Danger Close

by Charlie Flowers

  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 t
he 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.

  36

  The van jounced along the A275 just north of Offham and I checked the satnav. Nothing. No trucks, no vehicles. Fuck this. I swore and pulled into a layby in a shower of gravel. I needed a leak.

  ‘Bollocks!’

  Bang-Bang opened the side door and pointed at a TV screen she’d got going inside. ‘Babe. You’d better come and see this.’

  I climbed into the compartment and watched the screens. There were two. The left-hand one was showing the Police Superintendent’s Association conference, the one we’d been aiming to hit. Keith Hatchett, the president, was at the podium. He was speaking. ‘We cannot close our eyes to the predicament facing us, and the consequent loss of goodwill… the same goodwill where police officers work long, thankless hours without…’

  He tailed off. His eyes flew as wide as drawn curtains and he shouted ‘Spiders!’ and slumped over the podium. Then the camera panned round to show a pandemonium of shrieking fools. A uniformed Chief Superintendent was trying to claw his eyes out of his head. Someone seemed to stagger into the camera and it fell to the ground. That feed went out.

  The right-hand screen showed a retread of London Tonight. Nina Hossein had her concerned face on as she outlined how the conference had gone horribly wrong, ambulances had been called, and the visiting ACPO lead on terrorism and other matters had later been found floating dead in the Thames. The conference’s lead on Diversity had been found down the road impersonating a fire engine.

  I shouldn’t have, but right then I burst out laughing.

  Bang-Bang gave me a knowing look. ‘That would HAVE to have been Sags. No-one would notice a Somali girl doing the catering. We fixed ‘em good, babes.’

  ‘LSD tabs in the catering?’

  She nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Brilliant. Teacher and Sags did the business and we certainly have. The Colonel will be happy.’

  37

  I drove us back into London feeling depressed and deflated. The enemy had the edge on us and Zero Day was nearly here. I pulled the van into the entrance of Knightsbridge barracks, KTS’s temporary base and home of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. It was 11pm. The lights were blazing, and the drill square was full of all kinds of vehicles. Dinger rapped on the bodywork and grinned.

  ‘It’s the Afghan Two!’

  I laughed. ‘Hello Dinger, they got you pulling gate duties?’

  ‘They sure have Riz. We just had the chief of the Met down here in a rage demanding to know what we’d done to his staff at the ACPO conference. He had a warrant and all sorts. We had to train some guns on him to get him to piss off.’

  ‘Oh boy. Things really are coming unstuck.’

  Dinger nodded at some cars in the drill square. ‘See them? That’s the gang from Northumberland Avenue. The old man spent most of the day with them crossing the t’s.’

  That was good. He was referring to the unit from the Treasury Solicitors, real hardass legal people who cleared up after the MOD and their indiscretions.

  We parked up after our van had been checked outside and in with mirrors, and our Ministry Of Defence passes were scrutinised by torchlight. A sniffer dog team was brought up to search the van but was soon pulled off when Bang-Bang smothered the dog with the “who’s the lovely doggie” routine and scared the dog so badly it hid between its handler’s legs. I was surprised they hadn’t cottoned onto that by now. All you had to do was ruffle the search-dog’s ears. Bang-Bang came back grinning and I gave her my “you’re not helping” look.

  A corporal waved our van into a parking space. We were shown through the side entrance and into a converted KTS/MOD command centre. It was alive with activity and radio noise. As we watched, some NCOs hung up some enormous blown-up overhead photos of Birmingham next to the wall screens. This would serve as backup in case any of the online systems went down.

  Bang-Bang went off to check that the canteen was lively. Ten minutes later she came back with a tray of teas and plates of stew and plonked them down with a wry look. ‘Slop jockeys are on form tonight - Frappe Mystique a la Horse Guards, or stew to you and me.’

  I started on the stew with the standard plastic spoon. To be fair I felt happy to be back in the warm embrace of the UK military establishment. At least you knew where you stood.

  A signals operator stood and called out ‘Feeds are up. COBR is live. Paris is live.’ The wallscreens came to life and split into various areas. Colonel Mahoney, Toots and some Army top brass were near the front of the room. He was speaking. ‘The marches begin the day after tomorrow, no matter what. Newcastle, Liverpool, Bradford, Reading, and Birmingham. The problem is that although the Home Secretary and powers-that-be can put banning orders on marches, they can’t ban static demos. And how does one go en-masse to a static demo? That’s right, they walk… march, down the road. We’re trying to get emergency powers activated through civil contingency planning regulations, but that might not kick in in time. That’s the bad news. The good news is we’re activating every camera system we have including Project Champion.

