Dispersal Delta, RNAS Dale, Wales, before dawn on the morning of Operation Firestorm, November 2000
Harry Potter slumped into a battered armchair, clutching two thermos flasks of coffee. After a few sips from the first of them, he fired up the computer which was on standby. It quickly awoke to a screen made up of a patchwork of squares, each showing a person sat facing the camera.
"Glad you were able to join us." stated Charlus Potter sarcastically; "I thought the video call was supposed to start a quarter of an hour before now?"
"Needed coffee." grumbled Harry.
"Operational plan updated, our allies in Gringotts have issued a summons to the Crabbe and Goyle families to arrive at zero-eight hundred. Due to the new wards Aunt Amy pushed through the Wizengamot, the only way to arrive in the alley is at the Leakey Cauldron." Adrian explained; "Nym and Rob will ambush them between the pub and bank, though I've left the details to them. I've bagsied the Mulciber Manor and prepared the summoning for a particularly nasty demon."
"I've got a strike force of some forty aircraft spread around Britain. Six Handley-Page Victors, nine Mirage IVs and twenty-four FG.1 Phantoms." Harry added; "Three of the Victors are loaded with Grand Slam bombs, the other three with the load of forty-eight one-thousand pound bombs. Jean-Sebastian Delacour secured me the use of nine Mirage IV strategic strike bombers to go with my Phantoms, all loaded with Golf-Bravo-Uniform-One-One Paveway One three-thousand pound demolition bombs."
"You've got the largest number of targets to take out. Dawn is at zero-seven hundred, and the targets must all be neutralised by zero-nine thirty. Can you do that?" asked James.
"Without a doubt. The Victors will fly in pairs, accompanied by two FG.1 Phantoms equipped with rockets, a gun-pod and anti-radiation missiles to take out wards. Between them, they have three targets to take out and three secondary targets." Harry said, waving his hand dismissively; "The Mirages and Phantoms will go in packs of three, one Phantom loaded with bombs, one Mirage loaded with bombs and a Phantom equipped with anti-ward weapons and ground-attack weapons. Nine primary targets to destroy, a further nine secondary targets."
"The secondary targets?" asked Charlus.
"Other holdings than the main home of our opposition. Safe-houses and suchlike." replied Harry; "Half-an-hour until we start warming up the aircraft. Last night we had one-hundred percent reliability, hopefully no problems will spring up."
"Finally, it falls to me and the Jean Bart to destroy Malfoy Manor, hopefully killing Lucius and allowing Narcissa, at the direction of Lord Sirius Black to take the Malfoy seat on the Wizengamot." Charlus stated; "At ten o'clock, the doors of the Wizengamot chambers will open. The House of Longbottom will have inherited by default the seat of the Houses Crouch and Yaxley as the closest living relatives. The House of Black will have inherited the seats of the Houses Crabbe and Goyle as they have intermarried and Crabbes hold primogeniture and the Blacks are the closest relatives once the Goyles are dead. The same goes for the remaining Rosier."
"And not to forget that the House of Black will also inherit the Bullstrode seat." added Neville Longbottom before Draco Black's wife, Astoria interrupted; Between us, that's an additional seven seats to our own of Abbott, Bones, Black, Greengrass, Longbottom, Potter."
"Also, the Lestranges in Azkaban are going to have an accident." Amelia reminded her; "Eight extra seats makes fourteen."
"Control of fourteen out of fifty isn't enough." grumbled Draco.
"The Wizengamot hasn't done anything in decades because it's in a permanent stalemate of purists who want to burn anything and anyone non-magical, neutrals who have no allegiance except continuing the status quo and the 'light' purists who think non-magicals are cuddly monkeys." Harry scowled; "It's something like fifteen seats on each side with the rest being us. We're killing off the entire purist faction. That will make, I believe, seven families completely extinct and us the beneficiaries of another eight, so fourteen out of forty-three."
"To make up the remainder to take complete control of the Wizengamot will take a number of threats on my part. But it means, instead of twenty-six seats voting, we only need twenty-two voting for us to get a majority." Charlus explained; "Of which we have fourteen already, instead of six."
"Yeah, I studied maths and got an A-grade A-level, it's not hard to work out." Harry muttered; "Today's actions will give us a nasty threat to hold over those who might not vote with us."
"We could kidnap a few of the remaining seat-holders." offered Adrian; "Reduce the number at this meeting, and when it's over, we'll release them, by which time it'll be too late to reverse our actions in this meeting."
"Possibly. A vote on the Wizengamot is either for, against or abstention. To get a majority over us, the Wizengamot needs to have fifteen voting against and no abstentions as an abstention disqualifies you from the quorum." Narcissa, their political expert explained; "An abstention from a vote is the same, legally, as not being voting at all. If, of the twenty-nine we do not control, none vote for us, but fifteen abstain, we win."
Their attention was momentarily attracted by a groan from Harry and a pair of slender hands appeared, massaging his shoulders.
"I'm bored of the politics. Leave the destruction to me. Ciao for now." and he hit the off button on the computer.
"A little abrupt, no?" asked a heavily French-accented voice as Harry leaned back into her touch; "Where were we?"
"My bed?" Harry said dryly, turning to face Fleur Delacour, a willowy blonde who had lost none of her legendary elegance and beauty since they'd first met.
Preparing an F-4K FG.1 Phantom II for flight was a lengthy process. Two engines, thirteen-thousand pounds of fuel, or nearly six tons in a fourteen-ton aircraft. Harry started out with a walk-round of his aircraft, a gloss-black painted one, the markings in blood red making it distinctive from the other camouflaged airframes.
