Hannah whispered the obvious. “We need a car.”
Chris opened his mind again, and the human thoughts returned. Move. They reached a gaggle of cars, many of them white Fords, perched alongside the road. The Turks bought more Fords than Americans did. He scanned for older models, easier to hotwire, but many were newer, equipped with modern anti-theft devices—and the windows were rolled up tight. Chris finally spotted an older model white Ford sedan. He tried the door handle. Locked. Next, he punched out a rear passenger window with his rifle muzzle and reached through to unlock the driver’s door.
Without missing a beat, Sonny opened the driver’s door, got in, reached over, and opened the front passenger door. Chris took his place beside him in the passenger seat, and Hannah sat in the back next to the seat with glass in it.
Sonny used his pocketknife blade to turn the ignition, but the car didn’t start. He unscrewed the cover over the steering wheel column. After tinkering around inside, the vehicle started. He revved the engine, but he couldn’t turn the steering wheel.
Chris opened his knife, leaned over and stuck it between the steering wheel and the top of the steering column. He snapped the steering lock, freeing the steering wheel.
Sonny frowned.
Chris and Hannah checked the screens on their GPS trackers again.
“The tangos have probably already removed whatever tracking devices either of you have on them,” Sonny said.
“And maybe they haven’t yet,” Chris said. “Drive us north until we can make a U-turn south.”
“You know this is a one-way street,” Sonny said, “and we’ll be going the wrong way.”
“Humor me,” he said. “We’ll be off the one-way in a flash.”
Sonny did as he was told.
Chris gave more directions.
Sonny made a U-turn and drove southeast on Ataturk Boulevard. “We’re going to pass by the embassy,” he grumbled. The police had swarmed around the embassy gates but still hadn’t entered. Maybe they knew what had happened to the first guy to arrive on the scene and were trying to figure out whether the terrorists were still inside or not. Sonny continued driving south.
Twenty minutes later, they arrived in the town of Golbasi, east of Mogan Lake. “My GPS shows the Switchblade Whisper stopping here in Golbasi,” Hannah said.
“Mine shows they continued south toward Syria,” Chris said.
“Just great,” Sonny interjected.
Chris showed his GPS tracker monitor. “Either they found one of the devices or both.”
“While we’re in Golbasi, I’d like to check it out,” Hannah said. “Turn left up here.”
Sonny turned off the main road and went east. He passed houses topped with clay, red-tiled roofs.
“This is a residential area,” Chris said.
“Maybe it’s an ambush,” Sonny said.
“Stop here,” Hannah warned. “We’re getting too close. We’re almost a hundred meters away.”
Chris pulled out the lighter he’d been carrying since his childhood abduction and flicked the lid anxiously.
Hannah read the distance on her GPS: “Fifty meters. Forty.”
They passed more houses.
“Thirty meters,” she said
“If this is an ambush,” Sonny said, “I won’t be pleased.”
“Twenty meters.”
Chris put away his lighter. “Only one way to find out.”
“Ten,” she said.
Sonny slowly applied the brakes. “Where is it?”
Hannah pointed to a white Renault parked in the driveway of a house. “The GPS tracker reads that it’s right there.” The lights in the home were on. Hannah stepped out of the car, strolled over to the vehicle, and laid down next to it. She tinkered underneath the vehicle before returning with an object in her hands. She got into her seat in the back and said, “Let’s go.”
Sonny released his foot from the brake and eased away from the curb.
Hannah looked at the tracking device in her hand. “I guess Syria is next.”
Sonny drove past the house with the Renault, made a couple turns, and returned to the main road. “Chris and I were lucky to blast through the border checkpoint terminals the first time,” he said.
“We might not be so lucky if we try that a second time,” Chris said.
“I know where the gaps are in Turkey’s border security,” Sonny said.
“Outstanding,” Chris said.
Hannah nodded.
Sonny made a pit stop in Golbasi to stock up on water before driving south. They drove straight through the night taking turns: one driving, one sitting as lookout/navigator, and one sleeping. In the early morning, Sonny came to a stop on the side of the road within sight of the Kasab Border Crossing Terminal. Turkey had beefed up security with barricades, canines, and extra guards. It seemed that the Turkish border patrol were doing thorough searches of each car leaving the country.
“There are more border patrol here on the main road than on the mountain,” Sonny said, “so our odds of sneaking around them are better if we hump over the mountain.” He turned around and backtracked away from the border patrol and further inland. Then he found a small road that led up a mountain on the border. “With all the recent shootings, the Turkish border patrol will have itchy trigger fingers, but they can’t shoot what they can’t see.”
“Turkish border patrol can shoot us for breaking the law, but we can’t shoot a NATO ally for upholding the law,” Hannah said.
Sonny flicked off the car lights. “That’s part of the challenge.”
“What’s the other part?” Hannah asked.
“In Syria, their border patrol shoots anything that moves,” Chris said. “If the shooting starts now, we may never reach Mordet in one piece, let alone with enough ammo to stop him.”
“I can get us past Turkish border patrol,” Sonny said with a serious face full of confidence.
