The Raid

A Cute & Maggie adventure

The wintry pre-dawn light leaks over the North Sea to cast the first spell across the frosted Fens. The frozen air hangs still, breached only and occasionally and from far away by the sound of early traffic. Birds, like silent scratches on a lens, pivot here and there against the impossible not-yet-blue of the sky.

In a car grown cold – they are under instructions to make no noise at all – mittened fingers huddle around lukewarm cups of plastic coffee. The screen of a secure phone, resting just behind the gear shift, pulses intermittently as if maintaining everyone’s heartbeat. Game plans and code signals and key words run back and forth through everyone’s heads, all perched on stiff and anxious necks.

Maggie, Cute and a large, monosyllabic and intimidating man they have been told to call ‘Steve’ are in this particular car, at a location known as (Cute recalls) P7a. They are one of more than twenty vehicles stationed in a rough circle. They cannot see any of the other vehicles, because the circle has a diameter of almost three kilometres.

At the approximate centre of the circle is a grand house, the oldest part of which was built in the 1540s. Over the centuries it acquired a moat, stables, a variety of extensions and outbuildings, formal and kitchen gardens, more outbuildings, and a series of hedgerows and small woods around its perimeter. The surveillance of the past couple of months suggests that some very high spec defensive equipment has been installed among the hedgerows and small woods: electric fences, CCTV, movement sensors, militarised turrets, various decoy devices, and possibly even some small-scale surface-to-air missiles.

It is not completely certain how many people are in the house and its various outbuildings. There are at least a dozen, but it could be as many as twenty. Most of the vehicles arriving at and departing from the site over the past few weeks have had heavily darkened windows. Occupants of the site are relying on a sophisticated range of anti-surveillance devices and practices, too, so the digital traffic has proven difficult to track with precision.

Maggie hates this sort of thing and can’t quite believe she is here. It’s one thing to be sitting in an idle daydream in a multi-agency meeting thinking how nice it is to have been recognised for one’s efforts and invited into the inner sanctum; it’s quite another to learn that it comes with consequences. She has been advised – by people she has decided she simply has to trust – that she is parked at a location in which there is virtually no actual physical danger; and that, in the unlikely event that any actual physical danger should come their way, the man known as ‘Steve’ is more than capable (Maggie scrunches up her insides at this phrase) of “taking out” any operational threat. But still.

Cute loves it, of course, but even he is noticing just how clammy his palms have become.

Position P7a is to the south west of the circle, at roughly 7 o’clock, not far from the A11 as it bypasses Attleborough to the south west of Norwich. The main route out of the compound heads east, so it is over at 2 and 3 and 4 o’clock where most of the vehicles – and people, and kit – are stationed. Other routes out are possible, using tracks that would normally be used by agricultural vehicles, and these head north and south from the main site. The whole plan has been put together on the assumption that many occupants of the site will try to run away as soon as they realise the raid has started; so a fair proportion of the team has been set up to catch those that flee.

The people inside the compound – they being the people working for, and including, the man in the vehicle marked ‘S K P’ who beat up Cute just a few miles from here back in April – have extensive interests in organised crime and a sustained track record of considerable violence. As well as smuggling gas, they are involved in the illegal dumping of waste, carbon credit fraud, human trafficking, the manufacture and distribution of class A drugs and a variety of crypto-scams. They definitely have guns.

The team conducting the raid, which has been carefully moving into position over the course of the night, would strongly prefer not to use guns. In general, if people start firing, people get shot. And it isn’t just messy and painful if people get shot, it also makes it more difficult to collect evidence and more complicated to fill out all the forms and harder, actually, to bring the proper baddies to justice.

The purpose of this raid (Maggie and Cute can still hear the woman they have to call ‘Sandra’ telling them) is to bring the baddies to justice, not to kill everyone or to end up with some huge explosion like in a James Bond film. (One of the briefing sessions had included reference to the findings from the surveillance suggesting that the baddies have rigged the compound to explode in certain scenarios.) (Cute and Maggie and ‘Steve’ are stationed outside the projected blast radius, they have been assured.)

What the bloody hell am I doing here? Maggie hears herself shouting, inside her head.

The screen on the secure phone flickers and changes colour and they know that this is the signal, it’s all about to start.

The first thing that happens is nothing at all. Or, at least, that’s what it looks like. With criminals of this kind, and with a raid on this scale, pretty much everyone is involved, from MI5 and the National Crime Agency to GCHQ and even a bit of Special Forces, so the sudden fade out of external comms is the only thing that those on night duty in the compound would notice. Anti- anti-surveillance techniques will also fool many of the sub-routines and AI defences upon which the baddies are believed to rely, at least for the first five minutes or so.

And five minutes is all they’ll need.

Any second now, once the clearance comes from the comms folk, the main business will commence: a swarm of drones. Cute recalls being astonished, initially, at what drones can do these days, and he is still somewhat stupefied at what appears to be about to happen, but it’ll be something like several dozen drones, sweeping in low and fast and rapidly disabling the perimeter defences and then the building-specific defences. Some of them will be flying in clusters, with decoys mixed among the actual weapon-equipped versions; some will have extremely targeted functions while others will be more flexible; some will be under direct human control, some will be enslaved to other drones, and some – and this is the bit that most spooked Maggie – will be entirely autonomous and under the control of their own AI.

The expectation is that, within five minutes, and therefore possibly before anyone in the compound is even aware anything is happening, the entire site will have been disabled, significant numbers of humans – should they present themselves – will have been disarmed, and it will be (relatively) safe for the human component of the raid to move in.

Does it always have to end in force? Maggie wonders. All these brains, all these facts and investigations, all this evidence-gathering and reporting and processing and discussing and… and, in the end, it still has to end in a big crash-bang-wallop?

The phone pings and a voice utters the code phrase: “There is no direct to route to Basildon.”

Here we go.