water. He had twenty good paces of sand to cross. He edged to the end of the pile of boxes until he could see the light from the fire. A couple of guards stood between it and the water.
As he put his head further around the box to look for the rest of the guards, he saw a figure walking directly towards him and jerked his head back, moving into the darkest hole he could find.
The guard came around the corner, his rifle over his shoulder and mumbling to himself. He removed the rifle, leaned it against a crate and unbuckled his trouser belt. The Somali was barely a metre from Stratton, but he had walked into the darkness from the fire and had lost his night vision.
He dropped his trousers and squatted. As he did so he looked down and he saw what was there. A boot. He followed it up to a trouser leg. Then to a torso, up to Stratton’s cold hard face looking down on him.
Before the man could react, Stratton swiftly gripped his shirt collar in both hands either side of the Somali’s neck and twisted his wrists so that his knuckles dug deep into the man’s throat. The effect was immediate and twofold. First, he closed the man’s windpipe so that he couldn’t make a sound. Second, he shut off the blood supply between the man’s heart and brain. In about five seconds the Somali’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, his hands hung limply by his side and his tongue hung out of his mouth.
Stratton lowered the dead man on to the sand and wondered what to do with him. If he left him where he was, he would be found by the next man who needed to relieve himself. Stratton dragged him away from the crates and up the beach for a distance before releasing him and making his way back.
The bodies were mounting. Hopper and he certainly needed to get out of there before the daylight exposed them.
Stratton decided not to take the Somali’s rifle. It would only get in the way and he needed stealth rather than firepower. He placed the weapon on top of one of the crates out of view and set his sights again on the largest vessel. Keeping close to the edge of the crates, he looked towards the fire again. The guards were huddled around it. Almost a dozen of them. He doubted they would miss their colleague. They would believe he had gone off for a kip long before they suspected anything bad had happened to him.
Once Stratton made it into the water, the next problem would be getting on board the ship.
An examination of the target presented him with two choices. The most obvious was the gangway. But although the bottom of it was in darkness, the top was exposed to the bright lights on the deck, the superstructure and the bridge wings. And he couldn’t rule out the possibility that someone would be sitting on deck watching the top of the gangway.
The other option he had was to climb one of the anchor chains. He had scaled them many times before in his career and knew the technique required. He could not see any rat cones attached. Those were a bitch to climb around. He looked at the aft anchor. That would be the easiest option because of the low freeboard. But if he went up that way, he’d have to walk the length of the main deck to get to front of the boat where he’d watched them take the crate. He decided to avoid that exposed walk past the superstructure and climb the longer forward anchor.
Stratton looked over at the guards around the fire. Nothing had changed. He left the cover of the crates and walked briskly across the soft sand. He ran the last few metres and dived into the waves that were collapsing on the shore. He kept beneath the surface for as long as he could and when he came up he looked back to the fire for any signs that he had been seen.
The guards still hadn’t moved and so he turned towards the front of the ship and swam. When he reached the huge metal links, he quickly pulled himself out of the water. He manoeuvred so that the chain angled beneath him and he climbed like a monkey on a branch using all four limbs and three points of contact at any one time. At first it was easy because the chain took much of his weight. But as the angle grew steeper, he had to climb the chain more like a ladder.
He took it one easy step at a time, keeping a watch above and on the shore, aware that from the beach he would be silhouetted against the night sky.
The last few metres were near vertical and required a greater effort as he eased himself up. The huge links passed through a large eye in the side of the ship that was big enough for him to climb through. He eased himself on to the deck and crouched in his wet clothes behind the anchor winch housing. No one could see him there and he took a moment to get his breath back and take stock.
The ship seemed fairly new, that or it was well cared for. The paint job was good and there appeared to be little rust. The superstructure was lit up like a hotel. It housed the accommodation, control room, galley and sick bay, with the bridge and radio shack on the top. The auxiliary generators that provided all of the
The deck was greasy beneath his hands and feet. That was usually the case around the chains and cables. He studied the superstructure. Anyone on board would most likely be in it. He saw a shadow move across a porthole beneath the bridge. No other sign of life. He scanned the decks, like the rest of the ship exposed by lighting.
Keeping low, he moved across the deck between the winch machinery looking for any sign of the crate. But he found nothing. The most obvious location to store anything that big at the front of the ship would be the bosun’s locker, a deep storage space that went from the main deck level all the way down to the bottom of the boat.
He looked at a large square hatch that was open. It had to be the locker. There was a light on inside. Which suggested that someone might be down there. The bosun’s locker wasn’t usually a place anyone hung around unless they were working in it.
He crept to the hatch and leaned over the opening to look down. Lights illuminated the locker all the way down, a good fifteen metres. The entire inside had been painted white. Metal stairs zigzagged part of the way down to ladders that continued to the bottom.
An oxyacetylene gas bottle stood upright just inside the hatch. He listened hard but he heard nothing. The hatch was the only way in or out. He took a quick look around and then he stepped into the hatch and down the handful of steps to the first landing and the gas bottle. A rope had been fixed to a strong point near the hatch and dangled all the way to the bottom.
The forward part of the bosun’s locker was the sharp-angled inside of the bows that cut through the water. The welded steel plates had been reinforced by a series of ribs and bracings. These were used as storage shelves and were stacked with ropes, chains and rat cones.
He stepped carefully down the steeply angled staircase to the next landing. From there it was a series of vertical ladders to the bottom. He went down the first two and paused on the bottom to look around. The whole area was cluttered with ropes, old paint buckets filled with shackles, nuts and bolts and odd bits of bracing, pulleys and large pieces of timber. It all appeared to be covered in grease and grime. He stepped on to the final ladder to the bottom and then he listened again. He climbed down and stepped on to the hull of the boat.
A portable electric lamp had been clipped to a brace and aimed at an angle. The hull below the waterline was reinforced by box sections of welded plates. The light was pointed at a particular section, which had been cut open using a torch. The white paint along the cut had bubbled or burned away. An acetylene bottle lay nearby, the piece of metal that had been cut away beside it.
Stratton walked over to look at the opening. The long wooden crate lay inside the space. They had most likely lowered it down on the end of the rope. There was a tin of white paint on the floor with a paintbrush and cloth on top.
He reached inside the hollow hull and searched for the clips that secured the lid of the crate. He found three along its length, unfastened them and gripped the edge. The lid was a tight fit but after a couple of tugs it gave way. Stratton pulled the lid fully open to expose the contents.
He saw a layer of tough, black sponge moulding that ran the length of the box. He peeled it back to reveal a dark-green, metal and plastic weapons system. He knew exactly what it was – a Chinese hand-held HN series ground-to-air missile. He had fired the original Soviet version, which the Chinese had later copied. It was an effective and lethal man-portable missile system designed to shoot down any size aircraft between eight hundred metres and four and a half kilometres above the ground.
As soon as he saw it, several things fell into place that he had a very bad feeling about. The Somalis, or more to the point the jihadists who had delivered the missile, were smuggling the weapons out of the country. They must have muscled in on the hijacking business to use the ships to distribute their ordnance and to send anti-aircraft missiles around the world. When the ship was released by the pirates, it would eventually arrive in a port. All the terrorists had to do was wait until the ship had cleared the usual formalities and inspections and then get on board
