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
‘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 was.
‘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
