by Alan Porter
Nothing was out of the ordinary. Nothing was wrong with this picture of English peace and quiet.
But something was coming. She knew it was coming.
39
What Leila didn’t know was that Black Eagle were already inside the perimeter too.
They had been for over a week.
Four hundred yards from the main building, the Mapleton ice house lay abandoned and forgotten. Daniel Peretz had walked right over the top of it as he wandered through the woods. He’d seen no trace of it, but it was still there, a huge conical structure lined with brick and buried beneath the ornamental woodland through which British security agents now patrolled. In its heyday it had been an unseen architectural marvel. Like a giant forty foot-wide laboratory flask, it contained two hundred tons of lake ice packed with snow. This was taken to the house along a deep tunnel that ran beneath the gardens as it was needed. From its creation in 1772 to its final abandonment with the coming of artificial refrigeration in 1922, two men had been employed doing nothing else but stocking, maintaining and carrying ice. Other than the odd tree root that poked through the double skin of brick, it had been maintenance free and had served its purpose perfectly.
In 1923 the small hut that stood at the top of the entrance shaft had been demolished, and the entrance to the conical workings of the ice house had been covered over. Decades of leaf-fall and the snaking roots of grass and trees had entirely buried the small flat area where for years two men took their lunch at the top of the shaft. The 1945 map of the grounds marked its position only vaguely, and a 1968 National Trust survey map failed to show it at all. Even in the 1960s it was assumed that the structure would long since have collapsed without regular maintenance so no one bothered to try to find it. It would have been pointless anyway: as Peretz had confirmed, the other end of the tunnel had collapsed and been walled up decades ago.
Six months before the Peace Talks had been moved to Mapleton House an elderly gentleman with a walking stick and a springer spaniel had ambled through the woods at the edge of the estate. Where trees had fallen and not been cleared, thickets of bramble had grown up. A badger set pocked the ground near the outer edge, and years of neglect had rendered the ground difficult to navigate. There were no footpaths through here, and other than occasional security patrols, no one had been in here in years.
In his pocket was a GPS device. He threw a ball for his dog and wandered this way and that through the trees, tapping his stick, probing the ground for more then half an hour. Eventually the tip of his stick met resistance at the edge of a thick tangle of blackberries and ferns. If he had not been told roughly where to look he could have stumbled about for hours.
He called the dog back to him and as he crouched to stroke the animal he dug his fingers into the frosty ground. Brick: several bricks arranged in a uniform pattern.
He pressed a button on the GPS and continued to walk after his dog. Mapleton security spotted him and told him to clear off. He bowed his head apologetically and made his way down the main drive and back to his car half a mile away.
A week before the peace talks, that same gentleman, now an athletic thirty-three without the heavy disguise, led a group of ten men back to the spot marked on his GPS. They came on a moonless summer night, pitch black, and stole across the fields in total silence, keeping below ridge lines and skirting hedges so that they would be undetectable from any of the inhabited buildings in the area.
This time there was no grounds security because the only thing alive at Mapleton was a conference of NGO AIDS agencies, and they were not really anyone’s first choice of target. The conference ended that night.
He had lowered them one at a time through the shaft into the ice house’s conical body, then had sealed them in. They would live and work down there for a week in appalling conditions. And only then would their true mission start. Few, if any, of them would get out alive.
For five days they took shifts digging through the blockage and shoring up the tunnel, forming a widely-space chain to pass plastic buckets back and forth along the ever-lengthing passage. Back in the ice house the earth and brick was carefully stacked and their equipment constantly moved as the floor rose upwards. The tunnel was ventilated by a hand-pumped air compressor feeding a long pipe that snaked its way to the working face. It kept them alive, just. The effective oxygen percentage made it the equivalent of doing hard manual labour at the summit of Kilimanjaro. Fit though these men were, progress was slow. They also had to maintain total silence. Mapleton House, usually used as an exclusive conference venue, had been cleared three days into their dig. It had always been a back-up venue for the peace talks, and as such had to be security-checked whether it was to be used or not.
They had broken through to the wall at the end of the narrow passageway at almost exactly the time the Hyde Park bomb had exploded. It had then been a matter of rebuilding a bank rubble and brick thickly and solidly enough that should anyone take the trouble to unseal the wall in the cellar, the tunnel would still appear to be blocked. Only the most thorough investigation would indicate that the collapse was now only four feet thick.
The blockage had been removed and the wall dismantled quickly and silently in the hour and a half that it took Leila to drive to Mapleton. The heavy shelves beyond the wall, cleared of their loads of copper and glass when Peretz visited the room the previous day, moved easily.
While Leila waited for Phillip to get her into the house, ten Black Eagle men waited in the darkness of the cellar.
40
‘Stop! Turn around slowly, keep your hands where I can see them.’
Leila had made it half way across the closely-mown lawn that led to the front of the house when the MI5 officer spoke. He approached from the cover of the shrubbery with a SIG P229 trained on her.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘DS Reid, Counter-Terrorism Command.’
‘Open your jacket.’
