Trike Patrol - Irish -

Aoife glances at the small auxiliary screen mounted on the handlebar riser. The FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) system is the trike’s secret weapon. It paints the world in ghostly white and cold black. The sheep look like walking furnaces. The rabbits are blurs of static. But tonight, near the old pier at Ros an Mhíl, something is wrong.

Byrne pulls up ten feet from the van. He does not get off the trike. He is a monument. The trike’s engine idles, a deep, guttural promise. Aoife is recording everything.

"Contact," Aoife says, her voice suddenly tight. "Human heat signatures. Three, no, four. Moving between the shipping containers." Trike Patrol - Irish

It is a bluff. Customs are thirty minutes away. The drone has their faces, but the light is poor. The trike has their plates, but the van is likely stolen. But the trike itself is the argument. It is so unusual, so unexpected, that the men cannot compute the risk. In their cognitive map of law enforcement, there is no slot for "Trike Patrol."

A black and tan terrier, tied to a container, senses them. It is not a warning bark. It is a location bark. One of the oilskin men looks up, stares directly at the drone, then at the stack of pallets where the trike is hiding. He shouts. The others scatter. Aoife glances at the small auxiliary screen mounted

Aoife exhales. "They bought it."

The response comes back crackled but clear. "Tango-1, copy. Units en route. ETA forty-five minutes. Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage." The sheep look like walking furnaces

"Fuel laundering," Byrne mutters. It is always fuel laundering out here. The diesel from the pumps is dyed green for agricultural use, taxed low. The criminals run it through a filtering process using bleaching clay to strip the dye, turning it "green diesel" into "white" road fuel. They dump the toxic sludge—a vile, acidic clay—into the nearest river or bog. The Environment Agency has a list of sites a mile long. The Revenue Commissioners have a list of suspects. But catching them in the act requires silence, patience, and a vehicle that can navigate a bog path at two miles an hour without waking the parish.