A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two, Mark Hobson [notion reading list txt] 📗

Dyatlov used the remote control once again and Pieter and everybody else in the conference room watched as the satellite image disappeared from the projector screen, to be replaced by a dull grey wavy picture.

At first, Pieter couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Yet as he watched, a little confused, he suddenly realized what was on the screen - the strange waves moving across the image gave it away.

They were looking at an overhead shot of the grey sea, the rippling effect caused by the swell and rolling of the water. It was taken from a camera on a drone, flying above the Ijsselmeer, and broadcasting live footage back to Police HQ.

The camera angle shifted as the drone slowly revolved in a hovering position and suddenly the long, snaking Houtribdijk Dam came into view in the near distance, the shoreline alongside the wide concrete embankment frozen with ice, and cars and lorries trundling on the road along the top.

The drone moved forward. There was no sound to the live video, but the sense of speed was dizzying, and within a minute or so the dam seemed very close, although the camera may have been at maximum zoom. The drone operator would be under instructions not to get too near.

Once again the drone altered direction. Now it was flying parallel with the dam, the picture focusing on the traffic. Up ahead, the now-familiar Trintelhaven dock came nearer and nearer, and then in the next instant the drone was rising up into the sky and hovering in place above their target, the concrete jetties and buildings below looking like a child’s model. The camera panned and zoomed back and forth, showing the buildings, the junkyard, the pebble beach alongside Vinke’s family home. And there, near to the front door of the house itself, Pieter saw the motorbike from last night.

He sat there shaking his head in amazement. After all this time, they finally had them, trapped and with nowhere to go.

The screen went dark and the lights slowly came back up.

“Let’s rock and roll people!” Dyatlov told them.

◆◆◆

On his way out Pieter caught sight of Commissaris Huijbers conferring with a group of senior officers near the door. It looked like he was giving them their final instructions, Pieter thought, or at least that was the impression he wanted to give: the man in charge, controlling things from HQ while the cavalry went to the rescue. But then he noticed Huijbers was wearing a flak jacket, and Pieter pulled up in surprise.

The small cluster of men broke up and he dashed across to catch the police chief.

“You’re coming with us, sir?”

“Of course I’m coming with you Van Dijk. I just need to make a couple of phone calls, and then we move out. Did you think I’d want to miss out on the fun or something?” Huijbers snarled.

“No, but…”

“Besides, I intend to slap the handcuffs on that Charlotte Janssen myself.”

Then Huijbers breezed past and was gone.

Chapter 24

Clawhammer

They set out in two separate convoys.

One would snake east past the docklands district and leave the city on the A1 motorway, and then branch off to race north on the A6 as far as the town of Lelystad, where the eastern ramp on and off Houtribdijk Dam was. This half of the Armed Response Division had the shortest distance to travel, so once in position, they would wait until their colleagues 30 kilometres away across the Ijsselmeer Sea were ready to go at their end.

The second convoy, whose personnel included Pieter, Dyatlov and Commissaris Huijbers, would go charging through the IJ road tunnel and then head directly north along the same road that he had taken that morning, but continue onwards to Hoorn and then finally the town of Enkhuizen, where the western end of the dam was anchored.

Once both groups were poised to strike they would be given the signal and the assault would be launched in a pincer movement, the two convoys closing in on the small dock at the centre of the dam.

As they travelled north, the roads ahead were cleared of other vehicles and all the traffic lights were locked-off, closing all the side lanes, and flashing a continuous green to allow the police vehicles to plough straight through each junction and intersection without slowing down. But as instructed, the dam remained open until the last possible minute.

Pieter was in the point vehicle of his convoy, as was Dyatlov. They travelled in a Lenco BearCat 4x4 Armoured Truck, a huge monster of a vehicle painted a dark grey colour. He sat in a bucket seat just behind the driver, facing towards the rear exit doors. Down either side ran a pair of plastic benches, where ten members of the assault squad sat, talking and laughing and checking their weapons.

Pieter wore a dark blue flak jacket and a helmet, but he was otherwise dressed in his usual clothes, and was armed only with his Walther P5 for his personal protection, having refused the offer of an assault rifle. This was Dyatlov’s bread and butter, and he had no intention of interfering with the operation by being at the head of the police raid.

Every few minutes he twisted in his seat to glance out of the front windscreen to check on their progress. He couldn’t see an awful lot for the vehicle had an anti-riot wire cage across the front, and the small slit-windows of bulletproof-glass restricted his view still further. But he did look down at the speedometer on the futuristic-looking dashboard and saw they were travelling at 140km/h, the vehicle’s maximum speed.

From overhead, he heard a deep thrum-thrum noise that seemed to make the air wobble. He looked up. In the roof were a pair of hatches. These were pulled down, but he could see through their glass apertures, and he caught a quick glimpse of a helicopter as it flashed across the sky. One of the pair of Police AW139’s, painted with