DARKNET CORPORATION (13 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Bill saw in the control unit that the drugs were fifty kilometres ahead
near the town of Edirne, getting close to the border with Bulgaria. He thought
for a moment about pursuing a customs seizure at the border and dismissed it
almost without thinking further. There would be no time to set up a proper
operation. He had no idea how good or bad the Bulgarians would be, or even if
they were in the pay of the smugglers or not. “No,” he thought, “way too soon to
start barging in.”

Sometime later he looked again at the control unit and it was apparent
that they had cleared the border checkpoint and were once again on the highway
going northeast. “So much for thinking as slow as a dinosaur,” he thought. He would
not have had time to even catch up to them, let alone do anything when he got
there.

They had been driving for about two hours as they approached the same
border post themselves. It had a large covered area with trees on either side
of the road, and large sign saying ‘
Kapikule
Gümrük
Kapısı
’. Bill
knew only that the middle word referred to customs. Mert translated the sign
as;
Kapikule
customs station.

There were separate lines for passenger cars and commercial vehicles and
as they rolled in they saw that there were two lines of trucks queued up. Bill
imagined that every one of these border crossings would be a bit of a trauma
for the smugglers. Any number of things could go wrong. The armed guards in the
SUV’s were probably far enough away from the actual transport in separate lanes
to avoid any connection with the hoard, but the truck driver was vulnerable. Of
course, he was assuming that the truck driver actually knew that amongst the
goods he was carrying were illegal drugs. It was always possible he had been
duped into believing the armed guards were protection for some other valuables
or some other excuse.

The customs procedure was straightforward and bureaucratic. Bill had
appropriate paperwork in order to carry a concealed weapon in most countries as
a licensed security officer. If the issue came up, Bill was confident that Mert
would be familiar in dealing with it. In the end, no one was interested in
their personal belongings.

They followed north and turned left onto a road marked “A1” at a large
cloverleaf junction. Mert mentioned that this was actually still the E80, the
European route 80 that ran all the way to Lisbon, in Portugal.

The convoy took the ring road around the outskirts of Sofia, and they
followed not wishing to get bogged down in the city traffic.

-|-

The border crossing into Serbia at
Kalotina
was
much more dingy and squalid looking than the last and Bill thought of the
relative prosperity demarcated by such borders. This border post, more than
most, had witnessed seizures of drugs and Bill almost admired the bravado of
those he was following.

Bill was starting to doze when his phone went. With a start he jerked up,
fully awake now and looked at his phone. It was Jenkins, carefully obscured by
the cryptic ‘J’ as the phone number owner on his new phone.

“Hey,” said Bill.

“Sir, we followed up on the registration numbers. The truck is registered
to a transport company in Germany that routinely takes loads from Turkey to
Germany. It has a mixed load with items from several consignees.

Looking at customs information for the …eh,” he
paused
thinking of a discrete term for the drugs, “…’Consignment’, we traced it to
MZVI GmbH; an electrical engineering company in Gottingen, northern Germany. We
are chasing down as many leads as we can but that’s our current update,”
Jenkins reported.

“The other vehicles are all registered to a German company,
Bundesverband
der
Führungskräfte
;
which means association of executives. We think it’s another front. Registered
in Frankfurt,” Jenkins added.

“OK. Thanks Jenkins. We appreciate your legwork,” said Bill.

“We’re going to start setting up lines of communication with the
German Federal Police, without compromising our information sources, to prepare
them for a possible drugs intercept operation, possibly in Gottingen.

They will need to arrange search warrants and get their team together and
briefed. We’ll keep working away on that and following up any leads we can
develop. Meanwhile we will continue to monitor you and the target. Oh
!...
and one other thing… we got the decrypt of the session
Bicep
had at the Internet café before he left.”

“Yeah.
What did he say?” asked Bill.

“He was talking on instant messaging to Security 1; he said that he had
received the payment and was taking it to the ‘buy’. Then he said that he had
found ‘some raghead’ snooping on the office, but had ‘dealt with it’.”

There was a pause as Bill took it in. This was unequivocal confirmation
that Wood had murdered Gorbat. Finally he roused out of his trance and said,
“OK. Thanks for that.”

Jenkins said, “Sure,” and rang off.

Monitor the target. The phrase reminded Bill, half asleep, to check the
control unit. When the GPS resolved Bill almost shouted, “They’ve
stopped! They’re in Belgrade, in the city.”

Mert explained, “They’ll be held up in traffic. There’s no alternative
route other than straight through the city. Even at this time of day they will
be slowed right down to a crawl.”

