Tuesday, May 30, 1967, 1718 Central European Time, Frankfurt, Hesse, Federal Republic of Germany

There had been somewhat of a change of plan. Namely via Adeline Khoury, who had come down with food poisoning, precise cause unknown.

This meant that Micheal Reagan was assigned to take her place in the truck and with unconfirmed reports of an increased police presence in Ostrava, it was decided that they needed to get someone in country as soon as possible; Wednesday afternoon if possible. The train service wouldn't get them there until the early hours of Thursday, what with the change in Prague.

Thus Reagan found himself at a customs broker near Frankfurt Airport as the dark red Bedford TK truck they were going to use was having its covered trailer loaded with a large quantity of German beer being exported to Czechoslovakia for their hard currency stores.

Diana Langdon was standing next to him, smoking a cigarette.

"They've fitted a covert radio under the suspension. Morse code and voice. Problem is that it takes five minutes to set the thing up..."
This message was last edited by the player at 11:44, Tue 19 Mar 2019.

Mícheál would have preferred it if they were transporting hard liquor instead of beer, if only because he could have weaponised the former. As it was he was eyeing up the truck, considering what he might be able to make use of. He'd foregone his usual suits for a jeans and checkered work shirt that he'd spent an hour deliberately wearing down to look long owned.

The mission was going to call for discretion. Not as much fun as blowing things to kingdom come but it did come with the benefit of less return fire. Finding himself dying for a fag, he plucked one from his own pack and lit up. He nodded understandingly. Five minutes was an eternity in some situations.

"Hope to God we don't need to use it. I'm hoping to get them out quick and quiet, no one noticing they're gone til we're in another country." All he could hope was that the notion of a pair of Irish delivering a truckful of beer wouldn't rouse any suspicions.

Langdon nodded and reached into her pocket for a road atlas, which she placed on the table, her finger tracing a route to the border with Czechoslovakia.

"We've got a long drive ahead of us", she said, "My guess is around 9 hours, not including however long it takes us to get through the border at Rozvadov. At some point, I may end up having to sleep because I'm too tired to drive. How's your lorry experience?"

She paused.

"I don't have a current Czech map on me. I'll have to pick one up when we find a gas station on the other side of the frontier. You know what we're trying to go to the Moon? Perhaps NASA could develop a system that would tell you where you were... and give you directions."

"More than enough to manage with. Driven them a few times." Admittedly once had been entirely in reverse, through a crowded warehouse while focusing more on his shooting than his driving. That wasn't the sort of thing that built confidence in others, though, so he kept it to himself.

"The Moon, yeah, I heard. Bet the view would be lovely from up there." One might even be able to imagine that the world was as peaceful and serene as it might look from far away. He wasn't too worried about the lack of a map. A person could get a lot of valuable local intelligence when asking for directions. "They made a thing like that, you know for sure J. Edgar would be watching each and every little move you made."

"If he was watching each and every move I made, he'd probably end up very bored, very soon."

The Turkish workmen in front of them seemed to have finished the job, at which point one of them came over to Diana.

[Language unknown: Conoreous o wittioith. Uterfo hi ncunee?]

Diana nodded and walked over to inspect the vehicle, doing up the cords of the tarpaulin. Then she disappeared into the office to fill out some paperwork.

Fifteen minutes later, she returned, holding a folder filled with paperwork.

"Right", she said, "Let's get this show on the road."

"From what I've heard, he'd be snooping for fashion tips." He took it as dictum that the more strait-laced and conservative a public figure appeared to be, the more depraved and decadent they were. He'd heard enough stories about the very top of the FBI pyramid to believe them.

Tapping a finger to his temple, he pointed on down the road. "Let's get going, then. The road won't get any shorter while we're sitting here." If Diana was a Soviet plant then she had already incriminated herself by mentioning the radio, nothing that would have been of any use had she proven to be a plant. He didn't have any armaments on him, if things went bad he had three very sharp pencils in his top pocket and a knife in his jeans.

"Indeed", Diana said, climbing up to the driver's cab of the truck. As this was a British truck, the driver's cab was on the right hand side of the vehicle, which was a slight issue when driving on the Continent.

The interior was a single driver's seat and a bench seat that could sit two people. There were no seatbelts, which was rather concerning to some people.

Behind the seats, a large green sleeping bag sat, along with a vacuum flash and a heavy looking torch, along with a batch of road maps.

Diana got into her seat, pulled out her key and stuck it into the ignition. Turning it, the engine revved a couple of times before bursting into noisy life.

"90,000 miles on the clock for this thing", she said, "I took it all the way to Iran last year."

He wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if someone had rolled the clock back on the lorry, but she definitely looked like she'd done her 90,000. "Drive her til the wheels fall off, my dad used to say. I think he was talking about motor vehicles." He watched her closely as she got going, having a knack for unobtrusive observations. An old hand at driving, he knew that any vehicle that stood the test of time would have plenty of idiosyncracies known only to a familiar driver. How good the brakes were, whether the tracking pulled to the left or right, those and a whole host of other little things were worth taking heed of.