by Gwynn White
Of course, they couldn’t simply sit on her tail. Overtaking, falling back, breaking off to gun it ahead on the side roads, they moved with her, one operator seamlessly passing control to the next. The autumn fog worked in their favor. With visibility down to fifty yards, they didn’t have to worry about their headlights showing up for miles.
“Hunter’s going for a pass.”
“Zero.”
Leonie trod on the accelerator, easing up to take Floyd’s place. “Chimera has control. I’m about a hundred back, unsighted, speed sixty, sixty-five.”
The road narrowed to a single lane. Now they were stuck in position, Floyd ahead of O’Braonain’s car and Leonie tailing her, the rest of the team strung out behind.
The net got mushy as they approached the limit of the car radio’s range. Gav reached down and switched the channel. The static diminished, but the voices were still faint: they were now rebroadcasting from the radar installation higher up on Slieve Gullion, which doubled as an army base.
“Hunter. I have a zoom and horsebox parked on the verge, no lights, no suspects sighted.” By suspect Floyd meant Irish person. “If it’s the ROCK I suggest they get it out of sight sharpish.”
“Zero. Can you go static and do a recce?”
“Hunter. I’m half a mile past Chicken Coop, intending straight. I’ll try to find a place to park up.”
“Zero.”
Gav bent over the mapbook. “There’s no other farm within two miles.”
The Morris skimmed through the fog. The lumpy fields on the left of the road dropped away, leaving a low stone wall between them and a drop. A steep, overgrown bank blurred away in Leonie’s right mirror. They were closing on the farmhouse designated Chicken Coop, which was listed as belonging to one Dan Joyce, sheep farmer and known IRA sympathizer. Breasting a rise, Leonie glimpsed brake lights. She blurted, “Chimera. I have O’Braonain dropping speed.”
“Hunter’s static. The forest comes down to the road approximately a mile beyond Chicken Coop. I am going walkabout in the rough.”
Gav was bolt upright, scrutinizing the bank.
“Zero. Chimera, that’s a stop, stop, stop! Get off the road if you can.”
Leonie’s foot hit the brake almost before the words sank in. “Chimera, acknowledged.”
Gav scooped the PX-80 out of the footwell. He held it across his body, pointing at his window.
“Zero. Chimera, you are inside the ROCK’s cordon. Cooperate if they approach you.”
That was all that Quillon—the Intelligence Company South ops desk officer, call sign Zero—could say, with the ROCK liaison officer sitting beside him in the duty room, listening to everything the team said on the net and relaying their positions to his own men. But Leonie could hear Quillon’s frustration at the way the ROCK had swooped in and taken over the op. Bloody Royal Order of bloody Coenobitic Knights.
A shadow rapped on Gav’s window. “Remove your hands from the weapon,” it barked as Gav rolled the window down, and then the snout of a handgun was jammed into Gav’s neck, and Leonie squirmed, fighting the urge to yank her car pistol out from under her thigh and empty the magazine into the center of the black-clad figure. Gav, his face screwed up, said, “Dial it down, mate, we’re Company.”
The ROCK knight withdrew his handgun. “You were inside the cordon maneuvering suspiciously. Don’t let it happen again, blokes.”
Leonie reversed as fast as she dared. “Zero, Chimera. Exiting the area.”
“Zero, acknowledged.”
“Gift.”
“Bee Sting.”
“Hunter.”
“This ought to be far enough,” Gav said. “There was a layby.”
“Got it.” Leonie tucked the Morris under the hedge and switched off the engine. The darkness closed in.
“Pillocks,” Gav muttered. “Yes, they’re knights, and yes, they’re special forces, but they’re crap at covert operations. A horsebox. At night. Lucky the pointyheads didn’t pull them over on suspicion of smuggling cows. O’Braonain will see that, smell a rat, and run for it. She’ll abandon the cache, if there is a cache. We lose, again.”
Leonie nodded. Adrenaline ebbing, she felt tired at the prospect of the ROCK ballsing up their op, thousands of Company man-hours—and woman-hours—going up in smoke.
