? ? ?
“Bianca!” Vincent Voland ran up to her and helped her away from the scene of blood and bodies, and then together they scrambled up the street and back towards Voland’s car. They climbed into it a minute later and raced off through the night, with shadowy figures just appearing in their rearview as the Frenchman floored it around a corner.
Bianca hyperventilated for over a minute while Voland drove.
“It’s all right, my dear. You are safe. I promise you, you are safe. It’s over.”
But when she could finally speak, Voland realized it wasn’t her own safety she was concerned with. “The American. He . . . he took Jamal?”
“Oui, mademoiselle. He took him and delivered him somewhere safe.”
“Where? He is in Jordan? In Paris?”
Voland hesitated.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
“He is still in Damascus, but tonight we will get him out. It’s all arranged.”
Bianca went catatonic. She sat quietly in the passenger seat for over a minute more. When she finally spoke she said the last thing Voland expected her to say. “I want to return to Syria.”
“What?”
“I want to die with my child.”
Voland shook his head. “No one is dying, I promise you.” He turned to her as he drove. “No one else will die. I will get Jamal out. Please, believe me. Just give me until tonight.”
* * *
? ? ?
Back in the alleyway, the bodies of six men lay motionless. The dawn’s light increased, seemingly by the second, as did the sound of approaching sirens.
But the men did not move.
A new sound entered the alley: the noise of racing footsteps, coming back from the north, the opposite direction from the port. Five men in black, pistols in their hands, skidded to a stop when they reached the figures, and they began checking each body for a pulse.
They almost missed the sixth man, but one of the Syrian operatives from the ship noticed a pair of feet sticking out from between two parked cars. He shined a light on the feet, tracked it up the body, and saw a blond-haired man, lying on his back. His eyes were open and blinking.
“I’ve got one alive!” he shouted.
The leader of the group turned and looked at him. “That’s Drexler. Get him to the boat.”
* * *
? ? ?
Sebastian Drexler offered the men no help at all in extracting him from Greece. He’d been wearing a Kevlar vest, but when Sauvage shot him multiple times in the back, it knocked him into the car. He’d banged his head and lost consciousness. When he’d come to, the GIS men were already on top of him, and he had no choice but to go with them back to the skiff.
But still, he wasn’t going to make it easier. He lay limp, and they carried him, one man on each appendage, and as soon as they were back on the landing craft and racing towards the ship, they checked his wounds and found them to be nothing more than bruises, and then they began interrogating him about what had happened.
Drexler couldn’t answer at first; all he could do was stare ahead, at the ship out in the distance. That ship meant Syria, and Syria meant Shakira, Ahmed, and certain death.
And the ship kept nearing. Despite him willing it to get smaller, it got larger with every second the skiff churned the water towards it.
One of the Syrians leaned over him, asking him again about who showed up to shoot Malik and the others and to steal Medina, the precious cargo. As the man spoke, his pistol in his shoulder holster hung tantalizingly close to Drexler’s reach.
In a moment of panic the Swiss operative went for it and tried to draw it free, but the Mukhabarat officer subdued him. Others came and pinned him to the hull of the boat, and then they shined a light in his eyes.
Drexler spoke perfect Arabic, so he understood what they said.
“Fucker tried to take my weapon!”
Another said, “Bastard’s in shock. He thinks he’s still fighting back there. Just watch him, and we’ll get him some help when we get him on board.”
Drexler went limp now, because there was nothing left to fight for. No matter what he did now, he knew.
He was a dead man.
CHAPTER 74
Ahmed al-Azzam had been waiting to hear reports on the pickup of Bianca from Athens before deplaning, but no word had come, and he knew the Russian military reception was waiting just outside the main cabin door. He stood from his seat, moved forward within his cluster of guards, and climbed down the air stairs pushed up to the door of the Yak-40.
When he stepped onto the tarmac of the Palmyra airport, feeling the cool morning desert air, he realized he hadn’t set foot in this part of his nation since well before the beginning of the civil war. Even though his armies and militias had taken back the territory over a year earlier, much fighting had remained close by, so it had been too dangerous for the president to make such a journey.
But now he was surrounded by over three hundred Russian soldiers, a half dozen Russian attack helicopters, and even more Syrian army and air force personnel and equipment. Beyond this cordon of protection, he’d been told, his militias had fanned out and pacified the towns and villages for twenty kilometers in all directions, solely for his ninety-minute visit.
This area was as safe as it could possibly be made, and, for the first time in a long time, Azzam finally felt comfortable in a location outside the capital other than the regime-held bastion of Latakia on the western coast.
Still, Azzam wore black body armor over his light blue button-down shirt, and his eight-man protection detail kept tight with him as he deplaned.
He wasn’t crazy. There was still a war going on, and this was still on the edge of contested territory.
But, Azzam thought, perhaps on his next trip out of Damascus he wouldn’t need the body armor. Russia had all but won this war for him, with help from the Iranians. A year from now the last pockets of resistance to his rule would be confined to somewhere out in the desert or up in the mountains, and the civil war would be over. His patrons in Russia and Iran would trade with him while other nations fretted over sanctions, and although his nation would not be as prosperous as it was before the war, Azzam himself would be even more prosperous from the under-the-table deals he fashioned with every Russian commercial opportunity that crossed his desk.
This Russian base would be the last nod to Russia’s power over him, because Azzam had worked out a secret agreement with the Iranians. In a few months, when the end of the war came, he would agree to allow the Iranians to create permanent bases in his country, just as he had done with the Russians. Moscow would be furious; they had forced him to agree to their patronage in a moment of weakness, but now that he had grown strong again—albeit in large part due to Russia’s help—he would dampen Russia’s hold over his nation by taking more support from the Shia regime in Tehran.
Azzam stepped down from the stairs, up to the welcoming committee of military men, and shook the hands of a Russian general and several colonels, who themselves had been ferried into this remote location for today’s photo op.
Within moments Azzam ducked his head and stepped into the back of a Kamaz Typhoon, a massive Russian armored transport vehicle, for the five-minute drive northeast to the Russian special forces base on the other side of the highway. This vehicle was followed by a second Typhoon, in case the first became disabled.
* * *
? ? ?
Almost two and a half miles away, two men lay on the cheap linoleum flooring of a bombed-out sixth-story apartment and looked through high-powered optics at the vehicle as it began rolling north.