Akosua nodded, Loftus grinned and the other team members appeared satisfied that they had a plan of action. It was Private Cohen that spoke up.
'Sir, is it fair to say that we're in a live fire situation now?'
Rey looked to Loftus who took a deep breath.
'Correct, live fire! Discard your blank firing adapters and load up on grenades. Wilson, you have the RPG, I want you to stay close to me for directed fire. We'll hand out ammo once we're in the farmhouse and take up defensive positions. This is the real deal, we will be fired upon and it is going to get rough.'
Everybody muttered and some were even clearly pleased that there was now no doubt about the actions that were expected of them, however Ramsey suddenly spoke up.
'Why have you told us sir? You said that the whole point was to keep us in the dark in case we were captured and interrogated, but we all know now. Why?'
Rey thought for a moment before closing his eyes for a second or two.
'You're being asked to put your lives on the line - I happen to think that you deserve to know why. It doesn't change the outcome, but it may change exactly what you need to do. Capture is not an option or this whole thing is pointless. I wanted you to know that. It clarifies some of the decisions you may have to make.'
Ramsey swallowed hard and his face became blank.
'Sir!'
'It is going to get rough and it will probably be sooner rather than later, but be assured that there will be an assault on this position at some point. You can forget any ideas of the local community police officer turning up on a bicycle. I fully expect Special Forces to be deployed and their initial aim will probably be to capture us and secure the Horn. Our response will rapidly change that approach to kill and secure.'
Rey's voice became solemn and heavy.
'Brothers and Sisters, the reality is that some of us will not survive this encounter. We've all taken an oath; from our earliest years in the Holy Order of Thrones and it has been our sworn undertaking to provide the sword arm and shield of our Order. We are now being called upon to perform that duty in earnest and, possibly, to even make the ultimate sacrifice. Over the coming hours or even days, we may question whether we are doing the right thing but keep your faith Brothers and Sisters, we are living a moment that will become as much a part of our history as anything that has ever gone before. For us, history is right now, be part of it, be proud of it!'
A silence pervaded the barn but Rey could see the fire that was starting to ignite within the eyes of his team. They would do their duty he was sure. They would all make the ultimate sacrifice if they had to, but he sincerely hoped that it would not come to that.
A sharp crack erupted as Loftus clapped his hands in finality.
'Let's go to it!'
Breaking in, breaking out
The voices in the corridor on the other side of the door to her room had faded away and Gertrude took a step back, becoming thoughtful as she ruminated over what she had just heard. She had listened intently to the barely concealed conversation outside as she dithered near the entrance, knowing that her room was under surveillance and pretending that she was selecting a book from the stack that had been piled on the small bombe chest near to the door.
Apparently, the little man was leaving, he grumbled to the guard outside her door that he had been called away and would be catching a train soon, however, he had left explicit instructions to the sentry and, no doubt, to whoever else was occupying her prison building.
Gertrude started to nibble at her lower lip, an idea was starting to form, the specifics and details were still wholly obscure but she suddenly felt that this turn of events somehow presented an opportunity to escape. She was suddenly struck by a thought, she had read about her countrymen imprisoned in Colditz castle during World War II and it was notable that the Dutch officers had been the most prolific in engineering apparently ad-hoc escape attempts from that supposedly secure institution. She took some inspiration from her recollection since she imagined that she was actually in Germany, the little man had referred to her prison as a 'castle' and after all, she was a Dutch citizen.
Of course she needed to escape and at the very least, in the worst case scenario that she was caught during her first attempt her breakout could provide some detail of the surroundings of her predicament which might come in handy for a further attempt. She knew where she was starting from and her objective was clear, she just needed to fill in the detail of getting from her room to the safety of the world outside.
Staring up at Burg Linn on the outskirts of the small town of Krefeld, Pieter was amazed that such a place was probably now holding Gertrude Verker. Although it was clearly a public museum, various signs revealed that it was undergoing refurbishment and was closed for a couple of months yet. He briefly wondered whether he should contact the local authorities but decided against it, time was possibly short for Gertrude and he wanted to move fast.
He had arrived at the last known location of the Renault van and had immediately spotted the ominous shape of the castle looming out from a low layer of mist that had risen from the moat waters that surrounded it. The building was magnificent and evidently well-maintained and the imposing towers and steeply sloping tiled roof peaks of the main buildings were dominated by a single large circular tower at one end of the compound that must have provided fantastic views of the surrounding countryside.
