‘I have ID in my jacket,’ Stratton said.
The soldier looked into Stratton’s pale eyes and knew they were not those of an Arab. ‘Let’s see it,’ he said. ‘Nice and easy.’
Stratton slowly reached inside his jacket, into the breast pocket of his shirt, and pulled out the plastic ID card that bore a hologram
image of the Union Jack across its front, a gold information chip in a corner, and his picture. The soldier inspected the card, then looked at Stratton, only able to see his eyes. As if Stratton had read his mind, he slowly took hold of the
shamagh
where it covered his nose and pulled it down to reveal most of his face.
‘You SF?’ the soldier asked.
‘Yes.’
The soldier took a moment to compare the ID thoroughly with Stratton’s face, then his tension visibly lowered. ‘Wait here,’ he said, before stepping back and walking away to leave his buddy to watch Stratton.
He was conscious of the minutes ticking away but there was no point in pushing these guys. They would let him get on his way in their own time once they were satisfied that he was kosher and nothing he could say would change that. Pushing them would only make it worse.
Stratton turned his head slowly and looked into the distance to where he expected the train to come from eventually. There was no sign of it.
The traffic slowly moved through the checkpoint, each car searched for weapons and other devices. A military interpreter, an Iraqi dressed the same as the soldiers and wearing body armour but not carrying a weapon, questioned the occupants. Some vehicles were allowed to proceed while others were directed off the road to an area where they were searched more thoroughly by soldiers using dogs.
Stratton watched the soldier with his ID show it to his commanding officer who inspected it, glanced over at Stratton, said something to the soldier, then handed it back.
The soldier returned and gave the ID back to Stratton. ‘You’re outta here,’ he said dryly, unimpressed.
‘Thanks,’ Stratton said as he pocketed the card and climbed onto his bike.
‘So, what are you, Lawrence a’ fucken’ ’Rabia?’ the soldier asked.
Stratton started up the bike. ‘You take care of yourselves,’ he said, meaning it.
‘You too, Lawrence,’ the soldier said in his dry country accent, a smirk on his face.
Stratton cruised through the checkpoint. When he was clear of it he opened up the throttle and sped away.
Half an hour later he slowed to consult his GPS. He checked the lie of the land ahead, pulled off the road and steered along a track that led past a dilapidated village – a collection of mud huts, several battered vehicles, starved-looking dogs, ducks and goats, with raggedly dressed children playing amongst it all.
The uneven rock-solid ground that would be impassable mud for a bike in a couple of months’ time when the rains arrived prevented a speedy passage. He had little choice but to bump slowly along, avoiding the deeper ruts as best he could.
A mile further on, as the track became smoother, Stratton stopped to check his GPS once again, comparing its information to the desert ahead that was flat as a billiard table. Across his front as far as the eye could see in either direction were electricity pylons, all bent over as if some great storm had tried to blow them down. The clue that the damage was man-made was provided by the missing cables and terminals, which had been stripped clean by criminals to be sold as scrap metal. Behind him he could just about make out the clump of trees that surrounded the village he had passed through while ahead the orange-yellow earth with its sporadic bumps and clusters of brittle vegetation ran on for ever.
Following the GPS he left the track and drove out over the hard-packed ground. After a mile he stopped again but this time he turned off the engine. The sudden silence was like a loud shout.
Stratton climbed off the bike, laid it down on its side with
some care, removed his bag from around his neck and walked on into the desert towards several sandy mounds. It was not until he was a few metres from one that he spotted the tell-tale signs of a milit ary hide: a whip antenna and a patch of camouflage net covering one side of the mound.
Stratton climbed under the back of the net and joined Jack who was looking out at the desert through a pair of high-powered binoculars.
‘Watch out for the memorabilia,’ Jack said, indic ating an anti-personnel mine a few feet away.
Stratton glanced at the small Russian-made Pog that resembled a cast-iron corn on the cob half buried on the edge of the hide.