The aircraft was fuelled up with a full internal load as he was checking the control surfaces and making sure the hydraulics weren't leaking. An erk climbed into the cockpit, firing up the Northrop-Grumman AN/APG-76 radar which replaced the older, unreliable Ferranti AN/AWG-11 radar.
Armourers crawled over the aircraft, the centreline pylon was loaded with an SUU-23/A gun pod containing a single six-barrelled M61 Vulcan Gatling gun and twelve-hundred twenty-millimetre shells. Four brand-new AIM-120 C-7 AMRAAM air-to-air radar-guided missiles were raised and locked into depressions in the belly of the fuselage before the armourers moved onto the under-wing pylons.
The underwing pylons quickly had weapons racks placed in position, secured to the aircraft and then loaded. The inboard pylons under each wing were loaded each with two Python-4 missiles and two CRV-7 rocket pods containing nineteen rockets each, making for a total of fifty-six deadly projectiles. Then the outboard pylons, usually used for carrying external fuel tanks, instead carried an AGM-88 High Speed Anti-radiation Missile, modified to target the stones to which wards were tied.
Yellow bands painted around each weapon identified them as live weapons, or 'war shots' Now, the Phantom had teeth, besides the ones painted down the nose, the mouth and eyes of a snarling red-eyed wolf.
Harry, having finished an examination of the aircraft, signed off on the fuel and headed to the briefing room where the crews assembled, having completed their own external checks and armament. It was in briefing that the detailed photographs of their targets, captured by the force's RA-5C Vigilante reconnaissance plane, were to be examined a final time.
It was still well before dawn that the base fell silent, the crews sat in their aircraft on the countdown until start-up. Harry was strapped into the cockpit by his plane's crew captain, the ejector seat armed while his back-seater, an Israeli veteran F-4 WSO called Daniel did the same. The few Israelis who had joined the squadron as mercenaries, given their past with racial hatred, reserved a special kind of loathing for the blood purists, the kind that led to missions like this.
"Intercom check." Harry said over the intercom.
"Intercom loud and clear." the Israeli replied.
They fell silent for a few minutes as Harry continued his internal checks until he was finished, sitting back and waiting for the radio call from the tower giving them clearance to start. The cockpit canopies were down and locked, the ejector seats armed and ready and the cockpit access ladders removed, they were ready to start. And then the radio buzzed to life.
"Pirate flight, Pirate flight, check in."
"Pirate One, loud and clear." Harry responded.
"Pirate Two, crystal." replied the second Phantom pilot in the flight.
"Pirate Three, volume good." the Frenchman in the cockpit of the Mirage IV that made up the third part of the flight added.
"Pirate One, say status."
"Alpha Four Four Plus, with four pods Charlie-Romeo-Victor-Seven and two missiles Alpha-Golf-Mike-Eight-Eight, Fast Tiger Two-Zero." Harry replied. 'Alpha' fit meant that he had no external fuel tanks. The first 'four' meant he had four AMRAAM missiles, the second 'four' meant he had four secondary missiles. Then came the air-to-ground weapons and finally, the call of 'fast tiger two-zero', meaning he had enough fuel to get airborne, stay supersonic at intercept height for twenty minutes and return.
"Copy, start."
"Starting." said Harry before switching to intercom; "Time to rock and roll."
He could hear in the background as his flight declared their status, but was concentrated on the aircraft. Engine master switches on and then raised a white-gloved hand, twirling his index finger around in a circle. The Ground Power Unit was plugged in and running. In a matter of seconds, the Rolls-Royce Spey began to whine to life, and he depressed the ignition button. With a howl like an angered bull, it lit. Advancing the throttle, he watched the engine temperature, exhaust temperature and fuel flow gauges.
"Rear throttle movement good." called Daniel from the back as Harry ran the engine up to full military power and.
"Roger." Harry responded, the starboard engine reaching good RPM and the air behind the aircraft suddenly being superheated to about two-thousand degrees Celsius. A hundred-and-fifty feet behind the Phantom, the air had cooled enough that anyone stood there would not be boiled alive, but instead swept away by a hundred-mile-an-hour wind.
Harry then made another twirling gesture having set the starter switches to the port engine. In moments, it too howled to life, the gauges fluctuating as the airframe vibrated. Making a throat-cutting gesture, he got the ground crew to power down the GPU, switching on the aircraft's own generators. It took a minute to finish the last checks, then he clenched his hands above his head, signalling to the crew to pull out the chocks.
"Pirate One, request taxi to runway one-one-zero two-nine-zero." Harry radioed.
"Pirate One, cleared to taxi."
"Pirate, roger."
Easing off the wheel-brakes, Harry depressed the button for the nose-gear steering, opening the throttle a little to get the aircraft rolling before dancing on the rudder pedals a bit to test the steering. Satisfied it was working, he pressed down on the left rudder pedal, idling the port engine and opening the throttle on the starboard one to make a tighter circle.
"Pirate Two, requesting taxi as previous." called his Phantom wingman followed by a call from the Mirage IV; "Pirate Three, request taxi with Pirate Flight."
"Pirates, cleared to follow Pirate One."
Harry eased the big fighter in a left-hand turn onto the perimeter 'perry' track, watching in his mirror for a moment as a second Phantom and then the sleek form of the Mirage IV joined them. Passing alongside runway one-six-zero three-four-zero, he pulled off the perry track to the arming point. Idling the throttles and putting on the brakes as he reached the end, Harry kept an eye open as the remainder of the flight entered behind him. Armourers swarmed over the aircraft after the pilots signalled that the brakes were on, arming the various weapons.
