by Ian Andrew
“But, never say never. Anyway, you two get off home and give me a call tomorrow from the big smoke.”
Chapter 22
Thursday Night. Epping Forest
RV1 was the Lord Cardigan Rise. A combination pub, restaurant and motel annex perched on top of a small hill in the gently undulating countryside to the west of Epping Forest. It had been Sammi’s best guess for a base of operations. Midway along the main expanse of woodland, it was in a small hamlet of houses and had a fairly good road running past it east to west. That road connected at both ends to relatively good north and south routes. Overall she had picked it because it offered rapid access to all of the surrounding area. When she had called and enquired about four rooms she was told that the separate motel annex only had six rooms in total and three of those had already been let. Sammi took the last three and agreed with the owner to have a small cot bed put into the third. Not that they would need it but it was what would have been expected of more normal guests. What she nor the rest of the team had known was just how remarkable her choice of a base had been.
The seven of them crowded into one of the bedrooms and variously smiled, laughed or shook their heads at the fact that from where they were sitting to the back of what they presumed was Illy and Yanina’s garden was less than five hundred yards in a direct line. The pub did sit to the wrong side of the east-west road and they would have to negotiate it before they could get to the rear of the house, but other than that it was a superb location.
“I’d say well done to me, but it was pure fluke,” Sammi said.
“Don’t knock it. I’d say it was about time we had some luck on this,” Kara responded. “All we have to do now is make sure that the house is actually hers and not a friend she was visiting.”
It had just gone 19:30 and despite their best attempts at drive by observations there had been no way to see if Yanina’s car was still parked at the house she had pulled into. Given the narrowness of Avey Lane there was also no way to leave a couple of cars in situ without them being easily spotted should Yanina drive back out.
What they needed was for it to get dark but they had at least an hour and a half to wait for the sun to go down. Double that for the night to get dark enough for them to venture forward and reconnoitre the house and its grounds.
“You never know Kara,” Dinger said from his cross-legged perch on the floor next to the room’s bed, “Our luck might well be changing. It’s the new moon tonight so all things being equal it’ll be as dark as we could want. But, right now, I’m fucking starving so what are we going to eat?”
They decided they had too much to do to allow for a visit into the Pub’s restaurant so elected instead to have a mixture of Chinese and Indian take-away delivered.
While they waited, Dan, Eugene and Dinger started to check all the equipment they had brought. Tien moved to the room’s small table and set up three laptops. Chaz, Sammi and Kara stood behind her.
“Bloody hell,” Sammi said, “That’s amazing quality. How the hell did you get that?”
Tien looked up, “Which one?” she asked looking back to the three screens, each one displaying a different resolution image of the target house.
“Any of them to be honest, but that one on the right. It’s phenomenal.”
“It’s all commercial grade imagery and available to anyone nowadays,” said Tien.
Chaz shook his head, “Jesus, this is better quality than we had off the military systems when I started out.”
“Yeah, but you did start out a long time ago. Weren’t they still using balloon observation in your day?” Kara teased and stepped quickly to the other side of Sammi, using the broad shoulders of the keen swimmer as a mock shield from the lithe Mancunian’s reach.
“Not quite and don’t think she’s going to protect you,” he laughed. Chaz was the oldest amongst them but not by much. What he was by a long stretch was the best exponent of self-defence and martial arts out of the seven in the room. Even Eugene and Dan knew that if it came down to an all-out, no holds barred fight Chaz had the taking of them. Kara winked at him from behind Sammi.
“They appear to have a lot of house for what’s probably only the two of them,” said Tien refocussing them back on the screens.
Sammi was peering forward over Tien’s shoulder, “Seriously though, how do you get this quality? It’s way more detailed than Google Earth?”
“Yeah, but it’s still commercial. You can buy this off the Net. We’ve got access to three of the big satellite imagery companies. They’ve got birds flying now like WorldView-3. It’s got thirty-centimetre resolution. But this on the right,” Tien said pointing to the screen that showed the house in fine detail. “That’s low-level aerial imagery taken by a small UK outfit. Local council’s use it for planning and homeowners can buy prints of their house. That sort of thing. It’s really excellent and very similar to what we would have taken on an op. Between all the sources we can normally get imagery taken within the last few months. It’s not perfect, it’s not real-time and we certainly can’t task it to go look where we want at the time we want but for what we do, it’s the best available.”
“This must cost a fortune,” Chaz said.
“No idea really,” said Kara. Sammi and Chaz turned to look at her with small frowns of confusion. “Tien broke her way in ages ago. We have actual accounts, it’s just that when we need the imagery we don’t get billed for it. She managed to shut that bit of the process down for our particular account. It’s sort of like having an all-inclusive, access-all-area pass. And no one comes looking for us ‘cos they don’t know we’re stealing it.” She gently patted Tien’s shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised,” Sammi said. Tien looked up and smiled at her in acknowledgment of the compliment.
“So you have access to all of this great imagery but how do the two of you non-trained, poor excuses for ex-intelligence analysts manage to cope?” Chaz said and smirked.
