Stand-To

CHAPTER 2

Constantine had arrived for work an hour previously and immediately checked his email for secure messages; he had spent the next hour speaking to Moscow Centre.

The suitcase, he was informed, contained a sophisticated timing device and a new explosive superior to Semtex H. The case it was carried in was also of a special material, apparently once detonated there would be no forensics’ left for even the most modern laboratories to gain any clues, let alone evidence.

The bomb had been for delivery to an Irish terror group. The Irish were planning a ‘spectacular’, which Constantine had already worked out for himself, but beyond that he had no ‘need to know’.

Constantine was irritated, the time of sponsoring these animals was supposed to have passed.

The good news was that the missing cars anti-theft device’s transmitter signal could be isolated. It would be possible to locate the car without the Police being alerted. Looking at his watch he estimated at least an hour at the earliest, before his NCIS contact would have anything for him.

Constantine was ill at ease with the previous evenings meeting with Peridenko’s pair. Both had behaved as though nothing untoward had occurred previously. The woman, the tall attractive blue eyed and blonde Alexandra Berria and been almost flirtatious, however refreshments were declined by Constantine and Svetlana. The cultured public schoolboy tones of the man, Anthony Carmichael, were no product of any language school. He was the real article. Harrow and Eton educated, wealthy old family. Carmichael had entered Sandhurst, as had his father and his father before him, etc., and joined the old county regiment the Carmichael's had served with since Napoleon had been public enemy number one. Unfortunately for the infantrymen of his first, and fortunately his last, platoon, 2^nd Lt Anthony Carmichael was a bully and a sadist. A happy unit is a good unit and 12 Platoon of one particular battalion went from good to bad in short order. The Army caught on to the antics of Lt Carmichael and there soon came a parting of the ways with Carmichael being required to resign his commission. Carmichael had further embarrassed his family when a few years later he had been arrested and jailed for beating and raping a prostitute.

Whilst in custody the police had also questioned him about the earlier disappearances of two other known prostitutes and a rent boy, but there had been insufficient evidence to indicate foul play in their vanishing.

Carmichael had been recruited by the KGB as a ‘stringer’ in the late 80’s and had been noticed by Peridenko who paired him up with Berria; the two kindred spirits had stayed together after the KGB downsizing dispensed with their services.

The Russian Mafia kept them in suitable employment controlling and acquiring prostitutes. Every so often an abducted young woman of particular striking beauty would be delivered to Peridenko’s dacha instead of the Mafia’s brothels and porn movie studios. It was their way of staying in his good books, their version of Christmas and birthday cards.

The previous night Carmichael had been all business, there was a single scratch on his throat from Svetlana’s nail but nothing else to indicate an altercation had occurred. Constantine had not mentioned the earlier events either, but he was worried. These two would seek revenge on both of them at some point; it was in their nature.

Svetlana had not touched a firearm since her training, a fact known to Carmichael and Berria. At Constantine’s instruction she had worn clothing too tight to conceal a handgun. Denim effect leggings without panties left both little to the imagination and no hiding place for a weapon. The tight sweater however had long sleeves that extended to the base of her thumbs; a slim, tube-like single shot .22 ‘zip gun’ was secured to her wrist, held in place by her watchstrap. He had calculated that the leggings, bare midriff and obviously braless Svetlana would allay any suspicions as to concealed weapons. After her earlier masterful demonstration he had doubted they would completely rule her out as a potential threat though. In contrast, Major Bedonavich had been ostentatiously armed and ready for trouble. He had ordered them to stand ready with the Irish in vehicles from 0800 the next day when the car, thief or both were located, they were then to secure them with as little violence as necessary and call him.

A ‘street duties’ course is for the benefit of newly arrived probationary Constables to take their initial tottering steps in police work after leaving Hendon Training School. It is also a chance for their future teams to correct any illusions they may have about what ‘The Job’ entails. As such a few experienced officers from those very teams closely supervise them. Parading them today Police Sergeant Alan Harrison had a bundle of ‘warrant dockets’ under his arm. Those people who had been identified yet not arrested for offences or had failed to answer bail were contained in the dockets. PCs Sarah Hughes, John Wainwright, Colin Mackey and Phil McEllroy would do the rounds with the ‘skipper’, PS Harrison and a twenty year veteran PC Dave Carter. Amongst the bundle was a warrant for Jubi Asejoke. A pencilled notation above his registered address gave an alternative location where he may be found. After a cup of coffee in the canteen, they climbed aboard a twelve seat Mercedes Sprinter minibus, known as a carrier, and left the station.

Ducking below an office divider and very aware he was late, Scott Tafler started the new week by avoiding his boss. Like a man looking for something small he’d misplaced, he had almost, almost, made it to his workstation by utilising the dead ground provided by varied office furniture.

Peering over the top of a pair of spectacles directly at him was the aforementioned boss, Max Reynolds, sat at Scott’s position. “Morning Scott, that jack-knifed water buffalo at the end of your road really held things up, huh?”

Straightening up Scott greeted him with a

“Yep, it got you too, huh?”

Max had been perusing Scott’s ‘In’, ‘Out’ and ‘Pending / Too difficult right now’ trays.

“Anything new… and if you make that crack about microchip technology, you is buying lunch fella!” Scott grinned, after a moment he said

“Maybe something, maybe nothing” Max sat tapping his teeth thoughtfully with an earpiece of his glasses as Scott explained the O’Connor report and his brother-in-laws remarks.

The boss gave Scott back his seat.

“Give Armondson a call at Commerce, he’s a deep thinker and knows the China and Russia markets” and departed.

Scott caught Armondson on the second ring.

“Swede, Scott, how are you?”

Eric Armondson confirmed what Scott already knew, that there was no way China would sponsor a competitor, despite the relatively recent kiss and make up of the two countries as seen in the mutual trade and military assistance treaties of 1998. So either O’Connor had been fed misinformation or something hooky was going down.

Right on cue a light flashed on his display, it was Ms O’Connor returning his call.

After updating the boss, a request was passed to the FBI office in San Diego to debrief her thoroughly on her Russian contract.

The sun was shining intermittently through broken cloud upon the joggers in St James Park, the tourists who had begun to gather at the western end. Passers-by and other tourists had paused to watch the goings on the other side of some railings running along Birdcage Walk.

Today was the turn of the Coldstream Guards to provide the ‘Queens Guard’, and the curious civvies watched the men in Bearskin caps, grey greatcoats, white buff kit and best boots formed up in two detachments with the Band and the Corps of Drums in attendance.

How the Guards came about their headgear and the red plume worn on the right by this particular regiment would have offended the politically correct sensibilities of many in the crowd. Had they been in Belgium, at a place called Waterloo, late in the afternoon of the 18^th June 1815, they would have seen a unit of French soldiers wearing the Bearskin hats but with white plumes in them. Napoleon’s French Imperial Guard were his elite troops, made up of veterans who had proved their courage in battle whilst serving with other regiments. The Imperial Guard had never been defeated until Napoleon sent them up a grassy slope that afternoon against their opposite numbers, the British Guards regiments. Some wrote later that the French Imperial Guard fled the field, but those authors’ slighted brave men in so doing. The Frenchmen did not drop their arms and run, but backed away, back down the slope they had fought their way up. In a fighting withdrawal they gave ground, stepping on the bodies of the hundreds of their comrades who had fallen on the way up. The British Guards fixed bayonets and went after them, discarding their Shako’s, the common headgear of the British infantry. They replaced them with the bearskins of those they slew, trophies of war and a symbol that they had done what no others had been able to achieve. To prevent ‘friendly fire’ incidents in the heat of battle they removed the white French plumes and altered the colour with the one dye available in that place. The British troops turned them red by dipping them in the blood of the fallen, and there was a lot of that item about that day, roughly 48,500 from both sides in fact.

Today on the square at Wellington Barracks the young men of the Buckingham Palace and St James Palace guard detachments were drawn up awaiting the presence of the regimental sergeant major with various levels of dread.

One such soldier who had every reason to fear the worst of the RSMs wrath was Guardsman Robertson, he had gone out ‘on the beer’ to a club on the Old Kent Road the previous night, arriving back in barracks at 4am the worst for wear, his clothing grubby from falling over more than a few times. Robertson had only gotten past the guardroom safely due to a mate being ‘on stag’, on sentry duty, at the time. Word of his condition had made the rounds after reveille and was not well received by one individual, the soldier designated as one of the two Men-in-Readiness, who would have to take the place of anyone who failed inspection. The soldier in question was a married man, and tonight was his wife’s birthday so he told Robertson his fortune should he not survive the inspection.

To add to the young man’s woes; the Captain of the Guard, the officer who would be inspecting the New Guard was Major Manson, who was not known for being an easy going individual. The major made a point of finding fault, even where no fault existed; it was a trait that hardly endeared him to his men, who considered him an out and out bastard.

The sergeant for the Buckingham Palace New Guard had turned the air blue when he learnt about Robertson, but after bending his ear he stuck the errant soldier in the centre rank, and hopefully out of sight. Robinson looked like death warmed up and stank like a distillery, but his mate Aldridge, mucked in to get him ready. Robertson had been in a hurry to get his kit done the night before, cutting corners as he went. He hadn’t wrapped his brasses in cling film to keep the air off the metal once he’s cleaned them, and he had used a popular kitchen floor application on his boots, applying it with a piece of cotton wool. Aldridge had cursed him when he looked at the brasses, and hurriedly buffed them up, but when he got his mates best boots from out of the man’s locker he’d slapped Robertson across the back of the head.

“You wanker… you put that crap on yer toe caps and didn’t even wait for it to dry!” The clean yellow rag lain across the boots to keep the dust off had stuck fast to the surface. A quick examination of Robertson’s ‘Seconds’ the drill boots worn for practice and rehearsals revealed that they were far below the high standard required for a Queens Guard. Shaking his head he went to his locker for his own ‘Best Boots’, they were good enough to get his mate through the inspection before the guard was mounted.

Regimental Sergeant Major Barry Stone left his office and paused outside. ‘Baz the Raz’ was one of the names he was known by amongst the Guardsmen but they would never have dared to have called him that to his face. The second name became obvious whenever the RSM was out and about, armed with his Pace-Stick.

RSM Stone worried the burnished brass curb chain that held the Bearskin in place, not as a chinstrap would, but resting between chin and bottom lip at the middle. Once he was satisfied that it was sitting correctly he then opened his pace-stick and set off, marching purposefully toward the square. Not merely a symbol of office, the pace-stick is a measuring tool, a wooden and brass tipped pair of compasses that required not inconsiderable dexterity by the user. An audible tick tick tick tick gave advanced warning that ‘The Bomb’ was about, as he rotated the pace stick at the heavy infantry quick marching pace of 180 paces to the minute.

The handle and hilt of the sword on his left hip protruded from an aperture in the greatcoat, and only the silver tip of the scabbard extending beyond the bottom of the greatcoat could be seen of the rest of it. Pausing beside the square he closed the pace stick, noting the presence of five soldiers at its edge, the Picquet Sergeant and Picquet Corporal plus the Corporal and Guardsmen In Readiness.

At six foot six inches tall and barrel chested, Barry Stone was an imposing figure, the archetypal sergeant major from head to toe. As he stepped onto the square his bearing became even more martial, if such a thing were possible. Transferring the pace-stick to below his left armpit he stepped off, marching to a position in front of the detachments. As he passed the band he nodded to the Drum Major, an old friend from the Depot days at Pirbright.

"We’ll have some Prussian Glory on the way out the gate today Drummy.”

RSM Stone slammed to a halt in front of the parade and delivered his usual few words of cheerful and friendly encouragement before starting the business of replacing the Old Guard with the New. His voice carried beyond the square to the watching public in the street; there was nothing fatherly in its tone.

“Right… listen in people.” The men were stood easy, which meant no talking anyway.

“I want hard work from all of you… no fidgeting, no faffing about… and above all no idleness!” He looked along the ranks as he spoke; his stare reinforcing in the Guardsmen the knowledge of all that incurring the ire of the RSM entailed.

His voice raised several octaves and the last words were delivered in rapid fire.

“Work hard, the Markers… and set the tone of the parade!” After a last look along the ranks he glanced over his shoulder, making sure that the Captain of the Queens Guard, Major Manson, and the young 2^nd lieutenant who would be the Ensign were waiting nearby.

He peeled back the top of a white glove to check his watch for the time and then straightened up.

“Right… stand at ease, stand easy everywhere… here we go, brace up on my next word of command.”

Taking a half pace forward with his left foot, bending his right knee and driving his right boot in next to the left with a solid crash into the surface of the parade square.

“Markers!”

The barked command made the watching members of the public in the street jump involuntarily. A Lance Sergeant from each detachment came to attention and marched quickly forward at two hundred paces to the minute. After fifteen paces they halted, and the RSM ‘spoke’ again, drawing out the first part of the command, and snapping out the second in a voice that carried across the park and the noise of the traffic.

“Get onnnnn… PARADE!”

Barry Stones ear was a finely tuned instrument, as a piano tuner can spot discord in that instrument that layman cannot, so too could RSM Stone on the drill square. Robertson was a fraction slow coming to attention, and the regimental sergeant majors head snapped toward the Buckingham Palace detachment. The next three words out of his mouth flowing into one.

“ASYOUWERE!”

The men regained their former positions under his harsh glare. The pace stick had found its way into his right hand, and like an extension of his arm it was pointing unerringly at the centre of the detachment. “Buck yer ideas up, whoever you are… or I’ll JAIL yer!”

He fixed them with a look before replacing the pace-stick beneath the left arm once more.

Out in the street a middle aged American couple apparently assumed this was a Vegas style piece of pantomime for their benefit and laughed delightedly. There was only one thing in the world Barry Stone detested more than an idle soldier, and that was civilian’s. He wasn’t discriminatory; he didn’t care what colour, creed or nationality they were, he regarded them all with equal contempt as lower forms of simian life.

As he opened his mouth to give the command once more, the tourists hooted and cheered, tossing a handful of change over the railings which caused the RSMs teeth to snap closed without issuing the command. He stepped off quickly toward the railings that separated the military world from the civilian, pointing his pace stick accusingly.

“You, you people there!” Mr American tourist looked around, to identify the object of the RSMs attention and then grinned in realisation and pointed to himself, Mr and Mrs Middle America where about to be the audience participation feature.

“Yes you… ” The RSM affirmed. “… the dopey looking pair!” He stopped a foot from the railings and leant forward at the waist. “Do you see any program sellers about?… do I look like I’m carrying an Equity Card?”

Mrs American registered the unfriendly tone and glanced uncertainly at her husband, both their smiles were wavering.

Spittle flew as the RSM asked his final question.

“And do I look like a shagging pole dancer?” Both tourists hurriedly shook their heads.

“You people are annoying me and interfering with my guard mount… I’ve got two free cells and two candidates to fill 'em… now get yer scaly arses out of my sight before I stick you where you’ll get stripy suntans as souvenirs to take home to Stupidville!”

Most, if not all the Guardsmen of the detachments heard the RSM, and though rigidly stood to attention their shoulders were shaking, and curb chains were being bitten in an effort not to give voice to the laughter that was threatening. On the far side of the square Major Manson was straining to hear what was being said, and frowned when the couple hurried away. If the RSM had said anything that was of an embarrassment to the major, he’d have him bust down to buckshee Guardsman by fair means or foul.

Regimental Sergeant Major Stone marched back to his former spot, halted and turned about.

“Get onnnnn… PARADE!”

The parade continued without further incident, the detachments moved into open order and the Corporals dressed the ranks before falling back in, and the RSM turned smartly about, saluting Major Manson and declaring the Guard ready for inspection.

Major Manson stopped four men before reaching the centre rank of the Buckingham Palace detachment, declaring a watermark on a toecap constituted ‘dirty boots’, a recent finger mark on a curb chain was ‘filthy’, and two sets of brass belt buckles were ‘disgusting’. The ‘Picquet Sergeant’ dutifully recorded all the details with a

“Yes sir, Guardsman Warren dirty brasses, sir!” and so forth. Eventually he came to Guardsman Robertson, he of the sallow complexion and bloodshot eyes. Robertson’s kit was in good order, thanks to his Oppo that is, but he just looked like death warmed up.

Robertson had been taking deep breaths before the major arrived in front of him, and in order not to breathe 100 proof breath on the man he now held it. Major Manson looked him up and down before taking in his almost grey complexion and eyes that looked like twin piss-holes in the snow.

“Are you ill man?”

“No sir.” Robertson whispered, barely audibly.

The major leant forward.

“What… what, speak up man!”

Robertson replied more firmly this time.

“No sir, I’m fine sir.”

The majors nose twitched and then his eyes widened in realisation. “RSM, this man is drunk!”

Barry Stone already knew about the young man’s condition as he had asked the two full sergeants of the detachments at breakfast in the Sgt's Mess if there were any problems he should know about. Despite his ferocious reputation, Barry Stone wasn’t a total martinet, which was the public persona that went with his job. He had himself as a young Guardsman been in a similar condition as Robertson on a couple of occasions. If he replaced him then he would have to charge him, better to let him take his chances and learn from the experience. Mounting guard and standing on sentry was a miserable way to sober up. He now pulled Robertson’s weapon from him, passing it to the Picquet Sergeant before pulling off Robertson’s Bearskin, and handing that across too.

“Man in Readiness!” he shouted out, summoning that soldier from the edge of the square.

“Picquet Corporal, get this specimen off my square!” he barked.

As Robertson was doubled off the square toward the Guardroom he passed the Man in Readiness who was marching forward to occupy the empty file.

“I’ll see you when yer get out of nick, ya bastard!” the married man muttered just loud enough for Robertson to catch.

