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M6 and M62 motorways, North West England. May.

Low cloud scudded across a leaden grey sky. Drips of rain fell on the convoy of heavy trucks racing northwards on the main M6 motorway in Lancashire. The rumble of the heavy tyres seemed louder than usual, yet the lorries seemed quieter, and there appeared to be no diesel emissions - if anyone had got close enough to smell them, they would have smelled none of the exhaust fumes normally associated with such vehicles. The Patrol rarely used transports like this, they usually preferred coaches, high end cars confiscated from their owners, and four by four vehicles: these were obviously military trucks, and vehicles like them hadn’t been seen on the roads for a long time. The grim faced men in the back of each truck were not wearing the brown uniforms of the Patrol, but were wearing military camouflage pattern battle dress uniform. They were also in full battle camouflage makeup and fully armed for a fight. The convoy looked just what it was: an army troop convoy.

Military convoys hadn’t been seen for a number of years, and when the six man Safety Patrol, who had set up a checkpoint at the entrance to the motorway service station, saw them coming, they were more than a little nonplussed. Most traffic was heavy commercial vehicles, there were very few cars these days, and certainly no overtly military style vehicles.

The Patrol didn’t have the necessary skills to have roving motorway patrols, so they had initially resorted to setting up checkpoints at most junctions. This had caused so many problems that they had soon moved them to the ‘more convenient’ motorway service stations. Most drivers simply avoided the service areas now, but some had no choice.

Today, at this service area in central Lancashire, the Patrol had been stopping as many vehicles as they could, checking the papers of all the occupants. So far, in the five hours since they had been at the checkpoint, they had issued twelve fines for minor none-compliance of the travel regulations; had arrested seven people, impounding three cars in the process; confiscated one vehicle simply because it was better and newer than their own vehicle; and generally harassed and caused misery to a number of other people, particularly lone female drivers. They hadn’t, as yet, gone further than that, but the day was young, and the six young men were all single and full of testosterone and aggression. And bored. The combination was not good, this was not a popular posting and they were taking it out on the few drivers who were forced onto the service station. Interestingly, things that a ‘proper’ traffic policeman would have been writing tickets for: tachograph violations, tyre tread depth, lack of mirrors or seat belts, using phones or eating while driving, the patrol just let slide.

The young, barely twenty, section leader looked at the approaching convoy. “Fuck me,” he said slowly. “Think we might need a bit of help here.” He wasn’t worried or scared that they were outnumbered, he was too cocky for that. He simply meant that their detention facilities would not be capable of holding the possible number of people coming. He had no doubt of his ability to detain and arrest them. They would be too scared of his uniform to do anything but what he said. Or so he believed, so all six Patrollers believed.

The trucks were slowing and approaching his barrier. He stepped out and held up his hand. “HALT!” he yelled. A little unnecessarily. The front truck pulled to a stop just inches from him, but even though he had gone pale with fear, he had held his ground. Moving around to the driver’s side door, he peremptorily ordered the driver down. “The rest of you stay there,” he ordered.

The man who climbed down was wearing military style fatigues complete with corporals stripes. He did so with easy self assurance, and stared at the slightly smaller Patroller with a hint of contempt on his face.

“You should have stopped before this. Can’t you see the stop sign?” Asked the Patroller aggressively.

“The only reason I didn’t run you over, was all the fuckin’ paperwork it would entail,” the driver told him coldly. “Now shift your arses and let the real men get on with their jobs.”

The section leader gaped. He hadn’t been spoken to like this since before he’d become a Patroller. “You are under arrest. All of you,” he managed to grind out a few moments later.

“Oh yeah? And who’s going to arrest me?”

“I am.”

“Yeah? You and who’s army?” The corporal took a step closer to the section leader, who felt another stab of fear. He fumbled for his side arm, which he hadn’t fired in over a year, but then found himself lying flat on his back when the corporal suddenly flipped him over and down.

