Chapter 4

The whole of the short drive back to Alfie's, Ed kept trying to convince me that I'd done the right thing by sending Holly off with his secretary Katie. Sure she had worked for MI:5 and Her Majesty for nearly as long as Ed had, and this was far from the first time that she'd been entrusted with a package that must be safeguarded at all costs.

"Look!" Ed told me with exasperation as we prepared to climb once more down into the sewers, "Katie is very nearly licensed to kill, and has the temperament to do it and come back for seconds! We've got a very secure old farmhouse near Epping that we've been using as a safehouse since the Cold War started, with security glass and a reinforced door that'll need more than a big pair of boots to kick down. There are guns there and her father, who is the caretaker, is mean old bugger of a bastard that fought the big war as a Desert Rat with Montie and still loves a good bang-up! Even if they had a watch on the flat and followed Holly and Katie there, the house is designed to survive a siege and reinforcements can be there in less than half an hour. What can possibly go wrong?"

Oh dear God! Never, ever, say 'what can possible go wrong'. Whatever can go wrong will ... especially when involved in Company business!

I refused to go down into the sewers until Ed made one last additional phone call to call in some local Epping PC's to put an additional covert stakeout on Katie's house. I almost even meant it! Anne was gone, probably now hustled off to someplace where we weren't going to ever find her, but I was damned if I was going to let Holly slip through my fingers twice! My little voice was still muttering inside the back of my head and I've stayed alive all of these years by listening to it!

The sewers were not much if any improvement the second time around, but at least this time we were prepared. Ed and I both had oxygen masks and nightvision/IR glasses on. With an IR flashlight we could move fairly quickly and securely in the near total darkness, now that there was absolutely no light coming in from the sewer grates above.

Since the little shooting war with Ollie's gang underground, all of the normal sewer electrical lighting was now off, and if his boys were still camping in the darkness waiting for a second assault they'd be looking for bright flashlights, not us ... creeping along quietly in the stygian darkness with our milspec night-vision stuff on.

Ed, despite being a good thirty or forty pounds over his best fighting weight, could do the old tiptoe with the best and I don't think the pair of us made any more sound than a couple of sewer rats. We didn't need to go far to reach my furthest exploration point, where I had first grabbed Alfie's runners that had been porting Holly. From this point, it was all going to be guesswork. Our best clue suggested the old Whittmore warehouse, about another eight sewer intersections down, but I half expected to have to search every ladder upwards for a good half-mile radius of it, if I had to.

No stone unturned indeed! It was indeed a forlorn hope and we were entrusting ourselves entirely into the hands of lady luck.

The first hint that we were indeed on sort of the right track was when as we quietly stuck our heads down each side of a crossing tunnel, Ed waved me over for a quiet wordless confab. Two bad guys, armed, about fifty feet down and to the right, down this left side passage. I quietly stuck my goggles around the corner into the darkness to confirm. Spot on! They looked fairly loose and not at all alarmed at anything and I had a pretty good notion that we could take them out nice and quietly with our silenced .45's. I frankly didn't like Ed's mimed suggestion that we bare-hand them. Sure I wanted some prisoners to question, but these guys would be low on the pecking order and likely didn't know shit. Besides, with their AK's sort of at the ready, they could do quite a bit of loud spray'n'pray with them, warning the bigger fish upstairs. That would be worse than getting no intel at all.

After our wordless debate, Ed shrugged and we did rock, paper scissors for the fun of making the pair of headshots, and he won. Two short pops and our gunsels dropped. We each gave our man another two in the back of the head just to make sure. Nice and quiet like, with nothing to give even a peep of warning.

Our thugs had been guarding a ladder going up, but my little subconscious voice was whispering to me again. This ladder looked pretty rusty and not at all recently used. No mud, no dried shit from the sewer, just old flaking rust on each of the metal rungs. No way that this was the main entrance or exit. Also Alfie's droog had mentioned a white spraypaint dot marking, and our UV goggles were not showing any sort of paint on the walls nearby.

We sprayed around the walls nearby the ladder with luminal and found nothing. The chemical is good for a lot more than just finding blood splatter on the TV crime shows and you'd be surprised how many other things than bodily fluids show up when sprayed and viewed under UV. This time around, we found nothing. I was pretty sure that this was not the place ... but what was it? Against my better judgment I climbed up a few rungs to take a better look at the square metal trapdoor, about eight feet above. I didn't like what I saw.

I mimed for Ed to pull out his little fiber-optic TV camera and use it to take a better look up through the cracks of the trapdoor. He returned back down a minute later and threw his fiber-optic spy camera back into his goodie bag in disgust.

"Oh Fuck me but that was a close one!" He whispered. "There's a bomb up next to the door, wired to blow if the trapdoor is lifted. Big one, too! Anyone down here for a hundred meters would be toast probably! Designed to take out an entire tact assault team! Damn, but I need a pint and a large whisky!"

"Me too, and it's on me!" I whispered. "They have to be close though. Let's do a circle around this spot and check our tunnel/surface map to see where this goes? They won't want to blow their main storage place, but a decoy location next door would be expendable and certainly create a diversion so they could clear their goodies out elsewhere." Or so I figured.