Having been signalled that he was 'weapons hot', Harry released the brakes and rolled off the arming point, back onto the perry track and then around the south-eastern corner of the airfield onto the runway, facing two-nine-zero degrees, twenty degrees off directly west, Harry pulled to a halt for the final checks. The Mirage held back as it would do its own takeoff roll after the Phantoms were airborne, while Pirate Two eased his own Phantom a little distance back on the starboard side of Harry's fighter.
"Pirate One." Harry radioed, declaring that he was ready, staring in the mirror for a signal from his wingman.
A thumbs up and a call of "Pirate Two." told him they were both ready.
"Pirate Flight, takeoff." called Harry.
"Pirate Flight, takeoff roger." replied the tower.
The runways at Dale were built in a different era for different aircraft. Fourteen tons of Phantom. Six tons of fuel. Zero-point-six tons of AMRAAM missiles, half a ton of Python missiles, another nought-point-eight tons of AGM-88 HARMs, nought-point-eight tons of SUU-23/A gun-pod and over a ton of CRV-7 rockets and their pods. Nearly twenty-four tons. They had chosen the FG.1 for this base as they were built for carrier operations, with fast-lighting reheat, slow-speed flight flaps and a far more powerful set of engines than the American Phantoms. It could also be slammed down into one of four Rotary Hydraulic Arrestor Gear stretched across the runway with the tail hook down.
Opening the throttles fully, the Speys lit into full afterburner with a sheet of blue flame and a kick to the back. He had four-thousand two-hundred feet and he'd need all of them. The aircraft had already been moving at maximum speed he could safely take around the corner at fifty miles per hour. Making some slight corrections as the big fighter accelerated, squirming viciously, he gently eased the nose up and before he knew it, Harry, Daniel and twenty-four tons of fighter, fuel, fire and destruction were thrown off the runway, over the cliff and over the sea.
Pulling up the undercarriage, Harry caught his breath which he didn't realise he had been holding, easing the Phantom around in a right-hand turn, fairly gently as he couldn't risk losing speed and stalling out. Pirate Two joined him, falling in echelon port as they saw a brief burst of fire as the Mirage IV lit a bundle of Rocket Assisted Takeoff Gear. The RATOG bottles allowed him to get into the air much faster than the two Phantoms and was soon joining them.
Turning on a predetermined course to their target, they levelled out at two-hundred feet, which with the Welsh countryside was well below any civilian or air defence radar. No matter how good they were as flyers, how good their systems and weapons were, he didn't want to have to confront RAF interceptors. Luckily, the nearest RAF interceptor was two-hundred and thirty miles away, which gave them time that if they were alerted to a scramble, the strike force could vanish into the countryside.
"Pirates, bearing zero-four-three, speed six-zero-zero." Harry ordered, pushing the throttles to full non-afterburning power and began accelerating to six-hundred knots. He checked the map in his see-through knee pocket. Notthill Hall was a hundred-and-thirty miles away on the outskirts of Chester. Eleven minutes at current speed.
If the interceptors at Coningsby were scrambled for a subsonic intercept overland, it would take them just ten minutes to reach Chester. Not the best odds, but the Tornado F.3s were notoriously unreliable with their wing-sweep mechanisms and RB199 engines, and if they were working, took time to get into the air.
He had already anticipated the possibility of an intercept, as the Handley-Page Victor flights had filed flight plans for civilian aircraft and wouldn't stand up to deep examination, and they'd deviate from them for the bombing attacks, while the Phantom-Mirage flights would be sticking firmly below the radar.
Anticipation of a possibility had become action. The power lines feeding electricity to several civilian air-radar and air traffic control sites would fail, and it would take about ten minutes for the backup diesel generators to kick in and get sufficient power for them to reboot the systems. Then they'd have to mop up the chaos resulting from ten minutes without air traffic control.
The military air defence radar sites he couldn't risk taking out of action, so the Tornadoes would be scrambling to several diversions. A hacker in his pay was going to hack into the air traffic control and delete or modify the flight plans of several civilian aircraft, prompting an intercept. The final stage of the diversion were five RA-5C Vigilantes and five Mirage IVs, all modified with SNECMA M53 engines. Testing had shown them to easily be able to outrun a Tornado. Their job would be to force a scramble and intercept by Tornadoes and high altitude over the North Sea, away from the majority of the strike force's targets.
"Pirates, make speed six-five-zero." barked Harry, opening up with a burst of afterburner before cutting back, mentally recalculating speed for what was now a hundred-and-twenty miles. Ten minutes, approximately. At eight minutes cruising at six-hundred and fifty knots, or seven-hundred and fifty miles-per-hour, they had covered one-hundred miles. Harry opened up a datalink to the other two aircraft, allowing them to share weapons control. He then set up a second, separate one to contact the family's video conference.
"All going well?" asked Charlus.
"Minute and a half out from Notthill Hall. No sign of the RAF. You?" replied Harry quickly, checking his air-search radar after a moment of listening to the silent radio to make sure that the only people on the channel were the three crews.
"Enjoying a delightful breakfast in the Combat Information Centre of the battleship Jean Bart, moored in Poole Harbour, about to awake the residents rather violently." Charlus smirked.
