Local time – 4:45pm, Saturday 16th June, 2011.
Tallinn, Estonia.
Alex watched Ryan and Josh peering through their binoculars, searching the heart of the small seaside town. It didn’t take long for Ryan to start pointing. He directed Henry to position the camera at the same angle as his outstretched arm.
‘Guys, look! It’s the same as the other buses, at the dock. There are probably more fuckers hidden behind that warehouse. Take some shots.’
Henry snapped away for a few seconds and Alex looked through her binoculars, wondering how to work the focus but not wanting to interrupt the men to find out. She could see a long way into the distance, but it was quite fuzzy and she couldn’t make out the spot Ryan was pointing at. Josh grabbed Henry’s sleeve.
‘There’s a crowd of soldiers coming off the ship. Can you see the gangway jutting out just there?’ Henry and Ryan took a few seconds to find where Josh was looking, but when they did, their excitement bubbled over like bird watchers finding the rarest of birds.
‘Man, there are hundreds of them!’ Ryan exclaimed. Alex joined the bunch of binoculars and cameras, but she still couldn’t get her binoculars to focus. After a little while, Ryan handed her his, and patiently directed her first to the ship, which seemed to be a troop carrier, and then to the small gangway where there were heads bobbing along in a procession towards the wharf. She also noticed the front of the bus. While the men were distracted by checking Henry’s camera, she scanned the entire wharf. She could see incredibly clearly, considering the scene wasn’t visible to her naked eye. Further up hill from the wharf, there was a group of buildings that looked like very old office blocks, or maybe even derelict apartments. Some movement caught her eye; a truck was driving on the road leading to the buildings. She could just make out the flat military cap of the man driving up the hill, and she could also see part of his load, the elevation of the road opening the truck’s rear tray to her vision.
‘Henry, get a shot of this truck,’ she said, still holding the binoculars steady so as not to lose the location. Henry stepped close to her and focussed his binoculars where she was pointing.
‘See, just there, it’s about to go into those buildings.’ Henry didn’t show any excitement at her find. He fired off a few photos before Josh caught his attention.
‘Look, the bus is moving. It must be full.’ Alex found the bus again and watched it move forward and around a corner until it was out of view. There was another identical bus behind it, and once that moved on, another and another. The windows were black so she couldn’t see any passengers. But it was definitely the same as the bus in the photo Henry had taken in France. And dark haired men were definitely disembarking from a ship and more than likely getting on those buses. Henry snapped furiously away, taking enough photos that they would later be able to see every movement of every bus like a sequence in a film.
Josh was scanning the scene with his binoculars when he froze.
‘Shit. There’s an LPPV coming. I think there’s hardware mounted on the front.’ Before Alex could put the binoculars to her eyes to work out what an LPPV was, Henry grabbed her arm and dragged her towards the van. Phil, who had been standing next to it puffing on a cigarette, reacted instantly, jumping into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. Ryan and Josh flung themselves into the back, leaving Henry to slide into the front. Alex was the last in, slamming the door behind her. She had time to see that an LPPV was a sort of armoured jeep with a gun on it.
They could all hear the loud hailer now, and though they couldn’t distinguish what was being said, it was easy enough to guess that it was probably HALT. The van lurched forward and a burst of gunfire buzzed over the top of it. Alex felt her limbs set into stone, an immoveable reaction to shock. No one looked out the rear window. Josh and Ryan were on the floor in the back, and Henry pulled Alex’s head down towards the foot well, twisting her neck painfully, but safely out of view. The only head that could be seen through the window was Phil’s, and he drove like a rally driver, skidding left and right, over the rise, and out of sight of the fence and the patrol vehicle.
The passengers lay low until Phil said, ‘Jesus, give us a bit more warning next time fellas.’ He sounded excited, rather than scared. Henry turned to see Alex’s terrified white face.
‘They probably weren’t aiming at us. They were just pissed that we didn’t stop. They must have heat seekers to spot us so far away.’
‘Thank fuck we know about that now!’ Ryan said, and laughed.
The men were surprisingly calm for people who had been shot at. Perhaps it was all in a day’s work for a spy, though surely that didn’t apply to Ryan and Josh. Alex was anything but; her heart beat punched her rib cage and she felt tears trying to escape. She hoped Henry wouldn’t look at her, and was grateful when he merely put his arm round her.
‘It was a close call, but we got what we came for. We were going to dump the van anyway. We can assume they’ll have similar security at the other facilities, so I think it’s prudent to leave them be.’ Josh and Ryan nodded and Phil went back to his taciturn self.
