Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Court Gentry lay under a narrow line of triple-canopy trees that divided one rice paddy from the next, and he listened to the massive engines of the big Russian helicopter as it neared his position. Under him was Fan Jiang; the small man just lay there limp, panting, in pain both because of the tight chest and leg cramps from the most intense cardiovascular workout of his life, and due to the fact that a man who weighed fifty pounds more than him was crushing him at the moment.

Court and Fan lay behind the rotting root ball of a felled broadleaf mahogany tree. Court’s plan was to keep their thermal signature broken up by both the trunk and the few inches of standing water here in the muddy hole left when the tree tipped over and ripped its roots from the ground during the last monsoon season.

Other than his head Fan Jiang was completely covered by the muddy water, but Court kept his torso and one arm out of the goo, because even though he didn’t want the helo to see any bit of him or his thermal signature, he wanted to keep his rifle pointed over the root ball in the general direction of the Mi-8.

Court lined the rifle up on the helicopter above using its engine and rotor noise to locate it, hoping he was aiming more or less at the cockpit. He didn’t really think he’d shoot it down, and he doubted he’d do much more than announce his exact location by opening fire, but if it became obvious the helo knew where he was, Court decided he’d rather go down with guns blazing.

Court’s mood had deteriorated dramatically in the past five minutes. On the helo’s first pass Fan had tried to race down the tree-covered levee and into the tall stalks of rice in the flooded field, thinking it could hide him better. Court understood the capabilities of thermal optics and knew Fan had made the wrong call, so he tackled Fan, but with more force than he’d intended, and the two of them rolled and slid down a muddy embankment. By the time Court righted himself and grabbed both his captive and his rifle, he realized his backpack had slipped off his shoulder in the tumble, and now it was somewhere either higher on the levee or down below the surface of the flooded rice paddy, and looking for it would put him in view of the approaching helicopter.

Now as Court lay here hiding in a little hole like an animal, he realized he had to come to terms with the fact that he no longer had a phone, money, papers, surveillance gear, food, or water.

He was so furious with himself he almost wanted to engage the big Russian helo with his stolen Galil rifle, if for no other reason than to expend some aggression.

But after some struggle, he kept his composure and did not fire, and the helicopter continued on to the east.

Minutes later he saw it pass back to the west, picking up speed and climbing away from the rice paddy as it did so, and Court felt sure it was flying away from the scene and back over the Cambodian border.

Court almost wished he could hitch a ride.

After a short while he stood back up, and then he yanked Fan Jiang roughly to his feet. He considered going back to look for his pack, but that would necessitate a climb up onto the high levee that would wear Fan out even more, and a fruitless search that would waste time they did not have.

He thought again about the Russians who’d hit the house, the woman on the team armed with only a pistol, and the Mi-8 that was now flying them back over the border.

After a moment he told himself it wasn’t all bad, because even though he had a long way to go before he’d be somewhere safe and dry, he figured he had one thing those assholes in the helicopter did not have.

He had Fan Jiang.

Fan spoke up just as they began moving again to the west. “I am not an athletic person. I am too tired to continue.” The last part was delivered in an unmistakable whine.

Court said, “Listen, Fan, if I have to sling you over my shoulder, I’m going to be even more pissed off.”

“I am trying, sir. I am trying.”

“Try harder.”

After a minute more Fan said, “Sir… what do I call you?”

“I don’t speak Chinese, and there is no one else here. If you say something in English, I will assume you are talking to me.”

Fan nodded as he walked. “Yes. Of course.”

As soon as the Mi-8 dropped the Russian task force off at the Phnom Penh warehouse used by the SVR, Zoya climbed out of the helo without saying a word to any of the operators. She carried her own equipment and barged straight through the metal door, ignoring the small guard force protecting the building. Several vehicles took up the main floor of the large, well-lit room, but in the back by a kitchen a row of green cots and boxes of equipment was set up next to a row of tables used as a gun-cleaning station. Zoya passed these by as she headed to an open metal staircase that led up to a small office above the warehouse floor. Here she shut the door, locked it, and walked over to her own private sleeping area.

Still covered in the mud, grime, and crystallized sweat from tonight’s operation, she pulled out her secure satellite phone and contacted her control officer in Moscow. She relayed the entire evening’s events. As she did this, she was certain Vasily was downstairs doing exactly the same thing to his Zaslon leadership, but Zoya didn’t give a damn.

