Hohenbruck Army Base, Germany

Day 2

15:15 hrs, Tuesday

Roper clicked his mobile closed as he walked into the SIB office building.

"She really isn't taking this well, is she?" Ox, one of his sergeants, asked, meeting him at the desk. Roper growled to himself. "The problem with wives is that sooner or later they become ex-wives." Ox groused. "Change your number, that's my advice."

"Where's Donnell?" Roper asked, not amused that Sas's phone calls had become so common place that his team knew about them.

"In the incident room."

Roper stopped in front of his old office. She was there, sitting at her old desk, as if the past four months had not happened. He could not see any of the trace of the bruises, the cuts that had marred her face the last he had seen her. He had only seen her from the back yesterday, when she refused to stop, to turn and face him.

"Boss?" Ox prodded him. Roper wrenched his eyes from her.

"Right. Get the team together. Briefing in an hour." Roper headed on to his office.

"Right, Boss." Ox turned, heading out.

Roper motioned Donnell to follow him into his office as he walked through the drugs incident room.

"Strauss and the locals have anything new?"

"No, and that's the problem." Roper sat down at his desk. Donnell perched on the edge. "Twenty more bodies have turned up in Hamburg. Another two seizures of drugs, packaged for distribution, caught up between here and there."

"Johnson's still in business then."

"Appears so."

"And that means that the drugs are still coming in here."

"And that," Roper rapped his knuckles on the desktop, "I will not have. If I do nothing else here, I want Johnson in prison."

Donnell started pacing the office. Roper watched him. Outside, the team had started assembling. SSgt Jilly McNamara nodded to them as she came in.

"We all want that one in bracelets but he's smart, too smart."

"Is that an insult to my team?".

"Well, Ox might be out in the cold." Donnell grinned. "I just want to prepare you that this is going to be a long one, if you're serious."

"I want him. He's responsible for international drug smuggling, murder, distribution and any number of other crimes. He's a one man crime spree all by himself. The Germans don't like us being here and perhaps they're right. It isn't for me to say. The least we can do is rid them of one of our own."

"Have the locals gotten anything new on him?" Roper shook his head.

"They've kept up their surveillance. Other than keeping away from the Blaue Tur, he hasn't changed his habits in the least."

"Which was our only chance at catching him with whoever is working with him on our side." Donnell mused. Roper smirked to himself. He could all ready see Donnell turning this over and over in his head. "If anything, the whole Shane incident has done nothing but make him more careful."

"The weak link is still here. Johnson was right about that. If we can figure out who and how the drugs are coming in, we can take him down with that alone." Roper snorted. "Easier said than done." Donnell said out loud what had just gone through Roper's mind. "Looks like everyone's here." Roper stood up.

"Let's throw it out to them, see what they come up with."

"What's happening, Boss?" Jilly asked.

"Everyone get comfortable." Roper told them, clearing the incident board. He felt strangely at ease standing up in front of them. He had always known that Burns was grooming him to take over the section. It was envitiable. Roper had not spent much time thinking about, just considered it the next step. He waited until each of them had pulled up a chair.

"Danny Johnson."

"Oh, bloody hell." Ox muttered. Everyone suppressed a laugh.

"Nevertheless, old boy, he's our target."

"We've been after him for years."

"That doesn't mean we won't get him." Jilly chided him. "So what's changed, Boss?"

"Nothing has changed and that's the whole point. I've just had a meeting with the locals. There's a drug war going on in Hamburg that is not showing any signs of letting up. They've got bodies falling as fast as they can pick them up. Now we know that Johnson is trying to take over the drug trade in Hamburg. We know his supply of drugs is coming in from this base." One of the Owens' hands went up. Roper could never keep them straight.

"For God's sake, Miles, you're a soldier, not a school boy!" Ox snapped. "Out with it." The other Owens, Johns, snickered.

"How do we know the drugs are coming in here?" He crossed his eyes at Ox.

"Four months ago, we had a case where we thought we had narrowed down Johnson's base supplier, a lad called Shane, who, it turned out, moonlighted as a car thief. Shane was executed in the back of my car out in front of a house where one of Johnson's bartenders and his girlfriend were executed. One shot, back of the head. The thought was that Johnson was cleaning up some loose ends. Shane and Heidel, the bartender, were weak links. If we got them on the car thefts, we might have gotten them to talk about Johnson's operation."

"I remember this." Jilly mused. "This was the boy that worked over in the warehouse. What made them think Johnson was bringing the drugs in through the base?"

"The locals had the ports on high alert. They knew the drugs were coming in from London. They found nothing. Surveillence on Johnson showed nothing of anything coming through the regular ports or known routes."

