“I see, did you get them straight?” he asks.
“I just wanted to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious and couldn’t think of anything, so all good,” I tell him and put my arm around his neck, pulling him into me playfully. “I just heard off Catherine, she says they are all fine; bored, but fine.”
“Good, won’t be long until we get back to them,” Josh says, pulling away from me as we get near to the hangar.
“Nope, not long,” I agree as my phone buzzes against my hip again; it’s another message from Catherine. ‘Come back safe to us. XX’, it reads, and I quickly type, ‘You can count on it! Xx’.
Chapter 13
“What have we got, gentlemen?” I ask Dan and Lieutenant Winters.
The Lieutenant answers first. “There was a power outage in the Paddington Basin area yesterday, which would have affected Orion. I have spoken to London Utilities and they informed me the power has been restored to that area. They could give no guarantees for the Orion building, however.”
“Dan, do we have drone footage?”
“Not yet, but a drone has been tasked and we should be online within five minutes,” he tells me.
“We are going to have to assume the Orion building has no power, so what are our options?” I ask.
“We will have to take a generator with us. There are portable ones,” Josh suggests from beside me.
“I’ll get one arranged,” the Lieutenant says without having to be asked.
“Josh, get Corporal Watts over here, please,” I ask.
Josh, runs across the hangar to where the Corporal, currently shrouded in bright blue light from plasma, is testing it, sparks flying off whatever piece of metal he has found to cut up to test it on.
The Corporal looks up to Josh through his blacked-out safety goggles, before he pulls them up off his head. He follows Josh back across the hangar to us.
“Corporal, the building might not have power, so we are getting a generator to take with us; do you know of any problems with using one with the plasma?”
“No, Sir, there should be no problem,” he tells me.
“As soon as it arrives, get it tested, as I don’t have the greatest faith in generators,”
“Yes, Sir,” he says, looking slightly confused.
He wouldn’t look confused if I told him about the generators failing at the Orion building yesterday and the resulting fate of many friends and colleagues one floor below me.
“Thank you, Corporal, carry on,” I tell him.
“The drone is approaching the target,” Dan says from behind me.
The Corporal and I spin around at the same time as he goes back to his plasma and I spin to look at the drone’s approach to the Orion building.
“Ten minutes until the generator arrives,” the Lieutenant says as I start to focus on the video footage from the drone.
Even from high above the ground, the picture quality coming in from the drone is excellent, and it still surprises me how far technology has come in such a short time. When I was serving, for the most part, we were lucky if we had a few blurry aerial photos taken from miles above the target area to study before a mission. You literally had to use a magnifying glass to look at them, more often than not. Now we are getting live footage of the target area, and if somebody told me it was full High Definition, I would believe them.
“What are we looking at?” I ask.
Dan checks the grid reference on the screen of where the drone is. “The Orion building should be in view any second now.”
And then, there it is, we are looking down at the distinctive triangular-shaped building sitting next to the Paddington Basin canal. The drone is too high for us to see much detail, but I can just about make out the hole in the roof that we escaped from yesterday and that is probably only because I know it is there.
“Tell the pilot to take the drone as low as he can,” I tell Dan.
Dan picks up the headphones that are sitting on the table, puts them on and then pulls down the microphone. It swivels on Dan's right earphone until it is in front of Dan’s mouth. It takes a minute or so for Dan to speak to the pilot, but the drone is soon descending as it circles around the Orion building. The view of the building improves constantly.
“That’s as low as he can get without risking crashing,” Dan says as he lifts his left headphone off his ear and onto the side of his head so he can hear both of us and the pilot.
We study the improved view for a few minutes, although there is still a lot of smoke in the area that clouds the picture. As the drone circles, one of us will lean in occasionally if we see something that might be of interest, closer to the screen, trying to get a better look.
“Rabids are still all over the front grounds, inside the perimeter fence,” I point out. “There aren’t as many as yesterday, but I was hoping they would have all but gone by now.”
“They aren’t really moving, they look almost asleep like they were when we got to the Tower of London yesterday. That’ll soon change when we arrive,” Dan reveals.
“Yes, do you think there are enough of them to build up to the broken windows again?” I ask.
“Doubtful, Boss, there would need to be a lot more of them; we will attract more when we arrive but I don’t think we will be there long enough from them to pose a threat,” Dan surmises.
“Agreed,” I say, “let's concentrate on the building then. Can anybody see any signs of the power being on in there?”
“Is that a light,” Josh says, pointing, “or is it the Sun reflecting on a window?”
We all look but none of us can
