I knew I was doing the wrong thing. Even if her plan was not to react to anything she saw, but to go back into the house, then return with an automatic weapon to hose down the area, I knew her well enough to see it in her eyes. I could feel sweat running around the back of my legs and neck. I waited three or four seconds more, then moved my eyes up again.
She was finishing off her scan, past me and down to the lake. Once there, she quickly turned her head to the wagon and walked up to the passenger door.
A white guy clambered out. By his style of dress I would say he was American. He was wearing a black nylon bomber jacket, tight blue jeans and white trainers. He was above-average height and build, about mid-thirties with black, fairly long, curly hair, and a moustache like the sheriff’s in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. He looked good enough to be the hunky lumberjack in any soap.
The meeting with Sarah was intimate: they hugged, kissed each other on the mouth, then held the embrace. They spoke in low voices as Sarah ran her hand across his back. There was something odd going on, though. They looked pleased to see each other, but the talking wasn’t loud and they weren’t going overboard.
I got two pictures of them during the thirty or so seconds that they were together.
Too Thin To Win had the tailgate down on the Explorer. He was looking quite smart in jeans and a dark check jacket. He pulled out a brown suit carrier with an airline tag on the handle.
Sarah had disappeared inside the garage with the white guy, followed by Too Thin To Win, who closed the door behind them. It was time to send another sit rep.
12
I had just started to prepare my message when Too Thin To Win emerged from the side door with MIB. He, too, had had a shit, shower and shave, and was dressed a lot smarter in brown trousers and jacket. They both got into the Explorer, Too Thin To Win in the driver’s seat. The wagon backed round to point uphill. They weren’t talking to each other, smiling, or looking at all happy. Something was happening.
The 4x4 bumped along the track and disappeared from sight. I looked back at the house. All the windows and doors were closed, and so were the curtains. That was strange; if someone was arriving at such a nice spot, surely you would show him the view? Maybe she had better things to do with him. Maybe he was just another sucker that she was using. But for what exactly?
It was nearly two hours before the Explorer returned. There were bodies in the back, but I couldn’t work out how many as it turned downhill, my eyes flicking between the wagon and the side door of the house, waiting for it to open. When it did, it was the American who appeared. Sarah was nowhere to be seen. He was looking aware, checking the lake and, as MIB had done, playing with worry beads. I watched him, listening to the slow rumble of tyres past my OP. His denim shirt tails were hanging out of his jeans and showing below his bomber jacket. I was right, he and Sarah did have better things to do than look at the scenery.
The wagon stopped and I counted an additional two heads in the rear seats. All four got out and I pressed the cable release.
The two newcomers were both dark-skinned. They hugged and kissed the American on both cheeks. It looked as if they knew him pretty well. All the same, there were no loud shouts of welcome or smiles, and everyone spoke in a murmur I couldn’t understand. The meeting also seemed to have an air of relief about it.
Too Thin To Win and MIB had opened the tailgate and were pulling out two square aluminium boxes which were plastered with what looked like old and torn ‘Fragile’ stickers and airline security tape. They started to move the boxes inside the garage via the side door. The luggage area of the 4x4 was still full of sports bags, another suit carrier and a black plastic cylinder which stretched from the back seat to the gear selector at the front. It was about two metres long and covered at each end. Either it was the world’s biggest poster tube or they had some serious fishing rods with them – I didn’t think. One of the new guys motioned to the other one and the American to give him a hand.
I snapped some more. This guy looked much older than the others. He was short and bald, with a very neat, black moustache, and he was a bit overweight, mostly around the stomach. He looked like he should be in a film as the gangster boss, the Bossman. The other newcomer was more nondescript, of medium build and height, and looked about twenty years old. He could have done with a few plates of what the bald guy had been eating.
After a couple of trips, with the boys lifting what seemed to be heavy kit, the 4x4 was empty and everything was stowed inside the garage. The side door closed and the area once more looked as if nothing had happened all day. What was going on here?
Ever since we’d first met, it had seemed to me that Sarah was sympathetic to the Arabs. She’d been involved with them in one way or another for most of her life. Come to think of it, we’d even had a row once about Yasser Arafat. I said that I thought he’d done a good job; she thought he was selling out to the West. ‘It’s all about homeland, both spiritual and cultural, Nick,’ she’d say every time the subject arose, and nobody who’d been within sight of a Palestinian refugee camp could argue, but I wondered whether there was more to it than that.
A faint drizzle was starting. It hadn’t penetrated my hide yet but could clearly be seen falling on the open ground in front of me. I could hear outboard motors in the distance as the intrepid fishermen set out in pursuit of a six-ounce carp. Lunchtime must be over.
There’s more to surveillance than just the mechanics. A report that says, ‘Four men get out of vehicle, two men pick up bags and go inside,’ is all very well, but it’s the interpretation of those events that matters. Were they looking aware? Did they seem to know each other well? Were they, perhaps, master and servant? These people were meeting up, in hiding, and with kit. I had seen this before with ASUs (active service units). The boxes looked as if they’d seen a lot of air time during their life, but not on this trip. There were no airline tags on the handles or on the bags. Maybe they’d driven to an RV point and then transferred the kit. If so, why? Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t about the turtles.
Things were starting to spark up and Lynn and Elizabeth needed to know that there were now four Arabs, one American and Sarah. Maybe London could make sense of what was happening; after all, they would know far more than they had told me. With any luck, Elizabeth would now be at Northolt, poring over my previous message and images, with her tea so strong you could stand the spoon in it.
It was 15:48, time to switch on the phone. It had been a couple of hours since my last transmission, and they should be calling me back with an acknowledgement and maybe even a reply.
