‘That’s the perimeter sensor,’ Carpenter said, gesturing towards the display and then pointing at an illuminated map mounted in a box on the wall to one side of the monitors. One roughly triangular section of the map was backlit. ‘That’s the area. It’s just on the edge of the woodland behind the house, about sixty yards away, and the motion sensor went off just over five minutes ago.’
‘Could it be some of the local wildlife?’ Richter asked. ‘A fox or something like that?’
‘According to the guy who runs this place, the sensors are calibrated to avoid being triggered by anything smaller than a human being, otherwise they’d be going off every time a rabbit hopped past. But you know technology. It’s great when it works and crap when it doesn’t, so who knows?’
As Richter stared at the visual displays in front of him, a second motion sensor was triggered – for sector five, right next to the previous sector – and the illuminated number four winked out. At almost the same moment, both he and Carpenter saw a faint movement on the infrared camera mounted high on the rear wall of the house and aiming towards the adjacent woodland.
‘That looks like our intruder,’ Carpenter said, pointing at the monitor.
‘Unless the opposition are real masters of disguise, I think that’s pretty harmless,’ Richter replied, looking at the unmistakable shape of a male deer making its way slowly through the grass and shrubs just outside the tree line. ‘But at least it looks like the motion sensor calibration is about right. That’s easily as big as a man.’
‘You staying up now?’ Carpenter asked.
Richter nodded. ‘I’m awake and I’m here,’ he said. ‘I’d planned to get up about midnight anyway.’
‘Okay, then. If you can eyeball the screens for a few minutes, I’ll go and take a leak and make some coffee. Instant okay for you? Actually, you don’t have a choice. It’s instant or nothing.’
‘No problem. Black, please, no sugar.’
About five minutes after Carpenter had left the control room, Richter heard the sound of the scrambled phone ringing in the sitting room, followed a few seconds later by the subdued murmur of conversation as Carpenter answered it. Then he heard the sound of the agent’s voice raised in either anger or frustration, or perhaps both, followed by silence.
Moments later the door swung open and Carpenter reappeared, his MP5 dangling from its tactical sling, and with a mug of coffee in each hand.
‘You are not going to believe what that idiot Simpson wants us to do now,’ he said, placing both mugs on the desk.
‘Actually,’ Richter replied, ‘I think I can. He wants you, Dave, and the two house staff to climb into the Transit and drive away, leaving me in the house by myself.’
Carpenter’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Richter.
‘How do you– Hang on, is this part of some convoluted scheme you’ve cooked up between you? Or is he just hanging you out to dry, like he normally does?’
‘It’s part of a plan, yes. I’m gambling that the opposition has found out where we are. Or where I am, to be exact. When we drove here I’m fairly certain there was one motorcyclist who picked us up near Leighton Buzzard and followed us the rest of the way. He was a long way back, and several times I lost sight of him, so I can’t be absolutely sure, but that white van is fairly distinctive and Dave parked it right outside the door of this house, so if he was a part of the opposition it wouldn’t be very difficult for him to spot it once he knew the rough area we were in.’
Carpenter shook his head. ‘That makes sense, but us driving off into the night and leaving you here by yourself doesn’t. That makes you a real sitting target, plus you’ve already got one bullet wound so you’re not going be as quick on your feet as you normally are. And I know that the ground floor of this place is basically armoured, but if these comedians turn up and make it to the door with some Semtex or C4, it’s going to turn into an open house real quick.’
‘I know,’ Richter said, ‘and that’s really the point. We need to take these people down, and getting them inside here is the best way I can think of to do that. If they believe there are half a dozen of us inside armed with submachine-guns, they’re not going to bother trying to force an entry. They’ll just set themselves up around the house and turn it into rubble using RPG7s or something, and us with it, and there’d be nothing we could do to stop them. We already know from what the first three were carrying that they have serious weaponry, so guessing they have access to RPGs is not that much of a stretch. I’m gambling that if they think I’m here by myself they’ll try and get inside. And maybe whoever’s calling the shots will be here with them, and if he is, he’ll probably want to look me in the eye when he pulls the trigger. And I’m kind of looking forward to that.’
Carpenter shook his head again. ‘You might well be right, but it still doesn’t make sense. You got lucky before, because one guy armed with a pistol should never be able to take on three men, probably trained mercenaries, carrying Kalashnikovs and walk away. This time, it’ll be just you – okay, helped out by the genius of John Browning and Mister Heckler and Mister Koch – but basically one man, in fact one wounded man, probably facing at least six heavily armed assassins. We know he’s in contact with at least that many people because of the phone records, but he might have another bunch hidden away somewhere that we know nothing about. This place will turn into a killing house, and it’ll be you that comes out of here in a body bag. This is a suicide mission, and you know it.’