She was in the right, not Anna One.

Yes, they’d lost a man tonight and they’d failed to secure their target, but Zoya had clearly ordered the team to stand down and egress before hitting the villa. It was Vasily who demanded they continue with the mission, and the results of that decision spoke for themselves.

As far as she was concerned Vasily was the one who was going to take the heat for this fuckup.

Zoya explained to her control that she didn’t know who had Fan Jiang now, but she didn’t think it was the CIA. She’d seen only a single person involved in the Chinese computer hacker’s capture, and that was most definitely not the way the CIA operated.

If the taking of Fan Jiang was, in fact, an American operation, it had been done by proxy. The kidnapper, Zoya maintained, was perhaps a foreign national who’d been watching the villa when the Russians arrived, and he’d then seen an opportunity to act when Fan, Tu, and the other armed Vietnamese gangster tried to flee the scene.

The “lone wolf who got lucky” scenario was the only one that made any sense to her.

She thought about the man she’d identified as a CIA officer several days earlier in Hong Kong. He’d been alone at the time, although that had been quite a different situation. He’d been drinking in a bar trying to get information about some men who disappeared, which was not exactly a tier-one commando raid on a building surrounded by fifty gunmen.

After she’d relayed all her intel to her control officer, she was told to wait by the phone for a return call. She hung up and went to the little bathroom off the office, and here she stripped out of her gear and clothing.

In the bathroom light she found leeches in her underarms and above where her belt had cinched her pants tight to her skin, and she sliced them away with a combat knife distractedly, with no great distress. After flushing the creatures down the toilet, she saw in the mirror that she’d picked up some bruising on her ribs, but she couldn’t even remember how it happened.

She turned on the little shower; the pressure was that of a garden hose and there was no hot water. Still, she took a small bar of soap out of the backpack pocket where she kept her toiletries and stepped under the flow.

Five minutes later she was clean and dried off and dressed in jeans and a black cotton shirt, and she sat on her cot looking at the phone.

A minute later it rang again.

“Allo?”

Her control officer talked for only two minutes, and when Zoya finally got a chance to reply, she was cut off, told the decision was final.

She hung up the phone and sat quietly on the cot in the little office.

But only for thirty seconds. Then she stood, opened the door, and descended the staircase.

There the seven surviving members of the Zaslon team all sat on their cots in the living area on the small warehouse floor; most of the men by now wore just their boxers or civilian tracksuits.

Sasha’s bunk lay empty.

It was clear the men had been talking together, but everyone shut up as Zoya approached.

Anna One still wore his grimy clothing, and he still held his sat phone in his hand. She knew he’d been on a long call.

Zoya walked up to him and stopped, just looked him hard in the face.

Vasily said, “Look, Koshka. These things happen. You tried to bite off more than you could chew, you got in over your head, and then you—”

“You told them I ordered you into Omega.”

“You did order us into Omega.”

“Initially, yes, but when the PAVN trucks arrived, I told you to stand down. You know that, you son of a bitch.”

The big commando shrugged. “By then it was too late. By then we were already taking accurate fire, and I determined the only way was forward.”

“You lying piece of shit. There was no fire. That came after you hit the building.” She looked around the room. “Every one of you heard my order.”

No one spoke.

“Really? Are you all going to back up Vasily when you know he was the one who directed you to hit a building with two dozen PAVN around the perimeter?” She turned back to Vasily. “You had me removed from the task force. You had me recalled to Moscow. All to cover your ass and to make you feel better about your fuckup, the fuckup that got Sasha killed.”

Vasily pointed a finger at her, got it right in her face, but before he could speak she snatched his arm and jerked it down with her right hand, yanking the unsuspecting paramilitary officer off balance.

She threw a hard left jab to his face, connecting perfectly with his jaw and mouth, compounding the magnitude of the punch by pulling him down and into it.

Vasily’s head snapped back and he fell to the ground.

And then he got back up.

None of the other Zaslon operators moved while Vasily touched his hand to his mouth and then looked at his blood-covered fingertips.

Zoya stared him down. She didn’t have the strength to defeat Vasily in hand-to-hand combat; objectively she knew that. But her fury had surpassed her judgment. She wasn’t going to run, and she wasn’t going to hit him again. Instead she waited for what she knew was coming.

