To Kill Or Be Killed

By

Richard Wiseman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 Richard
L Wiseman 2009

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Prologue

It’s a well
known fact that back in 1940 with the threat of the Nazi invasion
of England by Hitler that Winston Churchill organised a resistance
force. Caches of weapons were built up around the country in hiding
places and people were organised and trained to fight as the French
resistance did after the Nazi invasion. Of course the invasion of
England never came and to this day a number of the caches of
explosives, weapons and equipment still lie buried in parts of
England awaiting resistance fighters who will never come and are
not now needed.

It is a little
known fact that Winston Churchill also created an espionage network
across the United Kingdom in 1940 to assist the resistance fighters
and to watch the government, the law enforcement agencies, the
army, the navy, the air force, the people of the towns and cities
and generally speaking the streets, the transport routes and
coastline for any attempts to infiltrate the land, the communities
and the forces organised to protect the country. This agency was
made up of ordinary citizens, chosen for their loyalty, their
levels of intelligence and their foresight.

They were
scattered across the UK, armed, equipped with the latest
technology, which at the time was radio and radar equipment, and
given diplomatic immunity on the British mainland. They were a non
military branch of the civil service. They were recruited on the
basis of recommendation from Churchill’s most trusted aides. They
were of course not needed when Hitler’s army failed to invade, but
they continued their espionage work through the war.

The police,
Special Branch, MI5 and MI6 watch for threats against the UK,
domestic and foreign. They have done since Churchill’s time and
before, but since 1940 those watchmen and watchwomen of the known
and recognised services have been in turn watched by Churchill’s
war time secret network.

It’s a little
known fact that the network of watchers set up by Churchill in 1940
still exists to this day and there is still a web of men and women
in every town and village across the UK working for a branch of the
civil service known as the Department for Internal Concerns or the
DIC. They are the unseen and unknown; they are those who watch the
watchers.

Chapter 1

LOCH CARRON
SCOTLAND

JUST BEFORE DAWN

April 17th

The shores of
Loch Carron are beautiful, with ragged edges of rock against which
chilly sea water sometimes bumps gently and incessantly and at
other times scrapes and scratches wildly, rasping away at the
gouges time and tide have left on the land’s edge. Deep green moss
and grass cover the bumpy ground of the foreshore like crumpled
baize and there is a reinvigorating power in the clean and Spartan
air.

One might walk
happily, if a little cold, on spring days, over rough chunky tracks
to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and, on a clear day, see to the
stark western horizon. Night is different though. You have to be of
a mind as sturdy as the clothes and boots you’ll need and as clear
in your mind about your business as the thick plastic lens on the
kind of heavy duty torch you’ll need to cut the pure darkness of
such a landscape.

A skilled
captain with a good crew and some nerve could bring a submarine
from the Atlantic into the inner sound and within a strong
swimmer’s distance of the shores close to Port an-eorna. It would
have to be a powerful swimmer with emotions as cold as the water,
not to mention good modern diving gear, to even attempt such a
feat. It was in fact five such cold fish who left the submarine,
gathered together in the water, orientated themselves by compass
bearing and headed for the shores of Scotland with careful
effort.

The submarine
turned about, job done, and dropped out of sight. The captain, not
for the first time thinking that his vessel and specialist teams
willing to swim a decent sized distance were easily the best way to
make an incursion into enemy territory unsighted and unnoticed. On
this occasion he was wrong; his vessel had caused a blip and a
bleep on some highly sensitive equipment located in the loft of a
house just off Main Street Drumbuie. He wasn’t to have known it was
there, neither were the five swimmers; nor did, amazingly, the
people of the area or the neighbours of the man who lived in that
house know anything other than that Michael Dewey was a computer
programme writer and that the slightly bigger than usual white
satellite dish on the house was for the purpose of transmitting and
receiving the work he did to allow him to live in such a remote and
beautiful place in easy comfort.

Inside his loft
a small sized, but commensurately powerful radar scanner rotated
slowly and an electronic screen registered vessels tracking them
across the LCD map. All of this information was fed into a laptop
which in turn was linked to a satellite phone.

Michael was an
early riser and was sipping tea waiting for the dawn, which was a
mere half hour away, when his idle scanning in the loft registered
the submarine. He climbed down the loft ladder and frowned at the
drizzle spattered glass of the landing window. April was living up
to its reputation.

He made a short
visit to the gun cabinet in his bedroom to remove a well oiled
automatic Sig 220 pistol. A quick check on the mechanism reassured
him of his ability to defend himself and he slipped it into a belt
holster.

In the hall
downstairs he laced on his walking boots and put on a heavy waxed
green coat. At the sight of the coat and boots Paddy, his Border
collie, jumped around him wagging his tail. Paddy didn’t bark,
knowing his master didn’t approve of unnecessary sound. Finally
Dewey grabbed his night vision binoculars, hanging in a case in the
hall, and together he and Paddy went out into the drizzly darkness
and climbed into the Land Rover.

The Land Rover
left Drumbuie and a short time later it was bumping over the tracks
to the water’s edge. As the Land Rover was approaching the land’s
edge the five swimmers from the submarine were approaching a slight
rocky cove which was half mile to the left of Dewey’s aimed for
vantage point.

