PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (33 page)

14

By the time Cole had landed and met up with the other Force One commandos, Vinson’s London contacts had weapons and equipment ready and waiting for them.

There were also file photographs and background dossiers on the missing Iranian aviators, which Cole distributed to each member of his team.

There wasn’t a great deal they could do at the moment, they were just going to cover the memorial procession as it went, their expert eyes keeping a look out for anything in the least but suspicious.

If any of the aviators were located, they were to be confronted immediately.

Aviators
, Cole thought again as he checked his Glock pistol. What was he missing?

He shook his head, and thought about Morgan. She’d still not been seen, and nobody anywhere had heard from her. He knew it didn’t look good, and his initial suspicions about her being targeted by friends of Milanović were starting to seem increasingly more likely as time went on.

But – as much as her cared for her – he couldn’t let himself be distracted by her absence now.

There was simply too much at stake.

He checked his watch, saw that it was nearly ten o’clock GMT.

The procession was about to start, and they still weren’t on location.

He was rounding everyone up to get in the vehicles when it hit him.

Army
Aviation wasn’t airplanes – it was helicopters. Helicopters and . . .

Cole called through to Forest Hills immediately.

‘Michiko,’ he said desperately, ‘the aviators are
drone pilots.
They’re going to drop the chemical weapons on London with
drones
.’

‘Drones?’ Victor Parish said just an hour later, when the news finally got to him via Vinson, dos Santos, and Dennis O’Hare. ‘Here?’

‘Yes,’ O’Hare answered, ‘we think so. How’s it set up there?’

‘We’ve got air defense right outside,’ Parish answered, ‘the new FLAADS Land set-up.’

The Future Local Area Air Defense System had replaced the UK’s aging Rapier SAM missile defenses only recently, but Parish had seen the system in operation and had been suitably impressed. The MBDA Common Anti-air Modular Missile had an operational range of twenty-five kilometers, and could get up to speeds of Mach 3 and beyond.

‘You think it’ll be enough?’ O’Hare asked.

‘Sir, if there are drones out there, this thing will shoot them out of the sky long before they get anywhere near here.’

‘Okay son,’ O’Hare said, ‘just keep an eye out, okay?’

‘Yes sir,’ Parish said, looking at the scene around him.

With the first arrivals waiting to enter the stadium and thousands more in the performance areas and parking lots outside, he already had his hands as full as he could cope with.

He would leave the drones to FLAADS, he decided, and concentrate on the job in hand.

As Cole’s troops spread themselves along the parade route to offer a third layer of protection to the world leaders, who led a procession of thousands down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace, Cole busied himself with trying to figure out where a drone attack could come from.

Drones large enough to carry a chemical weapons payload sufficient to cause mass death would be easily picked up by London’s city radar system, and destroyed by FLAADS – and at high enough temperatures to render their compounds harmless.

But still Cole felt he was missing something, and he was angered by the casualness of MI5’s approach to the problem. Vinson had reported that, with hard evidence still not provided, Sir Ian Riley – no doubt on the advice of the head of JTAC, Bryce Kelly – was treating the drone threat as the least of his problems. With anti-Muslim protests on every street corner, alongside anti-fascist
counter
-protests, the police and intelligence services were more concerned over civil violence than they were with an uncorroborated terrorist threat.

Cole wouldn’t be happy unless he’d covered every angle though, thought of every eventuality.

Force One was plugged into the city’s defensive systems, and radar had so far picked up nothing of any interest whatsoever.

But with the arrival of world leaders to Wembley Stadium to happen within the next couple of hours, the missing aviators were still a thorn in Cole’s side.

He shook his head, terribly tired, unable to remember the last time he’d slept, and thought that he’d be very happy when this day was finally over.

15

By the afternoon, Cole was at Wembley Stadium alongside Victor Parish, with the full authorization of President Abrams.

The morning parades had passed off without a problem, with numbers marching past Hyde Corner estimated to be somewhere in the region of one million citizens, many clutching teddy bears, the symbol of the lost children. It had been a sight to behold and – even though his mind was on other things – Cole had been moved close to tears by the sight of it.

