33
The bridge of the Transmanche Ferries Seven Sisters was busy, but after the introductions and some waving of warrant cards the captain had given us free run. We were all looking at the monitors showing the cargo deck. No movement so far apart from crew members in their fluorescent vests every now and then. The truck was parked among several similar vehicles. India Papa 501 Alpha Kilo and its rusty container, still sitting there like the dumbest of dumb things. Tchéky had been instructed to turn off their transmitter as we left the three-mile line into international waters. He’d phoned both Defence Ministries to try to rearrange some sort of NATO country coverage but no dice so far. That was frustrating. Bang-Bang checked our laptop for our own tracking device. ‘Weak signal but it’s there. Bit worried about the battery though.’
‘OK… where are the driver and his mate?’
‘Truckers’ lounge. Marianne has eyes-on.’
We all looked at each other and did the now-standard Gallic shrug. ‘Tea?’
We went to the driver’s lounge, which was bizarrely called “Brighton Pier”, fell into the seats and kept half an eye on the truck crew. They seemed utterly oblivious. I took a photo of them on my BlackBerry and emailed it to Toots at KTS. Two hours till Newhaven and they weren’t going anywhere. Bang-Bang came over gingerly carrying a tray of tea and paraphernalia from the cafeteria. ‘You be mum, Riz darling, I’m going topside for a fag.’
She gave the laptop on the table a final look. ‘Bollocks. Lost the signal. I think the modem is roaming for the UK side.’ She started tapping furiously on the keyboard. I squeezed her shoulder in encouragement. ‘C’mon babe, if anyone can get a connection out here, you can.’
I looked at the DPSD team. ‘This girl here could get an internet connection on the moon.’
She leant back and raised her hands away from the keyboard like a concert pianist who’d lost the vibe. ‘Yes to an internet connection, no to a phone. Either the battery’s dead or all the bulkheads are getting in the way.’ We all looked at each other. ‘Well like we said, it’s not going over the side. And we can see the drivers.’
I poured the tea for our French colleagues. ‘Anyway. This is proper tea, mes amis. Pay attention.’
My phone vibrated on the table. ‘Riz. Mahoney. How we doing?’
‘Too good, boss. The crew look cooler than the other side of a pillow and there’s been no interaction with the cargo. Also, we’ve been looking at stuff the opposition have been planning. They’ve been mocking up mosques in Birmingham.’
‘OK. That makes sense. They might use the demos as cover. I don’t like any of this either, and I’ve made a decision. We’ll hit them as soon as we can outside Newhaven.’
‘Agreed… time of arrival at Newhaven is 2000 UK time. Our vehicles are all about three cars behind the target but we’ll follow them straight out and see you in the arrivals park. Do COBR know?’
He laughed. ‘They will…after the event. See you at the port. You’ll need to sign for your new wheels. Toots has the paperwork.’
‘Got that.’ I dialled Fuzz.
‘Rizbhai! You anywhere nice?’
‘On a boat. Listen, I need you to rustle up the posse and get down to Abacus Van Hire in Andover and hire two or so motorhomes. Ring the Colonel for backup, we can use the Army Land HQ account. I’ve a feeling we’re all going to be living like gypsies for the next couple of days. Get hold of Roadrunner and see how many fast cars she can get hold of – at least two, with some oomph. And swing by Uncle Khan’s shop. We’re gonna need guns. Lots of. Proper firepower. Say “Overmatch” to him.’
Bang-Bang took the phone from me. ‘Salamz hun - can you also bring the kit I’ve been working on? Ta muchly babes!’
34
I pulled the Citroen into the car passengers’ section and we got out. On the other side of the harbour under a splash of lights, I could see a big grey UK Border Agency ship moored right next to the warehouses. I’d better check that. I rang the Colonel. ‘Boss. Are UKBA cleared on this?’
‘All the way, Riz. They have a little office at the train terminal, they’ll be along.’
‘Cool. I worried for a sec.’
Marianne and Rico pulled up and after some brief farewells Rico spirited the Citroen away, ready for the return ferry. I showed my diplomatic passport to an approaching UKBA man and he gave it the once-over, shrugged and went away.
The trucks were being filtered through a different lane so we had a few minutes leeway. Toots walked smartly forward with a clipboard and a kitbag. ‘Hello you two and welcome back. You’re signing for the white fleet van behind me and…’
She nodded at the bag, ‘your personal effects and personal weapons.’
I began signing the forms. Toots was speaking under her breath. ‘MOD 90 and KTS passes, fuel card and Luncheon Vouchers are in the glove box. I topped it off with petrol myself and checked the tyres. The numberplate’s flagged so you can set off as many speed cameras as you like and plod will leave you alone. Your personal effects for a week are in the kit bag and I’ve loaded the back of the van with enough stuff for a short week. Two gonk-bags, a camp bed and a copy of Chat magazine. I have the keys to your flat, Riz, and I’ve spoken to your Mum, Holly, it’s all good. Colonel Mahoney says no heavy weaponry yet, let’s keep it low profile. Sign here and… here. Van’s all yours. Try not to push all the buttons at once.’
