by Mark Greaney
He climbed out of the bus a half mile from the border, walked north out of the village into a field, and turned left.
There was no moon; he had a tactical flashlight in his pack but did not use it. Instead, he stumbled to the west, walked a mile on his cut feet, could feel the sting and the warm blood squish in his socks and between his cold toes.
Finally, just before eight in the evening, he crossed a field full of modern windmills and found himself in the Austrian border town of Nickelsdorf.
He had made it into the European Union.
It was another mile walk — a limp, really, with the gunshot wound to the thigh and the injured feet and knees — before he found the road. He walked west with his thumb out for a few minutes. A trucker pulled over, but he was heading north and could not help. A second driver and then a third were also heading in the wrong direction.
At a quarter past nine, he was picked up by a Swiss businessman heading all the way to Zurich. Court told him his name was Jim. The businessman wanted to practice his English, and Court obliged. They talked about their lives and families on the trip across Austria. Court’s story was 100 percent bullshit, but he was a pro. He sold the tale of the messy divorce back in Virginia, the lifelong desire to visit Europe, the mugging in Budapest that cost him his belongings, and his good fortune to still have his wallet and cash and passport and a friend in eastern Switzerland who could put him up until he caught his plane back home the following week.
As they drove through the night and talked, Court kept part of his focus on the side mirror, nonchalantly making sure he’d not been followed. He also, between the BS stories of places he’d never been and people he’d created out of whole cloth, kept in mind his task at hand. He tried to get his head around the events still to come in the next thirty hours.
It was a Friday night, traffic on the A1 was heavy, but the businessman’s Audi was sleek and fast. They skirted to the north of Salzburg. Court offered to drive, and the Swiss businessman caught a couple of hours of sleep.
The Audi turned onto the Engadiner-Bundesstrasse and crossed the northeastern border of Switzerland at three a.m. There was no customs control at the Swiss border, though Switzerland was not officially a member of the EU. The Swiss driver pulled into an all-night rest stop, insisting Jim simply must try Swiss beer and give his honest opinion. Court did so, gushed over the body and color and texture, threw in a few other accolades he’d once overheard in a Munich biergarten in reference to German brews, and this convinced the now-smitten businessman to take Jim directly to his destination instead of dropping him off once their paths diverged.
They took the 180 south and then the 27 west through a valley, though in the overcast night they could see nothing on either side of their headlights. Finally in the burg of Lavin, Gentry picked a half-timbered house just off the main road and claimed it as his destination. Actually, by climbing out of the warm Audi here, Court was left with a two-mile walk in the snow, but, he decided, should there be trouble waiting at his real objective, there was no reason for this nice fellow to suffer for his good deed.
“Thanks for the lift. Auf Wiedersehen.” Court climbed out of the car and shook the gentleman’s hand through the window. He stood in the road as he waved good night.
As the taillights of the Audi rounded a corner in the distance, the Gray Man turned in the opposite direction and began walking westward through a gentle snowfall.
He trudged along purposefully, but he was bone tired. The adrenaline that, along with his discipline, had moved him forward without pause for the past twenty hours had now given out, and all that remained was the discipline. He needed rest and hoped to find a few hours of it up the steep road in Guarda.
By four ten, the snowfall had picked up. Court was up the hill and in the village now. He saw not a single soul, though there were still some lights on in the little hotel. The lights of the homes of the villagers were all extinguished, the shepherds and the blacksmiths and the innkeepers and the pensioners were sound asleep for a few hours more. He continued on, still climbing higher through the village, past ancient stone water troughs for the sheep flocks that moved through the hamlet’s pedestrian-only streets, past the tiny gardens surrounded by tiny fences in front of the tiny homes, until he broke out the other end of town and climbed higher up the steep hill along a dirt path. The evening’s snow settled on earlier accumulation, and it nearly blanketed the hillside, though even in the moonless night Gentry could see patches of darkness, bare spots on the prominence that had yet to accept the cover of the white powder.
