Red Notice

57

Thickets of steel crowd barriers had taken root outside the entrance to the terminal. Police in riot gear held back a mob of reporters and photographers, crowds of angry motorists and foot passengers, and a few spectators unable to resist the attraction of crowds and commotion.

The heli landed out of their sight, and Gavin and his signallers gathered their equipment. As Woolf strode over, Gavin wasted no time on preliminaries. ‘You got comms with COBRA yet?’

Woolf shrugged. ‘Only on mobile. And there are still none with the train. COBRA’s faffing about. I got here from London quicker than they can get their bloody act together in Westminster. The French are already set up and, as far as I know, the situation hasn’t moved on from bi-national status.’

Gavin nodded. Each would be doing what they could to sort things out from their end of the tunnel, but at some stage, the earlier the better, one of them would have to grip the situation. Which was where the whole process got complicated. As far as Gavin was concerned, the problem wasn’t just too many chiefs and not enough Indians: it was the chiefs spending too much time admiring their headdresses and not enough leading the braves into battle.

As the rotors closed down and the signallers and Slime unloaded, the two men headed for the steel-shuttered entrance to the hangar.

The holding area was completely self-contained. One of the rectangular, green-powder-coated low-level buildings that dotted the site, it provided the Blue and Red teams and their vehicles with the perfect location — beyond prying eyes — for preparation and rehearsal.

Apart from a washroom block and enough power points to fire up the Blackpool illuminations, the interior was bare. Three men in hi-vis jackets stood beside a lot of trestle tables and cheap fold-up chairs stacked along one wall. Arms laden with ring binders and long cardboard tubes, they looked as nervous as schoolboys.

For some reason that Gavin never understood, people got star-struck when the Regiment turned up. He always did his best to put them immediately at their ease. Apart from anything else, he could get more information out of them that way.

‘All right, lads?’ He dumped his ready-bag by his feet. ‘Why don’t you get some of those tables out and we can have a look at what we’ve got, yeah?’

The signallers began to wire their satellite comms into the roof dishes, to hang flat-screens on the wall and network a series of laptop computers. The hi-vis lads fished the plans out of the tubes and laid them out while the Slime anchored their corners with whatever they could find. Gavin settled himself in a chair and glanced across at Woolf, who was continuing his mobile love affair with the Cabinet Office Briefing Room.