DARKNET CORPORATION (8 page)

He took one hand off the camera and gripped his Glock. The two men
starting arguing amongst themselves then one of them spotted what they needed
and they grabbed four plastic containers and struggled out with them, closing
the door behind them.

Bill felt his shoulders release down as the tension relaxed. He looked
back at the camera. The metal top was being reassembled onto the high-tech thing
and a large number of bolts tightened all the way around it. Another man stood
close by holding a paint pot and brush ready to touch up the paintwork to
conceal the scratches on the tightened bolts.

Then Bill realised what they were; electrical transformers. The weight
would ideally disguise the concealed heroin. Clearly the oil filling in the
fins, and probably the copper coils had been removed to provide space for the
heroin.

Bill thought that if the paperwork for the electrical transformers appeared
genuine, it was understandable that customs scrutiny might not be aroused.
“These guys know what they are doing,” thought Bill. Indeed Bill recognised
that the incoming shipment they had followed of morphine base would form
another batch and what he was watching was a previous batch. This was clearly
an industrial level laboratory producing enormous quantities of heroin.

With the batch of heroin secreted and the night closing in, the operation
started to quieten down for the day. Bill wondered if that would give him the
opportunity to get over and see into the rooms across the passage once everyone
retired. He waited and watched advising his lookouts that he was staying put
for some time.

An hour later there were only the sentry and the occasional person moving
around, checking the fires had been extinguished. The rooms across the passage
also had the same kind of ventilation holes and Bill decided to abandon the
awkward camera and simply peer in through them. After another long period, once
he had steeled himself to creep around in the lion’s den, Bill opened the
storeroom door and tiptoed the three metres to the opposite wall. Being careful
not to pass in front of the ventilation holes he stood up and put his eye to
the nearest one and looked in. Pitch black.
Nothing visible.
He cursed himself for not using the camera, even though it might not have
helped.

He ducked down below the ventilation holes and tiptoed forward to the
middle room and repeated the spying. This room had several people and lamps.
They were playing some kind of board game. He surveyed the faces and decided
these were not what he was seeking. He dropped down and spied into the last
room from the far side.
Bone
was sitting opposite an Afghan. Judging
from the quality of his clothes this was obviously the most senior local here
and it wasn’t Abu
Ukasha
. “Time to exit,” thought
Bill.

A door opened in the upper story at the back courtyard end. He could hear
footsteps coming down the steps. Bill knew he could not make it back to the
storeroom and looked around for cover. He ducked down behind the nearest cover
which was the four-wheel-drive and hoped that the interlopers were not going to
use one of the vehicles and put on the headlamps, or come past where he was.

Several tribesmen workers walked straight to the front gate and exited.

“Several persons exiting the front gate and turning
right.
Negative
Monarch
.
Negative
Monarch
,” reported
Mickey, obviously still very awake and alert. “Good man,” thought Bill.

From his new position he could see that the two front ‘gatehouses’ were
actually open at the back and consisted of only three walls. There was an upper
platform that had lookout holes in all three walls and a wooden ladder fixed to
the wall that gave access to it.

In the lower part of the right hand gatehouse were
oildrums
and a hand pump. “Fuel for the vehicles,” Bill thought. On the other side was a
fork lift. The ‘L’ shaped metal contraption stood about two and half metres,
with two fork prongs sticking out and a hydraulic cylinder operated by a long
handle. It had inset wheels in the base at the front of the L and big rubber
wheels at the back.

Bill realised they would need something like the fork lift to get the
electrical transformers onto the flatbed truck. The heavy metal devices, fully
loaded with heroin must weigh much more than could be lifted by pure manpower.
This confirmed that the operation was not a one-off, but was fully equipped for
an ongoing production line and had probably filled several ‘electrical
transformers’ before. The scale of the operation was a lot to take in.

An idea formed in his mind. He was crouching at the back of the
four-wheel-drive virtually looking at the centre top stoplight where the
transponder was. Since he had touched the back of the vehicle when he ducked
down he was semi-confident the vehicle wasn’t alarmed. Pulling out his knife he
slipped it between the stoplight cover and the metal of the car and prised it
open. Sure enough, the red stoplight cover popped out easily. He caught the
edge of the silver reflector with the tip of the knife and wriggled that free.
It dropped forward and was caught by the electrical wire clunking against the
car body. Bill paused, waiting for another door to open at the noise.

