Thus Janet’s working day had begun with her tired, pale and again wishing to block out the worst thoughts, but she did that last part everyday anyway.
Breakfast had been served up to a Jimmy who was much quieter these days. His best friend Alistair had been taken out of a lesson the previous week by a usually stern faced head mistress whom at that time had been visibly moist eyed and exuding compassion. Alistair had not rejoined the class and by the time school finished for the day the married quarter his friend had lived at was locked up, awaiting contractors to empty its contents and ship them up north. There were a lot of ‘pad brats’ attending Jimmy’s school and not all from 1CG.
The headmistress had made half a dozen trips from her office to classrooms as result of telephone calls since the war had started.
Karen was also quieter of late but her daughter seemed to be making a conscious effort to make her mother’s life easier, a sure sign of growing up. She was also helping more without first having to be asked, and there was no more sniping at her brother, the catalyst of many squabbles, for which Janet was truly thankful.
With breakfast passed she had steered her car carefully along frozen roads that were not receiving the attention of the gritting lorries as they had in peacetime. The multi storey she always used, and in previous times had trouble finding a space at, was half empty so perhaps the roads out of town were in even worse shape she’d mused. Her carriage on the DLR was less than packed, allowing her to sit in relative comfort and watch the snow squalls beyond the carriage windows as she thought about Karen’s coming birthday. She really needed to apply some thought to that. Pull out all the stops and have a party, or an outing, just something to lift all of their spirits.
At Heron Quays she departed the automatic train with a handful of commuters and dutifully passed through the barrier with a sweep of her oyster card across the yellow face of the reader. Still deep in thought she left the station entrance and grimaced at the bitter cold and myriad flakes assaulting her exposed skin.
The wind was blowing straight along the Thames from the east and into the right side of her face, freezing her ear and depositing snowflakes down her neck.
Once she had muffled herself against the elements as best she could with her scarf Janet pulled her coat hood up, holding its right side extended as a wind break with one knuckled, frozen hand she hunched against the freezing wind and hurried to work.
Turning into South Colonnade, and into the icy wind, she did not see the man in thick padded jacket bearing the logo of a firm of lift engineers. They bumped shoulders and she opened her mouth to apologise, as commuters do in such situations. He mumbled something equally automatic that was lost in the wind, shrugging the strap of a heavy canvas bag higher onto his shoulder before tugging on the peak of his baseball cap, which Janet took to be a rather quaint gesture as she continued on to the entrance of the imposing glass tower where she worked.
The lift engineer gritted his teeth in annoyance at the collision, which had almost caused him to drop the bag with its heavy and irreplaceable instrument. He had tugged the peak of his cap further down across his face and made it appear to be an act of apology, backed up with something suitably trite. The cause of his discomfort had responded in similar fashion and went on her way.
He watched surreptitiously for a long moment for any indication that it had been anything but accidental, and then satisfied he resumed his own journey.
Thirty minutes later the engineer emerged from a small van liveried with the lift company logo inside a lockup garage containing a single saloon car. Securely closing and locking the large double doors behind him he took a laptop from the saloon cars boot and set it up on an oil stained worktop at the back of the garage. His breath fogged in the frigid cold of the garages interior. From the canvas work bag he extracted what appeared to be a large cordless electric drill with an oversized battery pack. A USB cable was plugged into one of the laptop ports at one end whilst the other slotted into an innocuous looking recess above the drills trigger guard. His fingers tapped a few keys before leaving the laptop to carry out the command he’d given it, turning his attention to a rather less high tech item.
Close to one wall of the garage a grimy oil trap, like a giant roasting tray, sat upon the cold concrete floor. Within it rested a large and equally filthy engine block wrapped around with chain and above that a sturdy steel ring was bolted to a roof girder. From the back of the small van he took a set of steps, pulley, hook and chain. The harsh metallic sound of the chain and pulley sounded until he hoisted the engine several feet clear of the ground and moved aside the oil trap to reveal a safe set in the floor. Muscles knotted as he unlocked and then lifted the heavy door before stepping back and stripping off all the lift company’s clothing except the pair of snug leather gloves on his hands. He was shivering hard by the time he had checked the laptop had completed its task and disconnected the drill, wrapping it carefully in the padded jacket before kneeling to place the bundle in the safe. The clothes and canvas bag followed them into the safe, which was then closed, locked and concealed as before. His teeth chattered as he placed the chain and pulley into the saloon cars boot. The steps were returned to the van, which he locked with keys he concealed on a hook behind the worktop. Quickly dressing into a smart business suit and topcoat taken from the back seat of the saloon he fought to stop the shivering and looked about carefully for anything amiss. Apparently satisfied, the garage doors were unlocked to allow the saloon to be backed out into the snow and then closed securely and locked once more.
The ‘engineer’ removed a glove long enough to test the temperature of the air issuing from the cars heating vents. The air was icy so he cancelled the airflow to all but the screen and sat patiently for five minutes, until the snowflakes that had settled on the bottom of the windscreen began to melt.
Turning the fan back on and allowing the warm air to chase away the shivering he put the car into gear and drove the short distance to the Mile End Road, which he followed away from the City.
Forty minutes driving later and he pulled the car into a lay-by, collected the laptop and a holdall off the back seat and carried them through a gap in the hedge bordering the road. There was very little traffic on the road and no one at all in the fields, a fact he was careful to verify before crouching behind a holly bush and assembling a satellite transmitter from the holdall. The same USB lead was plugged into the transmitter that he pointed twenty degrees above the northern horizon. One thousandth of a second was all it took to transmit the results of two hours in the snow traversing and bisecting the banking and business estate, covertly mapping the site by means of concealed ultrasonic ‘radar’.
On returning to the car he looked at his watch, noting that he had completed the hurriedly ordered assignment with eleven minutes to spare. He wondered how the remainder of his team had fared up in Scotland and whether they would return before the arrival of orders for yet another task.
The Nighthawk was only fifty feet above the sea as it approached the coast, the plasma screen covering the cockpit windows was showing only the information the on-board systems already knew of prior to take-off.
Their radar was switched off, rather than merely at standby, and with no external data feeds from other sources, the information they held related only to fixed locations. No air or sea threats were displayed, just land based and at least a week old.
The passive infra-red sensors that peppered the airframe were at the moment adding nothing to that which was already displayed, and the crew both hoped that was good news.