He climbed down, stepped out of the barn and scanned the night sky. It was filled with stars that seemed unusually bright.
As he stood holding his breath, his senses tingling, the sound came again, as brief and faint as before but unmistakable to his experienced ear.
Stratton stepped further into the open and looked up again, panning slowly around. But he could see nothing to confirm that what he’d heard was almost certainly a distant helicopter. Then it came again, a little louder this time, the faint throb produced by rotors cutting through the air.
He stood still for almost a minute, waiting for it again. But the air was empty now except for the breeze gently toying with the treetops.
If it was a coincidence it didn’t matter – a rule of survival in the intelligence business was that there was no such thing. The fact was that Stratton had been in the same location for too long.
He hurried into the mine and down the shaft, knowing what he had to do. He’d been considering his contingency plans since his arrival. Some fulminate remained in the glass bowl and he placed it in the centre of the cavern, grabbed up the reel of explosive cord, tied a knot in the end and carefully placed it in the detonator compound. The remaining RDX was in a corner in a bin liner and he carried it over and lowered it gently on top of the bowl. Then he picked up the gas bottle, leaned it against the RDX and moved the glowing petrol lights alongside it. He picked up the reel and headed slowly back up the shaft, unreeling the cord as he went, ensuring that it remained slack but without any kinks or loops that might negate its function.
When Stratton reached the truck he hung the reel over the driver’s wing mirror, climbed into the cab and turned the key in the ignition. But the beast of an engine kicked over once and then died.
‘Great,’ Stratton muttered as he turned the starter again and stamped on the accelerator. But the truck appeared to have chosen this moment to retire. The smell of petrol wafted from the engine compartment and he cursed himself for flooding it.
He sat back, took a calming breath, left the pedals alone and eased the ignition key around in its slot. ‘Come on, old girl,’ he said as the starter motor turned over several times without the engine catching. As he let go of the key to give the starter motor another rest the engine suddenly boomed into life, spluttering as a couple of the pistons failed to ignite at first. A gentle pressure on the accelerator increased the revs and as the truck shook with the unbalanced rhythm the idle cylinders suddenly kicked in. The roar grew healthier by the second.
‘Attagirl,’ Stratton said as he played the accelerator to warm the engine. Then he eased it into reverse and backed out of the barn. He straightened the truck up as the nose faced the track that he could just about make out by the gap through the trees. Keeping his lights off, he eased it into drive and powered slowly forward, his hand out through the window as he unwound the cord. He kept the line slack, being careful not to pull the end out of the charge, and it seemed to take an age to reach the gate. As he closed on it Stratton took his foot off the accelerator and eased the gear lever into neutral so that the truck would roll to a stop without him having to touch the brakes and activate the red tail lights. To bring the truck to a final halt he eased on the hand-brake, jumped out, opened the gate, climbed back into the truck and eased it forward.
A few yards past the gate Stratton turned off the road, along a rut that separated the track from the wood, up and over the other side and in among the trees, the lower branches snapping against the sides of the truck. He continued slowly into the wood and when the cord ran off the reel after reaching the end he stopped the truck, using the handbrake again. He turned off the engine.
Stratton climbed out. He walked ahead of the vehicle through the trees until he reached the edge of the wood from where he could see the road several hundred yards away. He watched it, waiting for his night vision to kick in.
As it did, a shape began to grow in clarity on the hairpin bend in the darkness. After a few minutes Stratton had no doubt that it was a large van. Then his heart quickened as the possibility grew that the van and helicopter were part of a net closing in on him. He looked in all directions, not only for signs of other elements of a trap but for a way out. The ground in front of him was rough but all right for the pick-up and he could make the road without using the track if he had to. The problem was what to do then, if he could even get that far, since there were bound to be roadblocks. He had two choices: leave now and abandon the mission or let the noose tighten around his position and then assess the disposition of the enemy and their likely tactics.