There were a
few bubbles and some turbulence in the harshly cold Atlantic water,
but amongst the daily thrash of the ocean it was for the best part
invisible. The swimmers closed up on the land and one by one hauled
each other onto the rocks. As the first two landed waterproof bags
were handed up and activity began silently. The five men, for men
they were, took no break after the long hard slog through the cold
waves. They stripped in the near dawn darkness, changed into dry
clothes by touch, stowed equipment, readied themselves and sank
their water gear and all signs of their landing into the dark water
near the rocks.

Out of the car
with his master Paddy sniffed around the moss and grass happily
letting the light wind brush his black and white fur. Michael’s
night vision binoculars inched their way over the seascape. He saw
nothing, but still he scanned and watched.

The men on the
rocks had crawled with care from sea level to land level and were
now dressed in civilian clothing. Keeping a careful look out,
watching to right and left, one after another they made their way
inland. The first to the A87 road to thumb a lift, the second to
the Plockton air strip, the third to the rail station at Duirnish,
the fourth to a waiting motorbike in Drumbuie and the last to the
Plockton harbour, where a boat was waiting.

It wasn’t the
cold and the niggling drizzle but Paddy damply brushing against his
leg that led Michael to begin heading a hundred metres inland to
the dry of the Land Rover. The five men would have made the best of
starts if the last hadn’t lit a comforting cigarette. Michael,
sharply observant, a skill for which the DIC pick all their people,
caught the match flare in his peripheral vision. He whipped out the
night vision glasses and zoomed in.

In the dark the
cigarette lit up a profile and Michael mentally stored the lines of
the face, another skill the watchers had honed to an edge from
natural talent by DIC trainers. Even then he didn’t stop there. He
scanned a line inland and caught dim outlines, fuzzed by gloom, but
moving nonetheless. He got as far as a fourth and with a narrowing
of eyes he took the shortest route between the edge of the ocean
and his attic.

The smoker
flicked the butt away unaware, though he knew his habit was
unhealthy, how true the black writing on the Lucky Strike pack was
‘Smoking Kills’.

A short time
later Michael Dewey was back in the loft in the house in Drumbuie,
tea in hand. He accessed the DIC network via the internet and
alerted them to the illegal incursions. He contacted the police
describing the men, but knowing that the remote location and the
size of the area that such a small number of police patrols had to
cover immediate capture of the intruders was unlikely. DIC wouldn’t
expect Michael to take them on personally, not in those numbers,
besides given the power of the DIC network and its coverage Dewey
felt certain the men would be captured very soon. Messages sent
Michael sat down to draw a sketch of the smoker.

Chapter 2

Dover

7 a.m.

April 17th

Mary McKie
waddled uncomfortably through her kitchen door, paused for breath
and called up the stairs clutching her rounded bump.

“Come on David
you’re going to miss your train!”

“Alright I’m
coming.”

David McKie,
tall, broad shouldered, sandy haired and dressed in a dark brown
suit heavy footed down the stairs of his Dover semi. He checked his
reflection briefly in the hall mirror, aware in his Spartan soul of
the dangers of narcissism.

“Don’t want to
be late first day.”

David bent and
kissed her puffy cheek and rubbed at her denim covered pregnancy.
She took one hand and held his face examining his eyes.

“No. You’ll be
alright no?”

She had watched
him stagnate at Dover customs, always wondering why with a degree
in history he had applied to the civil service. True he had passed
the Executive Officer’s exam and gone into the Scottish Office at
the top, but he hadn’t liked the desk work. Then transferring to
customs had brought the family to Dover and the adventurer in him
had stopped him getting further up the promotion ‘ladder’. It was
so like his father who’d spent twenty years in the army and got no
further than sergeant. She was pleased that he’d got the London job
and she was glad he’d be working from home most of the time. She
was worried though mostly because of the lockable metal gun cabinet
and the loft full of technical equipment the two men had come and
fitted two months ago, but mostly she was worried because of
David’s month long absence at Lympstone in Devon. She knew from
Conor, David’s dad, that the marine commandos trained at Lympstone.
She shared her worries with him and he had reassured her and she
knew that he wasn’t a man to be held back from things he wanted to
do. She also knew he wasn’t a man to take random risks.

“I’ll be fine
and don’t forget I’ll be at home here a lot of the time. It’s only
two weeks on the active rota three times a year, the rest I’ll be
here.”

“That’ll be
nice, especially now.” She hugged him as tightly as the pregnancy
bump allowed.

Their three
year old son Conor joined the scene.

“Me hug! Me
Hug!”

He grabbed
their legs and pulled at them. David bent down and picked him up
and squeezed him. Conor struggled against the gaggle of kisses
David planted on his son’s morning ruffled hair.

“A wee hug for
my man Conor here!”

“I’m a
boy.”

“You’ll be the
man when I’m not here though. Look after mummy and bump.”

“Okay
daddy.”

David put him
down and for a moment there was silence.

“You’d better
go, you’ll be late.”

“Righto.”

On his way to
the door David picked up a medium sized black rucksack and a large
black holdall. To his strong arms the rucksack was surprisingly
light, especially when he thought that it contained his hand gun,
ammunition, laptop, satellite phone, night binoculars, a digital
SLR camera and a gun microphone. The holdall had changes of clothes
and toiletries.