by John McNally
At that very moment in the darkness over the Bay of Biscay, six members of the French maritime special forces – Le Commando Hubert – waited upside down to make their drop. They had been scrambled from Bordeaux-Mérignac airbase and briefed en route. Total prep time: seventeen minutes.
They left their transports at 20,000 feet (falling upside down out of open fast jet canopies) after a flight of only nineteen minutes.
They dropped into sea area FitzRoy, sixty kilometres north of La Coruña. They reached speeds of over 120mph. They would not deploy their specialist chutes until the last possible moment.
* * *
The tall guard with the scar took a call on the satellite phone.
He passed it to Stefan who connected it to his laptop.
The message came in the form of a data burst, the regular half-hourly call and response routine between the yacht and ‘North Star’.
Cooper-Hastings stared at them from his chained position, on the floor at the back of the main cabin.
“I want to speak to her again. To make sure…”
Stefan twitched in annoyance. If he heard the pathetic plea again, he would cut out Cooper-Hastings’ tongue. He closed the laptop and walked across the cabin to start beating the chained man again.
The tall guard, unable to watch the boy’s casual brutality, took himself out on the bridge to smoke.
He hoped they would be allowed to kill the scientist soon, to dump his body at sea and then get into port. He was just wondering how – strangle? Shoot? – when he had the extraordinary sense that the sky was about to fall on his head. He looked up. The suddenly billowing parachute made the commando seem like an angel of death.
A tranquilliser dart hit the centre of his forehead.
Within nineteen seconds, all six commandos had landed, feather soft, onboard the moving motor yacht. An infra-red assessment during the descent had already established there were three more figures onboard, two in the main cabin, one in the sleeping quarters.
Two commandos entered via the rear hatch and detained the sleeping guard.
Three more entered the cabin where Stefan was still beating Cooper-Hastings.
Stefan was shot with a tranquilliser dart in the back of the head and fell immediately to the floor.
Cooper-Hastings looked on in astonishment at the black-clad figures.
Like something from a Parfum Pour Homme advert, a commando took off his mask, shook out his tousled hair and checked a picture of Cooper-Hastings on a wrist-mounted data screen.
“Docteur Coopeur-Hassteang, je suppose?”
Cooper-Hastings stammered, “I… I… Yes…”
“Bon.”
* * *
Sitting in the Élysée Palace watching events unfold (alongside other world leaders via the Hook Hall feed), the French President did all he could to resist a patriotic cancan, quietly repeating: “Bon.”
* * *
Finn and Delta greedily ate a celebration meal out of the ration packs and waited, listening out for sirens and checking for further messages onscreen.
Finn looked at the picture of Carla again. She looked interesting, inquisitive. A more open version of her big sister, although even she was beginning to relax now the mission was nearly over.
“What’s she like?”
“Nooblet? So cute she got adopted by the judge in the family court. Not any more though. Now she’s more like you.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe you should come visit when this is over? We have – they have – this cabin in the woods where we all go. You can go fishing, hiking, white-water rafting…”
“You want me to come? To America?”
Delta finished her rations and thought about it.
“Think of it as a mission.”
“A mission?”
“She gets bored with me and the judge. Says she’s bored.”
“She sounds great.”
“She really is. But she doesn’t like gaming or combat. She’s the one person, legally speaking, that I’m allowed to tell what I do. I don’t think she even believes me.”
“Shall I tell you something terrible that kids don’t tell grown-ups?”
“What?”
“They’re really not that interested in them. Especially not members of their own family – at least until they lose one.”
Delta considered this. Made a serious mental note.
BANG…
“They’re here!”
CRACK…
They were coming through the front door on the other side of the house.
“HERE! OVER HERE!” they called out excitedly.
Glass smashed and still they called.
It was only when they saw, in a gilded mirror, a boy in a hooded top struggling through the remains of the front door that they paused.
“No cars? No sirens? And who is he?” Finn said.
“I don’t know,” said Delta. “But I know the type.”
So did Finn. He’d seen them in the playground. Avoided them at night.
“I’ve got a bad feeling here…” said Delta.
CLICK – suddenly light blinded them as the boy hit a switch. Finn and Delta fell back.
“RUN!” she shouted.
“They’re escaping,” snapped Kaparis into Kane’s earphones. “Back of the desk. Stop them. Now.”
Finn and Delta ran to the hole in the desktop and slid down the power cables.
The hooded youth padded carefully into the kitchen. Eyes fixed on the computer. Finn and Delta disappeared into the darkness and dust beneath.
“Where the hell are the cavalry?” muttered Delta. “He must be a looter; he’s coming for the PC…”
“Cables – he’s going to want the cables,” said Finn.
They scrambled up on the skirting board, Delta leading, powering ahead, perfectly balanced and aware, vaulting obstacles – cables, lumps of Blu-tack – with speed and ease. Though physically awkward and spiky in life, she was balletic in combat. West Pole, thought Finn. A switch had flicked and Delta was back in the game.
Kane approached the desk, cautious, constantly checking his hand-held scanner, but there was too much heat coming off the PC and the plugs to get a clear fix.
