The Drone Attack

By Richard J. Sloane

When Jack Sanderson’s boss at MI5, Sir Maurice, tasks him with interrogating an IRA defector, he uncovers a mind-boggling plot to destroy the entire Royal Family in one blow with Novichok, one of the deadliest nerve agents known to man. This is supposed to happen in a mere ten days while they are all celebrating Christmas at Sandringham, using a special drone designed by the defector. Then it is a race against time to foil the conspiracy. But, even when that is done at the very last second, it’s still not finished for Jack, who is sent on a final mission by Sir Maurice to kill the instigators of the plot....
This is the fourth in the Jack Sanderson series of political thrillers after The Double Conspiracy, Traitor in our Midst and The Dirty Bomb Affair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728329185

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© 2019 Richard J. Sloane. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/30/2018

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2919-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2918-5 (e)

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Corrigan’s story: The last twenty years

Chapter 2 First signs of trouble: 7 months ago

Chapter 3 Corrigan’s story: 7 months ago

Chapter 4 The next 6 1/2 months

Chapter 5 Two weeks to ten days before Christmas

Chapter 6 Thursday afternoon and evening 16 December

Chapter 7 Friday morning 17 December

Chapter 8 Friday afternoon 17 December

Chapter 9 Later Friday afternoon and evening

Chapter 10 Saturday morning 18 December

Chapter 11 Saturday afternoon and evening

Chapter 12 Sunday morning and part of the afternoon 19 December

Chapter 13 Later Sunday afternoon and evening

Chapter 14 Monday morning 20 December

Chapter 15 Monday afternoon and evening

Chapter 16 Tuesday 21 December

Chapter 17 Wednesday 22 December Morning and afternoon Chapter 18

Wednesday early evening

Chapter 19 Thursday 23 December - morning

Chapter 20 Thursday afternoon and evening

Chapter 21 Friday December 24th Morning and afternoon

Chapter 22 Friday early evening up to 8.15

Chapter 23 Friday from 8.15 to 10.30 pm

Chapter 24 The rest of Friday night

Chapter 25 Saturday - Christmas day

Chapter 26 Sunday December 26 and Monday 27

Chapter 27 Tuesday 28th December till early evening

Chapter 28 Later Tuesday evening until the following morning

Chapter 29 Final tidying up

About the author

CHAPTER

1

CORRIGAN’S STORY: THE LAST TWENTY YEARS

Peter Corrigan had been leading a relatively contented life. That is, until the postcard arrived.

He was originally from Northern Ireland and had settled in England some twenty years ago in the expectation, he always told people who asked, of being able to escape the Troubles there. He still had strong traces of a Northern Irish accent but had managed to integrate well into the small suburb of Cambridge he lived in now. He was a very clever chap who had got a First from Belfast University when he was 20 and then come to Cambridge to study for a postgraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering. He had done well enough on that to be offered the chance of doing a PhD with a scholarship attached. When he’d finished, some four years later, and his thesis had been published to much acclaim from those in the know, he was promptly offered a tenured lectureship at his old college which he grabbed with both hands. So he felt he now qualified as a regular Cantabrian and was happy enough in Cambridge to be able to resist the tempting offers of employment from other universities, especially American ones.

However, what he’d never told anybody in Britain was that, while at university in his late teens before he arrived here, he’d been a trained bomb maker with the IRA. In fact they thought so highly of him that, after several years of producing some very effective made-to-order car bombs without being caught, he was ordered to go to Britain and hone his skills in secret and wait to be called on when the time was right. He was given enough money to pursue his education and just did as he was ordered.

He seemed to his handlers back then to be the perfect secret weapon, as he had the ability with his natural Irish charm to hoodwink anybody into believing whatever he wanted, one of the reasons he’d never been caught; another being that he had the talent to blend into any background he chose. He’d been a devout member of the IRA and anti-monarchist since his early teens but had never been involved in any of their demonstrations, so wasn’t on any of the Security Services watch lists, preferring to work for the IRA behind the scenes, in his garden shed at home in fact. That suited his handlers perfectly as soon as they discovered his talent for producing devastating bombs.

So how did he ‘hone his skills’ while in England? At first he played around making a few different kinds of improved explosives but, after he was left alone by his handlers and after he’d finished his studies, he decided to branch out and become a proper inventor. Which he did, rather successfully, it must be admitted. He started by building a large shed in his back garden in which he installed heating, light and a fully equipped workshop and, when that was finished, he cast around for ideas. Using his own postgraduate students for these – he was in the right place to do this after all – he decided to focus his considerable energies on materials science, which was close enough to his own research interests to be worthwhile, and came up with some very innovative materials which had many applications in the real world. Then he patented these and earned enough money from his patents to make him financially secure for life. But this didn’t stop him working. He wanted to go down in history as one of the great engineers.

Did he miss his family back home? The answer is simple: no, not really. They’d never understood him, as he always had his nose in a book, usually some incomprehensible manual of instructions, and were quite happy to see him go, although it’s true he did have one older sister he was close to when he was growing up. But now he had no contact with any of them and they all assumed he’d sold out to the British. He was naturally a loner who didn’t mind being left to his own devices, although he could be sociable enough when the occasion demanded. He’d never married and seemed quite happy being celibate, being apparently uninterested in either women or men and living alone in his smallish detached two bedroom bungalow which, by now, didn’t have a mortgage attached to it.