"Good." Harry grunted, flicking down the visor for his helmet-mounted display. Tapping away at controls in the cockpit, he projected onto the visor over his right eye the view from a camera attached directly to a powerful marksman's scope aligned with the Phantom's gun-pod; "Good magnified vision for strafing ordnance. Requesting electronic warfare." continued Harry as he used the HOTAS, hands on throttle-and-stick, to adjust the focus.
"Electronic warfare coming up." replied Daniel from the back seat, where he'd been scanning the air and ground for interesting radar reports.
One of the screens in front of Harry changed display, lighting up a luminescent green colour. He flicked up his visor as the was no need for the scope yet, choosing instead to survey the electronic warfare imaging. A bar at the side of the display stayed stubbornly green, but if it encountered any magic, it would change to red, the brightness of which corresponded with the strength of the magic.
"Electronic warfare display good." Harry stated; "Transferring data link view from cockpit camera to HUD."
"Getting it clear here." replied Charlus; "Zero-hour minus thirty seconds."
"Master arm live!" radioed Harry, flicking the big toggle switch to 'arm' from 'safe'. Moved over to the ordnance switches, setting the two AGM-88 HARMs and the SUU-23/A gun-pod live before twisting the knob for the rockets to 'arm', setting the interval between launches to just a tenth of a second and the quantity as four, one from each pod. The aircraft's electronics lit up as the 'brain' sent signals down the nervous system, energising the various weapons.
"Pirate two, armed." replied the second Phantom.
"Pirate three, armed, fuses set." the Mirage IV pilot responded, the fuses set for his GBU-11 bombs.
"Report on Electronic Warfare, tally, tally, tally." called Daniel from the back seat.
"Lock it up." Harry ordered as the screen in front of him refocused, a square and a diamond converging on a building on the green-tinged monitor.
"Locked."
"Pirates, weapons hot, go, go, go." barked Harry, setting the trigger to the AGM-88 HARMs. His headset whined as they locked onto Notthill Hall, the magic emanating from the structure and the stones which anchored the enchantments standing out like a sore thumb to the modified seeker head.
Squeezing the trigger, there was a momentary delay and for a moment Harry's heart stopped. A dud missile on the rails was not nice. Then there was a loud thump as the rocket motor lit, boosting the first weapon to twice the speed of sound. A second push on the trigger and his second HARM left the rails, the thirteen foot-long missile leaving shock-cones of fire in its wake.
"Time on target, thirty seconds." Daniel reported; "Twenty. Ten. Five, four, three, two, one, splashdown. Missile two, five, four, three, two, one, splashdown."
Harry watched the electronic warfare reports on the screen. Suddenly the concentration of magic it had been reporting fell massively, becoming more an area saturation.
"Pirates Two, Three roll in. Two, take lead." Harry ordered.
"Two, roger."
"Three, copy."
The Mirage and the Phantom had already pushed up after the missiles, a LITENING targeting pod under-slung on Pirate Two's Phantom locked on target and a data link feeding that information to the Mirage.
"Two, dropping, dropping, dropping."
There was a veritable rain of bombs as the Phantom released, followed by the Mirage. The one outboard pylon under each wing were carrying a rack with three bombs, had been carrying three bombs each, with another three under the inboard port pylon, two on the inboard starboard pylon with the targeting pod. More could have been carried, but they didn't want to sacrifice the air-to-air missiles which also occupied the same pylons. The Mirage, with no air-to-air weapons had five triple-mount bomb racks, for fifteen weapons.
The impact as viewed from Harry's Phantom, orbiting the target, could only be described as apocolyptic. The fuses were set for a mixture of delays. Some burst in the air before hitting the target. Some detonated on impact. Others ploughed into the earth and blew out the ground from beneath the target. Notthill Hall was utterly destroyed.
"Strafe request, we have multiple attacks from estate gates. They're firing ineffectually." called Pirate Two.
"One, roger." Harry grinned, hauling the Phantom around in a six-G turn with the nose below the horizon. Selecting CRV-7, he put the visor down so that the video-feed from the scope and crosshairs was over his right eye. "Daniel, tell me to pull up at one-fifty."
"Copy one-fifty." replied the Israeli.
Pushing the Phantom into a shallow dive, Harry opened the flaps and air-brakes to slow himself somewhat as he lined up on the gatehouse to the estate. Beams of green light were being shot at him rapidly from the building. Range was displayed on the visor, ten-thousand feet. He'd close to eight-thousand before loosing his rockets. Nine thousand displayed. At just before eight-thousand, Harry fired. The four rocket pods under his aircraft lit up, as he fired five rockets a second from each pod. In under four seconds they were empty, all seventy-six rockets loosed.
Harry switched to the gun-pod and focused down the scope. He could see every detail of the building. Great neoclassic colonnades, wide, arched windows flashing with spellfire. He pressed down on the trigger, an electronic signal of deadly intent sent to the M61 Vulcan Gatling gun in the SUU-23/A gun pod. It buzzed like a demented chainsaw, four high-explosive-incendiary-armour-piercing and one high-explosive-tracer-armour-piercing shell fired every nought-point-nought-five of a second.
"Pull up, one-fifty." the Israeli called and Harry heaved back on the stick; "Good effect, I say good effect. Target destroyed."
Harry took a deep breath, levelling the aircraft out and flicking up his visor. Then the radio buzzed to life.
"Strikers, this is Victor callsign Nelson over Shrewsbury, I am being intercepted by two Royal Air Force Tornadoes." called a calm voice over the radio; "We have ordnance on board and have not prosecuted the target, our Phantom is holding station."
