Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Court Gentry lay flat in the thick foliage by an irrigation canal, staring ahead through the head-mounted night observation device he’d made with his binos and his ball cap. He was tired and gross, covered in the slime of rotting foliage and mud, and he had no illusions that he would dry out any time before sunrise, which was eight hours away.

Through it all, however, he managed to look on the bright side. The moonless overcast night was sticky and warm, which meant he could survive being soaked to the bone here much better than he could in some colder climate.

He’d kept his gear inside his waterproof backpack for the two-and-a-half-hour hike through the flooded fields and thick bush, and he was glad he did, because he’d stumbled face-first in knee-high water at least a dozen times on his trek. Now he lay on semidry ground just south of the canal, and even though the hazy green image in front of him was narrow because of the optics he wore, he nevertheless had a perfect view of his target, because while his side of the canal was covered in trees and brush, the other bank had been cleared.

Just feet from the water’s edge on the north side of the canal was an unpaved parking area. Court could see the black BMW he’d tailed earlier parked in the darkness there, along with a few other cars and trucks, and a few scooters and motorcycles, most of them covered with tarps. Beyond the vehicles was thirty yards of open ground, and then a large French Colonial villa in the center of the property that looked to Court like a slightly more ornate antebellum plantation home. Vines covered the walls of the three-story structure, weaving around the decorative architectural molding, much of which had chipped or cracked through the effects of weather and age. Old black shutters hung off half the windows, and the tiled roof appeared to be original, meaning it was probably a hundred years old, and it looked every single day of it.

Ahead to his left was a low wooden barn, and while there was substantial light coming from the big villa itself, the barn was dark and ramshackle and it appeared to be uninhabited.

Two sentries walked the three-acre property along individual routes; each moved alone in a predictable and lazy pattern, and they wielded flashlights. The long white beams moved up and down, not side to side, and this gave Court the impression they were just walking, not actively searching the grounds.

Through his NODs Court could see the shape of a human form appear from time to time in a southern window on the third floor of the big villa, and it looked to him like this person was probably guarding some room or a hallway in front of a room but had also been tasked with eyeing the waterlogged area to the south of the villa.

The front of the large building faced east; Court couldn’t see the entrance from the south, so he had no idea if there were other guards at or near the front door. He could just see a bit of a porch at the back door on the western side, along with the closer portion of the western wall of the villa.

On his laborious sloshing walk here through the rice paddies he’d remained a couple hundred yards west of the one road to the villa, but through his night vision gear he had seen a pair of sedans set up as a checkpoint on the dirt road. Several men stood around each vehicle with shotguns, controlling access to the villa. Court imagined this roadblock had been put in place after the attack in Saigon today.

Yes, there was a decent security posture in place to warn of or even repel an attack up the road, but apparently the Wild Tigers here had no major concerns that a lone man just might splash, swim, and stagger overland through the slop for hours to get here on foot.

Not that it had been a cakewalk. Court now took his eye from his binos to pull yet another leech off his body, and he thought his feet would hurt for days where he’d rubbed sores into his waterlogged skin.

He’d been given a malaria shot on the CIA aircraft before he landed in Hong Kong, administered by the flight attendant, and he was glad for it now, because his arms and neck were covered in mosquito bites.

As he looked through his NODs he listened again to the night around him. It was full of the normal noises one might expect on most any farm anywhere in the world: dogs barked in the distance, a chicken clucked somewhere, and an airplane flew high overhead towards Ho Chi Minh City.

But there was one unnatural sound in the air; it wasn’t loud but still it dominated the entire scene, and Court could not have been happier about that. A sixty-thousand-watt diesel generator the size of a car sat alongside the back wall at the southwestern corner of the villa. It was dead ahead of Court’s layup position here, and it hummed along, covering the scene with a soft but prevalent white noise. This was the source of the lights inside the main building, obviously, and Court imagined that a generator of that size could power the entire house with ease, even providing electricity for televisions, radios, and computers.

Court scanned the corner of the house around the generator, then looked higher above the big rectangular device. Soon he decided this area would be his target. If he could cross the large parking area and make his way over a swath of open ground and then along the vine-covered wall of the old building, he could tuck himself between the generator and the building’s wall and hide from sentries as they passed. Then he could shut off the device and wrap the entire location in darkness. A window two stories directly above the generator was open; Court could make his way up there by climbing on top of the generator, then using the architectural molding on the French Colonial building as hand- and footholds the rest of the way.

It would take time to make his way up; he was sure the wall would have weak or slippery handholds, but it looked like his best bet.

He felt certain once inside he could either find Fan or eliminate the possibility that he was even here.

This plan of his required an incredible amount of stealth, but Court had made it into and out of more secure locations populated by better-trained opposition, so while it was a definite risk, he had confidence in his abilities.

His confidence was blunted by only one hurdle. It was just now ten p.m. He’d rather wait until much later, just an hour or two before dawn. But every fiber of his being told him he had no time to spare, and he had to move now. The Wild Tigers could relocate Fan at any time, or they could improve their security setup here. Or else Dai’s men or even the other force out there involved in the hunt for Fan could find this location on their own and hit the place at any time.