Doing this first circle didn't turn up anything particularly interesting, or any more gunsels downstairs looking for us, so we found a dark corner where we could synchronize where we thought the decoy tunnel/warehouse was, so that we could check the other tunnels that led near the other warehouses within a two block radius. This brought us some luck on our second try, with a warehouse directly next to the docks, two buildings to the east of the 'decoy' location.

I didn't even need to find the scratched out remains of a white paint dot next to the ladder to know I'd found the jackpot. The remaining flecks of paint showed up brightly on our IR goggles and there was lots of nice recently deposited sewer muck from boots at the base of the ladder and on every step going upwards. Jackpot!

Now it was time for some brief coordination once more. A check of our map under a bit of real light suited to give us the street address of the warehouse above, and Ed had enough of a cell phone signal to call in the waiting strike team. They were going to hit all of the entrances up top while we came up from below.

In theory, everything was more or less arranged except for the assault location, I had expected everyone to get into place within a half-hour, but as we waited for over an hour before getting the 'Go' signal, I was getting increasingly nervous and certain that our rats were already long gone. We certainly hadn't heard a single sound from above, and that alone was worrying me.

Finally when the 'Go' signal sounded, Ed and I blew this trapdoor with a prepared shaped charge. Like the decoy entrance, this one was also triggered for an unpleasant welcome as well, but with slightly less explosives. Ed had brought his own bag of toys and we'd spent much of the last hour debating just how much Semtex it would take to blow the bigger bomb out of position and (hopefully) explode somewhere else less critically hazardous, and hopefully leave the ladder more or less intact. We'd taken a good look around with our mini-cable camera and didn't see anything particularly breakable nearby ... like helpless kidnapped hostages.

So we blew the entrance from a fairly safe distance and signaled the other teams to make their own rather noisy entrances. There were more improvised bombs covering all of the other front, side, back and roof entrances as well, so it was a wonder that the building was still standing afterwards for us to raid.

Ed and I were in still in another sub-level series of tunnels and basement storerooms that more or less survived the explosion, but only just barely. Some remaining still-wired explosives showed that if the trapdoor had been conventionally opened, the entire sub-basement (and the sewer below) would have been nothing but rubble. Upstairs, the other Met and MI:5 officers were finding similar unexploded ordinance, but no kidnap victims either.

As I had feared, we were already too late. Ollie had more or less cleaned house and his secret holding cell dungeons downstairs were all empty. Ed and I could tell that the victims, perhaps as many as fifty women, had been held here not long ago. None of them had thought to leave us a forwarding address.

Having nothing else better to do, I exhaustively searched each of the steel barred cells looking for any sort of clue, like light fingernail scratch marks on the white painted walls, to tell me where they had been taken to next, but I found nothing, even a gallon of luminal later, and nothing at all to prove that either Anne or Leslie had been held here up to a few hours ago.

About an hour latter, another carefully planned raid bypassed the explosive traps at the decoy Whittmore warehouse and found a similarly abandoned operation. Probably Ollie regularly rotated the use of his warehouses for each large operation to avoid falling into a noticeable business routine and/or he had deep enough pockets to be able to afford to go scorched earth on all of his vulnerable properties on just the hint that the 'Old Bill' was on to him. When Alfie had been compromised and silenced, this warehouse had been cleaned and set-up as a decoy. Now that his scheduled 'delivery' had been met, this other warehouse in turn was also currently expendable. Perhaps already Ollie was preparing for his next captive shipment in a similar warehouse a few blocks or a few miles away, and the nasty smart blighter had covered all of his tracks well! Ed confirmed with me that there was no shortage whatsoever of old semi-abandoned warehouse buildings in Southwark with dubious ownerships, and by next month, if not sooner, Ollie would be right back in business ... secure and as safe as a clam.

To give the bastard a boost to his self-confidence, we were later going to blow both warehouses and create a fictitious news story of injured Met officers and firemen, but he didn't really need the satisfaction! Our forlorn hope had failed, and as I heard Big Ben strike Midnight upriver, I knew that I was probably already out of time! Somewhere up or down this dock, there was a ship full of illicit human cargo that was due to sail sometime tonight ... and perhaps it already had!

Dozens of ships lined the wharves in the gloomy dark just within eyesight, maybe even a hundred or more had their deck lights shining mocking us, and I didn't have the slightest clue about which one my Anne was on! The only remotely good news was the report that Holly had arrived safely at the house in Epping and that the extra car of local constables were on duty there as well, with the local constabulary station alerted and ready to respond in less than ten minutes.

The situation was frankly impossible; Ed and I both agreed that we'd shot our bolt and that a random patrol of the entire London docks wasn't going to turn up anything useful. No one was going to remember seeing a long chained group of naked female slaves being herded onto a ship by burly Arab slavers with whips. They would be locked, indeed probably drugged, inside a container probably, or big wooden crates marked machine parts. Our customs agents, Met or MI:5 officers could have walked right past their prison a dozen times and not known otherwise, our quarry hidden in plain sight. Now this boat was ready to leave, if it wasn't gone already!