After climbing through the white meadows for three hundred yards above Guarda, Gentry clicked on his small tactical flashlight. Behind him was sheer pas tureland, but he was now entering a pine forest, and the snow swirling though the trees and the black night made the road invisible ahead of him. The light helped. He pressed forward another hundred yards and found his destination in the woods, a tiny shack.
It stood thirty yards from the road, which continued on and up through disused private property. There was no reason anyone else would pass by, and no reason, if someone did, that they would look hard to their right through the forest and notice the simple structure. A huge, rusty padlock hung uninvitingly on the front door, the three windows around the one-room shack were boarded from the inside, and the surrounding pines grew unfettered nearly to the edges of the building.
Gentry walked through the trees and circled the building with his tac light. At the back of the cabin stood a utility shed, also heavily padlocked, and he checked this and found it secure. Continuing around the structure, he scanned the walls, the wooden slats on the roof, and finally the front door. He took off his gloves, ran his fingers around the door’s edges slowly and, in the top right corner he found it. A wooden toothpick jabbed flush with the frame. Had the door been opened, this telltale would have dropped to the ground and given the Gray Man the tipoff that his cabin had been compromised by visitors.
Satisfying himself that the location was secure, Court next turned his back to the front door, took thirty measured steps away into the pines, pushing through the needled branches. At thirty paces, he shifted five yards to his right and knelt down.
The key was buried in a metal coffee tin, just six inches or so below the pine mulch and frozen dirt. He dug it out with a flat rock. After retrieving the key, he returned to the cabin and opened the lock.
The interior air was dry and stale and every bit as cold as outside the door. There was a knee-high coal furnace in a corner, but Gentry ignored it. Instead, he lit a lantern on a card table in the center of the room, its dim glow the only warmth to be had.
A shelf on the wall held cases of military rations, meals ready to eat, and the thirty-six-year-old American tore into the first MRE he could grab as soon as he came out of the restroom with the chemical toilet. He ate hard crackers and cookies, wolfed them down as he sat alone at the card table.
He finished his meal in ninety seconds. Next he stood and pushed the squat coal furnace out of the corner and lifted the loose floorboards below it.
Placing the tactical light in his mouth, he climbed down a wooden ladder exposed with the removal of the floorboards, into a dirt-walled basement six feet high and ten feet square. When he turned from the ladder, he faced three chest-high stacks of black cases, each case the size of a very large toolbox. This took up nearly half the room in the underground cellar, and a metal workbench filled the space to his right. There was only room to climb up and down the ladder and move sufficiently to manipulate the cases. Court hefted the first container off the first stack, dropped it heavily on the table, and flicked open the latch.
Early that morning, when Court told Fitzroy he would rescue his family, he immediately decided to go to Guarda, Switzerland, to his massive weapons cache hidden in the forest. He had a half dozen other stores around the continent, but nothing like Guarda.
Guarda was the mother lode.
The heavy metal.
The first
case housed a black Swiss Brügger & Thomet MP9 submachine gun. He pulled it out of its foam bed and snapped a loaded magazine into the mag well, affixed the sling to its buttstock, and lifted it over his head to push it outside the trapdoor onto the floor above him. Another case held a sub-load, a nylon and canvas rig full of loaded magazines for the weapon that would strap both to his thigh and his utility belt. He tossed this through the hole above him as well.
For the next five minutes Court went through case after case. Into a huge duffel he stuffed all manner of small arms and explosives. Into a smaller bag he placed a black tactical suit, a face mask, ballistic eyewear, a small surveillance scanner that would allow him to pick up short-distance communication, and a pair of binoculars.
