Capital Falling Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Winkless, Lance

  I catch a glimpse of Alice with Flight Lieutenant Alders out by his Lynx and Josh is with Buck. Josh is seated behind the rotary barrel of that Lynx’s minigun, Buck pointing as he takes Josh through how to operate it. Josh looks like he is eager to let it rip. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

  Going right out of the hangar, I carry on walking and look for a quiet spot that will give me some peace and quiet to think, if that is even possible at this busy airport.

  Not far past the hangar, the building comes to an end and before the next one starts, there is a small alcove which is out of sight of the hangar but still close enough that if anyone shouts for me, I will still hear them. Beggars can’t be choosers so this spot will have to do, and I go just around the corner and sit down on the tarmac. My back leans against the whitewashed wall and my knees bend up for my arms to rest on, then finally, I put my head back against the wall, the sun feeling good on my face as I let out a sigh.

  My thoughts are not immediately centred on the mission, as my mind wanders to Emily, where she is now and what she is doing, hoping she is still okay. Then, I allow myself to think of Catherine for a moment; I am taken back to yesterday when she met us out of the lift at the Orion building. I can’t help but think of how gorgeous and vibrant she looked in the red dress she had on, how it clung to her body as she walked in front of me and the long black zip that went all the way down the back. Will I ever be lucky enough to find out what that long zip was hiding? God, I hope so.

  Forcing my mind back to reality, I have to leave those fleeting thoughts behind and get my head back in the game. I clear my mind and start to play out the mission in my head. I try to visualise the whole mission from when we take off to when we land back at Heathrow. Every part is thought out, and I try to envisage each step that has to be taken to carry out the mission, much like a sprinter does just before the starting gun is fired. There is so much more to visualise for this than a sprinter must for their ten-second sprint.

  I open my eyes after several minutes and look down, staring at the tarmac, feeling as though I have accomplished nothing. There are just too many variables to consider and too many things I can imagine going wrong; there are threats at every stage of this mission. I knew before that it was going to take a large slice of luck to accomplish this mission, and this process has brought that home to a sharp point and made me feel more dejected about it.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket, so I lean to one side to enable me to pull it out of the tight space. There is a message from Catherine; did her subconscious tell her I was thinking about her or is it pure coincidence?

  ‘Hi Andy, I just wanted to let you know that Emily and Stacey are fine, we are still stuck in the same room and it is pretty boring, to be honest. Suppose it could be worse. Good luck with the mission, I’m thinking of you, how much longer until you go? Luv C.’

  Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence, perhaps it was the Universe pulling us together. Whatever it is, it is great timing, because Catherine’s message has picked me up out of the doldrums somewhat.

  I click reply. ‘Hey, how did you know I was just thinking about you? Thanks for letting me know about the girls, and I can’t wait to see you all again. We go in about half an hour, so this will probably be the last message for a while. Try not to worry too much, love Andy.’

  After I click send, I get up from my stoop, slip my phone back in my pocket and stride back towards the hangar, my son and my team. We have one option and that is to succeed, there is no way I am not going to see those three girls again, no matter the odds!

  On the way back, Josh sees me approaching and comes running over.

  “You okay, Dad?”

  “Yes, Champ,” I tell him and give him a confident smile. “Just needed a bit of time to go over the mission in my head away from all the noise. Nothing to worry about.”

  “I see, did you get them straight?” he asks.

  “I just wanted to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious and couldn’t think of anything, so all good,” I tell him and put my arm around his neck, pulling him into me playfully. “I just heard off Catherine, she says they are all fine; bored, but fine.”

  “Good, won’t be long until we get back to them,” Josh says, pulling away from me as we get near to the hangar.

  “Nope, not long,” I agree as my phone buzzes against my hip again; it’s another message from Catherine. ‘Come back safe to us. XX’, it reads, and I quickly type, ‘You can count on it! Xx’.

  Chapter 13

  “What have we got, gentlemen?” I ask Dan and Lieutenant Winters.