“I’ll get us past Syrian border patrol,” Chris said.
Hannah nodded her head in agreement.
Sonny seemed to hesitate for a moment. Allowing Chris to lead them on the Syrian side was trusting Chris with his life. Sonny nodded in agreement, too.
The snaking paved road became a dirt road. Five klicks south of Yayladagi, on the Turkish border, Sonny drove the car off the road and into a grove, where he parked the vehicle. “We’re going to have to hoof it from here.”
They exited the sedan, gathered branches of evergreen needles, and camouflaged the car—not enough to conceal it from close, prying eyes but enough to conceal it from someone at a distance.
Sonny took the point. After him came Hannah then Chris. At a moderate pace, they hiked four klicks up the mountain, heading south toward Syria, until Sonny slowed.
If he saw something, he would’ve signaled, so we must be approaching a danger area.
Insects and occasional birds chirped but not nearly as loud as Chris’s heartbeat.
The trio slipped into a gully and continued slowly, lowering to a crouch. After fifty meters, Sonny quickly dropped to the earth. Hannah and Chris followed suit. Chris looked around, narrowing his gaze to try to spot the source of what spooked Sonny. There was no sound of rustling in the bushes or on the ground. A small, dark figure, an animal, swiftly waddled toward Sonny, who rose to his feet. The animal didn’t stop. Sonny spread his legs, and the animal passed under them. Hannah also rose to her feet and spread her legs. The dark little beast stood about one foot high and one foot across. Chris had already risen to his feet. He spread his legs apart to allow the animal passage. He turned to see if it would come back and harass them, but the creature disappeared around a bend in the gully.
Sonny resumed their journey at a crouch. Twenty-five meters later, he gradually lowered onto his hands and knees and signaled that there was a person ahead. Sonny led them in a crawl.
On top of the mountain, a few hundred meters above Chris and his teammates, a guard stood with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Although th
e sky was dark, the guard’s silhouette was darker, causing him to stick out. It wasn’t clear if the guard was facing toward the three or away from them. If the guard had chosen a spot ten feet down the mountain from his current position to stand, his silhouette would’ve been hidden by the darkness of the mountain. The pounding in Chris’s chest shot up his neck until it throbbed in his ears, hammering his skull.
The three followed the slanting gully to the right until Sonny low-crawled through a dip in the right bank, taking them out of the gully. Rather than go up the mountain and pass near the guard, they travelled a horizontal path on the mountain, creating distance between themselves and the guard. Tall, grassy weeds helped conceal their movement. After a hundred meters, the guard was no longer in sight, and Sonny eased into a ravine. The trio rose to a crouch, moving faster but still slowly, and followed the bottom of the ravine up the mountain. As they neared the top where two ridges dipped like a saddle, they dropped down on their bellies and crawled over the saddle, careful not to silhouette themselves against the sky. On the other side of the mountain, they slithered on their stomachs down into another ravine.
In the ravine, they patrolled at a crouch until they reached the bottom of the mountain, where they could walk upright. Finally, they crossed into Syria. Chris assumed the point and avoided the danger areas while finding safer routes.
The sun still lay hidden, but it changed the dark sky to grey as Chris and his team patrolled west until they arrived south of a Syrian town named Duz Aghaj. They stole another vehicle and headed south. Hannah drove the first leg with Sonny riding shotgun and Chris in the back.
Chris sucked on an energy gel pack and checked his GPS: seven and a half hours to Al-Bukamal. Located near the southeast end of the Euphrates River in Syria, near the Iraq border, Al-Bukamal was where Professor Mordet’s French plantation stood. He remembered the night he and his teammates had hidden in a field of wheat and first seen the back of that two-story building and its expansive roof. Each floor had those thin, white wooden columns, wide porches, and French doors. Still in Chris’s memory, the French colonial plantation house seemed so eerily out of place near the humble farmhouses that sat on small plots of land to the south. He had an uneasy feeling, but he tried to put it out of his mind and catch some sleep while it was his turn to rest. They still had a seven-and-a-half-hour drive, and there was no point to wearing himself out before they arrived. He was going to need every ounce of strength to stop Mordet from hacking into the Switchblade Whisper’s secrets and attacking America.
For thirty minutes, Hannah drove down Syria’s west coast until they passed Latakia.
Sonny made conversation, but the macho tone of his voice suggested that he was enamored with her.
“Where you from?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m from New York,” he said with his chest sticking out.
“I figured that,” she said.
“Queens,” he offered up more.
She was the ultimate spook, pulling information out of people without even trying. “I grew up in Hawaii,” she said.
“Were you born there?”
“Born and raised,” she said.
Hannah had told Chris that she was from East LA, but now she was telling Sonny that she was from Hawaii. Question marks popped up in Chris’s mind, but only Hannah could answer them, so he ignored them and drifted to sleep.
Two and a half hours later, they switched roles. Chris took the wheel. He knew the roads, so he didn’t need a navigator, so Hannah only needed to keep a lookout for trouble. Sonny slept in the back, snoring loudly like a twenty-mike-mike auto cannon.
