Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

As he began hurrying towards the stairs, Court called Colonel Dai. He could not know for certain whether these attackers were Dai’s men or part of the mystery force who hit the cargo ship in Po Toi the day before yesterday, but either way, Court knew he was screwed. There was no way he could make entry to the building himself with whatever was happening in there. The state of alert for the Vietnamese gangsters inside would obviously be through the roof; there would likely be local cops on the way, and, it went without saying, the two vanloads of new actors on the scene showed no compunction in killing threats in their way.

And Court was armed with nothing save for a small folding knife.

All he could do was hope Fan Jiang wasn’t in the building in the first place, or else that the Wild Tigers got him out of there before he was either killed by the Chinese or captured by the other unit after him.

He listened to his earpiece while Dai’s phone rang and rang. Court ran down the stairs, through the narrow hallways of the guesthouse towards a back door that opened to a stoop in the back alley. Dai’s phone still rang in his ear as he launched over the stoop and down into the alley, then sprinted to the gated lot on Le Quang Dinh where his motorcycle was parked.

Court gave up on the call before he got to the lot; he slipped the phone back in his pocket but left the earpiece in his ear as he put his helmet on his head. He climbed onto his Suzuki bike in the parking lot and fired it up, then waited for the attendant to raise the bar so he could pull out onto Le Quang Dinh.

He made a left into heavy scooter traffic, then another left onto a side street. This led him back in the direction of the Wild Tigers building, so Court slowed, then pulled his bike onto the sidewalk at the corner.

He quickly remounted his GPS unit on the handlebars of his bike, then stood there on the sidewalk, straddling the Suzuki, looking up the street through the steady rain. From his position here the Wild Tigers headquarters appeared to be as quiet as at any other time all day, so Court took the opportunity to pull his phone from his jacket pocket and check the camera feeds.

Just as he swiped to the rear camera, he saw movement on his screen. Two men leapt out of the front seats of the minivan as it sat parked in the back lot, facing the entrance to the underground parking garage. They dropped into combat crouches, pistols in their hands, both aiming at the dark entrance to the ramp down to the garage.

Court glanced around quickly at his own environment, then looked back at his phone.

As he watched, a black sedan launched out from the darkness of the underground ramp, so fast it appeared to Court to actually catch air for a moment before the vehicle bottomed out. It swerved hard to the right of the van, striking the shooter who’d jumped out of the driver’s seat, knocking him into the air and over the hood of a car parked next to the minivan. The black sedan raced on, making a hard right to fire out the back gate, and then it took a ninety-degree left to head north.

Here it sideswiped a man pulling a food cart, knocking both him and his cart into the air, sending them crashing off Court’s screen.

He watched it all on his phone, but he could hear tires screeching a hundred yards away on the far side of the building.

And then the sirens of approaching police vehicles began to wail.

Court couldn’t see into the black sedan, but whoever was inside had to be important. Maybe Fan himself, maybe not, but certainly at least a major player in the organization.

With nothing else to go on, no desire to sit around here and wait for the cops to arrive in force, and no confidence that anyone important to him would be left alive inside the building across the street when this was all over, Court decided he had to go after the black sedan.

He revved the throttle on his bike and launched out into the rain and the traffic, leaned to the left, and whipped through the scooters, cars, and pedestrians.

It took Court a minute, but he did catch up to the fleeing vehicle, and it wasn’t due to any high-speed daredevil feats on the street bike. Instead it was the lousy traffic that slowed the black sedan to a crawl just a few blocks north of the Wild Tigers building but nevertheless allowed a determined driver of a motorcycle to pick his way through.

Court found himself just a few car lengths behind the black sedan. From a quick look at the rear of the car through all the action on the street, he managed to ID it as a BMW 7 Series, and this convinced him even more that he was following someone who could help him with his mission. There were some luxury cars around Saigon, a significant number, in fact, but Court didn’t imagine anyone short of top brass for the Wild Tigers would be escaping from their HQ in a ninety-thousand-dollar ride.

The black BMW 7 Series pushed its way through the congestion. The driver laid on his horn in an effort to coax vehicles out of his way. Court did the same some seventy-five yards back. Several times he stood up on the footrests of the Suzuki to try to pick out the sedan ahead in the heavy traffic, then immediately dropped down as soon as he did so in order to focus on something in his way.

He desperately wanted to check his phone to see what the hell was going on back at the building behind him, but the chaotic street ahead of him required all his attention. He whipped around the scooters and cars moving in the same direction but at slower speeds, fought his way through cross traffic at intersections, and narrowly avoided pedestrians who used the low speed of vehicles here to make their way across the street far away from any crosswalks.

He had just accelerated around a man with a pushcart when he saw a garbage man changing out a metal can on the side of the road right in front of him. Court couldn’t believe this idiot was calmly standing in the far right traffic lane to do this, but he didn’t mull it over for long, because he had to bounce his rented Suzuki up onto the sidewalk to avoid him.

Doing this put him right in the middle of an open-air market along the side of the street, and with the sedan continuing through the intersection, he had no alternative but to race through the milling crowd as he drove along the sidewalk.