The guard mount carried on, the New Guard joined the Old in front of Buckingham Palace, the band and drums played their days selection of music as the sentries were replaced outside of the boxes at ‘Jimmy’s’ and ‘Buck House’. Virtually unchanged in format since Victorian times the guards were changed at Horse Guards, Windsor Castle, Edinburgh Castle and the Tower of London at the same time as the two London palaces.

To the majority of the onlookers it was a quaint old ceremony staged daily for the tourist industry, they neither knew, nor probably cared, that these were front line troops carrying out ceremonial duties, and that they really did have a ‘day job’.

London is a mixture of the old and new buildings that have developed over the centuries. At one end of the scale Pre Roman remains of a city gate built by King Lud lie under late 1800’s buildings at Ludgate. Crossing the river the river in Greenwich the other end of the scale is the former Millennium Dome, now called the ‘O2’.

Herman Goring's landscaping of the city in the forties gave birth to the 1960’s era inner city estates that replaced the prefabricated dwellings the victims of the Luftwaffe had resided in for twenty odd years. That was in the ‘You’ve never had it so good’ age of swinging London. Those estates are now the centres of drug related crime in the inner city. Running through one such estate is a red brick elevated railway line. The spaces between its hundreds of arches have been rented out by the rail line to many diverse businesses. Most were honest whilst some could best be described as sailing close to the wind, and a few were outright criminal concerns.

One such arch was in the business of ringing stolen cars, altering their identity for resale. Beneath the sultry gaze and lovely curves of a calendars Miss March up on the wall, a silver BMW Roadster was currently being altered to become a red BMW Roadster, its new identity being taken from an identical car that had met its demise in a collision with a lamppost in Frankfurt. The three mechanics were far too busy and the ghetto blasters volume turned up far too loud for them to have noticed a light aircraft flying above, taking ‘aerial photos of London for an estate agents’ a half hour before. Neither did they notice the approach of four men and a woman in police uniform.

An hour later the LFB, London Fire Brigade, received a call to a railway arch lock-up. Their entry was hindered, briefly by a brand new padlock. Inside they found three bodies, too badly burnt to be identified, and a buckled and burnt out BMW Roadster. The police were called, as a matter of course at the same initial call to the scene. It did not take the brains of an archbishop to work out that this was no accident.

A police Mercedes carrier pulled quietly into a cul-de-sac beside a derelict 1960’s tower block keeping close to the building line in order not to advertise to their fugitive in a flat far above, the police livery, blue lights and distinct ‘Air Code’ upon its roof, the unique identifier for helicopters.

On the opposite side of the carrier, at the bottom of an embankment, a London Underground line ran above ground. Alan Harrison left the driver, Dave Carter in the vehicle, he would be prepared to drive around to cut off Jubi if he was at the address and managed to run.

Constables Sarah Hughes and John Wainwright went around to the rear of the flats, in case Jubi climbed down from the seventh floor, balcony by balcony.

Sergeant Harrison, Colin MacKay and Phil McEllroy took the stairs. The previous residents had only been moved out over the last six months and many of the flats were still habitable. Whilst still out of earshot the officers turned their radios down, drew and extended their Asps. Jubi was fond of knives and their body armour only provided limited protection. The flat in question faced out across the tube line and the 1920’s built housing beyond, to the large modern Surrey Quays shopping centre. Approaching quietly along the balcony to the flat Alan saw the guardrail was missing, no doubt stolen for its scrap metal value and he indicated caution to the young officers with him.

The door was ajar, nothing unusual there as most of these flats had been trashed by kids and scavengers. Using his Asp to push open the door he signalled MacKay to wait at the door. He went to the stairs whilst McEllroy checked the downstairs of the flat. Peering cautiously into the living room, McEllroy started as he saw a figure at the window peering down. The figure at the window was looking down at the figures of two policemen outside; despite Dave Carters best efforts he been on lookout for such an eventuality and seen the carrier arrive. He had warned Alexandra Berria and his colleagues. Berria had called up to Carmichael in confirmation.

“Politseiski ma peredinyie zdaniya.” She had slipped out of the flat and hidden on the next floor below for the officers to pass on the stairs, before taking steps to neutralise the carriers’ driver.

Phil relaxed when he recognised the uniform worn by the stranger even if he did not know the man in it. The other officer wore a Glock handgun in a holster and had some other type of weapon held down the side of the leg furthest from Phil. He had to be an SFO, Specialist Firearms Officer, with SCO19. It did not seem strange to Phil that they had not heard of an ‘armed op’ on the ground, nor seen their vehicle as he was new to the game. The officer at the window looked over his shoulder at Phil’s greeting and smiled in a friendly manner at the young officer.

“Hi” he replied, a Belfast accent in evidence. Mounting the stairs quietly Alan had reached a spot where he could look along the level of the floor of the landing. He jumped when he saw the figures of an Inspector and a PC stood blocking his view into a bedroom through its open doorway. Both men were looking directly at him and both smiling reassuringly. Back at the carrier Dave Carter’s attention was on the ‘main set’, the main radio for the ‘Met’. There was a chase going on and he was listening with professional interest to the commentary. He did not immediately see the rather attractive uniformed female police sergeant approach in his nearside wing mirror. The passenger door was opened and he looked across at the blue eyed blondes smiling face framed in it.

On the stairs Alan let out a breath and climbed the rest of the steps; then he suddenly noticed that these firearms officers wore exactly the same body armour as he did, not the much superior ballistic armour in its distinctive, bulkier rig.

In the police control room at Lambeth the Metcall staff were busy with a major incident.

Fire Investigation at the Laboratories in another part of the complex was being arranged and the Area Major Investigation Pool, AMIP, was being summoned to the scene of a fire at a railway arch lock-up, along with a host of other agencies.

Police Personal Radios have a ‘Panic Alarm’ function, when activated the officer has a few seconds of hands free time to shout his or her location if they can. If that is not possible their radios unique number flashes on a screen anyway on the operators panels, the operators look up who the radio is issued to and where that officer was last known to be. The makers of the radio had offered a locator beacon function to the Met, it would have made things so much quicker but the Met did not pay the extra for that facility. An audible ‘beep’ sounds on everyone’s radio and continues until the radio of the officer in distress is reset.

A loud beep and Sergeant Harrison’s radio number flashing on the screens of the operators caused a flurry of keypunching on consoles. The sound issuing over the radio was that of his body bouncing down wooden steps. A ‘Last Assigned’ query of the system gave his possible location.

The senior controller, CCCIR, punched into the Southwark radio nets and listened in. It could have been a case of a false alarm but until information arrived to confirm an accidental activation it was treated as urgent.

Alan had managed to depress his panic button just as two MP5 automatic carbines with large sound suppressers came to bear. At the door, Colin MacKay was greeted by the sight and sound of his sergeant crashing down the stairs in a jumble of limbs leaving smears of blood on the wall where his body brushed against it. From upstairs there was a an unusual sound, he had not heard the sound of working parts moving back and forwards rapidly inside automatic weapons before.

The metallic tinkle of spent cases bouncing off walls and hitting floorboards, rounds missing Sergeant Harrison striking plaster covered walls meant his death was not a truly silent affair.

PC McEllroy turned at the sound of Sergeant Harrison tumbling down the stairs. He was in mid stride for the door when he was hit in the back by a short burst of Teflon coated 9mm rounds that tore through the body armour supplied by the lowest bidder. The burst of fire would have been longer had a stoppage not occurred in Sean McVinnie’s weapon.

Sarah Hughes and John Wainwright heard their radios announce whose panic alarm had sounded and were sprinting around the building for the stairs at the front. When the carrier came into sight John shouted toward it, he could see Dave Carter leaning forward, apparently unaware of the emergency.

Colin MacKay heard the sound of McEllroy's body hit the floor and his helmet rolled into sight in the living room doorway. Colin also depressed his panic button as a kneeling McVinnie appeared in the doorway, MP5 hanging from a strap and a Glock pistol levelled at the young Constable.

Two loud gunshots and a screaming Colin MacKay stopped Sarah and John in their tracks. Hit in the upper body MacKay was instinctively stepping backwards and as his legs folded beneath him he rolled, falling off the unguarded balcony to the footpath seven floors below.

After a moment’s hesitation John ran for the carrier where Dave Carter still sat unmoving. Sarah was scared; nothing in her twenty-three years had prepared her for this. What she should have done, as she had already decided that someone upstairs had a firearm, was to get clear and report. We are all wiser in hindsight, and besides, her friends were in trouble. Right or wrong she went to her colleagues’ aid something she would never be criticised for by her peers. Drawing her Asp and CS spray canister she ran for the stairs, also pressing her radios alarm button and shouting into the mike as she ran, reporting the sound of gunfire and an ‘officer down’.

Carmichael and company had extracted the information they wanted from the flats sole occupant just before the police had arrived. In the absence of Jubi himself it was the next best thing. He now knew where Jubi would be later that night and used a length of telephone wire to dispatch the informant before calling Constantine on his mobile with the news. The strangulation had excited him, as it always did. It was a shame it could not have been Svetlana whose eyes had turned red with burst blood vessels though. He was at odds of how best to deal with that girl. Whether to deliver her, addicted to crack cocaine and controllable, to a Mafia brothel for a very fat fee, or substitute her shower gel bottle for one containing a water sensitive phosphorus compound. Decisions, decisions, his erection throbbed now, a result of the killings as well as pondering Svetlana's ‘punishment’.

Killing the police sergeant had been a thrill but it was a shame that there were no women officers present. It was far more satisfying than killing men.

Although there were no approaching sirens yet audible, that situation would change very soon. McVinnie's gunshots had ensured that. Not aware that Sergeant Harrison had already sounded the alarm, Carmichael and the Irish quickly left the flat. Nearby was the windowless hire van that had brought them. Carmichael led the way downstairs, the sound of Sarah’s pounding approach caused them to leave the stairwell at the fifth floor to avoid meeting her but Carmichael caught a glimpse of a ponytail, as she swept past unawares. He could not resist.

“Constable! Over here”.

As a flushed Sarah glanced cautiously around the corner from the stairwell, Asp at the ready, she let out a relieved breath to see an armed police Inspector an arm’s length away.

“My, my, what extraordinarily beautiful eyes you have” said Carmichael, and promptly shot her through the right one.

With a clearer picture from Sarah’s hurried sitrep, ‘Trojan’ units were now converging on the scene. British police officers are not armed as a matter of course, despite the growing violence in the country. The Home Office would state the reason being that it was simply unnecessary. Politician speak for “It would cost money to arm and train our officers”.

The call sign of India 99 was added to those units attending as a police helicopter was making its way from the Lippets Hill base.

The Duty Officer, an Inspector, had ordered an RVP be designated and was driving toward that rendezvous point at speed. Local units although unarmed were also clamouring to be included. At least one of their colleagues was probably dead and now there were three activated radio alarms. None of the officers at the scene were answering radio calls.

John Wainwright did not notice the splattered blood and brain matter or small hole and matrix of glass fragments that were held together by friction alone in what was the driver’s door window until he reached the vehicle; he froze with hand on the driver’s door. Berria stepped out from behind the vehicle’s rear and shot him through the side of the head with a single aimed shot from her MP5 before hurriedly making off toward the waiting transport.

Svetlana had taken the day off sick on Constantine’s instructions to keep herself ready for whatever may arise. Clad in a leotard that was wet with sweat, and long leg warmers. She was suspended from ankle straps attached to the top of her bedroom doorframe, her hair in pigtails and coiled inside a sweat-cap. She slowly double over and touched her toes, holding the position for a few seconds before slowly unfolding and repeating the exercise. As she touched her toes for the eighteenth time that session her mobile rang. Hanging inverted she stretched out her hand and grabbed the phone off the carpet.

“Caroline Carlisle?” she answered with as close to a heavy head cold imitation as she could manage, and then an instantly cured “Hello sir” when Constantine spoke. After a minute she ended the call and released herself from the self-induced torture device to check her wardrobe and shower.

Constantine replaced the receiver and looked back at the television in his office. The media were reporting live from a street in London, blue and white police cordon tape was stretched across a road and grim faced policemen of all ranks were in evidence. He had phoned Carmichael asking if this was his handiwork and received a denial but he knew in his gut that the man was lying. Constantine was appalled that the man could kill in cold blood without considering an alternative, as there undoubtedly was. He corrected himself, no it wouldn’t have been in cold blood, and the man would have enjoyed the killing.

Switching off the TV set he stood and paced to the window. As soon as the suitcase was retrieved his own life and the girl’s, Svetlana, would be forfeit.

He was not unduly concerned for himself, he had faced danger often, but the girl? He had become very fond of her in a short space of time. On his desk were the building plans for a club in west London, he had gone over them thoroughly and tried to cover all possibilities in his head. Glancing at his watch he saw he now had nothing to do except kill time for the next two hours’. He opened a copy of the Times to the crossword page; confident he would crack it in the time. He would have been exasperated to learn that Svetlana rarely took more than twenty minutes to complete the broadsheet’s famous brainteaser.

Jungle night at the South London venue was the place to be if you wanted to be noticed. Despite the security on the doors, if you were really bad you didn’t get checked. Doormen who tried to make an issue over who really ran things tended to get shot before the night was over. Jubi had not reached the lofty heights where he could just turn up and blow through unchallenged; a £50 note had however ensured that his stash of rocks went un-confiscated.

He was trying to be cool and be noticed all at once; so far he had been ‘dissed’ and ignored.

After a trip to the gent’s toilet’s to unload some of his stash to two customers, he had some of his own wares and now was feeling pretty good. He tried for introductions with some of the names here tonight. The names were all rivals but the venue was neutral territory, just so long as each stayed in his own ‘corner’. ‘J-‘(Jay Dash) was the biggest there that night, he was up on the balcony with his favourite bitch and some long auburn haired girl, totally hot in denim hooker boots. Jubi had tried to catch his eye but ‘J-‘had been more interested in watching the girls’ heavy pet. Fuck ‘em all; he thought as he sat on the floor with his back to the wall, listening to the music that thumped out with so much bass it shook the walls.

There were several ‘crews’ present; all had some really hot pussy along, one day he would be there too.

The news had been full all day of some shooting, six pigs! In his mind he formulated a scheme that would get him noticed by the big crews and popping a copper featured strongly.

The crowd of sweating humanity seemed to part and the sexiest girl he had ever seen glided on through. It was girl who’d been on the balcony with ‘J-‘, her hips and shoulders swaying in time to the beat. Those denim thigh high hooker boots clad a pair of killer legs and the short and skimpy skirt the girl wore was a pixie affair of numerous short strips of lacy material that sat on her hips, only half covering her cheeks. The girl’s loose crop-top draped over barely covered breasts that moved wonderfully in time to her dance steps. The rich flowing mane of auburn hair tumbled over her shoulders and down to the visible cleft between her buttocks.

Heavy guys from the crews tried talking to her, and gang pussy snarled threats on recognising competition they could not match, but she ignored them as if they didn’t exist. In the strobing lights Jubi did not recognise the girl he had seen for only a few minutes in the car park two days before, even when she was stood just two feet away, apparently unaware he was staring up with lustful eyes. On the previous occasion she could have been striding along the catwalk of a Paris fashion house. Tonight her attire would be more suited to a porn star convention.

Svetlana had been up on the balcony, all which remained of the 1930’s cinemas upper circle before its conversion, in order to both blend in and identify Jubi before dangling herself as bait. She had to admit that the reaction she got from the guys and the less than hetero girls was a bit of a turn on for her. A big black guy draped in too much gold had offered her a week’s supply of crack to perform an act with him and the girl on his arm which was illegal in many countries. She had made out with them, kissed them both lingeringly on the mouth and allowed their hands free reign beneath her top and skirt for several moments before shaking her head and dancing clear of their clutches, laughing to herself and feeling quite good.

Earlier, as she had dressed with the Pussycat Dolls on MTV in the background her thoughts had been on her Controller. It had been a long time since anyone had made her ovaries twang the way they did when he looked at her. Several outfits had been tried and then discarded. She had decided that she still looked too elegant and on discarding a white leather micro mini she had next tried a tiny Highland kilt before settling on the pixie skirt. With one eye on the mirror she had danced out some moves in perfect step with the girls on the screen. Whilst still gyrating to the music she had undone the side strings securing the G-string she wore beneath the skirt and let it tumble down to her ankles. Kicking it into a corner of the room she had performed a pirouette that exposed her nakedness from the hips down, before nodding to herself critically. Perfect, the exact look she had been seeking, ‘Complete-and-utter-slut-with-a-dash-of-chic’! That should do the trick she’d decided, heading for the door and pulling on a full-length greatcoat. She had been honest enough with herself to realise it was the major with the grey eyes flecked with green who she wished to tempt, rather than the thief.

Dancing close to Jubi now, feeling his eyes on her she executed a little twirl that left nothing to his imagination before returning his stare. Jubi could not believe what he was seeing, the girl was naked except for hooker boots, top, a wispy excuse of a skirt and she was speaking to him.

“Hi.”

He swallowed, trying to think of a cool response but all that came out was.

“Er… hi.”

She smiled, looking him up and down and pausing when she reached his crotch with its fairly obvious bulge. She licked her lips, equally obviously.

“You want me to blow that, or ride it?”

“What?”

“For a rock… you want a blow job or do you want to do me against the wall?” she nodded her head back towards the fire exit door across the room behind her

“I’ve got a rubber.” When he did not immediately reply she rolled her eyes as if making a concession.