A pair of headlights suddenly flashed from the direction of Caliente and a few seconds later they disappeared, extinguished. But he could hear the vehicle’s motor and then the black silhouette came into view on the road from Twin Oaks, eventually slowing to a stop behind the van with a brief display of red brake lights. A moment later several dark shapes climbed out from both vehicles and gathered in the gap between them.
‘That track leads directly to the mine,’ the commander of the HRT unit said to Hobart as they approached each other. The commander was dressed in a one-piece black fire-retardant suit, a Heckler & Koch MP5K sub-machine gun hanging by his side and a pistol in a holster strapped to his right thigh. A chest harness filled with MP5K magazines and a radio with a wire leading to an earpiece completed the ensemble. Behind him the rear doors of the van were open, revealing about two dozen similarly dressed personnel sitting inside.
‘How do you want to play this?’ Hobart asked as he scanned the distant black wood that hid the precise location of the mine.
‘Way I see it, we can do it two ways,’ the HRT agent said with a degree of confidence. ‘We can debus here and make our way in teams across country to the wood, then head for the mine, cover it from all sides, see what we got and then head in. Other option is to drive up the track, get closer to the mine, debus and move in along the track. The walk-in option is quieter,’ he said, looking at the night sky and listening to the still air.
‘Unless you get caught up in the wood,’ Hobart said, not sounding overly confident. He didn’t know the man other than by sight and was never too fond of this military type of operation. Hobart was a Federal agent, by job and by heart, and running around the countryside with a small army made him feel more like some kind of platoon commander. It did not appeal to him.
‘We’ll do a reconnaissance first, of course,’ the commander said, sounding to Hobart more like a soldier than an FBI agent.
‘You know exactly where the mine is?’ Hobart asked. ‘I mean precise distance and bearing?’ Hobart knew something about operating in the field from his time in Kosovo, not that he was an expert by any means, but he had on more than one occasion experi enced how difficult it was to cross strange country at night.
The HRT commander gave him a hostile look under cover of darkness, feeling annoyed as well as somewhat compromised. Hobart was his boss, sure, but this little shindig was the commander’s to plan and organise and he didn’t like having his toes stepped on. However, the old hack had a point, he had to admit. ‘Not exactly, no. That’s why I’d like to do a recon.’
‘Recon,’ Hobart muttered to himself, beginning to get the feeling that this guy had read too many Nam books. ‘Which do you prefer?’ Hobart asked. In situations like this the call was usually left up to the HRT commander. But one of Hobart’s other problems was handing authority over to subordinates, mainly because he rarely trusted anyone else’s decisions but his own.
‘Well, since we don’t know exactly where the mine is,’ the HRT commander said. ‘I mean, I know it’s close but I couldn’t point a finger in its exact direction so maybe we should move in along the track. That also covers us if he decides to move out in his truck while we’re moving in.’
‘Why don’t you wait till morning?’ Seaton asked. He had been standing quietly in the background but felt the urge to intervene.
The HRT commander looked over at the stranger, wondering who he w
as.
‘Things always go wrong in the dark,’ Seaton went on. ‘Plus you’re giving him a lot of advantages.’
‘I’ve got twenty men in that wagon,’ the HRT commander said with some arrogance. ‘All professionals and with night vision. We can handle one man no matter how this cake is cut.’
‘But isn’t this track the only way out?’ Seaton asked.
The HRT commander was getting miffed with both these guys trying to tell him his job. ‘And what’s to stop him just walking out the back? There’s a thousand miles of nothin’ out there. He could be twenty miles away by morning in any direction.’
‘But not with a ninety-pound bomb,’ Seaton said. ‘I guess you have to ask yourself which is the most important at this stage: the explosives or the man?’
‘I want them both,’ Hobart said.
‘In that case we should head in now,’ the HRT commander said.
