Mission Critical
“And how will you get into and out of the castle? We will have to cross Loch Ness underwater. I’ve never heard you mention you were a trained scuba diver.”
Zakharov said, “To get out, I will put your reserve air regulator in my mouth, hold on to you for dear life, and hope for the best. Once my plan is enacted successfully, my life is unimportant. But to get into the castle, I have a different idea.”
“Which is?”
Zakharov smiled. “I plan on simply driving up to the front gate.”
Fox looked at him like he was insane. After a moment he recovered. “Well, we will survive the plague, we have more than enough antibiotics for that. But I don’t know that we will survive penetrating a well-defended intelligence target like the Five Eyes symposium.”
Zakharov said, “If we live, we live. If we die, we die. Either way, if we succeed, we have utterly destroyed the West’s intelligence apparatus.” Zakharov looked up to Hines now. “How about you, old boy? You up for a wee bit of excitement?”
“I go where Fox goes, sir.”
“Good chap.” He looked at his watch. “Five hours till we move. Have the men make sure they remain hidden from the air, because as soon as they are sure I did not die in the fighting at the church, all five eyes will be open in search of me.”
* * *
• • •
Court, Zack, Jenner, and the three other able-bodied men of Jenner’s team arrived at Castle Enrick in the early afternoon. They had changed out of their wet, sweat-stained, and bloody clothing from the action at the church and now wore neat clothes: khakis, blazers, leather shoes. Court and Zack dressed themselves with clothing from the rucksacks of the dead and wounded of Ground Branch, and the surviving members of the team in the helo gave them dirty looks for this. As Court sat there on the helo in Aaronson’s dark blue suit, he fully understood the looks he was getting. He would have felt the same way if someone on his team had died and a virtual stranger put on his clothes, but there was no way he could walk around the Five Eyes conference dressed like a commando.
His broken hand would draw attention, but when he unwrapped it to test it, he determined there was no way he could allow free movement of the broken bones in it, so he got Travers to reapply the metal brace and a fresh ACE bandage.
After landing they walked to the main gate and were searched by Scottish military and met by Suzanne Brewer, who showed their badges to the security force on duty there to get them checked in. Then she told them to follow her into the castle.
They all went directly to Hanley’s third-floor suite.
She told them, “We’ll put you right back out as soon as we have some clue as to where to send you. We will, at that time, request support from the United Kingdom. A squadron of paramilitaries from SAS, because clearly you’ve shown yourselves to be unable to handle Zakharov and his men without assistance.”
Jaws flexed in anger, and eyes narrowed in the group of hard men, but no one commented.
Brewer ignored the looks. “For now, blend in, try to look like typical security officers. I hope to have a target for you very soon.”
Inside the command center next to Hanley’s suite, over a dozen agency analysts pored over computers, checking satellite photos of the area, maps, traffic and security cameras, and the like, all desperate to find a group of men, probably traveling on the roads, probably moving in this direction, and probably carrying weapons. British intelligence was in on it now, after a fashion, with their leadership putting David Mars and his known cohorts in the national crime database and with the suspects involved in the mayhem at the church to the west being identified as an unknown group of military-aged Russian nationals.
Local police were on the lookout now, but there was a lot of area to cover in the Scottish Highlands, and much of it was remote or rural.
Outside the castle, British and Scottish security experts were told to be extra vigilant. A pair of police boats patrolled the waters of the loch, and helicopters flew patterns high above.
* * *
• • •
In the late afternoon, Zoya Zakharova stood on the banks of Loch Ness, next to a two-door Nissan she’d stolen in Inverness so she wouldn’t be driving a hunted van around.
She gazed up in the sky at the helicopters circling above Castle Enrick on a cliff on the opposite bank, just barely visible through the mist pouring off the water, even now in the afternoon. With binoculars she’d purchased at a store in Inverness she scanned the entire area, left and right.
She noticed two small patrol boats bobbing in the water at the bottom of the cliff, a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on each one, along with a crew of four.
Zoya wasn’t flying blind by being here now. She’d seen the scuba tanks in the back of one of the vans, so she knew this was how her father’s unit of commandos was going to infiltrate the conference. She couldn’t figure how they would do it, though. There seemed to be no other access up to the castle other than scaling that sheer cliff.
And even if they did scale the cliff, they would be completely exposed to security forces in the parapets of the castle wall overlooking a well-manicured lawn. It would be a shooting gallery for the defenders if the attackers chose that means for their ingression.
No, there had to be some other way into the castle grounds that could be accessed by water.
She was missing something, but she wouldn’t find it here, searching from across the loch. Instead she looked again at the map on her phone, trying to find the best place for someone to put a boat in the water nearby. Somewhere out of view of long-range spotters on the security force of the Five Eyes conference, but close enough to access the shore below the cliff.
After a minute thinking about it, she decided that her father’s divers would be in plain view of the castle if they tried to sail a boat out into Loch Ness to get closer.
No, the scuba divers would not be diving off a boat. They would enter the water close enough to make their way to the castle directly, without using a boat at all.
It was probably four hundred meters across the water here, an easy swim for fit men in still water.
She looked on her GPS again, and within moments she found the spot. An inlet, just a half mile north of where she stood, was completely obscured by a hill from the castle across the blue water, yet close enough to swim from cover there to the area at the bottom of the cliff.
Zoya was back in her car in seconds, racing to get a vantage point on the inlet.
* * *
• • •
As she drove up the road in the blue Nissan, a gray commercial van passed by on her right. She normally wouldn’t have paid any attention to an oncoming vehicle, but in the front passenger seat was a blond-haired giant.