Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,56

ambient light up to about two hundred times, too crude for precision work such as sniper activity but enough to show up the presence of an enemy in the vicinity, and portable as well.

They flattened themselves against the wall and moved along it towards the gate, Purkiss in front. As he crept nearer he heard a cough, saw the glow of a cigarette tip beyond the gate just as the smoke reached his nostrils.

‘Other way,’ he whispered.

They retraced their path along the wall until they came to the corner at which they had started, then followed the wall to the right. The forest had been cut back from the wall far enough that no branches were within leaping distance from the top. Purkiss chose a particularly stout looking fir tree and began to climb up the trunk, Kendrick following suit on the other side. They reached eye level with the top of the wall and hauled themselves a couple of metres higher and peered across.

As the Google Earth images had shown, the farmhouse lay at the end of the drive sweeping down from the gate. The windows of the farmhouse were lit up and the brightness shifted with movement inside. Smaller lights burned here and there in the yard.

‘What the hell’s that?’ said Kendrick.

Some distance behind the farmhouse was a huge wooden building, a great sprawling barn of some kind, floodlights rigged to illuminate its front and men, four or five, moving back and forth through its doors. Their voices were too low and distant to be made out in any detail.

‘It wasn’t in the pictures.’

‘No.’ Purkiss muttered down the line to Abby, describing what they were looking at.

In a moment she said, ‘Checked again. It’s definitely not on Google Earth. Must be new, or newish. As I said, the pictures can be up to three years out of date.’

They clambered down and set off along the wall once more. Further down they shimmied up another tree. They had come a longer distance than Purkiss had estimated and the buildings were behind them now, the view directly across the wall one of fields and copses.

Kendrick was tapping his arm and when he looked he noticed it. Just visible within the perimeter, thirty metres away, a man’s shape was making its way on foot along the wall. Before he disappeared from view Purkiss saw he was carrying something in both hands, pointing downwards: a rifle.

Unless the man had some kind of night-vision viewing capability himself he wouldn’t have seen them. They climbed down anyway. Faintly, from the other side of the wall, they heard the rasp of static from a walkie-talkie, a low murmur in reply fading as the man moved on.

So there were guards patrolling the perimeter, perhaps more of them at the rear where the tree cover was dense inside and outside the wall and intruders would be likeliest to attempt entry. As silently as they could Purkiss and Kendrick continued along the wall, eventually reaching the next corner and turning in so that they were following the rear wall.

Again they crept up a tree and looked over. On the other side was a copse, the gleam of the farmhouse and the barn barely visible in the distance through the layers of fir. Purkiss scanned from left to right and back with the goggles. No signs of life. He indicated with two fingers and Kendrick nodded. To Abby he murmured, ‘We’re going over the wall.’

There was no reply and he glanced at the screen again. The signal was gone.

The wall was of varying height, the ground uneven along its length. At its lowest it was perhaps three metres high. Kendrick squatted and interlocked his fingers. Purkiss used it as a step and pistoned himself up so that his hands grappled with the top of the wall. His toes found a purchase and he hauled himself to the top and looked down. No movement on the other side. He braced himself and reached down for Kendrick’s hand and helped pull him up. They dropped on to the carpet of fir needles at the foot of the wall.

Moving apart a little they passed between the trees at a crouch. From far ahead beyond where the fields sloped upwards they heard the voices of the men moving in and out of the barn, the words still unintelligible. The wind had come up and overhead the clouds were being dragged free of the moon until it loomed, three-quarters full, bathing the fields in