Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘Have you been wondering what Boese’s doing while all this is going on, Jack?’ Byrne asked him as the plane took off.

  ‘I have, yeah.’

  ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘Well, the best time to escape is during the pandemonium. Who’s going to get stopped?’

  Byrne nodded. ‘He stuck around to watch once before.’

  Swann shook his head. ‘He stuck around to check out SO19’s tactics. That was a bit of research. He doesn’t need to research any more. He’ll be long gone, Louis. Back to wherever it is he came from.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ Byrne looked away from him.

  Swann tightened his seat belt. ‘He has to have a safe haven somewhere. Every terrorist needs friendly faces.’

  ‘He’s different though, isn’t he,’ Byrne said. ‘Thinks of himself more as a businessman than a terrorist. That’s why he’s guarded his identity so carefully.’

  ‘He’s been clever, all right. I’ve never come across a more cunning bastard than this one.’ Swann frowned. ‘We were very lucky with your ATF connection. That was a serious result.’

  Byrne looked at him. ‘You still think somebody snitched, don’t you.’

  Swann made a face. ‘Not snitched. Made a mistake. Loose talk in a pub, maybe. It happens.’ He looked sideways at him. ‘He knew far too much to get it just from antisurveillance.’

  From the deck of his father’s trailer Little T saw them walk to the truck, Harrison between two men, and the one who beat him behind them. Harrison sat between Drake and Wingo in the back seat, handcuffed behind his back. Jesse drove through town to the highway. Harrison saw Danny Dugger’s truck with the white camper top parked out in front of the Silver Dollar. The cloud was low still and a fine drizzle washed over the windshield.

  ‘Looks like it might storm up,’ Harrison said.

  Drake looked sideways at him. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You’ll have every Fed in the state camped on your stoop by the morning.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Jesse watched in the rear-view mirror. ‘I don’t think so either.’

  They drove him into the compound with the rain falling harder. The dogs were out and they barked as Tate stopped the truck. It was cold when they set him on the ground, the wind coming in off the mountains to bend the trees against the inner compound wall. Wingo got out first and, grabbing a handful of Harrison’s shoulder, hauled him out afterwards. The house stood huge and white and silent. Harrison looked at an upstairs window and saw Jemima Salvesen watching him, a look of disgust on her face.

  They marched him inside the walls of the inner compound and closed the gates. Then Jesse went up the steps to the house. Wingo and Drake escorted Harrison across the yard to the armoury. Harrison thought of all the M16s down there and wished he’d had the opportunity to substitute the firing pins. It was too late now. Wingo unlocked the side door, threw him inside and locked it again after him.

  Harrison knelt in the darkness; no windows, no interior light switch that he could find. He stood up and allowed his eyes to grow accustomed and, as they did, he gradually made out the gallows above his head. The trap door was open and he glimpsed the thick loop of the noose. He thought about Guffy then and all the people he knew in town. He flexed the fingers on both hands. The cuffs were the plastic type used by the state police, and they bit into the skin round his wrists. He leaned against the wall and caught his breath. He knew from his reconnaissance in the tunnels that there was a second door. Turning his back to it, he tried the handle. Locked. Ironic really: beyond that door was more firepower than a man could ever need and here he was helpless. He could feel the knot in his stomach. Fear. He was locked in, hands tied fast. Again he looked at the gallows and he knew they would hang him.

  Porter and Mitchell, the two entry operators, waited while the Engineers worked on the hole in the wall. All four of them had stick-on chemical indicator paper attached to their arms and legs. If there was contamination immediately, the paper would turn blue. Porter watched his as the first breeze block came clear, one more and Mitchell would be able to get through at least. Porter wasn’t so sure that he would. The sweat was in his eyes again, running down his face, mask sucking at flesh beneath the rubber housing. He would have given anything just to ease that pressure for a moment and wipe the moisture from his eyes. Twenty minutes was the optimum time that anyone should spend working in one of these suits, and over it he had the modular bomb gear with the heavy Kevlar lining. He wished he had opted for the lighter one and allowed his arms to remain free at least. If the device went off while he was gaining entry, he would be history anyway. But caution was always the watchword and you never think of those things while you’re preparing yourself. If you thought you were going to die, you wouldn’t do this job in the first place. Cregan had the right idea, getting a job with the Met when his time was up. The Met handled more IEDs than they did, but none stuffed full of chemicals.

