A subtle agency omnibus, p.78
A Subtle Agency Omnibus, page 78
part #1 of The Metaframe War Series
Just how many Order operatives were active in the UK right now? How many were members of the Mirovar force team? Where the bloody hell were they and what was their objective? He had too many questions and no answers.
One message stood out, the results of the Panopticon searches for cars matching the descriptions provided by the local Coningsby villagers. There were two hundred and forty-eight hits within a sixty-mile radius of the town, all were being actively tracked. He filtered the hits for pairs of cars traveling together, and the number of hits went to zero.
Had the two SUVs split up outside of Coningsby? Had they swapped vehicles and were now using something else? Were the Order operatives hazing the Panopticon without tripping countermeasures?
If they’d doubled back and were now heading south, east, or west, he had no idea where they might be or what their objective was. It was only to the north that he had any hope of finding them. He put his hands over his face, then dragged them down over his cheeks and jaw. The next decision was critical, he had to make the right move or lose everything.
The one piece of information he could rely on was the flight plan to Goathland - it was the key. There would be no more wild goose chases after phantoms or will-o-wisps. He would not waste time and resources searching anywhere but the north. He needed to adapt. The Order operatives were faster and stronger than he’d anticipated. He needed to apply area of effect weapons to defeat their ability to evade fire. Hellfire III missiles would be the weapon of choice, and that meant nightfalcon and blackwidow helicopter gunships.
Gordon closed his eyes; his thoughts intensifying. He needed to find the Mirovar operatives before he could kill them. With two hundred and forty-eight hits from the Panopticon, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. His gut instinct was the Order team was somehow still hazing the Panopticon. They would still be in their original cars, running hard to the north and whatever objective they had there.
He broadcast the details of the cars, and photos of Peter Lamb and Anton Smith, to the remaining operational Shadowstone forces in the UK. He issued clear orders; report all contact, track, and do not engage unless fired upon. He then placed a call to his agent on the Privy Council, it was time to get the king to declare a state of emergency and get everyone in the north of England off the roads.
Gordon’s phone started dialing. He frowned, glancing at the face of his smartphone, it read 13:32. The wheels of government were slow to move but move they would. In another ninety minutes, perhaps two hours, the traffic would start disappearing from the roads.
Gordon’s eyes sparkled, if you can’t find the needle, then remove the haystack.
* * *
The road sign flicked past on the left. In another five minutes, they would be entering Scarborough. From there it was twenty miles to Whitby and the manor house where Kain was being kept prisoner.
“With a little luck,” Francis advised, “we’ll be there by four o’clock this afternoon.”
Peter observed, “Is it just me, or is the traffic thinning out.”
Juliette looked up from her laptop and frowned. “Camera counts are dropping.” She shook her head. “Cars are disappearing from the roads, and hijackable phone cameras are disappearing with them.”
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “Oh no. There is a state of emergency in play. Everyone is being told to avoid travel and return to their homes until further notice.”
“Why didn’t we hear about this earlier?” Anton asked.
“The UK government doesn’t have your phone number Anton,” Li observed sarcastically.
Juliette shook her head. “Don’t fight. Unfortunately, the technique I’m using to haze cameras as we pass them requires my full attention.”
“You’re being squeezed,” Li said. “Can I help?”
“Not without an implant.”
“Lights ahead,” Peter noted.
There were a pair of local police cars parked in the distance, their lights strobing blue and red in the universal police pattern. Before them, there was a turn off to the left and a sign above it that read, ‘A170.’
Anton asked, “Are the police looking for us too?”
“They could be,” Francis answered. “We have to assume they are. We need a new route, is the A170 any good?” Francis slowed the Range Rover, giving Juliette more time to check options. The intersection was approaching rapidly, and beyond it, the police cars were waiting.
Juliette paused for a handful of seconds, her face still, her eyelids closed as if she was dreaming. “Yes, take it. It’s the next best route.”