Henry passed the camera around and pointed out photos that clearly showed a ship full of men disembarking onto an ex-Soviet naval base. Alex couldn’t deny it was very strange. Not just because the base was obviously being reopened and people were being moved into it in such large numbers. That could be happening for a number of reasons. The thing that worried her most was that this was being done in such secret. Patrols were there to warn off visitors. The press knew nothing.
Soon they were back on the motorway in the heavy flow of traffic headed towards Tallinn. Alex just wanted to get back to the airport as quickly as possible. Her visit to Estonia had been horrible. It was bad enough being the target of a police search on the plane. But now she had been shot at and her fragile bravery wouldn’t take her any further today. She felt the familiar shape of her bag with her foot. Maybe it was time to write some things down. Henry glanced at her, but didn’t say anything when she took out Bernie’s iPad.
‘How can we be the only ones who’ve noticed these bases?’ she wondered aloud.
‘We’re not,’ Henry replied, glaring at the iPad. ‘Tom Broderick from the Guardian wrote about the French base last week.’
‘Really? Is it on the web? I’m guessing it’s not a good idea to connect to the internet just now. Ryan, can it be traced like my phone?’
‘It’s safest if you don’t connect to 3G with that SIM. It’s too easy to track. I’ve got some spare cards for my iPad, if you want one of them? I swap them around every few hours to keep people off my scent.’
‘Thanks, that would be great. I can check my emails too.’
Henry looked relieved at Ryan’s suggestion, so Alex gratefully let Ryan swap out Bernie’s SIM for one he had in his backpack. She gave Henry the old one and watched him snap it. While Ryan set up the new SIM connection in her iPad settings, she explained with a hint of pride, ‘I don’t use my work email when I’m travelling. It’s an old trick of Bernie’s to stop competitors hacking our exclusives. We set up new Gmail accounts for each trip and forward all our emails there. It’s handy for internet cafes too. The one I’m using at the moment is brand new. That will be safe to use, won’t it?’ Henry looked to Ryan for approval and he nodded. That was enough for Alex. There was definitely enough paranoia in this car to keep her safe. She didn’t really believe anyone was following her, or tracing her mobile and 3G connections. But it made Henry happy when she played along, and it didn’t hurt to imitate their caution.
Before she checked her emails, she Googled “Tom Broderick Guardian French Army Base” and the first result that appeared was a news story from only an hour ago.
‘Shit. Tom Broderick was covering Bilderberg. The Guardian’s announced he was a casualty of the car bomb.’ Everyone in the car sat up.
‘They obviously thought he was getting too close,’ Ryan exclaimed. Alex was speechless as she scanned the eulogy for the dead journalist. She clicked back to the search results, and there was the article by Broderick about the new French army base. He didn’t seem to be making much of it, rather just reporting that the base was a new addition to NATO’s European capability.
‘He says in his article that the French base is NATO. Could that be true?’ Alex asked Henry.
‘He may have thought that. But he was covering Bilderberg so perhaps he was starting to put two and two together.’ Alex felt her stomach squeeze again at the thought of yet another dead journalist.
She was about to open her Gmail account when she noticed a new email on the mail app. As far as she knew, Bernie didn’t use email on his iPad. She tapped it open. The email was from Laura. Alex felt terrible; she hadn’t called Laura to see how she was. She had put it off because it was too hard, and now Laura was reaching out to her. But the email caught Alex by surprise:
‘Alex, please call me. I need to speak to you urgently. Don’t call from your mobile phone, use a public one and call this number: +44 518-631-3563’. There would be public phones at Tallinn airport; she would call Laura from there. She slipped a pen out of her bag and wrote the phone number on her wrist. No one was paying her any attention; they were engrossed discussing what they called their “truth video”. Alex excused herself from the conversation by pretending to be asleep. In actual fact, she was listening to every word they said. After a few minutes, she was surprised to hear Josh and Ryan discussing their wives’ reaction to them choosing to come to Prague. She hadn’t considered anxious families back home and she pricked her ears up to see if Henry mentioned a wife or girlfriend. Josh took out his wallet and passed around the photos of his twin boys, but even then Henry didn’t mention anyone. She couldn’t help but notice that she was pleased he appeared to be single. The talk about families also passed Phil by; he continued his irritable silence all the way back to the airport. When the conversation returned to nuclear weapons and the Bilderbergers’ plans for their arsenal, Alex’s stomach squeezed again, recognising that she was stuck between utter disbelief and a creepy feeling that what they told her made perfect sense.