as the scientists had kept claiming. She half-hoped that she would be detected; the chance to put a missile into a Russian fighter and avenge some of her dead comrades would be too good to miss.
She clenched her teeth as the memories returned. She had always been a tomboy; when other girls had been putting on make-up, she had been learning at her father’s knee — her father had been an engineer with a passion for flying. Her mother had died when she had been very young and her father had never remarried; his only child had taken care of him in-between acing her Standard Qualification Tests and living a nightlife that would have had the Romans green with envy. Her father had taught her far more than she had ever learned at school; by the time she was twelve, she had been doing advanced maths in her head, and knew what she wanted to do with her life. The opportunity had come when she had joined a flying club, and then the RAF itself; they had been delighted to have her.