since no further information would be forthcoming.
‘I’ll lead off. Give me some space, okay?’ Stratton said.
Abed nodded and Stratton moved around the boulder and headed down a steep, loose track. Abed gave him a good distance before he followed.
Stratton kept his eyes ahead, his ears telling him Abed was behind.
They reached the bottom and carried on along the track that tightly hugged the quarry wall. Within minutes, they reached the furthest point they had been able to see from their start point and Stratton squatted to take a look at the ground ahead. The route looked obvious enough, keeping to the lowest point of the valley. The tough part was, as Morgan had said, the settlement on the top of the hill. It lined the ridge like a fortress, its battlements made of sheer plates of concrete fifteen feet high and knitted together to form an impregnable defence against a human assault, the tops of the ramparts fringed with razor wire just in case anyone was crazy enough to get that far and put up a ladder.
Abed joined him and looked at the route for himself.
‘You up for it?’ Stratton asked.
‘If you are,’ Abed said, matter-of-factly.
Stratton concentrated on the route again, taking stock of his senses that were working hard but not reporting back anything in the way of danger. He got up and walked forward. Abed let him get a dozen yards ahead before following.
Stratton repeatedly switched his gaze between the path ahead and the settlement above. There was no sign of life in any direction. As always, he automatically scanned for immediate cover he could drop behind in the event of a contact. The bad news was that as they moved around a gentle bend protection from above slimmed and the route was highly exposed. If they were going to be hit from the settlement this was the ideal place.
He increased speed across the open stretch, his eyes on a crop of boulders ten yards ahead. Suddenly something whistled through his jacket sleeve and struck the ground a few feet away with tremendous force, kicking up stones. It was accompanied by the loud report of a gun firing from above that echoed around the quarry. Stratton lunged forward and dived for the boulders, immediately looking back to see Abed sprinting across the open space towards the foot of the hill to dive and roll behind a collection of small rocks.
Abed could not get more tightly against the rocks but he still felt highly exposed. He looked over at Stratton who held up a hand indicating Abed to stay where he was. Abed had seen the round strike close to Stratton and if the man was wounded, he gave no indication of it.
Stratton pulled up his sleeve to find a bloody crease across his forearm but not deep into the muscle.That was too close for comfort.
He took stock of their tenuous situation. At first take they were pinned down by a sniper with nowhere to run and a good eleven hours before darkness. However there was some useful information to be gathered to help form a strategy other than waiting for nightfall. The first and most obvious point was that the sniper was a lousy shot. The ground immediately in front of the battlements of the settlement, the most likely place for the gunman, was no more than two hundred yards away.An average sniper, using the term as a military qualification, with a 7.62 rifle, was expected to hit a man at six hundred yards every time. A good sniper could do the same at a thousand yards in ideal conditions: good light and no wind. The next point was the type of weapon. If it was an automatic or semi-automatic rifle the sniper had plenty of time to take another shot at Stratton or adjust his aim and shoot at Abed, but he had not. That would suggest the shooter had a proper sniper or hunting rifle that required a manual reload. The best sniper rifles had as few working parts as possible to improve accuracy, the main parts being the barrel that floated in a wooden stock, the scope fixed on top and the breech. The only parts that actually moved during the firing process were the trigger mechanism and firing pin. As few working parts as possible meant each round had to be loaded manually. That meant moving the scope off the target, reloading the breech and then relocating a target. A good sniper would have