Tunnels 05 - Spiral

they shook hands. “You know, I often think of Ian. I miss him.”
    She nodded. “He was very fond of you, too. After you had your accident, he used to joke that you’d been trying your best to save your family the expense of a funeral by hitting the ground so hard you buried yourself.”
    “One thing I don’t miss about the old sod is his sense of humor.” Harry laughed, then turned serious. “How was he at the end?”
    “He came to terms with the illness. He told me he’d reconciled himself to it because he’d got what he wanted — to die at home rather than in some godforsaken jungle, like so many of you three decades ago. But enough of this maudlin nonsense. . . . How’s the arthritis?” she asked, changing the subject.
    “Not bad, considering. Takes me longer and longer to get going in the morn —”
    He fell silent as two police cars raced into the parking lot. Harry slipped his hand in his jacket pocket, closing it around his Browning Hi-Power. But as he and Anne watched, the cars drew up beside the supermarket. Police officers jumped out and then hurried inside the building.
    “Probably just more fisticuffs at the counters,” Anne muttered. She was staring at the police cars. “But you don’t know who you can trust these days, do you? Except us old folks, because everybody’s written us off already. We’re invisible.” She chuckled as she laid her sawn-off shotgun by her feet again.
    “We live in uncertain times,” Harry agreed. “I still find it preposterous that they’ve called on the army to patrol the streets.” While he’d been talking, Anne had retrieved an object wrapped in khaki cloth from behind her seat. “That’s for me, I presume?”
    “Yes, with love and kisses from the Commander,” she replied. “Parry told you the drill?”
    “Yes, he briefed me,” Harry confirmed.
    She handed him the converted Geiger counter. “Happy hunting, Hoss,” she bade him. Before she closed the door, he glimpsed numerous other khaki bundles stacked in the rear of the Land Rover.
    Back in his car, Harry placed the mobile detector carefully on the passenger seat beside his GPS unit and Browning Hi-Power, then covered them with a newspaper.
    “It’s going to be a long day,” he said to himself. He checked the fuel gauge as he drove off. He’d need to find a gas station that actually had stocks so he could fill up his car. He had some way to go yet before he hit the motorway that would take him out of London and to the quadrant he’d been assigned by Parry.
    “A long day for the Old Guard,” Harry said.

    Back in the Hub, Danforth was coordinating operations while Drake controlled the parabolic dishes on the BT Tower using his laptop. Drake had a map up on his screen, and each time a report of Dark Light activity came in from any of the Old Guard or Eddie’s men with their mobile detectors, it was relayed to him from Danforth. Then Drake would concentrate on the area, using the dishes mounted on the tower, and the exact location could be triangulated.
    The operation wasn’t helped by the several power outages that shut down Drake’s dishes. Each time, he had to wait for the electricity supply to be restored, and also allow the system to reboot before he could start over again.
    It was several hours before he called out to Parry. “I think we might have something here,” he said, inclining his head toward the map on the screen. “We’re finding signals all over, but there’s a location in the west where the level is spiking off the scale. We’ve got ourselves a major Dark Light hot spot there.”
    “Near Slough,” Parry noted as he peered at the cluster of red dots pulsing on the map. “Should we mobilize and get over there?”
    Drake shook his head. “Not yet. We don’t want to waste our time if it’s nothing to do with the Phase. Danforth’s sent some teams in for a recce.”

    After he’d exited the motorway, Harry passed through two roundabouts and was on his way to the industrial estate when he spotted the army roadblock up ahead. He quickly scanned around; there were grass shoulders on either side of him and not a building in sight. It was too late to consider turning back, so he made sure the mobile detector was turned off and out of view as he approached the barrier.
    An armored vehicle was parked at the side of the road, which he recognized as a Viking, and in it a soldier was manning a .50 caliber machine gun. It was aimed directly at Harry, who