“Stay where you are,” the corporal ordered harshly. He looked up to see three Patrollers approaching, all of them holding heavy wooden clubs. The other two men in the front of his truck decided to join the fun. One was a sergeant, the other a private.

The sergeant leaned against the front of the truck, then when the section leader began to stir, put his foot not too gently on the supine man’s right forearm. “You were told to stay there.” The harsh gravelly voice of the sergeant put real fear into the section leader and he subsided. The sergeant looked up at the approaching Patrollers. “You are outnumbered. Surrender quietly.”

The eldest of the three Patrollers still standing looked at the two soldiers in front of him. “How are we outnumbered? There’s only two o’ you and three of us, an’ two more coming.”

The sergeant smiled slightly. “You can’t count, there’s three of you, true, but I’m not out of it, and we each count as three of you. Plus my truck’s not empty, and there’s two more trucks behind this one.” He banged on the truck, and moments later men began piling out the back. Each was armed with an automatic rifle. The Patrollers didn’t recognise them, but they looked scary. The armed soldiers held back, but spread out slightly so that they could be seen, holding their weapons in a way that told the Patrollers they were very ready to be used.

“Drop those clubs,” the corporal told the three men. All three Patrollers looked at their opposition and without a murmur dropped the clubs. There was no resistance as all four were quickly handcuffed, and transferred to the back of the truck.

“Where are the other two?” asked the sergeant coldly.

“Who are you people?” asked the section leader. No one answered him. “You do realise that as soon as someone a bit more senior hears of this, you’ll be in deep shit?”

“You think?” asked one young private. “Now shut up. You may not have noticed this, but it’s you that’s currently in deep shit.”

“Not for long,” answered the section leader confidently. “You’re just a bunch of terrorists and murderers.”

“You’re not dead yet are you?” the sergeant snapped at him. “Then don’t make stupid ignorant comments. You should die, but that’s not my call, and I’ve orders to hand you over to the proper authorities.”

“Who will just let us go, and arrest you morons instead.”

“Not Truth And Freedom, ‘you moron’, nor The Patrol, but to the proper authorities. Those that the TaF and the Patrol have tried to supplant. Those that Thorn and his criminal bunch of lackeys have tried to suppress. Now I’ve already asked you once, don’t make me ask you again. Where are your other two people?”

The Patrollers gasped, obvious confusion, but also worry now starting to show on their faces.

“Inside, getting food,” said one. “So who are you then?”

“We are B Company of the Second Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers,” the sergeant answered, almost disinterestedly. “Recently reformed. Now shut the fuck up, you’re starting to irritate me.” He indicated a section to go off and arrest the other two patrollers.

Twenty minutes later the truck started up. In the back were the six Patrollers, plus two armed soldiers.

By the end of the day, the seven northernmost service stations on the M6, from the Scottish border, as far south as Lancaster, were all under the control of the Second Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. A platoon of men had been left at each service station. At Southwaite services in Cumbria, where the two sides were mutually accessible by a footbridge over the motorway, a single platoon, plus the company HQ, covered both sides. Elsewhere a single platoon covered just one side. The battalion HQ was set up close to Tebay West on the northbound carriage, while the other two company HQs were set up on the other side of the motorway at Tebay east. From north to south was a total distance of about 80 miles, and all the officers and senior NCOs were more than a little concerned by how spread out they were.

At each service station, when the relief patrol arrived, the waiting fusiliers simply took the relieving Patrollers into custody without any fight. Six Patrollers against a full platoon of twenty-eight was enough, in every case, for the Patrollers to surrender without a fight. Farther south on the M6, other newly reformed battalions and regiments took control of most other service stations, as they also did on all the other motorways around the country. In every case, the checkpoints and barriers were removed by the soldiers and carted away. To the few motorists coming onto any of the motorway service stations, they were simply open and available, the soldiers kept out of sight, though the service station staff knew they were there. Few people thought about it. Only the few service stations on and within the M25 London orbital motorway, as well as those close in to some of the other big urban areas or big Patrol bases were, for the moment, left in the hands of the Patrol.

