The Chase: A Thrilling Richard Yokely Novella by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

It had taken Abbas an hour to walk down from the ridge overlooking the Gulf of Aqaba to the coast road that ran alongside it. The sun was still high in the sky and he could feel the heat from the rocks he was walking across through the soles of his boots. He had made the journey thus far alone, but he would now have the help of a support group who were already on the ground in Taba, the resort town on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel. They would be needed to help him penetrate the Red Sea Security Zone. The Egyptian authorities had set up the zone several years before in response to a series of terrorist incidents, including sightseers being kidnapped or shot and an aircraft blown up. None of that was good for the tourist trade on which the area depended, so a very tightly controlled security zone, patrolled by elite Egyptian troops, now separated all the tourist hotels on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba from the rest of the Sinai peninsula.

When he reached the road, he found a narrow dry wadi a few metres from the edge of it, but before settling there he began walking south along the verge of the road. It was covered with litter and at intervals there were pieces of debris like snapped off wing-mirrors and broken plastic from minor collisions – not for nothing did Egyptians have the reputation of being the most erratic drivers in the world – but he had gone half a mile before he found what he was seeking. A truck must have blown a tyre at some time in the previous few weeks, and been in collision with a car or small van. The ripped carcass of the tyre lay at the road side, alongside a bent and battered door panel, with bright metal showing where wind-blown sand had already stripped the paint from the edges of the dents.

He waited until the road was clear in both directions, then dragged the wrecked tyre and the door panel into the middle of the south-bound lane. He ran back to the roadside and moved a little way back towards the wadi and dropped down behind a rock before readying the CATT. He waited until a line of south-bound vehicles had reached the obstruction and been forced to stop by the flow of north-bound traffic. A cursing driver climbed down from his truck and began dragging the door panel and the tyre off the road. By the time he had done that, Abbas had activated the CATT and as soon as he had a signal, he tapped in the number of the burner phone he had memorised and sent a four-word text. Within ten seconds he had shut the CATT down again.

The text would be intercepted of course and the position of the CATT that had sent it, identified to within a few metres, but the burner phone would be

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