  The Engineers were through and they looked back at Porter and Mitchell. ‘All yours, boys,’ one of them said. ‘You want us to stick around?’

  Porter shook his head. ‘Fuck off out of it,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here too long as it is.’

  The Engineer laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  When they were alone, Mitchell and Porter looked at one another. The time was ticking away, both of them knew it. Whatever time had been allowed on the safety-arming switch, there was less of it now than when they started.

  ‘Control from entry team,’ Porter spoke into the radio clipped to his bomb helmet.

  ‘Go ahead, entry team.’ Hewitt’s voice. He could hear the tension in it. You want to be tense, he thought. You ought to be up here.

  ‘Porter here, sir. We’re through the wall. Engineers are on their way down.’ He glanced down at the indicator paper. ‘So far, negative contamination. Indicator paper remains clear. We’re going to send Buck-eye in to take a look around. Retreating to distance of one hundred metres.’

  ‘Received, Porter. Standing by.’

  Mitchell set up Buck-eye, the portable version of the weapons-mounted Alvis Wheelbarrow. He could climb stairs and look over walls if you wanted him to. They had carried him up here between them and now he was activated, armed with three disrupters, drive and attack cameras. They moved away, feeding out the fibre-optic cable and the portable monitor. Porter had rigged up the radio control for the drive and attack cameras as well, but he doubted whether Hewitt and the others in the control vehicle would get any pictures, too much concrete around them. One hundred metres took them two floors down and they checked their position before using the remote handset to drive Buck-eye towards the hole. The little robot would get through easily enough, infrared sight on the cameras. They could risk no additional light and had worked the last few minutes in darkness. There was no way of knowing whether the movement sensors were also activated by light. There was also no immediate way of knowing whether Buck-eye himself would set them off; it all depended on the angle of the infrared beam. The moment he was at the wall was a tough one. Both Mitchell and Porter watched the monitor with the drive camera picking up the full expanse of the hole. Once through, the whole thing could go bang.

  They eased Buck-eye through the aperture and gently into the flat. Porter operated the lower hamper at a snail’s pace, using the attack boom to give them gradual all-round vision. He kept the weapons mount boom low, almost to the lower hamper itself, and carefully swept the area.

  ‘Control from Porter. Buck-eye is in the target area. You getting anything, sir?’

  ‘Negative. Too much interference.’

  ‘I’ll talk you through it.’

  Through the twin cameras on the robot, Porter could see the room in a pale wash. Keeping the boom fully flat, he zoomed the macrolens in on the booby-trapped door: a separate IED, but linked to the main device, about half a kilo of Semtex attached to a PIRA-style timing and power unit, with a mercury ti
lt switch on one side.

  ‘Booby trap on the door,’ he said. ‘But linked to the main device. I think we can do a con-ex on that and get the door open.’

  ‘How far is it from the main IED?’ Hewitt spoke in his ear.

  ‘Right across the room, probably thirty feet.’

  ‘Concussion waves?’

  ‘Possible, sir. We can leave it if you want, but it’s held on a mercury tilt switch.’

  ‘What about the rest? You said there were passive infrareds?’

  ‘Stand by.’

  Porter guided Buck-eye 360 degrees and then slowly across the carpet. He stopped and scanned the rest of the room. A glass cubicle had been built against the wall of the kitchen. They had not been able to see it with the fibre-optic camera.

  ‘Control from entry team.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Located dirty room. Four-sided glass in the kitchen.’ He moved the robot closer. ‘Plastic drum on the floor. Empty,’ he said. ‘About twenty to twenty-five litres. The cap is missing.’ It lay on the floor alongside the empty drum. He raised the boom now, gently, so he could see the rest of the room. On the surface inside the dirty room lay a number of glass bottles and a small gas burner. Discarded by the sink was a piece of copper tubing, with one end hacksawed off. Porter reported it back.

