Andy McNab - Boy soldier

Dave shook his head. 'I'll wait out here.'

Elena stepped inside. A man dressed in a suit was standing by the window looking out to the street. Slowly he turned round. 'Hello, babe,' he said with a huge smile. 'Surprised?'

Elena could hardly believe her eyes. 'Dad!'

Fergus was impressed when he saw the contents of the black plastic bag. It was similar to a target pack he would have been given when he was in the Regiment. Elena had given them the exact position of the target, with maps and information on how to get there.

They'd waited until dark before fetching the sack from the skip and then Fergus decided there was no point in taking the risk of hanging around in London for another night. They had everything they needed to locate Colonel Meacher. It was time to move.

On the late train to Norwich, they took all the operational precautions that were by now beginning to become familiar to Danny. Staying third party aware, travelling in separate carriages until Fergus was confident they were not being followed.

When he eventually took the seat opposite Danny he nodded but said nothing. The train ploughed on through the night. They didn't speak, but caught snatches of conversation from other weary travellers. The final stop before Norwich was at the small town of Diss. Doors opened and slammed shut and the train moved slowly away. Danny stood up and looked around the carriage. They were alone. He slumped back down onto the seat and felt his bruised shoulder jar, painfully reminding him of his meeting with the three muggers.

'You told me I should run away from a fight,' he said, shifting in the seat to get comfortable. 'But you were SAS, you didn't run away. You… you killed people.'

Fergus reached into his bag, took out a couple of pre-packed sandwiches and handed one to Danny. 'The Special Forces aren't all about killing. It happens, but mostly it's about gaining information and destroying strategic targets. Most times, if you get into a contact with the enemy, it's because they're blocking your mission or your escape route and you've run out of other options.'

'A contact?' said Danny. 'You mean a fight?'

Fergus nodded.

'And what then?'

'Then you react with extreme speed and violence, so they're scared shitless. And you kill them before they kill you.'

He saw Danny's eyes widen and he smiled. 'You asked, Danny,' he said. 'And seeing me limping around now probably makes it hard to believe. But that's what I was trained to do. Listen, when I was in the Regiment, every soldier I knew would rather dig a hole and hide than get involved in a contact with the enemy. It's all about survival, staying alive – exactly what we have to do. Now, are you gonna eat that sandwich or are you gonna sit there gawping at me all night?'

Danny finished his sandwich just as the train arrived in Norwich. The station was quiet; the shops and bar were closed. They found a computer phone they could use to go online to Elena in the morning and then made their way out into the night.

The city lights bounced off the dark river. Hordes of young people headed noisily towards nearby clubland. Girls wobbled along in micro skirts and high heels and shouted even louder than the leering, jeering lads shouting at them.

Fergus took in the new surroundings. 'We need to find a-'

'I know,' said Danny. 'LUP.'

Behind the station was a Big W superstore. At the back was a bin area, filled with plastic wrapping and empty boxes. It would do.

They went through the security drill before settling down and Danny volunteered for first shift on stag. He was feeling anxious. Uneasy. And when it was his turn to rest he found it impossible to sleep. Eventually he did drift off, but his dreams were troubled and violent, dreams of 'contact with the enemy'.

As Danny slept, Elena worked at her computer. For hours she'd had to sit and listen while her dad amused and entertained Dave and Jane with his endless stream of jokes and stories.

Joey was exactly as she remembered him and how her mum had described. Only more so. He was handsome and funny and as charming and cunning as a campaigning politician.

He said he'd come to England on business. Elena knew what that meant: the business of getting his hands on as much of the money her mum had left her as he could.

But not immediately. He was far too clever for that. That night was just the beginning of the operation. He was smooth. As smooth as a baby's arse, thought Elena as she watched him give Dave and Jane the full treatment. Carefully flattering. Gently flirting. It was no surprise when they offered him the use of the visitor's room for a couple of nights.

His 'I couldn't possibly put you to all that trouble' was sincerely spoken because he knew full well they would insist. And they did.

'Well, if you're absolutely certain,' he said with a smile worthy of a television toothpaste advert, 'it would mean I can spend as much time as possible with my darling daughter.'

Elena wanted to throw up. She got away as soon as she could, saying she was tired. It was gone eleven when she went online. At two thirty in the morning she was still online. And getting nowhere.

Maybe what she had told Danny was true. Maybe no site was safe, but hacking into the Intelligence Service was proving harder than she'd ever imagined.

From the outset Elena knew that the Firm would never be accessed through the normal, surface Internet. She had to go to dark corners of the Deep Web to find the information she would need.

She'd been there before, not as a hacker, but to find facts, to explore, to learn. Elena still had a printed-out paragraph she'd read online a couple of years earlier:

Searching the surface Internet is like dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: much is caught in the net but much, much more remains deep on the ocean floor. There are more than two hundred thousand Deep Web sites, and sixty of the largest ones contain more than forty times the information of the entire surface web.

The words had inspired her when she first read them and had continued to inspire her ever since. Elena had her future mapped out. After university she was going to make a name for herself as a computer scientist, but in the meantime she absorbed Internet information like a sponge sucking in water. And that included finding out how hackers operated, the language they used and the tactics they employed.

She'd visited some websites where hackers receive credits for their successful attacks; and others where details of what's happening in the hackers' dark world and how they have been stopped can be found; and even cybercrime.gov, where the American Justice Department relates its successes in prosecuting hackers.

But now she was trying it for herself. For real. It was dangerous, it was risky, it was illegal, but Danny and Fergus were existing outside the law and Elena was prepared to run any risk for them.

First she had to hide her online identity, spoof her IP address, cover her tracks. Finding and downloading a program that enabled her to mask her IP address was relatively easy, but it took time, valuable time. And this was the easy bit.

The minutes became hours as she hunted in dark corners for a script that would give her root access to the one place she wanted to go. She needed a script already written by an experienced hacker, an expert who would probably laugh at the tentative and fumbling efforts of a script kiddie like Elena.

At three forty-five she heard a noise outside her bedroom window. She looked towards the chink in the drawn curtains and saw that the sky was beginning to lighten. The noise was birdsong.

Elena was suddenly aware of how desperately tired she felt, but there was no way she was giving up. She found scripts of successful exploits and ran them, but nothing was right; she was getting no closer.