Winter is Coming

Dan Wood

Description

'Winter is Coming' is the sequel to Ignatius and is a highly engaging, fast-paced read.Top secret technology is stolen from a highly secure US military base and the British Government is implicated. The British Government is only willing to trust one woman and one man to find the culprits because only they have the special abilities that their mission needs.Sahira Basha and Ignatius Winter find themselves on a deadly mission to recover the stolen secrets and soon realise that elements close to home are working against them, so they must use all their skills and cunning as a senior MI5 officer and ex MI6 and SAS soldier to overcome ever mounting odds.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 07 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839785153
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Winter is Coming
Dan Wood


Winter is Coming
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: [phone]
www.theconradpress.com
[e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-915494-00-9
Copyright © Dan Wood, 2022
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


Prologue
GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research
Darmstadt, Germany
August 10th 2013
P rofessor Dick Rolf was walking around the room smiling warmly and shaking the hands of each of his colleagues.
Some team members were filling champagne flutes and others were still cleaning and packing away equipment, but everyone was in good spirits. They’d been working hard since July 14, building on the work of Russian researchers some nine years earlier.
The last four weeks had been spent monitoring the emissions of alpha particles and X-rays to try to fingerprint decay products. The timeframes had been immediate, but time had been well spent and the team had used nuclear fusion reactions to load protons into an atomic nucleus. The resulting science was positive.
One of the experimental physicists on the project was feigning joy along with the others, whilst trying to fight the intense feeling of anxiousness forming a fog around her. She needed to make the call.
While she busied herself with overseeing the procurement of the hi-tech equipment, she could hear a colleague talking.
‘Before we can give it an official name, a committee from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which governs chemical nomenclature, will review our new findings and decide whether more experiments are necessary, but with our findings and those of the Russians, which are by and large compatible, I don’t see a scenario where that will be required.’
The experimental physicist saw that a crowd was beginning to form, and the room was almost packed out to hear the imminent speech that was being demanded of Professor Rolf.
She took this opportunity to sneak out the room. Walking into the disabled, single-cubicle toilet, she took out a phone and dialled a number known only to her. The call was answered before the tone of the second ring had finished.
‘Talk to me.’
‘We confirmed it. It’s real...’
‘How long until it becomes public knowledge?’
‘I don’t know. Two weeks, maybe three weeks maximum.’
‘You’ve got work to do then, and not much time to do it.’
With that, the recipient of the call hung up. The physicist sat her petite figure down on the closed toilet seat and brushed both hands through her dark locks. She wished that she had never agreed to become involved.