Pod and Darrin reported that they were going static at a distance from what was now the ROCK’s exclusive operating zone. Floyd, on the far side of the cordon, was silent—as soon as he left his car, he’d gone off the main net, since their body sets had a very limited range and no one had a rebro set in their car tonight. When he came back on the air, he’d be in for a bollocking. All the same, Leonie wished she’d had the foresight to go walkabout before the stop order came through. She knew Gav wished the same thing.
“Lily, my love, oh Lily my love,” he hummed, and got out his cigarettes. “Fag?”
Leonie shook her head. He knew she didn’t smoke, and enjoyed teasing her. “At least open the window.”
The moist, icy night filled the car. Gav blew smoke rings.
“Chin up, love,” he said. “We must let the young prince win his spurs.”
Reluctantly, Leonie smiled. It was a fair observation. One of the reasons the ROCK got to do whatever they liked—apart from being the ROCK, the Royal Order of Coenobitic Knights, with a history dating back to the year dot—was that they had Crown Prince Harry on the strength, as of this year. Even if they weren’t letting the prince anywhere near the sharp end, it was important for him to win the respect of the public by association with the ROCK’s legend of unorthodox, highly effective soldiering.
So it wasn’t that HM didn’t appreciate the Company’s abilities, she reassured herself. He was simply thinking about the future, when Great Britain’s fortunes would hinge on Harry’s leadership.
Gav poured cocoa from his thermos into the plastic mugs he kept in the glove compartment. “All right?”
She accepted the hot drink. “All right.”
They’d been partners for two years. Female operators were not allowed to go out alone, but many of the younger blokes refused to partner a girl. Gav—originally a sergeant in the Cornwall Regiment, now a mere two years from retirement—had no such hangups. Kindly and unflappable, he was old enough to be her father, and that’s how she thought of him if she was honest with herself, a substitute for the dirty rat who’d run off when she was a kid.
Listening to the long silences over the net and the unbroken silence outside, they drank their cocoa.
3
Harry
Five Minutes Later. Slieve Gullion
The net was a living thing in Harry’s skull, formed by the voices of his brother knights. His Z4 rested in his shoulder. His finger gripped the trigger guard, numb as the metal itself. Like everyone did, he’d chopped off the first two fingers of his right glove for better sensitivity on the trigger. Brant Yates-Briggs moved ahead of him, a crouching shadow in the darkness of the forest.
They were patrolling in from the west, having been dropped off with the others three miles out. On the Dublin road behind them, the police were setting up a checkpoint, acting on the Intelligence Company’s confirmation that Alyx O’Braonain had arrived at the farm. The other ROCK knights had reached their forward OPs and established sightlines on the farmhouse. Only Harry and Yates-Briggs had yet to get into position.
Aware they’d been given a circuitous route to minimize the possibility that they might actually come into contact with the terrorists, Harry felt ashamed that his personal indispensability had factored into their task planning. He’d passed selection on his own merits. Hadn’t he earned the right not to be babied like this?
Not yet, said the voice of pragmatism, which always sounded suspiciously like his father Tristan’s. This is only your second task, isn’t it? You’ve still got a lot to prove.
Sir Northumberland, their commanding officer, came on the net. “The Company are reporting an abandoned car and horsebox parked inside the
cordon, about two hundred yards Dublin-wise from the farm. Are there any of our call signs near the road, over?”
Yates-Briggs glanced back at Harry, who nodded emphatically.
“Dragon and I will take it.” Dragon was Harry’s call sign; he’d picked it himself. He moved up beside Yates-Briggs. “Switch on your night sight and stay behind me,” Yates-Briggs muttered. Blackened with cam cream, his face barely moved as he spoke. “We’ll make for the hedgerow and patrol down this side of it.”
They headed downhill, lifting their feet high to minimize the noise of their boots on the soggy carpet of pine needles. The forest was a royal plantation that would never be harvested, for fear of offending the locals, until and unless, someday, the Irish reconciled themselves to British rule.