“Davai!” she shouted. Come on!

The paramilitary operator slammed the back of his hand against her face, sending her spinning to the ground like a rag doll. He stood over her while she slowly rolled onto her knees.

“You are done, Koshka. You never were a team player. Go home.”

She remained there on her hands and knees. Blood dripped from her nose, and the inside of her mouth began to swell. She spit on the floor. “We could have had him. We could have just sat back and watched the villa from distance until the PAVN left. We could have taken Fan at a time of our choosing. The actor who took him couldn’t have done it if we sat back and secured the area and Sasha would still be here.” She pointed to the empty cot. “Sasha would still be sitting right fucking there, with the rest of you idiots.”

Vasily wiped his mouth with a dirty rag from the gun-cleaning table. He said, “Anna team doesn’t sit back and watch. My men are not the guys you send in to run surveillance.”

“Right,” Zoya said, slowly climbing to her feet now. “Next time I’ll do everything myself.”

“The only thing you will be doing by yourself is flying home to Moscow. Me and my guys will take it from here.”

Zoya gave one last look at the team, and then she stormed back up to the office. Five minutes later she returned with all her gear loaded in two backpacks. Her nose had tissue jammed in it, and the right side of her face was puffy from the blow she’d taken.

The SVR motor pool had allotted the team four vehicles, which were parked side by side on the warehouse floor: three Toyota Sienna minivans and a twenty-year-old Toyota Tundra pickup truck. Zoya opened the chain-operated garage door, climbed into the Tundra, and drove off without even a glance at the men standing around watching her go.

As soon as Zoya was out of the parking lot she fished in one of her packs for her satellite phone. Quickly she dialed a phone number as she drove through the darkened streets of Phnom Penh.

She knew that the local assistant resident of the SVR for Cambodia would be home asleep, and there was no way he would be aware of the decision Moscow had just made regarding her status on the task force. She didn’t know the man well at all; they had just met for a few minutes the day before. He’d given her his mobile number and she knew his instructions had been to give her whatever she needed for her mission.

The man answered with a rough sleepy voice. “Allo?”

Zoya said, “Ivan? I need help.”

“Sirena?”

“Da. I need information… fast. Either I can come over to your place now, which will probably piss off your wife, or you can tell me over the phone.”

The man coughed sleepily. “I’ll meet you at the embassy. Give me an hour.”

“I don’t have an hour.”

Ivan cleared his throat, and then she heard him moving around. She assumed he was leaving his bedroom.

Finally he said, “This is an open line.”

Zoya ignored the comment and said, “Just tell me who we can send to help me find someone along the border to the east of the city.”

“That’s a little vague, isn’t it?”

“I’m talking about a force. A persuasive force.”

“I thought you had a force.”

“Someone who knows the area. Who won’t stick out. A proxy unit. I don’t care if we never use them, have no relationship to them. I don’t care if they are communists, drug dealers… fucking headhunters or cannibals. I don’t care. I need them, and I need them now.”

“An open line, Sirena.”

“Help me.”

“Okay…” Ivan thought a moment. “What’s in it for them?”

“The guy I’m looking for… He’s valuable. Very valuable. If they can find him… they can have him.”

“How does that help you? What the hell is going on?”

“This is an in extremis situation. I don’t know the local underworld here in Cambodia, and neither do my guys… but you do. Right now I know where my target is, generally speaking. But if someone doesn’t go get him right now, then he’s in the wind, and we may never pick him back up. I want him caught by a known entity, so I can find him again.”

This pause was even longer. Finally the assistant resident said, “The group you are looking for… they aren’t Cambodian. The guys you want are Thai. They are well connected in that part of the country. But we don’t work with them. We don’t touch them. Ever.”

“I need a phone number.”

“Shit, Sirena, it’s three a.m.”

“And by four it will be too late!”

“Okay… I’ll send it to you. They are based in Bangkok, but they smuggle over the border through Cambodia and into Vietnam all the time. The route they use is just east of the capital, the area you are talking about.”

“Perfect,” Zoya said. “Hook me up with them, and then you can go back to bed.”

“I hope Moscow is okay with this.”

“Moscow is interested in success. That is what I… that is what we will provide them.”