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.”
“What will you do when the war is over?”
The young man gave Court a strange look. “When the war is over I will be dead.”
Court glanced at him a moment, then crawled back to his rifle’s scope to scan the Russian base. “You don’t think you’ll live through this?”
“No. I will die Shahid. You call it . . . a martyr.”
Court just sighed, and the Terp heard the noise.
“You don’t want to be Shahid?”
“I’ll let some dumb son of a bitch on the other side be a Shahid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Patton,” Court said. “General Patton. That was his line. Well . . . sort of.”
This did nothing to rectify the young Syrian’s confusion. “Who is that?”
“I’m just saying . . . that if you go into a war ready to die, then you’re probably going to die. And if you die, then the other side wins.”
“Of course, but I know that Allah can take me at any time.”
Court took his eye out of the scope and looked at the Syrian. “You think you could ask him to wait till I’m done with you?”
The young man smiled. “It . . . it does not work that way.”
“You guys talk five times a day and you don’t get to ask him for stuff?”
The Terp laughed. “You are a Kuffar. A nonbeliever.”
Court shrugged. “A nonbeliever thinks they have all the answers. That’s not me. I don’t know what’s out there beyond my ability to see. All I know is that I don’t know, and I do know that a hell of a lot of people in this world are dead set on killing each other over stuff they seem so damn sure of.”
“Yes, my country has been crying blood for a long time. My friend, we share the same destiny. You and I are going to die like everyone else.”
Court scanned to the south again, at the airport. There were no fixed-wing aircraft in sight, which he found interesting. He said, “I don’t plan on dying till I kill at least one more asshole.”
“Azzam?”
“Can you think of a bigger asshole around here?”
“No . . . He is definitely the biggest asshole around here.”
As he finished saying this, Court took his eye out of his scope and looked out at the blue sky in front of him. Off his right shoulder an airplane came into view, flying low, its gear down. Court recognized it as a Russian Yakovlev Yak-40, an old but trusty transport jet.
The Terp said, “The airport is open!”
In the sky above it both men saw a pair of MiG-29 fighter planes circling. These were not preparing to land, but they were clearly protecting the transport.
Court said, “And a VIP has arrived.”
“Do you think it’s Azzam?”
“We’ve come a long way, so I’m shooting whoever gets off.”
The Terp said, “I like this plan.”
Court reached into his backpack and took out three liters of water. It was all he had left. “Kid, I need you to pour this all around the floor and on the walls, three meters in every direction.”
“But . . . why?”
“When I shoot this gun, it’s going to kick up a lot of dust. If we don’t wet the area, I’ll have to wait for follow-on shots.” Court added, “We won’t have time for that.”
The young man opened the first bottle and began pouring it on the floor, sprinkling it on the walls around him.
CHAPTER 73
Just before seven a.m. Bianca stood with the three Syrian GIS men, their leader Malik, Drexler, and Henri Sauvage inside the door to the office building. The ship from Syria was just offshore, and a skiff would be arriving in the marina shortly to pick everyone up. Malik was on his phone, talking to a man on the skiff, and she could hear him coordinate the exact location for the pickup.
Malik slipped the phone back into his pocket and turned to the group. “We want to arrive at the dock at exactly the same time the launch does. It’s still dark. We do this right and no one sees us.”
Drexler looked out the window, then back to Malik. “Let’s go. What are we waiting for?”
The Syrian Mukhabarat operative shook his head. “We have a minute to wait so it is timed properly.”
“What the hell does it matter if we get to the water a few seconds before they do?”
Malik just shook his head. “My operation, Drexler. My rules.”
Drexler wiped sweat off his brow.
* * *
? ? ?
Vincent Voland parked his rented Toyota Yaris four-door compact on a hill just a block away from the camera that had recorded the sighting of Bianca Medina, Drexler, and the Syrians the day before. It was not yet seven a.m.; he’d come straight from the hotel after his late-night flight and his early-morning checkin, and he’d just spoken with the two watchers he’d hired to keep an eye on the port and told them they could go home for a few hours’ rest.
His men had seen nothing, so Voland worried the Syrians were no longer in the area.
Voland needed more rest himself, but he was too wired to sleep. He figured there was little chance he’d see Drexler and company walking around the dock, and that he’d probably already boarded a ship, but as soon as offices at the marina opened up he’d start pumping the workers there for information.
In the meantime, however, he wanted to walk the area to get a feel for the location.
He walked along Akti Kondili, where the images had been taken, and then he went down to the water. An occasional car drove by behind him, but this was near the closed private marina, so there wasn’t much going on this early in the morning.
He turned to go into the city a few blocks, to try to get a feel for where Drexler and his entourage had been coming from on their way to the port, because he felt certain he knew where they’d been going. They’d gone to the marina to board a boat, and that boat was gone.
On the corner of Egaleo and Kastoros he heard a noise off to his right. It was a door closing, and this surprised him, because the only buildings he saw were commercial, and none of the offices would open for hours.
In the dim light a block away, he saw a group of people walking south, towards the water.
There were six men and one woman. The woman was tall and beautiful; the Frenchman could tell this even from a block away.
Vincent Voland turned and began running down Egaleo, parallel to the group but out of sight behind a row of buildings. He didn’t have a gun, and he didn’t even know the number for the police here in Athens. He was a sixty-five-year-old man with no hand-to-hand fighting skills, and after half a block he was already feeling the pounding of exertion in his heart. He had no plan other than to try to see if this group was, in fact, Bianca and her captors.
If these were the people he’d come from France to find . . . he hadn’t a clue what he would do about it.
* * *
? ? ?
Drexler had pushed and pushed for Malik to begin the movement towards the docks, for the simple reason that he knew his plan to kill the three Syrians, then Sauvage and Medina, would only work if there wasn’t an additional skiffload of Syrian operatives on the shore to stop him.
Malik had pushed back, of course, because he wanted the skiff to arrive at the water’s edge at the same time as those boarding it to reduce the chance that any passing police or harbor official would see the illegal transfer.
But Drexler had won the fight. Although he would have liked to have left the office minutes ago, so there was no chance the men in the boat would be near enough to the marina to see what happened, he decided instead to rely on the darkness of the alleyways leading to the docks and a quick getaway.
Malik put his earpiece in so he could stay in constant communication with the men on the skiff, and then the entourage walked down Etoliku, a two-lane street with cars parked on both sides, making for a narrow advance. The street ended perpendicular to the docks, and already in the distance Drexler could see a dark skiff approaching, with several men dressed in black on board. He had positioned himself behind Malik and one of the GIS men. Bianca was walking along silently at his right shoulder, and Sauvage was on his left a few feet away, behind one of the GIS officers.
The last GIS man brought up the rear.
Drexler looked right at Sauvage as he walked, willing him to look his way. When he finally did, Drexler saw the terror in the man’s eyes.
The Swiss operative only needed the French cop to fire his gun twice, shoot or slow down two of the four operatives, and then, when he invariably tried to shoot Drexler himself, Drexler would simply kill Sauvage and then Medina.