“Are they funneling us?” Li asked.
Francis took the off-ramp to the new road. Juliette twisted around in her seat to face Li and replied, “No evidence of that, but cutting traffic is clearly a strategy directed at us.”
“With no other traffic,” Anton observed, looking at Li. “We’ll be easy to find.”
“I kinda worked that out, Anton,” Li noted drily.
Francis directed, “We’ll keep the cars as long as we can. Then, we’ll leave them, and disappear.”
He looked along the road in front of him, there were only a handful of cars and a lone truck visible heading in both directions. He accelerated back up to the speed limit. “No one promised this was going to be easy,” he broadcast to the team. “Of course, Shadowstone will do everything they can to find us and kill us. We’ve got to stay one step ahead of them. Keep your eyes open and your weapons handy. We may need to fight at a moment’s notice.”
Francis kept his concerns to himself. It would be a miracle if they could get to Whitby without being found. They’d been lucky not to lose anyone so far, and he felt in the depths of his soul, that sooner or later their luck would run out.
The team had never been this exposed on a mission.
* * *
The Shadowstone agent put the freshly made cafe latte next to his briefcase.
He’d taken a position in a cafe booth overlooking the main road through Thornton Dale, about four hundred yards before the intersection of the A170 with the Whitby Gate road. The second road was a much-used route north into the Yorkshire Moors, and the agent had been assigned the task of monitoring it. He’d positioned himself a little to the east of the intersection as he’d liked the look of the cafe he was sitting in.
The agent’s case was on the large side for a briefcase, more like a small suitcase. It rested on the table, its lid up, revealing a twenty-four-inch high definition screen and a server sized computer in the body of the case. Four gray spheres rested on the edge of the table. Shadowstone sensor arrays wirelessly connected to the main server in the case. The system was fully operational, covering a hemisphere of territory one mile in radius centered on the case.
The agent sipped his latte; he’d made it himself. The owner of the cafe was sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, struck down by a Shadowstone sleeper dart. He’d be stiff, cold and sore when he woke up tomorrow, but he would still be alive and the previous twenty-four hours would be a black hole, his memory wiped clean.
The agent silently lamented the need to be working. He was on annual leave, holidaying in the north with his girlfriend. He’d been called into work by the boss and had reluctantly left her watching videos in a hotel room while he sat out here in the middle of nowhere watching an empty road. He’d taken a first in psychology from Oxford University and completed a masters in public relations at Bristol University. Acquiring a senior operator role in the PSYOPS directorate of the Shadowstone organization had taken hard work and commitment. But it was days like today, boring days that impinged on his personal time that made him wonder if he’d made the right choices in life.
He stared at the screen, there was not a single hit within a mile of the cafe. The roads were deserted, everyone had fled to their homes under the state of emergency. A sudden movement caught his eye. He glanced up from the screen, peering out at the main road running past the cafe. A pair of charcoal Range Rovers were driving past at speed.
“What the hell!” he said. “Not a bloody sign of them on my scopes.”
He grinned triumphantly and dialed Gordon Heathmont’s direct line. The director would want to know about this straight away.
* * *
Juliette’s laptop pinged.
“Damn,” she swore. “Shadowstone just found us again.”
“How do you know?” Anton asked.
“There’s a big difference between a Samsung, Amazon, or Huawei-Apple camera and what I just hazed. I’m certain it was a Shadowstone sensor array.”
“If we hazed it, maybe we’re still okay?”
“No chance Anton. A sensor array takes my system about ten seconds to fully resolve. It put the center of the array back up the street. The array’s operator was watching the main road through this town, we literally passed them at a range of less than forty yards - they would have noticed we didn’t ‘show up,’ on their scopes.”
Francis spotted a side street and cut down it to the left. “Let them think we’re heading south. He circled around to the right and a minute later was heading north out of sight of the location where the sensor array had been passed.