“Okay, okay… both then.” And with a glance over her shoulder at him to ensure he got the message Svetlana headed for the fire exit to the rear alley, posterior rolling suggestively. Teenage hormones propelled Jubi off the floor and into her wake. He lost sight of her in the crowd and was panicking until he saw the exit door ajar. Stepping out into the night he blinked and held out an outstretched arm in front as his eyes were not adjusted to the dark of the alley. Looking to his left he could see the lights from the street, but she wasn’t silhouetted in its light so he went right, cursing as he trod on broken glass from a recently smashed security light. After a moment or two his eyes began to adjust but two wheelie bins partly obscured his view down that end of the alley. Doubt filtered through to his brain, what if this was a trap to relieve him of his rocks, or another dealer thinning out the competition. Spying a broken beer bottle beside the nearer bin, Jubi picked it up by the neck. If it were a trap he would be ready and if the girl was just prick-teasing him for a free rock of crack, then it would serve as a persuader too. At that point Svetlana offered an audible incentive and Jubi heard soft sighs of female pleasure. Warily he moved further away from the safety of the door. Peering deeper into the gloom his eyes began to slowly adjust, and then he saw her beside a car and already on her knees, her eyes closed and lips parted with one hand under her top, the other tucked between the fine net strips of the skirt and apparently busy between her legs. In six strides Jubi was with her, trousers undone and erection pointing the way ahead. In four strides Constantine was with him, coming out of a crouch from behind the bin furthest from the fire door and pressing a stun gun into the side of the youth’s neck. Jubi dropped in his tracks.

“Would you please put your coat on,” Constantine asked her, and she smiled as she retrieved the long coat from through the cars open window. Constantine chuckled.

“You should join the Mounties”; Svetlana paused before replying “Why?” injecting a dose of Valium into Jubi.

Constantine knelt and lifted the unconscious body up and over in a fireman’s carry.

“You always get your man”. The girl opened the boot. All Constantine could see of her in the shadow of the boot lid was her outline against the lighter brick wall behind.

“No, not yet… but I’m working on him, sir”.

Alicia O’Connor entered her apartment with two FBI agents in tow. She had spent all morning and the best part of the afternoon in their offices at 9797 Aero Drive. Thoroughly puzzled as to what the hell was going on. She had repeated, several times, her job in Moscow. Named the people she had worked for, given the address of the building where she had been working, she had even had to point it out on a map of the city. No she hadn’t seen any Chinese. No, no names had been mentioned as to who the backers were.

After four hours’ of getting very bored with the sound of her own voice repeating itself they had sat her in front of a computer screen. All she was shown were pictures of men and women, no names for any of them. Some of the pictures were obviously scanned from newspapers and magazines; the remainder were passport or identity photos and some obviously covert in origin. She tried to read the characters of the people on the screen, to fathom some clue as to why she was being grilled, if nothing else. After an hour this palled and the faces started to take on a uniformly bland appearance. Then a group shot of what appeared to be Chinese and Russian diplomats, stood beside Red Square for a cheesy publicity snap. Behind this group, glancing out in an idly curious sort of way from the back seat of a Zil limo was one of the two ‘silent partners’ of the enterprise who had hired her. One of the agents asked her why she was so certain,

“When a guy with sweaty palms laughs at your work one day and then offers you a thousand dollars to visit his home dressed as a nun and sit on his face the very next, he tends to stick in your memory.” She explained. “If only for the novelty value”.

An agent had treated her to lunch, chilidog and a Bud Light as they tried to ID the guy. She wasn’t told if they succeeded or not but after lunch she was slapped with a warrant to seize all records she had of the work she had done for them.

Constantine had allowed Svetlana to administer the Sodium Pentothal to Jubi. He had absolutely no experience whatsoever in interrogation techniques. He was a 35-year-old pilot, grown too old to throw fast jets around the sky in combat, not a master spy.

Svetlana had known without asking that he would not harm this black youth without very good cause, so she had provided two ski masks for the pair to wear, negating any reason to administer an overdose.

Jubi himself had been in a drugged haze. Valium, Crack and Pentothal would not have been a cocktail prescribed by any reputable doctor but it had not induced any psychosis on that occasion. After about one hour the location of the suitcase had been revealed. Keeping in touch over mobile phones should more detailed directions become necessary; Constantine had found the case hidden with a large stock of crack, doubtless purchased with the money from the BMW. Also present was a 6.35mm Beretta handgun and ammunition, so apparently the young man intended a more violent future for himself.

Although someone, probably Jubi had attempted to force the case open, its sturdy design had thwarted his efforts.

Collecting everything from beneath the floorboards of the derelict shop Jubi had described.

Constantine had lugged the lot to his car. Once in the boot he then collected something from off the back seat and held it over the suitcase. The word that escaped from his lips after a few moments would have seriously offended his mother had she still been alive.

Just off a quiet road in the Essex countryside, a family called Fitzhugh for over a hundred years has owned a smallholding. The Fitzhugh’s had been in England for so long that all that remained of its Irish heritage was the name. The present owner, and end of the family line, so far, had been dispatched to University in Dublin. By far the brighter of his two children, George Fitzhugh felt that it would have been wrong not to let his youngest child get a proper education. Paul had got into the swing of campus life and on the way fallen for a fiery Antrim girl with very republican political views. Young Paul had fallen under her spell as she awakened him to his Irish heritage and the wrongfulness of a British Army of occupation to the north. After graduating, Paul had returned home and had lost touch with the girl. Several years later, tragedy had befallen the Fitzhugh family by way of a head-on collision with an articulated lorry as the family returned home from an outing in heavy rain. Paul had been the only survivor of the wreck and had inherited the farm. A lonely and unhappy young man, he had been delighted by a visit a few months later from his old flame from Dublin days. She had a proposition for him. By employing men sent his way by the Provo’s, he would be providing them a credible cover as farm labourers and a safe house. This is why Paul was now watching his five labourers’, sat around his dining room table, clean and oil some quite scary hardware. The news had been full of policemen and a policewoman being gunned down in London. Taking a very long pull of whiskey, he wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into.

Constantine and Svetlana had not returned to either of their homes. After Constantine had passed the Geiger counter over the case, he had returned to the empty warehouse rented by a front company for less than legal business the London embassy should be called on to provide. All he had told her was that they had to clear out quickly. With Jubi unconscious on the back seat under a blanket he had cleared their tail of any surveillance after sweeping the car, once again, for any tracking devices. Eventually he had parked up at a 24hr fast food restaurant and sat brooding silently. Svetlana had left him alone with his thoughts for half an hour.

“The reason I did not stay at The Aviary had nothing to do with frigidity or inhibitions. I am not of the first and I have few of the second.” She said levelly. “It was realised that I was too smart to be a mere mattress for potentially indiscreet foreign businessmen and the like”. She paused to check he was actually paying attention. He was, so she continued.

“I may be a bimbo to some, but I hope you can actually see beyond the packaging sir?” Constantine thought about it for a moment, he then told her everything that he had discovered. She listened quietly and allowed him to finish uninterrupted.

“I think the path to take is obvious, or are you actually considering restoring the case to the Irish” had been her reply “We are not at war with this country!” she’d continued. “What exactly could our country hope to achieve from a bomb in London, always assuming that it is our leadership ordering it and not a lunatic faction?”

Constantine shook his head.

“I heard from someone, I am not sure who, that Peridenko was once in charge of the KGB section that would use small atomic devices covertly delivered to targets in NATO. I never heard him described as a lunatic though”.

“I had a look at the case, it doesn’t look like an improvised nuclear device, not that I have ever seen one, though.” Svetlana was thinking aloud as much as she was talking it over with him. “I would guess that if the security forces here got hold of it, they could trace its origin, yes?”

Constantine nodded in agreement, not speaking, not wanting to interfere in her train of thought.

“So, why run the risk, would they blame it on deserters selling them to terrorists for cash?” Constantine shook his head, as he answered

“No, the international fallout would be huge, massive sanctions imposed until we got them back under control. UN troops stationed in the Motherland even. No, they would not risk that so it doesn’t make sense?”

Svetlana let out a breath as realisation hit her.

“Yes it does, if they had nothing to lose, if this was just the start of something. If this was not the only bomb!”

“You realise of course that I cannot be a party to this, this proposed genocide… if that is what we are talking about?” He told her.

She smiled softly.

“I knew that, I just hoped you realised it too”.

Even had this not been the worst day in the history of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, calls flowed in at an average 13000 per day.

The majority are classed as ‘I’, for immediate action or ‘S’, as soon as possible, by way of priority. Two operators sat at the long bank of communications terminals received almost simultaneous 999 emergency calls from opposite sides of London, the substance of the calls necessitating their classifications as ‘I’ graded. A man claiming to have been shot at by a stoned black youth in Hampstead and an obviously pre-recorded message of a bomb near a synagogue, the voice on the second was electronically produced and claimed membership of Al-Qaeda.

Four minutes later a Constable found an aluminium suitcase against the rear wall of a synagogue in south London. A strong smell of almonds hung in the air around the case; courtesy of a brief stop at a late night grocery shops baking section just to ensure the case was treated with respect, the now empty bottle of concentrate Almond essence itself had been dropped down a nearby drain.

In Hampstead an unmarked car drove past an alleyway, saw an apparently unconscious black youth laying on the ground, high on crack. A handgun and spent cases were in view. Armed officers closed in and trussed his arms behind his back with nylon cuffs as a precaution. A bus pass identified the owner of the recently discharged firearm, a pocketful of ammunition, sixty-nine rocks of crack and £1285 cash as one Jubi Asejoke, whom police already wanted on warrant. The fact that he was found next to the home of the police officer who had last arrested him, with the officers name and home address written on a scrap of paper in one pocket would ensure Jubi would learn the hard way about the dangers of dropping the soap over the next ten years.

In Croydon, an extremely a somewhat alarmed bomb disposal officer would pack away his portable x-ray machine and order the evacuation of all homes and businesses within one mile. His next act would be to call out a team from the nuclear weapons facility at Aldermaston.

A third phone call, this time on the confidential ‘Crime Stoppers’ number gave the names of several men and a woman, an address in Essex and another in St Johns Wood. This call was passed to SO15 Counter Terrorist Command in addition to a police incident room, set up at Shooters Hill police station to investigate the murder of the officers earlier. Two hours’ later the Sir Richard Tennant, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, London’s top policeman, got off the phone’ with the Home Secretary. He next put through a call to the former RAF Credenhill which now housed 22 Special Air Service Regiment. The Home Secretary would be calling the Chief Constable of Essex instructing him to extend full co-operation.

The prime minister was stirred from sleep and informed that a possible nuclear device had been found in south London. All over the capital and surrounding counties, off duty police officers were being telephoned and ordered to their stations and departments. Geiger counters were brought out of special stores and an extensive street search plan formulated.

Leaving the DAC for counter terrorist matters to handle the Essex business the commissioner attended the major incident centre, which was slowly filling with staff called from their beds. It was going to be a long night for the Met.

Over the previous two days Anatolly Peridenko and Serge Alontov had briefed the Chinese Premier, Defence Minister Pong and Marshall Lo Chang of which terrorist groups would be delivering the devices. Premier Chiu was a man who had attained his office more through low cunning than by higher education. He had thought that the detonation of the devices would have been simultaneously at rush hour worldwide until reminded that the daily event varied considerably by hours’. A cynical Serge wondered if the man held the flat earth theory as being fact and all else as being foreign devil propaganda. At 0900hrs on the day, a delivery van would be hijacked enroute to the White House by Muslim extremists who had been briefed that the device would produce a similar effect as 300lbs of Semtex. The young fanatic driving the van would trigger the explosion as soon as he was compromised, but if he was prevented from doing so the internal timer would initiate the explosion at the same time as the remaining devices worldwide, 0900hrs Washington time, whether in position or not. This included the device being delivered to the Pentagon by the same group. This of course meant that NATO Headquarters in Brussels would be destroyed at 1500hrs, local time whilst all its offices were full but the Australian Parliament in Canberra would probably be virtually empty at 7pm their time. The odds that the worlds security forces could impose curfews once a pattern emerged was unlikely.

In countries of the former Soviet Union, those who yearned for the return to the old ways were ready to seize power and set their armed forces to join the armies of the Russian Federation as they rolled west. The combined forces would be a fraction of their old size yet more than a match for a headless NATO.

Marshal Lo Chang was stripping the fleet ships of some of their best seamen, not all, not enough to weaken their crews in order to man the carrier, Mao.

The armed forces of the People’s Republic of China were always at a higher state of readiness in peacetime than existed in the majority of countries elsewhere. It would be a relatively speedy business to bring them up to war readiness.

Despite western intelligence to the contrary, China had sufficient amphibious capability to move two infantry brigades and minimal light armour and artillery support in conventional amphibious assault craft. The numerous small roll-on roll-off ferries that served the coastal communities along her lengthy coastline would land heavy reinforcements. The first modern day amphibious invasion by China would be, predictably, Taiwan with landings simultaneously on both sides of the Cho-Shui river estuary that bisected the narrow strip of land between the coast and the mountains that dominated the island. The Chinese plan for Day 1 also called for mass airborne landings, not only on Taiwan but also to seize the Island State of Singapore. Privately, Serge suspected that could well become China’s Bien Dien Phu or the Arnhem of the East, at the least it could rob China of elite troops who would be sorely needed in the invasions of Japan, Australia and the Philippines later in the year. In contrast the soon to be reborn Soviet Union had a far easier task confronting it. The real fight would be in securing the Middle East oil fields. With the taps turned off the USA would wither and die on the vine.

As in the first two world wars, closing the Atlantic was a priority for the submarine fleet. China, with her tiny submarine fleet was being loaned the services of two flotillas for use in the Pacific. This left a bare margin of reserves from the currently under covert refurbishment diesel and nuclear boats.

The United Kingdom held no strategic value for the Russian forces and their allies. For America though the British Isles was potentially a giant aircraft carrier and staging post, as it had been during the cold war years and Second World War before that. ICBMs that had been aimed at China were now re-targeted. A large percentage of these weapons were now aimed at the British Isles.

The mothballed, partially completed carrier Varyag would not be ready on Day 1, the workforce that had completed the Admiral Gorshkov / Mao was working around the clock in order to double Russia’s carrier force.

There were many smaller operations, many vital and many merely designed to weaken their enemy. The small-scale operations could be rehearsed by those taking part, without compromising security. For some on the large-scale operations, it would be ‘on the job training’.

With their work in China completed Serge Alontov had retired to his room for an early night. Shrugging off Peridenko’s invitation to share a bottle of vodka and the seventeen-year-old twins Peridenko had acquired in order to celebrate. His job here was finished and he felt no further need to feign cordiality with the man. He had been promised an active role, again in uniform. Serge had intended to be rested before their return flight to Moscow.

Peridenko stretched and yawned. The wall clock told him he had five hours’ before he needed to depart for the airport. At the end of the massive bed he occupied lay the Chinese girls, still fast asleep and sprawled out naked in one another’s arms. The Chinese Minister for Education had assured him that the ‘ch'ing-kuan-jen’ girls were twins, yet what they had done to each other whilst he regained his strength, had been highly arousing rather than sisterly.

An inch of vodka remained in the bottle and taking it by the neck he drained it. He was considering stretching out his leg to nudge them in to wakefulness, but the telephone rang.

The military attaché in London had learnt that Peridenko’s agents, along with an Irish terror group were believed by the UK authorities to be responsible for the murder of several policemen in London. Furthermore the attaché had been unable to contact his deputy, Air Force Major Constantine Bedonavich. He did not know if the case had been retrieved, and oh yes, there was a nuclear incident in south London.

Peridenko froze, one leg outstretched and the phone in his hand whilst fury began to grow in his chest. He was in that position when Serge rapped once, loudly on his door and stuck his head around it. Serge ignored the two naked sleeping girls.

“America and Europe just announced a nuclear terror alert, get dressed, Politburo in 30 minutes” and departed. A roar of anger awoke the alleged siblings with a start, and Peridenko’s foot sent them tumbling off the end of the bed in a jumble of squealing naked limbs.

It is fair to say that relations between Westminster and the White House had improved somewhat since 24^th August 1814, when British troops had burnt down the original residence of the President of the United States of America. Tonight the president was speaking to the British prime minister over speakerphone in the White House situation room.

Attended by his hastily summoned ‘battle staff’, the president was frowning deeply as he heard the details of the now confirmed nuclear device. The device had been made safe by the nuclear incident team from Aldermaston, and they reported that had it been unarmed. Thus far the device appeared to be of pre 1990 Soviet construction, although the arming mechanism was much newer, and in fact was state of the art.

The full Aldermaston report, along with preliminary police and intelligence service reports had been received from England. Copies lay before all person’s present.

Benjamin Dupre, the first black Director of the FBI, gazing over the top of his spectacles at the president was the first to speak once the call from London ended.

“Sir, this would appear to be confirmation that nuclear bombs in suitcases are no longer an urban myth” he removed his eyeglasses to massage the bridge of his nose before continuing.

“You will recall all the speculation and scare mongering in the press after September 11 regarding Bin Laden allegedly having bought, tried to buy, built, or whatever, nuclear bombs the size of backpacks or suitcases?” The president nodded in confirmation. Ben continued. “You will be aware of the high level defector, a KGB major who was involved in the development of these alleged things. When he came over in ’61 we doubted they had the expertise. He sounded credible and knew enough of the technical side but there just wasn’t any independent evidence to back it up though”.

“Until now” said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“Until now” Ben agreed. “However, I do not see anything before us now that convinces me Al-Qaeda is behind the London bomb”.

Terry Jones, the CIA head was also looking thoughtful.

“Why make the Brits a present of a 2 kiloton unarmed nuclear device?” he turned a page to confirm a fact. “It was doused in Vanilla essence according to the Brit labs and that stuff smells just like plastic explosives to a human nose, it was shouting for attention. No way Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group is going to do that!”

“Unless of course… .” Said Ben “… we got a friend on their side of the fence”.

The president remained silent, listening to thoughts and theories batted about across the table for several minutes.

“Alright gentlemen, we have a nationwide alert and once again the country will be grinding to a halt as we re-erect the roadblocks and the press gets even more paranoid”. He glanced irritably at the TV news monitors that in a few hours’ would alert the citizens of the United States of a threat worse than Anthrax.