"Pirate Three, RTB. Pirate Two, jettison all non air-to-air stores." Harry ordered. Thankfully, they'd thought of this possibility. All the stores under the aircraft were fitted with Portkeys, and if they were jettisoned, they would simply appear in the hangar at Dale.
Harry set his jettison control to drop the rocket pods and the racks for the AGM-88 HARMs, the Phantom bucking a little as it lost a lot of weight, the stores tumbling away and then vanishing. Pirate Two jettisoned his as Pirate Three peeled away, heading for the countryside for a fast, low-level flight back to Dale.
"Nelson, Pirate flight is on its way." Harry radioed back.
"Nelson, roger." acknowledged the Victor pilot.
"You sure about this, the RAF aren't the bad guys." said Daniel.
"We'll just shake them up a bit and pull them off the strike force so that they can hit their target." Harry waved off his worries, turning south. "Time to intercept?"
"Locking them up, distance forty miles." Daniel responded; "Five radar contacts. ISAR running... two Victors, one Phantom and two Tornadoes."
"Four minutes. And already within AMRAAM range. Lock the radar on them and see if they react." said Harry before adding a quick order for his wingman; "Two, drop into the mud and join Nelson flight."
"Two, roger." replied the second Phantom, dropping a wing and falling toward the countryside.
"Their Radar Warning Receivers are going to go bonkers at this." Daniel said, a hint of mischief in his voice as he locked the fire-control onto the Tornadoes. "One of them is breaking off the intercept and turning this way."
"Two, corral the one remaining Tornado away from Nelson flight." Harry snapped.
"Copied."
"We don't have enough fuel for a sustained fight." warned Daniel.
"I know. We may have to scramble a tanker or divert." Harry acknowledged his comment, but his mind was on the fast-approaching Tornado. Closing speed was fourteen-hundred miles an hour, or just over a minute-and-a-half. The Tornado had an internal gun, Skyflash or AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles, AIM-9 Sidewinder or AIM-132 ASRAAM heat-seeking missiles. It had a data link, much like his own, electronic countermeasures, chaff, flares and radar decoys.
It meant he would have to play his strengths and his Phantom's strengths. Acceleration and high-subsonic turn-rate. And pray he wasn't going to get into a furball with an experienced pilot paired with a navigator he worked well with.
Lighting the afterburners of his twin Rolls-Royce Speys, Harry watched the range diminish on the radar, preparing for the merge, where the two aircraft would pass. The Tornado flashed past, a streak of grey in an otherwise grey sky. He just spotted the wing-position, they'd been swept forward, preparing for a turn.
Harry, just as the Phantom was about to go supersonic, pulled back hard, hauling hard on the stick and pushing the throttles wide open. Grabbing short, hard gasps of breath as his vision greyed out and his g-suit crushed his legs, Harry climbed vertically and then pulled inverted.
"Radar lock lost." Daniel reported, then suddenly called sharply from their inverted position; "Tally Tornado, ten o'clock, low."
Rolling the Phantom out into a shallow dive, the Tornado shifted to two o'clock, turning back towards the path of the merge, apparently unaware of twenty tons of fighter bearing down on it.
"Lock him up." Harry barked.
"Locking."
"Switching to guns." said Harry as the Tornado reacted to his Radar Warning Receiver and began to pull a turn to the right.
He'd anticipated this and began to pull lead, the squirming lines and the 'pipper' targeting reticule on the Head Up Display squirming as Harry turned the Phantom to bring the gun to bear. He had no intention of firing unless fired upon, but it was a good exercise and a good distraction.
"Nelson flight, say status."
"Status, full bomb-load, proceeding to target. Tango-two has broken off to engage Pirate Two." replied the Victor pilot.
"Good. How long d'you need." Harry asked.
"Five minutes to hit target. Quarter of an hour to RTB." Nelson One responded.
"Roger." Harry grinned; "Dan, looks like time to take this fight somewhere else."
"Entice him to follow us out of the zone?" grunted the Israeli through the G-force Harry was pulling. They'd better get some good gloating material from the gun camera or he was going to be pissed!
"Exactly. Fuel state is enough that we have enough for maybe twenty-five minutes of manoeuvring and then an RTB unless we go supersonic." Harry stated, rolling out from the turn, executing a hard ninety degree turn and dumping the nose in the countryside.
The Tornado, with radar lock suddenly no longer present, turned to follow them, just to see the blackened exhausts of the Phantom disappearing around a hill. Harry was concentrating with every fibre of his being. The Phantom, clean of almost all stores, was aerodynamically slippery and on full non-afterburning power, going like a bat out of hell. And he was at less than a hundred feet in a valley.
At the end of the valley, another hill rose up, and at the six-hundred knots the Phantom was pushing past, they would hit it awfully soon. Harry drew back on the stick, flying up the face of the hill, rolling inverted and keeping the stick back as he descended the far side, rolling out onto the starboard wing-tip and pulling a high-G turn around another hillside, a quick burst of afterburner replacing any speed he'd bled off.
"Bite?" Harry asked.
"Affirmative, they've taken the bait." Daniel replied; "They're really packing on the boost to catch up."
Smirking, Harry tipped the Phantoms nose down, following the terrain which was being mapped by a line on his HUD. Like throwing a wheel of cheese down the hill, the Phantom gathered more speed. The Tornado's Turbo-Union RB199 turbofans burnt fourteen-hundred pounds of fuel a minute at full afterburner. The Phantom's two Rolls-Royce Speys at full afterburner burnt thirteen-hundred pounds of fuel a minute and produced four-thousand pounds more thrust per engine.