"And they're coming in enough quantity that he's not at a loss when he looses a couple of shipments to the locals."

"So our target is actually who is bringing the drugs onto the base." Jilly's brain started turning as well. This team ate, drank and slept their jobs. Turning down Burns' post had seemed a defeat at first. Somehow, Roper thought he got the better deal. This team functioned as one at all times. They were not used to serving under an autocratic seargeant major.

"Was there any lapse in Johnson's operation after Shane's death?" Roper shook his head. "So whoever we're looking for has been here a while. Johnson probably wouldn't trust someone new so soon after that. Maybe Shane was working with someone inside the warehouse."

"We're going to need a solid case against whoever it is, enough to force them to talk about Johnson." Roper put in, preferring to stand back while the rest of them mused the case over.

"First thing to do is find out who is in and out of the warehouse regularly. I'll start pulling personnel records on anyone posted there." Jilly started taking notes.

"Johnson probably isn't in direct contact with whoever it is. We've watched him. The locals have watched him. There isn't any evidence of him speaking with anyone we've been able to connect to the warehouse. He never made direct contact with Shane. We were never able to find out how Shane was involved or how he got involved. The theory was that he was blackmailed but we were never able to prove it conclusively." Donnell told them.

"So that means surveillance." Ox's expression was one of glee.

"You're lucky my man is posted to Basra." Jilly put in. Her husband, also in the army, had been away for months. "He'd shoot you for the amount of hours this is going to require."

"We'll be luckier still when he gets his arse back here to perform his husbandly duties and soothes your nasty temper."

"We need to find out who is coming in and out of there, as well as what's going on inside. Any idea of what size the shipments are coming in?" Miles asked, shoving at Ox to get back to the point.

"The shipments the locals have confiscated were all contained in the boot of a car." Donnell told them.

"Well a lot of bloody good that will do us." Ox grumbled.

"If you spent half the time that you spend grumbling, you'd be something of a help around here." Jilly chided him, shoving at him as she got up. "Boss?" She waved him away from the board.

"Don't mind me." Roper said, moving out of the way.

"Right, so we need to run checks on everyone working at the warehouse." Jilly started writing down objectives on the board. She had a thing with note taking. She was cronically taking notes. "Can we get copies of the manifests of everything going in and out of there?"

"Probably not without raising some sort of suspicion but we should look into it." Roper put in.

"Surveillence can see if we can catch anyone visiting and if anything untoward is going on." They all sat quietly while she continued on. "Locals will be keeping an eye on Johnson." Roper nodded.

"We've done all of this before." Ox grumped.

"And we'll do it again." Jilly snapped, not even looking up. "And if we don't find anything in this warehouse, we'll pull every warehouse and depot on this base apart until we come up with something." She eyed him up and down. Roper hid his smirk behind his hand. "And the exercise will do you good." She poked him in the belly. Roper stood up, separating Jilly and Ox with his body.

"All right." He stood up in front of them again. "Personnel checking, Jilly? You take the Owens. Go over everything. Get the usual stuff but I want financials. Find out everything about everyone. Find out where they're from, talk to UK SIB to check out their lives before they joined the army. Find out if there are any locals engaged to anything at any of our warehouses or depots, while you're at it. Its probably a long shot but we might as well check." She nodded.

"Donnell, I want you to set up and schedule the surveillance. I want inside and out. I want to know everyone in and out of that place. I want to know everything that is going on in that place. You clear it with the brass. Get everything in place and let me know. We'll work out the schedule."

"And what about me? I'm supposed to sit here, taking phone messages?" Ox grumbled. Roper spun around.

"And Oxley, I know the army's line about keeping track of everything onto and off the base. I want you to double-check everything. I want to know how this stuff is getting off the base." Ox rolled his eyes. "Or I could stick you with Jilly and let the twins off the leash?"

"No, no. I got it."

"All right. I want everyone out of here, now. I want you to get a good night's sleep. We'll start tomorrow morning bright and early. Briefing at 07:00 tomorrow morning."

Roper unlocked and opened the door to his flat, searching in the dark for the light switch. He still had not gotten the feel of this new place. His fingers finally felt out the wall switch, the room bathed in light. He threw his keys on the table by the door, wandering into the kitchen to grab an ale out of the icebox.

He pulled off his tie, tossing it onto the sofa, pulling up his ratty chair up to the floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the narrow side street. He leaned back into the chair, taking a long draw from the bottle.

This was the same chair he sat in while he waited for Jo that first night at his old flat, waiting for her to come back to him. Months had passed, he was still waiting for her to come back.