Court found himself puttering along among the foot traffic, stuck on the sidewalk because of the long impenetrable wall of plastic-tarp-covered portable kiosks lining the side of the road. He shouted to move people out of his way, slowed down significantly when the elderly or those pushing strollers forced him to do so, then sped up to a dangerous pace when a pair of cops in loose-fitting green uniforms blew whistles and swung batons in the air as he passed.

He raced through a group of young locals, forcing them to dive to safety in all directions, then saw a tight opportunity on his left to squeeze back on the road. He jacked the handlebars, began racing towards an intersection, then almost immediately saw the black BMW parked there, stuck in traffic, just on his left.

Court had no choice but to whip back to the right, almost flipping over his bike as he did so to avoid detection by his target, and then continue on down the sidewalk for another block before coming to a stop. Seventy-five feet behind him four local police ran through the crowd in his direction, voices shrieking and batons swinging in the air, but Court just waited, watching the intersection ahead, looking for the black BMW.

The traffic wasn’t quite bumper-to-bumper, but it was moving along at only ten to fifteen miles an hour, so the wait for the vehicle he was tailing felt interminable.

When the cops were just twenty-five feet behind him the BMW rolled by, directly in front of a green and white city bus. As soon as he was flush with the rear of the bus he throttled hard, sending his bike out into the street and spraying the police with rainwater off his back tire.

For almost a minute as he drove Court was blocked by the bus in front of him; he had no eyes on the BMW so all he could do was drive on and swivel his head to the left and right, checking the connecting roads to make sure his target had not turned off. Finally the bus turned to the right and Court saw the 7 Series, five car lengths ahead, just as it made a left a few blocks short of the airport road.

Court followed suit, and soon his target merged onto an on-ramp for a six-lane street. Court stayed behind, and while he steered he carefully adjusted the screen on his GPS unit, backing out the scale so he could try to get some idea of where they were going.

As both vehicles sped up on the new road, Court’s GPS unit on his handlebars indicated they were heading due west now, and it looked as if they were leaving the city altogether.

Court stayed farther back than he would have liked considering the congestion because he realized the person or persons in the vehicle ahead might be worried about being tailed right now, since they’d just raced away from an attack. He didn’t want to lose them — he really had no fallback plan if he did — but he knew riding their bumper would mean immediate exposure.

Suddenly Court hit his brakes hard, shimmying a little on the wet pavement. Up ahead, three Ho Chi Minh City police motorcycles came out of a side street and seemed to link up with the BMW, which had moved into the right lane. The black car did not stop, but the driver rolled his window down and communicated with one of the cops; then the window went back up and the three motorcycles formed a triangle around the BMW, two in front and one behind. Court noticed the rear biker looking back over his shoulder a couple of times, but Court did nothing to stand out. He just rolled along with dozens and dozens of others heading northwest on the highway.

This was all good news to the American on the motorcycle fifty yards behind. The BMW would be easier to tail if it ran in a motorcade, and the possibility that someone important was inside the car, while already high, was now a sure bet.

For fifteen minutes they continued on, until the cement and bustle of the city began to give way to a configuration of leafy palm-lined suburban areas, broken up by some small cultivated plots of land.

Court had backed off further with the arrival of the cops, and he just managed to make out the black car and the three motorcycles surrounding it all taking a left across heavy traffic. From this distance the turn of the target vehicle would have been hard to detect on its own, but he was greatly helped out by the fact that the motorcycle policemen stopped the oncoming flow like they were running a legitimate motorcade, and the resulting jam wasn’t hard to see, even from several hundred yards back.

Court immediately crossed traffic himself, bumped back onto the crowded sidewalk, and accelerated until he, too, made it to the intersection, and he steered to the left.

The BMW was ahead of him once again, still with People’s Police motorcycles forming a triangle around it, and Court knew he had just dodged a bullet.

He could barely take his eyes off the four vehicles moving together because there were so many turnoff opportunities for them. It would take only one moment of reduced vigilance for Court to lose the entire entourage if they left this road and pulled into a parking garage or raced down a side street.

So Court kept his eyes on them, but as he did so, he carefully placed a call on his mobile and listened to the ringing in his headset.

Suzanne Brewer answered quickly; Court struggled through the challenge-response protocol, then said, “The Chinese hit the building. They didn’t tell me they were coming.”

“Shit! And Fan?”

“I’m tailing a vehicle that squirted.” He added, “I don’t know if Fan’s in it. I don’t know if Fan is back at the building. I don’t know much of anything, but I’m making some educated guesses, and I think I’m doing the right thing here.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I need you to tell me where I’m going.”

“How the hell do I know where you are going?”

“I’m following what I believe to be senior Wild Tiger leadership to the west. We must be leaving the city because I can see rice paddies in front of me. I’ve had to back off several hundred yards, and I’ll probably lose him if he turns off.”

Brewer said, “I’ll ask again. How am I going to know their destination? Do you think I have a satellite tracking you?”

“For once in my life that would be terrific.”

“No sat, no drone.” She added, “You were the one who demanded a low-profile approach to this, remember?”