Hobart wasn’t sure about any of the ideas. What Seaton had said sounded like good sense but he didn’t like the idea of giving Stratton any more time than he already had. ‘Let’s head down the track in the vehicles,’ Hobart said to the HRT commander. ‘Get closer to the mine, see how it feels, then you take it from there.’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ the commander said with a glance in Seaton’s direction before heading for the cab of the van.
Seaton shrugged his indifference and followed Hobart back to the car.
The van started its engine, turned off the road, creaked down the dip onto the track and slowly headed along it, followed by Hobart’s sedan.
Stratton watched them until they were out of sight beyond his stretch of the wood and made his way back, past his truck, to where he could see the gate which he had left open.
A couple of minutes later the large black van moved slowly across his front, closely followed by the sedan. Stratton moved his position to keep them in view when their brake lights suddenly cut through the darkness and both vehicles stopped. Stratton estimated they were just short of the final bend to the mine and a good forty yards beyond the gate.
The back of the van opened quietly and the HRT unit climbed down as the sedan’s doors opened and the four people inside stepped out. It was too dark for Stratton to make out any more than a crowd of silhouettes but they appeared to be concentrating their attention towards the mine and not to their rear.
Seaton remained by the front of the car watching the HRT group hold a parliament behind the van, after which the commander broke away and joined Hobart.
‘We’re gonna move down the track in file in four teams,’ the agent said to Hobart in a low voice. ‘When we sight the mine we’ll break off and take up positions around it. We’ll assess the situation from there, see what we’ve got, and when you give the word we’ll move in and take care of this.’
Hobart nodded, though he had a niggling doubt about something which he put down to the whole military thing.
As the HRT unit moved off around the van and strung themselves out along the track towards the mine Hobart joined Seaton. ‘How big a blast is ninety pounds of RDX?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. ‘I mean, if these guys are around the mine and it goes up, can they get hurt?’
Seaton shrugged. ‘Depends where the blast is. If it’s in the mine, they could be fine as long as nothing falls on them. If it’s on the surface, say, in the vehicle, I wouldn’t want to be within five hundred yards of it.’
That was not good, Hobart thought as he looked down the track where he could make out the black silhouettes heading slowly along it.
Stratton watched the line of men move down the track while the other small group from the sedan remained at the vehicles. He headed quietly back towards his pick-up and located the white cord on the ground. He picked it up, dragged it with some care to the truck and gently opened the door so as not to make any noise.
Seaton sighed internally, wondering how this was going to turn out. He walked around the car to look back the way they’d come, his thoughts on where Stratton was at that moment. Seaton expected him to be miles away but if he was at the mine he would know that these guys were coming: their approach was not exactly stealthy.
As he turned to head back to the front of the sedan and rejoin Hobart his eyes made out a thin grey line on the ground running between the vehicles. Curious as to what it could be he crouched to take a closer look.
Stratton wound the end of the cord a couple of times around the catch inside the pick-up’s door frame and looked back through the trees at the silhouettes on the track.
Seaton reached a hand out for the cord, noting that it ran beneath both vehicles. He raised it off the ground a couple of inches, felt the abrasive crystals, released it and put his fingers to his nose. He inhaled the odour that seemed familiar.
‘Hobart!’ Seaton said as he stood up and moved away from the cord, his stare following it first into the distance towards the mine, then back the other way along the track.
Hobart, Hendrickson and the driver looked round at him, bemused by his raised voice.
‘I think you’d better move away from the vehicles,’ Seaton said as he closed on Hobart who was practically standing on the cord. Seaton reached out a hand to grab the FBI man’s arm.
Stratton pulled open the door as far as it would go, gripped it with both hands and planted his feet to get a solid purchase. Explosives are measured by the speed at which they burn and RDX combusts at around 24,000 feet per second – the speed it would travel if it was stretched out in a line, as it was in this case.
Stratton gathered himself and then swung the door as hard as he could so that it slammed shut, while at the same time turning his back to the cord and ducking away. The blast ripped outwards from the point where the cord had been struck and the door burst back open.
