The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

a balanced combination that would afford him cover, but not have him dressed like a soldier if he found himself in a different situation that required him to blend into a crowd.

The mountain road took him higher, winding through woodland and pastures, affording glimpses of the Black Sea. King could see how the sea got its name. Not land-locked, but separated by the narrow Bosporus straight, the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea from the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean. The Black Sea was dark and slick, with choppy waves rather than small rollers, and the waters looked deep and black on all but the brightest and clearest of skies, or calmest of seas.

King found a track and pulled off the road, checking his mobile phone signal and sending a short text, before making his way cautiously down the track, the Dacia coping with the ruts and potholes without grounding. The track led to nothing more than a turning point, where King switched off the engine and typed a text, he checked for mistakes forced by the auto-correct before sending.

The silence as King got out of the car was blissful. The air was warm, but clean. He felt the sun on his face and was buoyed by the promise of getting ahead of Helena. He would soon be in control, and he relished turning the tables on his enemy. He received a message back, checked it and smiled. He had felt so alone until now. He had spent his entire career working alone and even when he had assistance or joined forces with another intelligence service, or agency from another country, he knew he would ultimately be alone. He had been a deniable asset. Nobody would trade for him, negotiate his release. He should have been used to it, but in his short-time working with MI5 and partnering Caroline on various cases, he had grown used to being a part of a team. But it wasn’t only that. King had felt from the outset, that the price of Caroline being held for ransom was too high, as was the risk of failure on his part. The pressure was insurmountable.

King opened the hatch of the car and started to take out the equipment and items he had bought. He set up the gas stove and arranged the mess-tins around it. Next, he took out the aluminium water bottles and set about puncturing the lids with his knife. He then arranged them in the boot of the car where it was a decidedly smoother surface than the ground. He opened a bottle of thick bleach and poured it into a mess-tin. Then he scooped out petroleum jelly from a large tub and placed it in the bleach, along with just the right amount of borax and potassium nitrate, also known as salt-peter. King placed the mess-tin on the gas stove and watched it melt the petroleum jelly. He sprinkled in the iron filings - to aid as an electrical conductor rather than shrapnel - and stirred the mix together with a stick. As the mix boiled and licked the edges of the mess-tin, King took it off the heat and stirred gently, the mix thinning further and gradually darkening in colour. He placed the tin in the boot of the car, then opened the bag of two-inch screws into his hand and fed them into two of the bottles, each about half-full. He then poured the mix into the bottles right up to the top and threw the mess-tin onto the ground. He took out a length of electrical wire, East-European spec, with just a negative and a positive. He used a pair of snips to cut the length, then fed the wires through the lid until approximately four-inches of wire protruded. Next, he coiled the wires separately around his finger so that both lengths of negative and positive resembled a spring. King eased the lengths into the warm liquid and fastened the lids in place. He then took two battery power units and a pin-timer delay out of the boot and wired the connections, leaving the batteries out until he was ready. He set the timers for five-minutes and taped the consumer units to the side of the bottles with duct-tape. King repeated the process twice more, imperative he use clean mess-tins and did not change the order in which he made the mixes, and finally stood back to admire his handiwork. Six time-delay Improvised Explosive Devices – or IED’s - each one capable of blowing a car into the air into pieces, or he estimated enough to take down two average-sized houses if set correctly.

King then set about cutting lengths of string and soaking them in sugar and liquid paraffin. He left them for twenty-minutes while he made four more bottles of the mix. He checked that the holes in the lids were made larger, to allow for air, then took the string out of the paraffin and allowed them to dry in the warm air. Once they were dry enough to the touch, he folded them in half, and pushed both ends through the lid and deep into the liquid compound, which was already starting to thicken. He tightened up the lids, leaving a ten-inch loop protruding. He tested a spare length of the string with his lighter, watched as it burned fiercely, counting the whole time. The length of string burned away, and King dropped the ember to the ground. He then adjusted the lengths of string in the bottles and taped them in place. He figured they would burn for ten-seconds before heating the mix enough to initiate and cause detonation. The initiation would use a third of the mix, making detonation around two-thirds as powerful as the electrically-detonated devices. Enough to disable a car, breach a door or take down a group of men effectively.

King took out a bottle of water, drank down half a litre or so