Lars was an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Pilot with the newly-formed 75th Air Wing of the Luftwaffe. These days the drones could mostly fly themselves so most of what he did was watch what happened on the screen and then writing down whatever went wrong so the engineers could fix it. It definitely wasn't the most glamorous of jobs, but he was happy so long as he got to stay out of the trenches in Scotland.
The UAV he was watching - an Airbus Super Barracuda Attack Drone - finally reached its target. Twenty pieces of ordnance soundlessly fell out of its cargo bays into the dark skies over London. Each individual GBU-46 JDAM bomb assigned to its own target and guided by precision GPS with an overall accuracy radius of two point five centimeters. Every one was set for a different military or strategic location designed to further cripple the British forces.
Twenty tiny bursts of light flashed up on Lars' screen. On the monitor next to it, nineteen display boxes turned green. Clicking on the failed one, Lars sighed. Damn. One of the bombs had exploded nearly forty meters above its intended target. That meant a failure report, which meant he wouldn't be getting to bed before three. Navigating to the auto-generated after-action report he scrolled down until he found the details for the bomb in the sixty-second drop slot, serial number HFA-21149. Opening the necessary form in a new tab he began to fill it out. When he got to the drop location, he paused. He'd put these numbers in before. Two times in the past month a bomb designated for this location had failed to explode and he'd had to write a report on it. He quickly searched the location in the unified action report system. Three times had German planes attempted to destroy that building and three times they had failed.
The GBU-46 JDAM ordnance had a failure rate of 0.2%. The three bombs in question had all come from production runs without any known defects or quality control issues. One bomb failing to detonate at that location was happenstance. Two was a coincidence, but still possible. Three meant advanced anti-bomb countermeasures, which meant that the low-level building was of much higher strategic importance to the English than Military Intelligence had marked it as. With a sigh, Lars printed out the three failure reports and got up from his controls to take them to his commander. He'd be lucky to make it home before five.
Two days later, Lars was once again watching the feed from a drone flying over London. This time, though, the drone wasn't going to be dropping any bombs. Its job was to find out what had stopped the first three attacks. The most likely countermeasure against a smart bomb was an extremely strong electromagnetic pulse. A strong enough EMP could hypothetically fry the delicate circuitry inside the device and cause it to detonate early. Knowing this, the Luftwaffe had long-ago developed an air-dropped probe built inside of a Faraday cage. The cage mitigated the effects of the EMP and would allow the probe to survive long enough to transmit video of the specific countermeasures being used. It was a pricy thing to build but well worth it when trying to circumnavigate the protections on strategic targets.
The probe in the bomb bay of Lars' aircraft was one of these specially-built devices. It was being dropped on what German maps called "Unknown Enemy Strategic Location #4". Up until Lars filed his report two days ago it had been believed to be a Radio Officer training facility. Such high-level defenses, though, would surely not be wasted on a simple school.
The probe was hopefully going to be able to turn "unknown" into something more useful and provide data about what kind of ordnance would be necessary to destroy it. Staring at his monitor Lars waited for the probe to drop. Its cameras and sensor suite were connected to the German military network via a live satellite feed so that he would be able to manipulate the drone in real-time. Once the UAV reached the preset location, the probe fell. It accelerated rapidly as it dropped towards the ground. Four high-speed cameras created a perfect hemisphere of coverage around the drone as it plummeted downwards through the air. Faster and faster, the tiny probe reached terminal velocity at two hundred meters from the ground. A parachute popped open at forty meters, stopping the rapid descent. Falling slowly would make the drone an easy target for ground fire but ensured stable, high quality video for as long as possible.
The view on Lars' screen changed. It was as if the drone had passed through a rift in space and been transported to some other city. The skyline of London, which had been blacked to make it harder for pilots to see their targets, was replaced with a merrily lit cobblestone street lined with storefronts being frequented by happy customers out enjoying a Friday night. Lars immediately ran a diagnostic and checked the tracking signal. The faraday cage had registered a massive voltage spike - a sign that the probe had been hit by the EMP that had disabled the three bombs - but everything else was nominal. Lars attempted to refocus the cameras to get a better view of the ground below.
The probe didn't have motors of its own, so it continued to drift closer to the ground every second. Lars scrambled to record as much data as he could, refocusing the cameras as often as possible to try and examine every new detail before the probe fell to the eye level of the population below. It looked nothing like the satellite photos of the military compound. The street was filled with men and women all dressed in some of the most curious clothing Lars had ever seen. There were children in some kind of creature costumes and a huge street performer who was probably walking on stilts. The buildings were in a rustic style with brightly-painted signs more reminiscent of the Victorian Era than the modern day.
After the probe had fallen past ten meters a few people noticed it and looked up. A woman in a red robe let out a shout as she pointed at the small metal sphere hanging underneath its white parachute, saying something that the microphones on the probe couldn't pick up. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew something - a firearm? - it was too dimly lit to make out. A flash of light burst out of the device and impacted upon the shell of the probe. The voltage in the Faraday cage spiked as it struggled to dissipate a massive EMP burst. Lars blinked, stunned. No device that small should be able to generate a pulse that strong. Zooming in, he tried to get a better whatever was shooting at the probe. Another streak of light was already on its way, though. The delicate wiring of the Faraday cage finally fried and the circuitry in the probe burnt out.
Lars sat back as the video and sensor feeds went black. This was huge. Whatever program the British had under development at this base could change the course of the war in an instant. Every war machine on the field had some form of circuitry that could be destroyed by such a device. Even the newest generation of standard rifles were equipped with smart targeting sensors. Tanks, APCs, missiles, smart bombs, and the entire joint European naval and air fleets could be grounded by these high-powered, portable, and focused EMPs. And that wasn't even mentioning whatever holographic technology the English had used to hide the true design of the compound. Knowing that the enemy had holograms that could fool the cameras on their satellites and reconnaissance planes threw all of their intelligence into question. The high command would have to be informed at once and the facility had to be taken out. If they couldn't capture and replicate whatever technology the British had then they may as well give up the war as lost.
A/N: A guest reviewer was rather upset about the idea about Scotland leaving the UK. Unfortunately I am unable to respond to them directly due to the anonymity of the reviewing mechanism, but I would like to clear some things up. I personally have no opinion on Scotland's independence or lack thereof, I merely thought that the concept (a war between England and the EU) would be an interesting one to write a story around. The scenario was simply a means to this end. Please do not take anything said by any of the characters in this story as a reflection of my personal political beliefs, especially those related to the internal matters of the United Kingdom. I am not British, I am not Scottish, and in general I try to avoid having opinions on matters such as these.