Court was here now, he was here first, and he knew he needed to get his ass in gear and take advantage of it.

After stowing his equipment back in his slime-covered pack, he shimmied forward on his elbows through the brush and then pulled himself down into the canal, slowly and silently. Here he grabbed hold of a cluster of free-floating water hyacinth and used it for extra cover as he crossed to the other side.

Even though he’d made it the entire evening without encountering a single snake, Court had snakes on his mind now. Of course there would be snakes here, somewhere. This was their world, not his. Court’s dad had talked about encountering pit vipers during his time in Nam, and he tried to picture his father swimming across this very canal forty-something years ago. Try as he might he couldn’t see it, couldn’t imagine his dad as a scared kid.

It took just moments to cross the canal, and when he made it to the other side he clawed into the mud and reeds at the water’s edge to keep himself perfectly stationary so he didn’t float off. Here he listened to the sounds around him, and he grew more confident in his ability to mask his own approach thanks to the humming diesel generator.

Court pulled his NODs out of his pack again, and with them he crawled up to the lip of the canal. He looked ahead, up to the window where he’d seen the lone sentry, and just caught the man as he moved out of view. Then Court waited a minute for a passing sentry to make his way across the open ground in front of the old villa.

When the slow-moving sentry and his lazy flashlight disappeared to the northwest, Court started a low crawl forward.

He entered the large grassy area used as a parking lot, then pulled himself under a pickup truck. From here he could see the black BMW parked closer to the main house. Court used the cover of the vehicles now to move quickly; he crawled under the work truck, then around a Toyota sedan, and he’d just made it between the cluster of covered motorcycles and scooters when he dropped flat and still. The other sentry passed by closer to the villa; he made no more of an effort than the last man, and he turned north along the western side of the main building. When he made the right to go back to the east he disappeared from Court’s view, so Court rose, used his NODs to scan the villa again, checking in the window for the man who’d made a couple of appearances there, and decided now was the time to move.

The American stayed tucked low between the bikes as he advanced, then he raced over to the BMW. Squatting down low to move around it, he saw no one in the windows, and although the first sentry’s flashlight beam shone on trees on the eastern portion of the property in Court’s view, the sentry himself was still on the other side of the building.

Court stood up and raced through the darkness for the French Colonial building across forty yards of open ground.

After forty minutes pushing through the vegetation-covered canal, Mikhail finally made it into position across from the villa and climbed out of the water, up into the brush and trees on the southern side of the canal opposite the Wild Tigers compound. He pulled his rifle out of its drag bag, extended the bipod under the fore end, popped the rubber caps off the image-enhancing/thermal scope, and settled down behind the weapon.

He saw a few lighted windows ahead of him, and a swinging flashlight’s beam coming from a source on the far side of the old French Colonial house, but otherwise he could see nothing through the scope itself. He reached up to flip it to the thermal setting to see if there were any heat registers indicating human forms moving around outside the property, and he began scanning from left to right.

Court made it around to the southwestern side of the villa, where the building’s big diesel generator rested on a platform at the corner. He lay down next to the big noisy unit, only because it was directly below the third-floor window that he’d identified as his point of entry.

Now one of the sentries passed just twenty-five feet south of Court, crossing the open grassy area Court had just crossed himself. He tucked himself tighter under the bottom lip of the generator, the heat of the diesel device warming his wet clothing while he lay there.

Finally the sentry turned to his right and began walking along the rear, western side of the villa’s grounds.

Court scanned left and right with his NODs and saw nothing of interest. He was about to begin climbing onto the rumbling generator when he decided he would make another quick sweep of the area, this time with his thermal monocular, on the off chance someone was moving on the road without vehicles.

He pulled off the hat with his NODs and slipped them in his pack, grabbed the monocular from his cargo pocket, and removed its rubber cover. He turned it on and began scanning across the canal, across the rice paddies, and all the way out to the unpaved road, a hundred yards to his southeast.

Mikhail looked through his thermal rifle scope, sweeping the compound slowly. He saw a figure move into and then back out of a window on the third floor, and he saw a sentry with a flashlight moving off to the west towards the back of the location.

Quickly he realized that the largest heat register in his scope’s view was not a threat at all. It was a big generator on the concrete pad on the southwestern corner of the main house. Mikhail couldn’t see anything there in his thermal sight other than a large white-hot glow, so he didn’t spend any time searching it. And when he detected no other threats, he determined the entire compound was secure on this side, other than the roving guards and the man peeking out of the third-floor window from time to time.

He touched the push-to-talk button on his chest and whispered, “Anna Seven to Anna One. In position at waypoint Omega. I have two mobile sentries patrolling the target grounds, and one static but intermittent subject on the third floor of the target location, south side. Suggest you continue your approach in the canal to the south and advise me when you are two minutes out. I’ll talk you in.”

The reply came after just seconds. “Anna One to Seven. Roger. Estimated arrival time, zero five minutes. Will advise when we are making the final turn before Omega.”