As Mert predicted, the convoy kept rolling forward and within ten minutes
Bill realised they were moving out of Belgrade still travelling on the major
highway. The E70 they were now on was just about the only motorway road in the
country. Nonetheless Bill urged Mert to close up to around ten kilometres.

A quarter of an hour later Bill was sure they had really stopped and
called it out to Mert.

“There’s nothing out here to stop at, maybe a rest area, that’s all,”
advised Mert.

“Well we cannot just stop on the road, we’ll have to drive by,
we’re
too close. Unless we come across a rest area before we
get to them,” said Bill working through options. Deciding, he said, “No, let’s
drive by and see what’s going on. We’re as well in front of them as behind
them.”

Bill told Mert to drive by as slowly as any normal motorway traffic could
on this road without drawing attention.

As they closed on the transponder Bill closed the unit and peered to his
right, looking for the group of vehicles. He saw a sign for a rest area and as
they went by the rest area he saw the SUV’s front and back and a guard standing
at each, paying attention to the traffic, obviously ready for trouble. Bill
tried to appear uninterested in the scene. The black sedan was parked behind
the softside truck and he caught sight of
Bone
talking to the driver by
the truck’s cabin door. Someone else was at the front, taking a leak behind the
SUV.

A surge of pins and needles washed through Bill at the sight of
Bone
.
That confirms it. He’s here.

Mert said, “It looks like they are having a break or changing drivers.
Maybe we should do the same?”

Bill was tired but he assumed that Mert would be just as tired and they
needed to refresh themselves with a change of role. He suspected that the
convoy guards would have registered sight of their vehicle and it would not be
safe to be seen again. They decided to remain ahead of the convoy for a while.

They pulled over in the next rest area and swapped seats. Mert
immediately curled up and closed his eyes to rest awhile. Bill opened up the control
unit and laid it flat on the central console of the car so that he could
monitor it while he drove.

They drove through the night and swapped drivers at two hour intervals as
both men dealt with fatigue, staying ahead of their target and sticking to the
main highway towards Germany.

The convoy did not deviate behind them.

Not long after dawn they stopped in a service area for fuel and bought
coffee and
döner
sandwiches. Bill hoped that the convoy didn’t pull into the same service area
by chance, but it was a busy area even at the crack of dawn and didn’t think
they would be too conspicuous. Just in case, they didn’t waste too much time.

Back in the car Bill got another call from Jenkins.

“He’s used the laptop and the keystroke recorder worked! We’ve got a
sequence of keystrokes we are working through, one sequence seems to be a
password, reading it out letter by letter
; ‘s
-w-n-Z-4-e-v-a’,”
Jenkins enthused.

“Yeah, I get it,” replied Bill, obviously Jenkins didn’t.

“Then he obviously makes an instant message. We can only see one side of
what he types but he explains that they expect to arrive at 1pm at ‘the
distributor’ and he confirms they’ve had ‘no trouble’,” reported Jenkins. “We
are trying to make sense of ‘the distributor’. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Not really,” replied Bill. “I guess they might break down the shipment
into smaller packages for distribution and that’s what he’s talking about, but
it doesn’t give us any clue as to what or where ‘the distributor’ might be.
Does the MZVI
company
have a distribution location,
warehouse, whatever?”

“That’s what we’re checking. I’ll let you know if we find anything. He
seems to have connected at an Internet service point in a motorway service area
near
Teisendorf
,” Jenkins explained. “But we didn’t
get the intercept through for some time after he had made the connection.”

“Good. They are still on the same route, not too far behind us. We are
approaching Munich. How is your liaison with the
Bundespolitzei
going?” Bill asked, referring to the German Federal Police who would have
jurisdiction over drug smuggling.

“They’re pretty pissed that we can’t tell them where the shipment is
given it’s likely to be on their territory soon, but they are cooperating fully
and now we can at least give them a timeframe. They want to control when to
intercept it, but we’ve told them we won’t know until it arrives. We’ve spun
them a yarn about the source of our intelligence.

They’ve said they are willing to share any intelligence that they acquire
and they will make contact with you when you get near. I won’t give them your
details including your mobile number until you’re ready.”

“Thanks for that,” he acknowledged.

Jenkins continued, now in briefing mode, “The police forces in Germany
are a bit complicated. The Fed police, the BPOL, are tasked with fighting
smuggling, but the state police have jurisdiction over about anything that
happens on their turf. So the BPOL team that’s likely to be assigned are based
in Hanover, which is Lower Saxony state. That’s the state of the likely
destination too given it will be where we think it is, but they’ve put other
teams on standby in Munich, and Frankfurt, just in case.”