The pitch darkness, the damp of the fog on Harry’s hands and face, and the dead silence added up to an uncanny atmosphere. He recalled the rumors about Alyx O’Braonain’s gang: they weren’t just boneheaded cuddies. They practised savage, primitive rituals. They couldn’t be killed …
Superstition was the besetting sin of the ROCK, a phenomenon that had taken Harry aback when he first encountered it, since the slightest whiff of credulity would have provoked ridicule from the hard-partying tourney knights he used to hang with. Perhaps it emanated from the lowborn knights who filled out the troop. He had been disconcerted to find himself vulnerable to it, too. Now it had him in its grip. His back prickled with the emptiness among the spindly trunks, and a cold spot grew between his eyes, as if someone had laid an ice cube on his forehead. That warned him that his thoughts were starting to get silly. There was tainted blood in the Wessex line, though no one ever spoke of it.
At the bottom of the slope, the perimeter fence of the forest snarled with the hedgerow. The two knights wriggled under the rusty barbed wire and patrolled in the direction of the farmhouse, parallel to the road. Yates-Briggs set a cautious pace: Three steps, stop, traverse your arc. Move, stop, traverse.
Long wet grass licked Harry’s ankles. Sweat pooled at his waistband where his belt, heavy with spare magazines, gathered his smock in. His earlier numinous unease forgotten, he now expected to hear a burst of gunfire at any moment and feel the rounds slam into his back.
A man rose from the drainage ditch at the base of the hedgerow, swinging his right arm in a circle. Harry would have shot him anyway; he was already bringing his Z4 up when Yates-Briggs stepped forward, his own rifle still in his shoulder. Harry went hot all over. The man had made the ROCK’s own hand sign for come here.
“Floyd Ayrett, sir,” the man whispered. “Intelligence Company South.”
Yates-Briggs put down his gun, implicitly trusting Harry to cover him. He grabbed the man, jerked his jacket off one shoulder, then pulled his shirt away from his neck. The man bent his head. Brant switched on the pencil torch from his belt kit, covering most of the lens with his fingers so there was just a reddish splinter of light, and played it over the man’s shoulder. Harry saw a palm-sized brand on the pad of flesh over the trapezius muscle. It was the same emblem that had adorned Harry’s nappies and schoolbooks, and in fact monogrammed his underthings right now—the crowned lion of House Wessex.
The brand proved that Floyd Ayrett was a sworn Wessex bondsman, loyal to Harry’s family rather than to the Crown per se. Such were considered the most reliable class of all.
Rearranging his clothes, his voice betraying no hint of resentment at the humiliation they’d just put him through, Ayrett murmured, “The horsebox’s there. You can get through the hedge here if you crawl. I’ve been keeping watch. No activity. It may be genuinely abandoned. On the other hand it could be a come-on.”
Harry was already irritated with himself for nearly making a fatal mistake, and now his irritation encompassed Ayrett, too. Of course the possibility had existed to begin with that the whole thing was a come-on. But now Alyx O’Braonain was confirmed at the farmhouse, unless the Intelligence Company was wrong about that, too. The IRA would not risk their precious second-generation pretender as bait in a trap. The information was good. Harry and Yates-Briggs had only to clear this last unknown from the picture and the task would be a go … and one way or another, O’Braonain would be out of the game.
But more hung on this operation than anyone else knew. Harry’s father believed that Alyx O’Braonain knew the whereabouts of House Wessex’s lost treasure, the sword Worldcracker. That arms cache at the farm might not be just another pile of old guns. It might hold Harry’s own birthright.
With so much at stake, why not send in the army and tear the farm to bits?
Because Tristan II believed their mandate to rule would be no mandate if they broke their own laws to secure it. Harry fully shared his father’s commitment to the rule of law. This had to be done right.
“I’ll investigate.”
He got down on his belly and wriggled through the hedge, pushing his Z4 in front of him. The wet ground soaked his combats. He splashed into the ditch on the other side and came up aiming. But there was nothing to aim at except the car and horsebox, sitting with its wheels almost in the ditch. He yanked open the driver’s side door of the car, then circled around to sight between the horizontal slats of the horsebox. He smelled the rich reek of horse, saw nothing.
Yates-Briggs dragged him into the ditch behind the truck. “Someone’s coming.”
