Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY

At nine forty-five p.m. Court arrived in the Binh Thanh District, in the neighborhood of the Nguyen Van Dau building of the Wild Tigers. He parked his motorcycle in a fenced-in parking lot and began walking the neighborhood, taking care to remain a street away from his actual target.

On his recon of the area he was happy to see quite a few guest housing options, and although there were no rooms for rent directly across the street from his target location, he considered this a benefit. If Con Ho Hoang Da were smart, they would have informants in the neighborhood, and any foreigner taking a room with an easy straight-shot view to the building on Nguyen Van Dau would be met with suspicion and further scrutiny.

Instead Court found a fourth-floor room that faced Le Quang Dinh, a major thoroughfare one block west of Nguyen Van Dau. The room was small and spartan but much cleaner than his place in Mongkok. There was no private bathroom, but a walk down a well-lit corridor led him to a public restroom with four stalls, each of which had a large window that opened to provide ventilation, though with the hot sticky air and the large number of vehicles outside on the street, it almost made things worse. Court didn’t need the ventilation, but with a little effort he found he could open one of these windows fully and pull his body through. From here he spent two minutes standing on the sill before he devised a way to pull himself up and climb onto the roof, careful to avoid both the electric wires hanging all around and the large swaths of pigeon shit here and there on the wall and the concrete eave that surrounded it.

Once on the flat portion of the roof he moved low behind a parapet until he arrived at the southeastern corner. Here, crawling forward carefully, he could see the Wild Tigers building some seventy-five yards away.

From the look of this roof, no one came up here regularly, and from a long, slow recon of the other roofs and balconies in the area through his night vision equipment, he didn’t get the impression anyone would have eyes on him as long as he did not stand up and make a scene.

He found he could secure himself further by making a small lean-to structure using a five-by-three-foot square of corrugated steel sheet that had fallen off an awning of the next building over, balancing it on the parapet to enshroud himself in darkness and break up his outline from anyone looking his way from down the street.

Once he was satisfied with this hide site, Court began crawling and climbing to the south, from his building to the next. After dropping down onto an adjacent structure, he pulled a wireless camera out of his bag and positioned it on the ledge of a bank directly across the street from his target, standing it on the flat disc base that came with it and securing the base by tucking it under loose pieces of roofing tiles.

Lying flat on the cement roof just behind the camera, he used his phone to turn it on, then panned left and right, zooming in to the individual windows in the facility and then back out again. Employing this camera as well as his own overwatch to the north, he had the western side of the building covered, so he headed back to ground level to distribute his other remote cameras around the property.

At ten thirty p.m. Court sat alone on a plastic bench, leaned over a plastic table in front of a sidewalk café, and ate a plate of goi cuon, rice paper rolls stuffed with noodles, vegetables, and pork. With this he downed a grilled chicken skewer and a bottle of beer, all the while taking in his new environment, trying to get a feel for the flotsam and jetsam of the neighborhood around him.

After his late dinner he continued walking this part of the district himself to learn the streets, alleys, buildings, and other features he might need to know during his operation here. He would have stood out if he were anyone else, as there were not a lot of Western faces around here at all, but he stayed out of the lights, in the deepest darkness he could find. Confidently but carefully he adjusted his gait and his route to cover ground without leaving any discernible trail.

Almost no one noticed a figure moving at all on the streets, and not a soul remembered him five seconds after he passed.

During his walk he put his second camera on a two-lane street that backed up to the Wild Tigers building, positioning it in some ivy about seven and a half feet off the ground. He stepped up onto a stoop to enter an apartment building, then held himself out to the side with one hand and formed his pipe cleaners around the device. He was still nearly one hundred yards away from the target, but with the ten-power zoom he was close enough to the back gate to ensure that he had a view without endangering himself or his operation.

The last cam went on the corner just forty yards to the southwest of the facility. This was wedged between a pair of signs outside a Pizza Hut delivery outlet and a small travel agency. The camera’s body was well tucked away behind the wires that ran along the wall to provide electricity to the signs, but the lens itself was exposed. Anyone looking for it among the wires would have found this camera in moments, but Court knew he couldn’t spend more than a few seconds standing here adjusting it to make certain it was low profile.

Back in his room he checked the function of all the cameras quickly. Their batteries would last only about twenty-four hours before he’d have to go back to all three locations, take them back to his room, charge them with the USB port of his laptop, and then return them to their hiding places around the Wild Tigers building.

But his cameras running out of juice was among the least of his worries. In fact, his concern was much the opposite: that Dai wouldn’t give him twenty-four hours to prep before he hit the building himself, either killing Fan in the process or scaring him away from the area, and leading to the utter failure of Court’s assignment.

Court lay down on his bed and thought over his plan. He considered breaking into the headquarters early in the morning, then slipping into someplace where he could lie in wait, using the cameras he had stationed around to identify the area where Fan might be working, or even to see Fan himself through a window or arriving in a car.