  ‘Oh. More bad news. There’s also been an influx from the European mainland in the last two weeks, spiking in the last few days. A mix of Blood and Honour supporters, gig-goers, NDL, you name it. We can only speculate.’

  He turned to Bang-Bang and I.

  ‘By the way, well done, you two. Tchéky was just on. One of those prints you lifted made a 73 percent match on the French Armée De La Terre database. They’re checking it manually now, but it looks like one Paul-Pierre Jesko, just got back from Afghanistan and dropped off the radar.’

  A photo of a cropped-haired, tough-looking guy came up along with a French Ministry of Defence docket.

  ‘That’s going into Project Champion and TrapWire, if it or we see him, you’ll know.’

  I raised a hand. ‘I thought Champion had been scrapped?’

  He smiled. ‘Not all of it. We still have some of it active, and we’re running TrapWire on it.’

  Project Champion had been a rather ill-advised programme where cameras had been erected all around Muslim areas in Birmingham. After some outcry it had been publically shelved. Or maybe not. TrapWire was cutting-edge, a predictive software system that analysed surveillance video for attack patterns and indicators of what we called “hostile reconnaissance”. The system could be placed on any camera network, be it traffic, police, a private firm. It was then just a case of letting it run and do its thing.

  I was on my own again. The staff went about their business, phones rang and the screens flicked as they updated with no kind of good news. Bang-Bang had gone upstairs into the tower block to scout out an empty room for us. Hopefully someone would be on leave or in Afghanistan and we could crash and get a few hours kip.

  The Colonel called out again. ‘OK. Troops. The planes are refuelling now and going up again. Everything. We’ve got about 48 hours tops. The Conservative conference in the city is now… off, due to the threat level and they’re not happy about holding up and relocating.’

  I shrugged. Stuff ‘em. Personally I didn’t care if they held it in a Nissen hut in Reading.

  A tall black man I didn’t recognise came into the room, escorted by an NCO. He was carrying a large archive storage box and Toots greeted him warmly. She brought him over. ‘This is Lennie. DCI Lennie George.’

  He shook my hand. ‘I’m with you lot now. And this…’ he placed the archive box on a desk, ‘is everything the CPS has on Colonel Mahoney and you guys. All yours.’

  I had to thank him. ‘Perfect, Lennie. Thankyou. We can make this, disappear.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s what
I thought.’ He and Toots went to look at the wall screens and confer on something. I decided to keep digging into the stew. Bang-Bang walked over to the little conflab of the boss, our new copper friend and Toots, and began drawing things on a piece of printer paper. I could see the Colonel’s face cycling through shades of bemusement, concern, then anger and finally, amusement. He started explaining something. I knew what she was doing. She was sketching FlameLite’s new capabilities.

  I was halfway through the stew when my BlackBerry buzzed with an unknown number. I answered. ‘War Office, wanna fight?’

  A spiky laugh. ‘Tommy Robinson here. You wanna speak with me?’

  ‘Yes, ASAP as in first thing tomorrow morning. Me and Bang-Bang will drive up.’

  ‘OK, I’ve heard of you two. You know where I live?’

  ‘Don’t be daft mate, you’re on our database.’

  ‘Fair one. See ya tomorrow.’ The line went dead. Bang-Bang traipsed back over and picked up her stew. ‘Who was that doll?’

  ‘Tommy, Holly. We’re round his first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah good. I suppose you’re going to ask about the Colonel’s face when I explained what FlameLite and my army of infomorphs did and how they could help take out any Met police threats or evidence. That Lennie bloke looked a bit stunned, too.’

  ‘I saw it all babe. What did the Colonel say?’

  ‘After much muttering, he agreed but said under NO circumstances should I turn it on until he’s got “higher approval”. After all, it destroyed an airbase.’

  ‘I think he’s right. I think anyone normal would be a bit concerned after being shown the future of information warfare. Did you get a room?’

  She grinned. ‘Yep. View of the park, an’ all.’

  38

  October 6th

  7.50am the next morning. Luton, L-Town, here we go. I rang the bell of Tommy Robinson’s house. As we waited by the door, a car full of Asian lads idled past, glaring at us. Me and Bang-Bang gave them the thousand-yard stare back and she swept her jacket back to reveal the CZ85 tucked into the top of her daisy dukes. They left sharpish.