Pirate

by Duncan Falconer

  ‘Roger,’ Stratton said as he watched the two pairs of headlights bump along a gravel road. The vehicles drove into the village, lights occasionally flashing skywards as they bumped over the heavily rutted ground. They came to a halt outside the house Stratton had been watching.

  He switched back to the thermal imager and focused on the lead vehicle. He could see the bright white of the car’s brake discs and exhausts. He watched as the Suburban’s rear doors opened. A couple of men climbed out. The thermal imagers graded them down the scale from the superheated components of the car. The bodies were lighter than the buildings behind them and the ground under their feet. Stratton could see the men’s hands and their heads, brighter than their clothing. Both men were carrying rifles, the cool metal almost black in their white hands, but just as visible because of the contrast.

  One of the men went to the front door of the house. As he approached, it opened and two men came outside. There appeared to be an exchange of words. One of the men from the house walked to the Suburban and looked to have a conversation with someone in the back.

  ‘Do you have eyes on?’ the voice asked over Stratton’s earpiece.

  ‘Yes, though I can’t identify anyone. But it’s the right time, the right place and they look pretty cautious,’ Stratton replied. ‘I’d say it’s safe to assume our man’s there.’

  ‘Enough to do the snatch?’

  ‘Why not? It’s like fishing. If we don’t like what we catch, we can always throw it back.’

  ‘Is that what you normally do?’

  ‘If there was a normal way of doing things like this, everyone would be doing it.’

  Stratton picked up a large reflector drum lens on a tripod with a device attached to the optic and looked through it. Because the image was highly magnified, it took him a few seconds to find the vehicles. He saw a man climb out of the back of the lead Suburban and talk with the one from the house. Stratton pushed a button on the device, which took several still recordings of the man. They were all of his head but more of the back than the front or sides.

  The man walked towards the house. Just before going in he turned to the vehicles as if someone had called to him. Stratton quickly recorded several images of the man before he turned and entered the house.

  Stratton viewed the images he’d taken and selected several of the man’s face. He downloaded the images on to the satellite phone attached to the lens. He scrolled through the address book, selected a number and hit send. A few seconds later a window confirmed that the file had been sent.

  He took up the thermal imager again, carried on scanning the house and the two vehicles. The two armed men stood off a couple of metres from the SUVs. The engines of the Suburbans were still running, their exhausts bright white on the imager.

  ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Stratton said, ‘I just sent London some images of a possible. They should be able to confirm.’

  Less than a minute later the satphone gave off a chirp and he looked at the screen message: Image 3. Target confirmed.

  Stratton disconnected the drum lens and put it in a backpack. ‘Hopper?’

  ‘Send,’ said the voice.

  ‘London has replied. If we catch this fish, we can keep it. I’ll see you at the RV in two.’

  ‘Roger that,’ Hopper replied.

  Stratton got to his feet, tied up the pack and pulled it on to his strong shoulders. He checked the ground around him, pocketed the wrapper from an energy bar he had eaten and searched for anything else. He made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scan of his surroundings using the imager. It picked up nothing save a few goats a couple of kilometres away. He wondered what the bloody things ate. It didn’t seem possible that anything could grow in this barren land.

  He headed down the gravelly incline into a gully that took him out of sight of the village. Stratton dug a cellphone from his pocket and hit a memory dial.

  ‘Prabhu? Stratton. We’re in business. We’re towards you now, OK?’

  Then he pocketed the phone and clambered on down a steep channel to a stony track barely visible in the low light. He paused to look around and listen. The sound of stones shingling downhill came from the slope opposite him. He continued walking and watched the shadowy outline of a man grow clearer as it made its way down the rise towards him.

  The man joined him on the track and they walked alongside each other. The man was a similar age and build to Stratton, his lighter hair cut short. ‘That was a pleasant few hours,’ Hopper said. ‘I would like to have seen the sunset though. Could you see it from where you were?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘If the demand for gravel ever equals oil, Yemen will make a bloody fortune,’ said Hopper. ’Never seen a country with so much dry rubble. The entire place looks like it’s been bulldozed. A few trees would help. I don’t know how the bloody goats manage. You could scratch around here all day and not find anything to eat. And water? The riverbeds must have water in them no more than a couple of days a year.’