Mikhail took his hand away from his PTT button, returned it to his rifle, and continued scanning with his thermal scope, looking for any more heat registers in the villa’s windows.

Court wasn’t sure what he was looking at, so he pressed a button on the top of his monocular, reversing his thermal’s polarity from white hot, to black hot, and then back again.

There was something out there in the trees.

Court had barely moved a muscle while he scanned, but now he froze solid. A single, small thermal signal appeared on the far side of the canal, fifty yards or so from where he now lay, and just yards from where Court himself had lain prone minutes earlier as he surveilled the property from the far side of the canal. From the small size of the register he first thought it might have been an animal, but upon zooming in with his monocular on the small object, he realized he was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, the visible portion of a figure lying prone, facing Court and the villa. From the broken thermal outline Court thought the figure might be positioned behind a sniper rifle.

Court remained motionless for several seconds; he even slowed his blinking. He felt certain this person must have just arrived on the scene; otherwise he would have noticed Court crossing the canal, crawling through the vehicles, then racing across the open ground, all right in front of him.

And now Court lay directly in the line of sight of the sniper.

If the man had a rifle, then he definitely had a scope on it, and if he had come out here for a nighttime operation, Court felt sure the scope would have either night vision or thermal imaging capabilities. Court was rooting like hell for the latter, because although he might not be detected on a night vision scope if he didn’t move, Court knew with thermal optics the warmth of the big generator above him would white out the sniper’s scope when focused in his direction.

Either way, Court knew he couldn’t move from his position as long as that sniper was there.

But who was he?

This guy couldn’t have been with the Wild Tigers, the American surmised, since he seemed to be conducting surveillance on the Wild Tigers location.

Court thought over the possibilities. Was this man with Colonel Dai? Was he with the group who’d hit the ship in Po Toi? Could he even be one of the CIA Special Activities Division paramilitaries who were getting themselves in position to launch a raid on this location?

Court dismissed the latter as the most unlikely of all possibilities. Brewer had been clear that SAD were waiting on Gentry’s signal to helo into the area. If she was telling the truth, it was highly doubtful they would put one man so close into an overwatch position.

But other than ruling out SAD, Court didn’t have a clue who this guy was and what kind of a threat he posed. All the American knew for sure was that he was pinned down for as long as that sniper lay there facing his way.

Shit. He couldn’t do a thing about the man fifty yards away with his folding knife, and it was getting hot here next to the diesel generator.

And then, just when he thought the prospect for the success of his mission was at its lowest point, he heard the sound of engines in the distance.

Big engines.

Slowly he shifted the monocular in his eye, directing his focus all the way out to the road far to his left. Some two hundred yards distant over the open ground of a flooded rice paddy, he saw the two vehicles parked at the checkpoint. As he watched them, the sedans rolled off to the side of the muddy road, just as they were bathed in the white lights of headlamps. Turning his monocular to the right to view the road farther to the south, he saw big heat registers. Quickly he reversed polarity to black hot and recognized the outline of two big canvas-covered military vehicles tearing up the dirt track as they neared the checkpoint.

The trucks rolled past the sedans without stopping, and the fact that the checkpoint let them pass indicated to Court that these big vehicles were on the same side as the Wild Tigers. This was bad news, because it probably indicated more security was about to show up here at the villa. It also almost certainly meant the trucks would be parking next to the other vehicles, which was to say, just twenty or thirty yards from where Court now lay, half under and half next to the diesel generator.

He thought about rising to his feet and running around the corner on his right towards the western side of the property, but the sniper with a perfect line of sight on his position caused him to remain still, to lie there and hope nobody who climbed out of those trucks decided to take a leak on the concrete slab holding the diesel generator at the corner of the villa.

The pair of olive drab, canvas-covered trucks rolled into view and stopped in the muddy grass. Court ID’d them immediately as old ZIL-131s, Soviet-era Russian trucks that had been used in the armed forces of most every nation that either bought or was gifted military equipment from Moscow.

Tailgates slammed down on both vehicles and armed men began leaping out of the back, down onto the wet grass. Court saw that these were regular army troops, all wearing the green camo uniforms of the People’s Army of Vietnam.

As the trucks emptied, Court counted twenty-four men in all, each carrying an assault rifle, a backpack, and extra ammo on their chests. Most of the men then ran off around to the east, but a few ran to the west side of the building, passing Court’s location on their way towards the back porch.

Court began to think he’d be stuck here until daylight, at which point his position would be obvious to anyone and everyone around him.

For an instant he thought about the burner phones stowed in his waterproof pack. One call to Colonel Dai and Chinese operators would descend on this location, although it might take them a couple of hours to make their move if they were still in Saigon.

But Court knew he couldn’t grab his phone and make that call, and he didn’t think even Colonel Dai would order an attack on front-line Vietnamese army troops.

No, the frenetic Chinese officer would likely just order Court to continue on his mission alone, to stage a one-man raid on this place to kill Fan, and use the life of Sir Donald Fitzroy as a bargaining chip to get him to do so.

Court closed his eyes in frustration. He found himself flat on his stomach, likely just feet away from his objective, with absolutely no idea what the hell he was supposed to do.