under some trees, which provided complete cover from the moonlight. The Colombian turned off the lights and the engine.
The two Pakistani men climbed out of the back of the van and skipped into the bushes. They looked at the few houses in sight, their lights on inside. Otherwise they couldn’t see any sign of life.
Dinaal hardly took his eyes off his watch. The others waited quietly and patiently. ‘Let’s go,’ he said finally.
The double doors at the back opened and the men climbed out. Two of them were carrying a long wooden box. Dinaal and the Colombian driver joined them.
‘You have three minutes to set up,’ Dinaal said.
One of the Saudis and the Indonesian climbed over a low, wooden fence and took the box that was handed to them. Then they all hurried along the edge of a ploughed field. The ground began to slope away a little as they reached the end of the field, where they stopped. Beyond them they could see a wide trough of marshy water that reflected the moonlight.
‘One minute,’ said Dinaal.
They placed the box on the ground and opened it. Inside was the rifle, a standard 5.56mm ball Galil IMI. The Saudi who had been elected weapon preparer lifted the weapon out of the box. He was handed a magazine and he pushed it into its housing, cocked the breach that loaded the chamber and handed the weapon to the Indonesian, who was standing ready and waiting to receive it. He was short and stocky, low centre of gravity. He took it, placed the stock into his shoulder and looked directly at Dinaal.
‘That way,’ Yusef said, holding his arm out. The Indonesian adjusted his position so that he was aiming the rifle into the sky in the direction indicated.
‘Hold him,’ Dinaal hissed at the Saudi.
The man took a tight hold around the Indonesian’s waist.
‘Safety catch,’ Dinaal said.
The Indonesian removed the safety catch.
Dinaal searched the skies behind them, in the opposite direction to the aim of the rifleman.
After about fifteen seconds they could all hear the distant sound of an approaching aircraft.
The rifle pair didn’t move, they just remained focused skywards, their backs to the oncoming aircraft, while Dinaal and the others stared into the black star-covered sky.
‘There,’ said the Colombian, finding a couple of tiny, piercing lights moving together through the thousands of stars. A large, commercial passenger plane soon took shape, increasing in size as it descended directly towards them, its headlights searching ahead.
Dinaal glanced at his gun team, who remained in position. ‘Get ready,’ he said.
The Indonesian regripped the weapon that he held tightly into his shoulder. His number two squeezed him slightly harder, arms clamped around the man.
The scream of the jet engines grew rapidly louder as the craft began to fill the sky. Dinaal could see the cockpit windows now. He felt a fleeting satisfaction with his timing and positioning perfectly beneath the large craft’s flight path. As it roared overhead the Indonesian aimed at its underbelly, which was not difficult – it practically filled his vision.
‘Now!’ cried Dinaal above the deafening shriek of the turbines.
The Indonesian fired a single shot. The report, like Dinaal’s shouted command, was consumed by the intense high-pitched whine of the big bird’s huge engines.
The Indonesian lowered the barrel but his partner still held him and they all stared at the tail of the thundering airliner as it continued to descend towards the bright parallel lines of airfield approach lights in the field before the runway.
‘Quickly!’ Dinaal shouted.
The Indonesian shoved his partner away and placed the gun back inside the wooden box. They picked it up and hurried along the field to the fence, which they scurried over. The two lookouts held the doors of the van open for them. The team stepped up and inside and pulled the doors closed. Dinaal joined the driver in the front and the engine burst to life. The Colombian reversed the vehicle out of the narrow track on to the stone lane, turned on the lights and drove them back the way they had come.
A line of suitcases of various shapes and colours oozed from beneath a curtain of twisted black rubber strips. They lay on a well-worn conveyor track that looped through the drab and humid baggage hall of Bogota International Airport. A porter plucked one of them from the line, placed it on a rickety trolley and followed a tall, casually dressed man to the customs desk. The man showed the official his diplomatic passport and was promptly ushered through to the arrivals hall.
On the street outside, the Englishman was led to a smart bulletproof limousine. He climbed inside, his suitcase was placed in the trunk and the vehicle drove off.
Forty-five minutes later it arrived at the entrance to the British Embassy, where it passed through several layers of robust security to gain entry. A few minutes after that the man wheeled his suitcase into a large second- floor office in the three-thousand-square-metre building. The room was well appointed, had everything such an office should have, including a big ornate lump of a desk. An older man in a dark suit sat behind it.
‘Ah. He has arrived,’ the man behind the desk said, grinning and getting to his feet. ‘Good flight?’
‘Bearable,’ the Englishman said, letting go of his suitcase and placing a laptop bag on a chair. ‘You’ve caught a bit of sun since I left.’
‘A round of golf with the American Ambassador.’
‘Did you win?’
‘Tried hard not to but his putting was frightful. Whisky?’
‘Yes, but this one’s on me. And I have a treat for you.’
The tall Englishman placed his suitcase on a chair and opened it. He took out a couple of shirts and looked at them. They were wet in his hands. He put them down and picked up the wooden box nested in the centre of the case. The contents of the box tinkled, made the sound of broken glass. The man turned it in his hands and an amber-coloured liquid dribbled from a hole in the side of the box.
‘Oh dear,’ the old embassy man said as he approached. ‘What a waste.’
With his index finger, the Englishman probed the two neat holes on either side of the wooden box. It led him to investigate the lid of the suitcase. It had a neat hole in the centre. He lifted the case to discover a corresponding hole the other side. ‘It’s a bloody bullet hole,’ he muttered.
‘So it is,’ the other man said, looking quizzically at his colleague.
1
Stratton sat in complete darkness on a grey rocky slope in a treeless, moonscape wilderness. He was wearing an insulated jacket and hard-wearing trousers, heavy boots and a thick goat-hair scarf wrapped around his neck to keep out the chilly night air. He looked like he had been camping in the outback for days without a clean- up.
He was in a comfortable position, his back against a rock, knees bent up in front of him, elbows resting on them, supporting a thermal imager in his hands. He was looking through the electronic optical device at a house half a mile away. It was one dwelling among a cramped collection of them, practically every one small, single-storey and built of mud bricks or concrete blocks. He slowly scanned the village, pausing each time the imager picked up a human form.
A mile beyond the village the land abruptly ended in a dead-straight horizontal line across his entire panorama, beyond it a vast black ocean and a lighter cloudy sky.
Stratton lowered the optic, letting it hang from a strap around his neck. He picked up a large pair of binoculars and took another view of the area. There was enough light coming from some of the houses for the glasses to be effective. Headlights suddenly appeared beyond the village, coming from the direction of the highway that followed the coastline. He shifted the binoculars on to them.
‘Vehicles approaching from the south-east,’ a voice said over Stratton’s earpiece. ‘Looks like two Suburbans.’