‘The place is festering with mines,’ Jack added. ‘That one’s probably from the Iraq–Iran war. Everything go okay?’
‘Pretty much,’ Stratton said as he put down his bag, grabbed a bottle of water from a six-litre pack and drained most of it in one go. ‘One locomotive,’ he said, taking a breath, ‘three passenger carriages, and a dozen or so trucks … Forouf is in the centre carriage.’
‘Complicated?’
‘Interesting,’ Stratton decided as he finished off the bottle. Then he opened what appeared to be a small laptop inside a protective plastic jacket. He checked the power leads, plugged in the whip antenna that protruded through the cam net and turned the computer on.
‘The junction is 500 metres ahead,’ Jack informed him. ‘I’ve rigged the charge and programmed it in as device zero one zero.’
Stratton flicked through several data screens on the laptop, stopped at a page labelled ‘device queue’ and studied it.
Jack picked up a radio handset. ‘Alpha one, this is Mike four zero, the deck is loaded.’
A moment later the radio speaker crackled. ‘Alpha one, roger
that. We have a visual that gives you an ETA in approximately three minutes.’
‘Roger that,’ Jack replied.
‘How did you rig the track change in the end?’ Stratton asked.
‘Well, I played with the two choices we discussed. I first went for the lever-throw option but then it started to look too complicated and so I ended up going for the push charge to shove the exchange rod directly across.’
‘Good choice.’
‘You sure?’
‘I would’ve gone for that.’
Jack nodded, privately pleased. ‘How about the carriages? How’d you rig ’em?’
‘Some interesting combinations,’ Stratton mused as he typed commands into the data queue. ‘Gave myself a few options.’
Jack glanced at him, then back to the open desert. ‘I’m looking forward to this.’
Stratton remembered something. He reached into his pocket, took out the small carving and placed it on a stone beside Jack. ‘Here,’ he said.
Jack looked at Stratton, then at the carving. ‘What’s that?’
‘What does it look like?’
Jack stared at it. ‘A camel with a harelip.’
‘It’s a present for Josh … he still collects animals, doesn’t he?’
‘He doesn’t play with them as much since you started giving him all that military crap,’ Jack said as he picked up the camel and inspected it. ‘I hope you didn’t pay for this.’
‘It’s a present from you.’
‘Oh, I see. Dad comes home with the penny camel and what do you have for him? No, let me guess. A glistening scimitar you wrested from Saddam himself just before you single-handedly destroyed all his bodyguards and brought him in.’
‘No more military crap, I promise … Since we’re not going
to have a chance to go ashore and do some shopping other than at the PX on the airbase, which only sells military crap, I didn’t want you going home empty-handed.’
‘That’s nice of you,’ Jack said with unguarded sincerity.
‘He’ll love it.’
‘Yeah. He probably will,’ Jack agreed, placing it in his pocket and going back to his binoculars. ‘Thanks.’
Stratton highlighted a list of eight device codes on his data queue with marginally different signal frequencies beside each.
‘Here she comes,’ Jack said, picking up the handset. ‘Alpha one, Mike four zero has the obvious visual,’ he said into the radio.
Stratton looked through his own binoculars and found the train beneath a black trail of smoke issuing from its nose. ‘That’s it,’ he said as he went back to his laptop. ‘Give me a nod at a thousand metres?’
‘Roger that,’ Jack said as he raised the handset to his mouth again. ‘Mike four zero, we’re standby, standby.’
‘Roger, you’re standby,’ the voice repeated.
‘Give me a countdown,’ Stratton said as his fingers played the laptop with surprising agility as he went through a systems check.
‘Will do,’ Jack said, studying the train.
Stratton moved the cursor down the device queue, carrying out a receiver continuity test. When he reached the last code a red marker flashed a warning. He hit the test key again with the same result. ‘Zero one zero … Jack? I’m showing no continuity on your charge.’
‘What?’ Jack exclaimed, horrified, and moved to where he could see the screen.
Stratton ran another test. ‘That’s a negative,’ he said as he grabbed his bag and started to head out through the back of the hide.