The only black mark against the day so far had been a violent confrontation between a hard-core fascist group, and a section of young Muslims who had been in Covent Garden to protest about the terrorists. A nearby Jewish group had joined in the melée on the side of the Muslims, and – although quickly broken up by the police – it had made the news around the world, cited as an example of religious and social unity in the face of terrorist violence.

But there was no sign of the suspected drones, or of the missing chemical weapons.

Perhaps Cole
had
been wrong after all; perhaps there
was
no secondary attack?

Cole hoped that it was the case, that he’d been mistaken, that his fears about the aviators, about the drones, about the weapons, were all entirely misplaced.

But even now, as he watched the combined leadership of the global community take their seats at the front of the stadium, the coffins of the dead laid out across the vast stadium field ahead of them, Cole was convinced that this thing still hadn’t ended, hadn’t yet reached its conclusion.

‘Radar?’ Cole asked Parish, who checked in with the FLAADS troopers outside the arena.

He got his reply, and turned back to Cole. ‘All clear,’ he said.

‘Good.’

Cole watched on for several moments, as the massive stadium, full to bursting with ninety thousand mourners, grew silent.

The ceremony was starting in earnest.

Cole’s cellphone rang then, and he stood up and retreated somewhere quieter to take it, not wishing to disturb anyone.

‘Mark,’ he heard his daughter say, and he instantly picked up on the urgency and insistence in her voice.

‘What is it?’ he asked expectantly.

‘I’ve got something. Something bad.’

‘What?’ Cole asked impatiently. ‘What is it?’

‘Latest intelligence estimates suggest that the weapon that went missing from Shahid Dastgheyb was sarin.’

Cole shuddered at the news. Sarin, or GB gas, was a nerve agent which attacked the body’s nervous system and caused death within one to ten minutes through asphyxiation from lung muscle paralysis, a particularly nasty way to go. There were some antidotes, but they had to be administered immediately if they were to be effective. The gas was so efficient that, even when ingested in non-lethal amounts, permanent neurological damage was often the result.

‘Also,’ Michiko continued, ‘I found more accounts controlled by Khan, and started looking for connections between him and the pilots, but eventually found something else.’ Cole was about to interject again, to get her to hurry up and get to the point, but she carried on anyway. ‘Orders and payments, made by subsidiary companies set up by one of Khan’s offshore groups.’

‘To who?’ Cole demanded.

‘HobbyTech,’ Michiko said, ‘a company which supplies leisure drones, small ones, you know the type, the ones you can use to overfly your kids’ baseball games, to film them, or to take more impressive holiday selfies. Toys really, just a few steps removed from remote-controlled planes and helicopters.’

‘How many?’ Cole asked immediately.

‘Well, Khan used about two dozen different companies to purchase them, over a period of several months, and – ’

‘
How many
?’ Cole insisted.

‘Err . . .’ Michiko paused, as if checking her files. ‘It looks like two hundred.’

‘Two hundred?’ Cole exploded. ‘Shit! Payload?’

‘Approximately five hundred grams.’

He calculated quickly, knowing that each of the drones could certainly handle the weight of a camera, could probably take at
least
five hundred grams; multiply that by two hundred, and you had a potential payload of one hundred
kilograms
.

Shit. A chemical weapons payload of a hundred kilos would be more –
much
more – than enough to kill every single person in the entire stadium, several times over.

What was more, such little aircraft would be all but undetectable to the FLAADS system outside, which was set up to deal with incoming threats that could be dealt with from several miles out. Small, multiple targets appearing so close to the venue would be hard – if not impossible – to defend against.

‘Range?’ Cole asked next.

‘This model can fly for about twenty minutes on a single charge which – with a top speed of twenty miles per hour – means that they would have to take off from within a radius of about seven miles from your location.’

Shit
, Cole thought again – a seven miles radius covered thousands of buildings, millions of potential take-off sites for such small aircraft.

