Jihad

CHAPTER 41

Dean was less than ten feet from the area with the burial vaults when Rockman told him they had finally picked up the signal. Dean put the booster on the side of the passage and began backing up. He got only a few yards when he heard voices in the space ahead.

“Charlie, they’re coming in your direction,” said Rockman.

No kidding, thought Dean. He stopped moving, lying silent in the square hole, his chin in the drain inset that ran along the floor. The voices and footsteps echoed wildly, the sounds a bizarre mix of growls. As he lay in the ancient sewer pipe, Dean felt his sweat rolling down from his back. He felt his breath growing short and choppy; his head began to pound.

I’ll be out soon, he told himself. Just hang on.

When he didn’t hear any more sounds, Dean started to back up again. But he hadn’t gone more than three feet when he heard more voices. He stopped, lying flat in his sweat and the dank slime.

“Asad’s coming out now,” said Rockman. “We think he’s the last to leave.”

Dean tried to control his breath. His head had begun to pound fiercely.

“He’s out,” said Rockman. “Give it a minute or two, make sure they’re all gone. Then go. Leave the booster unit.”

Dean began pushing back immediately, fighting off the dread surging through him.

He’d never been claustrophobic. Neither was he given to panic attacks. But damn if it didn’t seem like he was having one now.

“Mr. Dean, this is Rubens again. Do you think you could scout the mausoleum area? We’d like to get an idea of what’s there.”

“Sure,” said Dean. “Give me a minute.”

Lia followed Sandy Chafetz’s directions, methodically planting video devices along the road that led out of the palace. As she walked out of the main entrance, she spotted two men in black business suits standing next to a brown SUV. She passed them, then stopped to examine some of the evil eye charms being sold by a man with a small table near the Byzantine church’s wall.

“I think I found one of the cars of someone at the meeting,” said Lia. “Want me to stick a tracker on it?”

“How do you know?”

“Two guards watching it.”

“Get the license plate and ID it for Tommy,” Chafetz told her. “We’ll check it out. We need you to get one more video bug up by the intersection near Haghia Sophia, then go down the hill and get some to cover the lot the tour buses use to leave.”

The walls of the chamber were lined with ornate bronze monuments to the dead, a succession of eagles and marching troops, chariots and masses of soldiers. Long forgotten minor deities shared space with saints and holy figures from the days of the Byzantine emperors. Marble benches lined the walls beneath burial niches. The floor was made of red marble, inlaid with a dull yellow metal Dean thought must be gold.

Dean played his light around the room, looking for a place to put the booster. But there was no place where it couldn’t be easily found.

Dean slipped out of the room, leaving the thick vaultlike door exactly two-thirds open as he had found it. Rather than going back in the sewer hole, he walked up the corridor, keeping the beam of his flashlight on the floor directly in front of him. He came to a T; the corridor to the right led back toward the palace. The other looked like it dead-ended in a pile of rubble. Thinking he could put a booster there, Dean went over and saw that two pieces of wood could be moved to open the way into another long corridor.

“Where’s this way to the left come out?” Dean asked Rockman.

“On the other side of the train tracks, near the Byzantine sea wall,” said the runner. “There’s a bunch of ancient ruins there, and on the other side of the highway there’s a park. A lot of, uh, hobos hang out down there at night. Homeless people.”

“Is it clear?”

“As far as we can see. Cars can stop along the road there any time, though. You want to go out that way?”

“Better there than going up through the palace,” said Dean. His clothes were sodden with grime, sweat, and bat droppings. He wasn’t going to blend in with the crowd.

“All right. Hang on until Fashona can come back over and we can get another view of the sight.”

Dean hid the booster, then walked out through the tunnel, brushing away cobwebs. He had to climb over a small pile of rubble and then crawl on his hands and knees through a small pool of water for about ten yards, but after what he’d been through earlier, this was like a stroll in the park. After crawling thirty or forty yards, he came to a rectangular shaft upwards. Shards of light came through an opening at the top of the shaft, thirty feet above. A wooden ladder ran up the far side about half of the way.

“I found the opening. There’s a ladder,” Dean told Rockman.

“Fashona and Karr are still on the other side of the city. Give them a minute, okay?”

Dean saw no point in waiting. He climbed to the top of the ladder, then examined the rocks lining the shaft. They fit together so smoothly that Dean couldn’t get much of a finger-hold. But the sides were less than three feet apart, and it looked as if he could lever himself upwards, pushing his back and feet up opposite walls.

It looked that way. About halfway up his legs started to tire, and Dean found it difficult to continue. He told himself he was too far to go back and pushed on another four or five feet. Then his right knee started to give out. He jabbed his foot against the wall, feeling suddenly old — incredibly old now, in his late eighties rather than his early fifties. He pushed his head against the shaft, looking upwards.

The alternative was crawling through the bat guano. And that was if he survived the fall without breaking a leg.

The notion didn’t cure his knee, but it made easier to ignore. He pushed his leg up and shoved himself higher. Just under the planks at the top of the shaft, he wedged himself against the sides so he could push the boards off. As he did, he saw a rope beneath the wood. He tapped at it, then pulled it out, letting it fall into the shaft below. It was a rope ladder, attached to a beam across the top of the hole. Dean pulled at it, not trusting at first though the rope was nylon, and very obviously brand-new. Finally he put his weight on it, standing on one of the rungs as he lifted two boards out of the way and climbed from the hole.

“Charlie, where are you?” asked Rockman in his ear.

“I’m out.”

“I thought you were waiting for Karr.”

