by Mark Greaney
“Rat holes?”
“I’ll show you.”
The Terp stood and entered the building next to them, and Court followed along, still slowed by his gear. They climbed two flights of stairs, passed a silent family of seven living among the ruins, and then continued on through the building. Court expected they’d have to find a way back downstairs, but to his surprise, the Terp took him down a long corridor, which ended at a wall with a man-sized hole in it.
The Syrian said, “This is a rat hole. When the Syrian Army was in the street, we broke holes in the walls between the buildings so we could travel through the city without going outside. You can cover an entire city block without having to expose yourself.”
“Great,” Court said. “How many blocks do we have to cross to get where we’re going?”
The Terp pulled out his small map of the city, oriented himself, then looked up to Court. “Twelve.”
Court sighed. “Christ. Are you kidding?”
“I’m sorry. The damaged sewer means we’re farther away than where I thought we’d be.”
Court was pissed, but at the situation, not at the kid. He said, “Let’s move out.”
The Terp looked the older American up and down. “You look pretty tired. You want to rest for a few minutes first?”
Court was exhausted, but he figured he’d have time to rest once he got where he was going. “I want to be in position before daylight. We have to push on.”
CHAPTER 71
In the top-floor offices of the Athens freight forwarding company, Malik sat outside on the balcony, speaking on the satellite phone to the men on board the ship on its way into the Aegean Sea from Syria. Inside, his three remaining men rotated watches and rest. Bianca slept on a small sofa in one of the corner offices, and Henri Sauvage sat at a desk by an open window and smoked morosely.
Sauvage hadn’t seen Drexler in the past hour, so he was surprised when the blond-haired man appeared in the dim light of the room and sat down in a swivel chair in front of him. He then rolled the chair around the desk, positioning himself at whispering distance from Sauvage.
“I don’t have long to explain, but you and I are in a difficult situation.”
“Of course I know that. You put me here.”
“Perhaps I did. But I can assure you one thing. Right now I am your best chance for survival.”
“What do you mean?”
“When we get down to the dock in the morning, the Arabs plan on killing us.”
“The Arabs do?” Sauvage asked. Bianca had all but convinced him that this was Drexler’s plan.
But Drexler said, “Yes. I found out through a source inside the Syrian Mukhabarat.”
This sounded like utter bullshit to the French cop, but he played along. “Why?”
Drexler shrugged. “Loose ends, you and me. But there is something we can do to save ourselves.”
“I’m listening.”
Drexler looked around to make certain no one was around, then reached down to his right ankle and pulled out a stainless steel revolver with a black grip. Sauvage blinked hard when Drexler turned the small weapon around in his hand and handed it over.
“What . . . what is this?” Sauvage asked.
“Tell me you’ve seen a gun before.”
“Of course I have. I mean, why are you giving it to me?”
“If we went after the four men right now, we’d be slaughtered. They are separated around the entire office, they are all armed with submachine guns, and as soon as we got one man, the others would be on guard. But tomorrow morning we will all walk together to the marina. You and I can walk apart from each other; try to lag back behind the Arabs a few meters. Then, when I pull my gun to shoot Malik, you kill the two men closest to you. You must not hesitate. One bullet into each man’s back. I’ll take Malik and then whoever is left.”
Sauvage was deeply mistrustful. “I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Once we get on the ship we are dead men. We have to do this to survive.”
“What about Bianca?”
“What about her? We let her go. I won’t be returning to Syria knowing they have targeted me for termination. She can do whatever the hell she wants. She can get on that boat, or she can stay in Europe.”
There was much here Sauvage did not take at face value, but the fact that Drexler had just handed him a loaded gun caused him to doubt his earlier thoughts that Drexler was planning on killing him. If so, how would Drexler know Sauvage wouldn’t just shoot him last? The little snub-nosed revolver carried five rounds, after all.
He gave Drexler a nod, the Swiss man went over the timing and the order of the action again, and then he drifted off into the darkness of the office.
Sauvage looked down to the pistol in his hands.
None of this made sense to him at all.
* * *
• • •
Bianca Medina had finally fallen asleep on the sofa in the corner office, and she’d dreamed of her son. She’d planned on taking him to the ocean for the first time in his life this summer, and in her dream she was there with him, and it was warm and wonderful.
He’d turned to her and he’d called her “mama” and she’d smiled when he spoke, and then she started to speak back to him, but she could not say a word.
She tried again but her mouth would not move, and Jamal looked at her with suddenly frightened eyes. She tried to scream now, but still she could not open her mouth.
* * *
• • •
Bianca opened her eyes to darkness, but she felt the presence of the man over her, his hand pressing hard against her mouth. It was Drexler, she just knew, and he’d come to slit her throat in her sleep.
She reached up to swing at him, but a hand caught her hand. Her eyes focused on a face that came down close to hers, and she realized it was the face of the Frenchman, Henri.
Bianca went limp as her heart pounded.
“Ecouter.” Listen, he said. “You really want to fight them?”
