by Mark Leggatt
He stared at her for a moment, then placed the keys in her hand. He held out the clipboard and pen and began to speak as Kirsty took the pen and scrawled a signature at the bottom.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “I’d love to stay and listen to your sexy German accent, but we really have to go.” Ignoring his protestations, she dumped her bag behind the driver’s seat and jumped in.
Montrose got in beside her, threw his kit and shades in the back, then saw a zip code come up on his phone. He programmed it into the satnav.
Kirsty took the sunglasses from her head and tossed them onto the rear parcel shelf. “Summer’s over.” She fired up the engine, pointed the car at the gates and hit the accelerator.
Mr. Pilgrim’s voice came down the line. “I have some disturbing news. This comes straight from a MI6 monitoring station on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, and has just been distributed to the Five Eyes. There is evidence of Middle Eastern operatives moving towards Germany. The intel is heavily encoded and details are sparse, but persons of interest are heading your way in an array of transportation. I feel the distribution of the missiles is about to take place. This may now be out of our hands.”
“Jeez, give me a bloody chance,” said Kirsty. She turned through the exit in the airport fence and a straight road opened up in front of them.
“These persons of interest,” said Montrose, “are they coming here? Because I think we’re headed for a link in a delivery chain, not the location of the missiles. It’s a truck depot. Stuff comes and goes all the time.”
“No, there is no information detailing exactly where they are going, but they seem to be a heading to a number of different locations in Germany.”
Kirsty turned off the main road and headed west. The road in front was straight, bordered by a high, thick pine forest on either side, blocking the sun. She opened up the throttle and they drove into the semi-darkness.
“Why don’t the German police just stop them?”
“It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The sheer volume of transport is what alerted the Brits in Cyprus. And we would have to mobilize an entire army to intercept them all.”
“You mean like NATO?”
“Good point, and you can be assured that it is underway with some considerable urgency, but they are not going to catch them all. One missile is enough to cause havoc.”
The trees flashed past, and Kirsty stared straight ahead. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
He turned his head. “Hell, yeah…”
“No, I mean this place. I think I know what happened here.” She flicked down through the gears and drove along the edge of the road until she saw a gap in the trees. “The depot is through those trees.” She hit the brakes and swung the nose of the Porsche into the middle of the road, then reversed back into the gap between the trees. She got out and dumped her bag on the hood then held up the car key to Montrose. “Just in case one of us has to make a quick exit.” She placed the key in the grass beside the front wheel.
“One of us?”
“You’re right. I mean me. I want the car to be pointing in the general direction of ‘get the hell out of here’.”
“Kirsty,” said Pilgrim, “report back what you see. If Montrose is right and this is a red herring, just a truck depot, then the operation will be cancelled. Do you understand?”
“Loud and clear, Mr. P.”
“I’m going to contact the CIA to ensure they have the capability to deal with this quickly. If I give the order, then you must withdraw immediately. We will let the CIA and the Germans take care of this.”
“Understood,” said Montrose. He checked his gun.
“Mr. P., we’re going to dial out. If there is anybody monitoring for phone activity, they’ll spot us a mile away. We’ll dial back in when we have anything to report.”
“Agreed. Good luck.” The call ended.
“We need some camouflage,” Kirsty said. “If there are cameras, they would give you points for fashion.” She reached into her pocket and took out a make-up compact. “Eyeshadow. Chanel has a color for every occasion.” She spat into the compact and rubbed her fingers hard into the dark powders, merging them together, then smeared it across her face then checked the mirror. “Gorgeous.” She closed the compact and tossed it to Montrose. “Get your war paint on.”
“This is the second time I’m gonna be wearing make-up today. Frankly, I’m getting worried about myself.”
“Channel your inner bitch, big boy, and follow me.” She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed into the forest.
He pulled on his jacket as he walked, ducking under branches. The mossy ground became soft and spongy under his boots. “What did you mean back there? About this place?”
Kirsty looked down at the map on her phone. “Years ago, when I was in London, I was big into urbex. Urban exploring, yeah?”
A picture flashed into his mind of him hanging on desperately to the frame of a tiny, ancient train engine, hurtling through a dark tunnel, its sides inches from his face, and Kirsty laughing and winding up the power. “Yeah, I remember. That’s not an easy thing to forget.”
“There was a guy I heard of. Total urbex legend. He told a story about a town in Germany that he’d discovered. It was online for a while, if you knew where to look. This was like the Holy Grail of urbex. He said his grandfather was a bomber pilot who was shot down in the war. Not the big, heavy Lancaster bombers, but the fast, fighter-bomber Mosquitos. They did the tree-top raids in France, taking out Nazi command posts and busting open prisons.” She pointed east. “Dresden isn’t far. He talked about that raid in 1944, when they fire-bombed Dresden. The problem with the big bombers was that they were flying too high to be able to identify their target in the dark. If they flew lower or in the daytime, the Germans shot the shit out of them. This guy’s grandfather was in a Mosquito, flying ahead of the bombers. His job was to mark the target. He would fly in fast and low, identify the target and then drop barrels full of flammable chemicals that would burn a bright color. Red or green, usually. The barrels of liquid ensured the fire spread over a large area which made it very difficult for local firefighters to extinguish the flames. Then the heavy bombers higher up would see the burning target at night and unload their bombs.”
