‘We’ll do a reconnaissance first, of course,’ the commander said, sounding to Hobart more like a soldier than an FBI agent.
‘You know exactly where the mine is?’ Hobart asked. ‘I mean precise distance and bearing?’ Hobart knew something about operating in the field from his time in Kosovo, not that he was an expert by any means, but he had on more than one occasion experi enced how difficult it was to cross strange country at night.
The HRT commander gave him a hostile look under cover of darkness, feeling annoyed as well as somewhat compromised. Hobart was his boss, sure, but this little shindig was the commander’s to plan and organise and he didn’t like having his toes stepped on. However, the old hack had a point, he had to admit. ‘Not exactly, no. That’s why I’d like to do a recon.’
‘Recon,’ Hobart muttered to himself, beginning to get the feeling that this guy had read too many Nam books. ‘Which do you prefer?’ Hobart asked. In situations like this the call was usually left up to the HRT commander. But one of Hobart’s other problems was handing authority over to subordinates, mainly because he rarely trusted anyone else’s decisions but his own.
‘Well, since we don’t know exactly where the mine is,’ the HRT commander said. ‘I mean, I know it’s close but I couldn’t point a finger in its exact direction so maybe we should move in along the track. That also covers us if he decides to move out in his truck while we’re moving in.’
‘Why don’t you wait till morning?’ Seaton asked. He had been standing quietly in the background but felt the urge to intervene.
The HRT commander looked over at the stranger, wondering who he was.
‘Things always go wrong in the dark,’ Seaton went on. ‘Plus you’re giving him a lot of advantages.’
‘I’ve got twenty men in that wagon,’ the HRT commander said with some arrogance. ‘All professionals and with night vision. We can handle one man no matter how this cake is cut.’
‘But isn’t this track the only way out?’ Seaton asked.
The HRT commander was getting miffed with both these guys trying to tell him his job. ‘And what’s to stop him just walking out the back? There’s a thousand miles of nothin’ out there. He could be twenty miles away by morning in any direction.’
‘But not with a ninety-pound bomb,’ Seaton said. ‘I guess you have to ask yourself which is the most important at this stage: the explosives or the man?’
‘I want them both,’ Hobart said.
‘In that case we should head in now,’ the HRT commander said.
Hobart wasn’t sure about any of the ideas. What Seaton had said sounded like good sense but he didn’t like the idea of giving Stratton any more time than he already had. ‘Let’s head down the track in the vehicles,’ Hobart said to the HRT commander. ‘Get closer to the mine, see how it feels, then you take it from there.’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ the commander said with a glance in Seaton’s direction before heading for the cab of the van.
Seaton shrugged his indifference and followed Hobart back to the car.
The van started its engine, turned off the road, creaked down the dip onto the track and slowly headed along it, followed by Hobart’s sedan.
Stratton watched them until they were out of sight beyond his stretch of the wood and made his way back, past his truck, to where he could see the gate which he had left open.
A couple of minutes later the large black van moved slowly across his front, closely followed by the sedan. Stratton moved his position to keep them in view when their brake lights suddenly cut through the darkness and both vehicles stopped. Stratton estimated they were just short of the final bend to the mine and a good forty yards beyond the gate.
The back of the van opened quietly and the HRT unit climbed down as the sedan’s doors opened and the four people inside stepped out. It was too dark for Stratton to make out any more than a crowd of silhouettes but they appeared to be concentrating their attention towards the mine and not to their rear.
Seaton remained by the front of the car watching the HRT group hold a parliament behind the van, after which the commander broke away and joined Hobart.
‘We’re gonna move down the track in file in four teams,’ the agent said to Hobart in a low voice. ‘When we sight the mine we’ll break off and take up positions around it. We’ll assess the situation from there, see what we’ve got, and when you give the word we’ll move in and take care of this.’
Hobart nodded, though he had a niggling doubt about something which he put down to the whole military thing.
As the HRT unit moved off around the van and strung themselves out along the track towards the mine Hobart joined Seaton. ‘How big a blast is ninety pounds of RDX?’ he asked, keeping his voice low. ‘I mean, if these guys are around the mine and it goes up, can they get hurt?’
Seaton shrugged. ‘Depends where the blast is. If it’s in the mine, they could be fine as long as nothing falls on them. If it’s on the surface, say, in the vehicle, I wouldn’t want to be within five hundred yards of it.’
That was not good, Hobart thought as he looked down the track where he could make out the black silhouettes heading slowly along it.
Stratton watched the line of men move down the track while the other small group from the sedan remained at the vehicles. He headed quietly back towards his pick-up and located the white cord on the ground. He picked it up, dragged it with some care to the truck and gently opened the door so as not to make any noise.
Seaton sighed internally, wondering how this was going to turn out. He walked around the car to look back the way they’d come, his thoughts on where Stratton was at that moment. Seaton expected him to be miles away but if he was at the mine he would know that these guys were coming: their approach was not exactly stealthy.
As he turned to head back to the front of the sedan and rejoin Hobart his eyes made out a thin grey line on the ground running between the vehicles. Curious as to what it could be he crouched to take a closer look.
Stratton wound the end of the cord a couple of times around the catch inside the pick-up’s door frame and looked back through the trees at the silhouettes on the track.
Seaton reached a hand out for the cord, noting that it ran beneath both vehicles. He raised it off the ground a couple of inches, felt the abrasive crystals, released it and put his fingers to his nose. He inhaled the odour that seemed familiar.
‘Hobart!’ Seaton said as he stood up and moved away from the cord, his stare following it first into the distance towards the mine, then back the other way along the track.
Hobart, Hendrickson and the driver looked round at him, bemused by his raised voice.
‘I think you’d better move away from the vehicles,’ Seaton said as he closed on Hobart who was practically standing on the cord. Seaton reached out a hand to grab the FBI man’s arm.
Stratton pulled open the door as far as it would go, gripped it with both hands and planted his feet to get a solid purchase. Explosives are measured by the speed at which they burn and RDX combusts at around 24,000 feet per second – the speed it would travel if it was stretched out in a line, as it was in this case.
Stratton gathered himself and then swung the door as hard as he could so that it slammed shut, while at the same time turning his back to the cord and ducking away. The blast ripped outwards from the point where the cord had been struck and the door burst back open.
The explosion came out of the wood and down the track like a thunderbolt, tearing beneath both vehicles, rupturing and igniting their fuel tanks at the instant when Seaton grabbed Hobart’s shoulder. It shot along the track, swatting the entire HRT unit aside like flies. Less than a second after Stratton slammed the door the mine exploded, rocking the very ground and sending a blast of rubble and dust from the mouth of the entrance shaft like grapeshot from a giant cannon.