Robert Waterman’s phone buzzed.
He reached with his eyes closed, patting the side table by his bunk to locate it.
It was a physical battle to open his eyelids, but he managed a squint, staring at the blurred letters of the message as he held the phone directly over his face.
And then suddenly he was awake, as if he’d been doused with a bucket of cold water.
Waterman walked quickly out of the dorm room and along the wide central corridor that ran along the entire circumference of the bunker. Above his head, the barrel-vaulted ceiling glowed bright blue, simulating the time of day.
He pushed open the swinging doors on the side of the corridor and looked around the room, his eyes taking a moment to adjust. The illumination, which came from spotlights mounted on the ceiling and scores of monitors that bled LED lights into the space, made it difficult to see. In front of him, programmers sat at banks of terminals.
An intense-looking man in his thirties appeared out of the gloom, making a beeline for Waterman. He was well over six feet tall and so lean he stooped in on himself, his body curving in like a question mark.
‘How long ago?’ asked Waterman.
‘A few minutes.’
Waterman didn’t ask Ian Hunter why, if that was the case, he had only called him seconds earlier. He had bigger things to occupy his mind, like the fact that if he moved his head too quickly, stars appeared in his peripheral vision. As the leader of the intelligence analysis unit, he was in charge of tracking the unusual surge in electronic chatter over the past twenty-four hours. The intercepts hinted at a player on the scene planning something ambitious. A strike on a hard target like a British military base. And most disturbingly, inside the borders of the UK. The combination of threats had kept him standing sentry without rest before he forced himself to the dorm room.
‘What are we watching?’ asked Waterman. As always, he spoke slowly, his Yorkshire accent wringing the music out of each word.
Waterman’s eyes raked the far wall, where a cinema-sized screen was mounted along with an array of smaller plasma screens that ran down either side. Continuous feeds were relayed on them, blinking on and off in rotation: CCTV from street cameras and private premises, satellite and drone surveillance footage, images hijacked from laptop cameras.
Two storeys above them, a vast network of neural computers sifted through unimaginable quantities of data, siphoned from the databases of British military intelligence and its overseas partners. In some cases, this was with the source’s knowledge and blessing. In some cases, not.
‘One through seven.’
Hunter’s reply was terse. It had been like this all week. Hunter led the computer systems and IT unit and had been, until three days ago, a peer and friend. But Sam Taylor’s breakdown had changed that. The fact that Waterman was only temporarily assuming Sam’s role pending the appointment of a permanent replacement didn’t seem to affect Hunter’s inability to process that he reported to Waterman now.
Hunter pointed to the row of smaller screens on the right side of the cinema screen. On each was an aerial perspective, in monochromatic hues of grey, black and white, of a different military base. The images combined the ghostly clarity of an X-ray with the sharpness of a digital picture. Human figures the size of a thumbnail moved around, and the magnification was strong enough that he could tell which were women and which were men.
Waterman’s eyes rested on another screen below the others, with an ‘8’ inscribed on it. Its feed was of a different sort of facility. Four small hangars were arranged in a neat rectangular pattern, with a single runway splitting them in two.
Waterman was one of the few people who knew the location of the Scottish base known only as Camp Ultra. He knew whose headquarters it was but only learned of what was housed there this week, when his elevation to temporary head brought with it a new, previously unheard-of, level of security clearance.
He glanced at the console and chair sitting on the raised dais nearby, a force of habit. It was Sam’s seat, and Sam always made the operational calls. A neat, meticulous man with an atomic sense of self-containment, Sam would carefully listen to every opinion before giving an order. But the chair was empty now, and today the faces around Waterman were looking at him instead.
Few coveted that chair. Certainly not Waterman, which made Hunter’s ambition even more suspect. The Agency was created as a triage facility: a vault submerged into the foundations of GCHQ to which the top threats to the Realm were directed. A secret division; if the Agency was tracking something, then a potential strike was imminent. It was thinly staffed with the cream of the executive level from the sprawling institution above them. Job stints were intentionally short. Burnout was the eventual fate of everyone at the Agency.
And this period was the most nerve-shredding. This silence, the lull in chatter, was always the herald of an attack.
‘Traffic has picked up again,’ said Hunter. ‘Something’s happening.’
Waterman walked closer to the screens, his heart in his mouth.
‘I see nothing on the feeds.’
The images of each facility had not changed, and tiny figures continued to move around the structures in slow patrols.
‘Pull back the scope of surveillance by five miles,’ said Hunter. ‘Take in the surrounding areas.’
A few faces looked over at Waterman. It wasn’t Hunter’s role to take the lead.
Hunter walked to a console, typed into the keyboard and looked back up at the screens. They all went dark for a few seconds, and then the feeds reappeared, the aerial view now high enough to encompass the terrain encircling each of the British bases. They were barren, empty of activity. Nothing stirred.
‘The attack’s on Ultra,’ said Waterman, his voice barely above a whisper.
He watched as a vehicle rammed the perimeter fence and burst on to the site, scattering the tiny figures. Flashes of white bleached out the screen, and when the images returned, further flashes consumed the aircraft hangars. When the light subsided, the structures were in tatters.
Waterman moved to a desk and picked up a secure phone.
The frenetic movement and bursts of light stopped, and a large, amorphous cloud, smoke from the explosions, now covered the majority of the screen, making it impossible to see what was going on below. Slowly, the smoke thinned and cleared as it was tugged in different directions by the wind, clearing the view of the base.
‘Find Spokes,’ said Waterman into the phone. ‘Tell him F Squad’s base has been attacked.’
There was no longer any motion on the screen. Bodies lay spread out across the ground, not moving. The roofs of the hangars were blown off, revealing the destroyed remains of four drones visible to the satellite. There was no sign of the attackers or their vehicle.
Waterman put down the phone and looked for a second at his hand.
It was shaking.
He knew without lifting his head that everyone was looking at him.
They had just collectively witnessed the worst attack on a military base on British soil.
He suddenly knew how Sam Taylor felt when he climbed the fire escape stairs, walked through the front door of GCHQ and started screaming at the top of his lungs in the car park.