The memories refused to vanish. She had lost her virginity at thirteen, had her first steady relationship at fourteen, lost the bastard at sixteen and since then had had a string of boyfriends and girlfriends, playing the role of the fighter jock to the hilt. She was fond of claiming that she had slept with more women then all of the men in the squadron put together; it was a way of relieving stress. The RAF could be dangerous; it didn’t help that the pilots knew perfectly well that many of the aircraft were older than they were. The Tornados had been intended to be removed from the RAF’s flight line years ago, but a handful remained; some of them had even served in the Gulf War. Like everywhere in Europe, Britain’s interest in its military had been waning for years…
She checked the download from the French AWACS. The French mission commander, a young Lieutenant barely out of diapers — as the fighter pilots called very young officers — had flown all the way from France to Britain as the chaos had enveloped France. The people who had briefed her had said that they figured the French would beat off and kick Algerian arse, but the Russian pressure from the east was growing ever stronger. As the Russians probed west from Poland and south from Denmark, it seemed likely that they would defeat the Germans as well and then crush onwards into France; intelligence didn’t believe that it was part of the Russian plan to allowed the Algerians any part of France.
“Time to move,” she muttered to herself. The Russians had been busy; her threat receiver warned of at least seventeen large and powerful ground-based air-search radars, sweeping the sky for threats, almost certainly backed up by ZSU missile launchers and fighters further to the east. If the Russians had managed to overrun a Danish fighter base that could be repaired quickly, they might even manage to have fighters operating from Denmark, which would reduce their reaction time significantly. American satellite information revealed that the Russians were using commandeered civilian ships to expand their foothold; most of Denmark had fallen before they even knew they were under attack. “Here goes nothing…”
The Tempest lowered itself still further as it approached Denmark. The aircraft was supposed to be silent, but Cindy had never fully trusted the assurances that it couldn’t be heard from the ground. There were two known ways to stealth an aircraft — although there were persistent rumours that the Americans had invented a third, but if there was an aircraft that stealthy no one had seen it — and the Tempest used both of them. The aircraft was designed to both redirect radar energy away from the enemy sensors, through the shape of the design, and absorb radar energy through its coating. In theory, even if the Russians caught a sniff of her presence, they would have problems actually locating her enough to launch missiles at her; the radar return would have shown her as further away than she actually was. In practice… there were a lot of radars operating in the region she was heading towards, and the Russians would have almost certainly linked them all together into one coordinated system. If they got a response, they might well be able to determine her rough location…
Her display blinked up a warning; there was a small group of medium-sized freighters under her, heading towards Britain. She wasn’t surprised; the news of the Russian advance was now common knowledge throughout Europe, even though most of the media channels had gone down, and thousands of Europeans were trying to escape. Those lucky enough to be near the shore were trying to get onto ships; she’d heard that someone on the French side had detonated a bomb in the Channel Tunnel and blocked all ingress. She didn’t want to think about what it would have been like for anyone caught under the seabed when the bomb detonated. The Royal Navy was badly overstretched; some of the freighters would probably try to dump their human cargo near Britain, forcing them to swim to shore or die, and then head back to collect more refugees. Other Captains, older and wiser, were heading for the United States; they didn’t want to be caught by the criminal gangs or the Russians. The Russians would probably have been nicer; they would only have pressed the Captains into service.
The entire North Sea was one vast no-man’s-land. She’d watched the satellites reporting on the small Russian fleet of ships that had landed in each of the major Norwegian ports, permanently closing them to shipping, but not expanding any further. It didn’t take a genius to understand why; the Russians might have been nervous about the prospect of American intervention landing in Norway, but they couldn’t have the manpower to take all of Norway at the same time as Germany and the rest of Europe. The ports might even be retaken by Norwegian forces; the delay was all that mattered to them. Russian and British submarines hunted each other through the North Sea; there had been hundreds of tiny encounters that had resulted in the loss of one or more ships for both sides.
She focused her attention on her sensors as she came up on Denmark. She had taken the precaution of avoiding ports as much as possible, but it was still an intimidating sight on the display screen; the Russians were being busy. Their radars revealed the presence of other aircraft to her sensors; there were hundreds of aircraft in the air, many of them either coming from Russia, or leaving Denmark to return to Russia. She did the maths in her head; the largest troop transport aircraft the Russians had built could carry one thousand soldiers, if they didn’t mind only limited equipment. A hundred of them could land a hundred thousand troops in a single flight… and the Russians built their equipment to last. It might not be as advanced as the European or American equipment, but most of it would hold out long enough to land thousands upon thousands of enemy soldiers behind the lines. The ships… there were hundreds of ships, some of them military, but most of them civilian…
The sheer scale of the invasion terrified her. The Russian radars didn’t seem to have seen her, but she could detect Russian fighters on patrol and banked to avoid them as her sensors faithfully recorded everything they saw. Denmark itself was dark, with only a handful of lights showing, but she could see the glare of lights from the Russian-captured ports from a far distance. The unloading was going on throughout the night; she wondered if they had captured enough civilian traffic to help them move all of their supplies to their units. Hamburg had either fallen or was on the verge of falling; when it did, the German units that had survived would be destroyed.
It wouldn’t be long before the Russians reached the Netherlands and Brussels, she decided. Under her breath, she muttered a curse on the European bureaucrats who had driven EUROFOR to disaster as she hunted for more intelligence. She would have liked nothing more than to have led a force of Eurofighters and heavy bombers into the area to wreak havoc, but that was impossible. Thanks to the politicians, the RAF had lacked the firepower to do that even before the missiles had taken out most of the force. The remaining units were being conserved; everyone knew, even though no one had spoken of it directly, that Britain itself was under direct threat for the first time since 1940.
“A single bombing run,” she muttered, wistfully. The Argentines had tried that during the Falklands War — she wondered if they would try again with the British distracted by the Russian War — and they had caused real problems… and would have caused worse if they had had worked the tactic out properly. She would have volunteered for the flight; a single very low-level bombing run, right over those ships and ports and airports that had been pressed into service. She might even have got very lucky and hit an ammunition ship; an Italian port had been wrecked by just such an explosion, back in the Second World War. “Why not…”