DARKNET CORPORATION by Ken Methven

they would
not be obviously travelling as a group. Mickey brought a cigarette packet-sized
‘walkie-talkie’ from their SORV (or Severe Off Road
Vehicle) which he referred to as their ‘mobile armoury’.
    “You can use the radio as is, just switch it on here,” he said, pointing
out the power switch. “Press this to talk,” he explained, indicating a ‘talk’
button. “If we need to go quiet, you pull this earpiece/mike from the side…” he
demonstrated disengaging a hook-shaped earpiece that fit snugly into a recess
in the side of the radio, connected by a stretchy spiral of cable. “This will
switch from speaker to earpiece. It has a range that is pretty much
line-of-sight, maybe a couple of kilometres or so,” he added.
    After a couple of hours of driving, keeping in touch periodically by
radio, the tracker showed that Bone was approaching Jalalabad.
    Ledge came on the radio and said, “We need to close up on Bicep in
case he stops to make contact with anyone up ahead. Over.”
    Bill replied, “Yeah, you two go ahead of me and get closer. Mickey can
navigate and be ready if he stops, to get eyes on. Out.”
    The SAS men overtook Bill and raced off ahead to get close to Bone .
Within a quarter hour Mickey’s voice came through the radio. “They are not
going into the city; they’ve turned off right on the outskirts. It’s a dead
end. It doesn’t go anywhere. We are halting here until you arrive. We will
flash you when you get close. Over.”
    Bill acknowledged.
    Pulling in when he saw the flash, the two men got into Bill’s vehicle.
    “This road they’ve gone down is a dead end. It ends before the mountains.
If you wanted to go across the border, you probably wouldn’t go over here.
There’s no need. You could walk across almost anywhere else, it’s so porous.
No. I think they are here for a meet. This could be it,” Ledge was steeled for
the challenge.
    “How far down the road are they?” asked Bill.
    “About 20K. The issue is, there’s nothing much down there and no excuses
to be travelling down this road. If we run into them or whoever is going to
come down this road to meet them, it will be a firefight. So we have to be
cautious,” Mickey added some sober caution.
    “OK,” said Bill, decided. “We will have to go off road far enough away
not to be seen but still able to keep eyes on the road and move parallel to the
road until we can get a vantage point over Bone .”
    “We have some capabilities in our mobile armoury,” nodded Ledge.
    “We’ll need to keep it slow to avoid kicking up dust and making too much
noise, especially when we get closer to them. The noise could carry for miles
out in these boondocks,” warned Mickey. “We will need to standoff quite a
ways.”
    “If I was them and knowing this is the only way in, I would post a
lookout a few clicks up the road with a radio,” suggested Ledge.
    “Right! Let’s get moving off the road before Abu Ukasha comes around the corner and wonders what this pow wow
is about,” urged Bill, confirming his commitment.
    They set off into the desert with Mickey riding with Bill to monitor the
tracker and made easy going in the rocky flat area for several kilometres. Then
the terrain started to become a little more rolling and sometimes they had to
slow down to navigate dry water channels carved into earth.
    Eventually Mickey said, “They’re stopped. We should pull over there, in
that wadi and cam up.”
    They stopped. Ledge, seeing the stop lights, pulled in alongside Bill in
a depression that effectively shielded them from view.
    “Good spot Mickey,” he said. “I’ll pull out the cam nets too, just in
case.” He opened a flap in the ‘mobile armoury’ and pulled a mess of dusty
looking net from a roller on the side of the vehicle. The dusty mess folded out
in all directions and covered both vehicles once Ledge had swung the roller,
which was on two poles front and back, to pivot over onto the opposite side of
the