‘We got a match on two of the aviators too, entering the country at Gatwick under assumed names about three weeks ago. We can probably assume the others are here too, we just haven’t managed to get a facial recognition match yet.’

Cole’s head started to spin as the ramifications hit him. He’d thought the aviators were here to control planes, or large drones, skills for which specialists were needed. Leisure drones could be operated by pretty much anyone, on the other hand; but given the near impossibility of recruiting two hundred murderous jihadists, experts were also needed to control the numerous smaller aircraft.

Each man would have to control several drones at once, but – although he was sure that they were highly skilled – it was unlikely that they would be able to fly more than three or four at a time, which meant that the attack would probably come in waves of twenty to thirty drones at a time. Such smaller groupings would also not be as likely to show up on radar systems; two hundred drones coming in at once would show up like a full-on airplane.

Cole shook his head. The entire thing would offer no chance for defense, no way to target so many aircraft at once.

‘Do you know the frequencies they operate on?’ Cole asked. ‘Can you track where the signals are coming from?’

‘I’ve got the frequencies from the company that made them,’ Michiko said, ‘but I need radar access to track the source.’

Cole breathed out slowly, calming himself as the plan formed in his mind.

‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’

16

Half an hour later, the evacuation of Wembley Stadium was in full swing. It had taken a call to Bruce Vinson, who had spoken to Catalina dos Santos and Dennis O’Hare – and while dos Santos shared their latest intelligence with her British counterparts, O’Hare was getting in touch with the presidential protection team, ordering them to get the hell out of there.

Finally unable to ignore the threat, Sir Ian Riley had consulted with the head of the Met police, and they had jointly decided to evacuate the entire building.

General Olsen had also spoken to his military counterparts in Britain, who had ordered the FLAADS troops to liaise with Michiko at Forest Hills; she immediately gained access to their systems, taking over the radar to track for the incoming frequencies.

It wasn’t long before she picked them up, the first wave of lethal drones coming in from the northwest; and while she tracked the source of the signal, she also broadcast the frequency to the security force’s jamming units, which immediately stopped the signals getting through to the incoming aircraft.

The first flight of drones started to fall out of the sky, well before they made it to Wembley; but there was the danger that the payloads would still be dispersed when they crashed, and emergency messages went out to houses in the area, warning people to stay indoors, to cover their heads with wet towels, to protect themselves in any way they could.

Units from the military’s Defense CBRN Center were already en route to the area to deal with the potential fallout, to seal off any affected neighborhoods and administer antidotes to anyone who had been caught.

Cole, checking his weapons as he waited for final confirmation of the address where the drone pilots were located, heard the information come through from Michiko as each wave of drones crashed down to the empty streets below, starved of the signals they needed to operate.

But then the next wave continued onward, unaffected by the jammers.

‘They’ve changed frequencies,’ Michiko said in panic.

‘Can you find the new ones?’ Cole asked as he climbed into a car alongside Barrington and Russakoff, who had come by to pick him up.

‘Not in time,’ Michiko said, ‘the drones are just ten minutes out!’

‘Damn it!’ Cole said as Barrington pulled out into the street. ‘Get me that address, now!’

They were just going to have to do it the old fashioned way.

Parish watched in horror at the chaos that filled the stadium in front of him.

The plan was to have evacuated the leaders first, then the rest of the audience; but when people saw security moving in, the leaders being pulled out, word spread quickly.

And, although most of the gathered crowds were content to wait for the authorities to tell them what to do, a minority were most certainly not.

They began to leave the stadium immediately and eventually, following their lead, everyone else did the same, all at the same time.

The result was chaos and confusion, entries and exits all blocked by a fleeing mass of humanity; and then Parish got word that the situation outside was just as bad, crowds of tens of thousands aroused into blind panic by news of
drones
,
poison gas
, and
terrorist attacks
.

He had no idea where it came from, but the result was that most of the world leaders were still penned inside the arena, unable to get out unless their security staff started shooting people.

And then that happened too, and as Parish heard the gunshots, he knew that the
real
chaos had only just begun.