DARKNET CORPORATION (5 page)

“About 20K.
The issue is, there’s nothing much down there and no excuses
to be travelling down this road. If we run into them or whoever is going to
come down this road to meet them, it will be a firefight. So we have to be
cautious,” Mickey added some sober caution.

“OK,” said Bill, decided. “We will have to go off road far enough away
not to be seen but still able to keep eyes on the road and move parallel to the
road until we can get a vantage point over
Bone
.”

“We have some capabilities in our mobile armoury,” nodded Ledge.

“We’ll need to keep it slow to avoid kicking up dust and making too much
noise, especially when we get closer to them. The noise could carry for miles
out in these boondocks,” warned Mickey. “We will need to standoff quite a
ways.”

“If I was them and knowing this is the only way in, I would post a
lookout a few clicks up the road with a radio,” suggested Ledge.

“Right!
Let’s get moving off the road before Abu
Ukasha
comes around the corner and wonders what this
pow
wow
is about,” urged Bill, confirming his commitment.

They set off into the desert with Mickey riding with Bill to monitor the
tracker and made easy going in the rocky flat area for several kilometres. Then
the terrain started to become a little more rolling and sometimes they had to
slow down to navigate dry water channels carved into earth.

Eventually Mickey said, “They’re stopped. We should pull over there, in
that wadi and
cam
up.”

They stopped. Ledge, seeing the stop lights, pulled in alongside Bill in
a depression that effectively shielded them from view.

“Good spot Mickey,” he said. “I’ll pull out the cam nets too, just in
case.” He opened a flap in the ‘mobile armoury’ and pulled a mess of dusty
looking net from a roller on the side of the vehicle. The dusty mess folded out
in all directions and covered both vehicles once Ledge had swung the roller,
which was on two poles front and back, to pivot over onto the opposite side of
the vehicle. Ledge placed rocks around the edges to hold the cam in place and
folded down an extra piece from the roller to cover the side of the SORV. He
walked around surveying his handiwork and was satisfied that they were pretty
much undetectable from a reasonable distance.

“They are about 5 clicks South East, stationery. We need to go get eyes
on them and see what’s going on,” Ledge was pretty stoked with the excitement
of the chase.

“I’ll get the bird out,” said Mickey opening panels in the back of the
‘mobile armoury’.

Bill said, “Bird?”

“We’ll show you in a minute when we get set.” Mickey was wrestling a
large box from the vehicle.

“The ‘bird’,” he said, somewhat triumphantly, revealing what looked
like a model plane with the wing stowed along the length of the fuselage. He
pulled out the wing and clipped it into place, turning a screw to lock it. He
filled a tank under a flap, where the cockpit should be, from a plastic bottle
and placed it on the ground. He pulled a control unit out of the box and pulled
out a telescopic aerial and switched it on.

“Ah!
An aerial camera.
But is this model plane
able to get up to where they are? Won’t they hear it, or see it?” Bill was not
yet convinced this would work.

The control unit was blank until he clicked a switch on the fuselage,
then it glowed to show the dusty ground the bird was sitting on. He used a
bulky torch-like device with a cog at the front to start the “bird’s”
propeller.

“We’ve used this bird many times and it’s quite a bit more than a
‘model plane’. Think of it more like a scaled-down drone.” Mickey was
confident. “Once we get enough height, we mute it down and it basically glides
along until it loses too much altitude and we have to unmute it, but if we get
it right, we can let it glide all the way back here. Come on, let’s get this
up.” Mickey sensed there was urgency handing the controls to Ledge.

Ledge got comfortable in their vehicle and Mickey lifted the bird and
shouted to Ledge, “Ready? 1-2-3,” and threw the bird forward and it rose
abruptly into the air, whining, but not as loud as Bill had anticipated. It was
certainly much more highly engineered than a ‘model plane’.

He watched as Ledge flew the Bird and it gained height by circling around
ever higher until Bill couldn’t see it or hear it any longer. Bill went over to
stand at the door of the vehicle and watched Ledge steer the Bird up the
valley, taking note of the height that showed on the display and marvelling at
the camera zoom capability and the clarity of the image he could see.

Ledge did a few more circles to gain height and then Bill realised that
when the camera zoomed back that the Bird was already very high indeed.

“OK you should be getting close to where
Bone
stopped,” Mickey
chimed in.

Ledge had starting scanning back and forth up the road using a joystick
on one side to operate the camera. It didn’t take long to locate the two
vehicles since they were two of several that were congregated inside a walled
compound off the road.

Ledge zoomed in and started recording. A red “REC” message flashed on the
control unit, bottom left and Bill noticed that there were strings of numbers
changing as the GPS coordinates of the Bird were displayed.

There were three of the typical pickup utility-type vehicles; one that
looked like it had a 50 Cal mounted on it; a four-wheel-drive, that Bill
thought looked like
Bone’s;
a closed in van and a commercial sized
truck, maybe two tonne, with a flat deck. All off-white coloured.

A row of ant-like figures were moving, what looked like black plastic
sacks from the flatbed truck and placing them into the van and the
four-wheel-drive.

Ledge zoomed right in to a western-dressed man at one end of the truck
apparently rummaging in one of the plastic sacks. Bill was sure it was
Bone
.
He was handling black bricks and seemed to be examining them.

“Ah!” said Bill, “Opium. That’s what this is about. No wonder they were
bogged down with too many contacts. They’ve been running around the country
buying up ‘base’,” referring to the second stage of heroin. The opium gum is
boiled first with lime then with ammonia to separate the morphine then
re-boiled and filtered until it turns into a brown paste which is sun-dried
into bricks.