“We already have plans for this eventuality; let’s keep focused on finding any more of the damn things. The theorising can wait until then”.

“Mr President?” Ben ventured. “What if we do have a friend… and what if that friend is not within Al-Qaeda, what if he, or she, is trying to warn us of an attack from a totally unexpected quarter?”

Scott Tafler had thumbed his way through the reams of notes and computer printouts seized from O’Connor. The girl had been incensed when the accompanying agents had agreed between themselves that they had not the first clue as to what they were looking for. That had not amused her, she‘d had no choice in surrendering her work but she’d been damned if she would lift a finger to help. What had caused her to go ballistic was their clearing her office of every damn piece of hardware, software and scrap of paper. A subtle form of blackmail but one that had ensured her accompanying the seized property in a ‘company’ Lear Jet to Langley. The sooner he had all the information then the sooner she could get her life and business back.

However, she was sat before his desk now with a bottle of mineral water in hand and her Irish eye’s still giving off the occasional flash of suppressed anger.

For the past hour Scott had struggled to gain her total cooperation before realising he was never going to get it as things stood. Excusing himself he had gone to his boss, Max.

“There is no way that this girl is going to help us get what we want quickly. She thinks we are using a legalised form of industrial espionage at the behest of ‘Commerce’. I have this real bad feeling that something is about to go down and we are going to miss it, because we’re pussyfooting about here”.

“What makes you think that Comrade Peridenko hasn’t just gone entrepreneur, plenty of others have?” Max pointed out.

“I’ve been making enquiry’s since I first read the FBI report. Firstly, no one in the industry has ever heard of the company, and that just doesn’t happen, everyone knows someone who knows someone in the business. It is a pretty elite section of gaming, this virtual reality. Secondly, Commerce has pretty knowledgeable sources around the world. Not a whisper about financing for a Russian VT venture or a new company either.”

Max stretched out his legs under the table and looked fixedly at Scott.

“So what do you propose to do, I am pretty certain we are very close to infringing the young ladies civil rights here. In fact I’m surprised that she hasn’t already screamed the house down for a lawyer?”

Scott had already given it a lot of thought.

“Under that rebellious exterior I am pretty sure there lays a very patriotic soul”. He weighed up the odds of his being slapped down before continuing, “I want to show her what we have on Peridenko, I want her to cooperate because she has the same bad feeling about this as I have”.

“No way Scott, that stuff is classified.” He said with a shake of the head. “It’s all cold war stuff and still classified secret to protect the sources. As to your gut feeling, well all we have is a not very pleasant Russian who wanted virtual reality cities getting wasted, and unless no one told you, we and the Russians are buddies now”.

At that point there was a knock and a messenger handed over a bulletin. The nuclear alert had gotten them kept at their desks but they knew no real details of what had happened in London yet. So far, as far as they had known it was just a bomb scare. Until now.

“Ah, it seems the mythological suitcase bomb is now a reality”. Scott had been looking at his feet and trying to think of some angle, he suddenly stopped and looked at Max quizzically, although he already knew the answer.

“Wasn’t Peridenko named by a defector as being in charge of the KGB suitcase bomb project?” He let that sink in before adding. “And didn’t you find it strange that so far as we know from Ms O’Connor, none of her scenarios was of a Chinese or old Warsaw Pact location?”

Max picked up his phone, pausing before dialling.

“Go keep Ms O’Connor company, I’ll get back to you”.

The large committee room echoed hollowly to voices, some charged with emotion. Unlike the previous sessions there were only eight person’s present. Minister Pong, Marshal Lo Chang, Alontov and Premier Chiu were sat around the head of the table. Further along were Krusov and Gorebitski, the Russian political and economic experts with a very stressed interpreter from the Premiers confidential staff. Peridenko was at the far end of the room speaking angrily into a cell phone to a female in England. At least Serge assumed his colleague would not address a member of the male gender as a ‘Depraved dyke psycho bitch’ at the top of his voice, as he had done after a minute of quietly listening to the other party. As an insult, coming as it did from Peridenko, Serge decided he would definitely not wish to make the acquaintance of whoever was on the other end of the telephone.

Serge remained calm as three other occupants in the room ranted and accused, he listened to their concerns being voiced, albeit with passion at times. Whatever they were paying the interpreter, it wasn’t enough he thought. The poor man was trying to be diplomatic and filter out the harsh language flying back and forth in two languages. He noticed that the Premier was keeping his own council for the time being too. The Chinese sundry Ministry’s had been excluded from the meeting; the plan was likely to have totally fallen apart in this room with the full politburo being present. It was bad enough with those few who were here.

Serge heard Peridenko’s final comments to the London end.

“I want him dead, slowly, and as for the girl… . I want her starring in one of your friends movies, make her co-star a German Shepherd and make it a snuff movie, understood?” A snuff movie was the term for underground films where the star died on camera for real at the end. Serge made himself a promise, once this business was finished he was going to kill his colleague, which was the only way he would ever feel clean again.

Peridenko terminated the call and put away the phone. The Premier also saw the call had ended and silenced his top soldier and defence minister with a single word. The Russians voices trailed away as they realised attention was focused elsewhere.

As Peridenko walked back toward the group he was aware he was now the centre of attention, his mind raced with its search of some means to deflect blame from himself. Alontov was watching him with a cynically knowing half smile on his face. The soldier had built up a lot of kudos with these people; if it came to a face-off with the man he knew he, Peridenko, would lose in the eyes of the Chinese. So, forget about blaming the military, which just left the Irish. He was gambling that the Chinese would not learn the full extent of the London debacle.

Clearing his voice he addressed the group.

“It would seem the Irish terrorist group were compromised by fate. Following a shootout with the English police the weapon fell into the hands of their security forces”. An understatement and a massive avoidance of the truth if there ever was thought Serge, who was aware of far more of the true facts than Peridenko knew. The premier was looking at Peridenko unblinkingly, trying to judge the truth with his eyes before he spoke.

“How does this effect operational security Comrade Colonel General?” Serge could see Peridenko bridle at the slight from the Chinese Premier, security was Peridenko’s province, and his own was purely military. Deciding not to declare open war with his colleague he looked over at him.

“Anatoly?”

Peridenko nodded at Serge before stating to the premier.

“They have found one device, one out of a hundred. There will be confusion-fuelled conjecture as to its presence in London and in the current climate the finger of blame will likely fall on the collusion of Bin Laden with other terror gangs. However, expert examination will show it to be of Russian manufacture. We can argue that away by blaming deserters but there are likely to be calls for UN sanctions against my country.

“What of these terrorists, where any captured and if so what can they divulge under torture?” was the premier’s next question.

“The armed police unit was wiped out without casualties to themselves, they are now in a secure safe house” Peridenko answered before adding. “After a week the hue and cry will have relaxed, we can still proceed on schedule”.

The plan had called for the nuclear attacks on financial centres, as well as government, military and communications targets. The London bomb, detonating in the Rotherhithe tunnel below the river would have destroyed the nearby modern international financial centre around Canary Wharf. The British parliament would have been sitting for Prime Ministers Question Time. With little to impede the blast wave, and a river borne tidal wave would have destroyed the Palace of Westminster where Parliament sits.

“Is there any way of replacing the captured device?” asked the premier.

Peridenko nodded affirmation

“Yes comrade Premier”.

“Then see to it please” ordered Premier Chiu. He stood and the meeting was at an end.

Only from orbiting the Earth can some of Mother Nature’s works best be viewed by man. The great forest fires and El Nino for example, are such disasters and phenomenon that are photographed, and then downloaded to the planet for fire fighters and scientists to work on.

The SeaSpace B was non-military and owned by a commercial venture but the camera package was under evaluation by the US government. Plugged by its makers as far superior to that presently in service it was being put through its paces monitoring and recording the oceans swells and giant ripples about the globe. These were being digitally downloaded for the oceanographers at the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command at Stennis Space Centre, Mississippi, USA.

The analyst’s at the space centre are used to seeing ships and their wakes appear in the frames but these do not cause much distraction from the real work at hand. However, the wakes of several ships in apparent naval formation do come under some scrutiny, if only out of professional curiosity. Several frames of one such group of ships heading south, 100 miles off the island of Komandorskiye Ostrova in the North Pacific Ocean were passed to the office of naval intelligence. Once there they were compared with RORSAT shots of the same area taken just 20 minutes before, the brown stuff hit the fan in the shape of the discoveries of compromised security in the United States vaunted satellite surveillance program, and that of the PLAN nuclear powered aircraft carrier Mao.

As days in politics’ go America’s chief executive was having a bit of a bad hair day, what with nuclear terror alerts and all. He was now speaking on the phone to a disgruntled large campaign contributor who wanted action on an environmental issue that could prove costly to his company. The Chief of Staff, Luke Garry and General Shaw, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs entered unbidden and caused him to lose track of his conversation. He was tempted to just hang-up but oil money had been largely responsible for his being in office and he owed markers they would not let him forget. He glanced up in annoyance at the two men, Luke looked away but General Shaw met his gaze. The marine was clearly not in the mood to pussyfoot with niceties. Cutting the platitudes short he ended the call. As with most people in office, who had never worn a uniform, let alone never been shot at he found the military a strange breed. Correction, strange and expensive.

“Is this about the nuclear thing?” The chairman of the joint chiefs shook his head.

“General, this had better be very important, and that means important by my definition, not necessarily yours!”

General Shaw met the challenge easily.

“None of our satellite photos or RORSAT scans can be relied upon. An enemy has subverted our elint capability by unknown means, possibly by infiltration into the ranks of the NSA. The Chinese have a nuclear powered aircraft carrier task force we didn’t know they had, and it is now at sea… oh, and a guy at CIA thinks Russia may be planning at best to de-stabilise us or at worst to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on us”, he paused momentarily before finishing with. “Depending on your scale of definition, I can either remain here or I can grab a doughnut and a coffee to-go from the kitchens on my way home, sir”. The sarcasm he had felt at the presidents rebuke was absent from his tone if not from his choice of words. The Chief of Staff quickly updated the president on the brief outline of what had transpired. Seeing that the general had apparently not been exaggerating, he ordered a full briefing for himself and the battle staff in four hours’ time.

At Langley a startled Scott Tafler received a call from his Directors office. After twenty seconds he put down his telephone receiver and began scrambling to gather all he needed to present his findings in the White House situation room.

The mobile phones vibrating and its repetitive four chord ringtone roused the Russian girl. She answered and listened to the instructions without expression before speaking quickly and without emotion.

After less than a minute Alexandra Berria broke the connection with Beijing and reset the plug-in encryption module on her cellular before calling the military attaché to confirm the instructions she had just received from Anatoly Peridenko. The colonel was not exactly thrilled with Moscow’s earlier order that he cooperate with her and Carmichael. That he resented his most recently received order to now obey their directions was evident in his voice. All available assets were to be alerted to be on the lookout for Major Bedonavich and Svetlana Vorsoff. They themselves would search the fugitive’s homes for any clues as to their present whereabouts, after which they would collect the Irish from Essex in order to be in a position to move in with force once the pair were located.

She was not alone in bed and awoke the brunette.

“Get dressed.” She told the brunette. “It is time you were leaving.”

At the instruction of a military attaché who was being forced by circumstance to perform an active role, the brunette had brought with her all the information she had supplied Major Bedonavich with previously.

As with the majority of traitors, this young woman was motivated by greed rather than any supposed higher calling. Like had recognised like during this first meeting and after Carmichael retired in preparation for another long day Berria had chosen not to follow his example.

Using the houses telephone she called a local cab firm and awoke her partner in his room, quickly updating him before running a bath for herself.

Carmichael was all smiles whilst dressing and hummed to himself, he was very pleased with Peridenko’s orders regarding Svetlana

A ring of the doorbell announced the arrival of Alexandra’s girlfriend’s cab and once she had waved her off Alexandra went to take her bath.

As the taxi turned a corner the passenger was surprised to see quite a number of uniformed policemen stood just out of sight of the street they had just left. She had only just taken it all in when she was thrown forward by the cabs sudden stop. Both rear doors were flung open by armed officers of the Mets SCO19, Specialist Firearms Unit who dragged her unceremoniously out onto the tarmac of the road. She was too stunned to react. The muzzle of an MP5 was thrust in her face and the orders she was given left her in no doubt that she was going to be shot if she made a single hostile move. Hands roughly bound behind her, she and her shoulder bag were quickly and expertly searched by a female officer in the same black coveralls, Kevlar helmet, goggles, ballistic armour and weapons rig as her male colleagues. One item was separated from the contents of the prisoners’ handbag and handed to the senior officer present. Exiting the cab its driver tossed the car keys to a uniformed constable to be returned to the cabs rightful owner, who waited at the outer cordon where he had been stopped. The Home Secretary had signed the order permitting the police to tap the telephone at the house, so the cabs arrival had been expected. The ‘cabbie’ then approached the prisoner and identified himself as being a Detective Inspector with the Counter Terrorist Command. He then informed the young woman that she was under arrest on suspicion of having committed terrorist offences and then cautioned her, which is the Brit equivalent of being read your rights, before her being manhandled into a waiting police van.

After the previous day the Met deserved some luck. The first catch of the day had been the brunette Detective Constable attached to NCIS. As he watched the van depart the Chief Superintendent in charge of the St Johns Wood operation, until his Commander arrived, looked again at the arrested young woman’s police warrant card, thanking god for small mercies she hadn’t been on duty last night when the tip-off had arrived.

A short distance away a specially equipped van was recording sound transmitted from small bugs placed on the glass of each room’s windows during the early hours’. A copy of the telephone call made by Berria, albeit only half of a conversation, was being listened to by a Special Air Service trooper whose specialist skills included speaking Farsi and Russian fluently in addition to being his team’s medic. Stopping, rewinding and restarting the tape, he rapidly transcribed Berria’s words onto paper in English. On completion he opened the rear door of the van, looking for his own lieutenant but not finding him, he hailed the Chief Super

“Oye, you wiv the braid on yer ‘at”. Accustomed to slightly more respect when being addressed the senior officer approached him. This man was not in his organisation and beside which he rather admired the quiet, yet competent professionalism shown by the trooper and his team leader. The two of them were his liaison/advisors-if-need-be. Two Troops from 22 SAS were at present in Essex poised to tackle the harder target, which would be assaulted simultaneously as SCO19 stormed the house around the corner.

“It is customary to address superior officers as ‘Sir’, is it not?” he enquired of the trooper.

“You ain’t my superior mate” was the reply “You just get paid more than me, so cop ‘old of this, I’m busy” and the van door closed again.

Telephone calls had roused the neighbouring residents and plain-clothes officers had led them to safety whilst the occupants of the target address slept. The next task had been to affix microphones to the windows and move marksmen into position.

Looking at his watch the Chief Superintendent joined the SCO19 Inspector in the Control vehicle.

Unlike the police team in London the troopers from G Squadron, 22 SAS had rather less cover to play with, at least from the point of view of an uninformed observer.

The troopers did not have innocent civilians to clear out of harm’s way, they did have however the bane of all covert rural operations to contend with, animals, and dogs in particular.

Anyone who has ever tried to pass covertly, upwind of a farmhouse, will tell you that no matter how silent you are the dogs will sense you and start to bark. Dogs have extremely sensitive noses. To simply go around downwind may seem the obvious solution, except that sods law dictates that there will be another farm upwind of you as you do so and they will have equally noisy dogs. The original farm dogs may not be able to smell you but they will certainly hear their kin and join in. Close Observation Platoon, ‘The COP’, intelligence gathering soldiers in Northern Ireland, where farms are much closer together than in Kansas, named this nightly embuggerance as the ‘Howl-we-hear-ya Chorus’. For the very dedicated, abstaining from all milk products in their diet goes a long way to altering the human scent that alerts the dogs. Alternatively, modern science has provided chemical masks that although not 100 % proof all of the time, do at least inhibit the dogs from raising the alarm until they can be silenced with doctored meat or cheese wire garrottes.

With the carcasses of Paul Fitzhugh’s sheepdogs removed, two-man sniper teams chose un-obvious firing positions from where they could completely cover all possible escape routes, if not all of the buildings sides, between them. Once they had ‘gone firm’ the entry teams moved to their jump off points in the farmyard.

A very long way from the man who a few years previously had been mounting ‘Queens Guard’ at the Royal residences in full ‘glory order’, scarlet tunic, tweeds, bearskin etc., Pete ‘Sav’ Savage today resembled a cowpat. Or at least an inconspicuous part of a field studded with the aforesaid deposits. Cows are a less vocal hindrance to covert rural ops. With little to occupy their days except chewing the same old thing, immobile humans, invisible to the naked eye, seem to be an irresistible form of distraction in the cattle’s mind. It is most frustrating to have taken several hours’ getting into position, dug an O.P below a hedgerow, hidden the resulting spoil and got all of the team secreted away, only to have a Bovine appreciation society gather with the dawn. Fortunately the same kit that bamboozles dog’s noses also works on other species of God’s creatures.

‘Sav’ and his oppo had gone firm at 0222hrs. Dick French beside him was his spotter and his back up with a 7.62mm belt fed ‘Gimpy’. The elderly General Purpose Machine Gun had been replaced in infantry sections by the LSW. The LSWs lighter, magazine fed ammunition and its fixed barrel were a serious step back in most soldiers’ eyes. The LSW could not provide the necessary weight of fire needed. Its 5.56mm ammunition lacked the stopping power of the 7.62mm round and constant pauses to change magazine's cuts its rate of fire. Once its barrel overheated it was a useless lump of ironmongery until it cooled down again. With the gimpy it was a simple business to clip fresh belts of ammunition onto the end of the one being fed through the gun and swap the barrel over with one of several spares carried. Wherever possible, units of the British armed forces kept the gimpy despite the incompatibility of the ammunition it now meant for small arms.