‘I’m too young to die, Steve, and I know what I’m doing, so just trust me on this. I do have a plan, but it’ll only work if all of you leave, and make it very obvious that that’s what you’re doing. Tell Dave to switch on the blues as soon as he starts the van and use the siren if you see any other traffic nearby.’
One of the other modifications made to the Transit had been the installation of a set of blue lights behind the front grille and a police siren. Using the siren at around midnight in the middle of the countryside would probably be unnecessary, but if there were watchers outside the house, the flashing blue lights would lend a sense of urgency to the scene and – hopefully – convey the implication that everyone except Richter had been recalled to take care of some other emergency situation.
‘I still don’t like this,’ Carpenter said, stepping forward and shaking Richter’s hand, ‘but it’s your choice. You’ve got enough weapons and ammunition?’
‘I can only fire one gun at a time, Steve, and I’ve got the MP5 with three spare magazines and a box of nine-millimetre shells, plus the Browning. If I need more than that, I guess I wouldn’t have made it anyway. Now get the hell out of here.’
Carpenter took a final glance at the monitor screens, one of which was now showing activity at the front of the house as the bulky figure of Dave Roberts stepped out of the main door and walked over to the Transit. Seconds later, they both heard the dull rumble as he started the engine. Carpenter turned away, then stopped and turned back to face Richter.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re up to and I am going to get in the van and drive away. But whether you agree or not, I’m going to tell Dave to stop the vehicle once we’re about a mile from the house, and we’re going to hold position there until I hear from you on my mobile. If you need help, just call. The way Dave drives, in that Transit we can be back here in less than a minute. And that’s non-negotiable, no matter what you say.’
Richter nodded. ‘Thanks, Steve. I appreciate that. It won’t be necessary – or I hope to hell it won’t – but thanks anyway.’
A little over three minutes later, Richter closed and locked the main door of the house behind Carpenter, then walked into one of the sitting rooms and stood right in front of the armoured glass window. He watched as the Transit accelerated rapidly away up the drive, the flashing blue lights lending a surreal quality to the scene, and then turned right and disappeared along the road. Then he pulled the heavy curtains across the window, turned and walked out of the roo
m, extinguishing the lights behind him.
He visited every room on the ground floor doing exactly the same thing, making sure that the curtains were in place, so as not to allow any light from inside the building to escape. The curtains would also minimise the amount of shattered glass that would end up on the floor inside if the attackers decided to blow the windows as a means of entrance.
Then he climbed the stairs to the upper floor. In one of the bedrooms, he turned on the main light before drawing the curtains, and left the light on while he drew the curtains in every other room on that floor. Only then did he switch off that bedroom light, hoping to give the impression that he had actually gone to bed in the room.
Richter made a very brief call on his mobile, then switched on a pocket torch he’d found in a drawer in the kitchen and walked back down the darkened staircase to carry out one specific action, then revisited every single room in the house to perform exactly the same task in each of them.
What appeared to be nothing more than simple domestic activity was in fact the first phase – or perhaps the second phase after making sure that Carpenter and the other three men had left the premises – of his hastily constructed and somewhat ambitious, or perhaps more accurately desperate, plan.
All that done, he left the final bedroom he’d visited and descended the main staircase to the control room, to wait for whatever the night might bring.
Chapter 15
Just under two hundred yards from the property, entirely concealed in a patch of undergrowth and completely invisible to anyone nearby, a well-built man wearing camouflage clothing stared at the front of the house through a pair of high magnification tripod-mounted binoculars. Using the tripod meant that his hands were free to do other things, like aiming his sniper rifle at the window of the property where he’d last seen the target through the powerful telescopic sight mounted on the weapon or, as he was doing at that precise moment, pressing a speed dial combination on his mobile phone.
The moment he heard the ringing tone through his Bluetooth earpiece, he slid the phone back into one of the pockets of his camouflage jacket and again turned his attention to the house. His call was answered in a matter of seconds, and the brief conversation that followed was conducted in English, their only common language.
‘The van has just left,’ he reported. ‘As well as the driver, three men got inside, one of them a black. The target remained in the house.’
‘You are sure about that?’
‘I’m certain. He stood at one of the downstairs windows in full view and watched the vehicle leave. If you had given me authorisation, I could have taken him out at that moment.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ said the man the observer had called. ‘That building is almost certainly a safe house, and the probability is that the windows will be armoured glass. If you had fired, you would simply have confirmed that we know the target’s location, and your bullet would probably have just bounced off the window. So what is happening now?’
‘The target must have climbed up to the first floor as soon as the vehicle left, because one of the bedroom lights came on, and is still on now.’ Seconds later, the situation changed. ‘That light has just been switched off. There are now no lights showing at all. What are your orders?’
‘Keep watching the house and call me immediately if the situation changes. But you can leave your observation point and make your way down to the road to join the others. I will be there in a few minutes.’
