Reign of Evil

Trevor, who was driving, scoffed and couldn’t help but reply, “Your romanticism is amazing. Kings are just like anyone else. They are fallible, sometimes mean, most often greedy, and rarely considerate of the common man.”

YaYa was sitting in the backseat and leaned forward. “Is that the way you feel about your queen?”

Trevor kept his gaze straight ahead, but he replied quickly. “Not at all. Queen Elizabeth, God bless her soul, is completely different.”

Walker laughed. “Now who’s being a romantic? I heard she’s a billionaire many times over. I’ve also heard the theories about her and Princess Diana.”

“Rubbish. Pure bloody rubbish. It’s in no way the same as your Americans’ reverence for a king you know nothing about.”

Walker couldn’t help himself. He crossed his arms. “Explain?”

“It’s because of your movies and books. No, it goes back further. It goes back to Washington. Sure, you had a general for a president, but you lost your king. Americans have always had a love affair with the idea of a monarchy. It’s why you put so many of your cultural icons on pedestals.”

“Like LeBron James and Brad Pitt,” YaYa said.

Trevor pressed harder. “What do you know about King Arthur? Have you as Americans read any of the actual historic texts or the academic dissertations or are you a victim of American pop culture? Your movies have become encyclopedias to your young. Look at Arthur. You have one movie where he wears chrome armor and another in which he is a Roman wearing leather armor. In one movie Camelot is a ten-story gleaming castle with pinnacles and in another it’s an old fort made from stone and mortar. Your love affair with the myth makes reality unreachable.”

Walker sat back for a few moments, then said, “Wow. Where’d that come from?”

YaYa nodded. “Probably some pent-up anti-American sentiment.”

Walker’s brow creased. “So what you’re telling me is that Arthur doesn’t look like Richard Gere and doesn’t wear chrome armor? I drop the bullshit flag on that.”

YaYa shook his head. “Lancelot. Richard Gere played Sir Lancelot. It was Sean Connery who played King Arthur.”

“Sean Connery. Yeah. That fits with me. He even talks like he’s from around here.”

Trevor turned to Walker and gave him a deadpan look, then shook his head and turned forward. “All I’m saying is that when we meet King Arthur I think he’s going to scare the shit out of us.”

Walker uncrossed his arms. “That I believe.”

They parked a mile away from their target. They were dressed for recon, not for battle, although they did wear body armor. Instead of helmets they wore baseball caps. Their night-vision goggles were in pouches hidden under their jackets. They carried Sig Sauer P229s with silencers and knives. They had their intersquad radio system but wanted to keep it silent until they knew what they were up against.

There were no CCTV cameras in this area near Glastonbury Tor, so they didn’t have to concern themselves with their actions being seen by police. Three men dressed in black approaching a home on Christmas Eve would have been odd.

They made their way down the lane with Trevor on one side and the SEALs on the other. They’d traveled halfway to their objective when they passed a house that was under construction. They checked for security, but there wasn’t any. In fact, the front door was unlocked. The serendipitous find would serve as their forward observation post.

Walker and YaYa each carried a small plastic case containing a PD-100 Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System. Comprised of two micro-unmanned aerial vehicles called Hornets, a base station, a recharging station, a remote-control unit, and a seven-inch screen by which to watch the footage.

The Black Hornet was little more than a camera molded into a tiny helicopter, weighing less than sixteen grams. It was invisible at ten meters, almost completely soundless, but lacked the ability to film in night vision. The smallest FLIR camera weighed twice as much as the entire Hornet. Even without night vision, what the three-inch UAV would do was allow them to get up close to the house and surrounding compound and see what was going on without being seen.

At least that was the plan.

Trevor placed infrared trip wires at both the front and back doors downstairs and on the stairwell. If one was tripped, a signal would travel to the receiver in his pocket, which would then vibrate in series, with the number of repetitions corresponding to whether it was from number one, two, or three.

It was about ten at night and snow just had begun to fall when YaYa and Walker were ready. They’d chosen a second-floor bedroom to use as their launch bay. The glass in the window had yet to be put into place, so the space was open to the elements. Walker could already feel the cold seeping into his fingers as he prepared the tiny UAVs.