  Stratton listened to his partner talk. Hopper was a passionate man at heart to be sure. He felt sympathetic to people whose lifestyle he judged to be of a lower quality than his own. And he assumed that if they could, they would like to live the way he did. It made Stratton feel cold and unconcerned by comparison and Stratton didn’t regard himself as particularly cold. He didn’t resent Hopper for it though. Nor did he think the man was soft. But the way Hopper talked, with his emphasis on human kindness, it was a tad over the top, as well as being a potential weakness in their business. Yet that was Hopper. Stratton had known him on and off for ten years or so. He had worked with him hardly at all and knew him more socially than anything else back in Poole.

  ‘You happy with this next phase?’ Stratton asked.

  ‘Yep. No probs. You talked to Prabhu?’

  ‘He’s on his way to the RV. Have you done a snatch like this before?’

  ‘A few. One in Iraq. A handful in Afghanistan.’

  ‘This should be easier. I don’t expect the target to be as twitchy here. This is generally a quiet neighbourhood.’

  ‘You operated in Yemen before?’

  ‘Did a small task in Aden a couple years ago,’ said Stratton. ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  Hopper checked his watch. ‘Helen’ll be putting the boys to bed about now,’ he said. ‘We usually let ’em have a late night Saturdays.’

  Stratton had met Hopper’s wife a few times. At the occasional family functions the service ran. She was nowhere near as chatty as her husband, certainly not with Stratton at least. But that standoff attitude was not unusual. He had a good idea what most of the wives thought about him. He was single for one. And he never brought a girl to the camp gigs, which suggested he did not have a steady girlfriend. There was ample evidence to prove that he had normal tastes when it came to females. It was just that nobody he hooked up with appeared to last very long. Add that to his reputation as a specialised operative, exaggerated or otherwise, and most of the wives, other than those of his closest friends, put up a barrier when he was around.

  But Stratton never felt completely comfortable operating alongside men like Hopper because they brought their families with them. Hopper was always thinking about them or talking about them in conversation. He seemed unable to disconnect while away on ops. Hopper never saw it as a disadvantage being a family man as well as an SBS operative. He regarded himself as pure special forces. He only talked to civilians beyond casual exchanges if he had to. He viewed them as potential security leaks. All of his friends were serving or former military personnel.

  All of which meant several things to Stratton. Hopper would be fine and he would do the job well enough. But he would have preferred it if Hopper had not been chosen for this operation. He was better suited to large-scale ops. But at the end of the day Hopper had a reputation for being reliable, for being steady, and Stratton had no doubt he would do well.

  ‘We weren’t talking the day I left for here,’ Ho
pper went on. ‘Had a bit of a row. Not the best thing when you’re off on an op. By the time I get home it will all have blown over. Helen doesn’t hold on to things like that for long. You’ve met Helen before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Course you have. That last service family barbeque. I never associate you with those kinds of bashes.’

  ‘I think I got back from somewhere that day and just happened to be there.’

  ‘That would explain it.’

  ‘We’re getting close to the RV,’ Stratton said. He wasn’t concerned about being overheard. They were still a long way from the village. But the family chat was getting him out of the right frame of mind. It didn’t feel right to be talking about Hopper’s family life. It was precisely the reason why he didn’t like working with married fads.

  They came to a broader track that connected the coastal highway with the village. A short distance further along they hit a track junction, the other route leading way up into the hills.

  A narrow wadi ran alongside the track and through the junction at that point. Stratton stepped down into it. Hopper joined him.

  ‘This is ideal,’ Hopper said. ‘Far enough away from the village and the highway.’