Delta pelted along the top of the skirting board, dust flying, Finn right behind. A massive hand reached round to pull out the printer and shake up their world.
CLUNKCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Dust bloomed and light washed in. An exposed centimetre of grey cable disappeared into the wall at the end of the skirting where the white plastic electrical trunking ran short. It was tight, but Delta dived in and wriggled through the gap, turning to haul Finn after her.
Together they fell into an empty, dark space. When they switched on their headlamps, they found themselves in a huge narrow void, all plasterboard, and pipework and wiring running this way and that. They were inside a partition wall, literally under the skin of the building.
“What’s happening out there?” said Finn.
“Something bad,” said Delta.
She grabbed her pack and checked its lethal contents. Two grenades and the rest of the plastic explosive.
“What have you got?”
“Just three flares,” said Finn. “But they’ll be here any minute, won’t they?”
They could feel the boy’s presence, close now on the other side of the wall, and then they heard a voice.
“Got footprints. Got thermal.”
“Uh-oh…” said Delta.
“What? Got… what?” said Finn, with barely time to puzzle the words, before –
“Up!” Delta screamed as – SLAM – a massive finger crashed its way through the hole after them and started to rip at the plasterboard.
She grabbed a dangling grey cable and started to climb, Finn grabbing the one next to it, a heartbeat behind.
“Climb!”
The giant hand tore at the board below them.
You’re Tarzan, Finn told himself as he pulled himself up the cable. You’re Tar
zan, climbing a vine… Don’t let go.
Kane uncoiled half a metre of fibre-optic cable, screwed it into the end of his phone and poked its glowing head through the plasterboard. Twisting it, he caught an image of the two tiny figures clambering up the wires.
SLAM! A fist clattered against the plasterboard right beside Finn, releasing a shower of dust as he school-gymed it up the cable.
“Faster!” said Delta. Finn needed no urging.
SLAM SLAM SLAM! Like huge explosions.
Kane wasn’t going to break through the plaster with his fists. He looked round the kitchen for something to use. Spotted a meat cleaver.
Delta and Finn were only a few nano-metres from the wood of the ceiling joists when – SMASH!
Finn was deafened and rocked as the leading edge of the cleaver smashed through the plaster beside him, like the prow of a ship through pack ice. He swung on the cables and choked on the dust.
SMASH! A second blow carved an open wound in the wall, quickly filled with the blinding light of the fibre-optic camera. Finn instinctively kicked at it as he swung.
“Yes…” said Kane, pulling out the camera to see for himself.
Finn saw Kane’s massive eye now fill the hole. A dead, speckled eye… An eye that made him think of – Spiro?
Delta was descending now, biting the pin out of a grenade and releasing the catch. Five… four… three…
“Noob! Get out of the way!”
Delta dropped upside down from her cable and pitched the grenade at the giant eye – just like she’d been pitching baseballs since the age of three. The explosive fastball beat Kane’s blink reflex by a whisker, getting caught behind the tear duct of the lower lid just as it went off – BANG!
“ARRRRRRRRRGHGHHH!”
“Go!” Delta scrambled back up her cable, Finn still making his way up. As he reached the ceiling joists, he felt Delta’s hands grab him and pull him over.
“AARRRRRRRRRGGHH!”
Kane reeled through the kitchen, clutching his stinging eye. Although no catastrophic damage had been done – the nano-blast could only impact in the way a sharp jab from the point of a compass might – it did have the power to hurt like all hell.
Delta and Finn scrambled over a large beam and dropped into centuries-old dirt somewhere beneath the first floor. They found themselves in a dark tunnel that ran the width of the house, its sides ancient oak floor joists, its roof equally ancient floorboards, the tunnel blocked by patches of brick at either end.
“Go!” said Delta, not letting Finn recover.
They scrambled through the knee-high soot and dirt between the oak joists.
“Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgghghh!” They could still hear Kane’s anger shake the world below.
“He has Spiro’s eyes!” Finn called as he caught Delta up.
“What?”
“Spiro, who tried to blow us up! This guy has the exact same markings…”
Delta slowed. “What do you mean markings?”
“They’re speckled, like a pattern, like a tattoo or something, but you can only see it up close. Either they’re evil twins or… Maybe it’s the mark of whoever set this thing rolling, or…” said Finn, trying to make sense of something so strange.
Delta was way ahead.
“If he’s working with whoever Spiro was working with then they know where the Scarlatti was released, and they were monitoring it…” said Delta.
“So they saw us attack?” said Finn.
“And they’d know we have to be close by. All they needed to do was watch the local telecoms net…”
It was making horrible sense. Footfalls above replaced the racket from below as Kane switched his search.
“We’re screwed,” concluded Delta. “Go.”
She started to run through the drifts of dirt again and Finn had to force himself to keep up.
“Where are we going?”
“He said ‘got thermal’ down there. If he’s got a FLIR night sight – thermal image sight – then he can see through anything,” said Delta.
RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP!!
“Is he pulling up the carpets?” said Finn.
“He can’t pull the whole place apart,” said Delta.
Above them, crazed by the pain in his weeping, stinging, bleeding eye, Kane roared and tore at the flooring, ripping through carpets and underlay. Raising hell.