Mickey had the sat’ phone in his hand and was talking to someone relaying
information about the GPS coordinates reading them off the Bird’s control unit.
He repeated three times “Negative eyes on
Monarch
”. Then he said
“standby,” dropped his phone hand down by his side and watched as the scene
unfolded on the control screen.

Mickey asked, “Any sign of a guy with a limp? Or somebody that looks like
the boss?”

“The guy talking to
Bone
must be the boss, but he’s standing on
his own. He doesn’t have a posse of bodyguards. Can’t be Abu
Ukasha
,” he concluded.

Then the person Ledge was watching walked back to the group of figures
now finished packing plastic bags into the vehicles and he did
not
have
a limp.

“Definitely not Abu
Ukasha
,” Ledge announced.

Mickey raised the phone and confirmed his earlier advice and rang off.

“Who were you talking to,” asked Bill.

“Network control.
They are patched into everything that’s going on.
They’ll add this location to a watch list so that it gets checked every time
there’s a satellite or a drone overflying it, in case there’s activity that
leads to actionable intelligence.”

Ledge warned, “They’re on the move.”

Bill and Mickey peered over Ledge’s shoulder to watch as the flatbed
truck and two pickups, now full of the figures, circled out of the compound and
drove away.

“What do you want to do, Bill?” asked Mickey.

Bill paused for a moment, then said, “Mickey, call it in to your control
and see if they can pick up these guys as they go back up the road towards
Jalalabad, by whatever means.” As an afterthought, and as a justification he
added, “There’s no way
we
could follow them without being spotted.”

As Mickey was making the call the headlights of the convoy they had just
watched appeared in the distance and they watched as they went past, thankful
of the approaching gloom and the cam nets masking their position.

They continued to watch the walled compound for another 30 minutes. Ledge
had to glide the Bird almost back to their position and fire it up out of mute
so he could regain height and repeat the gliding/circling manoeuvre. It was
clear from the campfire that had been lit in the centre of the compound and the
lack of any movement that
Bone
was settling in for the night

Ledge brought the ‘Bird’ in for a bumpy landing behind them and Mickey
ran out to recover it. Ledge said, “We’ll have to refuel it, if we are going to
put it up again?” it was a question to Bill.

Bill declined saying that it looks like they are not going anywhere and
that they would be able to see them move on the tracker if they did, so there
was not likely to be any value in continuing to surveil them with the Bird.
Ledge pushed in the aerial and handed it over to Mickey who stowed it away.

“Right,” said Bill, “We need to sit tight and wait for them to move.
Bone
isn’t going anywhere without his drugs and as long as the transponder keeps
working, we don’t need to get close enough to expose ourselves. He will have
deployed sentries. We need to do the same.”

Ledge rummaged around in the ‘mobile armoury’ and brought out night
vision binoculars, it was starting to get quite dark, as well as a FLIR
infrared device. He said, “Whoever is on lookout, these will allow us to see in
the dark, not that I expect anyone to be moving about out here in the dark.”

“OK,” concluded Bill. “We’ll check the tracker every half hour. I’ll take
the first stag. You two get some rest.
Three hour stags; you
next, Ledge.”
They settled in and Bill was not surprised to hear gentle
snoring only a few minutes later, coming from the cab of the ‘mobile armoury’.

The transponder showed that their quarry did not move all night.

At sunrise, Mickey had just fished his stag and was rustling up some kind
of breakfast out of the ‘mobile armoury’, when Ledge spotted the transponder
had moved out of the compound.

“How far away are they,” asked Bill concerned that
Bone
might spot
them as they came past.

“They’re going the other way,” Ledge said surprised. They watched as the
red blip went south continuing in the direction they had arrived. They waited
for some time in case the group had split up and some would come back up the
road towards them.

The breakfast was the familiar ration pack egg and sausage mush in a
metallised foil pouch, described as an ‘all day breakfast’ that Micky had
heated up in a mess tin of water on a gas stove. He had ripped the tops off and
stood the pouches up in mugs with plastic spoons and a coffee sachet stuffed
down the outsides of the metallised pouch. Once they had scoffed the mush, he
handed round the mess tin of boiled water to make coffee from sachets in the
mugs. He had a plastic bag that the food came in hooked onto the side of the
SORV for them to toss the empty pouches, plastic spoons and sachets in.

They watched one of the tracker units as the T-1 red blip moved
away towards the mountains.

“What’s down there?” asked Bill.

“Pakistan,” said Ledge.

“How far?” asked Bill.

“The border is the middle of the mountain range.
About
30K, or so.
But I’ve never heard of a passage anywhere near here,”
replied Ledge.

“Are you guys able to operate in Pakistan?” Bill looked concerned.

“We’re your backup. The only question is ‘how much shit will we get in if
we are caught’. For us that’s SNAFU, situation normal, all fucked up, as usual.
No worries, we just don’t get caught,” replied Mickey laconically.

Bill was quiet in thought. There was a chance that some of the
group were still at the compound and they would be in trouble if they just
blundered in on them. He was also concerned that with more elevation as they
followed
Bone
towards the mountains, the convoy in front of them might
chance upon a glint of reflected windshield or whatever and expressed his
concern about finding their way through whatever pass
Bone
was taking
without being able to follow them.

Mickey explained, “yeah,
nah
. I’ll change to
trace mode” and he changed the display on the tracker control unit to show a wiggly
red line rather than a blip. “We can follow their path. Wherever they can go,
we can go,” he said. “I’ll just keep it on while they show us the way.”

Bill’s face broke into a smile, “cool.”

They decided they would wait until
Bone
had traversed the mountain
range and then follow. If they could trace their path, they did not need to
take any risks provided they were able to catch up with them before they had
any rendezvous.