The explosion came out of the wood and down the track like a thunderbolt, tearing beneath both vehicles, rupturing and igniting their fuel tanks at the instant when Seaton grabbed Hobart’s shoulder. It shot along the track, swatting the entire HRT unit aside like flies. Less than a second after Stratton slammed the door the mine exploded, rocking the very ground and sending a blast of rubble and dust from the mouth of the entrance shaft like grapeshot from a giant cannon.
Stratton climbed inside the vehicle, started the engine which was still warm and drove forward through the wood all the while holding the door shut since the latch was now broken. He passed out the other side of the wood and across the stretch of rugged open ground towards the road. He kept the speed down while avoiding any large dips or bumps, conscious of the sensitivity of his cargo. Then he mounted the road and sped along it towards Twin Oaks.
As he approached the bar he could see that the lights were on and a dozen or so vehicles were parked in a haphazard manner on the open ground outside.
He slowed as he turned off the road, pulled in tightly alongside a white pick-up slightly smaller than his and stopped. He looked in through the passenger window, saw the key in the ignition and killed his engine. He shuffled across the seat, climbed out of his passenger door, grabbing his gear, and climbed up onto the truck’s bed. The white pick-up was empty and as quickly as he could he transferred his load onto it.
A few minutes later Stratton was back on the road in the white pick-up and tearing along as fast as was safe. Caliente was the last bottleneck he had to pass through and from there he had half a dozen choices of roads to the highway and after that a hundred different routes to LA.
As he reached the end of the town he saw a white car parked on the side of the road up ahead and slowed. As he suspected, it was a police patrol car and the state trooper seated behind the steering wheel looked at Stratton as he drove past.
Stratton watched the patrol car in his rear-view mirror, waiting to see if its lights came on. Then it was out of sight.
Stratton knew better than to celebrate prematurely but he had the feeling that for the moment he had slipped the net. But now he knew for sure that the net was indeed there – and closing
. He had been lucky so far, there was no doubt about it, and if he was to continue the pursuit of his objective the chances were high that he would fail.
Seaton and Hobart, on the ground beside each other, shuffled away from the heat of the flames from the burning vehicles. Hendrickson’s coat was on fire and he rolled over and over, yelling ‘Holy shit! Holy shit!’ until the flames were out.
None of the HRT crew was seriously hurt, though one had broken an ankle. Another, who had been standing on the cord when it detonated, miraculously only lost the heel of his boot.
Hobart got to his feet as his mind came back into focus. Frustration and anger began to rise in him as he realised that they had walked right into a trap. ‘Hendrickson?’ he shouted. ‘Hendrickson!’ he repeated in irritation, looking for his assistant who was beating his smoking clothing and apparently ignoring him.
‘Hendrickson!’ he shouted again, moving towards him.
Hendrickson looked up, squinting at his boss.
‘Call the goddamned cops and tell them to put out their road-blocks! And where’s that damned helicopter?’
Hendrickson shook his head and rotated a finger alongside his ear. ‘I can’t hear a thing,’ he shouted. ‘Just ringing.’
It was only when Hobart saw Hendrickson’s lips moving and could hear hardly anything he was saying that he realised his ears were ringing, too.
31
Stratton spent the rest of the night in a motel on the outskirts of Los Angeles and early the next morning, after grabbing a bite at a local diner, he made his way into the bustling city. Morning traffic was heavy but by nine a.m. he was parked outside a construction-equipment hire company in Mar Vista, waiting for it to open. He was the first customer to enter the reception office after the man running the desk had drawn up the blinds and turned on the computer. Ten minutes later, on completion of the paperwork, Stratton was directed to an assistant across the yard who explained how to operate the mobile work platform – or cherry-picker, as it was affectionately known – that he had hired for the day. Stratton was happy to leave a credit-card imprint for the final bill because it would not show up on any police trace for at least twenty-four hours, by which time it would all be over. One way or another.
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