He floored the accelerator, the car barreling along the street. “Now it’s speed that matters - we’ve got to put some distance between us and this town. We’ll ditch the cars where they won’t be noticed before Shadowstone can re-establish visual contact, and proceed on foot. Where is the nearest main town?”
Juliette consulted her laptop. “Goathland. It’s about eleven miles north of here, and ten miles from the manor house at Whitby.”
“Goathland - where we were heading to at the start,” Peter noted.
“Small world,” Anton remarked.
Francis flicked the steering wheel to the right, then left. The car raced through a dogleg corner onto the main road heading north. “Ten miles is close enough. We’ll be in Whitby by five thirty, an easy two and a half hours before sunset. Jay, all speed.”
The supercharged engines roared as the Range Rovers surged along the road in a tight convoy. There was no other traffic, not even a police presence to slow their progress.
The eleven miles to Goathland would disappear in minutes. Juliette took a deep breath and sighed. Normally serene, the day was beginning to wear on her. How many more things could go wrong?
It was a question she feared to ask.
* * *
The semi-trailer rig spouted steam from its punctured radiator. It lay on its side, its white trailer, emblazoned with the livery of a local supermarket chain, blocking both lanes of the A169 road.
A pair of Squadron F MRAPs were parked tail to tail behind it, carefully hidden from any traffic coming up from Thornton Dale to the south. Eight Squadron F troopers were guarding the main road leading to Goathland or Whitby. Thirty yards in front of the ‘crashed,’ truck was an intersection with a road leading off the A169 directly to Goathland. The roads had become deserted in the last half an hour, the locals retreating into their homes under the declared state of emergency.
The Shadowstone trooper glanced up at the western sky. The clouds were rapidly darkening, a storm was on its way. There had been an operational weather report fifteen minutes before, warning of strong winds and heavy rain throughout the late afternoon pushing eastward overnight.
Lovely, he thought sarcastically. He hated bad weather and the cold. Being stationed anywhere in the north of England set his mood midway between sour and homicidal.
His mouth was a grim slash, he whispered to himself, “Suck it up, princess.” There was work to do, bloody work. Almost half the strength of Squadron F had been decimated that morning. The enemy were still at large and needed to be found. His orders were clear - ‘report all contact, track, and do not engage unless fired upon.’
Of course, following orders was a matter of interpretation, and ‘fired upon,’ - well, sometimes it can be difficult to determine who fired first. He had command of the two squads manning this post, and he’d lost close friends that morning. If the enemy showed up, he would make sure they were not going anywhere else - except, in a body bag.
He checked his squads. Four of his men were inside the MRAPs, the drivers, and the gunners operating the M240 machine guns mounted on top of the armored vehicles. The other three troopers were with him, outside the vehicles and armed with large caliber H&K 417 assault rifles fitted with under-barrel grenade launchers and red dot laser sights. Shadowstone command had provided descriptions of the vehicles the enemy would be driving and photos of two of their operatives. If they came along this road, he and his men were sure to find them.
The trooper took a position just to the left of the tail end of the overturned trailer. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the road to the south. The landscape of the Yorkshire Moors stretched in all directions, the roads gently curving around low hills. The land was covered in unkempt grass and low mauve bushes. The sky was a dark-gray sheet tending to black in the west, and the light was dimming to a dusk-like shadow.
His binoculars were fully digital, linking seamlessly back to the Panopticon. In the distance a pair of SUVs came over the crest of a low hill, racing along the road toward his position. The Panopticon marked them as matching the description given for the target vehicles. Metadata streamed through the viewfinder; the vehicles had been marked by a Shadowstone operative nine minutes ago as the targets.
The Range Rovers began to slow, their speed dropping below one hundred miles per hour, down through ninety, eighty, seventy, back to the speed limit of sixty miles per hour. The trailing SUV pulled out to shadow the shoulder of the leading car, and then moved further apart, making full use of both lanes.
They’re suspicious. They should be.