  The air was still. Both men heard the quiet sound of boots on loose stones and they looked along the track that led up into the hills to see a figure approaching along it. The man was short and solid-looking and carrying a small backpack. He stopped on the edge of the wadi and squatted on his haunches with an economy of energy.

  ‘Ram ram, Prabhu,’ Stratton said, by way of greeting.

  ‘Hajur, sab,’ Prabhu replied.

  ‘Sabai tic cha?’ Stratton asked. It was more of a formality than anything else because Prabhu would have warned him as soon as something was not OK.

  ‘Tic cha,’ Prabhu replied in his calm, easy manner, a hint of a smile on his lips. He had a flat, ageless face, short dark hair. He was a former British Gurkha officer and had completed twenty-four years in the battalion, rising through the ranks to major, one of the few who did. ‘Ramlal is waiting in the vehicle around the other side of the hill,’ he said.

  ‘Good man. Take this pack back with you. We’ll do the snatch here as planned. Soon as it goes off, you drive down and pick us up.’

  ‘No problem, saheb,’ Prabhu said, exchanging packs with Stratton.

  ‘Don’t forget your gas masks,’ Stratton said with a smile. He had a soft spot for the Gurkha soldier but especially for Prabhu who he had worked with before in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  ‘Don’t worry. We won’t forget.’

  The ex-major set off back the way he had come and Stratton pulled a gas mask from the pack and handed it to Hopper, who stuffed it into one of the large pockets in his coat. Stratton took another mask for himself, which he pocketed. Then he took a large, heavy, jagged metal coil from the pack. He carried it along the wadi for a few metres and stopped to inspect the track.

  ‘This’ll do,’ he decided.

  Hopper climbed out of the wadi and Stratton handed him the coil. Hopper crossed the track, placed it on the ground, removed two metal pins from the brutal-looking device and pushed them into holes in its sides. He removed his scarf, bundled it on to one of the pins and gently hammered the pin home with a rock. He repeated the process with the other pin until the device was held securely, and wrapped the scarf back around his neck. As he walked back across the track to rejoin Stratton in the wadi, he unwound a coil of steel wire, the final part of the installation.

  Hopper pulled the wire just enough to make it taut, then he put a rock on it to keep it in position on the edge of the wadi.

  ‘We’re good to go,’ Stratton said and they both walked back to the track junction.

  Stratton took a final item from the pack – a cardboard box – and opened it to expose half a dozen canisters, ring-pulls attached. They looked like smoke grenades but smaller. He handed three to Hopper. ‘The lead car will open their doors as soon as they stop,’ he said. ‘That’s the best time to pop them in.’

  ‘We found that smashing the windows and dropping them inside the vehicle was quicker,’ Hopper said.

  ‘What if the glass is armoured? They’ll lock the doors and you won’t get in.’

  ‘Unlikely, but I get your point.’

  ‘You take the rear vehicle and I’ll take the lead.’

  ‘Roger that. Good luck,’ Hopper said and he made his way back along the wadi to the cable, where he sat down and made himself comfortable.

  Stratton sat back so that he could see the village, and stretched out his legs. He felt tired. The past few days had been long ones.

  The operation had started in Washington DC three days earlier. He had flown in to attend a meeting of British and US special operations. Discussions about strategic alignments for Afghanistan and North Africa. It had finished with a global assessment of the Islamic offensive to date. Not surprisingly to Stratton, the Americans pegged Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea as focal points for future operations. Somalia had become a mess on just about every level and was threatening to get worse. The world’s centre for piracy and large-scale kidnappings was fast becoming a conduit for hard drugs and arms smuggling. And the ops guys talked about another, possibly greater concern: Somalia had begun to emerge as an operational front for international Islamic terrorism.

  It wasn’t Stratton’s kind of meeting. All too hypothetical for him. But he hadn’t been able to avoid it. With his level of experience he was expected to contribute to alliance planning strategies that included British special forces. His fears of one day getting permanently dragged into the office, desk, operations administration system had gone up a notch. But luckily for him, on this occasion someone in London thought they needed him more than the Washington thinktank did.