  The Lieutenant answers first. “There was a power outage in the Paddington Basin area yesterday, which would have affected Orion. I have spoken to London Utilities and they informed me the power has been restored to that area. They could give no guarantees for the Orion building, however.”

  “Dan, do we have drone footage?”

  “Not yet, but a drone has been tasked and we should be online within five minutes,” he tells me.

  “We are going to have to assume the Orion building has no power, so what are our options?” I ask.

  “We will have to take a generator with us. There are portable ones,” Josh suggests from beside me.

  “I’ll get one arranged,” the Lieutenant says without having to be asked.

  “Josh, get Corporal Watts over here, please,” I ask.

  Josh, runs across the hangar to where the Corporal, currently shrouded in bright blue light from plasma, is testing it, sparks flying off whatever piece of metal he has found to cut up to test it on.

  The Corporal looks up to Josh through his blacked-out safety goggles, before he pulls them up off his head. He follows Josh back across the hangar to us.

  “Corporal, the building might not have power, so we are getting a generator to take with us; do you know of any problems with using one with the plasma?”

  “No, Sir, there should be no problem,” he tells me.

  “As soon as it arrives, get it tested, as I don’t have the greatest faith in generators,”

  “Yes, Sir,” he says, looking slightly confused.

  He wouldn’t look confused if I told him about the generators failing at the Orion building yesterday and the resulting fate of many friends and colleagues one floor below me.

  “Thank you, Corporal, carry on,” I tell him.

  “The drone is approaching the target,” Dan says from behind me.

  The Corporal and I spin around at the same time as he goes back to his plasma and I spin to look at the drone’s approach to the Orion building.

  “Ten minutes until the generator arrives,” the Lieutenant says as I start to focus on the video footage from the drone.

  Even from high above the ground, the picture quality coming in from the drone is excellent, and it still surprises me how far technology has come in such a short time. When I was serving, for the most part, we were lucky if we had a few blurry aerial photos taken from miles above the target area to study before a mission. You literally had to use a magnifying glass to look at them, more often than not. Now we are getting live footage of the target area, and if somebody told me it was full High Definition, I would believe them.

  “What are we looking at?” I ask.

  Dan checks the grid reference on the screen of where the drone is. “The Orion building should be in view any second now.”

  And then, there it is, we are looking down at the distinctive triangular-shaped building sitting next to the Paddington Basin canal. The drone is too high for us to see much detail, but I can just about make out the hole in the roof that we escaped from yesterday and that is probably only because I know it is there.

  “Tell the pilot to take the drone as low as he can,” I tell Dan.

  Dan picks up the headphones that are sitting on the table, puts them on and then pulls down the microphone. It swivels on Dan's right earphone until it is in front of Dan’s mouth. It takes a minute or so for Dan to speak to the pilot, but the drone i
s soon descending as it circles around the Orion building. The view of the building improves constantly.

  “That’s as low as he can get without risking crashing,” Dan says as he lifts his left headphone off his ear and onto the side of his head so he can hear both of us and the pilot.

  We study the improved view for a few minutes, although there is still a lot of smoke in the area that clouds the picture. As the drone circles, one of us will lean in occasionally if we see something that might be of interest, closer to the screen, trying to get a better look.

  “Rabids are still all over the front grounds, inside the perimeter fence,” I point out. “There aren’t as many as yesterday, but I was hoping they would have all but gone by now.”

  “They aren’t really moving, they look almost asleep like they were when we got to the Tower of London yesterday. That’ll soon change when we arrive,” Dan reveals.

  “Yes, do you think there are enough of them to build up to the broken windows again?” I ask.

  “Doubtful, Boss, there would need to be a lot more of them; we will attract more when we arrive but I don’t think we will be there long enough from them to pose a threat,” Dan surmises.

  “Agreed,” I say, “let's concentrate on the building then. Can anybody see any signs of the power being on in there?”

  “Is that a light,” Josh says, pointing, “or is it the Sun reflecting on a window?”

