Since his retirement from the post of Director of Special Forces, Harry's work had increased beyond anything he'd done before. It wasn't like any of the dozen wars he'd fought in, there was no desert, no jungle, nor the cold and lonely valleys of the mountainous Balkans. His war was being fought on British soil.
His headquarters was the lowest vaulted croft of Ravenscroft Manor, deep beneath the manor itself, spreading out as far as the moat itself. The walls were plastered with maps, each pillar of the vaulted croft surrounded with filing cabinets. A gun rack sat by the dark-stained and iron-studded door, and it was in this domain that he ruled supreme.
Andrew McCabe, a one-time steelworker from Glasgow, turned paratrooper and SAS Warrant Officer looked on. Jock McCabe had fought in more wars than his boss, his first fights being on the estates of Belfast and Derry. He'd parachuted into the cold South Atlantic to join the carrier Hermes to attack the Falklands, he'd fought in Lebanon. And then his most unusual task had been to act as guardian and advisor to a boy barely into two figures of years.
Harry Potter. A wizard. The Wizard if MI5 were to be believed, the be-all and end-all of wizardry. Jock's beliefs had been significantly altered in the years leading up to the 1990 annihilation of the purist movement as it was then. They'd been altered even further since. Watching his boss balancing threat after threat to Britain, wading through paperwork and memorising one face after another, he wondered if Harry was some kind of primordial chaos entity.
Detailed maps of the major cities of Britain were neatly labelled. The majority were the marijuana symbol, though a good few were the symbol of marijuana on top of an image of a pound coin. Consumers and dealers of drugs, one of the roots of petty crime, itself the beginning of the slippery slope to many other things.
On a projector screen on the wall was a map of the entirety of Britain. Passing the Medway Forts on that same fateful route as Admiral de Ruyter had once sailed, the fast frigate Rapid cruised towards Chatham, having been once again employed for the smuggling of arms and drugs from the Continent. Harry moved his pieces around where she had landed her cargo as he read through the reports, preparing to send off the intelligence to the Essex Police unit he was working with on this operation.
Tracked weapons and drugs would allow them to clear the ancient city of Colchester of much of its major crime, and hopefully he'd be able to track any extremists in the city, or indeed the area. Turning to a second, paper, map of Britain, he eyed the reports pinned to it. The purist faction had reformed under a coalition of the more extremist wizarding nobles. Luckily they hadn't been able to put aside their egos and cease squabbling, until recently. That had rendered them impotent.
The door swung open, admitting a shapely blonde in the desert camouflage favoured by Harry's personal staff who had retired from the Special Air Service to continue working with him. Sweeping her hair out of her eyes with one hand, she passed a file to Jock.
"Anything interesting?" Harry asked.
"Just political intelligence and analysis. Reading it saps my will to live." Amy commented as Jock flicked the file open; "I wonder sometimes why we bother with a government. There are some good ones, there are some bad ones, there are some downright fanatical ones, and then there's the majority who are merely incompetent."
"Democracy m'dear." drawled Jock; "It's what we have to put up with to avoid being either a fascist or communist nation. As tempting as burning the government to the ground sometimes seems. Democracy is the right to be ignorant. That's why we're working to erase any threat to the safety and security of our population. Democracy is why we, some specialist units of the army and our intelligence services work in the shadows to keep the darkness at bay. Before you joined the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, the night after the bombings in London, Harry said something to us, remind me..?"
"We can survive worse." Harry quoted himself; "London can survive worse. 2043 will be the two-thousandth anniversary of the city. It has revolted, suffered revolution, been burnt to the ground twice, razed to the ground once, bombed, firebombed, and conquered at least twice, but no matter what has befallen it, England and indeed Britain, its people, its throne and its capital have endured."
Someone sent me an e-mail asking about the events in London on Wednesday, and I decided to scribble out a quick trailer for a story I've been working on for some time that would also address what we're feeling. It can be summed up in what I call the HMS Hood Reaction Syndrome.
Five percent shock, five percent fear. The rest is made up of fury, anger, defiance and vengefulness.
Civil war, invasion, insurgency, terrorism, disaster, tyrannical rule, weak rule. We endure. London endures. Britain endures. Even a faint shadow of a superpower that it once was, Britain is not lacking in spine. Politics and religion divide us at every moment, nationalist interests, religious beliefs, creeds, colours, sexuality and a hundred other things divide us. Our nation is one of the few things that unite us. If you're in London, perhaps you'll have heard that the people of London are turning out in force, particularly gathering in Trafalgar Square beneath the statue of Admiral Lord Nelson in a peaceful gathering in memory of the dead and in defiance of the attacks on British soil.
And I'm raising a glass of something good to no-one and to everyone. It was inevitable that an attack would be perpetrated on British soil, we can't stop them all, especially a lone wolf who isn't buying suspicious objects like chemicals for explosives or firearms and ammunition. A car and a kitchen knife do not a terrorist make, only the method of their employment. I can only thank whatever deity/deities you/I believe in that the casualties weren't higher.
ElMarquis.