Nothing.

He put his left hand into the cavity and felt around. There was a sticky
packet. He had to peal it off the metal behind. It was black; about the size of
a cigarette pack with nothing to distinguish it. All six sides were tacky.

Bill pulled it out and stuck it on his chest while he replaced the silver
reflector, pushed the stoplight back clipping it in and then pressed the red
diffusion cover into place with a click. Looking around he sneaked over to the
two transformers and looking for the most inaccessible corner he pushed the
transponder between the fins until it was in a dark space. With his knife he
gently prodded it even further back until it was stuck deep into the crevice.

On his way back to the storeroom, he paused and looked into the
four-wheel-drive. He thought better of opening the doors unless there was an
alarm. He could see a laptop on the front passenger seat and realised the
windows were open. He didn’t need to open the door. “How careless can he be,”
thought Bill.

He resisted his first reaction, which was to simply grab the laptop. It
would obviously be missed and give them away. Given what he knew about the
secrecy with which Bone had conducted his online sessions, there might not be
anything useful on the laptop anyway. Then he remembered the USB gizmo and
fished around in his pocket until he felt it. Blowing any dust from his pocket
out of the connector and wiping the outside of it with his finger he leaned in
and pressed it into a slot in the back of the laptop. Frustrated he realised he
had it upside down and had to try again before it clicked satisfyingly into
place. He breathed out, starting to sweat.

Once back in the storeroom he considered lighting a fire. “There are no
innocents in this compound,” he thought. A fire in this tinderbox would
certainly become a massive explosion with all the highly flammable materials.
It was inevitable that they would, sooner or later, blow themselves up, given
the scale of the operation, but, on balance, he decided he could not, in all
conscience, execute the workers. He sacrificed the opportunity for mayhem, for
the opportunity to get the main mayhem maker himself. In any case it would be
safer to take this place down, anytime, when they were well clear of it.

Bill gathered up his equipment, checked the sentry position with Ledge
and pushing the
mudbricks
outside, and exited the
hole. He pulled the boxes close to the wall and repaired the exit with
mudbricks
as best he could. They might not find his doorway
for some time, hopefully.

The team withdrew one by one and made it back to their hidden vehicles
without incident and after listening to Bill’s report and checking the control
unit to make sure the repositioned transponder was still active, settled down.
Mickey organised tea and oatmeal biscuits out of the rations as they let the
adrenalin subside.

“So why did you move the transponder, Bill,” asked Ledge.

“I figured if
Bone
hadn’t met with Abu
Ukasha
at the buy or at the lab, he was probably not going to meet him. Presumably
he’s going back to Kabul, so we can follow him back and see if he does meet up
with anyone. As for the drugs, if we can trace the smuggling route from here,
it might be more useful than anything else we could do with the transponder. We
don’t need a trace to follow
Bone
back to Kabul,” Bill reasoned. “We’ll
set a lookout close to the road and follow him when he goes past.”

With a few expletive remarks about the treachery of
Bone
they
settled in for rest and arranged staggered lookout duty.

Chapter Eight

Ledge dished up the ‘all day breakfast’ mush and took a plastic mug with
a heated up pouch in it to Bill at his lookout ‘
posi
’
in the bushes close to the road.

“Cheers Ledge. Are we good to go?” querying whether the makeshift camp
could be struck in order to follow
Bone
when he was sighted.

“Sure,” was the
reply.
“Moment’s
notice.
We called in the
sitrep
on the drug
lab and gave them the coordinates and your estimate of the quantity.”

Just at that moment the four wheel drive came into view crossing the bridge
coming out of Sadda. Bill raised his binoculars, “Fuck! That’s not him.” He
checked the registration. “That’s his four-wheel-drive, but he’s not driving
it.” He followed the vehicle as it went past checking that there were no
passengers.

Putting down the binoculars he was nonplussed. Then he said, “he must be
going with the drugs; looking after his investment.”

“What do we do now?” asked Ledge.