Sammi started to laugh at his stirring of an old pot between those who had been trained in Imagery Analysis and those who had been trained in Signals Intelligence. Sammi, with a foot in either camp, loved the banter that invariably occurred at the first inkling that Kara or Tien could look at photos or Chaz could understand signals. All four of them had been trained in human intelligence techniques so they couldn’t wind each other up over that.
“Well I just don’t know Chaz. I guess it can’t be that hard. We managed to figure it out without having to go to a school for four months,” Tien said quietly.
“See! Now you’ve kicked it all off,” Kara said with an air of fake reproach. “If Tien’s coming out swinging then you’ve overstepped the mark.”
Chaz put his hand on Tien’s shoulder and with mock graveness said, “I am so sorry Tien. I know a fantastically trained person who specialised in electronic gathering such as yourself, could do anything. I was meaning your linguist friend over there who, let’s face it, struggles to speak English let alone any other language. How did she manage to hold an image up the right way, let alone analyse it?”
“Eh bien, je ne sais pas comment vous parvenez à vous habiller,” Kara said. Tien and Sammi laughed. Chaz, not understanding the phrase but fairly sure it contained an insult, flicked the V-sign at her.
“Well, if you have all finished talking gibberish at me,” he said in as posh an accent as his Manchester dialect could manage, “I suppose one of us better do some work.”
Tien stood up and gave Chaz a hug, “Love ya really,” she said. “It’s all yours and there’s a printout coming soon.” The portable colour printer she had set up wirelessly on the other side of the room started to whirr and feed paper in confirmation.
Chaz took the seat and he and Sammi began to examine and analyse the grounds and surrounds of the target house on the high resolution image.
Kara and Tien slipped outside and in turn went into the other rooms they had booked. They dressed them so that to a housekeeper coming in the next morning i
t would look like someone had stayed and slept in the beds. Then they stepped back into the courtyard and waited for the food deliveries.
They also noted the faux coach-lights hanging to the front of each room in the motel annex and the additional lighting that illuminated the rear of the Pub and the beer garden.
*
At 22:30 Chaz came out of the en-suite bathroom and looked at the rest of them, “I’d love to see that Chinese delivery guy’s face if he knocked on the door now.”
Each of them might have had their own preferred makes or designs of equipment and clothing but it didn’t detract from their uniformity. They all wore black high-leg boots, black combat trousers, black T-shirts, black combat smocks and black gloves. Each was bedecked in two-tone camouflage cream on face and neck and the only slight difference was in the choice of either dark green or black rolled woollen caps perched on their heads. Each had a small day pack, similar in size to the ones Tien and Kara had used to transport the money, slung over their shoulders.
Sammi grinned, her white teeth showing menacingly from darkened face and lips, “I reckon we’d probably have got away without paying.”
Laughing, they began a series of buddy checks to make sure there were no rattles of tell-tale objects or glints from exposed metal. Tien had them check their digital radio systems that, given the openness of the countryside and proximity of their observation points, she had assured them would work much better than in the town earlier. But she had them take their phones as backup, just in case.
“You all sure they’re switched to vibrate?” Kara asked.
A series of nods confirmed.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
They switched the room light off and Tien slipped out the door into the dark courtyard. Between the food being delivered and getting changed, Kara and she had removed all the bulbs from the coach-light lanterns.
She stood still in the small porch and waited until sure the occupants of the other three rooms weren’t out and about. Then she moved along the edge of the wall that separated the motel annex from the neighbouring golf course entrance. Once satisfied that their path was clear she went back and gently tapped on the door. The rest filed out quickly and Dan slipped in front of Tien to lead them.
Although in a direct line they were only five hundred yards northeast of their target, on that line was the main east-west road, a collection of houses that constituted a small hamlet, an open stretch of ground and two small tributaries that fed into the Lea River. To get to the target house unseen and dry they would need to go in a much more circuitous route. So they started by following the trees at the edge of the golf course and headed northwest for four hundred yards. Then they swapped that cover for a high roadside hedge that swung southwest for three hundred yards before it merged into a small thicket. A hundred yards further and they had reached the point that they could double back to the south east and reconnect with their original line. With no houses in sight and no vehicles within earshot they quickly crossed the road with little chance of being observed. Another three hundred yards further and they regrouped at the edge of a line of trees. This was the final cover they would use to make their approach to the target house.
Dan and Dinger used the two most modern sets of night sights that had been in Tien’s cupboard to scan the whole of the approach to their next point of reference; two hundred yards to their southwest a T-junction of large trees marking the corner of Illy and Yanina’s garden. Or so they hoped. With no observation on the house since Chaz had seen Yanina drive in five hours earlier there was a chance that they were on a wild goose chase. Kara knew it but there was nothing to be done but press on. She moved beside Dan and put her hand on his arm.
“All clear for me,” Dan whispered.
“Same,” Dinger concurred in a similar tone.
“Okay. Dan you have point,” Kara said softly. She and the rest of the team had much older-generation monocular night sights that were good for use in static observations but difficult to use on the move, so they set off again into what, for five of them, was almost absolute darkness. She smiled to herself, remembering the first time she had ever gone out of town and into properly rugged country.
