He landed hard on his feet, which he kept together as if for a parachute landing, spun on to his back and shoulders and rolled several times in the dirt before coming to a dead stop against the wall of the neighbouring house.
The Saudi didn’t fair quite as well. Hopper jumped out holding on to him while Prabhu shoved him with all his strength. More by luck than design, Sabarak ended up directly under Hopper. Every bit of air was forced from the Saudi’s lungs as he hit the ground with the combined weight of Hopper and himself. When he finally came to rest, he remained where he was, unable to move. And had it been up to him, he would have stayed there. But Stratton and Hopper grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away from the track behind the house as the two 4×4s bounced past through the dirt.
Stratton watched the tail lights disappear.
‘What’s the plan from here?’ Hopper asked.
‘I’m working on it,’ Stratton said, scrutinising Sabarak. The guy was sitting up holding his chest and looking like he might go unconscious again.
‘On your feet,’ Stratton said. ‘I’ll make this simple for you. I only have to get you back alive. No one said anything about unbroken. If you make life difficult for us, Hopper here will break your legs. He likes doing things like that.’
Hopper gave Stratton a glance that appeared to question the claim. When Sabarak looked at him, he adopted an expression that wholeheartedly supported the threat.
‘Get up,’ said Stratton.
Sabarak got unsteadily to his feet.
‘Stay right behind me,’ Stratton ordered.
The three of them walked quietly between the houses. Hardly any had lights on but that didn’t mean they weren’t occupied. It was hard to tell. The locals were very poor. They used their minimal resources sparingly. That meant going to bed and getting up with the sun to avoid using all their fuel on lighting.
The men arrived at a high wall, part of the harbour’s perimeter, that kept them from the water. They went left and followed it to a large metal gate. The harbour entrance. It wasn’t locked and they made their way on to a broad concrete jetty. A man-made boulder mole went out to sea at a right angle to the jetty and after a couple of hundred metres turned a sharp corner and ran on a few more metres, where it ended to face the end of the opposite mole a hundred or so metres away. This was the sea entrance.
They paused to survey the scene. The walkway was dimly illuminated by a spread of lamps. Dozens of small craft were moored to the inside perimeter or to each other. Mostly fishing boats of varying sizes, from little row boats to thirty-foot sailing boats. There were a handful of powered metal tugs, all of which could have done with a lick of paint. A building set back from the jetty and surrounded by the perimeter wall advertised itself as a fishery in English as well as the local dialect. They could see no sign of life other than a couple of scavenging dogs.
‘Nice evening for a boat ride,’ Stratton said.
Hopper noted the gloomy skies.
‘All we do is follow the coastline to Salalah,’ Stratton said. ‘What can go wrong?’
Hopper rolled his eyes at the effort to tempt fate. ‘Would be nice if we could find something with a bit of speed.’
‘And comfort.’
Hopper moved to the edge of the jetty to look down on the boats. ‘What about that one?’ he said, pointing at a long skiff with twin outboards.
Stratton felt a twinge of guilt about taking any one of them. ‘These people struggle enough to make a living without us coming along and nicking their livelihood,’ he said.
‘Right. What are those over there, by the entrance?’ said Hopper. He jutted his chin towards the mole entrance and a couple of low-profile, sleek black semi-rigid inflatables.
Stratton’s interest in them was immediate. They didn’t look like fishing boats, more like some kind of security or military craft. And they looked fast. Hopper kept a hold of the Saudi and the three stepped along the concrete path at the base of the mole. They came to a building at the end, in the corner of the mole. The sign above the door said it was AUSTIN OIL TERMINAL SECURITY. The boats had twin 250 outboards bolted to the transoms.
‘We don’t feel guilty about borrowing one of these, do we?’ Hopper asked.
‘We don’t. Check out the fuel. We need around forty litres. I’ll look into starting this one up.’
‘Give me a hand, Sabarak,’ Hopper said, pulling the Saudi with him.
Stratton climbed down into the first boat and looked at the controls and battery housing. It appeared to be in good order.
By the time Hopper and Sabarak returned, both straining to carry a couple of large petrol containers each, Stratton had prepared the wires behind the ignition lock on the coxswain’s consul. ‘We’ll need water,’ he said to Hopper. ‘Hand those down to me,’ he said to the Saudi, who obeyed tiredly.
Beams of light suddenly flashed across the top of the mole. A second later they could hear the low rumble of vehicle engines and tyres on gravel.
‘I suspect our Chinese friends have discovered the ruse,’ said Stratton. ‘Hurry up, Hopper.’
Stratton connected two wires then struck them with a third and they sparked and the starter motor turned over. They were spared the drama of having to wait for the engines to gun to life. The sound was loud and immediate and the two-stroke engines gave off a lot of smoke. Stratton released the stern line.
Hopper pushed Sabarak down into the semi-inflatable and jumped down himself, carrying a couple of bottles of water. ‘I hope the tap water’s potable,’ he said as he untied the bow line.
Stratton straddled the jockey seat and reversed the long and powerful craft away from the jetty. As he did so, a 4×4 slewed up to the harbour gates, followed by another, their headlights shining through the barred entrance. A figure got out of the first vehicle and pulled the gates open. The two 4×4s swept into the harbour and came to a squealing stop. Doors opened. Men got out and started running along the walkway.
Stratton played the throttles. The powerful engines roared and Hopper and the Saudi held on as the nose of the boat came tightly around towards the harbour entrance. The Chinamen had guns in their hands. Stratton heard the loud cracks of the weapons over the revving engines. As he lined up the nose of the boat with the mouth of the harbour he gave the engines full throttle. The boat lurched up on to its plane, the nose dropped and it tore out of the relatively smooth waters of the harbour and went partially airborne as it hit the choppy waters of the Gulf of Aden proper. The gunmen, who had run out of bullets, reloaded but by the time they came up on aim they had nothing more to shoot at.
The sea was heavy and Stratton eased the power back enough to get the boat into its rhythm, rolling over the waves.
‘They might try and follow us,’ Hopper shouted, looking back at the harbour entrance.
‘Good luck to them in this. By the time we get into that lot, they’ll need more than radar to find us.’
Hopper looked ahead and saw where they were heading: due south, straight out to sea, right into a massive bank of low, thick cloud. All sign of the land behind them disappeared as they hit the dark shroud that reached down from the skies to the sea. They couldn’t see a single light, not even a shadow.
Using the compass on his watch, Stratton brought the tip of the boat around to the north-east, and set the speed at what he estimated was a steady twenty knots. With three hundred miles to go that would take around fifteen hours, if there was no tide of course. In the windless haze he had little chance of working out its direction or speed. Only daylight and the lifting haze would reveal that.
Stratton pulled his jacket together against the chilly air. Hopper sat in the bows looking unperturbed. He was a tough bird. But Sabarak was already feeling the damp cold through his thin jacket. He sat between them. He had lost the shemagh he had been wearing and his short, black curly hair framed a thin face, light-brown skin, dark eyes and thick eyebrows that came together above a large, narrow nose. His mouth was accentuated by a thin, manicured line of a beard that gave him a permanent grimace. It was either that or he hated the two Englishmen so much he couldn’t hide it from his face.