“Easy, cowboy!”
“I’m trying to keep us from getting lit up.”
Crocker turned to see whether the Sprinter was still behind them. Couldn’t see it through the swirling dust.
“Slow down!”
He heard the.50 cal on the helo open fire.
“Breaker. Breaker, Deadwood here. You okay?”
A few tense seconds passed before Davis answered. “We’re in the high grass about sixty feet to your right.”
Another pass from the helo and more fire. The Sprinter found a parallel road.
“You clear, Breaker? Report. Report!”
“All good. Over.”
Based on the light issuing from their windows, the modest homes they whipped past were occupied. A sniper in one of the houses fired a shot that whizzed past Hassan’s shoulder and ripped into the dash.
Crocker picked up the 416 and returned fire. He was so focused on the windows of the houses, searching for other snipers, that he forgot the Mi-24, which had veered off in search of other targets.
“Pedal to the metal,” Crocker shouted.
“Make up your friggin’ mind,” Akil growled back.
“Stay on this road,” Hassan shouted. “It will take us straight into Idlib.”
They entered through streets piled with trash and rubble. It seemed unlikely that people still lived here, but lights shone from some of the damaged structures and they heard the occasional crack of small-arms fire in the distance.
Crocker stuck his head out the window and saw the Sprinter. “Nice work, Manny,” Crocker said into his head mic. “See the bird? You good?”
Mancini, who was driving the Sprinter, responded, “Yeah, Deadwood, high and tight. The bird has flown west. What’s the thinking at this point? You looking for real estate?”
“You see something you like, you let me know. I got cash.”
“I like the collapsed-roof thing with the jihadist graffiti sprayed all over it.”
A very pregnant dog wandered in front of the truck and stopped. Akil had to honk repeatedly to get it to move.
“You guys trying to wake the dead?” Mancini asked through the earbuds.
“No, we’re trying to get your mother to move,” Akil responded.
“Up yours with a rhino horn, douchebag.”
“The good news is that we have the sarin, and aside from a couple of cuts and bruises, everyone’s intact,” Crocker reported.
“I question, boss, whether Romeo is completely intact,” Davis said.
“More together than you’ll ever be, surfer dude pothead,” Akil shot back.
“Focus, guys,” Crocker said. “We’re still in Syria. Looks like we’ve lost our escort and probably have little chance of finding him. We’ve also got about an hour before the sun starts to rise.”
“Rising sun means Syrian helicopters, and helos mean rockets,” Mancini said.
“Thanks, grasshopper.”
“So what’s the thinking, boss man?”
Crocker turned to a shell-shocked Hassan in the front seat and asked him a series of questions about the streets ahead. Then he got back on his headset and said, “Hassan knows a completely bombed-out, deserted part of the city where we can hide till nightfall.”
“Sounds like our kind of joint,” said Akil.
“No electricity, no toilets, no running water,” Mancini responded. “The Idlib Hilton. Lead the way.”
Chapter Eleven
The greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That was almost too easy, Crocker thought as they entered what once must have been an upscale part of town, now completely destroyed. The Syrian air force had leveled everything. They traveled a half-dozen blocks beside a little park with shattered, dying eucalyptus trees without seeing one light or any evidence of life besides an occasional rodent. There were signs of phosphorus bomb damage on practically every building.
Too fucking easy, Crocker thought. He had expected more resistance from the Syrians at the air base. Then remembered that Assad’s men were busy chasing ISIS jihadists. Our timing was perfect, for once.
Hassan pointed to some wreckage ahead on the right. “Turn in there,” he instructed. “It used to be a primary school. I had a girlfriend who taught there.”
“You had a girlfriend?” Akil asked. “I thought you were into guys.” But Hassan wasn’t laughing.
The three-story modern structure looked as if it had been abandoned for months. Bombs had landed on the roof, collapsing the middle of the building so that the resulting wreckage formed a giant V.
“Welcome to paradise,” Akil announced as he emerged from the cab of the Ford, farted loudly, and stretched.
“First let’s find a place to hide the trucks,” Crocker said. “Then I want you and Suarez to do a quick recon of what’s left of the building.”
“We looking for ghosts?” Akil was in a jaunty mood.
“Ghosts, rats, busted gas lines.”
“Roger that.”
“Davis, you establish comms with Ankara Station. Let ’em know that we’ve got the sarin and we’re planning to stay here until it gets dark.”
“Awesome.”
They found a garage in back that was big enough to accommodate both trucks and made them impossible to spot from above. Several of the washrooms on the first floor still had a trickle of running water-dirty and undrinkable, but enough to rinse their faces. Crocker, Mancini, and Davis pushed the trash out of a classroom with a view of the street.
“We’ll assemble here,” Crocker announced. “Soon as Akil and Suarez get back we’ll set up a sentry schedule and the rest of you bums can catch some z’s. I’ll take the first watch.”
No vehicles had passed along the street so far, which was what they’d hoped for. Since all the structures around them lay in ruins, there seemed no reason for anyone to enter the neighborhood. The buildings had already been looted.
When Ankara Station asked the name of the street and the building number, Crocker went looking for Hassan. He found him standing in a stairway, talking on his cell phone, which he found odd.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked.
“I was trying to reach a friend,” answered Hassan.
“Probably not a good idea to use it. If the Syrians are looking for us, which I assume they are, they could be using scanners to pick up cell-phone signals.”
“I’ll power it down.”
“Do it now. Thanks.”
He thought of taking the phone away from him, but decided against it. The kid had been useful and cooperative.
Akil and Suarez’s recon of floors one, two, and three yielded nothing surprising. The classrooms and offices they had been able to reach had already been stripped of valuables-desks, computers, calculators, books, toilet fixtures, and maps. They were about to wind up their search when Suarez noticed what looked like fresh wax drippings leading toward the basement.
Cautiously and quietly, they descended and entered a dark hallway that led to storage rooms, a laundry, and an electrical room. Here, too, doors had been ripped off their hinges and everything of value taken. Akil spotted water on the floor of the last storage area ahead. Strung from one wall to the other was a line containing items of women’s laundry, including two black bras.
In the far corner, behind a large heating unit, they found mattresses, blankets, and two trembling women. One held a pair of scissors, the other a small kitchen knife.
“We’re not going to hurt you. We’re not going to touch you,” Akil repeated over and over in Arabic.
The women didn’t believe him at first. But when the one with the long dark hair and amber-colored eyes asked where he was from and he told her that he and his colleague were humanitarian workers from Canada, she started to relax.
Her name was Amira, she said, and explained that the school had been destroyed with the rest of the neighborhood five months ago. She and her friend Natalie had both been teachers at the school. Along with many others, they tried to flee the country, but because they were young unmarried women, they had been picked up by pro-Assad forces and raped.