“He’s got skills.”
“Who do you think the three British men are?”
“How the hell should I know?” Zoya asked, then lowered her binoculars and put them on top of her pack. She unscrewed the lid on the water bottle and drank some more.
Another man appeared from the brush behind. He was filthy. He’d been up here all night, Zoya knew, and he smelled like it. He said, “Satellite shows the Tai Chin VI passing to the east of Hainan Island. At present speed it will arrive here at twenty-one hundred hours tonight.”
“And we’ll be ready for it when it arrives?” she asked.
The filthy man said, “Don’t know about you, Koshka, but me and the boys are ready for it now.”
She thought about admonishing him for the nickname. They were in the field, and she had a code name. Her complete code name was Sirena Vozdushoy Trevogi, which meant “Banshee,” but the task force operators were supposed to call her Sirena, not Koshka.
But she let it go, deciding to pick her battles. “We need survivors, Sasha,” she said flatly. “This is an intelligence mission, and if there is no one left alive on that ship to tell us where Fan Jiang was taken, then we’ve all wasted a trip.”
Sasha stood over her, blocking out the sun with his wide shoulders. “You will have your survivors to interrogate. We have done this before, you know.”
She spun around on the granite rock and looked straight up at the man. “Oh yes, I know. I was there, in Kizlar, trying to interrogate that one survivor. You know, the man holding his intestines in with his shattered hands. He was rather distracted, barely heard me. Fucking useless endeavor.”
Ruslan sighed audibly next to her. “You’re never going to let us forget that night in Kizlar, are you?”
Now Zoya turned to him. “I’ll make you a deal. You boys don’t fuck it up tonight, and I’ll try to forget the debacle in Dagestan.”
“That would be good for all of us, yourself included,” Ruslan said.
Zoya looked at her watch now. “It’s twelve hundred hours. You both can go; I’ll take watch on the hide. Have Vasily send another team up here by sixteen hundred so I can get back to the boat in time to prepare a brief for the task force before tonight’s raid.”
“Ponial,” Sasha replied. Understood.
Both men turned away from the woman sitting on the granite rock, and they headed back into the brown brush to collect their gear.
Zoya called back to them. “Leave the VSS.”
She heard a low chuckle from Ruslan. “You gonna shoot the American if you get a chance?”
“Of course not. I’d just rather use that mounted scope than hold these binos up for the next three hours.”
Ruslan said, “I’ll leave the rifle behind, but you need to remember two things. One, keep your finger off the trigger. And two, there is no round in the chamber now, and I want to find it that way when I get it back.”
Zoya was quick with her reply. “You need to remember two things yourself.”
Sasha mumbled in the brush, “Oh shit, here she goes.”
“One… I received advanced sniper instruction at Kavkazsky Dvorik, which, as you well know, is the premier FSB Spetsnaz training facility for long-distance shooting and sniper fieldcraft. And two… go fuck yourself.”
Sasha cinched his heavy pack on his shoulders, laughed, and started walking down the hill to the northeast and out of sight of the bay. Ruslan hefted his own gear, minus his rifle. He then returned to Zoya on the rock. “I totally forgot that you were one of the boys, ma’am. I bet you were very popular at Kavkazsky Dvorik with your tits poking out of your little tie-dyed T-shirt.”
He turned and followed Sasha down the trail without another word.
Softly Zoya said, “Mu’dak.” Asshole. She looked down at herself. She was in “costume” for her cover alias: wig, big sunglasses, ridiculous clothing, and woven bracelets on her arm. Of course she wouldn’t be taken seriously by the paramilitary unit working with her. They didn’t live in a world that accounted for much art or personal expression.
She shook off the hostility from her male colleagues — it was nothing she hadn’t heard ten thousand times before — lifted the binoculars back up to her eyes, and scanned out into the South China Sea. Tonight the cargo ship that had spirited Fan Jiang out of Hong Kong would appear from the southwest; it would be full of drug smugglers, but it would also contain answers to where Fan Jiang went and who was protecting him now. She and her black ops paramilitaries would board the boat not long after setting anchor; they would obtain those answers any way they could, and then they would go wherever in the world the intel directed them, so they could snatch Fan Jiang and take him to Moscow.
The men on the cargo ship would know where they delivered him and to whom, and they would talk; Zoya had no doubt in her mind.
It wasn’t long before her binos swept back to the shore, and they scanned the streets slowly. She was thinking about the American again. Her mission tonight was going to be tough enough without worrying about mixing it up with the CIA. She didn’t need this guy around here asking questions one damn bit.
She stood, grabbed her pack, and headed back into the brown brush. She’d climb behind the rifle and scan the bay with the scope for the next four hours, hoping like hell everything remained just as sleepy and peaceful as it appeared right now.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Court took the half-empty ferry back to Kowloon at twelve thirty p.m., positioning himself in the center of a large cluster of empty seats near the bow on the bridge deck. Court surfed the Internet on his mobile during the ride back to the city, hoping to find a shop somewhere in Hong Kong that sold a particular niche item. He expected to find two or three stores at the most selling the goods he was looking for, assuming there couldn’t have been that large a market for this type of equipment.
Instead his phone filled with listings, and at the bottom of the list was the option to go to the next page of results.
Hong Kong was a mecca for electronics, with no shortage of choices.
Court selected a store in Mongkok, not too far from his hotel, because the area was crowded and not so close to the Peninsula, which was damn important to the guy who’d killed two men there two nights earlier.
An hour and a half later he stepped into an electronics shop that specialized in high-end optical devices, surveillance equipment, and other wireless mobile security solutions of all kinds. He spent several minutes just reading tags and brochures, familiarizing himself with several items he’d never used before, and reacquainting himself with other items that were upgrades to equipment he’d known all his professional life.
First he bought a small handheld thermal monocular that would allow him to see heat registers in the dark, even from a great distance. He was very familiar with the technology, but the version he picked up here was a generation better than anything he’d used before.
Taking his time to look around at other items, he found something he’d never had access to during his time with the CIA. Clearly, technology for private users had moved beyond what a man in Court’s line of work could field just five or six years earlier. It was a tiny wireless camera that linked with a smartphone and gave the operator the ability to view remotely in regular, low-light, and infrared views, as well as pan and zoom the camera. For just under three hundred bucks each Court thought they were a steal — if they worked as advertised — and it was Dai’s money in his money belt, anyway. He bought three of the devices.
He also bought a radio scanner and another smartphone; Court told himself he’d pick up as many phones as he could reasonably carry around here in HK.