Harry knew if he could use the terrain to keep his speed up and force the Tornado into lighting his afterburner frequently, he could force him to return to base. The merge had convinced him he wasn't fighting an experienced crew, or at least the pilot wasn't.
"Armada scrambling." another radio call came over the secure line from Dale. Armada flight was two combat-loaded Phantoms and a pair loaded as fast air-to-air tankers, but still packing enough firepower to make any attempt to interrupt the supply of fuel a short but distinctly painful event; "Time on target fifteen minutes."
"Roger."
It would be longer as Harry was pulling the Tornado away from the Victors of Nelson flight, away from the scrambled Phantoms.
Flying Officer Frank Cole was flying his very first operational scramble. He'd been in the Battle Flight aircrew rooms next to the QRA sheds at RAF Leuchars for twenty hours when the alarm had first sounded. Four crews were kept on 'Q', twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Two aircraft were kept on readiness with two more to take their place if a scramble took place or if an aircraft became unserviceable, or 'went tech'.
The alarm sounded and two crews raced for their aircraft. He didn't know what was happening in the air, and then, ten minutes later, just as the two replacement Tornadoes were in place the alarm had sounded. His back-seater, a Squadron Leader by rank had stayed perfectly calm, almost bored, as this was a duty he'd been doing for nearly thirty years. Cole, not so. It was his very first time on 'Q', having spent two years going through officer training and the Central Flying School at RAF Cranwell, prior to a posting to the Tornado F.3 OCU at Coningsby. He had arrived on-station at Leuchars and 111 Squadron, the 'tremblers' only two months before.
When the scramble went off a second time, Cole was in the cockpit and taxiing out of the Q-shed in less than five minutes, impressive for a first-time. Heading out over the North Sea, his back-seater and the other interceptor pilot had been cursing fluently with some quiet impressive expletives that he'd made note of, as their opponent was playing cat and mouse with them, but it was never clear who was cat and who was mouse.
The Tornadoes were flying at their service ceiling, with the aircraft they was chasing never coming into visual range, frequently forcing them to head supersonic to not loose radar contact. The radar contacts also stayed stubbornly above their altitude of fifty-thousand feet, sometimes climbing to as much as twenty-thousand feet above them.
Then the diversion from the scramble, directed, without the support of a tanker, south-east down the North Sea, making landfall near Berwick-upon-Tweed and down half the length of Britain to Shrewsbury on the Anglo-Welsh border. The first part of the intercept had been textbook, with his back-seater feeding him a perfect arithmetic for calculating the times to turn and speeds, bringing them out just behind a formation of three aircraft, none of which should have been flying.
The McDonnell-Douglas F-4K FG.1 Phantom II had last flown in the dawn of 1990, and the Handley-Page Victors just three years later. Whoever was behind this had their claws deep into the Ministry of Defence's disposal structure. Just as they were contemplating that and the fact that they were being completely ignored by the formation, the radar warning receiver in Cole's aircraft blared its alert and he'd been dispatched by his flight leader to chase down the radar which had been identified as an air-combat radar.
What he'd encountered befuddled his exhausted mind. Twenty-one hours awake, strapped to the most uncomfortable chair in the world with the equivalent of a small bomb underneath it and Cole was confronted with another Phantom, not laden with air-to-ground ordnance but instead, a highly lethal payload of air-to-air weapons that they'd just seen a flash of as the jet passed them on the merge.
"He's pulling lead!" yelled his frantic navigator, who with fifteen-hundred hours on Phantoms probably knew what his opponent was doing; "Nose down, don't let him get that gun on us or we're going to get reduced to the consistency of cream cheese in nought-point-not-very many seconds!"
Nose down? Cream cheese? Why would he... of course, the Phantom stuttered Cole's stalling brain. Dragging the stick over and back, his suddenly lethargic muscles strained against the straps and the ever-multiplying force of gravity. Lighting the afterburners to keep the energy up, he turned with the Phantom which was still descending irrevocably towards them. Looking up out of the cockpit of the nearly-inverted Tornado, he stared up, flicked his eyes back to the instruments, then stared up again.
"Wake up kid! He's broken off and headed bearing zero-three-three, speed six-zero-zero, height one-five-zero." barked the navigator; "Come on, you can't sleep with him on your arse!"
Cole silently half-rolled the Tornado and pulled back, dragging it in the opposite direction to the turn he had been holding and lit the afterburners to hunt down the fast-retreating Phantom. Suddenly as he dropped down into the mud, his senses became hyper-aware. Every tree, every rock, every hill seemed to lurch towards the Tornado. He'd only flown a handful of low-level missions, all in the Machynlleth Loop, and all but two in the BAE Systems Hawk or the Shorts Tucano. The Phantom pilot was easily handling the terrain, nearly dancing the big fighter through the valleys, every turn, dive and climb carefully calculated. Cole was barely hanging onto the rapidly-departing tail of the F-4.
"Fuel state is low. Luckily we're following him on-course for a diversion to Linton-on-Ouse." Cole's navigator interrupted his concentration momentarily; "Ten minutes. Then we have to disengage."
"Where are the bloody tankers! I thought we'd called for one half-an-hour ago." growled Cole.
"Air defence, this is Norseman Two, requesting tanker status." called his navigator on the air defence radio channel.
"Norseman Two, sorry, all serviceable tankers are airborne, they were sent to assist the interceptors but unidentified aircraft intercepted them and are shadowing them." air defence replied; "All aircraft are being brought to alert status and none can be spared to buddy-buddy tanker."