“But you said he was shot down?”
“Yeah, his Mosquito never made it to Dresden, the target. The night fighters got him. This guy tracked the war records that night, and the Luftwaffe records in Germany. That’s how he found out how his grandfather died.” She looked around between the trees. “He came down somewhere in this forest. The records said he avoided Rhiandorf but crashed just outside. His plane exploded when it hit the ground.”
“But he missed the town?”
“Yeah, but the whole forest was burning with the colored chemicals he was carrying, and behind him were four hundred bombers looking for their target. And they found it.”
The Director waited until all the board members had left the room, then opened a small cabinet and took out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. He poured two shots, and held a glass in the air as Grigor Mikhailov walked into the room. “Welcome to Rhiandorf.”
Mikhailov walked around the table and took the glass. “Na Zdorovie.” He sipped on the whisky. “Your taste in whisky has improved.”
The Director smiled. “One of the benefits of being at the heart of a transport hub. It’s amazing what comes in and out on those trucks.”
“I’m sure,” said Mikhailov. “How are the sheep?”
“Panicking over Connor Montrose. What an admirable pain in the ass that man has been. If I wasn’t going to kill him, I’d offer him a job.”
“Any concerns? Blokhin was quite a shock.”
“No, not really. I think Montrose got lucky. As for the sheep, if we didn’t need their funding and their capacity to tell tales, I would have
killed them already. One of them got a little too clever. He was old enough to know better.”
“Is he still here?”
“Technically, yes. He’s in a freezer truck full of frozen fish. I’ll have his body dumped as part of the delivery.”
Mikhailov downed his whisky. “When do we start?”
“Very soon. We need all the money safely in our account before the trucks begin to leave.”
“And then?”
“Then, a helicopter will be arriving from Dresden airport. It will land in the truck park to pick us up. The sheep will be ready to leave in their cars. I have them all in a warehouse, luggage loaded and ready to go. Then they’ll find out why I’ve been storing so much nitrate fertilizer.”
Mikhailov stared at the drops of whisky in his glass. “Do you think that some of the missiles will actually make it to the Middle East? Iran or Egypt?”
The Director shrugged. “I don’t care. Some will probably get lucky. It’s irrelevant to achieving the objective.”
“As long as the customer is happy.”
The Director finished his whisky. “Well, the customer who’s paying the most money. The other customers will not be alive to complain.”
Chapter 22
He watched her move quickly between the trees, noticing how she avoided the branches and twigs beneath her feet. “Who taught you fieldcraft?”
She looked back for a moment and grinned. “The same sergeant-major who taught me to use a knife.” After a few hundred yards, she came to a halt beside the trunk of an ancient pine tree.
Through the trees, Montrose could see a chain-link fence and hear truck engines.
“This is near enough. Get down behind me.” She took out her phone and steadied it against the trunk of the tree and expanded the picture until they could see the ground at the bottom of the fence. She moved her head to the side so Montrose could see the picture. “Look,” she said, “that’s not just one fence.”
He leaned in towards the phone and saw steel mesh in front of the chain link.
She lifted her phone and showed the top edge of the fence. “No razor wire,” she said. “But they don’t need it. No one is getting over that fence.” She lowered the phone. “Look at the ground.”
Montrose could see a strip of grass closely cropped either side of the fence.
“You only do that if you need the grass to be short for detectors.”
“Motion sensors?”
“Yeah, probably, and pressure pads. The place is as big as six football pitches. If they have that all the way around, that’s going to take a lot of wiring and security to monitor. It might look like just a fence, but this is a very professional set up.”
“Then the only way in is the front door.”
“Maybe,” said Kirsty, “let’s find out.”
“We don’t have time to recon the entire…”
“Technology, Connor. Get with the times.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the plain cardboard box.
“What is that?”
“It’s a drone for cell phones.” She ditched the packaging and pulled out a plastic phone harness with fold-out rotor blades at each corner. She handed him a piece of paper. “That’s the address for the app, download it to your phone.”
He typed in the address and started the download, then watched her clip the phone into the drone. A text popped up on his screen and he opened it to see the image of an old map, roads clearly visible on it and Rhiandorf in the center. “Kirsty, it’s from Priti. Check this out.” He brought up Google Maps and tapped the screen to zoom in on his position, then held it out to her and swapped the screen to show her the text message. “Look at the shape of the roads. They’re the same.” He looked around the trees. “This is Rhiandorf.” He flicked back the map and saw the roads and the warehouses amongst the trees but no reference to the former town.
“I see it.”
The app completed loading and he brought it up on screen. “This could all be a wild goose chase. There could be no missiles here. They could be anywhere in a hundred mile radius.”
