They talked for an hour and drank two bottles of wine. Every now and then Firas would receive a text from upstairs checking on him, and he’d confirm all was well, but Bianca worried the entire time someone would come downstairs to relieve him, in which case she’d have to start all over with another guard, another life story, and more red wine.
But soon enough, the young schoolteacher’s eyes went fuzzy and he put his head down on the table, and even though he wasn’t unconscious, he was disoriented enough to where Bianca just told him she was going to the bathroom in her little cell, but instead she stepped around a rack of brut champagnes. When she felt sure his attention was not on the situation around him but instead on trying not to puke, she darted up the stairs.
She’d made it through the kitchen and the hearth room, and now it was time to flee the house entirely. She felt that if she could get to a road she could find a ride, and if she could find a ride she could get a phone. Her plan was to contact Jamal’s au pair, Yasmin, and have her get a message to Ahmed that she had been kidnapped by Syrian expat insurgents, and this would ensure the safety of Jamal.
She stood up now, took a deep breath, and started to run.
“Take one more step and I’ll shoot one of those long legs of yours!”
The sound of Rima Halaby’s voice behind her, more stern now than Bianca had ever heard it, stopped her in her tracks. She raised her hands but did not turn back around at first.
Bianca said, “Madame, I am begging you. Please just let me go. It’s the only chance for my son.”
“The only chance for your son is the American who promised to put his life on the line for him, so the least you could do is fulfill your end of the deal and stay here.”
Bianca turned around and lowered her hands.
“You and I are different, Doctor.”
“This is true.”
“I mean that you are able to trust men. I am not so trusting.”
“I don’t trust all men. But that man, I believed that he believed he could do it, and that was enough for me.”
“But you have no idea what it’s like down there in Damascus now. There is no way he’ll survive, and by failing, he will reveal to Ahmed that I told you about Jamal.”
“Believe, daughter. Allah sent him to help us.”
“If that American is an angel, Rima, then he is an angel of death.”
Rima’s face hardened. “Perhaps that’s just what my country needs right now.” She looked at Bianca. “A man is risking his life for your child. He owes you nothing, your child nothing, me nothing. But he’s doing it. Believe in him. And believe me, daughter, if you try to run away again, I will kill you with my own two hands.”
* * *
? ? ?
Rima led Bianca through the hearth room on their way back down to the cellar stairs off the kitchen. The gun was low in her hand; she didn’t need it, but it was there in case Bianca decided again to run.
As the women entered the kitchen, they passed by Vincent Voland and Boyer, the leader of the new team of security men. Rima gave a slight embarrassed nod, Bianca just looked to the floor, and soon they both disappeared down the stairs.
Boyer shook his head and turned to Voland. “Vincent, if you are having trouble keeping the prisoner in, you might find it doubly so keeping a motivated enemy out.”
“Well then, I’m glad I hired you all. Whatever just happened, we will be certain it doesn’t happen again. You just worry about the threats from outside, and we’ll get things straightened out on the inside.”
Boyer said, “Put your people around the house, in the windows. My team and I will split. Two of us at the front, two of us in back. We’ll cover ninety degrees per man during the evenings.” Boyer pulled the cocking handle back on the MP5 submachine gun hanging from a sling over his shoulder. “We’ll be ready if they come, mon amie.”
CHAPTER 33
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.”