Stan Mason - Stopping World War Three

I fished into the bag under the guidance of his torch and found it. ‘My goodness!’ I whispered. ‘You think of everything, don’t you?’

‘Get down on all fours!’ he ordered I did so and he stepped on my back to reach the camera lens. Within a few seconds he had fitted the device to cover it. ‘It’s a special kind of lens cap,’ he explained, noticing the inquisitive look on my face. ‘Inside the cap is a photograph with its own reflected light of a corridor. The boys in ‘Block B’ are looking at that fixed picture on their screen. They can’t see us any more. Now… what we need to find is an electric socket!’ He flashed the torch up and down the walls to locate one opposite the handprint machine. ‘Super!’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to create a triangle rather than a direct beam,’ he went on, although I had no idea what he was talking about. He took a piece of glass, the shape of an ice-hockey puck, from his bag and placed it on one side of the corridor. ‘If I can attract the beam at the base of the door as well as the sensor in the floor below it into this glass puck, the beam will shoot from the door into this glass puck and bounce back to the sensor. In that way, the beam will remain unbroken when the door opens. The contact will be triangular rather than direct. The result should be that the alarm does not go off!’

He removed a small machine from his bag and plugged it into the electric socket on the wall. After putting on the spectacles again, he began to dig into the floor carefully with a metal tool to expose the sensor located in the floor. Ten minutes passed by, after using another tool, before he heaved a sigh of relief and pressed a switch on the machine. Then he removed the spectacles, handing them to me so that I could witness the electronic triangle he had created. A beam fired into the glass puck was directed back into the sensor and returned to the alarm unit at the bottom of the door ensuring that the beam would remain unbroken.

‘That should do the trick,’ he said with some degree of satisfaction. He delved back into his bag to produce a machine which looked like a toaster with one side missing. He placed it on the glass screen of the security machine. After sixty seconds, he removed it and placed a plastic glove on the surface of the screen, rubbing his hands over it several times. Then he pushed his fingers into the glove until it fitted his hand perfectly and placed his palm on the glass. The triangle beam remained constant as the door opened.

‘Don’t go anywhere near that triangle!’ warned Devon, ‘and give me back those goggles!’ He put them on and looked around the research room. ‘Great!’ he exclaimed joyfully. ‘No beams across our path to the computer but dozens around the laser gun. We’ve got to kill two cameras. One’s near the computer in the clear region. That’s easy enough but I’ll have to duck and dive to get to the other one. Stay where you are while I do it!’

He took too camera hoods from my bag and advanced swiftly to the wall behind the computer. Then he jumped on a chair and placed the hood neatly over the lens. For the other camera, he crept slowly along the wall, ducking under, or steeping over, scanner beams which obstructed his path. When he had completed the task, he made his way back to the computer terminal with great care, beckoning me inside and indicating that I should bring my bag with me.

‘Don’t speak unless you have to,’ he whispered softly. ‘There may be audio alarms or the boys in ‘Block B’ may have audio access. You can never tell.’

He sat calmly at the computer terminal as though he was in his tiny room in Leyton and switched it on, arriving at a point where it stated ‘Access Denied’. He reached into the bag and brought out another device which he connected to a socket on the computer.

‘What does that do?’ I asked almost under my breath.

‘When a peterman… a safe cracker… wants to open a safe, he uses a mechanism similar to this. It runs through the codes like lightning, finds the right numbers and opens the safe for him. It’s the same with this little wizard. The only reason it exists is to find a way through the computer maze when access is denied. The screen flashed at that moment to display the word ‘Passwords’.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ I said biting my tongue with shame. ‘There are two passwords… each one with five letters.’

‘Now he tells me!’ he muttered bitterly. ‘Get with it, man!’

He glared at me for the late information and delved into the bag to bring out yet another application. He plugged it into another socket before setting it into motion. Suddenly two passwords appeared on the screen… JPACK and RNOON.

‘Wow,’ I sounded in awe. ‘You’re a genius!’

‘I already know that, man,’ he responded immodestly. ‘Do these words ring any bells?’

‘JPACK stands for John Packman… the Director of the weaponry division. I don’t know the other one.’

‘Then I reckon we’re on the right track,’ he returned, becoming absorbed in his task. He began to tap the keys at an incredibly fast rate. As an executive in the commercial computer division of Dandy Advanced Electronics I had seen many good computer programmers at work but I had never seen anyone capable of using the keys at such speed. ‘How old is this laser weapon?’ he asked without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘No longer than three years from initiation, I should imagine. Why do you ask?’

‘All the plans and sequences are in date order. I’m racing through the files from eighteen months backwards. Damn! I’ll have to look at each file because all the research projects are in coded names. For example, an electronic guidance system is the nose of a fighter aircraft is called VISOR. An electronic communication system is called ‘LINO’. Ah… what about RED RUM? That’s the name of the horse which won the Grand National three times. I get it! Spelt backwards it reads MURDER!’ I bet that’s the one!’ He pressed a few keys and the file came onto the screen. ‘Bingo!’ he said, raising his voice with excitement. He pressed some more keys to move the pages of the file forward. ‘Look at that! Sixty-two pages of information, details and information! What more could you want?’ He moved the file back to the beginning and turned to me. ‘Well start filming! You’ve got the camera. We haven’t got all night!’

The blood drained from my face at the sudden thought of failure having come all this way. We had taken all this risk only to discover that camera had either been lost or left at Devon’s house. ‘I haven’t got the camera,’ I bleated woefully.

He felt in his pocket and laughed. ‘Jus kiddin’. Here it is! He handed the camera to me. ‘You take the photographs. I’ll turn the pages.’

It took a short while to complete the operation and I held on to the camera to make certain the plans stayed in my possession. After he had switched off the computer terminal, he told me to make my way back to the sloping corridor while he removed the caps on the cameras. Then he set to work on the door, removing his apparatus, the glass puck, and the cap from the camera. He was a perfectionist in his own right. After that, we made our way back carefully to the perimeter fence.

‘Why did you bring four bags?’ I questioned. ‘We needed only two.’

He opened the third bag which sported two machine-guns. ‘The other bag has ammunition, grenades, and a few surprises. I never intend to get caught on a mission like this… one way or the other.’

Chris Devon had ridden very highly in my estimation. I recognised him to be a true professional. He threw the bags over the fence and placed the trampoline into an appropriate position indicating for me to go first. I had far more confidence this time. In addition, there was far more intent to take the leap in order to leave the complex than to enter it. Devon joined me a few seconds later.