there in ten.’
One thing was bothering Ethan: what if they ran into anyone? They had no weapons, no way of protecting themselves. It was the only thing that made him really nervous. He felt reasonably confident that he and his teammates could handle themselves in a fight, but what if they got shot at? ‘What if we’re spotted?’ he asked.
‘It’s like Gabe said,’ Johnny explained. ‘We’re to be as close to invisible as we can be. We go in, do our thing, get out. It’s a grown-up version of hide-and-seek.’
‘But there’s still a chance, isn’t there?’ said Ethan. ‘And they’re armed. It doesn’t seem exactly fair. I’m not massively keen on getting my face shot off.’
‘The priority is the diversion,’ Luke said. ‘We’re not here for a scrap. If you’re pinged – sorry, Eth, spotted – just get out as fast as possible.’
‘But if you do run into someone,’ added Johnny, ‘you just hit them bloody hard and run away. Got it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ethan.
Luke folded up the map and got to his feet. ‘Johnny, you take point.’
Johnny grabbed his bergen and jogged off into the dark. Ethan swung his own bergen onto his back and joined the rest of the team as they followed in quick pursuit.
Having made their way through the trees, hiding their rigs on the way, Ethan and the team now stood staring across the open ground to the castle on the clifftop. To Ethan, the ruins looked like a set of huge broken teeth scattered across the horizon. Kat pulled out some binos and handed them to him. They were the same as the ones The Dude had given him at the antenna.
‘Check out the castle, Eth. Tell us what’s up there.’
Ethan trained the binos on the ruins. ‘There’s one tower still standing,’ he said after a moment, keen to make his description as clear as possible. ‘The wall is nothing more than a pile of stones, but there’s a large section completely missing, creating a huge hole. Through the hole, inside the ruins, I can see a large tent and some lights.’
‘I’m guessing the tent is where the meeting is taking place and probably where the disk is being looked at,’ said Kat.
‘Security?’ asked Luke.
‘Nothing obvious,’ Ethan replied.
‘This is probably a makeshift rendezvous,’ said Luke. ‘They won’t have done much prep of the site because they won’t be expecting anyone to know they’re here.’
‘Gate-crashing,’ said Johnny. ‘One of my favourite pastimes.’
Ethan was about to lower the binos when he saw movement. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I can see two guards. They’re standing at the large hole in the wall.’
‘Let me have a look,’ said Kat, and he handed over the binos.
‘The x-rays look more like doormen than anything to worry about,’ she said. ‘They’re carrying, though. Both have M4 carbines.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ said Johnny. ‘Even though they aren’t expecting visitors, that doesn’t mean they’re going to come out here with nothing but a toothbrush.’
‘The M4 is a variant of the better-known M16,’ Luke told Ethan. ‘It’s been used in Afghanistan and Iraq.’ He looked at the rest of the team. ‘If those two are anything to go by, we can expect anyone else we spot to be carrying as well. The one advantage we have is that, as Johnny said, they’re probably not expecting visitors. This place is miles from the mainland. If anyone was coming, they’d count on hearing them.’
‘Unless they happened to drop from the sky,’ said Johnny happily.
‘All the same, we’ll need to get rid of those two guards before we do anything else,’ said Luke. ‘If they spot us, the mission is screwed, and so are we. Kat, Natalya – you OK for that?’
Ethan saw the girls nod. Kat was still staring through the binos.
‘See anything else?’ asked Johnny.
‘No,’ said Kat. ‘Nothing. Hang on . . .’
Everyone heard the hesitation in her voice.
‘What is it, Kat?’ asked Luke. ‘What you got?’
‘Birds,’ she replied. ‘Helicopters. Over to the right, just in front of some more woodland.’
Luke took the binos from Kat, had a look, then passed them on.
Ethan could just make out some oddly shaped silhouettes far off to the right and away from the castle. If Kat hadn’t said anything, he’d never have known they were helicopters; in the dark, they simply looked like strange bits of the shadowy landscape.
‘Three of them,’ said Kat, taking the binos back. ‘Gabe told us Sam said there were more people here than they’d originally thought. That’s why he called for backup. That’s why we’re here.