“Good. If they stay on course we’ll make contact with BPOL about an hour
or so out to get set up around the target destination before they arrive. Talk
to you later.” The adrenalin wasn’t rising yet, but Bill was wide awake now
that he could see an end to this journey.

Chapter Fifteen

As Bill and Mert approached Bad Hersfeld Bill called Jenkins and advised
that timing-wise they needed to get the Hanover BPOL team on the road to
Gottingen now so they could meet up with them in plenty of time to prepare to
recce the MZVI property and plan how to close the noose on the drug shipment.

Bill was anxious to ensure that they were properly armed for the task,
and Jenkins advised he had already briefed them on the drug convoy’s protection
detail and the use of force they could expect. They arranged to meet the BPOL
assault team off the junction of the E45 and highway 3 outside Gottingen.

Arriving at the designated meeting point, Mert had to drive around the
back of buildings to find the BPOL vehicles out-of-sight with at least a dozen
men waiting, lounging around, some checking each other’s gear.

“
Guten
Tag,” started Bill, offering his hand to
the man who turned and starting walking towards their car. The officer took his
hand and asked, “Herr Hodge?” The officer introduced himself as Capitan Hans
Tugendhat
, leader of the BPOL team. Hans was a big guy, but
looked bigger in the charcoal-coloured jump suit with various strapped-on
pouches and protective plates. He had his helmet off and the black balaclava
worn under it rolled up around his head over tufts of blonde hair.

Bill laid out what he knew about the softside truck and the escorts and
his assessment of their likely firepower as all of the team crowded around to
listen. He explained where the drugs were and that they would need a forklift
if they wanted to get the electrical transformers off the truck, and a large
spanner to undo the bolts. They assumed they would find the equipment on the
target’s premises but would call in whatever they needed only after they had
neutralised the situation.

Tugendhat
already had blueprints of the MZVI plant laid out on the
bonnet of the car. He explained where the factory was in relation to where they
were now; about 2 kilometres north, just off the main E45 highway. They decided
to drive around to the factory and reconnoitre to see what it looked like from
ground level, to identify the entrances and exits and the building itself.

Tugendhat
was already determined that they would allow the truck to
enter into the factory precincts which would tend to lock them in to the fenced
area. His men would take up positions at each of the gates shown on the plans
and converge on the truck as soon as it came to a stop and the engine was
switched off. They looked at each of the roads that might be taken to get to
the factory and where to position to remain unseen until the swoop.

Tugendhat
had organised his men into several groups, each assigned to
one of the convoy’s vehicles, with the bulk assigned to neutralise the armed
escorts. They would use their vehicles to drive right up to them as quickly as
possible and use them as shields to convince the smugglers to surrender. It
sounded like a reasonable plan but Bill wanted to see if he could find any
holes. He knew things rarely go off as planned.

They drove around to the factory in
Mert’s
car,
Bill in the front passenger seat, Hans and one of his
offsiders
,
in the back, wearing plastic ponchos over their obvious military style outfit
with the white POLITZEI markings.

The heavy fence around the property and the two main entrances seemed to
confirm the suitability of the plan. There was a goods inwards bay with a
roller door that Bill pointed out and they discussed how long it would take the
BPOL team, from becoming visible on the street to surrounding the convoy at the
goods inward bay.

They scouted out where the assault vehicles would take up positions.
Finally they decided where the lookout needed to be to have early warning of
the arrival of the convoy to call in the team and dropped off the offsider as
lookout.

Satisfied that the plan was adequate, Bill suggested backup officers be
dropped at the gates as they swooped in to stop anyone joining in or for any of
the vehicles leaving again if it all went wrong. Hans appreciated that Bill
knew what he was doing and agreed, thanking him for the suggestion.

They drove back to where the rest of the assault team were and Hans got
out and gave a few brief comments to his team, getting them ready to move out.
Visor-fronted helmets started going on; weapons were checked and men started
climbing into the big black vans they had come in.

Bill got into the car and turned back to the control unit to check on the
progress of the convoy. As the GPS registered and resolved he noted that the
T-1 red blip was stationery. He zoomed in to see where they were. They were off
the E45 about 6 or 7 kilometres east on the E40; miles away! “Shit! They
could’ve been stopped since we’ve been here,” Bill blurted out exasperated.
“Bastard!” he cursed himself with feeling.

