Invasion

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?

“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.