Court said, “Last time I looked, this town was crawling with Agency hacks. Now I need some help and you’re telling me I’m all by myself?”

Brewer replied, “Bet you wish we didn’t call off the two case officers you ran into an hour ago.”

Court said nothing. He didn’t think Ken and Barbie would be any help to him now, but he’d sure made it easy for Brewer to use that against him.

“Whatever,” he mumbled. “I’ll just try to tail a car all the way across the country by myself.”

She said, “Calm down. What do you want me to do?”

“Find out what’s to the west of here, tap into cameras, look into what we know about the Wild Tigers, see if they have property or known contacts in this direction. I need to know something in the next few minutes.”

Court read his GPS coordinates to Brewer, and she typed them into her computer.

“Jesus,” she muttered, overwhelmed with the unspecific nature of his request and the timeline attached to it. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. I’m on a rented motorcycle. Can you find out if the government is working with the rental companies here to chip these things somehow so they can track them?”

To this Brewer was unequivocal. “You shouldn’t have rented a vehicle. We could have provided you with something clean.”

Court could hear typing over the connection to Langley. He assumed Brewer was already at work on his requests. “Thanks for the advice. I was in a rush last night, and I had to do this by the seat of my pants. Anyway, I wasn’t worried about anyone tracking me in the city; there are enough ways to melt away.”

“But now you’re leaving the city.”

“Right, and if I’m out here in the boonies and the police or intelligence services take an interest in me…”

Brewer interrupted. “I just instant-messaged our experts on HCMC, and they tell me we do not know if the rental companies are working with the government.”

“Some experts.”

Brewer did not respond to that, but she said, “I’ve got some information about your location. You are in the Mekong Delta, and the terrain around you is the same pretty much all the way to Cambodia. We know the Wild Tigers aren’t operating in Cambodia, so that puts a western endpoint on the search, but that doesn’t mean the Wild Tigers don’t have some property in the direction you are going. I’ve got analysts working on that right now.”

Court drove along for a few minutes more, then spoke aloud into his headset.

“Brewer, you still there?”

“Still here, still working.”

Court said, “Wanted to give you a heads-up. I’m dumping this bike.”

“Just like that? How are you going to continue to follow the Wild Tigers vehicle?”

“Probably better you don’t ask.”

As Court raced along the flat two-lane road he watched a man on a dirt bike ahead, coming in his direction from the right along an intersecting muddy track that ran alongside a canal. Court would pass by on the paved road before the man arrived at the intersection, unless Court slowed down.

Court did slow down, and he came to a stop at the intersection with the unpaved road. He began waving his arms at the approaching biker.

“Hey!”

Brewer was still on the line; Court knew this because he could hear her furiously typing in his ear.

She said, “Hey, what?”

“Not you. Hang on a second.” Court pulled the GPS unit off his handlebars and shoved it into his backpack.

The man on the dirt bike slowed and stopped, and the man turned off the engine, then removed his helmet. He appeared to be no more than eighteen, and he didn’t show any defensiveness in his actions.

Court quickly looked up at the BMW sedan, now farther away than at any point since he’d started tailing it.

To the kid he asked, “Do you speak English?”

The man shook his head. “Khong.” No.

Quickly Court reached into his shirt, then pulled a thousand U.S. dollars from his money belt. He held it up, then pointed to the man’s bike.

The kid looked confused. Court reached out, and the man took the bills.

Now Court climbed off his Suzuki street bike, motioned to the dirt bike, and stole a quick glance at the BMW, a half mile down the road in the light rain. When the young man did not get off the bike, Court pushed him once in the chest. The kid was now both confused and angry. He started to yell something at Court, but the American pulled his knife.

The kid got the message instantly, and he climbed off his bike. Court said, “I’m sorry, dude. No time to negotiate.” Almost as an afterthought he reached back into his money belt and grabbed a thick wad of Vietnamese currency. He shoved it into the young man’s hand, as well as the dollars, while keeping his knife at the low ready.

In seconds Court was on the dirt bike, a Honda XR250. He fired up the engine, looked down at the fuel gauge, and saw, to his relief, the needle resting over the three-quarters mark.

Court took off his black helmet and handed it to the kid. He then pointed to the white helmet in the kid’s hand. “I’ll trade you.”

Though he didn’t speak English, the young man held at knifepoint understood what was being asked of him. He handed over his helmet.

Court fit it on his head and, with another “sorry,” took off to the west with an open throttle, leaving the kid behind with the rented Suzuki and enough cash to buy himself a new motorcycle.

Court couldn’t see the BMW and the three police bikes anymore; they were somewhere far in the distance. He just leaned into the wind, accelerating to a dangerous speed on the wet road, and concentrated on his objective ahead, trying to catch up.

Suzanne Brewer had listened to the entire exchange with the young man.

She spoke into his ear. “You just mugged a guy. Stole his motorcycle.”

“Not how I see it.”

“How do you see it?”

“Colonel Dai just bought a used dirt bike in Vietnam. I was kind of the middleman.”

“Tell yourself whatever works, Violator.”