Without any fanfare, the army had taken over much of the road transport network, and no one noticed. From there they spread out onto some of the most important A roads, but kept to the service areas slightly out of the biggest urban conurbations.

The Patrol were the first to notice, but it took well over twenty four hours to do so, and then it was spotty.

“Where’s Fairclough?” asked one senior squad leader at roll call two mornings later.

There was a general shaking of heads. “Not seen him since he went out on duty yesterday morning,” one section leader answered.

The squad leader shook his head slowly. “You sure it was yesterday, not the day before? I haven’t got him signing in yesterday.”

There was a pause as the section leader thought. “Um, no, you might be right. Two mornings ago.”

It was seven thirty am, and the day shift had just come on. The senior squad leader in charge of the shift was allotting his men to the various patrols and duties. He and all the section leaders were in a small office. Normally it was quite cramped, but today it seemed rather less cramped than usual.

“What about Grundy or Kennerly?” The senior squad leader looked around the room and frowned. “In fact, I can’t see Shorrock either.” He walked over to the signon book and leafed back a couple of pages. “That’s odd, they didn’t sign in yesterday morning either.” He ran his finger slowly down the list. “There’s something wrong here. We’re missing five section leaders,” he eventually announced.

“Are you sure they’re not on leave sir?”

“Five at one time? Give me a break,” snarled the senior squad leader. “One maybe, two possible but unlikely. Three or more? Never in a million years.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Right. I’m gonna do a verbal roll call. I don’t like this.”

He spent two minutes reading out the list of section leaders, and ticking off those who answered him. To his horror he came up six short, not the five he had thought. He went back through the signon book again. “Shit. Bradshaw’s missing,” he muttered. He looked up. “Right, if anyone knows the whereabouts of those men, tell me now.”

No one spoke.

“What were their patrols?” asked another section leader.

“Shorrock was on motorway last I heard,” answered a third. “He was at Southwaite services I believe.”

“Butterworth was at the southbound Todhills. I remember him whinging about it,” answered a third. “He was complaining that he never got Tebay West.” There was a chuckle around the room. Even in the current harsh political climate, Tebay West was still considered to be one of the best motorway service stations in the UK, and this patrol station, based just south of Carlisle, was the one lucky enough to cover it. As well as Southwaite and Todhills.

The senior squad leader frowned. “Yeah, I think they all were,” he said slowly. He paused for a moment, thinking furiously. Eventually he came to a sort of decision. “Right, I’ll chase them down later this morning. Um. We’ll just have to leave the motorway patrols for the moment, almost no one uses the motorway any more these days. The night shift’ll just have to keep going a little while longer.”

Twenty minutes later he realised that six section leaders from the previous two night shifts hadn’t signed back in either. And for both shifts it wasn’t just the section leaders. It was the whole of their sections. That was seventy-two men who had just gone missing. It wasn’t totally unusual for a patrol to not bother signing back out at the end of their patrol, but they usually did it retrospectively the following day. He went through the rotas and signon books carefully, before discovering just how many men had signed on in the last couple of days, and never signed out, nor, in many cases, signed back in again for their following shift.

“Oh shit,” he muttered. He went back to his desk and picked up the phone to the regional headquarters.

An hour later, the Patrol Regional HQ just outside Preston discovered that it had ‘lost’ twenty-eight complete sections of six men each, and a few hours later, at Hendon on the outer edge of west London, Gareth Boase was finally told that close to five thousand Patrollers were missing, some for over twenty four hours.

Boase was livid. He had ‘lost’ nearly four percent of his total force since the start of the year. He was losing deserters almost daily: only a few at a time, but over time it had become enough to notice. And he had had almost no new recruits since Christmas. Not enough to even make up for the deserters, let alone other losses. No one thought to tell him that it was the motorway patrols that had been targeted. Boase just saw the overall figures and naturally assumed they were random patrols from anywhere and everywhere.

He stared at the desk, his hands and his jaw tightly clenched. This was not acceptable.

“He stabbed at a button on his desk. “Get me Supreme Group Leader Marshal, at once.”