‘I’m not comfortable with this. The other men leaving the property is just too convenient, and I’m sure we will be walking into a trap.’
‘Of course it’s a trap. That’s quite clear. The target will certainly not be lying asleep in a bed in one of the upstairs rooms. That’s just the impression he obviously wanted to create. He’s almost certainly waiting somewhere downstairs holding a submachine-gun or an assault rifle and expecting us to go in through one of the doors or windows.’
‘So how do we get in without being shot?’
‘I will decide when I get there. Now get down to the road and wait for me.’
Fifteen minutes later, in almost complete silence, the observer emerged from the field opposite the house and stopped beside the edge of the road. He was carrying a Walther nine-millimetre pistol in a shoulder holster worn outside his jacket, and holding his preferred long rifle, a Yalguzag.
One of the less-known sniper rifles, the bolt-action Yalguzag was developed in Azerbaijan in 2012 and fires the standard 7.62×51mm NATO round, giving it commonality with similar weapons from other manufacturers. It has an effective range of about 1000 yards. In Azerbaijani, the name means ‘lone wolf’, and the observer – a trained and experienced former military sniper – liked it because of its modern and futuristic design, and the total reliability provided by the unjammable bolt-action loading system.
He glanced up and down the dark and silent road, the surface in places turned to silver by the cold white light of the moon, then walked slowly and carefully about fifty yards to where he had seen a group of four shadowy figures.
In short and economical sentences, he confirmed what he had seen through the binoculars – the other men had been concealed some distance up the road and out of sight of the property – and the orders he had been given by the man he was expecting to arrive at any moment.
And about five minutes later, he did.
A dark saloon car, the colour of the bodywork indistinguishable from the night that surrounded it, and running only on parking lights, eased to a stop perhaps a further fifty yards beyond the group of silent men. The lights went out, the driver’s and passenger’s doors opened and then closed with barely audible clicks, and a heavily built man with an obviously pale complexion that contrasted with his black hair and almost black eyes walked cautiously towards them, a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol held loosely in his right hand. Another man – the driver of the car and the sixth member of the group – walking a few paces behind him.
The observer was easy to recognise, even in the dark, because of the unusual weapon he had slung over his shoulder, and the new arrival stopped directly in front of him.
‘Anything new?’ he demanded.
The observer glanced back towards the house before replying. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No lights and no sign of movement.’
‘Good. Show me.’
The two men walked about twenty yards closer to the house, to a position from which they could see the front of the building clearly, and then stopped. The observer pointed out the window where he had identified the target from his observation point, and the room on the first floor in which he had seen the light switched on, and then turned off again.
The new arrival absorbed the information without speaking, then simply stood and stared at the silent black bulk of the house for a couple of minutes. Then he nodded, turned on his heels and walked back to where the other men were waiting, the observer a few feet behind him.
‘Right,’ he said, his voice quiet and determined. ‘This is how we’re going to do it.’
Chapter 16
In the control room, the lights indicating four of the motion detectors changed almost simultaneously from green to red, the numbers above the lights showing intrusions in the areas on both sides of the house. Moments later, the infrared cameras detected rapid motion in those same areas, as men carrying automatic weapons emerged from the woods and undergrowth that surrounded the property and ran quickly towards the building. Once they reached it, the groups split, one heading to the front of the house while the other men diverted towards the back.
Richter put down his mug of coffee – the drink was now virtually cold – and used the directional adjustment and zoom facility on one of the cameras to closely examine the group of three men gathered beside the rear door of the property. He was looking out for one thing, and after a few seconds he nodded to himself and smiled briefly. Then he looked again at the image on one of the monitors, at a single man carrying a pistol but no as
sault rifle who was following the group to the rear door, walking with no sign of haste.
‘Bingo,’ he muttered, then stood up, picked up his MP5 and walked out of the darkened control room, the only illumination inside coming from the warning lights and the monitors. He made his way into the hall, opened a door and then closed it behind him.
Some twenty seconds later, the building echoed to the sound of two almost simultaneous explosions as charges of Semtex were detonated against the reinforced front and rear doors. The steel cores and reinforced frames would have withstood an assault from the ‘big red key’ – the metal battering ram used by police forces to smash open the doors of suburban houses – for several tens of minutes, perhaps even an hour or more, but against charges of plastic explosive placed in the correct locations, they stood no chance. Each door was hit by three separate explosions, two at the top and bottom on the hinge side and the third against the lock.
Just seconds after the charges were detonated, hefty kicks from the attackers caused both doors to simply topple inwards and crash down flat against the floor. The men swarmed into the house looking for targets, weapons cocked and loaded.
Every light in the building was off, and although the light from the moon produced some illumination outside the building, inside the house the blackness was total apart from right beside the doorways, the curtains that covered the windows providing a complete blackout.
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