Richard Wiseman - To Kill Or Be Killed

It’s a well known fact that back in 1940 with the threat of the Nazi invasion of England by Hitler that Winston Churchill organised a resistance force. Caches of weapons were built up around the country in hiding places and people were organised and trained to fight as the French resistance did after the Nazi invasion. Of course the invasion of England never came and to this day a number of the caches of explosives, weapons and equipment still lie buried in parts of England awaiting resistance fighters who will never come and are not now needed.

It is a little known fact that Winston Churchill also created an espionage network across the United Kingdom in 1940 to assist the resistance fighters and to watch the government, the law enforcement agencies, the army, the navy, the air force, the people of the towns and cities and generally speaking the streets, the transport routes and coastline for any attempts to infiltrate the land, the communities and the forces organised to protect the country. This agency was made up of ordinary citizens, chosen for their loyalty, their levels of intelligence and their foresight.

They were scattered across the UK, armed, equipped with the latest technology, which at the time was radio and radar equipment, and given diplomatic immunity on the British mainland. They were a non military branch of the civil service. They were recruited on the basis of recommendation from Churchill’s most trusted aides. They were of course not needed when Hitler’s army failed to invade, but they continued their espionage work through the war.

The police, Special Branch, MI5 and MI6 watch for threats against the UK, domestic and foreign. They have done since Churchill’s time and before, but since 1940 those watchmen and watchwomen of the known and recognised services have been in turn watched by Churchill’s war time secret network.

It’s a little known fact that the network of watchers set up by Churchill in 1940 still exists to this day and there is still a web of men and women in every town and village across the UK working for a branch of the civil service known as the Department for Internal Concerns or the DIC. They are the unseen and unknown; they are those who watch the watchers.

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.