Pirate - Duncan Falconer [3]
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