Simpson ended the call and for a couple of minutes sat in thought, running over the sequence of actions in his head, mentally checking to see if there was anything he’d forgotten.
Then he dialled Adamson’s mobile.
‘It’s Simpson,’ he said. ‘Richter will be appearing at the hotel in about twenty minutes, so get yourselves into position now. Orders as stated, objective unchanged.’
‘Copied. We’ll be mobile in two, and in position in ten.’
In the Renault Laguna parked beside the road to the north of the town, Adamson started the engine and shot a glance at Dekker.
The two men were dressed very differently, for Adamson looked like a businessman, in an outfit of slacks, shirt and tie, and a lightweight jacket concealing his pistol and shoulder holster, whereas Dekker wore a pair of thorn-proof olive-green trousers and a camouflage-pattern jacket. Also, in contrast to Adamson’s polished loafers, Dekker’s feet were encased in tough boots with thick rubber soles.
‘It’s a go?’ he asked.
‘Yup, it’s a go. You got everything?’
Dekker nodded and gestured to the bulky briefcase lying on the back seat. ‘Drop me where we agreed.’
Adamson checked the road in both directions, then pulled the Renault out of the wide lay-by and turned south, back towards Ax-les-Thermes. About three hundred yards short of the Hostellerie de la Poste, he indicated and pulled the car in to the side of the road.
‘Wait,’ Adamson ordered, checking the road ahead of them, then glancing in his mirrors to see behind them. ‘All clear,’ he said. ‘Go now.’
Dekker slid out of the passenger door, opened the rear door to grab the briefcase, looked both ways and then crossed the road swiftly, to disappear through a scrubby hedge and into the field beyond.
Adamson checked that Dekker was well out of sight before driving back onto the road. He indicated when he reached a lay-by about seventy yards from the hotel, and pulled the car off the road again. He lowered the windows, took out his mobile phone and placed it on the dashboard, then picked up a cardboard folder from the back seat and opened it. Inside were printed pages covered in pie charts and diagrams, together with several sheets of text, all of it in French. It was exactly the kind of stuff a commercial traveller would be expected to carry and, as Adamson spread it out on the seat beside him, he hoped this would provide him with a plausible reason for sitting there in the car by the roadside for an hour or so, with a mobile phone constantly pressed against his ear.
The moment he was through the hedge, and out of sight of the road, Dekker crouched low and hurried away up the gentle slope leading towards a small copse of trees some fifty yards ahead of him. He was shielded from the road behind by the hedge bordering that section of the N20, and from the hotel by another, rather lower, hedge that extended across the southern edge of the field.
Reaching the trees, he straightened up and eased his way into their sun-dappled gloom. He had already selected this as being the best — and realistically the only — spot from which he could watch the rear of the hotel from cover. Dekker chose a position on the perimeter of the copse which offered a clear downhill view of the target, and crouched down beside a large shrub with fleshy green leaves. He clicked open the briefcase, studied the component parts of the sniper rifle lying in their custom-shaped recesses and then, with the ease that only comes with long practice, began the assembly process.
The weapon was one of the variants of the standard SAS sniper rifle, the British-made Accuracy International PM — Precision Marksman — or L96A1. Designed for covert operations, the rifle Dekker had chosen was the AWS, or Arctic Warfare Suppressed, model. The name was a hangover from the days when the manufacturer produced a modified version for the Swedish armed forces, a move which spawned several different models generically known as the AW range. The stainless-steel barrel was fitted with an integrated suppressor which reduced the sound of a shot to about that of a standard .22 rifle. It was a comparatively short-range weapon, because of the subsonic ammunition, effective only to about three hundred yards in contrast to other versions and calibres of the rifle, some of which were accurate at up to a mile.
Both the stock, its green polymer side panels already attached, and the barrel were a tight fit in the case, each lying diagonally across its interior. He pulled them both out, fitted and secured the barrel, and lowered the bipod legs mounted at the fore-end of the machined-aluminium chassis to support it, while he completed the assembly. Then he took a five-round magazine out of the recess in the briefcase, along with an oblong cardboard box containing twenty rounds of 7.62 x 51-millimetre rifle ammunition. Before leaving Hammersmith, Dekker and Simpson had discussed what type of bullet should be used.
‘It all depends,’ Dekker had said, ‘on whether you want me to stop this guy dead, literally, or just stop him. If I use a hollow-point or a dumdum bullet, at the ranges you’re talking about, a hit anywhere on the torso is going to kill him pretty much instantly.’
Simpson had shaken his head. ‘If we need him dead, you can put a bullet through his head, right? No, just use standard copper-jacketed rounds, and hopefully there’ll be enough left of him to talk to us afterwards.’
Dekker took five rounds out of the box and loaded the magazine, then pressed it into the slot in front of the trigger guard.
The last item was the scope. The normal sight used on the AW rifle was from the Schmidt and Bender PMII range, but Dekker preferred something slightly different. He’d chosen a huge Zeiss telescopic sight that offered variable magnification, and incorporated a laser sighting attachment which would project a spot of red laser light directly onto the target, but he probably wouldn’t need to use that, not at this range. Once he’d clipped that to the Picatinny rails mounted on top of the receiver, Dekker removed one last piece of equipment, a two-way radio comprising an earpiece and clip-on microphone which were attached to a flat black battery-cum-transceiver. He clipped the microphone to the lapel of his jacket, slid the earphone into his right ear, then attached the battery pack to his waist belt and switched it on. Finally, he closed the briefcase and slid it to one side, and out of sight.
Dekker laid himself full-length beside and under the bush, settled the butt of the rifle into his right shoulder, drew back the bolt, and then slid it forward to load the first round. Only then did he peer through the sight at the target building, which was some one hundred and fifty yards away.
Dekker was a captain in the SAS and a sniper-team commander, and had been ‘borrowed’ from Hereford for this particular mission. He was a professional sniper who was competent enough, behind a good rifle, to guarantee accurate shot placement on a man-sized target at anything up to a thousand yards’ range. At only one hundred and fifty, he would barely need the telescopic sight at all.
In his earpiece he heard a series of clicks and bursts of static, then Adamson’s voice.
‘Sierra, this is Whisky. Radio check.’
The code was simple enough, and they’d devised it before they left their hotel in Cahors that morning. Sierra was the ‘sniper’, namely Dekker, and Whisky was the ‘watcher’, or Adamson. The radio system they were using included a scrambler circuit so that if any of their transmissions were detected they would sound like meaningless static. The units were, in any case, deliberately very short-range, and the FOE techies had estimated that none of their transmissions would reach more than about two miles.