With him in his bag he brought all of his surveillance equipment purchased in Hong Kong, which was something of a calculated risk, but even though his bag was opened and his electronics were poked at for a moment by a customs official, his several cameras, phones, binoculars, a tactical flashlight, and a monocular didn’t raise any eyebrows, especially considering they were being carried by a well-dressed and well-to-do-looking person traveling from the electronics mecca of Hong Kong.
The fact that they were in their original boxes helped, too, Court imagined, because it didn’t seem like a spook would smuggle in spy gear still in its shrink-wrapped packaging from the retailer.
On his taxi ride to the hotel, Court took in the city around him. Saigon was an amazingly vibrant and colorful place, with one-fifteenth the vertical sprawl of Hong Kong, and less than a fifth of the traffic on the roads and sidewalks, but to Court it somehow appeared every bit as lively. Court already knew he’d see twenty-five times the number of scooters and motorcycles here as compared to HK, but still the sea of two-wheeled traffic was an amazing sight to behold.
It was impossible for Court Gentry to be here without thinking of his father, who, Court knew, had spent a lot of time in Saigon long before Court was born. His dad had been a Marine Scout Sniper, and he’d fought combat missions north of here around Da Nang and in operations somewhere in the Mekong Delta to the west of Saigon. That was the extent of what Court knew about his dad’s service, because although their small Florida home had been nearly covered in both Vietnamese and Marine Corps memorabilia, James Gentry didn’t talk much about his service there.
By seven thirty p.m. Court had checked into his room at the Sheraton Saigon and, after just a few minutes to change into dark cotton slacks, a dark gray short-sleeve shirt, and black tennis shoes, he turned around and walked back out the door carrying everything he’d walked in with. He left the hotel and headed five blocks to a motorcycle rental shop, arriving shortly before closing time. Here he picked up a black 2009 Suzuki TU250X, a simple bike with enough power for city driving and a profile that wouldn’t draw attention.
Court affixed a GPS unit onto his handlebars so he could type in his destination and then set out towards the Saigon HQ of the Wild Tigers.
The Russians arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at six p.m. after sailing in their sixty-eight-foot yacht directly from Hong Kong. They managed to bypass customs and immigration controls subjected to other ships and boats entering the nation by dropping the yacht’s twenty-foot speedboat a few miles out of the shipping lane but inside Vietnamese international waters, filling it with Zoya and the Zaslon operators, and then linking up with a local cabin cruiser rented and crewed by Russian intelligence officers working at the SVR Residency in Ho Chi Minh City. The forty-footer then merged with the heavy maritime traffic heading up the Saigon River. The cabin cruiser offloaded its new passengers and their personal gear just outside the city, and the yacht simply went through the legal customs and visa process minus the passengers it had taken on from the speedboat.
Zoya Zakharova and the Zaslon force were picked up by the riverside in vans driven by Russian SVR non-official cover operatives working in HCMC, and then they were driven to a safe house in District One. Here Zoya and Vasily sat for a briefing on the Wild Tigers organization given by an SVR in-country analyst from the local SVR Residency, and then a second briefing about the local police and government counterintelligence structure. Zoya took information from both briefings — names, addresses, affiliations — and by late evening she felt like she knew enough about the organization to make her opening move.
At ten p.m. she leaned into the large upstairs bedroom where Vasily and Yevgeni were just climbing into their bunks. To Vasily she said, “I need two of your men.”
Zoya was dressed in blue jeans and a dark cotton pullover, with a zippered raincoat because the air outside smelled of an approaching storm. She wore a large messenger bag cross-body, and she held a black scooter helmet under her arm.
“For what?” Vasily asked.
“For about an hour. Maybe more.”
Vasily frowned. “Why don’t you call up those non-official cover guys who brought us here? My guys don’t know Vietnamese. They don’t know the area. Maybe you forgot, but we’re the ones you send in when you already have a target fixed.”
The good-looking brunette said, “I have a target.”
Vasily cocked his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Zoya explained, and twenty minutes later she stood with Ruslan and Sasha out in the garage, picking through plastic containers full of used local clothing kept at the safe house for operations in the city.
She dressed both men herself, telling them they would need cell phones and headsets, but no sidearms or other equipment. When they were ready, she had both men dial into the same secure conference call number. She did the same, which put all three of them on an open conference on a secure network. The two paramilitaries climbed into a dark gray Toyota Innova minivan parked in the garage, and Zoya chose a black Honda Air Blade from the row of five scooters available. She put on her helmet and then hit the button on the wall for the garage door.
At five minutes before eleven, the two vehicles carrying the three Russians rolled out onto the tree-lined residential street and into the night.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
At nine forty-five p.m. Court arrived in the Binh Thanh District, in the neighborhood of the Nguyen Van Dau building of the Wild Tigers. He parked his motorcycle in a fenced-in parking lot and began walking the neighborhood, taking care to remain a street away from his actual target.
On his recon of the area he was happy to see quite a few guest housing options, and although there were no rooms for rent directly across the street from his target location, he considered this a benefit. If Con Ho Hoang Da were smart, they would have informants in the neighborhood, and any foreigner taking a room with an easy straight-shot view to the building on Nguyen Van Dau would be met with suspicion and further scrutiny.
Instead Court found a fourth-floor room that faced Le Quang Dinh, a major thoroughfare one block west of Nguyen Van Dau. The room was small and spartan but much cleaner than his place in Mongkok. There was no private bathroom, but a walk down a well-lit corridor led him to a public restroom with four stalls, each of which had a large window that opened to provide ventilation, though with the hot sticky air and the large number of vehicles outside on the street, it almost made things worse. Court didn’t need the ventilation, but with a little effort he found he could open one of these windows fully and pull his body through. From here he spent two minutes standing on the sill before he devised a way to pull himself up and climb onto the roof, careful to avoid both the electric wires hanging all around and the large swaths of pigeon shit here and there on the wall and the concrete eave that surrounded it.
Once on the flat portion of the roof he moved low behind a parapet until he arrived at the southeastern corner. Here, crawling forward carefully, he could see the Wild Tigers building some seventy-five yards away.
From the look of this roof, no one came up here regularly, and from a long, slow recon of the other roofs and balconies in the area through his night vision equipment, he didn’t get the impression anyone would have eyes on him as long as he did not stand up and make a scene.
He found he could secure himself further by making a small lean-to structure using a five-by-three-foot square of corrugated steel sheet that had fallen off an awning of the next building over, balancing it on the parapet to enshroud himself in darkness and break up his outline from anyone looking his way from down the street.