“No unnecessary risks.”
“Right.”
Court walked the dirt bike off the shoulder and towards the trees near the edge of a rice paddy. He hid it there in tall grasses, not knowing if he might need it again later this evening.
A few minutes later he sat on a dry piece of ground in thick brush amid high trees lining the water of an irrigation canal and waited for darkness to fall. It was only five p.m.; he’d be here for a while, so he drank bottled water and pulled out two bags of snacks he’d bought the evening before. Looking over the bags, he realized he had a choice between prawn crackers and roasted cashews.
He slipped both bags back into his backpack. He decided he’d wait till just before setting out, and then use the nuts and crackers for the energy he’d need to make the arduous move to the compound.
But for now he’d just lie here, swat flies and mosquitoes, and check over his equipment.
He brought his night vision binoculars out of his backpack and pulled off his baseball cap. Looking both over, he got an idea.
It took him twenty minutes to get it right, but he used electric tape to affix the binos to the bottom of the bill of his cap. This gave him night vision goggles if he dialed back the zoom feature of the binos all the way. They were a little unwieldy like this, but it would be helpful to see in the dark with his hands free, and he found he could easily turn his cap around if he wanted to move the binos out of the way.
He made adjustments on other items in his bag, then secured all his zippers to ensure that everything inside would stay dry when he entered the rice fields. He knew the water would be chest deep or higher in some places, and it would be slow going with the mud and muck.
His dad had told him all about the paddies.
Court thought about his dad in the war now, over half a century ago. With a sly smile he wished more than anything in the world he had an M16 cradled in his arms, and an entire Marine rifle platoon sitting here with him now.
No luck. It was just Court, a knife, and a mission that could go bad a lot more ways than it could go right.
He made himself close his eyes and try to rest up, just as light rain began falling again.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
An old gray Mi-8 helicopter, bigger than a school bus and just about as aerodynamic, sat quietly in a gentle rain shower, alone in the middle of a parking lot. Around the hulking aircraft, four bearded men in their fifties and sixties stood with their hands on their hips, green flight suits dampening by the minute.
The pilot looked down at his watch after wiping water away from its face, then pulled a walkie-talkie from his pocket and checked the volume knob.
Tall grasses grew through the cracks in the asphalt parking lot between the helo and a row of derelict warehouses, just fifty meters away. On the other side of the rusty buildings lay the banks of the Bassac River, brown and slow in the warm afternoon.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia, languished under the same weather as Saigon, some hundred miles to the southeast. It wasn’t officially monsoon season yet, but puffy gray rain clouds had hung intermittently over both capitals for the past few days, and more rain was forecast for tonight.
The pilot of the big helicopter had taken the bad weather into account, of course, but it would have little effect on his flight plan; on this evening’s flight he planned on staying below the clouds and out of the mountains.
A rusty metal side door to one of the dockside warehouses creaked open, and a row of figures marched out into the weather. Each person in the line wore a large green backpack and a dark hooded rainproof jacket, most carried suppressed short-barreled rifles hanging from slings around their necks, and all of them wore radio headsets on their heads under olive drab, black, or green hats of various shapes and sizes.
The four crewmen of the Mi-8 looked to one another, then jumped into action. The pilot and copilot climbed aboard to start the engines, and both the crew chief and the door gunner helped the passengers load their equipment.
The eight SVR Zaslon commandos shook out of their heavy packs and threw them into the old civilian helicopter, and then they pulled themselves aboard after unslinging their rifles. They strapped themselves into the benches that ran along the fuselage as Zoya Zakharova, the last in the group, climbed into the helo.
Zoya wasn’t encumbered with a rifle as were the men of the task force, so she had an easier time of it.
This Mi-8 was a Russian-made aircraft, and consequently Zoya had been in dozens of these fat birds in her life, but looking around at this particular Cambodian relic, she wondered if it would even start.
A minute later the engines coughed and shook, to the point where Zoya had doubts that this old bird would get off the ground. She kept her eyes away from the others and looked out the open door; the last thing in the world she wanted to do in front of these paramilitaries was to show any insecurity about flying in a fucking helicopter.
The Mi-8 did manage to fight its way up into the air, then it turned on its axis and tipped its nose. The pilot lifted his machine higher and picked up speed. He rose over the rusty warehouse, climbed over the Bassac River, then soared higher into the warm, wet air.
Soon the gray helicopter was racing along just below the gray clouds hanging low over the capital city of Cambodia.
Zoya looked down at the flat cityscape for a while, then decided to put her worries about the questionable transport out of her mind. She did this for two reasons, both of them logical — for one, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to prevent a helicopter crash from her seat on a bench here in the back. And two, she had a thousand other responsibilities now, and precious little time to prepare for what was to come.
The graceless aircraft shook and rattled as they flew out of the city, over green hills and muddy fields now, heading towards the border with Vietnam.
The Mi-8 was currently owned by Russian intelligence and kept at the airport in Phnom Penh, but it had seen service with the Cambodian military back in the Cambodian — Vietnamese War in the late seventies. The crew were Russian SVR pilots who’d been working an op in Indonesia and were flown in on a Russian military cargo plane for today’s in extremis mission. This Mi-8 was not normally armed, but the crew brought two Chinese-made W85 machine guns along with them that they could hang from the sides and use as door guns by the crew chief and the gunner, but for now they kept the big weapons hidden in the cabin.
Zoya hoped like hell the machine guns wouldn’t be needed, but she’d requested the extra firepower herself. She was meticulous in her planning, especially when working with others, and the uncomfortable truth was that the extraction phase of tonight’s operation was a massive unknown. She had no idea what they’d find at the compound, and she wanted to be ready for as much that could go wrong as possible.
And, as Zoya had learned on dozens of operations in her career, sometimes big guns went a long way towards remedying big problems.
The primary intelligence about the location of the Wild Tigers secure compound came from the Ho Chi Minh City police officer Zoya had picked up the evening before. This man was still being held incommunicado in the laundry room of the safe house, and local NOCs had instructions to drop him off at some street corner when this was all over with a warning to keep his mouth shut unless he wanted it known he was the man who fucked over Con Ho Hoang Da. But he wasn’t Zoya’s only source. Since last night she’d communicated with the Russian embassies in Hanoi and Phnom Penh and checked into property records, police records, tax records, and other databases that helped her paint a picture with data about the people residing at the compound. By noon she felt certain the old rubber plantation facility near the Cambodian border was the current hiding place of Fan Jiang, and she immediately committed her entire task force to taking the location down this evening.