Finally, just before five a.m., Gentry climbed out of the basement, following behind the two duffels he pushed out in front of him. He left the entrance to the basement cache open. He drank from a half-frozen water bottle, washed down a couple of mild painkillers for his thigh, used the chemical toilet a second time, and pulled a sleeping bag from a shelf. He rolled it out on the floor, unlocked the latch of the front door, prepared the cabin’s defenses a bit, and then climbed inside his bedding. He set the alarm on his watch to seven thirty. A couple hours’ sleep would have to be enough to get him through another long day.
* * *
They came for him just after five. The minivan slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill. To the passengers, it seemed as if the driver had been out of control on the slick streets for virtually the entire two-and-a-half-hour drive from Zurich. The driver’s lack of skill in such conditions was understandable. There was black ice on the road, and the visibility was next to nil at times. Plus these Middle Easterners’ orders were to get to the blinking dot on their GPS as fast as possible, and the Tech was calling them on the satellite phone every ten minutes for an update.
There were five of them, Libyan external security officers from the Jamahiriya Security Organization, a fire team from the best of Qaddafi’s men. All ex-army commandos, each knew his Skorpion SA Vz 61 machine pistol like a trusted friend. The leader was forty-one, stern-faced and bearded, dressed in civilian adventure travel attire like the rest of his team. He sat in the passenger seat, incessantly barked admonitions at the commando behind the wheel, unforgiving of the man, though all knew the driver was more accustomed to negotiating desert dunes in an armored jeep than he was icy mountain switchbacks in a minivan.
Still, they made it to Guarda in good time and parked their vehicle in the lot by the train station at the bottom of the valley. The driver lifted the hood and quickly removed the distributor rotor and threw it into his gym bag, thereby rendering the vehicle useless until he returned. They then found the little road up the hill, spread their formation as wide as possible across it, and began their ascent on foot.
Each man carried his little Skorpion in a gym bag with its stock folded, and a backup pistol in a shoulder holster. Different operators carried grenades and breaching charges as well. They all wore knit caps, heavy cotton pants, and the same black parkas, an expensive name brand associated with professional athletes.
Also in their gym bags were night vision goggles; they remained stowed for now.
The five Libyans climbed the steep, winding road to the village in the dark. They moved quickly and efficiently. Any passerby would know from their near uniformity and the severe facial expressions bobbing up and down in the vapor of their exhalations that they were up to no good. But no locals walked the hillside road at five thirty in the morning in a snowstorm, so the Libyans arrived undetected into the cobblestone streets of the Swiss hamlet.
Each operator also had a small handheld radio attached to his belt and connected to an earpiece. With a single command from their leader, they separated on the western edge of Guarda, continued individually to the east, each through a different little pedestrian passageway. This tactic ensured that anyone looking out their window would only see one of the men. If an alarm was raised and the villagers began to talk about strangers, they all might well think they saw the same individual.
On the far end of the town the kill squad re-formed like a biologic entity, detached cells rejoining in a petri dish. The leader consulted his GPS and turned to the left at an unpaved track that continued from the ledge on which the tiny hamlet was situated, up the hillside and into the forest, only visible in the distance after they donned their night observation devices.
The leader updated the team from the information on his GPS.
“Four hundred meters.”
The snow had picked up even more; the swirling bands of flakes had turned to thickening sheets of falling white. The Libyans had seen snow before, during training in Lebanon or on other missions in Europe, but their bodies were wholly unaccustomed to this cold. Forty-eight hours earlier, this very team of operators had sat in a Tripoli apartment working with an electronic surveillance detachment to try to locate the source of a ham radio broadcast emanating from the city that had made comments critical of Colonel Qaddaffi. It had been nearly one hundred degrees in that cramped room, so the cold of the eastern Swiss valley was a shock to their systems indeed.
They almost passed the shack. Only the GPS coordinates provided by the Tech had saved them hours of wandering through the woods. By now their Skorpions were out of the gym bags, the bags were hanging from their backs, the weapon’s folding stocks were deployed, and the guns were raised to the low ready position, stocks pressed against shoulders and sights just below the sightline of their night vision goggles. Each man took a careful position around the cabin. They reported in one by one.