  As the second day of meetings came to an end, Stratton received a high-priority message to make his way to the British Embassy. Just him, no one else. Not the two SBS officers and the sergeant major from C Squadron he had arrived with. The message couldn’t have been clearer. The faint odour of an operation wafted through his nostrils. He couldn’t get out of the US Navy Intelligence offices quickly enough and grabbed a taxi to the other side of town.

  On arrival at the embassy he was met by an aide. After brief formalities and security clearances, the aide walked Stratton up to the third floor, along cream-coloured corridors, and invited him to attend a private briefing inside the bubble chamber – the electronically sealed room designed to prevent eavesdropping. Stratton had been expecting several people to attend the brief. But he was mistaken. It was just him and the aide. The younger man, clearly from MI6, started talking. He was erudite, polished and intelligent.

  Without the use of visual aids, he described how a month previously a British Airways flight arriving at Bogota International Airport from London Heathrow had been shot at from the ground. There was no doubt that the attack had happened while the aircraft was on its final approach to the Colombian capital. It could never have happened while taking off from Heathrow. And certainly not during its flight across the Atlantic and the eastern edge of the South American continent. There wasn’t a rifle made that could fire a bullet vertically for seven miles. And it had been a single bullet fired into the underbelly of the aircraft. The bullet had been recovered – a 5.56mm which was common enough and suggested a military issue rifle. As to the make, that was impossible to determine. The incident had initially been labelled as nothing more than vandalism. People loosed off shots at commercial aircraft all the time, particularly in poorer, more unstable parts of the world. But when the same thing happened a week later to a French commercial airliner on its final approach to Nairobi, ears pricked within the Western intelligence community.

  Yet it wasn’t until several fine threads of intelligence were weaved together from various sources that the two attacks began to take on the form of something more significant.

  Stratton sat quietly absorbing every detail. The MI6 man spoke method
ically without pausing to take questions. Stratton would observe the usual protocol, which was that all queries be left until the briefer had completed his task.

  The MI6 man kept talking. They had seen a spike over the previous twelve months in the interest among certain known terrorist arms providers in ground-to-air missiles. This interest had gradually become refined to the hand-held, man-portable variety of the weapon. That was always enough to set alarms ringing. But it was nothing new. The threat had been there ever since the Americans handed the Afghans large numbers of Stinger missiles during the USSR’s invasion of their country. The mujahideen had used them against Soviet aircraft with great success.

  A subsequent sting operation conducted by the CIA netted a handful of potential buyers of ground-to-air missiles but the trail to the ultimate end-users was never uncovered to any satisfaction.

  A few months ago the interest in the deadly weapons seemed to dry up, said the MI6 man. This was significant and had happened for three possible reasons. One, the end-users had failed to acquire the weapons and given up the effort, perhaps redirected their energies into a different scheme. Or two, they had just changed their minds about whatever they were planning to use the weapons for and no longer needed them. Or three, they had managed to find a reliable source for the deadly weapons.

  The intelligence community had been speculating that the third option might be the case and that Islamic terrorists had managed to acquire portable ground-to-air missiles. Whereas it was always wise to prepare for the worst, it was also dangerous to assume anything. What they needed was some ‘A1’ category evidence – A1 being hard evidence witnessed by an intelligence organisation’s own personnel. The source of the weapons couldn’t be identified but there was still talk of them going round. For a time the rumour was thought to be the result of a collating phenomenon. Like Chinese whispers. One intelligence organisation asks another if they know anything about a given topic, such as the purchase of man-portable ground-to-air missiles by a terror organisation. The question gets passed on to another intelligence agency, which passes it to another. On its journey the question gets distorted, perhaps thanks to an inaccurate translation here and there, and, without any evidence to support it one way or another, it comes back to its point of origin in the form of an answer. Experienced analysts have an eye for such a result. And a warning for any analyst irresist -ibly attracted to a particular theory for whatever reason: ‘If you look for something hard enough, you’ll find evidence of it, even if it doesn’t exist.’