“I didn’t.”

“All right. The car Lia ID’d looks like it’s heading around to pick up Asad and his people. We’d like you to join Lia and tail him. She just finished planting the video bugs.”

“I’ll have to change first,” said Dean. “Tell her I’ll meet her at the car.”

He rolled over and got up. As he did, he heard something behind him. Dean turned around and saw a pair of eyes staring at him. These weren’t rat eyes — they belonged to a man who had a large two-by-four in his hand.

Dean ducked. As the two-by-four sailed past, Dean pitched himself into the man’s midsection, tackling him. The other man managed to roll on top of Dean, pushing the side of Dean’s face into the dirt. The other man outweighed him by seventy-five pounds, and all of Dean’s fury barely budged him. Finally Dean squirmed to the side and squirted from his grasp. A desperate, unaimed kick caught his attacker in the ribs; it stunned the man, but he remained on his feet. Dean grabbed the two-by-four; it took three shots to the giant’s head to drop him.

“What’s going on?” Rockman asked. “Charlie?”

“Someone attacked me,” said Dean. “He looks like one of the local bums you told me about. But I’m okay now.”

Then he looked up and saw that wasn’t exactly true — four of the man’s friends, some with rocks in their hands, were gathered in a semicircle nearby.

Karr spotted the white Mercedes just as it pulled into a bus stop along Kennedy Caddesi. Asad and two other men got in and it pulled out quickly.

The helicopter was going in the opposite direction, and by the time they turned around, the vehicles were heading over the Galata Bridge. The Mercedes made a wide circle, came back over the bridge, and headed back in the direction of the palace. It parked on a street only a few blocks north of the Blue Mosque.

“Must’ve been making sure they weren’t followed,” Karr said. “Rockman, we’re going to fly back over the palace and see if we can find that SUV Lia saw earlier.”

“Tommy, don’t worry about that now,” said Rockman. “Get back over by the water near the mosque — Charlie’s in trouble.”

“Çtkil git!” yelled Dean, waving the wood back and forth in front of him. “Go away! Get out. Go!”

One of the men threw a rock at him. Dean ducked it and feinted toward him, backing the others off. He edged to his left, looking for a path to escape.

“Karr and Fashona are on their way,” said Rockman. “They should be there in a couple of minutes.”

Another rock flew by, this one much closer. Dean waved his board again; this time, the men didn’t retreat more than a step.

“I need the words for I’ll kill them,” Dean told the translator.

“You sure?”

“They don’t speak English.”

“Çtkil git!” yelled Dean to the nearest man. Then he told the translator, “I need something stronger than ‘go away’.”

The translator gave him a string of curse words and threats. Dean hurried through them, hoping to make up in ferocity what he lost in pronunciation.

The man closest to him stooped to pick up a rock. Dean leapt forward and whacked him on the side hard enough to knock him down. Then Dean jumped back, squaring to face the attackers again.

The men began jabbering together — complaining, said the translator, about this crazy intruder trying to move into their home.

“I’m going to go,” Dean said in English, repeating the Turkish when the translator gave it. “I’m just going to leave. If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.”

A path cut through the vines and overgrowth toward a set of stone and dilapidated marble ruins to his left. Dean took a step toward it, then ducked another rock. One of the men let out a blood-curdling yell, apparently their signal to charge — Dean took a swat at the nearest man. Two others lunged at the two-by-four. He poked one in the face, but the other grappled the wood from Dean’s hand.

Retreating down the path, Dean scooped up a large stone as a weapon. But when he turned to face his attackers, they had disappeared.

“Charlie, you okay?” asked Rockman. “Charlie?”

“Yeah, I’m here. These guys are hiding somewhere.”

“Karr and the helicopter should be there any second. Can you get across the road to the rocks?”

Something moved in the underbrush on Dean’s left. He whirled and threw the stone at a thick clump of vines. Whoever or whatever was there yelped and fell over.

Dean scrambled down the path, in the direction of the highway and the coastline beyond. He dashed across to a chorus of horns, then leapt over the guardrail and up onto the rocks at the water’s edge. His pursuers followed. As Dean veered along the rocky, debris-ridden shore, he heard the loud drum of the approaching helicopter’s rotors.

“There — look there,” Karr told Fashona, pointing at what looked like an overgrown landing near the shoreline. Five men were huddled on the highway side, throwing rocks at another — Dean. “We gotta get him out of there.”

“I’m going to buzz them,” said the pilot. “Hang on.”

The helicopter’s nose dropped toward the ground. Something cracked behind them — it was the banner, snapping like the tail end of a whip. One of the men on the ground turned, gestured at the approaching helicopter, and then threw a rock at them.

The rock missed by fifty feet, but it was exactly the wrong tactic for anyone to take with Fashona. The pilot hunched forward, demanding more speed from the throttle and setting his chin in determination.

“I’m going to bomb the bastards,” he said.

Before Karr could ask how, Fashona put the chopper nearly on its side, banking sharply toward the cluster of rock-throwers. He reached down and pulled the tow-rope release, shrouding Dean’s assailants with the fifty-foot-long banner.

Karr snapped off his seatbelt and leaned out the open door, grabbing hold of Dean as Fashona spun the little helo down. There were only two seats in the helicopter; Karr shoved himself back against the center console, but the best he could do was hold Dean on his lap as they pulled out over the open water.

“We’re going back to the airport,” Fashona said.

“Yeah,” said Karr. “ASAP. Dean smells like a sewer rat. I’m tempted to drop him into the water so he can take a bath.”