Gentry, Saunders, and the two remaining militiamen had spent the entire afternoon driving south towards the Desert Hawks Brigade base near Damascus, stopping at loyalist checkpoints along the way. After the ambush up north, the men all but expected another engagement by hostile forces, but no attacks came. Even so, on two occasions between Homs and Damascus they passed wrecked-out and burned-out vehicles and evidence of other assaults on the highway, and twice more loyalist checkpoints had been hastily erected because of insurgent activity near the highway.
Originally Saunders had planned on completing the drive from the air base near Latakia to the camp near Damascus by five p.m., but it was almost eight thirty when he, Court, and the two militiamen rolled up the Damascus Airport Motorway and turned into the Babbila district to the southeast of the city. After another few minutes of driving, they pulled into a short line of vehicles waiting to enter the base of Liwa Suqur al Sahara, the Desert Hawks Brigade.
Court had been to Syria a few times before in his career, both with the CIA as a member of a hunter/killer team known as the Goon Squad and as a private assassin. He’d once assassinated the Nigerian minister of energy in the northeastern Syrian town of al Hasakah. But this was his first time in the capital. Driving around the city to get to the southeastern edge, he’d been impressed by the urban sprawl. It was well developed and modern, and from what he could tell from the highway, the city didn’t seem to have any trouble with electricity or much trouble with infrastructure, although he imagined once you got into any remaining rebel strongholds, suddenly the lights would stop working and the roads would be a disaster.
But he was in the geographical heart of the regime now, and the regime seemed to have things, more or less, in working order.
They stopped at the front gates, made it through security, passed through the concrete-and-razor-wire barricade, and rolled up to a large, long barracks building. Here the four men climbed out, all tired from their eventful day. The two Desert Hawks soldiers headed off in one direction, and Court followed Saunders through the night in the other.
Saunders took Court into the administrative building, where he was processed into the base, given a badge as a member of KWA employed by the Desert Hawks, introduced to a few officers working on this Saturday evening, and then the two men headed back into the night.
After a ten-minute walk through rows of barracks and warehouses, they stepped into the KWA team room positioned in a building near the center of the base. Saunders nodded at ten or so men sitting in the dark around a TV playing a DVD of a superhero film. “Lads,” he said, “meet Wade.”
There were a few nods and a couple of grunts. Half the men didn’t even look up.
It wasn’t really much of a welcome.
A muscular man in his forties wearing shorts and a tank top sat at a table and spoke up in a South African accent. “Heard you got hit.”
Saunders said, “Bloody full-on Al Nusra ambush. Twenty-five oppo personnel, minimum, and two technicals with bleedin’ cannons on ’em.”
“Friendly losses?”
“Six KIA, twelve WIA. It took an Mi-28 to end the bloody thing.”
“Jesus,” muttered a bearded and tatted American lying in his underwear on a sofa along the wall. “And all we did today was show ragheads how to throw frags through doors without them bouncing back in their faces.”
Another man—Court thought he detected a Dutch accent from him—said, “You boys murder any of the fuckers?”
Saunders slapped Court on the back. “We’ve got us a real shooter here. Our new Canuck Wade took out two ZU-23 gunners at five hundred meters.”
“Sweet,” the American said, but there were no more questions about the attack.
The South African stood up and walked over to shake Court’s hand. “I’m Van Wyk. Team leader. Got an e-mail from Klossner himself about you this morning. He told me to fold you into the unit and you’d fit in like you’ve been workin’ with us for years. High praise from a man who doesn’t deal it out.”
Court would have appreciated Klossner not saying a thing about him to the men he’d be with down here, but that cat was out of the bag now.
Court said, “I’ll give you my best.”
“From the sound of it, you already have.”
Saunders asked, “We rolling out on a raid tonight, boss?”
“Good news,” said the South African. “We’ve got the night free. Bad news. Tomorrow at oh six hundred we’re heading northeast. Looks like a multiday deployment, working with the spearhead company of the brigade’s First Battalion.”
Court could tell by his expression that Saunders seemed surprised by this. “Why the hell are we doing that?” the British mercenary asked.
“New security sweep east of Palmyra. Big op, by the sound of it. Russians and SAA at the heart of it, Iranians to the west, militia to the east. That’s all I really know, other than we’ll be helping pacify opposition centers both in desert and urban terrain.”
Saunders looked at Court. “These days the desert east of Palmyra is FSA to the north, ISIS to the south, split by the M20 highway. We could be fighting anybody and everybody on this run.”
“Terrific.” Court’s mind was racing. He’d considered himself immensely lucky to be sent by Klossner to live on and work at a base in a Damascus suburb, considering how his target here in Syria was also in a Damascus suburb, albeit on the other side of the city. But now he had just learned that first thing tomorrow morning he would be saddling up and moving out somewhere else in the country entirely.
On top of this, he desperately needed to communicate with Voland and Bianca to find the location of Jamal’s home, and for that he needed a phone or a computer. But phones and computers were off-limits for mercs. Klossner had told him the KWA team leader here was only allowed to use commo equipment in the Desert Hawks Brigade communications room, and even then, only under watch by an English-speaking intelligence officer from the militia group. Court had no expectations he’d be seeing the inside of the communications room himself, so he knew he had one night to think of how to reach out to Voland, because it didn’t sound like he’d get much opportunity to buy a mobile phone and an international calling card in the combat zone where they were heading.
He didn’t know if Jamal had that kind of time, or if Bianca did, for that matter, because Court imagined Drexler would be working hard to locate her in France.
Saunders had peeled his body armor off and tossed it on the floor by the door. He looked over the cuts and bruises he’d picked up during the gunfight earlier in the day. “I promised the new bloke I’d buy him a pint for savin’ me arse. Rally back here in thirty minutes for all who fancy coming with us.” To Court, Saunders said, “Tomorrow morning at oh five hundred we’ll get you kitted up like a proper operator. But tonight . . . let’s celebrate our victory against Al Nusra.”
Court cocked his head at this. “So . . . we can just leave and go out to a bar whenever we want? By ourselves?” The Mukhabarat officer at the airport had told him he was not allowed to travel anywhere without an officer of the Desert Hawks.
“Not exactly, but we’ve sussed out a way to slip off base, and we’ve got a Desert Hawks major complicit in our scheme. He’ll go with us as long as we keep a drink in his hand. And it’s not a proper pub. Sadly, you won’t find too many of those here. It’s a disco, and it’s utter shit, but it’s got booze. Better we go get pissed than sittin’ ’ere all bleedin’ night.”
Court didn’t feel like going to a disco, because he was tired, and also because he didn’t like discos, but the opportunity to learn a tried and tested way to sneak out of the base was just too good to pass up.
“I’ve only got euros.”
Saunders said, “They’ll gladly take euros, so you can buy the first round.”
* * *
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