On target

THIRTEEN

Court was taken back in front of Gregor Sidorenko just after breakfast. This time the Russian mob boss was outside in his courtyard, a cold gray morning and a light but steady spittle of hard needles of sleet from the sky did not deter him from taking his morning tea in his robe in his bare gardens. He sat at a small metal bistro table under a red canopy, gold pajama bottoms and fluffy slippers intertwined due to his crossed legs. Two young men armed with machine pistols stood amid the bushes already defoliated by the long Saint Petersburg winter. The men watched Court closely, but Court knew that at the distance they kept from him, if they felt the need to shoot him with their little fully automatic peashooters, they would no doubt perforate their principal just as quickly as their target.

The American winced in the face of such lousy security protocol. To him, witnessing such amateurish tactics by men with guns was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Gentry approached Sid with two of his minders. He'd been with the men an hour since the hotel and had not said a word to them since leaving his suite. With a curt nod to his employer he said, "Let's do it."

"What happened to your face?"

"Nothing. Did you hear what I just said?"

Sid hesitated, nodded, clapped his hands, and gave two thumbs-up, which somehow lost something in the translation from English to Russian. "Excellent. This will make my government extremely happy."

Court continued, "Understand this. This is my op. You follow my instructions to the letter, or I walk away."

Sid sat up straighter, nodded swiftly.

"I leave here alone. I need time to prepare and research, and I don't need your Nazi freaks watching over me. In a few days I will contact you with an address. Your boys can come and get me." Court pulled out a handwritten sheet and handed it across the bistro table to Sid, who took it willingly. "They will have this equipment with them. They will take me out into the country, a place of your choosing, and I'll test-fire the rifle, check the rest of the gear. From that moment on I am operational. I will follow your instructions as far as getting into the Sudan. When I leave the airport in Khartoum, I will meet up with your agent. Together he and I will go to the coast. I will remain out of contact, in the black, until the operation is complete. I will notify you via sat phone, my own sat phone, that the job is done, and then we can talk about extraction."

Sid was almost giddy with excitement. "Brilliant. I will do exactly as you say."

For the next week Gentry test-fired and zeroed weapons, exercised rigorously on the hills and in the forests to the east of Saint Petersburg, did his best to build up his stamina by running, climbing tall trees, and carrying a rucksack filled with stones. He made daily visits to a tanning salon in Pushkin, an affluent suburb south of Saint Petersburg proper. He pored over maps and books and printouts regarding the players in the Sudanese region, from the smallest, most poorly equipped rebel group to the structure, tactics, and training of the NSS, the dreaded Sudanese National Security Service. He studied the history, the laws, the infrastructure, the roads, the ports, the location and disposition of the airports and the military garrisons.

He paid special attention to the Red Sea coast of the country, because this was where he would act, first as an assassin in the employ of the Russian mob and then as an extraordinary rendition operative in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This might get complicated, he told himself with cynical understatement.

He met again with Zack Hightower after the rest of Whiskey Sierra had left to join up with a CIA-owned yacht, named the Hannah, customized for their needs and already in Eritrea, about to sail for Port Sudan, thirty miles north of Suakin. Zack and Court spent an entire day together going over codes, maps, equipment, and operational plans. No aspect of this mission was too small for discussion or too trivial to troubleshoot. Hightower explained how the SLA, the Sudanese Liberation Army-an anti-Arab, anti-Abboud rebel force-would create a diversion the morning of the kidnapping of President Abboud that should distract the majority of his guard and force the president himself into the bank. CIA Sudan Station had an agent who was a former member of Abboud's close protection detail, and he had indicated the standard operating procedure for an attack while walking to the mosque in Suakin was to get inside the bank and defend the inner sanctum until helicopter troops could come from Port Sudan. It was considered a low-probability location for an attack on the president. The SLA was nonexistent in the area, and Abboud had visited the town dozens of times without incident.

Court would be waiting in the bank to snatch the president and then take him out of the city, while Whiskey Sierra stayed on the outskirts of the town, doing their utmost to refrain from direct action if at all possible. They would then all be picked up by an inflatable Zodiac boat and ferried to the Hannah, at which time they would pull anchor and head north. Then Hightower would put Abboud in a mini-sub attached to the bottom of the yacht, and from there Sierra One and Oryx would link up with a CIA fishing trawler in international waters. This way, if the Hannah was boarded by Sudanese coastal patrol boats, there would be no evidence of this group's involvement in the kidnapping.

The Hannah would then just motor up the Red Sea coast and eventually dock in Alexandria. By that time, Abboud would be imprisoned at the ICC facility in The Hague, Netherlands.

It was a bold, audacious plan. Court could see no specific part that seemed impossible or poorly thought out. That said, there were a tremendous number of things that could go wrong. Human error or failings might derail the op at any time. As could intelligence failures. So could the "shit happens" phenomenon, Murphy's Law.

But more than anything, this smelled like an operation that, though it might well come off just as planned, was thought up by a department desperate to remain viable under an administration for whom covert, paramilitary-style operations had been all but ruled out.

On Court's third night on his own, he called a number given to him by Sidorenko's henchmen. Sid's secretary answered, and Court told him he'd suffered a slight injury while training for the mission. He would require, Court declared, a small bottle of mild painkillers to get him through his recovery. Court went to a dark hallway in Vitebsk Metro Station, where he met one of Sid's young skinhead goons. A paper bag was exchanged without a word.

Court downed two of the Darvocet while still on the platform waiting for his metro ride back to his hotel on Zagorodny Prospect. He had convinced himself, sort of, that he was in pain. The stomach wound he'd received four months earlier did seem somewhat aggravated by his abdominal exercises-the knot of scar tissue pulled at the muscles and caused them to stiffen in protest-but truly it was not pain he would have batted an eyelash at had he not developed his penchant for narcotics.

Court knew this, and he wondered if-despite all the big, bad men in this world who wanted him dead-in fact, that friendly old doctor in Nice who'd hooked him up with the morphine would end up being the man who would ultimately bring him down.