Bill got out of the car to go explain the situation to Hans as his mobile
phone went off. It was Jenkins.

“They’ve stopped in Bad Hersfeld, about an hour ago!” Jenkins almost
shouted.

“It would’ve been good to know an hour ago!” shouted back Bill.

“We’ve had to extend the monitor interval to avoid the transponder
battery running down. We’ve measured it getting much weaker, so we’ve extended
to an hourly check. They were just lucky they stopped just after our last
check,” explained Jenkins, defensively.

“Well we’re on our way back there now but it’ll take us the best part of
an hour to get there. It’s over 100K!” Bill was fuming.

“Well I have other news, MI6 reports they have searched
Bicep’s
apartment, they call it a ….’
bed
sit’ in Clap-Ham.
That’s in London,” he added, almost comical in its naiveté. “They say it’s not
been used for over six months based on the sell-by date of stuff in the
refrigerator. There was no mail, not even junk mail,” said Jenkins.

Hans saw the heated discussion taking place on the phone and came over.
He broke into the conversation to explain that the truck had been sighted
coming off the highway and had confirmed it by its registration number.

“No! No! No! The truck won’t have the drugs on it anymore. It’s been
unloaded miles away, in Bad Hersfeld!” Bill was urgently trying to make his
point, but Hans looked back blankly.

“We must intercept the truck, now. If the drugs are gone we will go to
Bad Hersfeld, but it’s an hour away from here,” he said equally as frustrated
as Bill.

Bill, still connected on the phone, rang off from Jenkins with a
peremptory, “Later.”

Mert and Bill followed the two BPOL vehicles as they raced directly to
the MZVI property, abandoning most of their carefully laid plan and went
straight in, screeching to a halt on either side of the, already arrived,
truck.

The BPOL men surrounded it, shouting. The driver and two workers in
overalls stood with their hands as high as they could get them as the assault
team closed in and dropped them onto their stomachs securing their hands with
cable ties.

A fork lift appeared from within the roller door of the goods inwards
area. Seeing the scene in the yard, the driver immediately stopped and put up
his hands, scared out of his wits. Two BPOL officers jumped up onto the raised
platform he was on inside the factory and pulled him off the forklift,
repeating the cable tying procedure.

Bill and Mert got out and walked around the truck to see the softsides
pulled up on both sides to reveal four almost identical electrical transformers
to those that Bill had seen in the compound in Sadda on the back of the truck.
A man in a shirt and slacks with a clipboard came onto the loading bay and
stepped back in surprise asking “Was
ist
das?”

Hans recognising that the man was no threat, walked forward to avoid his men
applying their training and roughing him up and started a conversation with the
man, that Bill could not understand, in agitated German. After a few minutes
Hans returned and said that he wanted the tops removed from all of the
electrical devices. The warehouse manager that he had just talked to was
cooperatively arranging for a pneumatic spanner to be brought to accomplish
this as quickly as possible.

Bill remonstrated with Hans that this was a waste of time, but Hans
insisted that he must now check before they could do anything else. He
explained that he had called in the local
Landespolizei
or state
police, to take over from them and they could leave as soon as they arrived.

“Hans, it’s obvious that the escorts aren’t here and therefore
the drugs aren’t here. I have reliable information that they are in Bad
Hersfeld,” Bill pleaded. “Let me take one of the two vehicles and get down
there as fast as we can to locate them. We won’t do anything until you get
there,” he promised.

Hans agreed and spoke to his second-in-command who had
acted as the lookout, instructing him to go with Bill and maintain
communications. Hans took out his mobile and slapped it. Bill followed that
they would need to use mobiles since their radio’s mounted on the back of their
helmets would be short wave, line-of-sight capable and not any good for
communications over the many kilometres they were about to be separated.

Hans was quite animated in his discussion with his
second-in-command and slapped his hands to emphasise something. Bill presumed
reaffirming not to engage with the smugglers until the rest of the team got
there and they could fully prepare. Hans came over to Bill and exchanged mobile
numbers just in case they need to talk directly.

Hans made the same point to Bill, “do NOT, repeat NOT
engage with the criminals until the team reassembles and we set up a proper
plan.
Begreifen
?”

“
Begreifen
!”
Bill did not need
to understand literally what the word meant, but the context was obvious.

Hans barked at the group of men to his left, “
Raus
.
Loslegen
und
gehen
Sie
mit
Herr Hodge.”
Six men almost in unison made safe
their weapons and piled into one of the vehicles.

“Let’s go!” shouted Bill to Mert as they ran to their
car and started off.