‘No,’ Jack said, taking Stratton’s arm. ‘I laid it, I’ll fix it. You need to stay and play the board in case I can’t get back in time.’
Stratton knew that it was the wisest choice and didn’t argue.
‘What a wanker,’ Jack mumbled as he picked up his own demo -litions bag and ducked under the cam net.
‘Don’t rush it,’ Stratton called out. ‘You have time.’
‘I’m still a wanker, though,’ Jack called back as he broke into a trot to the bike, raised it onto its wheels, straddled the seat and after the second crank, gunned the engine to life. He quickly snapped it into gear and shot away across the hard ground, kicking up a thin trail of dust behind him.
Stratton looked through his binoculars to gauge the progress of the train, then moved them to check Jack’s progress. It was a risky move. Jack had to get to the charge, fix it, and get out of there before the train arrived. The engine driver would probably see the bike cross his front and his reaction would depend on how suspicious he was. Jack was wearing desert camouflage fatigues but the dust would make it difficult for anyone on the train to be sure of that until they were practically upon him. Stratton was confident that Jack would succeed but as he watched his friend and the train slowly converge he felt a twinge of fear for him.
Stratton and Jack had first met while on the same SBS selection course as young Marines many years ago. They exchanged hardly a word during the first three months of the course that began with a hundred and thirty-seven men. They only began to get to know each other during the last few weeks when the numbers were down to just twelve.
Their friendship was cemented during the final week-long exercise in Scotland when they partnered a two-man Klepper canoe along with one other pair to carry out a demolition raid against a power plant at the head of a loch. The underside skin of their canoe had been damaged during the final leg of their three-night portage across country to the foot of the loch from where they would paddle to the target. After patching it up as best they could
by using a couple of oyster clamps they elected to press on, hoping that they could complete the twenty- kilometre paddle before the craft, an extremely durable wood and canvas construction, became unseaworthy. In truth, they feared the clamps would not hold for long and they put their fates in the hands of the gods simply because it would have been unthinkable not to make an attempt. The selection course was less about achieving the objective and more about tenacity and initiative in the face of extreme odds and exhaustion.
The gods, however, did indeed smile down on Jack and Stratton, for a while at least. They succeeded in planting their explosives on the target but as they made their way across the loch to the landing point where they were supposed to meet up with the other canoe, one of the oyster clamps dramatically failed and water gushed in. With more than a thousand metres to the rendezvous they quickly changed direction and paddled as fast as they could to the nearest shore, which was still two hundred metres away. But within seconds the canoe was completely submerged and although it had built-in flotation tubes, their equipment, which included rifles as well as rations for several more days, was too heavy and they abandoned it as it sank. The water was near-freezing but they were forced to ditch their jackets, boots and trousers in order to stay afloat and not follow their canoe to the bottom which was a good hundred metres below them at that point.
As they briskly swam side by side through the calm black water that had a frozen mist hovering just above it Jack and Stratton were keenly aware of the serious ness of the problem. They were in a severe survival situation that would not necessarily be solved when they reached the shore – if they
could
reach it, that was. They tried to distract each other from the biting cold with inane chatter as they breast-stroked towards the black line below the silhouette of trees that indicated the shore. They discussed the possibility of drowning and how probably no one would know
their fates for several days since the procedure, if they failed to meet up with the other members of the team, was to make the next rendezvous some twenty miles east across country.
The exercise was run as realistically as possible and if they could not make that location they were expected to head for the final emergency escape rendezvous another twenty miles beyond that. Only then, if they did not show up, would the alarm be raised and a search party sent out to trace their route from their last known position. It could be several days on top of that before it was assumed that they had gone down in the loch and God only knew how long before a dive search was organised. In short, if they didn’t make the shore and find an immediate way of getting warm again they were screwed. To add to their problems the area was deserted for miles in every direction apart from the power station. But to seek aid there would mean, as far as the exercise was concerned, giving themselves up.