“First let’s check that
Bone
has gone with the drugs. Maybe he IS
going to meet up with Abu
Ukasha
. Who knows?”

The two went back to the vehicles, Bill filling his face with the
‘breakfast’ as he went. “Has the transponder moved?”
Bill
asked Mickey, who reached into the SORV and opened up the transponder control
unit.

After a pause for the unit to resolve the locations, Mickey replied,
“Nope. Oh!
Take that back.
They’re moving now, just
going south.”

They mounted up, Ledge riding shotgun with Bill; Mickey driving the SORV.

It was decided that since there was very light traffic they would keep as
far between them as they could to avoid attracting attention. The main
objective was to get eyes on
Bone
and confirm that he was moving with
the drugs, or he was somewhere else and then decide what action to take after
that. If
Bone
wasn’t with the drugs, they had lost him and had no easy
way to locate him again.

Ledge studied the control unit as they went. About a quarter of an hour
travelling south Ledge said, “There are a couple of curves in about 5K where we
might get a side on view of them if we close up a bit.”

“OK,” said Bill, “How close do we need to be?”

“Maybe a thousand metres, using binoculars.
They won’t be looking back our way
but we should stop before we get vision of the road ahead and go forward on
foot. If they see us and come after us, we will have to high-tail it back as
fast as we can,” said Ledge.

As they neared this manoeuvre, Ledge called up Mickey to let him know
what they were planning.

As they came close to a hairpin on an elevated part of the road Ledge
warned Bill when to stop and they both ran forward to the corner in time to see
in the distance, lower down, a convoy of two utilities full of tribesmen. One
in front, one behind a medium-sized flatbed truck with a tarpaulin roped over
its load and a sedan behind them.

As the convoy curved around to the right coming more side-on to Bill and
Ledge, both men said at the same time, “
Bone’
s driving the car.” Ledge
called up Mickey to tell them they were stopped waiting for him so they could
discuss next steps. When Mickey pulled in behind them after a few minutes he
said, “
Bone
‘s
with the drugs?”

“Yeah.
Driving a sedan at the back of the convoy.
Two trucks full or armed men and the drugs transport.” Ledge turned to Bill
asking, “So what’s the plan now, Bill?”

“We back off and follow the transponder till we see where they are going.
If they stop, we get closer to get eyes on who they meet.”

They waited until the convoy had established a suitable lead then
continued, still with a good distance between them.

They passed a junction on their right.
A road out of
FATA leading to
Khost
, across the border in
Afghanistan.
Ledge glanced at Bill to see if there was any flicker of
recognition of a road ‘home’; any chink of regret in his determination to
follow
Bone
, but there was none.

They passed several small townships or villages with the convoy several
kilometres in front of them, on average.

A loud, ground-shaking thump reverberated through the vehicle, followed
by what sounded like gunfire and three secondary explosions. “What was that!”
shouted Ledge in alarm.

Bill looked in his rear-view mirror to see a black cloud rising far
behind them. He said, “Call Mickey!”

“Mike this is Lima. Mike this is Lima,” he called. Then after a very
short pause, “Mike this is Lima, radio check.
Over.”

Hissing silence.

Bill had slowed right down. “Check the control unit!” he barked at Ledge.

Ledge opened the control unit. “Come on! Come on!” he said, willing the
registration of the transponders to hurry up. “The drugs transponders come
on…but Mickey’s isn’t. It’s not there!” There was panic in his voice.

Bill whipped the vehicle around and raced back up the road. As they got
closer to the black cloud they could see a fire and a wreck in the ditch. It
was only the bottom frame of a long wheel-base vehicle chassis. The top was
completely gone and the area around it was strewn with debris. There was
nothing bigger than a football. Everything was smouldering.

“Mickey?” breathed Ledge.

“Don’t’ know,” admitted Bill

“An IED?”
Ledge was stunned.

“I don’t think so. They don’t need them here and they leave a crater.
There’s no crater,” Bill rationalised, somewhat mesmerised by the scene.

A large number of local tribesmen had arrived to view the carnage and
were seething around the two men’s vehicle. Suddenly the door opened and Bill
was dragged from his seat. All he could see were fists and boots and rifle
butts. Then it went black.