His interest had been spiked simply by the fact that it was the only building in a large expanse of woodland that covered the area and it was not until he had actually wandered past the wooden bridge leading to the main gatehouse that he concluded that the place was being used to hide the abducted girl. He had only caught a glimpse of the front of a Renault van, a small angular view spied between the gap of the heavy wooden doors of the main gate as they had swung closed following the exit of a plumber's van which had been driven off along the trees lined approach road.
The glimpse had been enough though, he was sure it was the same van as he had been tracking and that meant that Gertrude was probably inside. The building was obviously being used as a convenient lair whilst the renovation work was being undertaken - a safe haven even though it was open to the public during the tourist season and the workmen probably knew nothing of the captive within.
Pieter trudged and crunched along the frozen gravel of the wide path and driveway that paralleled the moat, eyeing the ice that had formed on the surface of the water and wondering whether it was strong enough to take his weight. He had to get inside the compound somehow and the first step was to get across the barrier that the moat provided. Simply walking over the bridge and up to the front gate was surely not an option? He frowned to himself, even if he could get on to the island that housed the castle, how could he get in? After all, the whole point of such a building was to stop people 'getting in', the defences built so long ago were all concerned with protecting the inhabitants, not to present easy access to any passer-by.
He kept walking, suspiciously noting a young couple skipping along with their dog as they jogged toward him through the public parkland that would have once been devoid of trees, providing a clear field of view of an approaching aggressor. The time for action was fast approaching.
Gertrude sat on the edge of her bed and leaned forward slightly. Yes! She had been right, there was no light shining through the keyhole in the door which meant that the key was still in the lock. When the little man had arrived outside a little earlier, the guard had automatically placed the key to her room in the lock, no doubt presuming that 'Rumpelstiltskin'- as she had come to call the little man - would want to enter. In fact, after a brief conversation to discuss his imminent departure, he had gone away again without visiting Gertrude and the guard must have forgotten to remove the key again.
She calculated that she had less than ten minutes to prepare for her escape. Gertrude knew that the guard had poured himself a coffee around twenty minutes ago. He was a man of meticulous habit and it was a regular pattern of activity that she had come to recognise, occurring unseen on the other side of her door over the period she had been held in captivity. Around half an hour after finishing his coffee, she would always hear his chair scrape back and he would wander off, returning just a few minutes later. Evidently, he was visiting the lavatory and since he had finished his last coffee over twenty minutes ago she knew that he would be taking his toilet break very soon, effectively leaving her alone with the key in the door, albeit inserted into the other side and ostensibly out of reach.
She glanced behind her and over the bed, grabbing the magazine that she had been reading earlier, pulling it closer and readying herself to rip out a single page. She scanned the room, wracking her brain to figure out how she would extract the key from the lock, looking for a long strong implement to needle the key in its position until she could poke it out to fall onto the magazine page that she intended to slip under the door. Her eyes suddenly alighted upon the bathroom and she remembered the dental implements that that had been provided by the little man; the mouthwash, toothpaste, toothbrush and most importantly, the tooth-scraper with the slender handle and the small curved hook of metal at the tip. It would provide the perfect tool to scratch and scrabble at the key but she guessed that she would not need to perform too much manipulation; after all, the guard had only inserted the key into the lock and had never actually turned it.
Gertrude wandered to the bath room, snatched up the tooth-scraper and returned to perch on the edge of the bed, her heart beating faster in anticipation as she pretended to flick through the magazine that she would soon rip a page from, the instigation of a sequence of actions that could lead to her escape and freedom.
An old gentleman wandering between the trees with a pair of binoculars, occasionally pointing them at some unseen bird settling amongst the bare branches, seemed innocent enough but Pieter was acutely aware that the area was probably being watched. He eyed the old man with suspicion just as he had when the joggers with the dog had passed him, but shook his head with self-disdain as he consciously convinced himself that he was just being paranoid. He turned back to stare at the curtain wall of the castle and wandered further, examining the bare limbs of the trees that swayed in the bone chilling breeze gusting intermittently.
Centuries ago, the trees would not have stood anywhere near the walls however, they now provided a romantic summer covering of foliage and as Pieter realised, a possible route onto the walls and into the compound. Across the widest part of the moat he could see a group of three or four firs intermingled and abutted against the wall and fifteen metres further along the skeletal limbs of a large oak tree swayed gently. The firs looked too dense to climb through; however, they provided perfect cover from which to make a dash for the oak, a single limb of which occasionally brushed against the topmost brickwork of the ten metre wall. All he needed to do was to get across the moat and hide until the appropriate time.