‘I’ve got a gun in a shoulder holster,’ she said. ‘My ID is in my back pocket.’
‘Hold that side open so I can see the weapon and slowly get your card.’
Leila turned slightly so that her holster was clearly visible, then reached round to the back pocket of her jeans. She took her warrant out and opened it.
The MI5 man read the number into a microphone attached to his cuff and listened. His face gave nothing away.
He moved so fast that Leila was unaware that he was coming for her until he grabbed her arm and span her around. He kicked the backs of her knees and an instant later she was face down on the grass with the agent pinning her down. He unclipped her weapon and threw it some distance across the lawn. She felt the cold barrel of his own gun pressed into her neck.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘DS Reid, Counter-Terrorism. Can you let me breathe?’
‘You’re not on the roster. Put your hands behind your back.’
‘You’re kneeling on my fucking arm!’
He took her free arm and pulled it round behind her. Shifting his weight slightly, he did the same with the other one. He held her wrists together and snapped plasti-cuffs around them. He performed the entire operation in seconds and without his gun ever leaving her neck.
‘Get up, slowly,’ he said as he took his weight off her. Leila got to her feet.
‘How did you get in here?’ he said.
‘I’m part of grounds security! Check the roster again!’
‘You’re not listed.’
‘You read the number wrong. It ends four-five. You said five-four.’ She knew he hadn’t; she just had to sow enough doubt to get him to check it again. If Phillip had failed to get her onto the roster, she was in trouble. If it had just taken him a little longer than he had anticipated, she might get away with it.
The agent picked up her ID and read the number back to control. He frowned.
‘You got me this time?’ Leila said.
‘Yes. I apologise DS Reid. You understand we can’t be too careful.
’ He holstered his weapon and snipped the cuffs off. He was even good enough to retrieve her gun and hand it back.
‘Reassuring to know you’re that vigilant,’ Leila said.
‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ he said. ‘You weren’t at the morning briefing.’
‘I was drafted in at the last minute. I’m going up to the house,’ Leila said. ‘Anything I should know?’
‘All quiet. This place is secure. Again, apologies for the mix-up. Have a good evening.’
She headed for the house before he could think of anything else.
Flanking the drive that led to the road were a pair of Foxhound armoured personnel carriers. They were arranged artistically, but there was no doubt as to their underlying message: don’t mess with Mapleton House. Armed guards stood beside the vehicles. Two men were positioned behind the parapet of the house’s roof, pointing their assault rifles out along the drive. It would be impossible for anyone to get near the building through the main gates without being spotted.
She walked quickly along the side of the house and up the newer driveway that led to the service entrance at the back of the building. There was a slight dip in the middle of the path and rainwater from the previous night’s storms, sheltered by the deep shadow of the house, still glistened in its hollow. She absently thought a sewer must have collapsed underneath here, then the thought was gone.
She took a few more steps the stopped, turned around and walked back to the puddle in the drive.
Sewers.
‘Shit,’ she whispered. ‘They’re coming in underground!’
She ran.
At the back of the house, between the main building and the old stable block were several vans. Two had brought police in, another two were with the official caterers. A fifth, with blacked-out windows, bristled with antenna and a thick cable snaked from it to the double door to the house.
Two uniformed police officers stood by the door, each holding a standard MP5 carbine across his chest.
‘Evening,’ one said.
‘Hi. DS Leila Reid, CTC. I need to get into the house, now.’
‘No one goes in or out. Sorry.’
‘I’ve got clearance. Check you records.’
‘No one goes in or out.’
‘Look. I don’t have time to debate this with you. Check your records, then get out of my way.’
‘Fine.’ He radioed for assistance and a few seconds later the back door of the blacked-out van opened.
‘DS Reid, this way please,’ a man in civilian clothes said.
She stepped up into the van and the officer motioned for her to sit. The van was packed with surveillance equipment. Eight high definition screens showed CCTV feeds from various points around the house; other screens streamed data from infra-red and tremble sensors, audio monitors and, of course, the SHIELD perimeter system.
‘Look into the camera, DS Reid,’ the officer said. She leaned forwards and stared into the light, hoping that Phillip had managed to hack into whatever was driving this system.
‘OK, you’re good to go,’ the man said. ‘Wish they’d bother to tell us about these last-minute changes. So why’s CTC going inside?’
‘Just a precaution. Best to mix things up a bit, keep the element of surprise. You’ve not seen or heard anything out of the ordinary?’
‘Nothing. Minor blip on the fence system a few minutes ago, but base think it was just a switching error. There’s no way anyone could have got in in such a short down-time.’
‘And you’re certain there’s no other way in?’
‘There’s some concern about air security, but we’ve got jets on stand-by. Advantage of this place is that it’s on the edge of one of the busiest airspaces on the planet. Every inch of the sky is monitored.’
‘Good. Thank you.’
This time the officers at the door let her pass. She stepped into a small internal guard-room where she was once again invited to look into the searching eye of a retinal scanner.
An internal door clicked open automatically, and Leila stepped into the cool gloom of Mapleton House. She checked her watch.
