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.’ The communications were encrypted and scrambled should anyone else try to listen in.
‘Roger,’ Stratton said as he watched the two pairs of headlights bump along a gravel road. The vehicles drove into the village, lights occasionally flashing skywards as they bumped over the heavily rutted ground. They came to a halt outside the house Stratton had been watching.
He switched back to the thermal imager and focused on the lead vehicle. He could see the bright white of the car’s brake discs and exhausts. He watched as the Suburban’s rear doors opened. A couple of men climbed out. The thermal imagers graded them down the scale from the superheated components of the car. The bodies were lighter than the buildings behind them and the ground under their feet. Stratton could see the men’s hands and their heads, brighter than their clothing. Both men were carrying rifles, the cool metal almost black in their white hands, but just as visible because of the contrast.
One of the men went to the front door of the house. As he approached, it opened and two men came outside. There appeared to be an exchange of words. One of the men from the house walked to the Suburban and looked to have a conversation with someone in the back.
‘Do you have eyes on?’ the voice asked over Stratton’s earpiece.
‘Yes, though I can’t identify anyone. But it’s the right time, the right place and they look pretty cautious,’ Stratton replied. ‘I’d say it’s safe to assume our man’s there.’
‘Enough to do the snatch?’
‘Why not? It’s like fishing. If we don’t like what we catch, we can always throw it back.’
‘Is that what you normally do?’
‘If there was a normal way of doing things like this, everyone would be doing it.’
Stratton picked up a large reflector drum lens on a tripod with a device attached to the optic and looked through it. Because the image was highly magnified, it took him a few seconds to find the vehicles. He saw a man climb out of the back of the lead Suburban and talk with the one from the house. Stratton pushed a button on the device, which took several still recordings of the man. They were all of his head but more of the back than the front or sides.
The man walked towards the house. Just before going in he turned to the vehicles as if someone had called to him. Stratton quickly recorded several images of the man before he turned and entered the house.
Stratton viewed the images he’d taken and selected several of the man’s face. He downloaded the images on to the satellite phone attached to the lens. He scrolled through the address book, selected a number and hit send. A few seconds later a window confirmed that the file had been sent.
He took up the thermal imager again, carried on scanning the house and the two vehicles. The two armed men stood off a couple of metres from the SUVs. The engines of the Suburbans were still running, their exhausts bright white on the imager.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Stratton said, ‘I just sent London some images of a possible. They should be able to confirm.’
Less than a minute later the satphone gave off a chirp and he looked at the screen message: Image 3. Target confirmed.
Stratton disconnected the drum lens and put it in a backpack. ‘Hopper?’
‘Send,’ said the voice.
‘London has replied. If we catch this fish, we can keep it. I’ll see you at the RV in two.’
‘Roger that,’ Hopper replied.
Stratton got to his feet, tied up the pack and pulled it on to his strong shoulders. He checked the ground around him, pocketed the wrapper from an energy bar he had eaten and searched for anything else. He made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scan of his surroundings using the imager. It picked up nothing save a few goats a couple of kilometres away. He wondered what the bloody things ate. It didn’t seem possible that anything could grow in this barren land.
He headed down the gravelly incline into a gully that took him out of sight of the village. Stratton dug a cellphone from his pocket and hit a memory dial.
‘Prabhu? Stratton. We’re in business. We’re towards you now, OK?’
Then he pocketed the phone and clambered on down a steep channel to a stony track barely visible in the low light. He paused to look around and listen. The sound of stones shingling downhill came from the slope opposite him. He continued walking and watched the shadowy outline of a man grow clearer as it made its way down the rise towards him.
The man joined him on the track and they walked alongside each other. The man was a similar age and build to Stratton, his lighter hair cut short. ‘That was a pleasant few hours,’ Hopper said. ‘I would like to have seen the sunset though. Could you see it from where you were?’
‘Not quite.’
‘If the demand for gravel ever equals oil, Yemen will make a bloody fortune,’ said Hopper. ’Never seen a country with so much dry rubble. The entire place looks like it’s been bulldozed. A few trees would help. I don’t know how the bloody goats manage. You could scratch around here all day and not find anything to eat. And water? The riverbeds must have water in them no more than a couple of days a year.’
Stratton listened to his partner talk. Hopper was a passionate man at heart to be sure. He felt sympathetic to people whose lifestyle he judged to be of a lower quality than his own. And he assumed that if they could, they would like to live the way he did. It made Stratton feel cold and unconcerned by comparison and Stratton didn’t regard himself as particularly cold. He didn’t resent Hopper for it though. Nor did he think the man was soft. But the way Hopper talked, with his emphasis on human kindness, it was a tad over the top, as well as being a potential weakness in their business. Yet that was Hopper. Stratton had known him on and off for ten years or so. He had worked with him hardly at all and knew him more socially than anything else back in Poole.
‘You happy with this next phase?’ Stratton asked.
‘Yep. No probs. You talked to Prabhu?’
‘He’s on his way to the RV. Have you done a snatch like this before?’
‘A few. One in Iraq. A handful in Afghanistan.’
‘This should be easier. I don’t expect the target to be as twitchy here. This is generally a quiet neighbourhood.’
‘You operated in Yemen before?’
‘Did a small task in Aden a couple years ago,’ said Stratton. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
Hopper checked his watch. ‘Helen’ll be putting the boys to bed about now,’ he said. ‘We usually let ’em have a late night Saturdays.’
Stratton had met Hopper’s wife a few times. At the occasional family functions the service ran. She was nowhere near as chatty as her husband, certainly not with Stratton at least. But that standoff attitude was not unusual. He had a good idea what most of the wives thought about him. He was single for one. And he never brought a girl to the camp gigs, which suggested he did not have a steady girlfriend. There was ample evidence to prove that he had normal tastes when it came to females. It was just that nobody he hooked up with appeared to last very long. Add that to his reputation as a specialised operative, exaggerated or otherwise, and most of the wives, other than those of his closest friends, put up a barrier when he was around.