Crisis Four Read Online Free

the buildings, facing down the walls and lighting up the shutters. There were also lights on in some of the units, but no sign of movement. Apart from the fence there seemed to be no security, which would be about right for units that supposedly housed nothing more serious than JCB spares.
    The buildings gave off enough light for us to see what we were doing, but we were still in the shadows of the grove. Glen came alongside me and said quietly, ‘This is the FRV (Final Rendezvous). The target… if you look at the nearest building on the left…’
    We were looking at the long sides of three rectangles. He indicated the closest one. ‘You see the lights on?’ I nodded. ‘All right, count three windows from the left. That’s where we reckon he is – or was last night.’ The ‘reckon’ would have been a bit of a judgement call: the latest pictures we had of the Source were three years old. I didn’t even know his name. Only Sarah did, and only she could positively identify him.
    I could make out two small mobile satellite dishes and a wire half-wave dipole antenna on the roof, looking like the world’s longest washing line. You didn’t need that lot for road building.
    I sat against a stubby tree while the patrol prepared itself, bringing out kit from their bergens very slowly to eliminate noise. There was no light from the town to the north, which was lost completely in the dead ground. Reg 1 and 2 checked in with Glen, then moved off. Glen pulled an antenna out of a green twelve-by-eight-inch metal box and began to press buttons. I didn’t have a clue what the box was called, but I knew what it did. A little red light came up, which no doubt was a test to make sure he had comms with whatever devices were rigged up at the electricity substation which supplied the power to this area. I imagined they’d be using a number of small stand-off charges, something about the size of a Coca-Cola can, to penetrate the cast-steel casings. All they’d need to do was make a hole big enough for the coolant to drain out of and the generators would quickly burn themselves out.
    Sarah wanted confirmation about the target. She pestered Glen, ‘Are you sure that’s the building? Are you sure he’s in there?’ He was already pissed off with her, and told her politely that she might be in overall command but he was the commander on the ground, so shut the fuck up and let him do his job. Good one, Glen, I thought.
    We were kneeling around him at the edge of the grove as he made his final checks on the target and confirmed the orders with the rest of us. There were no changes to the plan. It was Sarah who would give the final Go or No Go now. She nodded at him.
    ‘OK, everybody, here we go.’ Glen got his box of tricks and pulled up the antenna the last few inches. ‘Standby, standby…’ I heard the click of a button being pressed. There was a delay of about two seconds, then a bright flash in the distance, beyond the glow from the industrial units. Then, after twenty seconds, there was total darkness as the lights went out in the compound.
    Glen was back to enjoying life, despite Sarah’s presence. He grinned. ‘OK, let’s go.’
    We moved off at a slow jogging pace along the edge of the trees. Once level with Reg 1 and 2, we turned left over the waste ground and went straight for it. They were pulling at the straight line of the cut they’d made, making a big upsidedown V for us to get through.
    We took advantage of the darkness and sprinted the fifty metres to the target building. There was the odd outburst of hollering and shouting through an open window – nothing frantic; the voices just sounded pissed off that the power had failed, probably halfway though the Syrian version of EastEnders . Now and again I saw the glint of torchlight from inside.
    We reached the edge of the target building and everybody got against the wall, Glen looking towards the nearest corner. Round that, to the left and next to the shutters,