LOCH CARRON SCOTLAND
JUST BEFORE DAWN
April 17th
The shores of Loch Carron are beautiful, with ragged edges of rock against which chilly sea water sometimes bumps gently and incessantly and at other times scrapes and scratches wildly, rasping away at the gouges time and tide have left on the land’s edge. Deep green moss and grass cover the bumpy ground of the foreshore like crumpled baize and there is a reinvigorating power in the clean and Spartan air.
One might walk happily, if a little cold, on spring days, over rough chunky tracks to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and, on a clear day, see to the stark western horizon. Night is different though. You have to be of a mind as sturdy as the clothes and boots you’ll need and as clear in your mind about your business as the thick plastic lens on the kind of heavy duty torch you’ll need to cut the pure darkness of such a landscape.
A skilled captain with a good crew and some nerve could bring a submarine from the Atlantic into the inner sound and within a strong swimmer’s distance of the shores close to Port an-eorna. It would have to be a powerful swimmer with emotions as cold as the water, not to mention good modern diving gear, to even attempt such a feat. It was in fact five such cold fish who left the submarine, gathered together in the water, orientated themselves by compass bearing and headed for the shores of Scotland with careful effort.
The submarine turned about, job done, and dropped out of sight. The captain, not for the first time thinking that his vessel and specialist teams willing to swim a decent sized distance were easily the best way to make an incursion into enemy territory unsighted and unnoticed. On this occasion he was wrong; his vessel had caused a blip and a bleep on some highly sensitive equipment located in the loft of a house just off Main Street Drumbuie. He wasn’t to have known it was there, neither were the five swimmers; nor did, amazingly, the people of the area or the neighbours of the man who lived in that house know anything other than that Michael Dewey was a computer programme writer and that the slightly bigger than usual white satellite dish on the house was for the purpose of transmitting and receiving the work he did to allow him to live in such a remote and beautiful place in easy comfort.
Inside his loft a small sized, but commensurately powerful radar scanner rotated slowly and an electronic screen registered vessels tracking them across the LCD map. All of this information was fed into a laptop which in turn was linked to a satellite phone.
Michael was an early riser and was sipping tea waiting for the dawn, which was a mere half hour away, when his idle scanning in the loft registered the submarine. He climbed down the loft ladder and frowned at the drizzle spattered glass of the landing window. April was living up to its reputation.
He made a short visit to the gun cabinet in his bedroom to remove a well oiled automatic Sig 220 pistol. A quick check on the mechanism reassured him of his ability to defend himself and he slipped it into a belt holster.
In the hall downstairs he laced on his walking boots and put on a heavy waxed green coat. At the sight of the coat and boots Paddy, his Border collie, jumped around him wagging his tail. Paddy didn’t bark, knowing his master didn’t approve of unnecessary sound. Finally Dewey grabbed his night vision binoculars, hanging in a case in the hall, and together he and Paddy went out into the drizzly darkness and climbed into the Land Rover.
The Land Rover left Drumbuie and a short time later it was bumping over the tracks to the water’s edge. As the Land Rover was approaching the land’s edge the five swimmers from the submarine were approaching a slight rocky cove which was half mile to the left of Dewey’s aimed for vantage point.
There were a few bubbles and some turbulence in the harshly cold Atlantic water, but amongst the daily thrash of the ocean it was for the best part invisible. The swimmers closed up on the land and one by one hauled each other onto the rocks. As the first two landed waterproof bags were handed up and activity began silently. The five men, for men they were, took no break after the long hard slog through the cold waves. They stripped in the near dawn darkness, changed into dry clothes by touch, stowed equipment, readied themselves and sank their water gear and all signs of their landing into the dark water near the rocks.
Out of the car with his master Paddy sniffed around the moss and grass happily letting the light wind brush his black and white fur. Michael’s night vision binoculars inched their way over the seascape. He saw nothing, but still he scanned and watched.
The men on the rocks had crawled with care from sea level to land level and were now dressed in civilian clothing. Keeping a careful look out, watching to right and left, one after another they made their way inland. The first to the A87 road to thumb a lift, the second to the Plockton air strip, the third to the rail station at Duirnish, the fourth to a waiting motorbike in Drumbuie and the last to the Plockton harbour, where a boat was waiting.
It wasn’t the cold and the niggling drizzle but Paddy damply brushing against his leg that led Michael to begin heading a hundred metres inland to the dry of the Land Rover. The five men would have made the best of starts if the last hadn’t lit a comforting cigarette. Michael, sharply observant, a skill for which the DIC pick all their people, caught the match flare in his peripheral vision. He whipped out the night vision glasses and zoomed in.
In the dark the cigarette lit up a profile and Michael mentally stored the lines of the face, another skill the watchers had honed to an edge from natural talent by DIC trainers. Even then he didn’t stop there. He scanned a line inland and caught dim outlines, fuzzed by gloom, but moving nonetheless. He got as far as a fourth and with a narrowing of eyes he took the shortest route between the edge of the ocean and his attic.
The smoker flicked the butt away unaware, though he knew his habit was unhealthy, how true the black writing on the Lucky Strike pack was ‘Smoking Kills’.
A short time later Michael Dewey was back in the loft in the house in Drumbuie, tea in hand. He accessed the DIC network via the internet and alerted them to the illegal incursions. He contacted the police describing the men, but knowing that the remote location and the size of the area that such a small number of police patrols had to cover immediate capture of the intruders was unlikely. DIC wouldn’t expect Michael to take them on personally, not in those numbers, besides given the power of the DIC network and its coverage Dewey felt certain the men would be captured very soon. Messages sent Michael sat down to draw a sketch of the smoker.