The camera moved skyward where it picked up a helicopter.
Stratton looked at the screen. It was an SBS Chinook, unmistakable, like a thick, short sausage with rotors on either end. A letter and a pair of numbers flashed on the screen and moved to a corner where they continued to blink.
A voice crackled over speakers. ‘India one-six, this is Whisky four-zero, clearance code Golf two-zero.’
The code the pilot had given matched the one on the screen.
‘India one-six affirmative. You’re clear to land,’ Jason said.
‘Roger that. Thirty seconds.’
Stratton suspected that Chaz and the standby team were on board, probably acting as the advanced recce team preparing surveillance for an assault team, whenever the lads could get back from Afghanistan. He wondered why he had not received a call from SBS HQ. The visit to MI16 was not a priority of any kind. They’d certainly known about this hijacking before he had arrived. Maybe Mike had been serious and they were resting him.
He put the thoughts aside as the powerful helicopter closed in on the landing pad.
Rowena glanced at the screen as if she was only half interested.
‘They’ll no doubt be in a hurry,’ Jason said. ‘Better get down to the airlock and meet them as they clear.’
‘You coming, Rowena?’ Binning asked as he started out of the door.
‘If there’s anything you can’t handle give me a shout.’ She seemed pissed off with him too.
Binning chose not to make the half-expected answer and put her from his mind as he went out.
The helicopter settled onto the pad and the cabin door opened. Men in black one-piece fireproof suits climbed out. Stratton recognised Chaz.
The heavy angled sheets of steel that Stratton had seen began to slide open. A red light to the side flashed and a sign lit up stating ‘ENTER THIS WAY’. The six men filed through the opening while the pilots and the crewman remained on board the Chinook. As the last man passed through the heavy steel door it began to close.
‘I take it you know these men?’ Jason asked.
Stratton was not ready to act as if all that had been said before had been forgotten.
‘Shall we go down and greet them?’ Jason asked. He walked off through the room. Rowena hadn’t moved so, rather than remain with her, Stratton set off after Mansfield. It would be a relief to meet Chaz and the boys.
They headed along another gently curving corridor and soon arrived at a more dingy part of the complex. The concrete was unfinished, as if the construction budget had been exhausted. Exposed pipes and conduits ran across the ceilings, connecting the bare strip lighting.
They passed under an archway into an expansive room containing a cloudy standard-sized swimming pool. Their feet echoed in the cavernous space as they walked along its length. ‘Testing pool,’ Jason pointed out as if he was a tour guide.
Another steel door led through to a wide room where overlapping sheets of rubber hung from ceiling to floor, which was covered in gravel. Around the room were distributed a dining table and chairs, a torn cord sofa, and two ragged armchairs - the cheap furnishings of an ordinary living room. Three men stood around the space in civilian clothes, two standing, one crouching. They didn’t move. Sponge dummies.
Stratton noticed ammunition casings in the gravel as he crunched through it, bullet holes in the furniture. He was surprised. MI16 had a killing house.
Jason glanced back at him. ‘When I got here it was a weapons-testing room. But I decided to make it more entertaining.’ They went into what appeared to be a storeroom containing rows of metal racks and shelving stacked with a variety of mechanical and electronic parts.
A muted alarm began to sound. Jason stopped in his tracks and looked up at the red light flashing above a door at the end of the room. ‘What the hell . . .’ he muttered. He pushed through the door into a dull concrete bunker where Binning stood in front of a control panel, holding a phone to his ear. Above the panel was a small monitor filled with Chaz’s irate face.
‘You were told that all weapons and communications devices were to be left on the helicopter,’ Binning said into the phone, sounding vexed. ‘And under no circumstances were any pyrotechnics to be brought into the complex.’ Binning looked at Jason and shook his head in frustration. ‘One of the bloody fools brought something in. The vault has locked down.’
‘We
‘Did you clean your equipment after your last training session or operational task?’ Binning asked. ‘I’ll answer that for you. No. You didn’t. You were warned that the system picks up the slightest chemical residue. If it has anything to do with explosives it reacts. You were told.’
Jason looked around at Stratton with an irritated glare. ‘Don’t these people pay attention to detail, damn it!’
Stratton didn’t like his tone but let it go. The boffins were clearly under stress. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘The security scanning system in the airlock is like the one you went through in the elevator,’ Jason explained.
‘And I put my phone and watch in a drawer and continued on down.’
‘You weren’t carrying any form of explosives. Without the clearance codes access goes into lock-down.’
‘Then give them the code.’
‘We don’t provide them,’ Binning said. ‘London does.’
‘Then send them back up to clear their gear,’ Stratton suggested, looking between the two men.
Jason sighed heavily as he tried to calm himself. ‘We can’t.’
Binning explained. ‘An unauthorised pyrotechnic invokes a Priority One protocol. It’s classed as an SSB, a serious security breach. We can’t override the system response and send them back up to the helipad. And neither can they carry on down to us.’
‘Our security is automated,’ Jason expanded. ‘Designed for a complex without physical security. We have no armed guards. Therefore we have far more stringent precautions . . . Your men are locked in, and that’s that.’
Stratton was getting the picture. ‘For how long?’
‘The vault can’t be opened for twenty-four hours.’ Jason was not apologetic.
Stratton automatically ran through the obvious implications.
Jason got the impression from his expression that it was the fault of MI16. ‘This has never happened before.’
‘Can I speak to him?’ Stratton asked.
Binning flicked a switch on the panel. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Chaz? This is Stratton.’
‘Stratton, what the hell is going on? They said we’re stuck in here for twenty-four bleeding hours.’
‘That seems to be the story, mate.’
‘That’s madness. We’ve got to get on.’
‘I know. There doesn’t seem to be a solution,’ Stratton said, looking at Jason to be sure.
A buzzer went off on the panel. Binning touched a button. ‘Binning here.’
‘London’s just called.’ It was Rowena. ‘The crisis response centre received an airlock-shutdown alarm.’
‘Tell them it’s under control.’ Jason cut in. ‘Give them our duress code, let them know we’re fine. It was an error. The SBS lads brought something into the lock.’
‘What a surprise,’ Rowena said.
‘Have London send the unlock code,’ Jason ordered.
‘We didn’t bring anything into the bloody access!’ Chaz shouted.
Jason looked at Stratton as if he’d been through that already. ‘It will take twenty-four hours to get them out. Nothing can change that.’
‘That’s bloody ridiculous,’ Chaz’s voice boomed.
‘You have to understand what this system was designed for,’ Binning explained. ‘Think of it like a bank vault that someone has tried to rob . . . the Bank of England, for instance. There are billions of pounds’ worth of systems in here. But it’s not just their financial value. Some of the devices would be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. It would be catastrophic, in fact. There are foreign governments that would give almost anything to get hold of some of the items we have in here.’
