In nearby Wiccopie was a rented house containing five men, the plan was to enter and arrest the occupants. Authority had been obtained to block the landline telephone access and switch off the nearby cellular servers for the area whilst the operation was in progress. Surveillance on the premises and occupants had shown merely that they rarely ventured out and seemed to exist on a diet of pizza and fried chicken delivered to the door. A male and female agent, posing as a couple had rented the adjoining building and over the past thirty-six hours’ a SWAT team had moved in and removed a significant amount of the dividing wall. In addition they had inserted fibre optic lenses into minute holes to observe the activity in the main room. A laptop computer could be seen, it had been on permanently since the surveillance had begun. Messages were being passed in an innocuous fashion in a chat room, this occurred every four hours’ and the sender in the house referred to a copy of a school textbook before replying. Concluding that this was a security measure the agent in charge had decided not to interfere with the landline access as their subjects ‘leaving the room’ would sound alarm bells at the other end as their screen name disappeared from the list of those in the chat room. They obviously had a procedure for re-establishing contact in the event of being accidentally ‘knocked off’ the server, it had not happened whilst the surveillance had been in place so they had no idea what it would be. In all, fifty-two raids were taking place across mainland America, Alaska and Hawaii this morning. It was impossible to synchronise them, local conditions varied too much as they did here where the next security check was due in two hours’ twenty-two minutes, they would ‘go’ in two hours’ thirty.
“We don’t want the subjects to break the connection right after their next message, it would look too suspicious,” the agent explained. “Ideally we don’t want the connection broken at all.” The agent glanced briefly at the colonel before continuing.
“You are all aware that this operation is being mounted in response to a suspected terrorist bombing being planned and you are probably wondering why the hell I am repeating myself after your briefing last night?” Pointing to the rear he informed them.
“You will all recognise Director Dupre, however the good colonel beside him is from JNAIRT, the Joint Nuclear Accident and Incident Response Team. There is a possibility that the bombing is not intended to a conventional one and suffice to say, should we find anything in the address it will be dealt with by JNAIRT.” This raised a lot of eyebrows.
With nothing to do but wait, Ben looked at his watch and wondered what the weather was like at 80’N 49’E.
Having burrowed into a snowdrift Major Richard Dewar had poked a small hole through to the other side to allow him to observe the innocent looking mounds three hundred yards distant. Richard and his men had made their initial approach towed on skis behind snowmobiles, their exhausts heavily muffled to the extent that the performance was well below that advertised for sporty civilian models. Wind was beginning to whip across the landscape; ice particles carried by the wind fogged his vision through his binoculars whenever the wind gusted. The wind chill factor had also lowered the temperature to a balmy –32’. The half-light made it difficult to judge distance; Richard had to concentrate on focusing his eyes. As he looked at the edge of one mound he distinctly saw its edge move, confirming that camouflage netting was in partial use at least.
Putting the last touches to his orders he moved backwards on his belly to join his section commanders for his ‘O’ Group.
“Gentlemen, thank you all for joining me here at such short notice, I hope the bikini clad hotel staff met with your approval?”
It was not possible to make out the features of any of his men, white thermal head-overs masked their faces, they were items of essential clothing as much as they were personal camouflage items. “Orders… ”
The damage to the doorframe and door to the cabinet room had not yet been repaired. The room contained the new PM with his cabinet picked from the opposition parties, the leaders of those parties and the Metropolitan Police commissioner along with the heads of the armed forces. Collectively they were all mirroring scenes from similar rooms across the world. No one expected one hundred percent success from their countries military and police anti-terrorist operations today, but even the seizure of one device would mean saving the lives of tens of thousands over the coming years. Cancer related deaths resulting from the nuclear detonations could match, if not outstrip, the body count of the original detonation.
The PM himself was no stranger to being at the sharp end of operations. Of all the politicians sat in the room with him, he was the only one present who had served his country in uniform. One of the telephones before him was exclusively for the result of his marine’s mission at Zemlya Georga.
According to the clock on the wall the first premises, in Wolverhampton, was about to be assaulted. All in all he would have felt far happier had he been on the ice with the marines than sat waiting.
The two surviving buildings from the old facility, abandoned to the elements twelve years before, had been patched up to keep out the weather. The buildings faced one another with about twenty feet between them. A colonel and his 2 i/c, a lieutenant, commanded an eight-man security team and two technicians responsible for operating and maintaining the satellite transmitter and radio equipment. In the weeks they had been confined here the colonel had remained aloof from everyone, leaving the running of things to the lieutenant. The colonel ate and slept in the smaller building with the communications equipment, apart from attending to the call of nature at the one chemical toilet they had; he never left the building. When the colonel did venture out he ensured that the key to the small safe beside the communications gear was around his neck on a chain. The troops had dug communications trenches in order to stay below ground level when out in the open, with both buildings almost buried by the snow it was a simple procedure to also transform the appearance of the site with cam nets, providing overhead cover from view. Three fighting positions had been prepared to provide security but with only the lieutenant and eight men it was not possible to keep them all manned. Remaining on sentry in sub-zero temperatures cannot be safely achieved for periods of over thirty minutes at a time. Once a man comes indoors again he has to care for his weapons and equipment. All snow and ice has to be removed before it melts, rounds have to be removed from magazines, weapons stripped and all cleaned to ensure moisture does not freeze them to inoperability when next exposed to the elements.
With only nine men available, only one position was kept manned for 24 hours’ a day, two sentries occupied it at a time and every fifteen minutes one was relieved.
Major Dewar had sent two men to perform a close target recce, they had sketch mapped the layout, noted the sentry change over period and correctly identified the buildings functions. With these details to hand Major Dewar had briefed his men.