Pirate - Duncan Falconer [131]
A week later a service was held for Hopper, and Stratton met his wife Helen and their two children. Downs urged Stratton not to mention his guilt about leaving Hopper in the prison while he went alone to the ship, not that Stratton had any intention of doing so. Downs felt that the subject belonged to the finer debate of strategy and should be left to those who dealt in that trade. Helen hugged Stratton and thanked him for being her husband’s friend. Stratton said he was sorry but didn’t explain what he really meant by that. And she didn’t read anything else into it.
Epilogue
Dinaal Yusef and the six members of his team drove in a van along a deserted country lane, its full-beam headlights cutting into the night. The Colombian driver turned the van off the stone-crushed road into a narrower lane and immediately came to a halt beneath a stand of mature trees. Two men jumped out and ran off the road into the bushes as lookouts.
The headlights of the van went out and the Colombian switched off the engine. A heavy silence descended.
Dinaal climbed out of the front passenger seat on to the hard ground and looked in every direction across flat, agricultural country. He saw the handful of small farmhouses spread about in the distance. Some of them had lights on inside.
He looked at the night sky. It had been raining but the clouds had moved on and the stars now shone brightly.
He went to the back of the van and opened the doors. The two Saudis and the Indonesian climbed out carrying a long green wooden box between them. It had Chinese characters stamped down its sides.
Dinaal led the way across the wider track to a fence. One of the Saudis hurried ahead and climbed over to receive an end of the box. The team made its way through the stile and carried on down the side of a freshly ploughed, gently sloping field to the bottom, eighty metres or so from the track. They could see a large patch of marshy water beyond the scrub that grew along the bottom of the field.
Dinaal’s men placed the box on the soft, damp soil and opened it. They could all see the Chinese HN ground-to-air missile within.
Dinaal turned to look skywards, past a vast array of bright lights aimed upwards on the ends of long poles. Beyond them, the other side of a tall mesh fence, he could see the beginning of a long, broad runway. Lights spaced out on either side of it continued into the distance for ever, it seemed.
A bright haze on the far side of the great expanse of flat ground surrounded a collection of buildings, the offices, arrival and departure terminals of Bogota International Airport.
Dinaal turned his back to the runway and looked skywards again. In the distance, among the millions of stars, he saw another white light brighter than the others. It was coming on fast.
‘Quickly,’ he said.
His men had become a slick, well-trained crew who had carried out this procedure twice without live ammunition since the first rehearsal two months before. But this time it would be very different. This time it would be for real. Each of the men could feel a palpable tension among the group.
The Saudi weapon preparer lifted the rocket from the box. He handed it to the Indonesian. The Indonesian hoisted it on to his shoulder and positioned it comfortably, as he had done a dozen or so times back in their basement HQ since the weapon had arrived a few days before. His number two gripped him around the body to steady him and he aimed the pointed nose of the missile into the air in the direction of the runway.
Dinaal watched the progress of the aircraft, his back to his men. The plane had to be less than a minute