Dicks GPMG was more than capable of stopping a mass breakout toward them, quite literally, dead in its tracks.

Sav had the superb Accuracy International .338 calibre rifle known simply as the L115A1in the British Army and this was topped with an American D-141 night sight. With the butt pressed into his right shoulder and barrel resting on its bipod he scanned the buildings ahead of him. At a fraction under 15lbs bare, the weapon was heavy enough on its own but with its telescopic sight and five round magazine, filled with armour piercing tungsten tipped rounds of ammunition it would tax an unfit man. Beside the armour piercing rounds Sav also had more standard ‘Ball’ ammunition, but with limited information on the target he intended to be prepared for the worst. Next to him Dick had the gimpy rested before him whilst he also scanned the buildings. Although there were twelve fellow troopers in amongst the farm buildings they could only see two, crouched beside the back wall of the barn.

In the same fashion that microphones had been placed on the house in St Johns Wood the troopers had wired the farmhouse. A recce of the other buildings and out houses had not revealed any surprises. All the suspects were confined under one roof.

A mile away Major Craig Thompson, the G Squadron commander, the Deputy Chief Constable of Essex and the Chief Superintendent for that area listened whilst all stations reported in. Major Thompson was concerned at the lack of movement from within the farm. To all appearances it was indeed a working farm, yet there were only the sounds of sleeping men. He would have expected some movement by now.

A Royal Signals sergeant informed him that the London targets were awake and one arrest had already been made without alerting those in the house.

“Do you relinquish operational control, sir?” he asked the Deputy Chief Constable.

“I believe the moment has arrived Major”.

Two signatures made it official. Taking a headset he informed the London operation that he intended to go in five minutes at 0430hrs exactly. London agreed and both operational commanders passed the word to the troops.

There had been a disagreement on how to handle the situation earlier. Whether to telephone the occupants of the addresses once cordons were in place and negotiate their surrenders or assault the buildings without warning. Unlike many of his staff the Commissioner of the Met had spent considerably longer in front line policing than the minimum two years. Pussy footing about with terrorists who’d butchered his unarmed officers went against the grain. That however had not been his line of argument. He stated, with some justification, that the suspects were heavily armed, ruthless and giving any kind of warning would further endanger lives.

Carmichael had finished dressing and had put the kettle on for himself. The coffee percolator bubbled and hissed with Alexandra’s favourite start to the morning. Striding to the kitchen window he pulled open the curtains in order to behold the new day.

“Shit!” breathed a black clad police officer of the team about to assault the rear of the address. PC Tony Stammers froze motionless in a crouch on Carmichael’s herbaceous border; he kept his head down and attempted to imitate a lethally armed garden gnome. Lying prone and using the garden hedges as cover the remainder of his team were less than impressed. Carmichael had been interested in the state of the sky rather than the progress of his Liliflorae and dropped the curtains back into place. Scuttling sideways into cover the gnome mimic received a thump on the top of his helmet.

“Next time you hug the cover, you don’t take short cuts!” hissed his sergeant and emphasised the salient point of his argument with a second, harder blow. Constable Annabel Perry, the errant SFOs partner, was looking at him with a despairing look on her face.

Intending to take Berria her morning coffee in the bath Carmichael raised one foot to mount the stairs when several things happened at once. Having climbed rubber clad storming ladders at the front and rear bedroom windows four SFO’s stormed through the flying shards of glass to toss stun grenades onto the landing and over the banister rail. Carmichael dropped the china cups and saucers he had held and was reaching down for a small handgun in its ankle holster at the sound of the windows shattering. Berria had been rather more switched on, she knew that what would come next would be mind numbing. Placing hands across her ears she slid below the water’s surface to muffle the sound. Four stun grenades went off with two of them within three feet of Carmichael, temporarily ruining his vision and hearing. Despite the pain in his ears Carmichael raised the gun in front of himself defensively and that was the sight that greeted the first two officers to burst through the front door.

Berria emerged from below the surface of the bath water the second she judged all the grenades had finished and heard two gunshots, so close together that the sounds almost merged. Fishing below soiled undies in the linen basket she withdrew and cocked an Uzi sub machine gun and extended its wire stock before opened the door to the landing.

On hearing the sound of a weapon being cocked Tony Stammers was bringing his MP5 around to bear on the direction of the sound and hesitated, for just a milli-second, at the sight of a dripping wet and naked blond in the bathroom doorway. The floral wallpaper on the wall at his back sprouted several holes but his ballistic body armour stopped both the rounds that struck him at chest height, however the round that pierced his left bicep shattered the bone behind it. Annabel Perry had also heard the Uzi being cocked but she had dropped prone at the sound. Alexandra Berria’s only burst of fire was cut short as Annabel shot her between the breasts. The butt of the sub machine gun remained in her shoulder but Berria came out of the aim and stepped backwards drunkenly with a wide eyed and open mouthed look of surprise on her face until the back of one leg struck the bath tub and she sat down heavily upon its edge. By accident or designed the muzzle of the Uzi swung toward the prone officer. Instantly Annabel raised her point of aim and shot Berria again, this time below the right eye. Alexandra was left draped over the edge of the bath with her head below water now turning slowly crimson, and legs akimbo, sticking over the edge.

At the foot of the stairs Carmichael was staring up at the ceiling whilst one of the officers who had shot him applied direct pressure on a wound dressing.

With the building secure, para medics from the London Ambulance Service entered. Having told Carmichael’s carer to save his energy they moved on up the stairs and gave the same advice to an officer working on Berria.

Major Thompson would have been relieved to a degree to have known that after cleaning and reassembling their weapons the Irishmen had gotten very drunk by way of celebrating the blow they had struck for Irish unity. Paul Fitzhugh had also got himself drunk after watching the same television news footage as his house guests, but for different reasons. He had taken himself off to the barn and continued drinking alone amongst the bails of winter feed. The trooper’s recce had not discovered him in the recess where he had fallen asleep with a bottle of Jameson’s for comfort.

Unlike the police method of entry in London the Army assault was far more spectacular. Breaching charges blew in the doors and windows whilst the salvo of stun grenades that followed immediately after created havoc amongst the rudely awoken occupants.

Contrary to left wing media press reports, British soldiers are not mindless killing machines. They do not shoot a man just because they are ordered to; neither do they kill a man because he bloody well deserves it. They shoot to kill rather than wound for the simple reason, that trying to emulate the Hollywood stunt of ‘winging’ an opponent or trying to shoot the gun from an enemy’s hand, is a quick way to get yourself, and your mates killed.

Two terrorists had weapons in their hands and both were shot. The remaining three were unceremoniously thrown to the floor and cuffed with hands behind their backs before being dragged downstairs where a medic had felt for a pulse on one of their number and abandoned any further effort on him. The second gunshot casualty would never know it, but his life would be saved by a British soldier his own age, born and raised just a quarter of a mile from where he himself had been born and brought up in Belfast.

Paul Fitzhugh woke up to the sound of explosions and gunfire. Staggering to his feet and lurching to the barns door he caught sight of a black clad trooper, face obscured by a respirator, the very vision most people conjure up when they think of the SAS. Fear injected adrenaline into his system and he ran to the back of the barn where he was grateful he had not got around to securing a section of the corrugated aluminium wall, loosened in the previous winter’s storms. Bitterness was also welling up in him. The false picture of himself as a noble freedom fighter had crumbled the previous night and his life was now ruined by the people he had allowed to manipulate him.

Dick was the first to notice the rear wall of the barn move. Sav had been covering the left side of his arc of fire when Dicks urgently hissed

“Barn, lower right!” caused him to bring his aim around and down. In the differing shades of green that make up the view through a night sight, crystal clear images are not present, Sav could see the shape of a person crawl through a gap in the wall with an object in its hand. Speaking quickly into his headset microphone, Dick alerted all stations on the net.

Paul had crawled through the gap where the loose section of wall just permitted enough room for his bulk. Across the two fields ahead of him lay a small copse, to his mind that represented safety. Looking back over his shoulder at what had been his family’s home for generations he elected to vent his feelings before running for it.

All Sav had a chance to see was the figure in his sight’s rise up on to its knees, bringing back its arm in preparation to throw the object it held.

Paul Fitzhugh, the last in the line of Essex Fitzhugh’s never completed the action of lobbing the empty whiskey bottle. The .338 round, intended for use in piercing the otherwise bullet proof shutters the farm may have had, entered his body seven inches below his left armpit and exited in the centre of his back taking part of his heart, left lungs tissue and ten vertebrae to pebble dash the barn wall. The round itself carried on through the aluminium sheet wall, passing completely through a tractor engine block beyond and lodged in the old brickwork of the Fitzhugh ancestral home.

Svetlana placed an empty, though brand new suitcase on top of the bed and rolled her head in wide circles to clear the knots a sleepless night had formed. There had been a series of quick stops in London to collect hers and Constantine’s own pre-positioned escape stashes after dumping the thief and informing the authorities before driving to Southampton.

As an ‘Illegal’, Svetlana had two locations, one in London and the other in Scotland where she had fake passports and genuine credit cards in false names. Her employers knew nothing of these; it was her own insurance policy against capture should it ever have come to that. She also had a clean firearm and £1000 cash, not that she ever wanted to have need of them. The single shot zip gun Constantine loaned her on that first day was also hidden about her person.

Constantine was not expected to ever have to make use of such precautions; he was covered by diplomatic immunity. His job description at the embassy was in effect that his superior never got his hands dirty, contacted agents or ran risks. He was the go-between/fall-guy for the military attaché. They both had the same information available to them but if something went wrong it would be the deputy military attaché, who was caught or named and then deported.

The day after the meeting with Carmichael and Berria, Constantine had known that he was in trouble. There was no way either of the pair would forget he had spoilt their entertainment, not with their history and boss, so he had formulated a contingency plan. In case of emergency there was cash and credit cards for ‘blown’ agents, and he of course knew the location of these dead drops He could only use them once and so just before midnight the previous evening, after collecting the £5000 cash he then walked to the nearest cashpoint machine. Drawing out the total daily cash on all the six cards Constantine waited seven minutes until the new day had begun, he then withdrew a further nine hundred on each. Sixteen thousand four hundred pounds was more money than he, a mere major, had ever seen before. With a thick marker pen he had written the pin number for each on the back of the corresponding card. Heading north, with Constantine on the lookout for down and outs they made a present of each one to each bagman and bag lady they saw. Confident that his superiors would not cancel the cards immediately, in the hope the transactions would trap him, they then picked up the M25 circular motorway and drove anti-clockwise around London to Southampton. For a time anyway, he hoped to throw the hunters off the trail.

Constantine had left the hotel right after booking them in to find food, and buy an early paper. There had been no news on the radio regarding the information he had passed to the police. He wished he had instructed Carmichael and Berria to stay in the Essex farm with the Irish but it was too late now to fret about it. He would have been far happier had they all been under one roof when the British came to call. Breakfast was not for two hours’ and they were both famished. Svetlana hit the shower before climbing between the sheets of the double bed and was asleep in minutes.

Returning to the hotel, armed with a pair of fast food breakfasts, Constantine had let himself into the room to find it held only the one bed, and that was occupied. Warm muffins and maple syrup were quickly disposed of and washed down with watery coke because the ice had melted, how he detested capitalism at times, using the minimum ingredients augmented by frozen water to make you think you had your money’s worth.

He looked over at the mass of reddish brown spread over both pillows. Despite the fatigue he felt his pulse quicken as he gazed upon the sleeping form. With a rueful shake of the head he bypassed the bed and washed, before using a towel as a pillow and the spare blanket that was provided, to make his bed on the floor. In a few minutes, he too was sound asleep.

Old Scotland Yard near Westminster Bridge took its name from being stood upon the site of where the old Scottish embassy had been located back before the United Kingdom had been a united kingdom, but a relatively short walk from Victoria train station along Victoria Street, SW1 will bring you to the newer headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. The entrance to this statement of 1960’s architecture is on a small side road called rather ridiculously ‘Broadway’. Police officers refer to the building either as ‘NSY’ or as ‘C.O’ after the headquarters of the year 1829, which had been a not overly large house located at 4 Whitehall Place and known simply in its day as the ‘Commissioners Office’.

This morning the current holder of that office was looking rather in need of a properly cooked breakfast and twelve hours’ uninterrupted sleep. The prime minister along with the commander of land forces (UK), the Head of SIS, the CIA Head of Station (London) and the Home and Foreign secretaries were sat in comfortable chairs in his office.

Ostensibly the PM was present due to the killing of the police officers in Rotherhithe the previous day as the nights operations were as yet not public knowledge. When the debrief details had arrived from those operations the commissioner had prepared a briefing for the PM, that had been 0730. The commissioners temper had been severely taxed by the PM’s delaying his arrival until arrangements had been made to exploit the occasion as a photo opportunity outside the main entrance.

The plain clothes Inspector in charge of the PM’s close protection team handed the commissioner a sheet of message paper that he read without change of expression on his face and waited until everyone was settled and the door to his office closed.

“Twenty four hours’ ago in a building awaiting demolition in Rotherhithe, southeast London, a young black male, a petty thief, was tortured and killed by a group of Irish terrorists led by a disgraced former British Army officer and a former KGB agent. Transcripts of a telephone call between the ex-agent, Alexandra Berria and her believed employer are on page three of your briefing folders. You will see that she addresses the man at one point as ‘Comrade Peridenko’. In the same phone call several mentions are made to ‘The suitcase’. The full details are in your folders but in short we suspect that at some time previously a third party stole an item of property. This item was a suitcase and its contents of sufficient importance to justify, in their minds, the torture and murder of this young man in order to retrieve it. At some point the suspects were disturbed by the arrival of six of my officers. These people murdered all of those officers. If I may again refer to the telephone call by the Berria woman, it would seem another petty criminal may have committed the original theft of the case, his name is Jubi Asejoke. The dead officers presence was coincidentally to execute an arrest warrant for that same person.

Late last night, here at NSY we received a series of telephone calls. The first call, by a foreign sounding male, led us to find the same Jubi Asejoke, who is now in custody. A woman with an educated English accent made the second; she named the Berria woman, the ex-army officer and all the terrorists along with two addresses where they could be found if we moved quickly. The third call was by someone disguising his or her voice electronically. It was essentially a bomb threat to a Synagogue in south London. My officers found a metal suitcase that smelt, to them, very strongly of plastic explosive. ‘Expo’ was called out, that is our on-call bomb disposal officer, or explosives officer to give his official title”, he added for the benefit of the American Intelligence officer and continued with the briefing.

“The case was x-rayed and immediately afterwards the cordons around the site moved from 200 feet to 1 mile. A.W.E, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston sent a team which found the suitcase to contain an unarmed 2-kiloton nuclear weapon of Russian origin. The recordings of the voices in all three of the calls made to us have been for analysis at the audio laboratories, I have the findings here. Any recordings currently on file did not identify the female’s voice with either the SIS or us. The electronically disguised voice took some time; however, it belongs to the same male who called with Asejoke’s location. Both Special Branch and the SIS have identified the voice from previous intercepts on file as belonging to a Major Constantine Bedonavich of the Russian Air Force. His current post is that of deputy military attaché at their Embassy here in London. As you will see from the transcript of both the phone call and those of her conversation soon afterwards with the ex-army officer, Anthony Carmichael, their employer wanted Bedonavich dead and what he wanted for Bedonavich’s female companion is simply nauseating.” The commissioner paused at that point before moving on.

“Acting on the information from the young woman’s call to us, the Home Secretary authorised military assistance in the apprehension of those responsible for the murder of my officers. At 0430hrs this morning, my officers and two Troops of G Squadron, 22 Special Air Service Regiment, raided a house in St Johns Wood and a farmhouse in Essex. There were four fatalities among the suspects occupying the two addresses and several arrests made under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. I am ashamed to say that one of those arrested is a serving police officer from the National Criminal Investigation Service. In the London address we found hard copy supplied by that officer to the Russian Embassy here relating to Jubi Asejoke along with passwords and user names that would permit access to the Police National Computer and files relating to the murder investigation of my officers. In the Essex farm we have seized documents that detail a plan to detonate a bomb in the Rotherhithe tunnel eight days from now”

The commissioner looked directly at the PM before concluding. “In short we have evidence that the Russian government has supplied Irish terrorists with a nuclear bomb. Those same terrorists would have detonated that bomb in this city… call me quaint and old fashioned Prime Minister, but does that not constitute an act of war?”

Art Petrucci, the CIA head of station looked at the British PM and was very disturbed by what he saw. Jesus Christ, he thought. This guy is out of his depth, without a spin-doctor in tow he is totally fucked! The PM did not reply to the commissioners question.

The commissioner had long ago formed an opinion similar to Art Petrucci’s.

Unlike many in office in government Sir Richard was no one’s political appointee and certainly no yes man. He was outspoken in his criticism of this governments policies where it adversely affected or interfered with the business of fighting crime.

The commissioner had known for some time his days were numbered, as soon as a suitably amenable replacement was found he would be out. As far as he was concerned that allowed him carte blanche to do the job, as it needed to be done, until the axe fell.

“One of my officers was wounded in the assault on the St Johns Wood address; otherwise there were no casualties on our side. There is one terrorist critically ill and under armed guard in hospital. The remainder are in the secure cells at Paddington Green. I am formally asking for the assistance of international law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As you can see before you, Major Bedonavich and his companion would appear to be on the run. They may be able to assist us with any other information they possess. If nothing else we owe them protection and a debt of gratitude.” The PM merely nodded whilst Marjorie Willet-Haugh, the SIS chief looked at the PM for assent before answering

“Of course”. She was another PM appointee.

This Brit PM, who hadn’t opened his mouth once, puzzled Petrucci; it was as if all or some of this information was not news to him. This whole meeting had an awkward feel to it with mutual dislike and mistrust heavy in the air.