Malcolm Marshal was, at that moment, trying to hide from his boss. As were the other two supreme group leaders. Gareth Boase was, in all but name, National Leader of the Patrol. He had three deputies, each of whom looked after different aspects of the Patrol. Marshal’s responsibility was operational and organisational control. In turn he had seven group leaders who were each responsible for a specific area of the country.

The other two supreme group leaders looked after recruitment and training; and supplies and logistics. Between the three of them, they made up Boase’ national Patrol leadership council.

Marshal was in fact about a mile away, driving frantically towards central London. He knew Boase was currently in Hendon, but Marshal was going to go to the Home office building and then claim he thought Boase would be there. If he could work it right, he could avoid being in Boase’ physical presence for a long time. Marshal’s mobile phone started to ring. He ignored it. Normally he ignored the fact that it was illegal to drive and use a mobile phone at the same time, but today he would claim it was too dangerous to answer. It didn’t stop ringing. Each time it went to answerphone it would stop, then start ringing less than a minute later. Eventually he picked it up off the seat beside him, and pondered for a moment. He would just have to say the battery was flat. Or maybe he’d lost his phone. That was it: he’d lost it. He opened the car window and threw the phone out. It would be easy enough to get another.

Once at his desk in London: like many of the very senior people he had multiple offices; he began contacting his deputies to try and get more details. It was Marshal therefore who first discovered it was just the motorway patrols that had gone missing. Unfortunately for the Patrol, he didn’t quite understand the implications of that, and he didn’t pass that information up to Boase, who would have instantly grasped the problem. Instead he kept that information to himself and tried to decide how he might go about ‘fixing’ the situation.

Up in Lancashire and Cumbria, where Second Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was waiting, had been waiting for three days now, the first of Marshal’s attempts to re-secure the motorway network began. The Regional Senior Group Leader was pretty efficient, and one of his direct reports, a Senior Leader, had been tasked specifically with securing and controlling the main transport networks in his region. That of course included the M6 motorway. He in turn had four Senior Assault Unit leaders, each of whom was responsible for a different form of transport: road; rail; waterways which included ports, rivers and canals; and air, which basically meant the few airports in the region.

The senior assault unit leader whose responsibility included the M6 motorway then got instructions to find out what was happening in his patch. He wasn’t totally stupid and assumed that his men had been attacked, but he had also been kept in the dark about what was happening elsewhere and assumed it was a relatively local phenomenon. He knew that in the past a single section of men was assigned to each side of each service station. That is, six men for the northbound station, six for the southbound. He decided to send a full squad of three sections with their squad leader and an assault leader to find out what was happening. He hoped that would be enough.

Unknown to him, he was sending the Patrol equivalent of the Fusiliers platoon, except that a Patrol’s ‘platoon’ had fewer men, so he was sending twenty men against twenty eight.

It was not long after two pm, and for over sixty hours, number 2 platoon, C company, 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers had ‘held’ Burton-In-Kendal services. Second Lieutenant Mark Schaffer, in charge, had posted a section of eight men about two miles along the motorway, spotting and watching for approaching traffic. Looking out in particular for Patrol vehicles. In the entire country, his platoon was the first to engage the Patrol when it tried to investigate.

“Sword leader, sword two six, over.”

Schaffer heard the call come in and looked up from his paperwork. His communications man was sat just six feet from him.

“Sword two six report over.”

“Sword leader, four patrol cars just passed this point, at high speed, over.”

The communications man, Lance Corporal Neil Copeland, looked at his boss. “Roger, understood.” Schafer made a beckoning motion with his fingers, and Copeland added, “return to this point, over.”

“Wilco,” came the reply.

“Get the men into position,” Schaffer ordered quietly.

“Yes sir.” Copeland began to transmit again.

Two miles at over ninety miles an hour meant the Patrol vehicles would be on them in less than two minutes. Until the spotter section got back, they would have no advantage in numbers, but they would have surprise on their side; as well, they hoped, as superior weapons and training. Schaffer had most of his men sleeping and resting by their posts, which were hidden not far from where the original Patrol checkpoint had been.