  We all look but none of us can say for sure, in fact, we can’t see anything that would confirm the building has power.

  “The roof is still clear, which is a good sign. Tell the pilot to switch to infrared, and let’s see if the Rabids show up and we can see how many and where they are in the building,” I tell Dan, who starts to speak into the microphone to the pilot.

  “I doubt they will show up, they are cold-blooded,” Lieutenant Winters informs us. “That is the report I have seen, from the specimens we have,” he tells me as I look at him, quizzically.

  “I’m not going to ask,” I reply.

  The picture on the monitor flicks off, then almost instantaneously comes back on again and is showing the footage in infrared. We learn nothing from the infrared camera; it seems the Lieutenant is right about the Rabids, and they are as dead as the building they are occupying. It shows no heat sources, so I get the drone's camera switched back.

  “Tell the pilot to fly over the hole in the roof and to concentrate the camera on it. Let’s see if we can get a look inside Sir Malcolm’s office,” I tell Dan, who relays the order.

  Almost immediately, the drone adjusts its course, coming around to get in line for its flypast of the hole in the roof of the Orion building. At the same time, the drone’s camera motors turn the camera, so it is pointing directly at the hole; it zooms in and the motors work to adjust the camera's direction, to compensate if the drone sways offline. The camera is now fixed on the hole, moving as the drone approaches its target. It points straight down into the hole when the drone is directly overhead, and still moves, fixed on the hole as the drone flies past.

  Even with the pilot slowing the drone’s speed as much as possible, the footage is fleeting, but I think I do get a look inside at the large red and gold patterned Turkish rug that adorns the floor of Sir Malcolm’s office. Or is my mind playing tricks on me?

  “Did anybody see anything?” I enquire, but nobody is sure. “Can you play it back in slow motion, Dan?”

  “Hold on, let me rewind it.”

  Dan rewinds the footage and plays it back slowly, and he even freezes it, with the clearest view inside the building he can find; it is stuck on the screen for us to study. It was Sir Malcolm’s rug that I saw and the only other thing we can make out in his office, apart from the edges of his furniture on the periphery of the hole, is some rubble on the floor, tarnishing his beloved rug. We can’t even see the sideboard containing the safe from the angle we have, but we know it is there. More importantly, there is no sign of any Rabids in the office, which gives us all a bit more confidence for the mission ahead.

  “Okay,” I say, “there is one more view I want to try and get. Tell the pilot to make a flypast of the long side of the building; he is going to have to get lower, as I want to see if we can see inside through the top floor windows, of floor seven.”

  “Boss, the pilot said he was as low as he could go?” Dan reiterates.

  “Tell him, Dan. It’s worth the risk, and we’ve finished with the drone anyway if it crashes.” Dan gives me a very sceptical look but starts talking to the pilot.

  A couple of minutes pass, and Dan goes quiet, waiting.

  “No dice, Boss, he says he can’t do it; his Squadron Leader won’t give him permission,” Dan finally says.

  “Put me through to the Squadron Leader,” I tell Dan.

  Again, a couple of minutes pass, and this time Dan is talking, nearly arguing constantly.

  “Here they are,” Dan tells me, takes off the earphones and gives them to me.

  “Squadron Leader?” I ask.

  “Yes, this is the Squadron Leader,” a female voice replies.

  “I’m Captain Richards, carrying out a critical mission under the direct orders of Colonel Reed. This flypast is vital to our mission under the Colonel’s orders. I order you to sanction the flypast, my team is about to enter that building. If there is a chance to see inside, we will take it, understood?”

  “I will speak to my superior,” she tells me.

  “Colonel Reed is your superior today, Squadron Leader. We are moving out imminently, with no delays, so authorise the flypast now. That is an order.”

  The Squadron Leader is silent for a moment before she tells me, “you have your flypast, Captain.”

  “Thank you,”

  “Good luck with your mission,” she tells me and is then gone.

