The Terp knew of a tunnel Daesh fighters had used when they owned this territory a year earlier. According to the young interpreter, the tunnel attached to the sewer system in Palmyra, and it extended outside the city to the south, connecting with an irrigation canal there that had brought water to farms ringing this ancient city out in the middle of the desert.
The Terp asked the other men in the technical while they traveled, but none of them knew if the sewer system or the pipes that ran into the fields had been damaged, destroyed, or filled in. Still, Court decided heading to the farmland south of the city seemed like it might be the best way to get a couple of men close to and then inside the city itself without being seen.
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? ? ?
After three hours driving across open desert, Court and the Terp’s technical stopped in a deep channel created in a wide alluvial fan. All four men on the operation climbed off the truck, grabbed their gear, and took a reading with both the GPS on Court’s watch and a compass. By their calculations, Court and the Terp had three hours’ walking ahead of them to reach the farmland, and from there it would take another one to two hours to get into the city of Palmyra itself.
Court said, “Five hours carrying gear and hoofing it, kid. Can you do it?”
“Of course. Can you?”
Yusuf and Khadir had just as much equipment, but their walk would be shorter, because they would find a hide sight on the eastern side of the supposed Russian base.
Court and the Terp said good-bye and good luck to the others, then headed off to the northwest across the alluvial fan, towards a point in the distance they could not yet make out. Khadir and Yusuf heaved their heavy equipment on their backs and went north, planning on finding a layup position as close to the area as possible without compromising themselves.
CHAPTER 69
The dishes were piled one upon the other. There was the breakfast egg soufflé dish, then the lunch croque monsieur dish, and now Vincent Voland placed the green salad and onion soup dishes on top of the rest.
Voland had purchased all three of the day’s meals at the café downstairs from his office, and he had devoured all three of the day’s meals at his desk. Now that it was seven p.m., the thought occurred to him that he should clean up his mess lest the rats he often heard in the attic above him find the courage to risk coming down into his office in search of the source of the scents.
Just as he rubbed his eyes, breaking the staring contest with his monitors so he could get up to go wash his dishes and return them downstairs, an automatic e-mail popped up on his screen. It was a potential facial recognition hit on Drexler’s image.
He’d received a half dozen of these so far this afternoon, and none had played out, but he still felt the tingles of anticipation as he blew up the file and the picture loaded on his screen.
He looked at the picture carefully to orient himself, and then he rubbed his eyes again, possibly for the hundredth time of the day.
A group of people walked along a sidewalk in front of the window of some sort of shop. The camera that took the image was apparently positioned across the street, but it was a small road, and the light was perfect for photography.
Voland zoomed in on the people, and the software cleaned up the resolution.
“Mon dieu,” he said. The man in the tan sport coat with blond hair was Drexler, no question in Voland’s mind. Next to him was Malik, and next to him was an unknown man of Western appearance. Behind them were three dark-complected and dark-haired men, close enough to where Voland could tell they were all together.
And there, right in the middle of the entire entourage of men, was a tall and thin woman with long black hair.
He zoomed on her. Bianca Medina looked even more tired and fraught than she had the last time he saw her, but she was very much alive. He had no idea how he could have missed her leaving with the Syrians the other night on the driveway, but he was elated that she had not been killed.
Voland’s hands shook as he clicked the file to read the details. The image came from a camera at a travel agency on Kastoros Street near the Port of Piraeus, the location where the cargo ship caught smuggling into Syria had picked up its contraband nearly a year earlier.
He went online; his hands still trembled with excitement, and he found a nonstop Aegean Air flight from Charles de Gaulle leaving in an hour and a half. Flight time to Athens was three hours, fifteen minutes, and before Voland had even checked what time the flight was due to touch down in Greece, he was out the door of his office, with phone, briefcase, and passport in hand.
He had contacts in Athens he could call, and he could get them to canvass that area around the port. If Drexler and Malik had not left with Bianca for Syria already, then he would damn well know about it when they did try to leave.
CHAPTER 70
Court and the Syrian known as the Terp thought it would take three hours to make it across the strip of desert and into the farmland just south of the city, but five hours after setting off on foot, they still hadn’t arrived.
They had a lot of good excuses for their slow advance: rolling Syrian Arab Army patrols to the southeast of the city; small temporary outposts; BMPs and trucks, and even a T-72 tank sandbagged out in the desert with an entire platoon of infantry encamped around it.
Upon seeing the T-72 the Terp admitted he’d never run into that sort of defensive setup before, and this just gave Court more reason to believe Azzam would show up near the airfield the next day.
The mobile patrols were sporadic, but even these, the Syrian said, were more prevalent than he’d seen in the area, especially this far away from population centers. The two men had to go to ground several times while vehicles passed, but with the wide expanse of desert around them, it was difficult for anyone with a light on their vehicle to sneak up on two men on foot, so Court and the Terp managed to remain undetected.
After dealing with the tank and the patrols, they spent a half hour lying flat in a low wash as a pair of Mi-24 attack helicopters circled high overhead. The FSA soldier couldn’t tell if the helos were Syrian or Russian—both nations used the Russian-made Mi-24—but Court worried the Russians might have thermal equipment on board that would make them easier to see if they were up and moving around, so they remained small, flat, and still.
After the helos moved back to the north, the men climbed back to their feet, reorganized all the gear on their bodies that had been displaced when they hit the deck, and began walking again.
It was past midnight when they entered the trees and farmland just south of the city. It was like an oasis to Court; the air smelled better, the cool of the night felt better with the moisture off the plant life.
But more than anything, the chickpea and lentil fields, and the rows of trees that grew alongside them, made it easier to move without too much worry of long-range spotters in the city seeing them approach.
They arrived at the irrigation canal and found the tunnel supposedly dug by ISIS when they were under siege by the SAA.
Court shined a tactical flashlight into the hole, and even though the beam stretched out for a hundred yards, it still ended in blackness. “How far till the tunnel attaches to the sewer?”
The Terp admitted he had no idea.
“I thought you said you knew this town.”
“Even when we were fighting here, we didn’t live in the sewer. Once we get into the city, I’ll show you what I know about the area, but this part right here . . . I don’t know. It looks tight. Maybe we should just stay above ground.”
Court shook his head. “We’ll just take it slow, turn around if it gets too tight.”
Court went first and began crawling through the tunnel with his small tactical flashlight in his mouth.
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