1
Present day
D r John Rainsbury was just leaving the English Village and was waiting for his shuttle to work. He only wished it was a real English village back in his country of birth, rather than a gimmick name given to one of the four areas on the base where he had been working for the past three years.
English Village was the name given to the housing administration part of the base and the other three areas, known as Ditto, Carr and Baker were work and logistical centres.
The name had always bothered him and was out of place for where he was, which was one of the most secure military facilities in the world: Dugway Proving Ground.
Following a call this morning, Dr Rainsbury knew that today was going to be his last day on the base, and there was no regret at the thought of leaving. The last three years that Rainsbury had spent on the base hadn’t been the best years of his life. The work was interesting, but the base and the people were abhorrent. There was no part of him that was going to miss this place.
In a matter of weeks though, his bank account would be overflowing, and it was only fair compensation for what he had gone through and what he was going to do today.
Waiting for the shuttle to take him to the lab, Rainsbury reflected on his first day and the orientation lecture all the new residents received.
‘Welcome to Utah and Dugway Proving Ground. We are a US Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons. Eighty-five miles north-east of us is Salt Lake City. The base encompasses 1,252 square miles of The Great Salt Lake Desert, which is an area equivalent to the size of the state of Rhode Island. As you can see, we are surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges and have a population of nearly 1,000 people.
‘Our mission is to test United States and Allied biological and chemical weapon defence systems in a secure and isolated environment. We also serve as a facility for US Army Reserve and US National Guard manoeuvre training, and US Air Force flight tests - mostly from nearby Hill Air Force Base in Clearfield.
‘We are controlled by the United States Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC). This area has also been used by Army special forces for training in preparation for deployments to Afghanistan.’
The man then went into details about practicalities of life on the base. This was a standard spiel to all new employees of the base, but missed out so much of the true purpose of the base and what was actually carried out here.
Dr Rainsbury understood why this was and he didn’t need any further information as he had already been briefed in extreme detail about the goings on at the base as well as his purpose for being there.
He saw the shuttle bus approaching and standing from the bench, picked up his briefcase. He climbed on to the shuttle bus nodding at the driver who had ferried him to his laboratory almost every day for the last three years, although never bothering to know his name. His stop was always the first pickup point on the repeating route, and he enjoyed these few minutes of being the sole passenger on the bus.
Rainsbury walked halfway down the aisle and picked a window seat on the opposite side of the bus to the driver. He pulled out some documents from the briefcase he was carrying and sat pretending to read them, but was mentally rehearsing the plan he had in place for the day.
A matter of minutes later, the bus pulled up to another stop within English Village and a group of base employees boarded. Whilst recognising many of them, there was only one employee who Rainsbury knew by name. It was one of the lab assistants from the laboratory where Rainsbury worked. He was called Matt Manning-Smith. Matt was a short man with slightly sticking out ears, that were jagged at the top and were accentuated by his military style buzz cut that he hadn’t changed since he was fifteen.
Matt was popular with most of the PhDs within the lab, but he and Rainsbury had never seen eye to eye. Although he had never said it, Manning-Smith made it clear that he didn’t respect Rainsbury as a scientist. As Matt walked down the aisle of the bus, he made eye contact with Rainsbury and nodded his head forward saying:
‘John’.
Rainsbury didn’t reply or react, but he was fuming inside. He knew that he would refer to any of the other scientists as ‘Doctor’. This little shit needed to be taught a lesson.
The rest of the short trip to the laboratory was spent in the usual morning calm, with most passengers engrossed in their own thoughts and only a smattering of quiet conversation between some.
As the bus pulled up to the relevant stop, Rainsbury made a point of getting off before Manning-Smith and made a call to his Mum, for no other reason than to ensure that he didn’t have to go through the multitude of security checks, making small talk with Manning-Smith. The fact that he might never be able to talk to her again may have also played a minor factor in the call.
Once through the intrusive security, Rainsbury took the lift four floors underground to his laboratory. As he walked out of the lift, he saw the two usual guards standing by the door to his laboratory.
‘Morning Dr Rainsbury. You know the drill.’
Rainsbury smiled warmly as he replied: ‘Sure do.’
The guards then did a final check of Rainsbury’s body and briefcase. One of the guards said: ‘Thank you, Dr Rainsbury. Have a good day.’
They both then headed for the lift and pressed the button to go up, which was the only available direction for it to take.
Rainsbury knew that this meant he was the last member of the workforce in this laboratory to arrive, as protocol dictated the guards left after the last member arrived. This was to reduce the risk of them being around for too long and catching a glimpse of something they didn’t even nearly have the clearance level to see.
Entering the lab, he looked around at his colleagues who were already busy working with the highest spec scientific equipment, or on laptops that looked like open briefcases. No one paid him any attention, not even so much as a glance up from their respective equipment.
When he had first started at Dugway, things had been very different. He had been greeted by these same people with open arms and they couldn’t do enough for him. They believed that he was an unknown genius, and they were having the pleasure of working alongside him.
The story that the base knew about Rainsbury (and any background check would reveal), is that Rainsbury was a child genius, recruited by the British Government at age eighteen, by which time he had already received his double Doctorate from Cambridge.
He was immediately put to work in a top-secret British facility where he had made epic breakthroughs in the fields of elemental chemistry and rocket propulsion that changed the global thinking in these fields.
The only problem with this story is that it wasn’t true and although these breakthroughs had been made, it wasn’t him that made them. His real story was very different.
Dr Rainsbury had been educated at Cambrid