  My eyes revert to the monitor as I pull off the earphones and hand them back to Dan.

  We all watch in silence as we see the drone start course corrections again through its camera, the ground below getting closer and closer and seemingly speeding up. The camera then turns upwards so that it is pointing out to the side of the drone and we start to get fast-moving views of buildings shooting past. They are almost a blur and it is impossible to identify any of them.

  Dan is talking to the pilot, who is giving him a running commentary on his approach; Dan relays some of it to us. ‘One minute’, he tells us, ‘thirty seconds’, ‘approaching the target, here we go’.

  A bright blue flash that lasts no more than a couple of seconds, if that, crosses the screen. There is no mistaking the mirrored blue glass of the Orion building as the drone surges past, close to them, and I suddenly have strong doubts whether we will find any usable footage from that brief flash.

  Almost as soon as the flash of blue has fleetingly passed from the screen, the footage comes to an abrupt end, black, grey and white static filling the monitor's screen and we look at Dan to see what’s happened.

  “Yep, it’s crashed into the next building,” he tells us. “That’s definitely coming out of your wages, Boss, only ten million quid or so.”

  We all burst out laughing, which draws looks from the other members of the team around the hangar. They are probably wondering what on earth we could be laughing at. They understand, however, that even in the tensest of situations, humour is very often what helps get us humans through, relieves the stress, and sometimes even helps stops the mind cracking.

  “No chance; this is the Colonel’s show, that is going on his tab,” I retort, eventually. “Rewind,” I tell Dan, forcing myself to stop laughing, although I hold no hope that we will see anything.

  Dan, rewinds, plays and freezes the footage frame by frame several times, until we have to admit that the footage is useless, and Dan turns off the monitor. The mirrored glass of the building did its job, kept prying eyes out, even though no one could ever have imagined the beneficiaries would be a Zombie horde holed up in the building.

  Sergeant Dixon hasn’t moved from
his area with the table he set up, as he and Corporal Simms have pored over the equipment; it looks to me like a briefcase computer, with various cables protruding from it and its instructions that arrived on the Lynx. Finally, he gets up from the table, leaves it and approaches me, with Simms close behind him.

  I have given the Sergeant space and time to familiarise himself with the equipment, without having me asking how it’s going or how long it’s going to take, which would not have helped. I had to trust he was working as fast as he could.

  “Are you happy?” I ask the Sergeant as he gets to me.

  “I think that would be overstating it, Sir. The equipment is ‘state of the art’ though. I have familiarised myself with this model now and have prepped all that I can ready for it to be used on the safe when we get there. That is going by the plans SecLock supplied, Sir.”

  “Was the Corporal much help?”

  “Yes Sir, very much, I’ve shown him everything as a backup, just in case,” he tells me, his scared face not showing one ounce of trepidation. This man is ice cool.

  “Excellent, Sergeant, are you ready to load it up?” I question.

  “Yes Sir, we are good to go.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Corporal, carry on,” I tell them.

  With that, they salute before spinning around and go to load up. That only leaves the generator holding us up and that should be here any minute. I check my watch, and it tells me it’s 1340 hours; so much for getting underway earlier, at this rate, we will miss Colonel Reed’s new mission time of 1345.

  Looking out of the open roller shutter, I can see no sign of any vehicles approaching that may be bringing the generator. Lieutenant Winters must feel my eagerness to get going because as I turn to ask him where the generator is, he is already picking up the phone and tells me he is ‘on it’.

  Instead of just waiting in frustration, I decide to give the team its final brief before the off. All of the team is outside milling around, our equipment loaded onto the two Lynx. Everything is in place apart from the bloody generator. Some of the team are alone, walking around, psyching themselves up for the now imminent mission, trying to suppress their nerves and fear while others are in small groups chatting and joking, trying to take their minds off the same nerves and fears. Everyone has their own mechanism to deal with fear, to stop them turning and running away as quickly and as far as possible. The ones who tell you they aren’t scared shitless are either lying or have lost their mind!