“There’s no choice,” Sean snapped back. He missed the remainder of the platoon desperately at such times; he would have welcomed a Royal Marine or even a Paratrooper, rather than such poor raw material. The other lads were likely to get killed by the people they were meant to be training. “They knew the dangers and they knew what would happen if they disobeyed.”
He looked back as the sound of human weapons cut off abruptly. The Saudi culture, as far as he could tell, was a bizarre mixture of Islam, machismo and a superiority complex that dwarfed anything else he’d ever met. He could imagine what the idiots he’d left behind had thought — there was no reason why proper Saudi lads couldn’t do the job of the infidel and probably better — and, in doing so, they’d gotten themselves killed. He wouldn’t shed any tears over them, not now, even though he saw a hint of the young teenager he’d been in their eyes. They’d never had to learn the way the world worked until it had been far too late.
The walk back to the safe house was easier as the streets filled with people again. They might have realised that several of the insurgents were returning to their base, but Sean had taken the precaution of ordering his men to keep their weapons hidden, both from the humans and the aliens. A collaborator could be anyone, and, unlike Texas, the collaborators were more often genuine than not. He’d taken a more complex precaution as well — none of the boys, apart from Kalid, knew the location of the safe house, but they would have to be more careful in the next few weeks. The aliens might have taken prisoners… and everyone broke eventually. There were more horror stories than hard fact about the alien methods for interrogation, but no one doubted that they worked, although the cynical part of his mind suggested that it had more to do with hard cash than anything else.
“Check the traps,” he ordered, as they entered the house. The noise of alien helicopters was growing louder, but they didn’t seem to have picked up any scents, just buzzing around to see who reacted. He refused to be panicked by them. “Once that’s done, we’ll lay low for a few hours, understand?”
The house had once been owned by a wealthy man, although none of them knew who, and he had had an astonishing — and probably illegal — collection of DVDs, some of which were borderline pornographic. He also had a collection of drink, including some quite rare vintages, all of which Sean had poured down the sink. The young men would have tasted alcohol before, on trips to Bahrain and Europe, but the last thing he needed was for them to get drunk near weapons. That was asking for disaster.
“Not a bad days work,” he said, once they’d checked the traps and confirmed that they were undisturbed. The aliens would have gotten a surprise if they’d tried to burst in. “We might just make soldiers out of you yet.”
“They’re not happy,” Captain Harper reported, that evening. The Marine seemed more excited than normal, almost smiling. “It seems that several attacks were made against their forces in the city and they want answers.”
Carmichael smiled thinly. “And are they blaming the attacks on us?”
“Not yet, but they do have their suspicions,” Captain Harper said. “They might not want to disturb the embassies, but I think it’s going to be harder to move around now. Hell, we don’t even know why they let us stay here…”
Carmichael had been giving the matter some thought. There seemed to be no logical reason for it, but the aliens had actually treated them as a semi-official delegation, although they seemed unwilling to say so out loud. “They don’t have an embassy in… America,” he said. He’d been about to say Washington, but that was too painful for words. “Or anywhere else, for that matter, unless they have one in Russia and the Russians haven’t told us. Perhaps they want to have some way of communicating officially with us…”
He broke off as a dull rumble echoed over the city. “Are we under attack?”
“No, that’s coming from further away,” Captain Harper said. He tilted his head for a second as the rumbling grew louder. The entire building, as large as it was, was shaking slightly under the pressure. “I think… I think we’d better get up to the roof.”
He led the run up the stairs and onto the roof. The sky was alight, not with the strange twinkling of the first battles in space, but with a thousand glowing engines. He thought of fireflies, hanging in the sky, but these were falling down towards the south. It wasn’t like the first invasion, or other alien activities, but something else…
Captain Harper put it into words. “My god,” he breathed. “They’re landing their population! We’ll never get rid of them now!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Imperialism is the growth of one self at the cost of another.
“Are you sure that this is a good idea?”
“Nup,” Brent said, happily, as he mounted his bike. “You do know all the dangers, don’t you?”
Joshua gave him what was supposed to be a reproving look, although he suspected that after having faced flying bullets, it wasn’t that terrifying. “Yes,” he said. Brent had spelled them all out in precise detail. “Are you sure that this is a good idea?”
“It has to be done,” Brent said, dryly. “You’re the only other person I can take with me, so… you’re coming. Besides, you can write about it for your blog.”
Joshua said nothing. The ID cards they both carried, to say nothing of their relative freedom to move around the city and even outside it, marked them as first-rate collaborators. The aliens might not be a danger to them, unless they had brought in some new security checks or even some of their own ID card technology, but there was a fair chance that some insurgent would take a shot at them, convinced that they were alien collaborators. Brent had wondered about some kind of general notice to the rest of the insurgents, but by now the aliens would have collaborators monitoring the blogs, just watching for intelligence they could use. Joshua had even helped to make them look unreliable; if half the attacks threatened on the Internet had come to pass, the entire alien force would have been exterminated several times over.
The three weeks he’d spent with the soldiers, once he’d come to an uneasy truce, had been the most exciting and the most boring of his life. Exciting because he never knew when the aliens caught on to the safe house and burst in, boring because he couldn’t go out on the streets, even for a short time. The aliens might not have a positive ID on the soldiers, but they certainly knew who Joshua was and had even hung up wanted posters, offering a reward for his capture. They hadn’t said ‘dead or alive,’ but that had been the impression Joshua had gotten… and so he hadn’t wanted to wander. Instead, he’d taken his blog back and updated it with heroic stories about the insurgents, although Brent had insisted on reading everything first, just in case. The result was a series of exciting stories that were rather vague.
And then the aliens had started to land several miles away from the city, to the west. Joshua had watched the massive shapes moving down in the darkness, their drives turning night into day, and wondered what they were doing. The aliens seemed to have clamped down harder on the city as the landings began, running far more patrols and checking everyone for signs of insurgency, leaving only their collaborators with any real freedom. Brent had spoken to one of his best sources, a former lawyer who’d signed up as a collaborator while working for the resistance, and obtained two ID cards. If they worked, they could get out of the city, if only for a short period of time, and find out what the aliens were doing.