There was nothing scientific about any of this, but all circumstantial evidence continued to point to a Russian base just off the highway east of Palmyra, and less than twenty-five kilometers from Court’s present location.
A Syrian major handed Court a sheet with the latest coordinates for the concentration of enemy forces trying to escape out of the hills. He wanted these exact coordinates relayed to the Russian helicopters.
Court decided to slightly alter the coordinates when he read them out over the radio, with the effect being to send the Russians to a location about two klicks west of the actual position of the Free Syrian Army forces. He wasn’t sure if it would save the guys on the ground or not, but he knew he couldn’t send the helos too far off course, or it would come back that they’d been fed completely incorrect coordinates.
* * *
? ? ?
Minutes later Court and Van Wyk left the command center, and minutes after that the entire KWA strike force was outside the control building, hustling back to their BMPs to leave the relative safety of the refinery and head out with Ali Company towards the east. As Court surveyed the scene around him, he saw bodies in the distance, slumped forms near some storage tanks. He was too far away to know if the people killed had been combatants or not, but he was well aware of the Hawks’ reputation for barbarism against civilians.
He climbed into his infantry fighting vehicle with the others, then looked up to see that Broz was sitting right in front of him. The Croatian still stared Court down.
Court said, “Dude, any time you want another shot.”
Broz clearly did want to start something, but Van Wyk sealed the hatch and looked in at the team. He saw the posturing between the two men. “Broz! Wade! You start fighting in this tin can with me in here with you, and I swear to God I’m going to shoot you both.”
Court and the Croatian both calmed down, but when the vehicle began bouncing on the road, it became obvious that any fight in these conditions would have likely resulted in more comedy than tragedy.
CHAPTER 61
In his office in central Paris, Vincent Voland hung up his phone and rubbed his tired eyes.
While he had spent his morning coordinating with the Jordanians a means to rescue the baby and the nanny in Syria, and the noon hour spent pushing Drexler’s photo out to all the airports and train stations in Europe along with warnings that he was behind the attacks in France and might be trying to leave the continent, he spent the afternoon hours on deeper research into every shred of intelligence of known Syrian Mukhabarat activities in Europe.
He focused on the physical logistics of the GIS, Syria’s General Intelligence Service, because he assumed Drexler would use Syrian government resources to get back to Syria. He researched airports first, looking for any examples in the past five years of known Syrian intelligence forces using international airlines, charter outfits, or privately owned aircraft. He even examined examples of Syrians sending freight via air, thinking it possible they might simply use the same means to ship a Swiss spook working for the Azzam regime as they would a shipment of jet avionics equipment or high-tech radar parts.
When he knew everything there was to be known about how Syrian government spies had moved men and matériel via air, he targeted every company, route, and middleman, and he communicated with contacts he maintained in the intelligence agencies in the different locations involved. He sent the new, high-quality photo of Sebastian Drexler and asked them to use their existing facial recognition assets to plug the image into the computers that analyzed security cameras around all the properties used by Syrian intel.
When the air routes back to Syria were as well covered as he knew how to make them, he began looking into ship traffic: specifically any instances of the GIS in using oceangoing vessels to move themselves, other people, or items. A couple of private yachts in the Med had been flagged as belonging to shell companies owned by Syrian interests, and Voland had the yachts located and the facial recognition software scanning video in the areas around the marinas where the yachts were in port.
Also through his work he’d found out that in the past year, two cargo ships from Europe had been stopped in the Mediterranean and found with illegal goods bound for Syria. Voland had been in this game long enough to know that for every shipment stopped on the water, certainly a dozen if not more made it through. Reading over the maritime investigations done by the EU into those responsible for the shipments, he learned that one of the two confiscated cargos had originated in Split, Croatia, and the other had departed from Athens, Greece.
Digging into the cases deeper, he found the actual ports where both cargo ships took on their illicit cargo.
Here both trails went cold. In both Split and Athens, investigators had uncovered no paperwork showing a freight company, a trucking company, or any other details of where the goods came from or how they were loaded on board. Instead in both cases it had been random spot checks on the water that determined the ship had been carrying contraband, and the contraband had been sent using forged manifests that could not be traced back to a person or company.
Still, Voland realized a ship from Europe to Syria would be a high-probability means of transportation for Drexler to return to Syria, especially since he must have known that by now he was being hunted at all the airports.
The Frenchman sent Drexler’s photo directly to the harbormasters of both ports where illegal Syrian cargo shipments had departed from the year before. Within an hour he was told that facial recognition suites were up and running at every camera at both ports, including the marinas, the traffic cams, police cameras, even restaurant and retail stores in the two locations.
Voland didn’t celebrate this positive step in his hunt because he knew Drexler could be driving to Russia, or taking a ship to South America, or simply hiding out in Europe for a month before returning to his patron nation.
These were just small steps, a few of many he would need to take today. Still, this was intelligence work. It required time, patience, and, more than anything else, dogged determination.
And in Voland’s case there was one more ingredient in the recipe. Voland was filled with and fueled by an intense passion to make Sebastian Drexler pay.
CHAPTER 62
Court and his group of mercenaries spent the afternoon climbing into and out of their BMP-3 as the KWA team worked to clear buildings behind Desert Hawks Brigade Ali Company’s spearhead to the east.
None of the mercs had been read in on the entire operation, of course, but it was becoming clear to Court that the objective for this day was simply to move through some villages along the M20 highway for the purpose of looking for a fight. Recon by fire, it was called. The Hawks rolled down the road, shot off a few rockets and rounds, and looked to see if there was any sort of fighting force in the area interested in mixing it up.
In the few cases during the afternoon where the militia did receive fire, Ali Company devastated the building or street where the gunfire came from, and then rolled on in their vehicles.
If any structure in the target area was left standing, the KWA men were sent in for room clearing.
Court hadn’t fired his weapon in the past three hours of action, simply because he’d seen no targets in the buildings he’d entered. He had seen dead and wounded; some were fighting-aged males, and others were clearly civilians. They’d all been killed or maimed by Desert Hawks weapons before KWA arrived.
It was scene after scene of sickening atrocity, and all the while Court wondered how the hell he was going to get away from this so he could report what he’d learned earlier in the day in the oil refinery.
* * *
? ? ?
About five in the afternoon Court’s BMP threw a tread, so he and the other five men from his team rode on the other KWA armored vehicle down a broken street, their weapons up in their arms. They’d been ordered to push on to the eastern edge of the little town and to find some hard cover high enough to get overwatch on the last village down the highway at the far edge of the security zone.
The KWA men were alone in the village with their one vehicle. The main section of Ali Company had been called out of the town and sent up to the north. Court heard from Van Wyk that somehow the Russian helos that they’d requested to pulverize the retreating FSA force had not located them, so nearly the entire battalion had been ordered to go out into the desert east of the hills to make sure the FSA was out of the perimeter the Desert Hawks had been ordered to secure.
The reason a dozen foreign mercs and a few vehicles had been the only ones left in the town had become clear to all minutes after arriving.