But before he entered the facility he needed some confirmation that his target was even here, and that he did not have. Both Brewer and Dai had told him about this building and its relationship to the Wild Tigers, and neither of them knew of any other real HQs of the organization, although both of them had provided addresses of a few nightclubs, bars, and pool halls where gang members were known to hang out.

If Fan was somewhere else, Court getting himself wedged into a closet in this building would just waste time he did not have.

No, now he had to be prudent, to take it slow, despite the time pressures against him coming from all sides. For now it was all about holding Colonel Dai and his men at bay until Court had actionable intelligence.

Right, Court remembered with frustration. And there was that other squad of assholes running around hunting for Fan Jiang.

He needed to keep an eye out for the people who attacked the boat off Po Toi, too.

As a gentle rain began to fall outside his window, Court closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep on the lumpy little bed, knowing tomorrow was going to be one hell of a long day.

The rain had just begun to fall when Zoya Zakharova pulled into a narrow cobblestone alleyway lined on both sides with motorcycles and scooters. She found a spot for her Honda, parked it, and turned off the ignition, but she did not get up from the seat.

Instead she just looked around at her surroundings for a moment, making sure no one was close by and no open windows overlooked her location.

At five-seven and with her helmet on her head, her raincoat, and the messenger bag she wore instead of a purse, she might have looked like a man to anyone who glanced her way, but no one did. Instead she just sat there in the near darkness, in the rain, and she waited.

This was her third back alley of the evening, and the first two had been dry holes. The street in front of the nightclub on Pham Ngu Lau Street in District One had been too packed to operate there successfully, and a small dark bar on Nguyen Tat Thanh in District Four — while open and an easy mark from an operational standpoint — simply had none of the potential targets on Zoya’s list.

Now she was trying her luck in District Three, on Dien Bien Phu at a basement pool hall called the Gambler.

“In position,” she said into her headset just as the back door of the pool hall opened and disgorged a group of young men. She watched as they lit cigarettes, pounded fists, and climbed aboard different bikes in the alley. She took in their faces but saw no one that spiked her interest.

“You receiving?” she said again.

There was no response.

“Sirena for Anna element,” she called a third time, and finally she received a reply from Ruslan.

“We hear you. Entering the front door now.”

Zoya thought Ruslan and Sasha were par for the course for Zaslon men, meaning they were pricks. She had determined this the first time she worked with this team, and now it barely registered with her. She told herself it was only partly because she was a woman. The real problem was their dead-set belief that they were superior, both physically and mentally, to everyone they ever came in contact with in their life. Sure, if they were up with top brass in Moscow they would show deference, and certainly they’d all but groveled when called upon to do so during their military careers in GRU, Russian military intelligence. But now they were SVR Zaslon, out in the field, serving on a task force led by a woman with a civilian background; they probably had to swallow their tongues before every response so they didn’t say something insubordinate, sexist, or both.

Zoya was so used to the back talk, the delays in response, and the downright insolence from this group as well as others just like them that it barely fazed her anymore, but it did have the effect of making her wish she were on another type of mission.

Her favorite type of mission… one where she worked alone.

The past week felt to her as if it were her job to manage a big group of overgrown teenage boys, although thinking back to her own teenage years, she realized her own father didn’t have it so easy with her.

“Tzarstvo emu nebesnoe.” God rest his soul, she muttered softly.

She smiled a little now, thinking back to her childhood, and then she thought about the men with her here in Vietnam. Well, at least she didn’t have to clean up after them on the boat or at the safe house; as rough as these guys were, as bad as they stank by the end of each day, at least they had military order in their lives that ensured each item in their possession remained zipped in the right pouch at all times. But still, these men, like most men, could be a mess. Zoya had lived in safe houses, team rooms, bunkhouses, and garrisons surrounded by men most all her adult life, so she knew how to keep her own personal space to her liking and mentally shut out the stench, clutter, and grime of large groups of men living in close proximity.

The Russian intelligence officer had just cleared her mind of her father and the jerks she worked with when she heard Sasha speak through her earpiece.

“Positive sighting on… break.” She heard him mumble something to Ruslan, and she imagined the two men looking at the photos she’d texted them on their mobiles, right there in the middle of a pool hall. She closed her eyes, thinking about the shitty tradecraft, but then told herself these men had been given mere minutes to memorize the faces of thirty-five potential targets.

She’d cut Sasha some slack.

After twenty seconds, however, she spoke. “Who is it, Anna Five?”

The reply came after a little more whispering. “It’s number thirteen.”

Zoya’s memory had been good her entire life, but it had been honed to a steel trap through years of training and practical application. “Bui something,” she said without hesitation. “He’s a local cop.”

“Uh… affirmative. Bui Ton Tan. He’s wearing blue jeans, a white shirt with a red track jacket over it. He’s drinking at the bar alone. Do we approach?”

Zoya smiled a little in her helmet. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

She knew the two Zaslon men would not be operating in a low-profile manner. This guy would see them in seconds, if he hadn’t seen them already.

A minute later she smiled again when Ruslan reported that the target appeared to be heading for the back door. “You want us to follow him out?” he asked.

Zoya replied, “Nyet. Just bring the car around.”