From Commander Daniel Spokes’ perspective inside the enclosed jeep, F Squad’s military base outside of Dornock appeared like a ghost kingdom out of the mist.
‘One mile,’ Spokes announced into the intercom, his voice barely above a breath.
Behind him, a convoy of jeeps bumped and rolled over the bracken-covered hillside. Four in all. The bulk of the Squad, returning from a mission. Above them floated a Lynx MK9A military helicopter, matching their speed and looking like a sinister Zeppelin tethered to their shells.
The Lynx would have provided a quicker route to the base, but its rotors would have obliterated any evidence that could exist there. And that was Spokes’ mission. To see if the recent unwanted visitors to the base had left any clues to their identity behind.
More of the base materialized, as the wind blew at the fog. Its high perimeter walls now clearly visible.
Ten of his men had been at the base. All now dead.
He had seen the footage of the attack and he knew already that the attackers were seasoned. Even with the element of surprise, it was unimaginable for the occupants of one jeep to have taken the base with such speed. But as he played and periodically paused the footage before leaving, that’s exactly what he saw.
His men’s deaths were a tragedy, but Spokes’ emotions were tightly in check, a dividend of being one of the most highly trained men in the British army. Although, technically speaking, F Squad was not the army at all. Indeed, if you had to be really technical, the Squad was off-book, its existence denied by the British government. Funding came from a black budget seen, as Spokes understood, by fewer than a handful of men in the country. They were the paramilitary unit of British military intelligence. Less than thirty men. All single: no dependants and no attachments.
His role was now to remove evidence of the armed drones F Squad maintained at Ultra before the Ministry of Defence regulars arrived, and then to pursue, apprehend and eliminate the attackers.
Spokes’ father had been a regular in the British army stationed in Belfast. Sitting in the hallway of their house were an umbrella stand, a coat rack and the telescopic mirror his father used to check his car for bombs each morning. Life was war, and either you were prepared or you died.
They were less than a mile away now and he began running through the mental checklist he had for all operations: sniper sweeps, securing perimeters, splitting ground forces to divide any enemy still inside. Then the bomb search, in case the attackers had planted IEDs for the search team. Only then, would the investigation begin.
‘Halt,’ said Spokes.
The convoy immediately decelerated and then stopped within a few hundred yards of where Spokes had given the order.
The voice of Simon Myers, Spokes’ number two, squawked over the intercom.
‘Do you have contact?’
‘Just sit tight,’ breathed Spokes.
He twisted his head to get a better view of the raised guard posts that made up the four corners of the perimeter chain-link fence.
The corners were all empty, other than the one at the north-west, where a lifeless body hung, half in and half out of the enclosure.
It was not the gruesome aftermath of the attack that had Spokes’ attention. He was looking for something else: the one thing that could tell him the whereabouts of the attackers.
Outside, the only sound was the gentle humming of the engines as they turned over.
Spokes pulled a pair of thermal imaging binoculars from the seat next to him and stared through them at the ground surrounding the base. He could see the fence was breached; a great truck-sized hole was punched clean into the fabric of the enclosure wall.
Spokes kept up his review, aware that his men sat patiently, awaiting his lead. He was not going to rush; their lives were in his hands. Years of instinct had layered themselves into his system, like sediment in a stream, guiding the course and flow of his actions.
Through a gap in the buildings, he could see the smoking wrecks of the drones, their hulking remains collapsed on to the ground. Heat sources flashed on the thermal capture as fires burned amidst the wreckage.
He was making a mental inventory of everything he saw, while still maintaining his search.
And then he saw it: at the rear of the base, on the south side, directly opposite the tarmac approach road that ran into the north gate.
‘OK, Simon, proceed with the sweep. Enter by the north gate.’
An hour later, ten bodies were lined up on the gravel floor of the base.
Spokes didn’t need to wait for the evidence to know this was no ordinary terrorist attack.
First, each casualty had been killed with one clean shot. Ten dead, ten bullets. This was the most telling fact in itself. In a normal terror attack he would have expected an advance guard of one or two suicide bombers, followed by a wave of Kalashnikov-wielding madmen with a spray-and-pray approach to dynamic targeting. Corpses would have been ridden with bullets, and he would have expected to find one or two whose vital organs would have survived the inelegant shower. But there were none. Each man had been killed with a single clean shot.