"Whose fucking airspace is this!?" demanded the irate navigator.
"I wish we knew." was the sober response.
There was no backup coming and no fuel coming.
Harry grinned as he checked the map in his clear knee-pocket. They were approaching the Peak District at just subsonic speeds, any faster and a loud bang would be shattering every window within twenty miles. The spectacular landscape unfolding in front of him, through the HUD, looked like a playground.
Ten minutes of flying had been spent simply observing his pursuer, getting a feel for his flying style and skill. Harry was moderately impressed with the doggedness of the Tornado crew, but they were distinctly reactive. The pilot wasn't pre-empting any of Harry's manoeuvres, and his flying seemed... sluggish.
As the Phantom's manoeuvres became less about testing his opponent and became more violent, faster and riskier, Harry sought to force the Tornado to disengage. A sensible pilot would do so soon, as the Phantom was reducing height, pulling closer to Mach speeds and trying to force the Tornado into overshooting a turn or over-stressing the airframe trying to follow. Israel's massive upgrade package had lightened the Phantom somewhat, packed it full of modern avionics, weapons systems, countermeasures and crucially, increased manoeuvrability due to the addition of leading-edge slats and strakes on the fuselage.
"Armada, rolling in. Pirate, you can disengage." the radio buzzed.
Cole was sweating and swearing furiously behind the controls. He'd thought the Phantom pilot was on equal terms with him and was just getting the hang of the pursuit, then suddenly, something had changed and the aircraft was suddenly being flown extremely aggressively. It was constantly keeping him guessing as to its next move, twitching one way then another, pulling high-G lateral turns that he was having to push seven-G to follow.
"Haul off, fuel state minimal." ordered his navigator before cursing; "Jesus fecking Christ!"
The gloss-black Phantom with its distinctive blood-red markings had peeled away, climbing on afterburner as another pair of the fighters dropped in behind him, this time they were camouflaged, but the white of missiles stood out as starkly as they had on the black Phantom.
"We've only got enough fuel for one turn, and no afterburner." Cole stated calmly; "Pray to whoever you believe in that they don't open fire."
Levelling out, he pointed the Tornado at Linton-on-Ouse and muttered a brief prayer as, a minute later, the black Phantom returned, with two more camouflaged aircraft in tow.
Harry disengaged, rolling out of a turn and lightning the afterburners while hauling back on the stick. A burst of blue flame from the exhausts and he throttled back, cruising to a camouflaged Phantom as it released a hose-and-drogue from a pod under the centreline. With a typically loud bang, the refuelling probe extended out of the black Phantom's starboard side.
Easing the Phantom up, gently walking the throttles, he executed the maneuver known colloquially as 'a running fuck at a rolling doughnut', driving the probe into the basket.
"Transferring." called the Phantom tanker.
"Roger. Five thousand pounds please." Harry replied. That was about the amount that the external drop-tank under each wing carried in total.
"Five thousand, copy."
A minute later, he throttled back slowly, disengaging from the drogue and closing the refuelling probe before flicking the Phantom over at a hundred-and-twenty degree angle and pulled back on the stick, descending to the level of the Tornado, followed by the tanker and the backup tanker. The Tornado showed no response to their sudden presence except a nervous waggle of the wings.
"He's not turning to engage. Is he out of fuel?" asked Daniel.
"We're on a direct course for RAF Much-Suffering-in-the-Marsh – that is RAF Linton-on-Ouse." Harry commented; "Armada, Pirate Two, haul off and RTB."
"Armada Flight, break, break, break." called Armada One.
One by one, the camouflaged Phantoms pulled hard turns off to port, leaving just Harry, who remained behind and above the Tornado who had slowed to five-hundred knots. Holding there until he had a visual on the runway of Linton-on-Ouse, Harry selected flares on his countermeasures panel and lit the afterburners, blasting ahead of the Tornado and, with a chattering sound, released a barrage of flares in the wake of his aircraft before performing a vertical break with a waggle of his wings.
No hard feelings.
Time to return to base. If all had gone well, all aircraft would recover safely, with one-hundred percent of primary targets destroyed. If not, then the Potter family might be moving overseas.
Charlus Potter's launch grumbled to a halt on the gravel of the shore of the Dale Peninsula, the battleship Jean Bart a faint, ghostly shadow in the haze, almost a phantom. Mentally smacking himself for the bad pun as one of the aircraft that had inspired the mental comment roared overhead, its mission far beyond the horizon or the ghostly warship.
Dropping onto the gravel with Draco Black, one of his huge family, both by blood and adopted, Charlus silently strode towards the steps carved into the cliff face. At the top of the stairs, a Land Rover awaited them with a driver, who quickly ferried them to the operations room on the far side of the airfield.
Harry, clad still in his flying suit, although he'd done away with the g-suit, immersion suit and lifejacket, was poring over a map of Continental Europe with Jean-Sebastian Delacour and his daughter, Fleur.
Stood easily six-feet, though not bulky, Jean-Sebastian Delacour provided more than just a father figure for his beautiful daughters. He was distinctly the father of Fleur and Gabrielle, with the same easy elegance. Greying hair was swept left and right down to his shoulders, a distinct sense of authority lent to him by the camouflaged clothes with the gold anchor surrounded by two diamond of scarlet on a brown diamond patch sewn on the shoulder and five gold bars on a rank slide on his chest.
"Grandpa!" Harry grinned as Charlus walked in; "Glad you're here, how did things go?"