  He and Mitchell had a discussion. They left Buck-eye where he was and sat on the steps of the tower block. Outside, the City was silent, dark now as the day faded. They had scanned and filmed the rest of the room and counted thirty-five tubes in total. The information had been relayed back to the control point and in turn to the scientists from Porton Down, who were still beyond the inner cordon at the command control point in White City. The tubes all had twin lines of detonator wire in them, which meant each one was charged separately. On the floor was the four by two wooden box with a hinged lid. They had filmed it up close and Mitchell had picked up a microswitch booby trap set under the hasp on the front. A tiny hole had been drilled at the back of the hasp and the wires threaded through to whatever was in the box. Seventy pieces of detonator wire in total, negative and positive leading down from the tubes. They were intertwined after that and fed into four other holes at the back of the box. They had risked lifting Buck-eye’s boom sufficiently to see over the top.

  ‘Take out the booby trap on the door,’ Mitchell was saying. ‘The wall-mounted stuff we can’t do with the robot.’

  It was true. They had counted movement sensors in all four corners of the room, separately and mutually wired, as if somebody had been setting up a stereo system. The wires ran down into the box. That presented them with another dilemma. They had no way of knowing what would happen if they disconnected the wiring. It would probably have been armed with a collapsing circuit, so that if the wires were cut, it set off the main charge. Porter got back on the radio. ‘We’re going to pig-stick the door,’ he said. ‘There’s no way to render safe the booby traps other than manually and I want to see what’s in the box before we do that. Diagnostics will have to X-ray. We’ll breach the door and enter for a manual look.’

  Hewitt did not answer for a moment.

  ‘Copy, Control.’

  ‘Affirmative. Go ahead, Tim, and good luck.’

  In the operations room at Scotland Yard, Webb, Thomas and Christine Harris listened to all that was being said. ‘Eerie,’ Thomas commented, ‘listening in like this. That apartment must be the loneliest place in the world.’

  Harrison was scraping the plastic handcuffs on the hinges of the door and knew he was not getting very far. Normally, you needed wire cutters to get them off. His hands throbbed now, and with the stopped-up blood so his anger mounted. He thought of Jesse Tate and the look of cold fury on his face as he levelled that 454 at him. Another thought was beginning to bother him: Scheller and Kovalski had told him that his ‘hello’ lines in Michigan had been called. ‘Hello’ lines were secure confirmation for any over-zealous questioner, and had been more than enough in the past, even when people like Joe Pistone were layers deep in the Mob. So why not now? Why had Salvesen looked further? There could only be one reason and that was that Salvesen was sure beyond any doubt he was a Fed. The only way he could be that sure was if somebody told him.

  Who had burned him and why? It meant death. Here he was, sitting under a home-made gallows, with the self-styled Judge of Idaho about to pass sentence. How did he get compromised? It could only be from someone who knew. And then a thought struck him: Chief had come into the trailer and seen him working on the Biblical stuff. Chief’s tone, his comments; standing with Banks and Means against the FBI in 1972. But how could Chief know? And would he really tell Salvesen? Harrison was positive he had entered the tunnels unnoticed, and more than covered his tracks on the way out. But had somebody seen him?

  He sat and considered the timing. The last thing he had done was send in the report and pictures, after entering Salvesen’s office. That was the first clear evidence that linked Salvesen to anything. But what had he photographed—a bunch of notes, the titles of some books, maps on the wall. Nothing that could be conceived to be incriminating in a court of law. Suddenly he heard voices outside, then the key turned in the lock. Jesse stood there with two other hands from the bunkhouse.

  ‘Get up,’ he said.

  Harrison worked his way to his feet. Jesse handed his pistol to one of the other men and then spun Harrison round. He cut through the flexi-cuffs and Harrison winced as the blood started to flow again.

  ‘Hurt, did it?’ Taking a set of metal cuffs from his belt, Jesse slapped one on Harrison’s wrist and the other on his own, then he led him outside. As he closed the door, he looked Harrison right in the eye. ‘Next time I come in here—it’ll be to drag your body out.’

