It was that twilight time between late night darkness and early morning grey when Tanner and Jax disappeared from the safe house. They had opened a basement window at the rear of the property and snuck out quietly, so that not even the rest of SCALPEL knew they were gone.
“You two are my forward reconnaissance team and overwatch, so assume the worst of everything,” the Fisherman had cautioned in their briefing the night before. “Assume that this house is being watched and that the opposition already has people at the target location. So I need you two to be stealthy like you’ve never be stealthy before.”
“We’ll be Ninja all the way, boss,” Tanner had said. Jax had rolled her eyes at the machismo on show.
“You are my ace in the hole. They will be going to the wrong place, so I’ve bought you some time to get into position. Get there, embed yourselves and stay hidden. I’ll message when we are on our way,” the Fisherman had said, before leaving them to it. He didn’t need to micro-manage them, they were seasoned professionals who had completed more than a dozen high risk operations each.
That night, Tanner and Jax raided the Ops Room for the kit that they would need. They were keeping it small and as light as possible. Kitted out in dark grey coveralls, skull cap and walking boots, they each carried one small rucksack that held the weapons, surveillance gear and personal kit they had broken down for ease of carry.
At that time of the morning, they did not expect to be seen, but just to make sure, they stuck to the rural routes and off the roads. They had a one-kilometre hike through the forests surrounding the area to get to the den.
The den was a concealed cache hidden deep in the woods and consisted of a buried fibreglass crate that contained escape kits, clothes, weapons and money. In the days before the start of the extraction operation, Luca and Alvarez had concealed the emergency escape kit and vehicles and then ‘pinged’ its location with a GPS locator so that they could find it again. It had originally been designed to be used as the final part of the extraction operation once they had left the safe house. The Fisherman and Sailfish would change clothes here and retrieve the new passports and ID before trekking to the RV to meet with the extraction helicopter. The rest of the team would be getting out via separate individual routes all over Austria.
But that was before things had gotten so fucked up and guys had started shooting at them from the fucking trees, thought Tanner. But that was the way ops went; either smooth as silk, or you were scrambling to improvise.
Tanner had once been an Increment operator for British Intelligence, MI6. He had been one of those people who would be called in to handle deniable jobs for the British. Eventually, he had been double-crossed by his MI6 controller and had gone on the run, only to be captured and interrogated at a cottage in Northern Ireland. Someone he had loved had been murdered in front of his eyes and it was only through the intervention of a covert SCALPEL team and the Fisherman that he had lived to tell the tale. After that, Tanner had been recruited to the Prism and became an integral part of SCALPEL. He had listened to the man who had saved his life when he told him of the future wars and the next level extinction if rogue operators managed to get control of future technology and use it for their own ends. Tanner had been the Fisherman’s soldier ever since; he was a causes man and had found a leader and purpose worthy of his talents.
They reached the den a little after dawn was breaking. It was deep inside the woods and far away from eyewitnesses and country trails. They ignored the location of the buried cache and instead went over to a clear patch of ground a few feet away. Jax pulled out several metal prongs from the ground and started to pull back the forest floor to reveal three road-legal BMW scrambler motorcycles which were concealed under a throw of camouflage netting.
The two operators took a bike each, leaving the third for the evacuation of Sailfish and his minder. Twenty minutes later and with the bikes checked and the den returned to its previous disguise, Tanner and Jax powered the bikes away, heading towards the primary target location – or, as Jax liked to call it, the kill zone.
The day moved fast inside the safe house.
There was work to be done prior to the exchange later that night and each man had a role to fill; Wolf was testing out the electrical circuits for the explosives that would destroy the house and any evidence, Luca was loading up the salvageable kit and putting them into holdalls ready to be collected by a Prism operative from a dead drop in a few days’ time, and the Fisherman and Pavel were sitting talking over how the night would play out. They were no longer agent and agent-runner, they were now just two men working together to rescue a person who they both cared about.
“Are you clear on everything?” asked Lyth. It had been the third time that he had gone over the details and he wanted to be sure that he hadn’t left anything out.
“Yes, I think so, probably,” said Pavel. He was unsure if he was ready, but he reasoned that he had been through worse hardship over the past few years.
Lyth folded away the notes that he had made on his pad. He would destroy them later. “Just stick to the plan and do what we agreed. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Do you think it’s all worth it, chasing the future technology around the planet? Trying to stem the flow of proliferation?” asked Pavel. He had been thinking of this more and more over the past few days, about the wider context. When he was a spy, it was to control the flow of information about Pandora. Now, probably due to having too much time to think, he was thinking on a more existential level.
Lyth nodded. “I know it is. I never used to think that way, certainly not in the past in a different life. I was very much a company man who did what was needed for my country. This is bigger than that, you know that. This is about the survival of the human race.”
“Really? You really believe that?”
“I’ve learned so much more about the reality of the world over the past few years. I know what is out there, what mankind is capable of creating, like the information that is in your head, and doing with it. There is real evil out there. If Pandora, or a future Pandora, is allowed to go unchecked or fall into the wrong hands, then there will be no way back for this world. Imagine if it was used by a despot, or an autocrat, or a populist US President, or a charlatan British Prime Minister to further their own ambition, rather than to defend or protect a sovereign country? It could lead to anarchy.”
“Now I am become death; the destroyer of worlds,” mumbled Pavel to himself.
“Ah, Oppenheimer! You know the quote,” said the Fisherman.
Pavel shrugged. “Actually, it was first said in Hindu scripture, but it is applicable to our situation, too. But how can you be so sure that we are on the side of right in these decisions?”
The Fisherman looked down at his hands for a long time, as if he was examining some invisible blood working its way into the whorls and grooves of his skin. “Because I have seen the other side, the alternative and what men, men with power, are capable of and what they are willing to do to hang onto that power and that control. For them, there is control in chaos and these future weapons give them that chaos and that control. So yes, I will choose the ethos of the Prism and what it does every time.”
“You speak from experience?”
“I do.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Perhaps one day I will, but not today. Today, we need to focus if we are to get Sabina back.”
“Alex…”
The Fisherman paused, caught himself about to say one thing and then at the last minute changed it to something else. Finally he blurted it out. “Tom. You can call me Tom.”
Pavel blinked once, very slowly and then smiled. “Tom… it suits you. Tom, bring her home to me. Please.”
“I will. Listen to me one final time. If it all goes wrong and we don’t make it out for whatever reason, I want you to run and don’t look back. Don’t try to fight, just run as fast as you are able. If you can get to Vienna, there is a man there. He’s a dwarf, he’s known as the Vizier. He’s rude and cantankerous and he’ll try to sell you. But I trust him, so he’ll sell you to our people. Tell him the Fisherman sent you. Promise me, Pavel.”
“I will. I promise you, Tom.”