Looking again at the silent PM the commissioner added.

“I imagine that the Russians will be most eager to detain their people. Should it come to my knowledge that this country lends them any assistance in so doing, for whatever reason, then the person responsible will find him or herself in one of my cells charged with perverting the course of justice and treason. I have just presented evidence to you of the murder of unarmed police officers. The youngest was 23. Those murders were sanctioned by a foreign power that also assisted in a plot to destroy a large part of this city along with up to a million citizens. I am fully aware that a 10 billion pound trade deal is being secretly brokered with that same country.” The Foreign Secretary shot a startled look at the PM before standing and confronting the commissioner.

“Now see here… ”

The Commissioner silenced him with a look before nodding toward the CIA officer.

“My reason for requesting Mr Petrucci’s presence was to ask his assistance in this matter, I am now glad of his presence for another matter that I have only recently become aware of.” The commissioners face-hardened.

“If you would please bear witness Mr Petrucci?” The commissioner faced the PM.

“Mr Prime Minister, do you deny that you received a telephone call this morning at 8.23am from the premier of the Russian Federation?” Aside from a ghost of a look of surprise the PM merely avoided the senior policeman’s stare.

“Waiting outside this office are your close protection officers. As members of the Metropolitan Police Service they answer to me whilst I am in office and that is why I know your closing remark to that man was ‘Leave it to me, you can be assured of our full cooperation.’ Two of my officers were present during that call.”

The Home Secretary was on his feet.

“Commissioner, I demand that you apologise to the Prime Minister at once or I will be forced to require your resignation forthwith!” he stormed. The commissioner was not moved in the slightest.

“Sir, in avoiding responsibility for the policing of London you created a police authority to take any blame instead. This does of course mean that I no longer answer directly to you.” For a long moment the politician stared at the policeman before backing down.

As the Home Secretary resumed his seat Art Petrucci could not resist leaning forwards to look along the line of chairs at him.

“Shot yourself in the foot with that one didn’t you fella”.

For the first time since the briefing had begun the PM spoke. “Commissioner, I did indeed receive a request from the Russian premier. However I was not aware of the full facts until now. Please rest assured that any such agreement I may have made is now void”. Although the PM’s reassuring smile was the product of hours’ of coaching by experts it failed to reach his eyes on this occasion.

Looking at each of the persons present the commissioner stated finally.

“That concludes my briefing, Lady and Gentlemen. Mr Petrucci, my aide will assist with any communication with Langley or Washington you wish to make rather than waiting until your return to Grosvenor Square. Now if you will excuse me, I have six sets of widows and grieving relatives to visit.”

The Home Secretary, still angered, chose absolutely the wrong time to seize the policeman’s arm as he passed.

“When will my personal secretary receive the next of kin details of the officers as we have twice demanded them and received no acknowledgement?” He received a harsh stare.

“I believe Clare Hughes father spoke for all the families when he said that outliving ones children is a very personal tragedy and not a timely photo opportunity to slow the PM’s fall in the polls!” As the politician had still not released his arm he continued.

“The last man to grab my arm was a skinhead during the Southall riot. Would you like to see how that situation ended?” His arm was quickly released and he strode from the room without a backward glance.

Art Petrucci had to pinch himself to prove that he was really witness to this. A London Bobby had threatened, no, promised his prime minister that he was going to throw his butt in jail if he interfered in a police investigation. His report to Washington was going to be classified so high it wouldn’t become available under the Freedom of Information Act for a thousand years he chuckled to himself.

He already had the commissioners permission to use the secure communications facilities here and the connection with the Russian government had to be reported immediately to his own government, walking briskly he left to find the aide.

The coffee maker was this morning in constant use in the Situation room. It was getting on toward twenty-four hours’ since most of the people in this room had last slept. The briefer from the National Security Agency, the NSA, had finished outlining why the Mao and its construction hadn’t been discovered until now.

The presidents’ temper was running thin.

“How much else have we missed and how long has it being going on?” Looking toward the NSA Director for support and seeing her boss was apparently distracted by something on the ceiling that the briefer couldn’t see she looked back to the president.

“Sir, the only way to discover that would be to cross reference Foreign RORSAT and non-intelligence agencies satellite data or to track down the means used to subvert our Intel. My personal theory on the second is that it is a sophisticated program that has been inserted into the mainframe, I would start there. As to the first, it will take unknown man-hours’ to hand check the data. Assuming the Mao was built from scratch we could be talking about hand checking three years’ worth of photographs and radar scans… sir.” The president took a deep breath. He desperately wanted to scream at someone, but a lowly briefer would be a cheap shot target.

“Young lady, if you were the NSA Director… ” he paused to glance meaningfully at her boss before looking back at her and continuing, “… which is not beyond the bounds of possibility, what would you do?”

After a moment’s pause, during which time she mentally replied “I’d expect to get my ass fired” she answered. “I would put all resources on a full systems audit starting at the download site end and work forward. Once the program was found I could determine when it was inserted. From there it would be a case of method and opportunity… detective work to find the culprit at the same time as auditing all other systems for other subversive programs and sub routines.”

“What did you major in and how long have you been with the NSA young lady?” was the next question.

“I have a BA in advanced systems analysis, I am working on my Masters and I have been with the NSA for four years sir.” Jesus she thought, he’s going to fire me.

“Jack!” called out the president to his NSA chief.

“Yes, Mr President?”

“Who is your systems security specialist?”

“Harry Nakajima sir, he’s a good man.”

“Not good enough by a long shot so fire his sorry ass and meet your new one.” Giving a brief smile to the briefer he nodded his head toward the door, signalling her meteoric promotion and permission to depart the room.

“Who is next?” he asked.

Scott Tafler began his briefing from the time O’Connor had been hired. Max had gotten him the permission he had asked for and she had not held back in assisting him. Thirty-five minutes later he ended with Peridenko’s file and a reminder to those present of the details of the device found in London.

“Why do you suppose that China is involved in this, it sounds like a red herring answer regards the financing thing?” General Shaw asked him.

“Sir, this whole thing could just be freak coincidence. Yet Peridenko was once upon a time in charge of the device in London, and a hell of a lot more of them besides. We know that he is still thick with the Premier. We know that none of the O’Connor data showed any Chinese targets.” Scott took a moment before continuing.

“Apart from a year as mosquito food in the Louisiana National Guard I have no military experience sir, yet to me it seems unrealistic for Russia to attempt an end run with the forces they have and have to watch the back door too. Sixty percent of the targets on the list could not be exploited by Russia; they are too far east sir”

General Shaw leant forward.

“The question was about a theoretical Russian Chinese pact by rebels or terrorists… who the hell said anything about their Governments and armed forces getting involved?”

“General, what would be the point of merely blowing up our cities and bases. If we didn’t retaliate militarily once we identified the origins of the weapons we would starve them to death. There is a saying I once heard “Do not intimidate a strong enemy, either destroy him or leave him the hell alone,” replied Scott.

“General Tsun Tsu, in The Art of War?” queried the general.

Scott could not help but grin widely.

“Actually sir it was Captain James T. Kirk, in the Starship Enterprise,” corrected Scott to the first laughter heard in the room for many hours’.

The president nodded to Scott once the last chuckle had ceased.

“I accept your connection between this Peridenko and terrorism as credible. I do not feel however that there is anything to connect his government or the People’s Republic of China. Many ex reds went rogue when they got laid off. So far we have seen nothing to suppose that this is anything more than terrorism.”

After thanking Scott and waiting until he had left the room he addressed the staff.

“I think we can take it as read that the Chinese are behind the satellite thing and that carrier of theirs is the reason. If that sonofabitch in the previous administration hadn’t been so damn scared of them not buying from us this may not have happened. His party may blame our proposed ICBM shield as the reason for their recent nuclear and conventional step-up but I think it was him showing too much soft underbelly. Does anyone here see anything that connects the Chinese carrier with these suitcase bombs?”

With a negative reply from them he called for his State Department to issue some notes to the Russian and Chinese ambassadors before sending everyone home to bed.

Over in England at this time the post operational debrief material had just arrived on the commissioners desk.

Once again Scott arrived late for work although this time he not only had an excuse; he also had a note from the Director of the CIA, Terry Jones himself.

Scott’s first stop was the bosses office.

“I understand that despite the hour… and lack of time, you sold part of your theory?” Max said, once he had waved Scott to a seat and got them both coffees.

“The device in London went a long way toward firming it up. Do you want the full skinny, not just my bit?” said Scott.

“I already know the Chinese have a blue water Navy in the form of a modern carrier group we never suspected. The geeks are on triple time doing an audit of all intelligence agencies computer systems. FBI are getting the ducking boards ready for the witch-hunt that will surely cometh and we are at DefCon 4”, was Max’s reply.

“We have been at 4 since September 11, if not in word then in deed” taking a sip of his coffee Scott went on.

“That London business is still running but the president is unwilling to take the next step without evidence that this is not just the work of a crazy ex spook. By that I mean declaring war on someone. However, the ambassadors from both countries are being handed ‘Just so long as you know we know’ notes. All units worldwide are to increase their readiness for action, but now that we know the President feels that will be the end of it, officially anyway. I wasn’t party to most of what was said but every location on the O’Connor stuff has been warn… ” The ringing of Max’s phone interrupted him mid-sentence.

“Reynolds?” Max listened for a minute before replacing the receiver and grabbed his jacket.

“I have to go to a briefing of department heads; we just jumped all the way up to DefCon 2. It would seem the Brits got a solid link between the Kremlin, the killing of some rookie English Bobbies and the group planning to blow up London. Finish your coffee Scott, the Director wants you in his office soonest”. Scott was beginning to wish he had called in sick.

“Wrap a rubber band ‘round my waist and call me yo-yo” He looked at his watch, the traffic was going to be a sonofabitch!

The sound of the shower awoke Svetlana and it took a few moments to recall where she was. After a few seconds more she slid from between the sheets and stretched. According to the clock on the wall she had slept for eight hours’. Looking down at the foot of the bed she saw the towel and blankets, recognising them for what they where she shook her head and smiled before gathering and folding them.

She looked herself up and down in the full-length mirror on the rear of the wardrobe door before opening the door to the bathroom a crack. The steam issuing from the shower cubicle would mask the lack of makeup she decided and striding in she opened the cubicle door. The waft of cooler air caused Constantine to turn hurriedly and wipe water clear of his eyes in alarm. Svetlana was stood there naked. He opened his mouth to protest but he saw the look in her eyes. The amorous look in them almost made him look over his shoulder to see who it was really directed at and despite the warmth of the moisture laden air her nipples were growing hard and proud before his eyes.

“I don’t think this is a very good idea” he told her as firmly as he could. Svetlana looked down his body before looking back up into his eyes with a smugly satisfied smile playing on her lips.

“Apparently you do, sir”. Stepping into the cubicle she pulled closed the door behind herself and with one hand on his chest pressed him back against the far wall of the shower and looking him in the eyes with a smouldering look. In an equally firm voice she said.

“I have never gone to a hotel room with a man without our both having at least three orgasms before I left it, and I don’t aim to start dropping my standards … so I am now going to do to you, what young Jubi thought I was going to do to him.”

She knelt before him in the shower but her eyes remained looking upwards into his as she took his erection deep into her mouth and cupped his balls in her left hand whilst the thumb and index finger of the right encircled him and began an up and down motion. Less than a minute later the Russian air force surrendered totally to a mere naked civilian in a two star hotel in Hampshire.

The north Pacific has very little in common with the south Pacific other than co-ownership of half a title. There are no warm, gold sanded beaches or semi-clad beauties with natural tans evident anywhere.

Currently moving at 15 knots, 600ft below the surface the Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Commanche was electronically sniffing away for a scent of their quarry. Diverted from her mission to boldly map the cold-water currents where no one had mapped before, along the east coast of the American continent. Actually it had been done several times before and until their president honoured the Kyoto agreement, the world began to educate itself, pull in the reins on all forms of pollution, and then it would be done again and again as global warming altered the way of things. At least that was the opinion of Dr David Bowman, who was not at this moment a happy man. The oceanographic survey on which he was working was on a tight schedule. The skipper, Captain Joe Hart, had assured him that the detour they were making would still leave them with plenty of time to return and complete the job. However, five hours’ later a message was received and they had gone to DefCon 2. They were still heading for the area the detour directed them at but no explanation from the Navy ashore as to why they were on an increased alert state that was last implemented during the Cuban missile crisis. It would have helped had the skipper told him what was at the end, what was so important as to pull them off the task he had been contracted to perform.

Joe Hart on the other hand was more than happy to be doing anything but skulking along with a thermometer sticking out the window checking if water molecules were running a temperature. The target was a carrier, believed to be Chinese with a nuclear power plant. His original orders were to find and evaluate. That had now changed to all of the above … plus, shadow. That was more like real sailor man work. He ordered the boat to slow to five knots and come up to 70 feet in order to stream the floating antennae. He expected a general sitrep to follow behind the issuance of the DefCon step-up; no one liked being kept in the dark.

Two other submarines were also involved with the carrier group. HMS Hood, a Trafalgar class submarine had cut short its visit to Taipei and was heading northwards on a bearing of 070’. The other was an Akula class Hunter Killer. The Gegarin had orders not to let anyone near its charge, the carrier. She was heading 180’ and rather closer to the Commanche than she was to the Mao.

There were also some fairly un-warlike looking vessels too, seventeen deep sea trawlers of the People’s Republic sporting items acquired by means of espionage over the recent years. One gadget masked the ships sound by blowing bubbles into the sea to mask the propeller noise by an appreciable extent. The second was the ATA, Advanced Towed Array, essentially a highly sophisticated microphone trailing behind the ship to a distance where the degradation of its performance by the ships noise was greatly reduced.

The Hood and the Commanche also possessed the ATA but not the Prairie Masker system.

It was a bit of a game of one-upmanship, staying ahead of the opposition by research and innovation, with a little help from skulduggery when the opportunity arrived.

For a time in the early 80’s the Warsaw Pact submarine fleet held that tactical advantage with a new towed array which was a big improvement for them and it was more than a match for the West’s towed array of the time.

In 1982, following a very publicised conventional role of her part in the Falklands War, the Royal Navy nuclear powered Hunter Killer submarine HMS Conqueror re-entered port flying the white ensign of course, and also the skull and cross bones, denoting she had sunk an enemy warship (the cruiser Belgrano). That flag also carried a small dagger in one corner which most took to mean she had been actively engaged in a Special Forces operation, landing Special Boat Service and Special Air Service troops on an enemy coast. However this is not quite correct as she had been way up north at the time Argentina invaded, and picking pockets like the Artful Dodger in Russian waters. Fitted with an ingenious contraption of US design the British vessel had stalked a Russian spy ship, carefully clamping a robot arm of some description to its towed array before cutting through the tow and stealing off into the night with her prize. The US device had been designed to sever the tow in such a way as to leave the Russian’s believing another vessel passing over it had cut it by accident, or that it had snagged on a wreck somehow.

Great lengths are taken, at great expense, to be too quiet to be heard by the other guy whilst being able to hear him.

USS Commanche and HMS Hood’s propellers cost considerably more than fishing boats and the top secret method of their construction had once put those years ahead of the Soviet Union in terms of quieting the ship. However, one day in the 1980’s a German traitor had sold that secret to the opposition. The west though had still managed to stay ahead with other innovations. The noise from the pumps on their power plants for instance, were mere whispers compared with Russian and Chinese boats.

The two western submarines were generating noise but remarkably little considering their complex makeup of machine parts and size as they moved through the water. Rubber panels assisted in muffling the noise of their operation, and depth helped too. The Russian Akula however could dive much deeper than its opposite numbers, yet had not mastered the art of near silence.

Three weeks before at the Gold crew’s pre cruise party. Captain Hart had been almost affable to Dave Bowman. It had been the first time he had met the captain and the crew he would spend the next six months with. As a last minute replacement for a colleague with appendicitis he had been introduced and then abandoned by someone from the Admirals staff. When the youngster’s antics had got too boisterous for the old folks, everyone over twenty-six had gravitated outside beside the hotel pool and away from the too loud music. Although Dave Bowman owed his living to the sea he knew little of submariners or their expensive charges.

Joe Hart had chatted away to him about the subject that had fascinated him ever since he had seen a rerun of Voyage to the bottom of the sea in the first grade. The stealth of his vessel was a matter of intense pride to the captain.

“The secret of successful naval warfare was once to have the best radar to see over the horizon and sonar to see below the waves.” He had told Dave.

“Man is fiendish in his counter-weapon inventiveness. He has learnt to go beyond merely finding a defence against his enemy’s weapons; he can now kill him with them.” They had sat in comfy sun loungers staring across to the water beyond the lights of the city below.

“The battle winners of yesteryear if flagrantly used today will only assist the enemy in his quest to find you first and kill you. A popular defence in nature is to be bigger and louder than the other dinosaur, wolf, bear or tiger. The less ferocious and less large just get out of the way faster or hide a lot better.” Dave had smiled at the captains’ analogy.

“The big guys hog the top of the food chain while the small but sprightly and the better at hide-and seek are hardly likely to become masters of the universe are they?” Signalling for refills for them both he had looked at Dave with an ironic smile.

“Yet here we are, king of the hill, top of the food chain, call it what you will, but the way we stay alive is to be quieter than the other guy and have smaller, more compact weapons of war with which to bash each other over the head with. It’s all rather un-natural really isn’t it?” Those had been possibly the only reasonably friendly words the captain had spoken to him.

The complex system he was sat before was powered down when the detour began. Not that power was a problem, the USS Commanche’s power plant could run a small town, but with no point in continuing the readings

It was just one extra piece of unnecessary noise.

