Swanson went off-road and skirted about a kilometer to the right of the scene, keeping low in the wadis to avoid being spotted. Within a mile, the country flattened again.
The village of Sa’ahn had the familiar, compact look of any other desert town he had ever seen, houses and shops that had grown up over the centuries around a water source. Rainfall in this section of Syria was adequate to feed fields of sugar beets that were bordered by tight patterns of apricot trees in the east. North of town, he could smell as well as see and hear the feed lots where sheep and goats were being fattened for market. Irrigated rows of ragged cotton were planted on the western side. Mount Druz dominated the land, and a carpet of desert stretched to all horizons.
The homes all looked alike, squat and square, with low walls that corralled the family’s chickens and goats. Drooping lines between poles carried telephone lines and delivered electricity from a dam about twenty miles away. One large building near the center appeared to be the town’s administrative center. Lights were on in a few windows of the private homes, brightening colorful small curtains of green and red, so people in those homes were already moving about. He had to hide.
Kyle stopped the bike about three hundred meters from the nearest building. He had run out of darkness and did not have time to bury the motorcycle, which he preferred to do. So he hid it in a deep wadi and covered it with bushes, hoping that the obscure location, the crude disguise of weeds, and the camo paint job would keep it hidden.
With the M-16 locked and loaded and his finger resting on the trigger housing, Swanson moved closer to the village until he found a forlorn and bare hillside that overlooked the approach road. A berm lined with thick brush rose like a dirty pimple near the top, and he ducked down to keep it between himself and the town. This was it.
He circled to the back side and dug a shallow trench straight up to the rim of the berm. The rising sun was already heating the dirt, and Kyle sweated the last few meters, but when he came up in the middle of the bushes, he had a clear view from the high ground.
Dumping his gear, he wiggled back down, gathered more brush from random spots in a radius of about twenty meters, and swept his tracks, then planted the foliage around his new hide until he was sure that it would look to a passersby like a single big bush. Time would slow down for him now, so he arranged things in his shady nook to get some rest. Real sleep was not an option, not alone in hostile territory, but he could allow himself a light doze, just under the edge of total awareness, with his hand always on a weapon.
As the sun cleared the horizon and full daylight arrived, he drank some water and took out the binocs again for a last look at the village before settling down. The homes, the goats, the women and children moving about. Normal tempo. Most of the men were probably still busy stripping the helos. He stopped his sweep with his glasses abruptly when he got to the area where the major road entered the town. Sandbags were stacked along a trench line, and just to his side of the road was another deep trench. AK-47 rifles were laid carelessly over its sandbags, and missile tubes leaned against the sides. Sticking out of a protected hole where the trenches came together were the snouts of the four barrels of a ZSU-23-4.
“Well, now, ain’t this a bitch?” he asked himself. “A Zeus, fighting holes with AKs, and lots of guys. We were flying into a fucking ambush.”
Kyle put away the glasses, took another drink of water, and let the adrenaline and excitement leave his body. He shifted his shoulders to get comfortable, laid the M-16 across his chest, and felt the heavy exhaustion from the past few hours pull hard on him. His last conscious thought before he passed out was, “They knew we were coming.”
CHAPTER 23
VICTOR LOGAN SAT AT A SMALL table, pecking at a laptop computer to input the names of the Marines killed in the crash. His big, thick fingers were blunt instruments, meant for things much more coarse than dainty taps on a keyboard, and he found this work both laborious and somewhat insulting. Clerks did this kind of shit, not warriors. He detested having to wear reading glasses when he worked on this machine. They were a sign of weakness, of getting old, past the prime, but Logan had decided to adopt the modern age to get the technological edge. Just because a gorilla eats leaves does not mean he is any less of a mean son of a bitch.
He could tell the sun was up by the steady increase of the temperature in the room. Finally, he finished copying the names that Jimbo Collins had culled from the dog tags and clicked the key to save the file to a directory. He called up another list that had been downloaded from Washington several hours earlier, did a cut-and-paste job with the one he had just written, and compared the two. He highlighted one name in bright red, increased the font size to make it bold, then pushed away from the screen and studied it. “I was right, Collins. Somebody’s missing. The Washington list has one name more than the dog tags on the kill list. You damned sure you got them all?”
“All of ‘em, Vic. I pulled the tags off every one of those crispy critters.” He held up a plastic bag filled with dog tags and shook it with a definitive rattle of metal against metal. Collins was at his own computer, working with his camera to freeze-frame individual images of each of the dead Marines, inject them into a folder, and adjust the color and clarity.
There was a knock and a shout at the door, and both men grabbed weapons. Security was always on their minds, and they kept an extra AK-47, locked and loaded, on two pegs directly above the front door for emergencies. “What?” called Collins. He went to the front wall and put his back to it.
“Open up! Something else has happened!” The English came in a familiar French accent.
Collins held a mirror to the window and angled it to confirm who was there. “It’s the frog. He’s alone.” Logan nodded, and Collins opened the door.
A small man, thin but muscular, came in. He had a sharp face with prominent cheekbones, dark eyes, and a slit of a mouth that never smiled and was almost invisible in a long, thick black beard. Pierre Dominique Falais was a familiar figure in Sa’ahn, where he had settled after getting out of the Foreign Legion. As a converted Muslim, he was welcome everywhere, despite his European background, and he would drive to other towns and villages to buy crafts, wool, and rugs and load them into his white Toyota truck, then usually find a reason to stay overnight in order to smoke and eat and talk with the locals. The Syrian villagers considered Abu Mohammed to be a most generous man and an honest trader. Success in the little trading enterprise and some carpentry meant nothing to him, for his real money came not from peddling items to stores and bazaars, but by selling his intelligence services to the governments of Syria, France, and Russia. He was able to work openly with all three countries because their policies were seldom in conflict.
For the time being, however, these two large American mercenary soldiers, who had deposited five thousand dollars into his bank account in Damascus, had his total cooperation. A similar amount would come in when the task was completed.
“The fuck you want, Pierre?” snapped Logan, turning back to the name on the laptop screen. A radioman lived through that and escaped?
The Frenchman stepped inside and closed the door. The place stank. These little homes were usually kept very clean by the women, with the pungent aromas of hard tobacco and cooking food welcoming visitors like a pleasant cloud. In here, the smell of human waste, sweat, and filth offended him. He shrugged it off. They were, after all, Americans, a disgusting people. “Two guards at that checkpoint a few klicks to the west have been killed. Bullet holes all over the bodies, and a villager described some open wounds that sound to me like they may have been made by grenades. I’m going out there.”