The leader was first. “One in position, ten meters from the front door. No movement. The windows are shuttered.”
“Two is with One.”
“Three on west side. One window. Shuttered.”
“Four at east side. One window. Shuttered.”
“Five at back. No windows, but there is a utility shed alongside the main building. A secure padlock on the outside. Nothing else back here.”
The leader said, “Five, stay at the back. Find cover and be ready. Three and Four, come to the front. We will enter as a team.”
“Understood.”
* * *
Gentry slept dreamless in his sleeping bag next to the hole in the floorboards that led to the earthen basement. The pain meds had dulled the ache in his thigh and given him the respite needed to relax. His sleep was deep, restful.
Brief.
* * *
The leader retrieved a fragmentation grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin and moved slowly to the front door with his hand on the spoon. Two was in front and preparing a breaching charge when he noticed the door was not completely shut. He turned to his leader and motioned to the crack in the door.
The leader nodded, turned to the two men behind him, and whispered “It’s open. Get ready.”
Number Two pushed the door open quickly and knelt down so that other weapons could train on any targets inside. It was completely dark at first; even the night vision equipment could not make out the features inside.
One lobbed the grenade into the room underhanded. Two, Three, and Four stepped to the edges of the cabin to avoid the blast. The grenade left the leader’s hand and disappeared into the dark, but the sound of the missile’s impact with a hard surface came too early. As the leader made to turn away from the door, the grenade reappeared in his night vision goggles, bounced out of the cabin, and landed in the snow in front of the door.
Fortunately for the Libyans, all four saw the sputtering grenade in time. They dove for cover, either to the snowy ground or around the edges of the cabin. The explosion whited out the goggles of the three men facing in the weapon’s direction, and a fourth man was hit in the elbow and knocked down by a small piece of shrapnel. Collecting himself quickly, the leader ripped his now-useless goggles from his eyes, returned to the edge of the door, and entered, firing into the dark. Number Two and then Three followed, but within t
wo seconds the leader’s shout made the others stop dead in their tracks.
“Mantrap!”
SEVENTEEN
Moments before Gentry had dropped exhaustedly to his sleeping bag for the night, he’d slid the large wall of rusty mesh to its position two feet inside the front door. The seven-foot-high contraption weighed over two hundred pounds and slid along a three-foot track on the floor. On each end of the fence there was a hinged wing, and each wing locked to a clasp on either side of the door. This effectively created a barricade capable of slowing down a breaching team, forcing them to bottleneck at the most dangerous point of any breach, the doorway. The mantrap was here when Court inherited the cache, and he had not placed much value in its capabilities due to the fact that it could easily be blown apart with explosives or knocked over with a battering ram or even a few serious blows from a boot heel, but as he leapt out of his sleeping bag to a crouch after the grenade went off out the front door, he immediately knew the rusty old barricade had just saved his soundly sleeping ass.
Frantically he kicked the two duffels of gear by his sleeping bag back down the hole to the tiny basement. He grabbed the Brügger & Thomet and fired a full magazine at the front door with one hand before sliding down into the hole. Once in the six-foot-deep cellar, he reached above and pulled the floorboard lid over himself.
* * *
Number Three knelt over bloody snow to the left of the shack’s entrance. The grenade fragment had hit him squarely in the elbow and passed through both meat and bone. But he was a disciplined soldier; he made little noise and quickly packed a handful of snow on the wound, wincing only with the shock of cold on skin, because he could not yet feel the pain he knew was soon to come.
Number One ignored his injured man as he ordered Two to set the fuse on his entire stock of breaching explosives and toss them through the doorway. A few seconds later a tissue-box-sized block of Semtex came to rest at the edge of the mantrap’s slide rail on the floor. The three uninjured Libyans at the front of the shack turned to run, and numbers Two and Four each grabbed Three under an arm and lifted him off the ground as they scrambled for cover.