Hannah checked her cell phone. “The embassy attack is on the Internet news. Shortly after, some Turkish border patrol officers and innocent bystanders were killed at the Kasab Border Crossing Terminal.”
“Mordet,” Chris said.
“We really need to stop him.”
“Most definitely.” Chris wiped the sleep out of his eyes as they travelled east through the middle of Syria. “Hey, I wanted to ask you something,” he said, changing the topic. “Before I fell asleep, I heard you tell Sonny you’re from Hawaii.”
“Oh?” she said casually.
“But you told me you were from East LA.”
“Okay,” she said.
“So which is it?” he asked.
“Which what?”
“Are you from LA or Hawaii?”
“Which do you prefer?”
He felt awkward but pressed on. “That’s not what I asked.”
“Okay,” she said.
Chris modified his question. “Why would you tell us two different stories?”
“The less information you know, the better. If you’re ever captured, they’ll make you tell everything you know about me and everyone else so—”
Chris cut her off. “They won’t take me alive.”
Hannah became silent for a moment. “You depend too much on it.”
“On what?”
“Truth.”
“How so?” he asked.
“Truth is subjective and relative.”
“You really believe that?”
“Don’t you?” she asked.
“Truth is objective and absolute. It’s not so complicated.”
“Sometimes I like complications,” she admitted. “But most people believe what they want to believe. And …that is their truth.”
“What about you?” he asked. “What do you believe?”
“Whatever helps me thrive. That is my truth.”
They became quiet for a minute.
“You think Sonny would ever allow himself to be captured by terrorists?” she asked.
“I don’t know of any Unit guys who’d allow themselves to be taken alive. Sonny seems to have that same attitude.” Chris paused. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah replied. “I guess it would depend on the situation. After what Mordet did to your ear? After what he did to Young, and worse, my asset? Either we take Mordet down or die trying because I won’t be a warm meal for that maniac. He’ll have to eat me cold.”
21
_______
In the afternoon, Sonny kept watch and an eye on the GPS tracker. “The signal just disappeared,” he said.
Chris drove. “Are you sure?”
“The GPS tracker shows our location on the map, but the device’s signal is gone.”
Chris drove to the Euphrates River and followed it south. Then he rolled into Al-Bukamal. “We should probably find a place to stage our gear,” Chris said.
“Sounds good.”
He drove them to a run-down part of town where he found a motel and parked in back. “I’m going to rent us a place,” he said.
“You need backup?” Sonny asked.
He smiled. “Not this time.”
“Good. I’ll wake up Sleeping Beauty, then.” Sonny winked, and Chris just shook his head.
Minutes later, he returned with a key. Hannah and Sonny exited the car, and Chris escorted them on foot to a run-down motel that rented rooms out by the hour. Inside the room, he unlocked the door, reached in, and turned on the light. A cockroach scurried away. The small, dingy room for two felt cramped with the three of them inside, but it could’ve been worse. They took turns showering in the worn and rusted bathroom.
After they’d all freshened up, Hannah said, “I want the Switchblade Whisper’s black box.” Determination was etched across her features, hard and cold like marble.
“I want to kill Mordet,” Sonny added.
“If this op is successful, there’ll be no shooting,” Chris reminded him. “We’ll insert quietly, grab the black box, and exfil like ninjas. If it hits the fan, there’ll be no air support or QRF, so we’ll be on our own.”
“Can’t blame a guy for wanting,” Sonny said.
They made plans while preparing their gear.
“I nominate Chris to be point man on this,” Sonny said. “He’s been here b
efore, and he knows the area best.”
“Agree,” Hannah said.
“Most of the people in this area would rather kill an American than look at one,” Chris said. “They won’t ask to hear our cover story. And it’s possible that Mordet will be waiting to ambush us.”
“We’ll need to carry a lot more than pistols,” Sonny said.
Chris and Hannah agreed.
After staging his gear, Chris studied the GPS again and again to make sure he knew the area. Preparations complete, they waited until midnight, when they loaded into their stolen sedan and motored to the edge of town.
Hannah kept her eyes on the street as Chris drove. “It’s too quiet,” she said.
“Like they’re expecting us,” Chris said.
Chris parked the car beside a small school. Others had parked their vehicles there, too. They stepped out of their car, and carrying their rifles and some grenades, Chris led them quickly across the school grounds to a dark patch of weeds under trees blocking the moonlight. They lay there for fifteen minutes to make sure no one was alerted to their insertion, while a pair of flies buzzed around them.
When it seemed no welcoming committee was on its way, Chris slipped across a paved street and descended concrete stairs to a filthy area that seemed like a cross between a parking lot, a backyard, and a road. Half a burned-out car lay in the weeds. Like many places his missions had taken him, it was difficult to figure out where one property ended, another began, and where public property was.
They turned a corner and stepped over concrete bricks scattered on a walkway made of large concrete tiles. Then they passed between two houses. Weeds poked up between cracks in the concrete. They descended another flight of steps to a dirt road that led uphill. The sound of footsteps crossed behind one of the houses, but it wasn’t clear who, what, or exactly where.
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