What about his politics now after being away from home for so long? One thing’s for sure: he still hated the Royal Family for everything they stood for and longed for the day when Britain could become a Republic and Northern Ireland could join up with the South, thus putting an end, he believed, to the farcical arrangement that had stood for so long. According to him, that was the only way to ever be able to give back the Catholics in the North their rights. He, of course, was a ‘good’ Catholic and still went to church every Sunday which helped him to integrate even more into his community in England.

So what was on the postcard? It was a perfectly ordinary touristy one with a picture on one side of the Giants’ Causeway but that wasn’t what interested him. It was the writing on the back which said simply: Be with you soon. Get ready. Your ever-loving Uncle Harry. As far as he knew, he didn’t have an Uncle Harry but he remembered from all those years before that the moniker was that of his IRA handler and the message was unequivocal. His contentment was about to be shattered, probably drastically.

CHAPTER

2

FIRST SIGNS OF TROUBLE: 7 MONTHS AGO

All this didn’t come out, of course, until much later under deep interrogation, including a comprehensive lie detector test. The job was given to me by Sir Maurice, my boss, to make sure that every last bit of intelligence that could be squeezed from Corrigan was. We did a number of background checks on him in Cambridge (very discreetly) and everything he’d told us seemed to check out 100% so we had to believe him. However, the plot came so near to total disaster for us that I’m still kept awake at night thinking about it. And that is the reason for this account of the affair.

My name is Jack Sanderson and I’m the Director of Operations for MI5 and a member of the COBRA Committee so I’m directly responsible only to Sir Maurice and the PM. The first I heard that something might be brewing on the Northern Ireland front was about 7 months ago when a sharp-eyed policeman at Liverpool docks noticed a man who he thought he recognised. When he checked the database, he recognised him as a high-ranking member of the New IRA who was on our watch list. He immediately contacted us and we put out an all-points alert to every police force in the country to keep an eye out for him. But he’d already hired a car at the port and disappeared and, unfortunately, we didn’t have the manpower to pursue the matter further although we had the license plate of his car. He was, incidentally, travelling on a false passport, enough reason for me to be worried.

Everybody at MI5 knew the situation in Northern Ireland now, of course. After the no-deal Brexit was consummated and a hard border reinstated on the island, the New IRA had started getting up to its old tricks again, planting bombs and generally causing mayhem. They, needless to say, were very angry about the new political situation as it meant that their vision of a united Ireland was receding ever further into the distance. We’d warned our political masters about the issue and about the possible threat to the mainland but, as we had no hard evidence of wrong-doing over here, there was nothing further we could do. So we just hoped and prayed that any dramatic attempts to disrupt life here would be found out in time and cut off before they could do any real damage.

So, back to Peter Corrigan’s story.

CHAPTER

3

CORRIGAN’S STORY: 7 MONTHS AGO

When the postcard came, his first thought was to disappear completely. After all, he was rich enough now to do it. But then he remembered the oath he’d taken when he joined the IRA and also the very long arm of the organisation and decided, in his logical engineer’s way, that such a course of action was unfeasible. All he could really do was go with the flow.

So he went out and did a big shop, including getting in several bottles of Bushmills whisky, his handler’s favourite tipple, he remembered. Then he just sat around and waited. It was the beginning of the long summer vacation so he had no teaching duties to worry about.

And his handler, a chap called Larry Donovan, duly turned up, the old pro we’d spotted at the docks in Liverpool, and, after hiding his car in the garage, promptly made himself at home in Corrigan’s house. He’d aged a lot since Corrigan had last seen him but he still looked like the hard man Corrigan remembered.

‘So what brings you here now?’ was Corrigan’s first question after getting Donovan a large whisky.

‘Let’s take it slowly, shall we? I’ve only just arrived and I’m pretty shattered. It’s been a long journey,’ Donovan replied in his harsh Belfast accent.

‘You weren’t followed, I presume?’

‘No. Don’t worry about that. Got any grub in this house of yours?’

‘Yes. Steak and kidney pudding and oven chips do you?’

‘Sounds good to me. Why don’t you run along and get it ready and I’ll just sit here with your whisky.’

Corrigan resented his tone but bit his tongue and went out of the room. After they’d eaten, Donovan went to the bedroom which Corrigan had prepared for him and had a nap, promising they’d talk when he got up. So Corrigan watched some TV desultorily, in a fever of impatience to know what had brought Donovan over to England now after so long without contact.

When Donovan finally came out of the spare bedroom, he plonked himself down in one of Corrigan’s comfortable arm chairs and said, ‘OK. Let’s talk.’ There was a longish pause before he continued, ‘Well, lad, we’ve been following your career with much interest and noticed how well you’ve done for yourself over here and we figure it’s payback time. We want you to design something for us and build it.’

‘What kind of something?’ Corrigan asked impatiently.

‘A drone.’

‘A drone?’ Corrigan said disbelievingly. ‘They’ve already been invented, you know.’

‘We are aware of that. But this is to be rather a special type of drone. It has to be almost noiseless and capable of dropping something very precisely down, for example, a chimney in the dark.’

Corrigan pondered this for a few moments, his brain whirring away with all the technical complications involved, and then replied slowly, ‘Yes, I think that should be feasible.’

‘It has to be ready within 6 months.’

‘OK. What kind of something will you be dropping?’

‘That needn’t concern you but I can tell you it will weigh only about half a kilogram. If you can do this for us, we