Another vessel abroad on those frigid seas was crewed by a retired English couple whom had sold their home and sailed from the UK in a 30’ Ketch to visited kin in Australia and New Zealand. They had topped up their supplies in a small fishing village near the northern tip of Japan two days before. Homeward bound (ish) via a few dozen places they had never seen before. Their next stop was Alaska where they would then turn south for the Panama Canal via Canada, California and Mexico.

Captain Hong surveyed his domain for the first time from the bridge of his country’s flagship. Having only arrived four hours’ before he had been busy sorting out the chaos of getting his equally newly arrived crew into their quarters before the business of their training by the relatively small Russian crew began. Even though he was his county's most experienced destroyer captain, this was going to be something like going from roller skates to the steering wheel of a juggernaut overnight. He felt the ship heel over slightly into the wind and turned to look aft over the bridge wing. A twin engine Antonov transport aircraft could just barely be made out by its landing lights turning behind the ship on its approach. This would be his pilot’s first experience of a carrier landing… and none of them were behind the controls. He watched, as the aircraft seemed to stagger and then recover as its Russian pilot earned his keep staying on the correct glide path. If he had believed in God, Captain Hong would have thanked Christ that he had arrived by rotary wing means and not fixed!

Hong knew that he had only eight days after which time they would be at war with a country with six carrier groups in the Pacific. The Russian Admiral Kuznetsov carrier group was already in Chinese waters and they were due to join with the Mao in four days for a joint exercise but he had grave doubts that the time they had to prepare would be enough to match America’s years of carrier expertise. If, and it was a big if, the bombs at Pearl Harbour, San Diego, Sasebo and Yokosuka caught any of the US carriers and their logistics vessels at anchor, then they would only have three carrier groups to tackle. Land based airpower would sink the remainder if they attempted to intervene in the invasion plans of Japan, Taipei and the Philippines. The PLAA had 4000 combat aircraft in place to support the operation. Three regiments of Backfire bombers purchased from the Soviet Union just before the fall of their regime, were all nuclear capable and they were earmarked for carrier hunting. He was banking on those aircraft to cover his ships until they were capable of competent air operations. Which in reality was likely to be several weeks after the first shots were fired despite his having the best sailors his Navy could offer?

Once the US Seventh Fleets teeth were pulled China would have free rein to do as it wished. Travelling by rail was the never activated reactor built for the Ul’yanovsk before her untimely visit to the breakers. Plans were now in hand, using the Ul’yanovsk’s blue prints to begin building another carrier for the PLAN, but it would be two years at the earliest before she would be launched.

“Do you approve of your new command comrade?” Hong turned to face Vice Admiral Putchev.

“Pardon me for not welcoming you aboard but we are short-handed and there was a problem in engineering.” Said the Russian who had a smudge of oil on the side of his neck and wore under his greatcoat a pair of coveralls that had seen much service.

Hong kept his face from showing surprise, firstly the man’s command of his language was very good and secondly no command level officer in his navy would ever consider getting his hands dirty on such a task.

“I was unaware that you were a qualified ships engineer comrade Admiral?” He received a broad grin in return.

“I am baffled by the workings of my daughters motor scooter engine Captain. My engineering staff required extra muscle rather than genius and I happened to be passing.” And that would definitely never happen on a PLAN warship.

Twisting to peer at his new home, Lieutenant Fu Shen was aboard the second Antonov carrying pilots to the ship. The young officer was actually thrilling at the prospect of his first landing on a carrier, unlike his squadron commander, Major Lee who was sat bolt upright in his seat and looking neither left nor right. His knuckles were white where they gripped his knees. After a nightmare journey just to get this far they would have a few hours’ sleep before flying off in the early hours’ to practice carrier landings on a very forgiving military air station. The Russian Naval Air Station runway was equipped with arrester wire gear on the coast near Ust’-Kanichtsk. Whilst the Mao group sailed in circles for four days the brand new air group would train. They had two days in which to become sufficiently skilled at landing in both day and night in the relatively safe surroundings of the rock steady practice ground on land before practising the same thing on the Mao.

The Antonov lurched in the air as the unpredictable updrafts toyed with it. Lt Fu Shen clapped his hands with glee whilst opposite him Major Lee closed his eyes and wished he had joined the infantry.

No matter where you are in the world, if you are in the British Army and not already engaged in some actual work, 0815hrs means muster parade. At 0810hrs the tuneless bellow of

“Right then… Get-outside-and-get-fell-in!” will reverberate through barrack rooms. The sick, lame and lazy, as all those on restricted duties are known, are also required to be there unless they have a ‘sick chit’ from the MO, medical officer, expressively excusing them. WO2s, the Company, Squadron and Battery Sergeant Majors ‘Call the Roll’ and lord have mercy on any latecomers and those absent without reasonable excuse! Christmas day is the WOs tonsils only day off.

At this official start of the Army’s working day all matter of business is dispensed, from soldiers being shouted at and reported for ‘dirty boots’ (not polished and buffed in the past 15 minutes) to the verbal notification of the day’s events. ‘Postings Out’ and courses are also announced despite the fact that all of the above will have been posted on the Company/Squadron/Battery notice board outside the Company Office the previous afternoon in Company Orders/Daily Detail.

At 0810hrs on this rather drizzly morning, CSM Probert was making his way from the Orderly room where he had been summoned from the Warrant Officers and Sergeants Mess a half hour before. The schedule posted the previous day had changed in a way that caused him concern. The young non-commissioned officers of Section Commanders Course number 95 were already outside their accommodation block.

Having finished the ‘Patrolling’ phase of the course they were due to begin ‘Defence’ in two says time. Today was intended to be one of instruction in Field Engineering, use of explosives in the preparation of trenches. The Duty Student called the Course to properly at ease. With his millboard in his left hand Colin wheeled to face them and drove his feet in.

“Course… Course ‘shun!” Colin Probert looked along the ranks to check everyone was there rather than subject the paperwork on his millboard to the elements by formerly calling the Roll.

“Hands up anyone who wants to go home?” This was the way Colin always finished his muster parades and the students always grinned and put their hands up. Any that did not he would accuse of being “Brown nosing wankers who would fit in well in the RAF”, (Royal Air Force). Today his use of it immediately caught them all off guard.

“Tough shit people, you are all going home, as are myself, the other instructors and the schools staff included”. There were puzzled expressions amongst the students and their instructors, who were at the rear.

“I do not know what is going on so don’t bother to ask. Those of you who require travel warrants, and that will be all of the students, the Duty Student will collect them from the Orderly Room at 0930hrs and distribute them. You will return all Course equipment to the stores, clean, by 1145hrs.” He looked at the puzzled expressions on the faces of all before him, including ‘Fanny M’.

“I want all kit outside ready to go, bedding stripped, sheets, pillow cases and mattress covers laid out, lockers open, wash house and rooms cleaned, ready for inspection by 1415hrs… Do you all understand?” Pausing to look at them all for a second before reminding them there was an officer on parade, Senior Lieutenant Bordenko, and barked.

“Dis… miss!” The students turned to the right and saluted before they hurried away chattering to one another about whatever the hell was going on.

As the instructors began to approach to ask questions Colin called out to a bemused Lt Bordenko to please wait, he told the instructors to wait in the WO and Sgt's Mess where he would brief them on what he did know in ten minutes.

Colin went over to Nikoli Bordenko and saluted.

“Sir, our Ministry of Defence has ordered that you and all the other visiting Russian service personnel with British units be detained prior to repatriation back to Russia. I am to escort you to the Officers Mess where an Officer will accompany you to your room whilst you pack. He will remain with you until your escort arrives from the RMP, that won’t be for a couple of hours’ yet.” Nikoli looked bewildered.

“Does this have any connection with this facility closing, Colin?” After looking about to ensure there was no one in earshot to hear him address an Officer by first name, he led Nikoli toward the Officers Mess.

“Fanny mate, I haven’t heard much more than I told the lads, but I do know that the Queen has signed the War Order which permits the calling up of reservists, so I would have to guess that it’s all connected.” Nikoli was deep in thought for a moment.

“I have a cousin, second cousin actually and we are not too well acquainted. I believe there was bad blood between our Grandmothers” he offered in explanation.

“But he is in London, the deputy military attaché” Nikoli stopped as the Mess came into sight.

“If I could be permitted to telephone the Embassy then perhaps I could tell you more?” Colin smiled and shook his head.

“As it may well be that our countries are going to be at odds I have to say no fucking way. The lines would probably be tapped and I’d get in the shit.” Colin removed his beret before entering the Officers Mess and stood inside the entrance.

“I cannot see it coming to a shooting match, but you take care of yourself sir,” he said earnestly.

“You Para’s think the whole deal is jumping out of an aeroplane, and once you land you stand around looking butch and expecting the press to be there. That’s why Para’s are so piss easy to spot, they are the only items of ‘shrubbery’ presenting their best profile,” he added smiling. It was a favourite dig of his at the airborne brethren and had used it often on Nikoli over the past six weeks. An officer was approaching from the dining room and Nikoli told Colin.

“Fuck off and shag a sheep Sarn’t Major,” smilingly referring to the unofficial nickname other units had for Colin's regiment. They shook hands firmly as Nikoli’s new escort arrived and then went their separate ways.

As Colin made his way toward the WOs and Sgt’s Mess an unmarked car with Army index plates drove past him from the direction of the Guardroom. Inside were a uniformed Royal Military Police captain of the female variety and an RMP staff sergeant. Colin looked at his watch and hoped he would make as good time back to London as they had coming up.

The rest of the morning was a busy one. Not only had the instructors to supervise the student’s cleaning and return of kit to the stores and the hand-over of the accommodation, they had their own to do also.

Colin was having a sandwich and a mug of tea in the Mess at NAAFI break when a Mess waiter passed him a message. Going to the entrance Colin saw an RMP lieutenant and sergeant waiting. Halting at attention before the RMP lieutenant he noticed the officer was looking vexed.

“Sir, company sarn’t major Probert… you sent for me sir?”

“CSM… you escorted Lt Bordenko to the officers Mess after muster parade, is that correct?” he was asked.

“Is there a problem sir?”

The officer ignored the question.

“Did he say anything to you on the way?”

Colin immediately thought the Russian had managed to ring his cousin.

“Sir, he said he wanted to ring the Russian Embassy, his cousin is the deputy military attaché he said. I told him he couldn’t, sir.” As the RMP was still looking troubled, Colin added.

“I’m sure his escort can sort out any queries if you call them.”

“That’s just it CSM,” the lieutenant replied,

“We are his escort!”

The wash bays at Fort Hood were in constant use as the AFVs and other vehicles of the curtailed Exercise ‘Cherokee Lance’ washed away the dirt and grime collected off the Texas countryside.

The smallest self-contained unit in the present make-up of things in a modern western army is the Company or Squadron. Dual redundancy is a fairly modern buzzword that means common sense in reality. In military personnel terms it means that at least two ranks below should be capable of taking over the more senior role. This morning that was in temporary evidence as there was not an officer in sight. Whilst the commissioned officers were being briefed, the warrant and non-commissioned ranks were cracking on with the job, and as usual making a generally better job of it

Officers only stay in one job for a while before moving on, they are the jack of whatever trade they had performed. NCOs on the other hand spent longer in each role; they are the masters at knowing what needs to be done and the short cuts to get there quickest.

Sgt Rebecca Hemmings, REME, stepped back from her armoured recovery vehicle and tossed the bass broom she had been using on those hard to shift stains. Her detachment had replaced two engine packs during the exercise and she had a feeling that the defective items would be needed sooner rather than later. She wanted get the packs into their mobile workshop soonest, before everyone was fallen out to their beds. It would save a couple of hours’ in the long run. She was tightening a section of cam, camouflage net, where the wire tie securing it had come undone when a hand brushed away a lock of hair that had escaped from under her beret.

M/Sgt Bart Kopak had been light heartedly pursuing Becky since the Brits had arrived, with limited success. It was not that Becky didn’t like Bart but she was married to a Petty Officer aboard HMS Cuchullainn, first of the Hero class destroyers. Their married quarters down the road at Catterick camp was frequently absent one of them, but that did not make their marriage any less secure. Becky knew her husband would keep his trousers on in Singapore and Manila during his present voyage and she would do the same. Kopak however, was apparently persistent if nothing else.

“Does Mrs Kopak know you act like this?” Swatting away his hand, she was tired, dirty and in no mood to be tactful. Bart had not meant it to seem a predatory act. He intended to ask her if she wanted to join himself and his buddies at a local watering hole the next day, the errant lock of hair had seemed very becoming. If he hadn’t been so tired himself he would not have allowed the impulse to become action. Before he could explain that the only Mrs Kopak in his immediate family was his mother, there were two thuds behind him as two members of Becky’s section jumped down from their vehicle. Not liking what they had heard in Becky’s angry retort they were prepared to give whoever was responsible a kicking.

Becky saw the look in Bart’s eyes and realised that he had not intended to cause upset. The arrival of her two soldiers, whose entrance was only lacking capes and underpants worn over blue tights, made her step toward them with both hands raised.

“Whoa guys… just a misunderstanding!” As her would-be rescuers gave Bart warning stares and departed, Becky turned to Bart.

“Look, I am flattered by the attention but I am married, happily, and not interested Bart.”

He looked down at her hands.

“You don’t wear any ring’s Becky.”

She pulled on the cord around her neck and fished out her I.D tags. A tiny velvet bag was strung on the same cord.

“I’m a mechanical engineer Bart, at best they would get damaged and at worst I’d lose a finger,” she explained before tucking them back out of sight.

“I was just going to ask if you and your mates wanted to join my guys and hoist a few tomorrow.” Bart’s use of the rather English term ‘mates’ made her smile. It was rather like a well brought up person trying to say ‘fuck’ for the first time and sound cool.

“If we can get the time we will be there, no promises though and just a pint or two, ok?”

“OK!” Bart replied, “Just a brew or two, see you there”, and left smiling.

“New contact, bearing 327’, range 14600 yards captain” the sonar department reported. The Hood had been using a fast moving container ship to mask any noise she made on her way north. Two hours’ previously they had come up to periscope depth to investigate a Chinese trawler that was barely making seaway yet not trawling, despite abundant fish nearby. The captain intended to inform the Admiralty tonight that he suspected the innocent looking ship was acting as a covert picket; she had definitely been towing some form of array. Under an awning on her deck had sat what looked very much like a second array being worked on. Photographs taken through the periscope had been examined and showed it looked scarily similar to their own. The submarines captain did not know it but had the picket ship not strayed over a Russian mud bank, uncharted on their Chinese charts, he would never have been alerted to their presence. Striking the bank had damaged the array and the mud churned up by the picket in its recovery of it had clogged its copied Prairie Masker system’s intakes, rendering the trawler detectable.

“Captain, classify new contact as Sierra four, Haizhou class destroyer.” Purchased from Russia where it was known as a Sovremenny class. 4,480 tons, top speed of 32.7 knots, two RBU-1000 ASW launchers, MG335 sonar on the bow and her own ASW helicopter. Although a multi-role surface combat ship she was a sub hunter to be respected thought Hood’s captain.

“New contact bearing 322’, range 17000 yards, Captain”. Looking up at the plot being updated constantly, they had detected the Haizhou, a Chinese warship, departing the Russian Sea of Okhotsk and heading north. By rights this new contact should be either another PLAN vessel or a merchanter.

“Captain, classify new target as Sierra five, Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, sir.” Curiouser and curiouser thought the captain. “Captain, four new contacts, bearing from 321’ to 333’, mixed ranges, nearest 17400 yards”. The ships were all being masked from the submarine by the island chain of the Kuril’Skiye Ostrova until they emerged from the channel between the two northern most clusters. According to the latest intelligence reports the Kuznetsov was supposed to be in port at Arkhangel.

Picking up the handset beside him he asked them to confirm Sierra fives classification.

“Sir, we double checked before informing you, classification is confirmed sir.” Replacing the receiver he turned to his Number One, “Well bugger me ‘Jimmy the One’” calling his First Lieutenant by the age old ratings nickname.

“Either someone dug a canal from the Barents Sea without telling me or someone has screwed up big time.”

The same old faces were present from the previous meeting, all looked slightly more rested, however there was more tension present in the air.

The notes passed to the Russian and Chinese Embassy’s had so far not been responded to by either Government. The United States Ambassador in Moscow had gone to the Kremlin to seek an audience with the Russian Premier and been kept waiting for seven hours’. Finally he had been seen by a junior minister and left angered by the man's insulting remarks regarding the American accusations. As there was apparently no hope of resolving the matter quietly a special session of the UN Security Council had been called and the USA had publicly accused the Russian Federation of assisting international terrorists with nuclear weapons. The Russian delegate had sat in defiant silence throughout. Faced with the old cold war response of the Russians and the high tech attack on her intelligence satellites the United States and NATO had gone onto a war footing. This was as much in the hope that the act would bring Russia to its senses as it was to prepare for possible hostilities. It was not to be though as evidently long term subversive operations had that morning seen distinctly unfriendly parties replacing the democratically elected heads of government in the Czech Republic, Rumania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary and The Ukraine in violent coups. In Poland, Belorussia and Lithuania, fighting was still going on after abortive coup d'état’s in those countries. International news agencies in Russia had been raided and all foreign journalists detained. A roundup of all foreign nationals had begun; however, emails from individuals had made it out with the news and alerted of a mass call up of reservists. There was silence now as the international phone system had been shut down.

The Iron Curtain was again erect.

General Shaw had informed the president of the receipt, via the British Admiralty, of HMS Hood’s contact report. The Kuznetsov accompanied by two Russian cruisers, the Velikiy and Nakhimov, three Haizhou/Sovremenny destroyers, either Russian or Chinese. Two Udaloy destroyers, nine Krival-1 frigates and five at-sea replenishment ships. HMS Hood had been unable to properly identify each ship due to the appearance of an Alfa class Russian hunter killer submarine and at least one suspected diesel boat. At about the same time as the submarines had been detected seaward of the Hood, sonar buoys had started being dropped by aircraft. Although confident that he was undetected and the other fellows were just being cautious, her captain had elected for caution also and slipped back to shadow at a distance but still inside the covert picket ship screen.

