Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

An old gray Mi-8 helicopter, bigger than a school bus and just about as aerodynamic, sat quietly in a gentle rain shower, alone in the middle of a parking lot. Around the hulking aircraft, four bearded men in their fifties and sixties stood with their hands on their hips, green flight suits dampening by the minute.

The pilot looked down at his watch after wiping water away from its face, then pulled a walkie-talkie from his pocket and checked the volume knob.

Tall grasses grew through the cracks in the asphalt parking lot between the helo and a row of derelict warehouses, just fifty meters away. On the other side of the rusty buildings lay the banks of the Bassac River, brown and slow in the warm afternoon.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, languished under the same weather as Saigon, some hundred miles to the southeast. It wasn’t officially monsoon season yet, but puffy gray rain clouds had hung intermittently over both capitals for the past few days, and more rain was forecast for tonight.

The pilot of the big helicopter had taken the bad weather into account, of course, but it would have little effect on his flight plan; on this evening’s flight he planned on staying below the clouds and out of the mountains.

A rusty metal side door to one of the dockside warehouses creaked open, and a row of figures marched out into the weather. Each person in the line wore a large green backpack and a dark hooded rainproof jacket, most carried suppressed short-barreled rifles hanging from slings around their necks, and all of them wore radio headsets on their heads under olive drab, black, or green hats of various shapes and sizes.

The four crewmen of the Mi-8 looked to one another, then jumped into action. The pilot and copilot climbed aboard to start the engines, and both the crew chief and the door gunner helped the passengers load their equipment.

The eight SVR Zaslon commandos shook out of their heavy packs and threw them into the old civilian helicopter, and then they pulled themselves aboard after unslinging their rifles. They strapped themselves into the benches that ran along the fuselage as Zoya Zakharova, the last in the group, climbed into the helo.

Zoya wasn’t encumbered with a rifle as were the men of the task force, so she had an easier time of it.

This Mi-8 was a Russian-made aircraft, and consequently Zoya had been in dozens of these fat birds in her life, but looking around at this particular Cambodian relic, she wondered if it would even start.

A minute later the engines coughed and shook, to the point where Zoya had doubts that this old bird would get off the ground. She kept her eyes away from the others and looked out the open door; the last thing in the world she wanted to do in front of these paramilitaries was to show any insecurity about flying in a fucking helicopter.

The Mi-8 did manage to fight its way up into the air, then it turned on its axis and tipped its nose. The pilot lifted his machine higher and picked up speed. He rose over the rusty warehouse, climbed over the Bassac River, then soared higher into the warm, wet air.

Soon the gray helicopter was racing along just below the gray clouds hanging low over the capital city of Cambodia.

Zoya looked down at the flat cityscape for a while, then decided to put her worries about the questionable transport out of her mind. She did this for two reasons, both of them logical — for one, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to prevent a helicopter crash from her seat on a bench here in the back. And two, she had a thousand other responsibilities now, and precious little time to prepare for what was to come.

The graceless aircraft shook and rattled as they flew out of the city, over green hills and muddy fields now, heading towards the border with Vietnam.

The Mi-8 was currently owned by Russian intelligence and kept at the airport in Phnom Penh, but it had seen service with the Cambodian military back in the Cambodian — Vietnamese War in the late seventies. The crew were Russian SVR pilots who’d been working an op in Indonesia and were flown in on a Russian military cargo plane for today’s in extremis mission. This Mi-8 was not normally armed, but the crew brought two Chinese-made W85 machine guns along with them that they could hang from the sides and use as door guns by the crew chief and the gunner, but for now they kept the big weapons hidden in the cabin.

Zoya hoped like hell the machine guns wouldn’t be needed, but she’d requested the extra firepower herself. She was meticulous in her planning, especially when working with others, and the uncomfortable truth was that the extraction phase of tonight’s operation was a massive unknown. She had no idea what they’d find at the compound, and she wanted to be ready for as much that could go wrong as possible.

And, as Zoya had learned on dozens of operations in her career, sometimes big guns went a long way towards remedying big problems.

The primary intelligence about the location of the Wild Tigers secure compound came from the Ho Chi Minh City police officer Zoya had picked up the evening before. This man was still being held incommunicado in the laundry room of the safe house, and local NOCs had instructions to drop him off at some street corner when this was all over with a warning to keep his mouth shut unless he wanted it known he was the man who fucked over Con Ho Hoang Da. But he wasn’t Zoya’s only source. Since last night she’d communicated with the Russian embassies in Hanoi and Phnom Penh and checked into property records, police records, tax records, and other databases that helped her paint a picture with data about the people residing at the compound. By noon she felt certain the old rubber plantation facility near the Cambodian border was the current hiding place of Fan Jiang, and she immediately committed her entire task force to taking the location down this evening.

There were more subtle ways to be certain — satellite analysis, drones, human intelligence operations — but Zoya had no time for these measures. If she could find Fan Jiang, she was certain the Chinese and the Americans could also find Fan Jiang, and they might not wait around for days building a target picture before they acted.

No. With what Fan Jiang knew about Chinese secure computer networks, she wouldn’t have been surprised if the Chinese fired a cruise missile into Vietnam to kill the poor son of a bitch the second they discovered his location.

