Grissom pivoted back to Anders and Crocker, who were now standing to his right.
“What do you make of this?” he asked gruffly.
“Katie and Logan are the experts,” Anders answered. “If the intel they have is accurate, we face a very serious dilemma.”
“What about you?” Grissom asked, thrusting his chin toward Crocker. “What do you think?”
“I think we’d better move quickly, before those chemicals fall into the hands of the terrorists, whether they’re al-Qaeda-affiliated or ISIS.”
Minutes before midnight the same day, Crocker sat in the passenger seat of a Toyota Land Cruiser rolling through the hills and valleys of Turkey’s easternmost Hatay province. What he saw passing in the dark were fields of olive trees, tobacco, and new wheat dotted with hamlets and towns.
Closing his eyes, he dreamt he was in Syria, not far from the Golan Heights. He and Akil were walking toward the Israeli helicopter that had crashed during their mission to recover a downed Predator drone. He saw Ritchie’s severed body lying alongside the Black Hawk. This time when he turned it over, Ritchie coughed, blinked, and said, “Boss, come closer.”
“What, Ritchie?”
With his last breath he whispered, “Life is tenuous.”
Then he turned his head away and sighed.
Crocker had told Ritchie and Cal to remain on the helo while he and the other three SEALs jumped. His order had resulted in Ritchie’s death and Cal’s very serious injury. Cal was healing now. But as for Ritchie, there was no way to make what had happened right, or to turn back the clock.
The sharp braking of the vehicle jolted Crocker awake. He looked over at the strange thin face behind the wheel and wondered for a moment if he’d been captured.
“I’m stopping here to check the tires,” Logan said casually. “Yayladaği’s about fifteen minutes away.”
“Yayladaği?” Crocker asked, temporarily confused about their destination.
“Yayladaği. The Turkish town on the Syrian border.”
He looked out the window and saw a red-white-and-blue NigGaz petrol station lit by flicking fluorescent light. Then he turned back to the light-skinned African American man named Logan he’d met at the Ankara CIA Station. “What’s wrong with the tires?” he asked, as he got his bearings.
“Low pressure, according to the indicator,” Logan answered, climbing out.
Crocker stood on the concrete, stretched, and watched the boy with the tattered Valencia CF T-shirt fill the tires. Air scented with rosemary refreshed his lungs.
If Akil were here, he thought, he’d say something clever about the T-shirt. Akil was an international football fanatic. His favorite squad: FC Barcelona. Favorite players: Andrés Iniesta and Leo Messi.
Crocker had little interest in team sports, and what with Black Cell, working out, and family had practically no time to follow them.
Logan emerged from the white station clutching two bottles of honey and handed them to Crocker as they reentered the vehicle.
“What’s this for?” Crocker asked.
“It’s a present from you to Colonel Oz. He’s our host and a connoisseur of fine honey, not the processed junk they sell in most markets that has none of the good bacteria and enzymes.”
Crocker had never heard of processed honey. “How do you tell the difference between the good stuff and the processed?”
“Well, labels are deceptive. So usually smell or taste, unless you know where it comes from.”
Logan explained that starting about ten years before, the Chinese had flooded the market with cheap processed honey. In order to avoid importation taxes in various countries they deliberately cooked out the pollen, which was the element that could prove the country of origin in lab tests.
“That’s messed up.”
“It’s commerce. Chinese merchants dilute it with water and high-fructose corn syrup. They couldn’t give a shit about human health.”
“A lot of people don’t,” said Crocker, looking out the window at a sign warning that the Syrian border was twenty-five kilometers ahead. He was a physical fitness fanatic who stayed away from excessive carbs, sugar, and processed foods. The older he got, the more he appreciated the need for feeding his body with high-value nutrients.
They topped a promontory covered with groves of olive trees. As they descended into a long valley Logan pulled to the shoulder and stopped. He pointed past Crocker to their right. Filling the oblong field were rows of hundreds of white tents with the Turkish red crescent and star insignia on their roofs.
“That’s Yayladaği Refugee Camp Number One,” Logan announced. “It holds about twelve thousand refugees and is currently being expanded.”
“It’s as large as a village.”
“It is one, in a sense, because the Syrians come here and don’t leave. They want to return home but can’t, because there’s nothing to go back to. Back in Syria, they’d die from attacks or hunger.”
Crocker had seen dozens of other refugee camps in places like Ethiopia, Jordan, and Somalia. They always struck him as sad, filled with people who had been torn from their lives and were facing an uncertain future.
“Looks well tended-to from here,” commented Crocker, noting that the camp resembled the rows of tobacco they’d passed before-except that these neat lines were formed by tents with families in them.
“This one’s state of the art,” Logan said. “Every tent is equipped with its own satellite dish and electric hookup to power, lights, heaters, refrigerators, stoves. The camp is run by its own internal government, with an elected governor and citizens’ council. Pretty orderly, by all reports, and well administered.”
“Nice.”
“The Syrians living there are tremendously grateful.”
Logan pointed to a group of low stucco buildings at the bottom of the opposite hill. “That’s the old tobacco warehouse. It’s now used for classrooms, a medical clinic, and laundry.”
“So it’s completely tricked out.”
“These refugees are the lucky ones,” Logan continued. “They arrived here more than a year ago. Now it’s a hell of a lot harder to get in.”
“I can imagine.” Crocker had heard that the huge exodus of people from Syria had severely taxed governments and NGOs in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. And it continued.
Logan pressed down on the accelerator and steered the SUV back onto the highway. “Last fall, the Turks were receiving as many as fifty thousand refugees a month,” he said. “They’ve been generous but have reached what the government has called the ‘psychological limit.’ Now border guards stop anyone who doesn’t have a valid passport, which eliminates most poor Syrians.”
“So what do they do?”
“Some of them sneak across the border at night. Others camp out in villages where there’s no fighting.”
The poor always seem to get the short end of the stick whenever things turn ugly, Crocker said to himself.
With that grim reality in mind, they rolled into Yayladaği, a town of six thousand nestled in a sweet green valley surrounded by pine-tree-covered hills. Many of the houses and buildings featured red-tiled roofs that reminded Crocker of Tuscany. In the center of town rested a domed mosque.
They passed it and stopped at the gate of a compound with two large Turkish crescent-and-star insignias painted on the walls. An armed guard checked their passports and waved them in.
He slept for five hours, awoke in the dark, put on a pair of shorts and ASICS he kept in his bug-out bag, and went for a run through the deserted streets. Pre-dawn and dusk were his favorite times of the day, because they grounded him in nature. Back home in Virginia, he liked to run a fourteen-mile loop through First Landing State Park near the Chesapeake Bay Beach, with gulls and egrets flying overhead. Here his footsteps echoed through still streets and under rooms filled with sleeping children and parents. A slight tremble stirred the air in anticipation of the new day, less than an hour away.