Bang-Bang delved in the bag, pulling out her CZ85 and my Walther 88 pistol. She handed my pistol to me as I took the keys to the van. There was a post-it note stuck to it with Uncle Khan’s scratchy Urdu scrawl, saying he’d changed the barrels, firing pins, extractor parts and anything else that left marks on cartridge cases. We all looked back into the truck park. ‘Is it moving, Toots?’
‘Yes, it is. They just cleared customs. We’d better stay on it. Laters.’
Toots saluted and made for an office car.
I looked at Bang-Bang. ‘Let’s go.’
We went to the van. I familiarised myself with the controls and started the engine, then placed my BlackBerry in the charging cradle. The displays lit up and the Bluetooth connected. Your common-or-garden Army Intelligence Corps covert surveillance van. On the dash was the standard stern sticker reading “THIS IS A PETROL VEHICLE”. Some comic had turned the “E” in “petrol” into an “A” with a marker pen.
Bang-Bang got in the back via the sliding side door, opened the connecting hatch and waved hello. Then she got the interior desk lamps on and started perusing the manuals and surveillance gear in the back. She whistled appreciatively. ‘This wagon has ALL the party gear, hun. We got night and thermal through a camera in the top, CB and all radio channels, wifi, TV monitoring, Airwave, printers, a scanner… hey check this, the luggage racks on top have all the antennas built in!’
‘Yes luv. I was driving one a month or so ago, remember?’
‘Ah. OK.’ She swore under her breath as she looked at the laptop display. ‘We’ve definitely lost the signal hun. I interrogated it with the software onboard and tried using it to restart the phone. No dice. Maybe the battery went. Eyes-on from now.’
‘OK.’ I pulled out onto the main road and dawdled away north. Sooner or later our target would come bumbling up behind us and then we’d call it in. Bang-Bang started snapping and popping some chewing gum. Nervous energy.
The radio in the van hashed. ‘
India
Papa
501
Alpha
Kilo
is
moving
from
truck
park
.
Come
back
...’
I keyed the pressel on the steering wheel. ‘Have that.’
We parked up at a junction, which according to the dashboard-mounted satnav display, was called either the Hollow or the Pottery. Hard to tell. Perfect spot for an ambush though. We got out of the van and made our way to the middle of the A-road. I gripped my pistol and checked the safety. Bang-Bang nodded at me in the darkness and went right. I looked down the hill to the bright splashes of light from the Newhaven port. On the hill all was quiet, and silence fell upon the land.
The E Squadron vehicles appeared from the darkness, reversing, their lights extinguished. Doors opened and I saw dark figures moving steadily about and ahead, down the incline. I knew they’d be setting the stinger across the road and getting an illumination flare ready. The team had reversed their lead truck across the road and were in ambush position.
A rumble came from down the incline, headlights appeared. The noise of the truck grew, louder, louder…
Suddenly the truck was here, its headlights bathing us all in light and grinding over the incline, and then things started happening rapidly. The truck sped over the stinger and its front tyres exploded and it ground to a halt. A flare shot into the night sky and detonated with a flat magnesium glare and all around us were shouts and yells. ‘GO GO GO!’ We ran forward, weapons in the aim. The target truck crew had jumped down out of the cab and raised their arms in shock. I got hold of the driver and stuck my pistol in his face. Behind me the guys were starting to wrench the trailer doors open and the EOD crew ran up shouting ‘No! Wait… wait.’
We waited. The EOD crew ran a cable forward, and some lights, and began checking around the rear doors. After three minutes one called ‘Clear.’
We ran to the rear of the truck and opened the container doors. We swung our flashlights in and looked. The container was filled with… televisions.
‘They’ve switched trucks.’
I looked down at the brazen license plate. IP501AK and the little F and the Euro flag. Bastards. I looked back down into the splash of lights at the terminal, and the brightly-lit ferry, and swore under my breath. They must have changed the plates on board. I remembered the crew moving about in the cargo deck. Obvious with hindsight. They’d chosen that ferry line because they had inside men in the crew. The truck crew were standing by the cab. The driver was smirking. That smirk was soon wiped from his face as Bang-Bang marched over, chewing gum, and cracked him hard round the jaw with her pistol. He bounced like a rag doll off the side of the truck and collapsed, vomiting and spitting out the odd molar. She was swearing at him French as I dragged her off him. The E Squadron team leader pulled him away and said ‘Don’t worry guys, we’ll get these two to JSIW and see what they know.’
Bang-Bang turned away and looked back down towards the ferry port. ‘Oh yeah, the Reid Technique and everything else. Good luck with that.’
I turned back. ‘Which could take days. Lads, we’d better face up to the fact they’ve swerved us. There are dozens of farm hangars and industrial units in this part of the world, they get used for drug smuggling all the time. Hell, Teacher’s family have their own trawler to do that kind of smuggling round here. Ten gets you twenty the truck’s undercover in one now and the cargo is being split up.’
Bang-Bang chewed gum at one hundred miles per hour. ‘Now what?’
‘The best we can do now is watch for faces, Infidel or C18 faces, because the day of demos is almost upon us. We’d better get back to London and programme the software.’