Two pairs of footsteps clonked on the metalled road. God, he wanted to shoot someone now. Yates-Briggs was on the net, quietly reporting what they could see and hear. “We don’t know any more than you do, lads,” said Sir Northumberland. It was in their hands now. The other pairs—waiting on the edge of the farmyard, in the top field, at the bottom of the track—would not come any closer, for fear of a friendly incident such as Ayrett had almost caused. If Harry and Yates-Briggs needed help, they would call for it.
“Stay here,” Yates-Briggs whispered. “I’m going to cut them off.”
Harry nodded. A classic pincer move. Yates-Briggs got down low in the ditch and crabbed away in total silence. Watching him go, warrior was the word that sprang to mind.
The footsteps drew nearer. Harry climbed out of the ditch, leaving Ayrett in the mud cuddling his pistol, and eased around the cab of the cattle truck. “Ready,” Yates-Briggs said in his earpiece. The footsteps drew level with the truck. Harry burst onto the road. “Hold it right there, don’t fucking move!”
Two men stood before him, cuddie silhouettes in peaked caps and bulky ‘maudie’ coats. They raised their hands. Behind them, Yates-Briggs flipped the lever of his Z4 to automatic. The men’s heads jerked. They knew that sound. They were players.
“Could I see your ID, please?” Harry put a dry spin on the standard query. These two might be sworn to some minor local knight who was betting both sides of the coin, but more likely they were freemen. Left behind by modern times, clinging to some paper right of freehold or traditional craftsman status handed down from antiquity. As such, they were legally required to carry their papers on them at all times.
“Sure it’s dark as a dog’s arsehole, but don’t you recognize me?”
The other player let out a low chuckle. “You’re not as famous as you think you are, Rook.”
Harry lowered his gun and switched on his torch, starting the beam low and moving it up the first player’s body to his face. His night vision would be shot to hell now.
The weathered face and drooping black moustache belonged to Rook Niorlain, one of the IRA gunfathers who had come to the negotiating table a few years back. Since then, ceasefires had come and gone, but Niorlain remained key to the peace process, along with a handful of other older players.
The original tip leading to this operation had come from Niorlain himself.
Alyx O’Braonain, with her dead folk hero father and her audacious claim to the throne of all Great Britain, threatened not only the peace process, but also the IRA’s grip on power in the north. The gunfathers wanted her out of the way as much as the Crown did.
None of which explained what Rook Niorlain and his sidekick were doing here.
Unless it’s all a come-on.
“If your boys are planning a party, you’ll be the first to die,” Harry warned.
Rook lowered one hand to shade his eyes from Harry’s torch. “Switch that thing off. Do you want them on top of us?”
The mist drifted white across the road. Beyond the low stone wall behind the players, it rose as if from a steaming void. Brant patted the two men down. Harry turned off the torch. The players would be left thoroughly dazzled, which was just as well. Even blackened with cam cream, Harry had a famous face. It wouldn’t help matters for him to be recognized.
“Get out of here, Niorlain,” he said.
“It’s the voice of reason that is in the boy,” the second man said.
Rook stood his ground. “What will you do with O’Braonain when you catch her, tell me that?”
“Not your problem,” Brant said.
In Harry’s earpiece Sir Alec was saying, “Bloody hell. Escort them out to the VCP, and make sure they don’t quack.” Harry’s night vision had recovered enough that he could see Yates-Briggs shoving his Z4 into Rook’s shoulder blades, getting him moving.
Rook winced away from the gun. “Throw her in Armagh Jail, will you? You’re making a terrible mistake. Put your commander on the radio, let me speak to him. Give me one of yon fifty-mil guns up on your hardtops and I’ll do the job myself.”
“Don’t you usually delegate that sort of thing to children and mental deficients?” Harry said contemptuously.
Yates-Briggs prodded the players past him. “I’ll give you a shout on the net when we’re clear.”
Harry put out a hand to halt them. None of this made any sense unless Rook was having an acute attack of second thoughts. Was it possible that he’d expected the Wessex forces to assassinate Alyx O’Braonain, doing the IRA’s dirty work for them? Inured to violence, did he actually believe the IRA’s own propaganda that the Crown had a shoot-to-kill policy?