Second, the weapons his men were carrying were barely spent. That suggested an attack that had the element of surprise and efficient execution. It also suggested a fast-moving enemy.
Third, the weaponized drones housed at Ultra were not completely destroyed. That would have been the goal of terrorists: to put a large enough IED under each of the drones to blow them into a million pieces. But their shells were largely intact. The only damage to them were two clean craters on the top and bottom sides, where perfectly proportioned amounts of C-4 had blown out the guidance and surveillance units housed within the aircraft. The net result was the same, the drones were useless, but the route they took was precise and troubling.
As his men continued to scrub the site for more detail, Spokes walked to his jeep and climbed inside. He picked up his radio and switched on the scrambling device.
‘Base, this is Alpha Four Bravo. We have a potential Code Blue.’
Blue was the code for an attack that was likely to have been perpetrated by a state-backed group in the guise of a terror attack. F Squad knew all about these: they were the unit committing them on behalf of the UK.
Spokes signalled to two of his men to follow him. They walked through the camp to the perimeter fence at the south, pulling the slashed chain-link to one side and walking carefully around the side of the two furrows in the earth.
This was the spot he was searching for when they first arrived.
Spokes nodded to the soldier carrying the digital camera. With a reflective hood to reduce brightness and anti-glare daytime colour reproduction, it was optimized and tested for any conditions. The man pointed it at the tracks running up to the perimeter fence. They were jumbled in places, different ridges mashing into each other, and in other places moisture from the mist had muddied the earth to partially cover them.
‘There. That’s not obscured.’
The route the attackers had taken was unmistakable. The photo would be able to pull an ID off the wheel sufficient to identify the tyre. And if they were in luck, that could lead to a vehicle ID. Spokes knew this was likely the end of the road of their line of enquiry. No vehicles were unique enough that the tyre track could lead them to the vehicle’s users. But it was at least a start.
The soldier took multiple pictures with his camera and then plugged a lead from a satellite phone into the device.
‘Let’s see where these tracks go,’ said Spokes, squinting at the horizon.
Ten minutes later, two jeeps were moving, following the trail across the moors heading north. In the front vehicle, Spokes peered out through the binoculars through the fog ahead of him. They were travelling at twenty miles an hour, a crawl for the fast-moving vehicles, but it was as much as Spokes would risk lest he lose track of the tyre marks ahead of them.
They were three clicks from Camp Ultra. As they drove, Spokes was feeling more and more uneasy. He looked down again at the map open on his lap. They were leaving the known area of the Highlands, identified and measured by a dense sea of blue whirls and spidery lines. What lay beyond was blank space: a simple oasis of white paper, like the printer had jammed and left the rest of its job unfinished.
There was nothing out there. Nothing. And that meant that it was most likely a trap. It was the perfect place. The mist limited visibility to less than ten feet. Their attackers could be waiting in ambush right ahead, and he wouldn’t know of it until they were on top of him.
Spokes shifted uneasily. He knew he needed to leave half his men with the bodies to protect the base, but the result was that they were now divided, and that left them exposed. Spokes knew who would win a firefight between his men and a handful of armed fighters but casualties were likely on his side. If he could eliminate the element of surprise, he might save some lives.
‘Halt!’ shouted Spokes.
The jeeps slid to a stop together, the last one skidding to the side to avoid hitting the vehicle in front.
Spokes stood up in the front seat and looked out. He then hopped out of the truck, indicating for the others in the following vehicle to disembark.
The tracks ran ahead of them. Spokes approached but slowed down as he saw what was coming. It made no sense, and yet it was there as plain as day.
The tracks simply disappeared.
The truck had vanished into thin air.
Spokes looked around in confusion and then walked back to his jeep and picked up the radio.
He was about to get back in the vehicle when he saw something flash on the horizon.
Spokes lifted his binoculars up and peered through them. He could see nothing at first, the mist hanging low to the ground and effectively blanketing the light source. Spokes waited, his eyes never leaving the spot where he had seen it. And then a gust of wind shifted the fog, causing it to drift, and he saw it clearly for the first time.
It was a box, the size of a household refrigerator, sitting in the middle of the moors.