The USS Commanche would be in the last known area of the new Chinese carrier in 24hrs. As that was where the ships reported by Hood were also apparently heading, there would be two very capable vessels available for offensive operations if necessary against those two groups. General Shaw went on to add that the Royal Navy also had three surface warships in the Pacific waving the flag for the British armaments industry. The brand new Invincible class small carrier HMS Prince of Wales, with her Harriers, a squadron sized Royal Marine detachment, Merlin helicopters and the new naval variant of the Apache gunship. The equally new multi-role destroyer HMS Cuchullainn and the frigate HMS Malta along with an oiler and replenishment ship. The Admiralty understandably wanted to recall the ships soonest but Washington had requested that they remain in the area for the time being, at least until China could be confirmed as not being actively allied to the Russian aggressive moves. The Admiralty had responded by stating, quite reasonably, that as the US Seventh Fleet was over twice the size as the entire Royal Navy, they were hardly going to appreciably boost the available firepower in the Pacific. They would be sorely needed in the Atlantic if it came to a shooting war. Britain’s PM had predictably over-ruled the Admirals, mistaking largess for statesmanship so the ships were now attached to Seventh Fleet. The Brits were to make all speed to Japan to top up their magazines and generally replenish. They would also join with a US Aegis cruiser and additional destroyer and frigate’s to augment their screen before heading north.

North Korea was reported to be quiet and no sabre rattling present there. Its young leader’s ego was a casualty of recent threats to invade the south and use nuclear weapons, because he had been called on it and lost a lot of face when the US Military had responded with a ‘Are you feeling lucky, punk?’ General Shaw saw no reason to reinforce at this time. In the Pacific, homeland and Europe, the general recommended all forces disperse when possible to minimise pre-emptive damage by the terrorist threat. As yet the London device was the only solid evidence that there were 99 other such weapons out there, but he wanted to minimise risk.

The National Guard had been federalised and the first reservists were reporting in. The federalised merchant shipping was arriving in port and as soon as possible the general wanted to implement the pre-set loading plan of war stores for Europe. Although only at division strength the US forces in Germany still had two armoured divisions and one mechanised divisions worth of pre-positioned equipment and the airlift had begun to move out the troops to man them.

NSA reported that the subversive program at large in their satellite Intel system had been identified, however it appeared to be booby trapped by a virus which would activate if the program were deleted or isolated and bypassed. It could be purged from the system but it would take time. On the positive side, federal warrants had been issued for the apprehension of two NSA employee’s currently at large having failed to turn up for work. The NSA director added ruefully that both were Chinese American citizens and both had access and opportunity to insert the program, which they now believed to have been in operation for the past 28 months. He added that it was a highly sophisticated piece of work that overlaid harmless images in critical areas. They did not yet know which areas of the globe were affected but so far it appeared that only relatively small areas had been disguised by the program to prevent prying eyes from learning what was really going on.

“Do we know how the Russian carrier came to be the other side of the globe from where our Intel led us to believe it was?” the president enquired.

“It had to have passed through the Bering Straits, in which case we may have screwed the pooch, but I suspect a friendly voice in Panama or Egypt would have dropped a dime on them as it passed through one of those canals. There is an investigation team enroute to Alaska now; we may have been compromised there too as their sensors are not tied into the same system as the satellites, Mr President.”

CIA and FBI both updated the president on the hunt for the devices, which may be out there somewhere. CIA had another item for the president that was a cause of concern.

“Mr President, we may have a problem in the UK” Terry Jones warned him.

“I haven’t heard anything but positive stuff from there, did I miss something?” the president asked.

“Sir, Art Petrucci, head of station has a very reliable source. Do you know of any diplomatic mission the Brits have negotiating with Russia?”

“No, what have you got?”

Once the CIA Director had laid out the information from Petrucci the president was both annoyed and curious

“Who the hell is his source?” Terry wrote it on a piece of paper and folded it before sliding it across. The president burnt the note and crushed the ashes.

“Well thank heaven not everyone of integrity has been replaced over there… keep me posted.” Turning to an aide he forced the man to bend lower as whispered in his ear.

Without change of expression the man left the room.

“General Shaw, please remain behind after this session if you would please… thank you ladies and gentlemen.” And the meeting adjourned.

Whilst Shaw waited patiently the president sat deep in thought for a few minutes collecting his thoughts.

“I now know how Eisenhower felt when France withdrew from NATO.” He said to himself.

“Sir?”

“General Shaw… would you please have some of your staff draw up contingency plans for the possibility of Britain’s declaration of neutrality.”

“There must be some mistake sir… the British have always stood shoulder to shoulder with us. What was the CIA Intel sir?”

“Firstly general, head of station trusts his source in as much as the source does not trust his own premier and has no political axe to grind whatsoever. It also appears that the British PM never envisaged ever being in the position that he does now, with a nuclear world conflict in danger of breaking out. He is reportedly hedging his bets. It seems he can talk the talk but the walk is beyond him.” The president nodded sadly.

“However, I very much doubt he speaks for the majority of his people… what do you think?”

“I have personally witnessed British soldiers drop their personal weapons and set to with the ‘enemy’ with fists on a training exercise, sir”

The president smiled.

“Your troops, general?”

“Hell no sir, the ‘enemy’ were Brits too… they just happened to belong to a different regiment… those guys love a fight!”

“Let us hope that is true of their present governments shadow opposition too!”

“Sir?” asked his senior soldier.

“Nothing general, just thinking aloud… I want the contingency plan to be in the utmost confidence, understood general?”

“Of course sir.”

Having been collected from the Officers Mess at Brecon by a very attractive female captain and silent NCO driver; the trio had driven toward London. Nikoli had chatted pleasantly with the captain and attempted to extract her telephone number, with no success but she had been amused by his attempt.

Pulling into a motorway services area Nikoli had been admiring the Captains shapely rear as it disappeared with its owner and a holdall towards the ladies when the staff sergeant driver had spoken for the first time.

“Even at 12 years old you bored the girls with your chatter Nikoli Bordenko!”

Nikoli was only able to stare at the driver. He spoke perfect Russian and apparently knew him!

Constantine had twisted around in his seat to look at his distant cousin and removed his red RMP beret.

“You are looking well Nikoli, how are your parents?”

“Constantine?”

“As you can see cousin, poor pay has forced me to take a second job,” he joked.

“What are you doing here, are you spying?”

“Nikoli, I have something important to tell you… ”

Alone in his office Premier Chiu was in telephone conference with his opposite number in Moscow. Although there did exist an up to date video conferencing system, the Chinese leader kept secret his inability to operate it unaided. There was no one else present, as it was a private one to one between the two leaders. Another little secret that few were privy to was Chiu’s command of the Russian language.

“My dear friend, I have to say that we were rather disconcerted at the rapid reaction of the West. Your plan called for complete surprise and that has been very obviously lost?”

The voice from Moscow was confident in its reply.

“The situation has started the first cracks in the West, Comrade Chiu, and America is unaware that its allies are already seeking to distance themselves from the coming hostilities,” he did not elaborate on which country or countries, nor how many. He was confident that once Britain turned tail, other NATO signatories would follow suit. He was however discomfited by the Chinese Premiers next statement.

“Be that as it may, with the existing time table the West will be far advanced in its mobilisation by the time we attack. Unless you can suggest some preventative measures I can no longer guarantee my countries support.”

The Russian would have made as fine a poker player, as he was an accomplished chess player. His voice revealed nothing of the kick he had felt in his stomach. He had allowed for this contingency but had not wished to put that plan into action.

“Comrade Premier, were the plan advanced by four days would that assist to reassure you of its continued viability… As the cat is out of the bag so far as my country is concerned, we were already able to begin mobilisation. I am sure that there is nothing to alert the West toward yourselves. They have not made a connection between the significance of the Mao and the delivery of the terrorist device in London, indeed they do not yet known where the Mao originated. Their satellites are still unreliable and they know nothing of our combined forces preparing to strike in the Pacific.” he assured his opposite number.

“I believe that three or four days would be advantageous in destroying those military targets that would still be occupied with reporting troops and equipment.” conceded the Chinese leader. “There is I agree little to suppose that the alliance of our countries is yet known. As to our forces gathering in the north Pacific, I was informed several hours’ ago that our picket ships have detected a United States Los Angeles class submarine approaching the area. Would you agree that the time has come to ensure our alliance remains secret?”

“I would indeed,” agreed the Russian.

“Good, your submarine Gegarin has been alerted and is now stalking the American,” replied Beijing.

“Then we should sink it before it has anything to transmit back to its fleet.”

The Chinese Premier smiled maliciously.

“I agree”.

Scott cleared Customs and after a moment saw a board being held that bore his name. After bona fides had been checked by both parties Scott shook hands with the staff member who had apparently drawn the short straw in collecting him at this late hour.

“Flight was delayed out of Chicago, if I could have got the BA flight from Washington I’d have been in over three hours’ ago. No one explained why it was necessary fly to Chicago first, is there a problem?” They left terminal 3 and walked into the English rain. “There may be.” A car pulled up and his escort opened the back door for him, jumping into the front seat himself. Scott was not alone in the back seat, and the driver he had met before.

“Let me get us away from this place and I can fill you in Scott,” Art Petrucci informed him as he checked the mirror and pulled out. The man sharing the back seat introduced himself to Scott and enquired

“Is this your first time in England Mr Tafler?” Scott was surprised. “Yes sir it is, would Mr Petrucci also have been collecting you from the airport or are you here to see me?”

The Englishman smiled.

“Alas I am kept rather too busy of late to have been able to take the luxury of a trip to foreign parts.”

Before reaching the M4 motorway that would take them into London proper their front seat passenger spoke into a radio with a telephone-like handset. Replacing the handset he nodded to Art Petrucci.

“We’re clear, no tail.”

Art pulled over and they swapped places. On the move again and now bound for central London Art gave Scott a rundown of what he had obviously not been privy to before.

“I wanted you to meet this gentleman sat here because you will probably not get the chance again. There have been wind changes that will be a great surprise to you, but I have met the architect of these changes and unfortunately I wasn’t. Terry Jones sent you over here to try and contact the Russian who tipped us off, and it will be no mean feat if you can pull it off. The Russian secret service wants him and so does MI5. That won’t come as a surprise to you… but the Brit spooks handing him over to the Russian’s if they get there first will be!”

Scott looked at the head of station as if he had grown two heads.

“Unfortunately very possible,” the Englishman said.

“Our Prime Minister appears to lack the courage it takes to be the ‘world statesman’ he aspires to be, or as my officers would put it ‘He has lost his bottle, large!’ but I have some information here that may assist you,” he handed over a docket.

“The Brit intelligence services don’t know who you are or that you are in the country, but they know everyone at London station. They may or may not put tails on us so we cannot help you after tonight… . but our friend here can.” Art informed him.

“I took the precaution of withholding certain facts when I briefed the PM following the discovery of the suitcase device” explained Sir Richard Tennant.

“We found only one fingerprint upon the outside of the suitcase that could not be accounted for. A very extensive search of databases has finally tracked it down to one supplied in opening a bank account in Paris, France. The address given is false, as probably is the name; however, there was also a photograph with the application. As you know an unknown female accompanies Major Bedonavich, at least that is what we suppose. Assuming they are no longer in the capital I have had missing person’s reports checked. A bank in London has reported an employee missing. She has no next of kin that are known and a welfare visit by one of their personnel staff found her flat door had apparently been forced sometime recently.”

Their car slowed on a slip road, faster moving cars and goods vehicles whipped past and raised a mist of spray before they joined the London bound traffic on the M4 motorway.

“The flat had been searched I believe and then trashed to cover the evidence of that search.” Sir Richard went on.

“As a precaution the local station recorded it as a crime in the absence of a formal allegation by the lady herself. A scene of crime examiner has attended and lifted some prints. I have had my stations email any photographs of recently missing women between 14 and 80. We have been comparing them to the French bank application photograph. I was alerted when the photograph on the application was found to be that of the young woman in the photograph supplied by her employers when reporting her as a missing person. I have had the marks found at the flat treated as a priority job, the bad news is that one of the marks belonged to an Irish terrorist, very recently dead I am happy to say in the raid in Essex, but there is the possibility that she fell into their hands. I have already heard the orders given regarding her capture.” The commissioners voice lowered slightly. “Young man, the only person whom I would wish that fate on is the man who wished it upon her in the first place.”

Scott began speed reading through the docket before him and came upon the section regarding Christina Carlisle.

“I take it this is not her real name… or is it?” he asked.

“Either she is a girlfriend of the gallant major or she is what you would term as an ‘illegal’, personally I think the chances are more likely that she is the latter of the two.” explained Sir Richard.

Scott opened a buff envelope and several photographs spilled out. “Wow!” he exclaimed in admiration. The policeman was smiling. “Precisely… a little too racy for page three of the tabloids but it would seem either the good major or a previous close friend knows their way around a camera and the fair Miss Carlisle is not the bashful type. That photograph was found with the remainder, in her flat” Scott moved on to the end of the docket.

“I have taken the precaution of arranging your accommodation rather than Art, you will be staying at a rented address along with some help, and there is a hire car in the drive in your name.”

“You will have two of London’s finest with you Scott, we cannot carry firearms but they can. If I were the brain behind this plot I wouldn’t waste the effort of trying to find the major and the young lady, not given that we have already discovered it. However, once you have read the docket fully I think you will agree that Peridenko is one vindictive mother. I would like these two found before his people get them. He and Carlisle may know a lot more” Art informed him.

“The Commissioner has covered a lot of ground in a short time. Miss Carlisle for example is renowned amongst her colleagues for her ability to complete the Times crossword with admirable speed. The answers to five of the clues tomorrow will be ‘Carlisle’, ‘Emperor Constantine’, ‘Whitehall’, ‘OneTwoOneTwo’ and ‘Commissioner’.” Scott knew what Art was getting at but… ?

“The phone number for Scotland Yard in days gone by was rather famous due its often being quoted in the cinema, Whitehall 1212. I agree that it is a long shot but I am open to suggestions,” the commissioner enlightened him.

“If the young lady has time to buy the paper, do the crossword and make the connection, I am hoping she will call. The Information Room operators have been primed to listen for callers named Constantina Carlisle and the like.” He shrugged,

“It’s a bit Boys Own Weekly and Famous Five but the best I could come up with at short notice,” the policeman admitted.

“Who the hell are they?” was all Scott could respond with.

With the exception of normal merchant traffic, much of it travelling at greater rates of knots than their company accountants would like, nothing so far had come to the notice of the USS Commanche. The rumblings of war had the mercantile marines of all nations looking over their shoulders and heading for the relative safety of coastal waters and ports. There was an air of expectancy amongst the crew as they neared the assigned search area. This had been offset by the news they may soon be at war with Russia. Why were they messing with the Chinese instead of the warships of China’s neighbour? The later report of a Russian carrier group being in the region, their only carrier group, had set them polishing the accessible warheads and asking their captains permission to write inane messages on the weapons casings. Joe had acquiesced to their request but insisted on his Exec checking the spelling.

“No one’s going to accuse this boat of launching misspelt profanities in time of war Mister, no sireee!” he had explained with theatrical earnestness.

With no real skills of his own that could assist the crew, Dr Dave Bowman had tired of pacing the length of his tiny-shared quarters and lying on his bunk. Before the rumours of war had reached them he had at least been able to chat with the odd crew member, they were all now far too intent on their tasks to bother with a strange civilian in need of a haircut. Dave had offered his services to the ships cook as a kitchen hand; he was at least no longer starved of human company and was doing something.

In the control room the Exec had the watch. Captain Hart was in his bunk catching some zee’s whilst it was still quiet.

“Con, Sonar… high speed screws approaching on reciprocal course… bearing 183’, range 16000 yards and closing, designated Sierra One Five, classify as Krivak surface warship, estimate speed as 27 knots, sir”

The Exec had just looked down at the plot and decided to call the captain when the sonar operator spoke again.

“Con, sonar, aspect change on Sierra One Five… vessel is turning hard to starboard… vessel has now reversed course sir.” Now what was all that about wondered the Exec and cancelled calling his captain.

“Sonar, Con… keep an eye on that guy, report as soon as he does anything screwy again.”

“Sonar, aye sir.”

Fifteen minutes later and the Krivak turned again; its screws thrashing the water as it raced in their direction once more. This time the Exec did call the captain. Joe Hart looked at the plot and looked as bemused as his Exec as the Krivak turned about again and raced away. Joe was about to ask if anything else had happened.

“Transient! Transient! Transient… torpedoes in the water close astern!” the sonar shack shouted the warning.

“Full ahead flank, launch counter measures, hard a-port and make your depth one hundred feet!” shouted Joe. The Exec slammed his palm onto the button sounding general quarters. The blaring klaxon instigated a tumble of bodies leaving their cots and running towards their action stations. In the galley, Dave Bowman gaped in shock at the noise that tore at his nerves.

Several things were running through Joe’s mind, the first being that they had apparently been detected some time ago, the second was that they had been suckered into looking in one direction. The third was that it was going to take too long to accelerate to their full 22knot speed from 9 knots.

The bow of the submarine was rising and the deck heeling over when the first of two torpedoes launched by the Russian Akula detonated against the USS Commanche’s single screw.

In the galley Dave Bowman was thrown off his feet by the terrific impact and drenched in hot fat. He was screaming in pain when the second warhead struck amidships.

Still 580 feet short of the depth ordered by her captain the USS Commanche’s hull and bulkheads collapsed and the sea rushed in and claimed her.