I took it out of my pocket and switched it on, placing it in the shell scrape so I could see when I had a signal while I got out the codes from my jeans, and encoded my sit rep. As I retrieved the 3C, I started to feel like I needed a shit. So much for the Imodium: it should have bunged me up, but maybe the combination of pizza, Mars bars and Spam weren’t the most binding of materials. I knew from bitter experience that fighting the urge never works; if you’ve got the time, however inconvenient that might be, you never wait until the last minute: if you do, sure as anything, a drama will occur at the target the moment you get your trousers down.
I got the roll of clingfilm from the bergen and pulled off the best part of a metre. Leaning over to my left, still trying to keep my eyes on the target, I undid the buttons of both sets of trousers with my right hand, and pulled them down, along with my pants. I then got the clingfilm in my left hand and tucked it under, ready to receive. I started to want to piss; I wasn’t going to rummage for the petrol can at this stage of the proceedings, so I just had to restrain myself while I got the main event out of the way. I wrapped the first handful in the clingfilm and put it to one side, pulled off another length, put it underneath, and carried on. Having to do this in the field is never an easy procedure, especially when you’re lying on your side and in fits and starts, because it’s got to be controlled. It’s unpleasant, but there’s no way round it.
The drizzle was now trying hard to become something more grown-up. I could hear the first raindrops hitting the leaves above me. I was about halfway through the second lot of clingfilm when the LED on the phone told me I had a message waiting.
At the same moment, I heard a voice – male and American. I switched off the phone and thrust it and the 3C in my pockets. I looked out of the hide at the movement of the trees, trying to gauge the direction of the wind. It was still coming in from the lake. The American was on his own, coming out of the garage doors and heading towards the boat.
Trying desperately to control my sphincter and bladder, I watched as he moved the boat out of the way of the garage doors. I guessed he was going to park up the Explorer. He climbed into the driver’s seat and revved the engine. All the curtains in the house were still closed and there was no other sign of movement.
There are quite a few times on tasks when you really have no alternative but to shit yourself, especially on urban OPs where you’re in a loft space and there are people downstairs. You try not to do it, because you might have to go out into the street straight afterwards and operate like a civilian, but sometimes, if there’s no room to move, it’s just got to be done. The only precautions you can take are to not eat before the op, drink as little as you can, and pop some Imodium – then hope for the best. It’s a bit like the KitKat commercial, with the photographer outside the panda house at the zoo: you could have been lying in an OP for four weeks, but the moment you get the clingfilm out, the panda emerges and does a quick impersonation of Fred Astaire.
I’d guessed correctly. By now the 4x4 was in the garage, the boat was back in position and he’d gone back into the house. I finished off the job with the clingfilm and petrol container and pulled up my trouser bottoms. I was feeling quite sorry for myself; the only consolation I could think of was that clingfilm probably did the job better than the shiny stuff in the carpark toilets would have done.
I tore off another big length of it, wrapped up all my offerings and popped them straight into the bergen. It would help to hide the smell, which in turn meant it wouldn’t attract flies and animals. I then tucked the fuel canister back into the bergen as well, doing my bit for eco-tourism.
I’d learned my lesson. I dug around in the daysack for the Imodium and took another six capsules, probably enough to constipate an elephant. I lay down again with my hands resting under my chin, looking at the target, but after a couple of sniffs I decided to rub them with soil and keep them away from my face for a while.
On target, nothing else had changed. The curtains were still closed. In the hide, it was now wet and miserable. The rain was starting to fall more heavily; the noise of it hitting the trees increased and it was dripping from the foliage, through the cam net, and running down my face and neck. I brushed away a small twig which had stuck to my cheek. Sod’s law of OPs was at it again; I knew it would only be a matter of time before it percolated down onto me in a steady stream.
I got out the phone again. Sheltering it under my chest, I switched on the power, tapped in my PIN and dialled Kay’s sweetshop then *2442. They would be transmitting one-time pad number groups to me, exactly as I’d done to them, except that the groups would have been recorded on a continuous tape, which would keep running until I acknowledged that I had received it.
I cradled the phone to my ear and listened as I switched the Psion to word-processing mode. As the woman’s voice recited groups of five-digit numbers, I tapped them into the keyboard. It was easier than writing them down.
‘Group six: 14732. Group seven: 97641. Group…’
I knew it had got to the end of the message when she said, ‘Last group: 69821. End of message. Press the star key if you require the message repeated.’ I did. I then had to wait a few moments for the message to repeat itself so I could receive the first five groups. Up it came again: ‘You have a’ – pause, different voice – ‘sixteen’ – back to normal voice – ‘group message. Group one: 61476. Group two…’
When the taped message had come full circle, I switched off the phone, put it away and transferred the groups onto paper. I’d never been up to doing the maths on the Psion, and by the time I’d got the hang of it I would have been up for retirement.
The rain was coming down in earnest. Keeping my eyes on the house, I pulled the hood up around my neck to cut out what was pouring through the cam net. I couldn’t cover my head, however, because that would degrade my hearing.
Armed with the number groups, I was now going to do the reverse of what I’d done earlier: look for the recognition group on the one-time pad, then subtract each group from the ones that I had on my OTP.
Once I’d done that, I put the flash card back in my jeans pocket and got out the one that held the codes. They came up on the screen and I worked out the message. The first lot of groups were the introduction – date, time groups, all that sort of stuff. Then I got to the meat of the message:
61476 EXTRACT
97641 TARGET
02345 BY ANY MEANS
98562 CUT OFF TIME
47624 DTG (date time group, times local)
82624 27 APRIL
47382 0500HRS (times local)