When he was through to the wood, he started hacking away at the first floorboard he could.
Delta grabbed Finn and pulled him beneath a copper pipe that ran the length of the joist. She reached up and slapped it. It was warm. Thermal cover.
“What do we do?” asked Finn. “If they intercepted the message then no one’s coming.”
“We know nothing for sure,” said Delta. “We’ve just got to sit tight.”
They crouched beneath the hot pipe and waited. It was going to be a long night.
And with every fraction of a second that passed, Finn felt more and more certain.
“They’re not coming. No one knows we’re here.”
THIRTY
Dr Cooper-Hastings, a dedicated, if highly strung scientist, had a single passion – opera. He had been to see one production at the Royal Opera House three times. The production featured the Russian soprano Olga Tieneto, of whom he was a particular fan.
After responding to criticism of her on an online opera fansite (as Cutmeibleedverdi72), Cooper-Hastings had been astonished to receive a message from Olga herself, thanking him for springing to her defence. A correspondence developed. Daily emails became phone calls that lasted hours. She poured her heart out. He fell in love. She was locked in a struggle with her Italian ex-husband over custody of her son. Cooper-Hastings took the boy out of his boarding school to attend a steam fair one weekend to save him from a paternal visit. He was a sullen, aggressive teen with strange, speckled eyes who seemed to know little about opera.
Cooper-Hastings lost the boy on the way home outside Aylesbury Aquatics. A car had pulled up and he was snatched. There was violence, then tearful calls from Olga begging him to do exactly what her husband said. The mafia were involved. Her life was in danger.
Hypnotised by terror – convinced the life of a child and the woman he loved were on the line – Cooper-Hastings went along with whatever the Italians demanded. When he almost faltered at the Scarlatti request, they played him Olga’s ‘Ebben? Ne Andrò Lontana’ and he fell under her spell again.
One phone call to the real Olga Tieneto from the head of the Russian security service, the FSB1, confirmed she had absolutely no idea who Cooper-Hastings was. The whole thing had been an elaborate set-up, no doubt concocted with the help of detailed observations of Cooper-Hastings’ habits and character from his junior colleague – Dr Spiro.
All regarded Cooper-Hastings as a gargantuan fool… all save the suave men and women of Le Commando Hubert, who smoked and drank and listened intently, fully au fait with ‘les maladies d’amour’.
* * *
DAY THREE 03:37 (BST). Hook Hall, Surrey
“You touch Fatty and I swear, I swear I will kill you…”
With these words, two hours and forty-six minutes after the rescue of Cooper-Hastings, Al had to remove himself from the command area at the centre of the control gallery and make his way over to where the RAF controllers were coordinating the sweep for the lost nano-crew. The repetitive, overlapping call signs were a poetry of sorts. A comfort.
“Come in, Messi, come in, Messi? This is Ronaldo, repeat, this is Ronaldo, over.”
“Come in, Messi, come in, Messi? This is Ronaldo, repeat, this is Ronaldo, over.”
Al needed to calm down. He feared death at the hands of his mother. He wanted to throttle Dr Cooper-Hastings. And he badly wanted to kill Commander King.
Firstly, news had come through that Grandma had somehow disappeared from her cruise ship and was en route from Oslo. He could sense her closing in and felt ten
years old again. As children, he and Maria had once burnt down her favourite gazebo test-firing a rocket, then had to wait hours for her to come home from a sponsored walk. That had been bad enough. How on earth was he going to explain this?
Secondly, after all the effort and risk of life, after all the waiting and hoping, the Cooper-Hastings trail had died at sea, literally. After being revived, and following a brief period of interrogation, the blond German teenager ‘Stefan’ – the apparent leader – had suffered a sudden and fatal brain haemorrhage.2 The guards onboard were mercenaries hired for a single task. They knew about the irregular satphone calls to Stefan from persons unknown, but little of the security routine linked to the laptop.
Despite much fevered activity since, the whole G&T operation appeared to be getting nowhere. The rescue of Cooper-Hastings had stalled. The public evacuation had turned into a panic. And they were eating up, chewing through, time.
Then Commander King made things a whole lot worse. He had checked his watch. He had glanced round the global feeds. And he had made a decision.
“We have to get the Fat Doughnut to Felixstowe by 6am. Dismantle the Large Accelerator.”
It had felt like surrender. Technicians down on the floor of the CFAC had looked at one another at first, unsure of what to do. One or two craned their heads to see if Al was present and at least aware of the order.
“I repeat,” said King as Al walked in, “dismantle the Large Accelerator.”
Al found he was still shaking with rage as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw King walk the entire length of the gallery to join him.
King stopped beside Al, checked his watch and, pretending to take in the view, spoke quietly so that no one else could hear them.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Believe me, you have absolutely no idea; you weren’t there when we blew up the gazebo.”
“You know full well at this point in time there is absolutely no other choice. Look around you at the global feeds. Presidents have been replaced by Generals who have been replaced by mere advisors. Power and influence are draining from the room and, if we are not seen to act, control of the operation will slip away. I need you at my side and I need you active and angry. What’s more – they need to see it.”