Drumbuie
7-45 a.m.
April 17th
It was unlucky for Martin Wheeler, the fourth of the men that Dewey had actually seen in his binoculars in the pre dawn gloom, that his pre-prepared transport, the 500 cc Honda was parked within sight of Michael Dewey’s house. Michael had asked about the bike at his local pub, the night before. Doing the logic link on the morning arrivals Michael made a point of watching it when he got home.
Sure enough a moving blur walked into focus in the view finder of his Nikon digital SLR not twenty minutes after he’d got home. Michael watched the man unlock the bike. Stow the padlock, do a quick check over and straddle the bike and ease it away noisily out of the small narrow street.
Michael Dewey had already tapped into the DIC system and used three minute’s worth of live satellite link up to look at Duirnish rail station and the airstrip. He was allowed the satellite link for short periods, given the remoteness of his location, but it was expensive and he had to account for every second. In this case he knew DIC would be happy with his use of it. He called the harbour master at Plockton and unsurprisingly found him awake and glad to talk about the unhappy reason for his ungodly awakening hour, that being an American tourist. The possibility that the four men might use a boat was one that Michael had to explore, but he had been a little surprised at finding out that they were splitting up and taking different routes and modes of transport.
He had four of them ‘tagged’ and had sent the information at high speed via the secure internet connection available to DIC operatives wherever they lived.
Sadly and unknowingly he had missed Stanton and was still thinking there were only four inbound ‘illegals’ when he sat down to thick cuts of bacon, creamy scrambled eggs and crunchy golden slices of toast.
Within two hours of arrival the five men were on their way into the United Kingdom mainland, via different routes, none of them aware that they had be seen and were now being tracked by the watching machine that is DIC.