The Patrol cars, all ex police traffic cars, but no longer quite so well cared for, came swinging into the service station and braked hard, kicking up dust as they skidded to a halt right where the checkpoint should have been. The Patrollers got slowly out of the car, looking around to see what was happening. Six of them were armed with shotguns, two others, the ‘officers’, had pistols, while the remaining twelve just had a mixture of pickaxe handles, police batons and baseball bats as clubs.

“Take the armed men out,” Schaffer ordered.

He had four men armed with L129A2 Sharpshooter rifles, but the range was low, and the Patrollers had no body armour on, so under instruction from the platoon sergeant, the men with them held back. It was highly likely that the higher power shots would have gone straight through their targets and travelled far enough to potentially cause other problems.

There were four cracks in very rapid succession, and four men carrying shotguns fell, all with holes through their chests. The remaining Patrollers all dived to the ground, crouched against their cars. None of them had seen where the shots had come from. There were two more shots, and one more shotgun holder and one of the pistol wielders died.

The remaining two armed men were too well hidden from the soldiers, and cowered down between two of the cars.

Schaffer raised a megaphone. “Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands up,” he called. There was no response, from any of the men. He looked at the platoon sergeant who was crouching six feet from him. “Sergeant, can we get a section to go forward and grab the unarmed men?” he asked quietly.

“It would be a little risky sir, no one can see what the two last armed men are doing. Try and get them to come to us.”

Schaffer nodded and raised his megaphone again. “You with just the clubs. Stand up now, leaving your clubs on the floor.” Six men slowly stood, the rest stayed down. “Good, hands on your heads, and walk slowly towards the main carpark. Now,” he added harshly when none of them moved.

Slowly, the six men shuffled forwards.

“Get down you fools,” came a voice. “They’ll only kill you as soon as you get there.”

The six standing men stopped and looked around uncertainly. It was their squad leader who had called. They trusted him, though they didn’t particularly like him.

“Keep coming,” called Schaffer. “If we wanted to kill you we could. You are outnumbered three to one.”

The six men standing nervously restarted their slow shuffle forwards. When they were close enough, a corporal and a private stood up, and using their rifles, directed them behind a low brick wall, where another two privates waited. The six men quickly had their hands cable-tied behind them, and forced to down to the ground.

“Corporal,” said one of the other privates, “I reckon I know where that other guy is. I can punch a hole through the car with the seven-sixtytwo. That’ll take him out.”

“Do it,” replied the corporal, just as Schaffer raised the megaphone to his lips. “Hang on, wait,” he added hurriedly, when he spotted Schaffer’s move.

“Throw your firearms over the car and stand up with your arms in the air.”

There was no movement, but one of the four remaining unarmed men slowly stood. “Are the others safe?” he asked in a fearful voice.

“Yes,” called Schaffer. “Come forwards slowly.”

“Can you prove that?”

The corporal covering the prisoners helped one to stand and encouraged him to call out.

“I’m safe, we’ve not been hurt,” he called tremulously.

The man out in the open looked down to his companions and said something. Slowly the other three men also stood. Two minutes later they too were securely cuffed, and lying on the ground behind the brick wall, guarded by two armed men.

“It’s just the two of you now,” called Schaffer once more. Come out now.”

“Liar, you’ll just kill us,” came the reply.

“Not if you throw your weapons out first.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well I have twenty seven men with me, you just have one.” Schaffer had seen the spotter section making its way back to him, though they were still a couple of minutes away.

There was the sound of a scuffle from between the cars, but otherwise nothing happened. Both Schaffer and the sergeant guessed that one man had wanted to come out while the other had stopped him.

“What do you suggest Sergeant?”

“Where they are is very awkward. We can’t even just shoot underneath the cars because that low wall is in the way.”

There was a crack from their right, where the arresting fireteam had been. Both men knew from the sound that it was a larger calibre weapon.