Fifteen years old, with eleven other Air Cadets and a couple of instructors she had been on a Duke of Edinburgh Awards expedition over the August Bank Holiday weekend. They’d headed for Exmoor and the minibus had dropped them off early on the Saturday morning at a little village she had never forgotten the name of; Simonsbath. It sat on the edge of the Exmoor National Park and from there they had walked to the head of the River Exe before heading in to the rolling downs of the Long Chains Combe.
That first night under canvas and under stars had been a revelation to her. She had never truly appreciated what dark meant before. Her small hometown of Crewkerne wasn’t exactly a metropolis but every street had streetlights. Exmoor didn’t. There was no artificial light other than the torches she and her friends had carried. The silence of the night and the majesty of the stars that she glimpsed through scudding clouds took her breath away. The following day they had set off to walk almost clear across the moor to find the point where the East Lyn River formed. That second night, colder with no cloud cover, had made Kara cry. Not from cold or tiredness but from the sheer spectacle.
She had never before seen stars like that. Innumerable dots in a vast sky. Unable to tear herself away, she had stayed up almost the whole night staring into the universe, helpless to not think how small she was in it. Yet she was also inspired. That night forged an ambition in her to live a life of boldness. She didn’t know then just what or how but she knew she must. It had been the thought of how desperately sad she would have been had she never experienced those stars until her old age. She figured many people had never seen things the way they should be. In their raw state. She swore to herself that evening on Exmoor to travel, to experience new things, to take on challenges and overcome them.
Staying up into the small hours had been somewhat regrettable given that the next day they had trekked the length of the river to where it met the West Lyn. But, even for her tiredness, as she followed the water and watched it flow into the sea at Lynmouth she felt refreshed, relieved. She went back home enthused and desperate not to live what she imagined had been the stationary lives of her parents and grandparents. She had joined the military three years later. Shortly after that she had discovered the truth about what her grandparents had done on both sides of the family and realised she was following in footsteps rather than breaking new ground.
The darkness surrounding Kara as she trailed Dan was also country dark. There were no street lights, no spill from houses that were shielded by high hedges and tall trees. But it wasn’t Exmoor. Less than fifteen miles southwest of where she stood was the centre of London. The immense sprawl of artificial light from the city contaminated the night sky with a glow that obliterated most of the spectacle that she knew was up there, waiting.
Dan stopped at the junction and waited for the rest to catch up. “We sure there are no dogs?” he asked.
“As sure as we can be,” said Kara. “If this is the right house then the information I got said Yanina doesn’t like them. Chaz and Sammi saw no dog runs or feed bowls, fencing or anything else that looks dog-related on the imagery.”
“Okay then. Let’s hope we’re right.” He and Dinger slid forward and breached the point that marked the rear of the garden. From now on they were all communicating via radio.
“Okay folks,” Dinger’s soft accent came through to all of them. “We have a medium height, densely thick hedge running from where we are now across the rear of the whole garden before it finally turns left and forms the right hand side of the boundary. It goes as far as the tight knot of trees to the front right of the house. That was where Chaz said the first OP should be?” he asked referring to the observation posts that they were going to try to establish around the house.
Chaz and Sammi had spent their time well in analysing
the imagery. Not only had they seen no evidence of dogs, they’d identified a range of close in security features like under-eave lights and motion sensors. Given the limited angles available on the photography they had selected, as best they could, five points that they assessed would make ideal places for long-term surveillance. The garden, or more properly the extensive grounds of the house were dotted with the occasional single specimen, but more usually knots of small copses, of Oak, Hornbeam and Birch trees. Testament to the fact that the house sat on partially cleared ground that had once been within Epping Forest itself. But the selection of points from a photo needed to be confirmed with conditions on the ground and Dan and Dinger were their eyes to establish the truth.
“Roger that. That copse is OP1,” Chaz confirmed.
Dinger continued, “To our front left is a tennis court and to the right side of it a weatherboard shed, probably for keeping the tennis equipment and lawn tools in. It provides a line-of-sight block between us and the house. If we need to penetrate further we can use it as a blind spot.”
Dan, lying to the left of Dinger took over, “To the left of the tennis court is that long stretch of trees extending all the way back to Avey Lane. I’m moving now to check. Wait.”
As Dan moved in a crouch to the left, Dinger moved further to the right and eased through the hedgerow’s dense roots to get a clear view of the house itself, sitting some one hundred yards from where he lay. The night sights showed a large, solid building that according to Sammi must have been built in the late 1800’s but had been substantially remodelled and enlarged in more recent times. A raised area extended from the back of the house and was surrounded by an elaborate balustrade. Midway along its length it broke to allow three steps to lead down into the garden and grounds proper. Dinger knew that the large area within the balustrade was an open-air pool and swim-up bar. The expansive pool-surround butted to the rear wall of the house and was accessed by a wide stretch of window-doors which were closed and curtained. The curtained darkness was repeated on all the windows that he could observe on the T-shaped house. But he could only see a limited amount from his position opposite the bottom right of the long leg of the T. If they were going to observe the property in full they needed to get more OPs in place. He looked left and saw the faint shape of Dan reappear at the bottom edge of the trees that marked the left side boundary.