Behind us the RMP team bundled our suspects into a car and sped away to Chicksands. We decocked our weapons and looked south again to the ferry terminal.
‘Bastards.’ Dinger stared at a map by flashlight. ‘While we were busy waiting to ambush the decoy they must have left port via the Lewes road, west out of town.’ He tapped the map.
Dinger pressed his finger to his earpiece. ‘Boss.’ It was Colonel Mahoney. ‘Really? That was quick. OK, we’re on it.’
He turned to me. ‘We’ve already got the Army planes up and one has found thermal smudges at some farm buildings. Vehicle activity and one trace that matches a truck. Seven klicks north from here. Industrial units at Swanborough Drove. Let’s go.’
He shouted at his crew for the grid references and we were off in several roostertails of dust and dirt, back down the A26 into Newhaven.
35
We hit 70mph on the Lewes Road outside Newhaven heading northwest. In my headlight beams ahead of us, the two E Squadron vehicles sped along; behind us, the EOD truck was struggling to keep up. Bang-Bang was in the front cab with me now, checking our pistols were loaded and made safe.
‘Hey doll, if we get there quick enough we might find a bunch of Nazis with heavy weapons, whooh.’
I laughed. ‘Best-case scenario.’ The satnav said two minutes to target. The E Squadron vehicles suddenly pulled in left in a spall of dust and the van’s intercom went. ‘Riz. Left left left, out and covering, MOVE.’
Bang-Bang cocked her pistol and I slewed the van left into the farmyard. Another flare shot into the air and lit us in a surreal yellow light. ‘GO!’
We jumped out of the cab and went forward, weapons in the aim. The E Squadron team were in there under the harsh flare light. A barn. A hangar. No people. ‘CLEAR!’
‘Oh my Lord.’
We looked into the barn. Guns. Lots of guns. The EOD truck pulled in behind us in a cloud of dust. We ran forward. There was a truck, identical to the one we’d just stopped, its container doors yawning open. We cleared it for enemy combatants. I placed my hand on the exhaust pipe by the fuel tank. Still warm.
‘Clear! Don’t pull the cab doors-’
They’d pulled the cab doors. Dinger stuck a carbine into the cab. We’d live another day, there was no-one here.
I saw a smeared set of light switches and I flipped all the switches down. The overhead strips flickered into life, and we looked around at an empty truck, tyre-trails, and a scattered selection of weapons, piled haphazardly on trestle tables and on the ground. Most were gaily-decorated in Taliban style, with blue electrical tape on the butts and child’s press-on floral decorations. We all slowed and stopped, two paces in. The night became quiet, broken only by the chirping of the odd radio.
‘OK. What don’t we see here?’ I asked to the air.
Bang-Bang spoke. ‘Small, concealable weapons like pistols, grenades. PPSHs, or carbines like my one.’
‘Right. PPSHs aren’t that compact though.’
‘Yeah, but you could sling it under a trenchcoat no problem, and they have drum mags and they’re chambered for 7.62 Tokarev… do a lot of damage... that round will go through NATO body armour…’
She tailed off and looked more closely at the detritus. ‘They’ve also left all these ICOM transmitters behind. And a bunch of landmines. And ooooh, some PKMs!’
‘We’ll have the landmines. Swallow?’
‘Definitely. We’ll get them loaded.’
‘Holly darling. I’ve got an idea. In the back of the van there’s load of Peli cases at the back, bungeed down. Can you grab the one marked ‘DABS’ for us?’
‘Sure.’ She went to the van and returned with the mobile fingerprint kit. I placed it on the ground, opened it and got busy with the gear inside as the E Squadron guys set up a loose perimeter and began calling in the bad news. Bang-Bang came over to watch as I set up the portable UV lamp and started dusting various AK grips and taped furniture with fluorescent yellow magnetic powder. Presently some prints became apparent. Some were partials so I put the powder away and got the can of Lightning Spray out and gave the surfaces a good blast. I waited. I got some lifting tape and took some of the best results off the weapons. I had to be careful. Latent prints sat on top of metal, plastic, enamel paint and other nonporous surfaces. The tiniest abrasion could render them worthless.
I fixed the tapes to an array of black 3” by 5” lift cards I’d set aside on the work surface and marked the orientation with a Magic Marker, writing “towards muzzle” along an arrow. On the back of the cards I wrote the time and date and a short description of where each lift was from. And that was all we had time for.
Bang-Bang and Dinger were carefully pacing round the barn, trying to guesstimate how many people had been here by the prints in the dirt. They couldn’t agree. Dinger said ‘Eight’. Bang-Bang pointed at a scuff and said ‘Ten. Nine.’
I coughed and handed the lift cards to Bang-Bang carefully. ‘Doll. Could you use the scanner on these and email the TIFFs to KTS. Ask them if they can get Tchéky’s lot to run them on the French databases for any possibles.’
She saluted wryly and left for the van. I looked at Swallow. ‘We’d better hit the road and bomb-burst out. Maybe we can catch them. Some of them. Maybe.’
He nodded back at me and got on his radio. ‘All callsigns, we’re moving.’
We moved.