Eight fifty-seven. The delegates were at dinner.
And they were sitting ducks.
41
Ten men emerged into the little white room at the end of Mapleton House’s cellar.
Each carried a small rucksack containing a vacuum-
sealed change of clothes and the weapons necessary for the operation. They quickly changed into clean black jeans and black t-shirt over ultra-lightweight liquid armour vests. C-4 charges, detonators and ammunition magazines were already loaded into custom-made webbing.
Seven of them carried Jericho polymer pistols with sixteen shot magazines. Three, including their leader, Eben Kriel, carried small CZW9 sub machine guns. Although little more effective than the pistols, they were impressive to look at. They also made a hell of a lot of noise, and that could be just as effective as raw fire power in close quarter battle. They did not carry a great deal of ammunition as most of the necessary disabling of security would be performed using their Entourage automatic knives. Ninety per cent of their training was in hand-to-hand combat. Guns were only for when things went bad.
Each was also equipped with a tiny two-way earpiece, loaded with five grams of high explosive. These could be remotely detonated or, in the event of live capture, would be activated manually, killing the agent and making any kind of facial or dental recognition impossible. Black Eagle Executive routinely falsified the DNA records of all field-operatives at the time of recruitment.
The final piece of equipment each carried was a simple black balaclava. No armour, no protection. Just anonymity and intimidation.
They knew the layout of Mapleton House as well as they knew their own homes. Gaining access to the ground floor would be impossible through the cellar and kitchens, so they shinned up the narrow shaft of the dumb waiter one at a time and fanned out into the building to their pre-arranged positions. The gang would be greatly out-numbered, but they had surprise on their side.
The grandfather clock in the main entrance hall chimed nine. Kriel checked his watch. The clock was thirty seconds fast.
He moved out of the cover of the servants’ corridor and stood with two of his men outside the wide oak door to the dining room. He attached a thirty gram shaped C-4 charge to the door lock and stepped back.
At precisely nine o’clock he detonated the charge. A six inch hole appeared in the door. He turned the lock and kicked it open, stepping into the room with his men close behind. So far there had been no shots fired anywhere in the house, but that would change very quickly now that the door had been blown.
One of his men ran across to the main door into the hall and jammed the locking mechanism. Fists pounded on the wood. The agents outside would be through in seconds.
‘Come with us, now,’ Kriel ordered the assembled guests. There were nine of them; The three Prime Ministers – Richard Morgan, Aaron David and Abu Queria – plus two close aides for each. Six men and three women in total. For a moment no one moved.
‘Now,’ he repeated.
‘What is this?’ Richard Morgan said.
‘This is your peace conference. So we need to move you to the conference room, right now. Go!’ He hauled Aaron David to his feet and shoved him towards the door at the back of the room.
The main door from the reception hall burst open. Kriel let off a short burst of fire from his sub-machine gun and the two security officers fell back. He covered the door while his men herded the delegates through into the servants’ corridor.
A hand appeared and tossed in a flash-bang grenade. Kriel got a single shot off before the hand withdrew. Flash-bangs are designed to disorientate hostiles and give rescue forces the upper hand for the few crucial seconds necessary to change the balance of power. This time it didn’t work. All Black Eagle field operatives were trained to ignore these grenades the hard way: Kriel had, on numerous occasions, spent an hour at a time lo
cked in a darkened hangar with his fellow operatives lobbing grenades at him randomly. They don’t hurt, and once the subconscious mind understands this, they lose most of their usefulness. Kriel ran, head down, for the exit door even as the MI5 men outside were steadying themselves for an assault.
By the time he was in the corridor the last of the delegates was being pushed into the conference room. He dashed the few yards along the corridor and in behind them. His second-in-command was already at the door into the main hall, securing it with the twelve-point hardened steel locking bolts designed to keep anyone from breaking into the room. No one had considered that one day those who were being kept out might be exactly the people they most wanted inside.
Kriel locked the door to the servants’ corridor. This too had been designed to be impenetrable.
Less than ninety seconds after blowing the first door, the nine delegates and three hostage-takers were sealed in the conference room; a room designed to be impervious to everything from radio signals to rocket propelled grenades.
‘Sit,’ Kriel said. A volley of semi-automatic fire echoed around the building above them.
‘You’re trapped in here,’ Morgan said. ‘There’s no way out. Let these people go now and we can do a deal.’
‘Sit down.’ The others sat around the conference table. Morgan did not move. Kriel raised his hand to push him to the table but Morgan grabbed his wrist.
‘I need to look into the eyes of the bastard who did this,’ he said. ‘See what kind of man you really are.’
‘I’m just like you, Prime Minister. I’m doing my job.’
‘My job doesn’t involve the deaths of innocents.’ The tip of the submachine gun was lightly pressing against his chin and he let go of Kriel’s wrist. ‘You know my government won’t negotiate with you. You’ve got nowhere to go.’
‘Sit down, Mr Morgan. We have no intention of negotiating with your government. Your part in this is over.’