She felt good enough about her intel to go forward this afternoon, and she felt even more sure she was making the right call now. She’d received word from the SVR Residency in Hanoi just an hour ago about a shoot-out at the Con Ho Hoang Da compound in Saigon, and reports from police there that the culprits looked like Han Chinese.

China’s Ministry of State Security and Ministry of Defense were getting closer to Fan, and they’d find this compound soon, so Zoya had to commit herself and her men tonight.

But while she wore a look of utter confidence in front of Vasily and the others, until she laid her eyes and her hands on the Chinese national she’d come all this way to snatch, she wouldn’t take a single easy breath.

The Russian foreign intelligence operative studied her maps again for a few minutes, but then she took a break to look across the open cabin at Vasily. He was geared up in civilian dress like the rest of his unit and Zoya herself, and there was nothing to distinguish him as the team leader, other than the fact that he was a few years older than some of the others on his team.

And for his nature. In a group full of alpha males, Vasily was the boss.

Zoya knew Vasily wouldn’t have allowed her along on the raid if he’d seen a way out of it, but the simple truth was he had no choice but to concede to her request to accompany the direct-action element on this mission. If she wasn’t there with the rest of the task force, she wouldn’t have the time she needed for the sensitive site exploration, the retrieval of intelligence there at the compound in the event Fan himself was not located.

But even though Zoya was on the mission to assault the compound, this did not mean she was on the team to hit the buildings themselves. Still, Zoya knew she’d be right there, just behind the action, and the only thing she would change by choice was that she’d rather be kicking in a door or two herself.

But while the Zaslon men had rifles, Zoya just carried a Glock pistol on her utility belt and some extra magazines in her cargo pants. She had a knife on her belt, as well, along with a second blade taped to the small of her back and a small Beretta Bobcat .22 caliber pistol in an ankle holster.

These were defensive weapons only, while Vasily and most of his men carried AKS-74U suppressed short-barreled variants of the AK-74, and Mikhail wielded the VSS sniper rifle.

Only twenty-five minutes after taking to the air, the pilot signaled they were approaching the landing zone. This wouldn’t be a hot LZ; they would be setting down in a sparsely populated portion of eastern Cambodia, landing two miles inside the border so that they could approach the Wild Tigers compound silently and by using a network of irrigation canals for both cover and concealment.

The Mi-8 touched down on a gravel road alongside a creek, the helo shut down upon landing, and the four-man crew grabbed Kalashnikovs and set up a simple security cordon while the task force began donning their packs and stowing their weapons under their jackets. If they were seen around here on one of the established trails through the jungle or between the farms, they would appear to be just a group of Western hikers heading to the southeast. It would seem strange, maybe — this wasn’t an area known for much tourism — but it wouldn’t cause alarm.

The Mi-8 would wait here by the creek and remain in radio contact with the task force and then, when the call came from Vasily, it would race over the border either to an LZ closer to the target or, if the machine guns or a hasty extract were required, directly over the target itself.

The nine-member task force walked on roads, through fields, and even along a knee-high creek for over ninety minutes before they passed the invisible border between the two nations by stepping up onto a levee at the southern end of one rice paddy and then back down into the northern end of another paddy. Only their GPS devices told them they were in a new nation, because there wasn’t a damn bit of difference to the mud squishing under their boots.

The Russians had timed their flight from the capital so they would cross the Cambodian border on foot right at the end of evening nautical twilight: the moment when the sun set twelve degrees below the western horizon, or the official beginning of nighttime.

Zoya checked her watch and was pleased to see they were right on schedule.

For the next half hour there was no conversation between the nine individuals moving single file, but just before eight p.m. Vasily spoke softly into his interteam radio and demanded full silence, because they were getting close enough to the compound to risk detection from any patrols out of the target location. No one really expected that the gangsters from Saigon would operate their rural safe house like a military installation, but Vasily hadn’t made it this long in his dangerous career by taking chances.

At eight forty-five p.m. the nine Russians had all taken a knee in deep trees and thick brush that ran along the canal to the west of the compound. The rain had stopped and they took their time drinking from water bladders and eating rations. Ideally they would arrive late enough in the evening to dull the senses of any sentries at the location, but again, Zoya didn’t want to wait for the middle of the night. They’d hit around ten p.m., use the darkness to their advantage, and use stealth as long as they could, and then they would just use surprise and violence to power their way to their target.

With a nod from Vasily, Mikhail pulled the second stage of a scuba regulator from his pack, adjusted the hose over his shoulder, and placed it in his mouth. He then climbed down into the canal. It was only five meters across and two meters deep in the center, but he’d use the air to stay under the brown water and remain undetected for much of his movement.

Zoya watched while the team’s sniper crossed to the other side of the canal. There, with only the top of his head sticking out of the water, he began moving slowly in the reeds and brush towards the east. The progression through the three hundred meters of muddy canals was scheduled to take an hour.

She, along with the rest of the men, had small oxygen tanks and swim masks, as well, and they’d follow Mikhail ten minutes behind. But they wouldn’t put their heads under the water until the last hundred meters or so, and from there they would each use their GPS wrist units to follow the canal. Mikhail would arrive minutes before the rest, set up on the far side of the canal, and use his VSS suppressed sniper rifle along with its infrared scope to identify any sentries outside the buildings.

A few minutes later, Zoya Zakharova and the rest of the task force slipped into the water, sank up to their necks, and dug their boots into the muddy surface below them. Together they began a slow, dreamlike push to the south.