  They crossed the yard, Harrison with Jesse fastened to him and the other two slightly behind, both of them holding rifles. Harrison looked left and right. The afternoon was waning now and lights burned in Salvesen’s office. Outside the wall, the dogs, smelling an unknown scent, suddenly barked. Jesse opened the door to the radio building and they walked into the courtroom. Every chair was taken bar the one that stood on its own. Jakob Salvesen sat in the judge’s chair with his hands across his belly.

  Harrison felt the rage begin to grow inside him. They were going to try him in their kangaroo court. These assholes actually believed they had the right. He looked Salvesen in the eye. ‘If you’re gonna try me, motherfucker, take this fucking thing off.’ He hauled his hand up and brought Jesse’s with it. Salvesen’s eyes flickered a fraction and then he lifted a finger and pointed. Jesse unfastened the cuffs and took his gun back from the other man who moved to the door. Jesse directed Harrison backwards to the witness chair and then went to stand behind Salvesen. Harrison’s chair was positioned to the left of the table. The trap door was five feet from him, looking like part of the floor. He knew then that they did not know he had been underground. Somebody had tipped them off, but that somebody did not know about the tunnels, or if they did, they hadn’t seen him enter them. Thank God, that counted out Scheller and Brindley at least. Bob Jackson, he would trust with his life.

  ‘This will be a very short trial, Mr Johnny “Buck” Dollar, who claims the alias of Harrison, resident of the town of Passover, Idaho.’ Salvesen’s voice had lost its charm, harsh now and purposeful, in a clipped almost metallic way. His eyes were cold and dark. ‘Federal Agent Dollar. An appropriate name. A unit of measurement. We have yet to weigh you for the gallows. You wouldn’t want us to get it wrong and pull your head off, now would you.’ He sat up straighter. ‘How did you get into this compound?’

  ‘Never been here before now,’ Harrison said.

  ‘Liar. You better tell the truth, Mr John Dollar, or I’ll just go ahead and sentence you anyway.’

  ‘Fuck you, asshole.’

  Jesse was out from behind his chair, but Salvesen had a hand on his arm. ‘Let him cuss all he wants, Jesse. He’s gonna have to face his maker sooner than you or I.’ He looked
again at Harrison. ‘I shall ask you one more time,’ he said. ‘How did you get in here?’

  Harrison had one hope and that was the T-17 transmitter. It was in this room, wired to the video, and if it would only work, then all of this would be captured on tape. Even if they killed him, Scheller would locate his forward lay-up point from the maps he had provided them with and find the tape. Salvesen would not only be hanging him, he would also be hanging himself. A slight whirring sound caught his ear and he glanced up to see the head of the video camera moving. He felt suddenly sick. Salvesen was filming it all for posterity.

  ‘You broke my fence,’ Salvesen said. ‘Trespassed on private land.’ His voice was rising. ‘I have a right to shoot you for that.’

  ‘Only if you catch me, Jake. And you didn’t.’ Harrison was eyeing the trap door. He might just be able to make it without Jesse shooting him. He could feel the adrenalin beginning to build. ‘I don’t recognize this court and I don’t recognize you as a judge,’ he said. ‘I don’t recognize Jesse Tate there or any of these others. What we got here, Slusher and Drake and Wingo. That you over there, Mark? And, oh look, the Passover marshal himself. Tyler Oldfield. You’re a cop, Oldfield. What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Harrison, you’re charged under common law for conduct unbecoming a government official,’ Salvesen said. ‘You have infringed my rights and trespassed on my land, gained employment under false pretences and carried out treasonous acts.’

  ‘Treason? I don’t know what you mean, Jake.’

  ‘Ignorance is no defence even for police officers, Harrison. If you had bothered to read any of the judgements given out by the Supreme Court of the United States, you would know that.’ Salvesen rapped his fist against the table. ‘Your work for the FBI, a corrupt and murderous instrument of the New World Order, is by definition unconstitutional. Any act or work carried out by a government official on behalf of the same New World Order is by definition treason. Treason is punishable by death.’