Kirsty flipped a switch and the rotor blades at each corner of the drone spun into life. “That’s not security for a truck depot in the middle of nowhere.” She held it in her hand and stared through the trees towards the fence. “Look, Connor. The office building.”
He saw a brightly-lit building between two warehouses. “Yeah? Doesn’t look too secure to me.”
“Hiding in plain sight.” said Kirsty. “Check out the top of the building.”
He looked up at the roof of the office block. “So?”
“The air-conditioning units. How many are there?”
He scanned along the edge of the roof. “I don’t know, fifteen, twenty?”
“If those things are switched on, and those are just the ones we can see, then that place will be ten below zero inside. Why on earth would they need so many air-conditioning units for an office?” She reached into the bag and took out another small box. “I’m going to find out.” She pulled a small clip-on camera from the box and fixed it to the cell phone.
“What’s that?”
“Infra-red camera. I’m going to see why they need all that aircon.”
“Refrigerated warehouses?”
She handed him the drone. “And the aircon is installed on a different building? Makes no sense. Go over there.” She pointed to a gap between the trees. “Hold it above your head. Give me your phone.”
He took the drone and keeping low, shuffled over to the gap then lifted the drone.
Kirsty fired up the app and the drone lifted into the air. It climbed straight up above the tree canopy and disappeared from sight.
Montrose scurried back towards Kirsty who was staring intently at the screen. “What can you see?”
She edged in closer to him. On screen the tree canopy retreated as the drone climbed higher and the buildings came into view. “I doubt if they’re using radar, but I don’t want to signal that we’re here.” The drone climbed higher and they could see a wide expanse of concrete office buildings, and groups of warehouses with lines of trucks outside. “Check the border,” she said.
“Yeah, professional job. No overhanging branches. Someone takes good care of security.”
“And look at the trucks,” said Kirsty. “I don’t see many refrigeration units. I don’t see any aircon vents on the warehouses.” She thumbed the controls. “Okay, let’s have a different view. She tapped the cell phone screen and it switched to a black and white picture. The warm hoods on some of the trucks glowed white on the screen. “Holy shit,” said Kirsty, “look at the office block.”
Montrose could see row upon row of glowing white squares where the air-conditioning vents stood. “There’s no way an office block needs that amount of air. This makes no sense.”
“Unless,” said Kirsty, “there’s something underneath that office block generating a massive amount of heat.”
“Like what?”
The drone moved back over the trees then began to descend. “I doubt if it’s going to be a cannabis farm. That size, you’d be able to smell it from Monaco.” She looked up between the branches and watch the drone return to the clearing. “Get your urbex head on, Connor.” She turned to face him. “I think we just found the Silk Road.”
He stared through the trees. “Kirsty. C’mon, that can’t be…” He watched the drone settle onto a cushion of dry pine needles. “You think all that heat is generated by servers?”
“Connor, the Silk Road has got to be somewhere. And you know how much heat they generate. There could be acres of computer equipment under the office block and anyone with enough knowledge could make them appear to be anywhere in the world.”
Montrose sat back against the tree and gazed up at the branches. “If that’s true, if it is the Silk Road, we could just bomb the pl
ace. If the missiles are there, then…”
“I like the way you’re thinking,” said Kirsty. “But let’s make sure we are not in the vicinity when it happens. Look.” She held out the cell phone, showing Google Maps. “There,” she said, pointing to the phone, “on the map that Priti sent you. That’s where Rhiandorf is supposed to be, at the road junction. Right here. But on the modern map it’s two miles away, in the middle of no place. That’s crazy. Rhiandorf was a market town. All roads led there. The roads are still on the map. And they all go to one place.” She pointed through the trees. “Those warehouses.”
“So why would someone go to all the trouble of making sure Google Maps pointed in the wrong direction?”
“The Silk Road. That’s why they never found Rhiandorf.”
“Who?”
“That urbex guy I told you about, remember? He disappeared off the face of the earth, plus his blog, and any reference to what he’d found. But the guy was a legend. I read the story.”
“You remember it?”
“It’s still famous around urbex dudes.” She looked at the screen and laughed. “He said he had found the cellars of Rhiandorf by going through a German bunker. It was four-foot-thick reinforced concrete, and about the only thing to have survived. You can still see them today, scattered across France and Germany. They’re just too strong to destroy.”
“The Russians didn’t blow it up?”
“Waste of explosives. There are still Nazi submarine pens in France. Huge, concrete structures the size of a football pitch. The concrete is twenty feet thick in places and reinforced with steel rods. The Allies bombed the shit out of them, but it was a waste of time. It would take years to destroy them, so they left them there. Now, look at this.” She showed him a web page, and a picture of a bunker.
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s in the forest where Google Maps and,” she jerked her finger over her shoulder, “whoever runs that place, wants you to think is the location for Rhiandorf. This is the weblog of another urbex guy who went searching for it to try to prove the story. He found what he thought was the bunker, but the floor was too thick to get through. He searched the forest for signs of destroyed buildings but there’s nothing there. So, he called the story a hoax.”