A chair scraped and Gertrude immediately tensed, aware that her guard was now leaving. She probably had five or six minutes at most to drop the key from the lock onto the paper, slip it back underneath the door and then exit her room, locking the door up again before heading somewhere - anywhere - in the large building that she knew she had been escorted through during her arrival.
She listened at the door as the footsteps receded and then went to work, slipping the torn page from the magazine under the gap of the door. Her hands were already sweating and she fumbled slightly with the tooth-scraper to insert it into the lock, manoeuvring it about to jiggle the key in its place.
'
Hoerenjong
!' Gertrude exclaimed to herself, she had accidentally turned the key in its position, actually making it more secure as it sat in the lock. She took a breath and exhaled slowly, inserting the tooth-scraper again and carefully dragging the key teeth around, aligning it with the hole. She pressed the sharp tip of the small scraper blade against the rounded end of the shaft and started to press, feeling elated as it slid back, although catching a couple of times before plopping out and falling to the paper she had placed on the opposite side of the door.
She grasped at the edge of the magazine page and gently pulled the sheet towards her, fearing that the key would strike the bottom of the door and be brushed off on to the floor, out of reach and retrieval. As she slowly pulled the paper under, the rounded oval of the key handle appeared and she hastily jabbed her little finger through the centre hole, plucking it toward her and sighing with relief as it shot into the room to rest on the carpet at her knees.
Grabbing at the key, Gertrude quickly inserted and twisted it in the lock, hearing the clunk as the bolt slid back. She depressed the handle and the door urgently yielded inward as she yanked at it with too much vigour. Taking just a moment to calm herself down, she peeped into the corridor and could see the table and chair of her guard and a monitor screen displaying a quadrant of security camera footage, the images flicking between different angles, one of the four displays dedicated to the rooms she was now leaving. This was it, time to make a break!
She darted outside and quickly locked the door behind her, leaving the key in place before scurrying along the narrow crooked corridor that she recognised as the final leg of her arrival route. Taking the lift she had been brought up in was out of the question, she had to keep away from the main halls and stairways but the corridor led off to a myriad of other different routes, archways opening left and right. One of them must provide her with a safe exit.
Pieter had performed a full circumference of the moat and was sure that the only way across was over the large wooden bridge leading to the main gatehouse. Standing before the frosted entrance ramp, he was also aware that his activity was probably starting to look a little conspicuous. Surely, somebody would be watching and he had to admit to himself that he had not been acting in a particularly relaxed or nonchalant manner. He walked to the bridge and placed a hand on the rail, deciding that a purposeful walk was all that was required, a quick hop over the rail from where he would have to drop into the bushes that grew out of the bank just above the water level of the moat. He could only hope that he would be able to grab onto the evergreen foliage and haul himself over to the small bank at the foot of the wall - he certainly did not fancy crashing through the thin ice that had formed where the damp stone of the gatehouse disappeared into the murky water beneath.
The wooden steps of the small spiral stairway creaked as Gertrude crept down, leaning into the small circular wall space as she tried to peep around the centre shaft and down to where she was headed. Meeting somebody on their up was not something that she relished. She arrived at a small landing and a short arched wooden door that seemed to have been built to the proportions of a child rather than a tall adult. She gently tried the latch and found that the door opened with her tentative pressure and peeking through she could she another corridor which she guessed was originally the sleeping quarter.
She was effectively entering the top floor of the main building, possibly containing a series of sleeping chambers that had once provided comfort to the Lord of the castle and his family hundreds of years ago.. She considered that her guard would be back at his post soon and that perhaps she should have waited to hear him settle down again. No matter, there could be other people wandering about the building and anyway, she had to be prepared to encounter anybody, she needed to be ready to run or hide and constantly examined her surroundings for possible escape routes or places to secrete herself.
Where did she want to go? The obvious answer was out through the front door, the same way she had come in. She knew that if she kept heading down, then she would obviously reach the ground floor and hopefully be able to make it into the courtyard where she had been dragged from the van she had arrived in, however, that presented a problem. What if the main gate was locked? She would still be trapped. She had to get a view of the outside to determine what it was like, after all, she had only seen the interior of the room in which she had been confined, nothing else.