Capital Crimes by Stuart Woods

Author:Stuart Woods
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2003-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

32

CARPENTER GATHERED WITH the small group of Royal Marines in a sterile conference room at a training establishment far down the Thames Estuary. They were all dressed in jeans or foul-weather gear and with a variety of headgear- baseball caps, woolen watch caps, and navy blue yachting caps with yacht club insignia. They looked like the crew of a world-class racing yacht-young, fit, and eager-as long as one didn’t know how quickly and quietly they could kill.

General Sir Ewan Southby-Tailyour stood at the foot of the conference table, manipulating transparencies on a projector. His first was taken from an admiralty nautical chart. “Now, you see here the position of the island in relation to the coast and the Thames Estuary,” he said. “We’ll have about a six-hour sail with the wind giving us a nice close reach, and in bright sunshine for most of the afternoon. The met office tells us conditions will deteriorate rapidly after sunset: the wind will back to the southwest and increase to around force seven, giving us a cross-swell and a very dark night, which should suit our purposes admirably.” He switched to a satellite photograph in which Sealand filled the entire frame.

“Now you see the landing, just here.” He pointed on the transparency with a pencil. “It’s certainly not what one would call a harbor, but it has some shelter from the southwesterlies, so we shouldn’t have much more than a light chop inside the point. There’s a dock, here.

“Now the buildings: There are six Portocabins, all identical from the outside, and I am indebted to Carpenter and her people for supplying us with some intelligence about the interiors. The southernmost is sleeping quarters and bathrooms; the next up the line is a mess hall and lounge for the inhabitants. These accommodations should be quite comfortable for them, since the island has a standing population of eight to ten. Provisions and mail are brought over from an East Anglian port twice a week, but never at night, which suits us.

“The third building in line is the computer installation and some offices, and the fourth houses the cellular telephone equipment and offices. The other two are purely for utility-storage, tools, et cetera. It is the third building, here, that interests us, but we will place guards on buildings one, two, and four as well, so that our workers are not disturbed.

“Carpenter’s intelligence tells us that there is one man each on duty in the computer and telephone buildings, so they should be easy to deal with. Sergeant Simpson, please show us how we will deal with them.”

A thick-set man in his early thirties stood up and placed one end of a yard-long tube in his mouth, pointing it at a dartboard at the other end of the room. His cheeks puffed out, there was a whfft! noise and a dart struck the board at dead center. Carpenter was impressed.

“Very good,” Sir Ewan said, walking to the board and extracting the dart. He held it up for the group to see.

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