She swallowed hard, blinking away the tears of panic. “Yes.”
“Then I’m with you.”
He took his hand off her mouth, and she recovered quickly. “You are? Good.”
She sat up in the darkness, and he sat next to her on the sofa and waved something in front of her. It was a small revolver.
Bianca gasped in surprise.
“Drexler gave me this. He told me the Syrians are going to try to kill me and him both just as soon as we get on board the ship. He wants me to shoot two of them as we walk to the marina. He will kill Malik and the other.”
“But . . . I don’t understand. He just handed you a gun?”
Sauvage nodded. “He did.” Then he opened the cylinder and dumped out the five bullets. He fished around in them for a moment. “These two? They were the ones in the cylinder next to fire when he handed it to me. These are live rounds. Three fifty-seven. Very dangerous.” He held up the other three bullets now. “But these three cartridges have been opened, and the gunpowder has been removed. The primer is intact, the bullet is back in the casing, but the weight was just slightly off, so I checked them. Drexler doesn’t know it, but I worked in the ballistics lab at La Crim for four years. I can tell if a bullet is real or a dummy round.” Sauvage smiled now. “He wanted me to shoot both men in the back, one round each. Then he would kill Malik and the final Syrian and then, when they were all dead, he could turn his seventeen-shot Beretta on me, and on you, and there would be nothing we could do about it.”
Sauvage reloaded the pistol, taking care to put the two live rounds back in the cylinder so they would fire with the first two trigger pulls. He then slipped the weapon under his shirt at the small of his back.
“What do we do? Will you shoot him?”
“Not with the revolver. We need his help killing the others
, so we go with his plan. But you walk close to him. When I kill my two men, I will try to get one of their weapons. But to do that I will need time. A few seconds. You must grab Drexler, stop him from killing me before I kill him.”
Bianca nodded at this. “I can do it.”
Sauvage said, “For both of our sakes, I hope you can.”
CHAPTER 72
Court Gentry lay on his belly perfectly still, looking through the wreckage of a destroyed and empty pet shop on the ground floor of a large apartment building and out into the street. The view ahead of him was not what he wanted to see. The scene was entirely too vivid. Now that dawn had broken, the light of the morning would make crossing the next street next to impossible.
The young man Court called the Terp was a few feet ahead. He’d taken off his equipment so he could move with more dexterity, and was all the way up at the doorway in the front of the shop, chancing a look out at the street whenever possible. Rolling patrols of Syrian Arab Army vehicles passed by at regular intervals.
The Terp turned back to Court, thirty feet away, and made some sort of motion, but even though the dawn had broken outside, here in the pet shop that had no pets, it was still too dark to see.
When the Terp’s gestures became more emphatic, Court took off much of his gear and moved forward. As soon as he crawled up next to his partner, both men had to move out of the doorway as a single BTR-50 armored personnel carrier rumbled by.
When the rumbling ceased and the vehicle disappeared from view, Court looked to the Terp. “What’s up?”
“The building you wanted to use. It’s not there.”
Court looked ahead. They were near the far eastern edge of Palmyra, but the going had been painfully slow over the past few hours, and they’d only now made it to within three blocks of their intended destination. But when Court looked across the street, over the low buildings there, he saw nothing to the east other than the top of a distant pile of rubble that had once been the seven-story structure he’d wanted to use as his overwatch position. It was less than half the height it had been before.
“Shit,” Court said. He was so fucking tired and sore and scratched and bruised from his hours of crawling and climbing through the rat holes, abandoned buildings, and rubble of Palmyra.
The Terp said, “We can move two blocks to the south of where we are. There might be some taller buildings to the southeast.”
Court shook his head. “Too much light to keep going. Even if that building were still intact, we’d never make it across open ground to get there.”
He took the map from the Terp and looked at it with a penlight. “This building we’re in now. It looks pretty big. How tall is it?”
The Terp had no idea. The two men went back for their gear. Then they crawled back to the rear entrance of the pet shop, made their way down the hallway that made up the ground-floor spine of the building, and began climbing the stairs.
Slowly. Very slowly, because both men were exhausted.
* * *
• • •
Fifteen minutes later shafts of morning sun shone through holes in the wall as Court and the Syrian interpreter climbed the last of the broken staircase to the sixth floor of a seven-story apartment building that had been half destroyed by shelling and bombs. Court walked down a hallway that sloped where the floor had suffered a partial cave-in, and then he crawled on his hands and knees the last few feet to make his way into a room on the eastern side of the building. Here he saw that the entire eastern wall of the apartment was missing, so he was able to look out onto a wide vista with the sun rising over it. He saw that they were three blocks from the far eastern edge of the city, and all the buildings in front of him were significantly lower.
He peered out beyond the edges of the city, but it was too far away to make anything out.
If the base was out there, the shot he took at Azzam now was probably going to be three or four hundred meters farther than he’d planned.
But there was no way he could get any closer.
