Stratton slowly lowered one hand to kill the engine, then the other to grip the handlebars so that he could climb off the bike. He dropped the stand with his foot and as soon as the bike was balanced upright he raised his hands again.
‘What you got in the bag?’ the soldier asked.
Stratton wasn’t concerned so much about the explosives he was carrying. They were most uncommon and would only be recognisable to a special-forces operative. Even an army explosives engineer would have to study them carefully before becoming suspicious. Stratton remained quiet.
‘Search the motherfucker,’ the soldier shouted to his buddy who walked briskly over, slung his weapon over his shoulder and reached out to pat Stratton down.
‘I’m a British soldier,’ Stratton said, quietly but firmly.
‘What?’ the soldier said, continuing with his task, his hands patting Stratton’s shoulders and down the front of his chest.
‘I’m a Brit,’ Stratton repeated quietly. ‘A British soldier.’
The soldier’s hand touched something solid under Stratton’s left arm and stopped dead.
‘What he say?’ asked the soldier doing the covering.
‘Says he’s a Brit,’ the searcher said, his hand still on the metal object that he was certain was a pistol.
‘That is a gun you can feel,’ Stratton said, looking the searcher in the eye in case the man was unsure.
The soldier was going through his own possible scenarios that included Stratton being a fanatic who could speak English and waiting for his chance to strike. He had just a couple more weeks left out of a year-long tour of duty and wasn’t about to end up in a body-bag after all that time. If that meant blowing away even a remote suspect, so be it. All he had to do was roll away while yelling ‘Bad guy!’ and his partner would empty his magazine into Stratton.
‘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.’