“What the... ?” started Schaffer. The sergeant just stared intently at the cars, holding one hand up in a wait signal. A hole had appeared in the rear door of one of them, where a bullet had entered it.

“He’s dead, I’m coming out,” came a quavering voice. “Please don’t shoot me. Please don’t kill me.”

“Throw both weapons out. Now,” ordered Schaffer.

A few moments later, a pistol came flying over the bonnet of the car. Then a shotgun was slid out from between the cars, sliding about ten feet before coming to a halt. A young man slowly stood, his face ashen, and blood all down one side of him. His arms were high above his head, his fingers splayed out wide and tense. The platoon came out of cover, allowing the man to see that Schaffer hadn’t been lying about his numbers.

“Is that your blood?” called a corporal with a red-cross arm-band.

The man shook his head. “You shot the Squad Leader in the neck. His blood squirted all over me.”

“Impressive shot,” Schaffer murmured to his sergeant.

“Lucky,” growled the sergeant.

“I’ll take what I can get,” Schaffer responded.

He turned to Copeland, still on the radio.

“Get me axe leader.”

Axe leader was the call sign for number 1 platoon at Killington Lake services, a few miles to their north.

The two platoon COs quickly conferred, Schaffer filling in Lieutenant Andy Lowe of number 1 platoon with what had happened. Both men agreed to alert the next stations along the motorway, Lowe going north, Schaffer south. Schaffer then got in touch with his company HQ to fill them in, who in turn alerted battalion HQ. It took just ten minutes for the whole of the battalion to know what had happened.

Within ninety minutes, every single platoon had taken into captivity a Patrol equivalent. 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers had just taken another two hundred men off Boase. Thirty nine Patrollers had died, and another twenty seven had injuries, though twenty of those were just minor injuries that only needed cleaning or minor dressings. The remaining men were all uninjured. The Fusiliers hadn’t even had a minor injury. And the M6 north was still out of the hands of the government.

Other Patrol regions of the country were slower to act. In Cheshire, on the M62 motorway between Liverpool on the west coast, and Hull on the East, Burtonwood services, about seven miles east of Liverpool had to wait until nearly seven PM the same day before the Patrol turned up.

1st platoon, A company, 1st Battalion the East Lancashire Regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Sophie Brooks, currently held the east bound service station. The East Lancashire Regiment hadn’t existed since 1958, but had been called back into existence a month earlier.

Like most other platoon leaders, Sophie had deployed a section about a mile or so before the slip road onto the service station. Her instructions to her people had been different though. It was now known that the Patrol convoys travelled at very high speed, and often far too close together. She had decided to try and shoot out the tyres of the front vehicle, and maybe cause a crash involving all the vehicles. Just maybe the Patrol might believe that this was a genuine accident. And since there was little or no paramedic ambulance service these days, and the fire and rescue service, what was left of them, now refused to cover motorway accidents, any surviving Patrollers would have to sort themselves out.

The section she had sent out had split itself into two fireteams, the first about half a mile from the slip road, the second about half a mile farther on, to alert both the main fireteam and Sophie to the coming Patrol vehicles.

Corporal Steven Beach spotted the approaching cars, and quickly passed on the sighting. However, to everyone’s surprise, not only were the cars travelling a lot slower, barely thirty miles an hour, he guessed, and more spread out, there were also a lot more of them, fifteen rather than four.

“Shit,” muttered Sophie when she heard the news. She grabbed the radio mic. “Steve, get back to the rest of your section asap, and then get back here, all of you. Don’t try stopping them, there’s far too many and you’ll get overwhelmed.”

Steve had already realised this, and was already starting to make his way back.

Sophie threw the mic back at Duncan, her radio operator. “Get 2nd platoon and ask if they can send assistance. We won’t be able to cope with that number otherwise. Then get in touch with company HQ and inform them of the situation.”

“Ma’am.”

The fifteen cars pulled slowly into the almost deserted service station. Fuel and travel restrictions, plus curfew, meant that most of the staff had already gone home, and there were currently no customers.