The trooper twisted around to face his men. Pulling his sidearm from its holster, he swung the 9mm pistol toward the MRAPs. He pulled the trigger, blowing out the nearest MRAP’s headlight with a single round.
“Right men, we’ve been fired on,” the trooper snarled, holstering his pistol. He shouldered his H&K 417 assault rifle and shouted, “Now open up on those bastards!”
The MRAPS surged left and right, racing clear of the semi-trailer, allowing their M240 machine guns to bear on the approaching Range Rovers. A second later both machine guns erupted into life, streams of bright tracers and 7.62mm ball heading down range toward the onrushing SUVs.
All hell broke loose.
* * *
Two MRAPs appeared to the left and right of the overturned semi-trailer. The M240 machine guns on their roofs spurted orange tongues of flame, stark against the darkening sky. Black-clad Shadowstone troopers raced on foot behind them, firing large-bore assault rifles straight at the Range Rovers.
A storm of bullets hammered the Range Rovers. The SUVs had been subtly armored, their defenses hidden beneath their ceramic toughened skins. Their windscreens and windows were bulletproof transparent armor designed to mimic glass in appearance. Their tires were designed to run flat with minimal loss of performance. But everything has its limits and defenses can be overwhelmed.
The Range Rover slammed to a halt. Francis shouted, “Weapons, out!”
The second Range Rover ran another twenty yards before the wheels twisted hard left. The SUV bucked like a wild animal, taking off and twisting in a sideways roll through the air. The doors flew wide. Jay, Yvette, Luther and Chiara, all ramped to the max, leaped from the SUV as it spun in a flat arc into the right-side MRAP.
The SUV smashed into the MRAP, coming apart with an earsplitting bang. Metal tearing itself to pieces as two tons of SUV encountered seven tons of MRAP at sixty miles per hour. The Range Rover evaporated to pieces, taking out the crew of the MRAP with it. The MRAP was destroyed, its front half caved in, the crew unconscious or dead.
The left-side MRAP continued firing its M240 machine gun at the lead SUV. All the doors of the Range Rover opened at once. The SUV’s windscreen starred and cracked, sparks flying from the front panels as 7.62mm rounds ripped into the ceramic armor. Francis, Anton, Peter, and Li blurred from the wreck, rounds from Shadowstone troopers whizzing through the spaces behind them.
Francis ramped hard, blurring away from the deadly trap the SUV had become. He lifted his H&K MP5, firing at the Shadowstone troopers near the MRAP. From his peripheral vision, he could account for everyone else in his team. Jay, Yvette, Luther, and Chiara were looping through the air to land behind the troopers. In moments, the troopers would be caught in a fatal crossfire. Anton and Li had gone left, their guns blazing as they cut the distance to the surviving MRAP. Peter appeared near his shoulder, his submachine gun hammering as he drew a battle-axe from his belt.
His heart leaped into his throat.
Where’s Juliette?
He turned in horror toward the SUV, the windscreen shattering as round after round pummeled it.
“No!” he shouted, blurring over the SUV in a mighty leap to the other side.
Francis landed, twisting around behind the armored car door. Bullets streamed a foot over his head or slammed into the open car door.
Juliette lay still in her seat, still strapped in, the left side of her face covered in blood.
“No, no, no,” Francis moaned.
* * *
Time slowed to a crawl.
Anton blurred forward, Li at his shoulder, his H&K MP5 vibrating in his left hand as it sent high-performance 9mm rounds at the troopers thirty yards away. He carried the Blue Dragon in his right hand, its naked blade dull beneath the leaden sky. Grenades were looping in toward the surviving MRAP from Jay and Yvette, while Chiara and Luther cut down the two remaining Shadowstone troopers near the smashed MRAP and the ruined Range Rover.
Anton locked gazes with one of the Shadowstone troopers for a fraction of a second, long enough for each man to bring their weapon to bear on the other. The trooper glared at him, moving faster than normal, his H&K 417 assault rifle swung around.