"I won't bother with the detail, but Amelia's Minister now, Fudge is lingering in a holding cell and the Aurors are being purged of purists prior to a top-down purge of the entire Ministry." Charlus said swiftly; "She was furious when she got the slightest hint of how dirty the entire Department of Magical Law Enforcement, but there are a good number of loyalists, and Dumbledore's bunch didn't oppose us for the most-part."
"Good. I expect to have to deal with the non-magical side of things fairly soon as we didn't get away with it unnoticed." Harry nodded; "The positive side is that we didn't lose any aircraft or crews, and neither did the RAF. Next move is France, Jean-Sebastian and Fleur have been most helpful."
Jean-Sebastian Delacour met Charlus with a firm handshake as the two men surveyed each-other. The Frenchman was awfully similar to the Englishman. Jean-Sebastian was a wizard of an old noble family, he'd had no time for politics and power-plays, and had enlisted in the French Army straight out of Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, joining the 1st Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment aged sixteen in 1955, retiring twenty-one years later and settling down to start a family.
Charlus Andrew Potter was also a wizard of an old noble family with a heritage stretching far into the mists of the Roman Empire and its occupation of the British Isles. Joining the Royal Air Force shortly before the Second World War, he'd reached a high field rank by dint of surviving. His wasn't the glamorous and often all-too-short life of the fighter pilot, but instead flying ground-attack missions, throwing himself into the jaws of hell and trusting his skills, his pilots, trusting in the sturdiness Hawker Hurricane, the murderous armament of the Bristol Beaufighter, the speed and lethality of the de Havilland Mosquito, the sheer power of the engine and weapons of the Hawker Typhoon and finally, the ferocious Hawker Tempest. Retirement for him came in 1950, and fatherhood five years later.
"How did your mission go?" Charlus asked Harry.
"Pretty much textbook. Took out the wards with HARMs, then smooshed Notthill Manor all over Cheshire with bombs. There was ineffectual response from a gatehouse, spellfire. I unloaded my rocket pods into the gatehouse and fired a long burst of twenty-mil into it." Harry replied.
Charlus winced. Flashbacks of Occupied Europe came to him. His Typhoon thrown side to side as the dreaded 2cm Flakvierling ripped apart the air as he raced toward Rheine-Hopsten Air Base on a flak-suppression mission for the fast Tempests to go in and take out Axis jets. A flak post blasted apart, smoke, shrapnel and bodies thrown everywhere with a barrage of eight rockets. The deck of a German armed merchant cruiser as it was swept with twenty-millimetre shells. He wasn't blind to the death that he had ordered when giving Harry the go-ahead on the mission.
Each rocket pod the Phantoms carried had more than twice as many rockets in it as his Hurricanes, Beaufighters, Mosquitoes Typhoons and Tempests had carried. Its twenty-millimetre Gatling gun had more than twice as many shells than one Typhoon carried, and fired them twice as fast with a twenty-five percent increase in velocity.
"I had the civilian air traffic control sabotaged, and diverted interceptors with feints into British airspace by A-5 Vigilantes and Mirage IVs. In a worst-case scenario, they'd have deployed their own anti-radiation missiles to take out all useful radar sites in Britain." Harry grimaced; "Luckily it didn't come to that, the two interceptors who interfered in a raid were swiftly herded away and eventually forced to abandon their missions. All the tankers scrambled to support the RAF interceptors were intercepted by our Phantoms and forced to hold off until our operation was complete."
"Let me get this right... you shut down the UK's civilian air traffic control. You diverted the interceptors, hijacked the tankers and were planning how to take out the entire radar system for these isles..." Charlus said slowly before bursting out laughing.
"Ze next step is a strike to completely neutralise the continental navies." Fleur interrupted; "Luckily for us, the 'as been no development in naval warfare in the magical world since, I think you call it 'the age of sail'. No 'eavy resistance eez expected."
"Indeed." said Jean-Sebastian with a sharp nod; "Den Helder. Antwerp. Zeebrugge. Le-Touquet. Le Havre. Cherbourg. Brest. Saint-Nazaire. The Gironde Estuary. Arcachon. These are the locations that the Netherlands, Belgium and France have their magical navies based. The most modern equipment they have are ironclad enchanted sailing ships."
Charlus made a noise of disgust.
"RA-5C Vigilante reconnaissance aircraft are being prepared along with Mirage IVR reconnaissance aircraft and RF-4E Phantoms supplied by Israel." Harry stated; "We know the bases, but fresh reconnaissance is needed within hours of any attack. I have only worked out the barest details of what we're going to throw at them. The Phantoms, when we decide to push on with the mission, will be loaded with AGM-123 Skipper II anti-ship missiles. I reckon each aircraft can carry six, plus Charlie Fit external tanks, one under each wing, a LITENING target designator, four close-range air-to-air missiles and four long-range air-to-air missiles."
"What sort of damage would that inflict?" Charlus asked.
"Imagine, if you will, a weapon weighing the same as a very light sports car, hitting a target a little short of the speed of sound, concentrating all the force on one spot unlike a car crash. And then two-hundred kilograms of high explosive detonating." Jean-Sebastian explained.
"We've also got five F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers which can carry a up to about eight Mark Forty-Four torpedoes which I'm going to add to the strike package." added Harry; "They're a rather nasty kind made by the South-Africans. It'll blow through a half-inch steel skin, a five-foot deep water-filled shock-absorbing double hull and then blow through an inch-and-a-half of steel armour."
Charlus had one thing to say.
"Have you got a two seater?"
"We'll see." Harry replied, not discounting what his grandfather was hinting.