He turned to the Terp, who was just crawling off the slanted hallway and down into the room. “You did great, kid. This is a good hide, but we are a lot farther from the base than I want to be.”
He found a dark corner in a back hall near a bathroom, and he sat against the wall, facing the opening ahead. He put down his AK, his backpack, and his rifle bag, and he leaned back against the wall, finally allowing his body to rest a moment.
Instantly his body began cramping. “Water and salt, kid. As soon as we’re set up, we both need to hydrate.”
The Terp peered out into the morning light. “Are we supposed to see a Russian base from here?”
Court lay on his stomach now, pulled his Zeiss binoculars out of his pack, and stabilized them on his backpack. Through the twenty-power magnification, he began scanning the desert floor to the east.
It took him just seconds to see a Russian Mi-8 helicopter hovering over a large cluster of low buildings, all surrounded by concrete fortifications, wire, and other bunkering material.
“Got it.” He pulled out his laser range finder. “Two thousand, seven hundred fifty-two meters to the center of the base.” At 1.71 miles, this was a full quarter mile farther than any shot Court had ever attempted, but he knew it was within the capabilities of his weapon, his ammunition, and his scope.
Scanning around the distant base some more, he saw Russian military vehicles, mortar and rocket positions, men going about their day, and a second helo resting on a dusty pad.
The young Syrian’s binoculars weren’t as good as Court’s, but through them he scanned to the southeast. “You were right about the airport. Take a look.”
Court did so, and he saw a second baselike development just off the runway, far from the shattered airport terminal. This base was much smaller, but it was fortified with several armored vehicles, and four Russian military helicopters were parked on the sandy tarmac.
A pair of Kamaz Typhoon MRAPs, or mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, also sat in the center of the base. Court knew these big transport vehicles were used in Syria by Russian Spetsnaz special forces units.
Only by carefully scanning the desert floor and the highway that bisected it here could Court see more infantry, more armored BTR wheeled troop carriers, and an assortment of big trucks and smaller military utility vehicles. It appeared to Court that at least two companies of regular Russian infantry were here, which was interesting, because he thought this was supposed to be a Spetsnaz or special forces base.
Clearly the area had been augmented with additional forces, and this meant to Court that something special was going on.
Next both men worked on their hide. Court pulled out the TAC-50 and set it up on its bipod, and he put his AK-47 within reach on the floor next to him. Now that he had his thirty-five-power scope on his rifle to use to sight on the base, he gave the Terp his twenty-power binoculars, along with a security sector to keep an eye on, and then he went back to work on ranging in his rifle for the approximate distance he’d be firing from later.
The young man asked, “Should we check in with Khadir and Yusuf to make sure they are in place?”
“Not yet.” The Motorola military-grade handheld radios the men carried were encrypted, and their range was over thirty miles. Still, Court had ordered the other team to stay off them until he transmitted, except in extreme cases. He was less worried about the transmissions themselves being picked up, but he knew it was always possible the transmissions could create an electronic signal that could be identified as an unknown force in the area on UHF, and the Russians could thereby determine they weren’t alone.
He looked at his watch. “It’s almost seven a.m. No idea what time Azzam is coming, but you can be damn sure we will see him when he comes.”
Court didn’t say it, but he was worried that seeing the Syrian president was all he would be able to d
o. He was just too damn far to feel confident in his ability to hit a man-sized target.
Court opened up an MRE packet of red beans and rice, which was full of the sodium he needed since he’d been sweating away salt for the past twelve hours. While he ate he drank an entire bottle of water, and he made sure the young Syrian did the same next to him.
While the Terp ate rations, he looked at Court a long time. Finally Court said, “I’d rather you didn’t stare at me.”
“Sorry. You don’t look like the other soldiers I’ve seen.”
“No?”
“No. What is your unit?”
Court spooned some rice into his mouth. “I’m with a unit that doesn’t feel the need to tell everyone about what unit we are.”
The Syrian seemed to think this over. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from that unit.”
Court smiled a worn-out smile at this. “Tell me about you, kid. How did you end up here?”
“I’m the idiot who agreed to come with you.”
Court smiled again. “You’ve been hanging around smartass Americans too long.”
The Terp chugged water, then said, “As I told you, I was in the university in Homs. I started going to the protests when they were peaceful, just singing songs and stuff. But the protests got rougher, people started throwing rocks at the police, and the police started shooting back. Some of the students managed to get guns. I was against that, but what could I do? Soon enough the protests turned to battles, but I refused to fight. The Mukhabarat picked up my brother, said he was a ringleader, but I don’t believe it.
“He never came home.”
The young man looked off into the distance as he recalled those days.
“I had done a year in the army when I was eighteen, but by then I was twenty-one, and I’d driven a tractor when I was in SAA, so I didn’t know much about fighting. Still . . . when Mohammed didn’t return and my mother’s and sister’s hearts were broken, I decided to join the resistance. I wasn’t special, just another rebel fighting in Homs and Palmyra, but when the Americans came, they needed someone to translate.”
