“What?” she asked, simply staying on the same bearing.
“There’s a van moving down there with no lights on.”
Keira couldn’t see it, as they’d passed it by the time this information was passed. She started losing height, and landed heavily at the edge of a field.
“Where?” she asked.
“Back there, in the trees. There was a track or something through the woods.”
“How far?”
“Hell, I don’t know; perhaps about a quarter of the way back the way we’ve just come.”
“Stay here!” she said, and took a smaller jump.
“Shit!” said Shannon, disappointed.
She found Shannon’s judgement of distance quite accurate, as there was a track in the woods. It was the sort of track that forestry vehicles use once a year and for the rest of the time dog-walkers and horses keep the weeds at bay.
She could not see a vehicle, but she could smell the exhaust fumes. She jumped back to where Shannon waited.
“Come on, I can’t see the van, but it was there.”
Grasping her friend, Keira jumped back to the last place she had been and the two girls proceeded on foot.
“Stay behind me.”
“Why?”
“I’m bullet proof, you’re not!”
Shannon ducked behind her friend without a delay.
“Who owns these woods?”
Keira shrugged, as she didn’t know.
“What do you reckon? Poachers?”
“Shannon, shut the fuck up!”
They walked for a few hundred metres, and then they saw a brief flash of a light; it was a flashlight or a lantern. Keira stopped and motioned for Shannon to get behind a tree.
“Wait her while I have a look. Don’t come out, as it could be dangerous.”
“But....”
“Shannon, this isn’t a game, so stay there. Oh, and silence your damn mobile, as I know you’ve brought it and knowing our luck, one of your daft boyfriends will ring you up just at the wrong moment.”
“I’ll switch it off.”
“No, just silence it. We may have to call the police and if it’s off, we will have extra wait while it warms up.”
“Oh, okay,” Shannon said, fiddling with the phone in question.
“Done!”
Keira relaxed slightly, as Shannon’s phone was well known for going off at all the wrong moments.
“Now, stay here!”
“Yes boss.”
“No, I know you, and your curiosity is going to get us killed, so stay here, I mean it.”
“Okay already!”
Keira left her friend, not trusting her to do as she was told for a moment, and moved towards where they’d seen the flash of light.
As she got closer to the spot, she made out some shapes in the gloom. There was a hut here; a rough, forestry hut, with one door and no windows. The side facing her was around twenty feet long. The dark-coloured van was parked next to it. Everything was in darkness.
She could hear muffled voices, and they weren’t that far away. She heard the breaking twigs first, so she knew that someone was moving close to the hut.
Someone stumbled, probably tripped by a fallen branch or similar.
“Bloody hell!” said a female voice, an Indian or Pakistan intonation with a marked London accent.
“What?” said a male voice of a similar pedigree, but lacking the London bit.
“These damn sticks; why don’t they come and tidy the place up?” said the woman.
The man just laughed.
“It’s not funny, I’ve grazed my leg.”
Two figures came round the side of the hut. They went to the back of the van and one of them opened it. Next came the sounds of them sliding something heavy along the metal floor of the van, and she could hear their grunts as they lifted it from the back of the van.
Suddenly Keira was aware of a good deal of noise and wheezing behind her, as Shannon plonked herself down beside her.
“What part of ‘stay there’ didn’t you understand?” Keira hissed at her.
“Fuck me; it was bloody frightening back there. Something hooted at me!”
Keira groaned.
“That was an owl, dummy!”
“What’s happening?” Shannon asked.
“Two people and they’re taking something heavy from the van.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, because some lumbering git came and distracted me!”
The girls watched as one of the figures returned and stood, looking vaguely their way. The other figure returned.
“What is it, Shamin?” said the male.
“I thought I heard something,” the woman, Shamin, said.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I hate these woods; they give me the creeps.”
“You’re a city girl, there’s nothing out there except for foxes and stuff.”
“Do foxes bite?”
“Probably, but they’ll be more scared of us than we are of them.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure.”
“Seriously, there’s nobody there.”
They stood, waiting and listening, while the two girls stayed still. Keira maintained a vice-like grip of her friend’s wrist, just in case.
“Come on,” said the man. “One more and we can get the hell out of here. I have to get the van back before seven this morning.”
The couple dragged something else from the van and lugged it out of sight round behind the hut.
A few minutes later, they returned, got into the van, and left with the man driving. Keira just managed to get the registration number.
“What were they up to?” Shannon asked.
“No good, that’s for sure.”
“Do you think they’re bank robbers hiding their loot?”
“No, I think these might be the people you spoke to me about; terrorists.”
“But one was a girl.”
Keira smiled in the darkness.
“So?”
“Oh, I see what you mean.”
“Come on, let’s see what they were hiding,” Keira said.
“Don’t you want to chase the van?”
“Why, even if I could find them by now, what good would that do me? Okay, I might find where they end up, but that doesn’t help us any. We need to see what they’ve been hiding.”
The girls picked their way to where the hut sat and then looked round the back. There was nothing apparent. The hut turned out to have strange openings at various places, the like of which she had never seen before.
The door was locked.
There was a plain sign carrying the letters; COS, No.6 Private.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, it could be something to do with the forestry commission or something. But they didn’t come in here, we’d have seen.”
“There’s fuck all else here!” said Shannon.
“It’s here, and we know it can’t be that well hidden because they were too quick.”
Twelve yards from the hut, amongst some trees, was a fresh pile comprising mostly of sticks, branches, evergreen needles and leaves.
Beneath the pile was a large rectangular piece of one inch thick plywood, which in turn covered a small pit, four foot by two foot by three foot deep. Shannon struggled to try to lift the plywood.
Keira pulled her out of the way, and used the torc to mentally shift it as it was. In the pit beneath it were two large, yellow, plastic containers.
The girls looked down at them. Keira lifted one out and Shannon took out her mobile phone to illuminate the label.
“What the fuck is NH4NO3?” asked the Irish girl.
Making no attempt to open the container, Keira replaced the container to where it had been, then she returned the ply, covering it over with the debris once more.
“Well?”
“It’s ammonium nitrate.”
“What’s that?”
“If you’d paid attention to what was going on up in the North over the last fifty years or so, you’d know. It was a favourite of the provisional IRA,” said Keira
“It’s a bomb?
“No, ammonium nitrate is a common fertiliser, but when mixed with fuel oil and sugar, it is a bomb. It needs some form of charge, like a detonator to go off. Compacted inside a vehicle or enclosed space, it can do a lot of damage.”
“How the hell do you know all this stuff?”