Through it all, however, he managed to look on the bright side. The moonless overcast night was sticky and warm, which meant he could survive being soaked to the bone here much better than he could in some colder climate.
He’d kept his gear inside his waterproof backpack for the two-and-a-half-hour hike through the flooded fields and thick bush, and he was glad he did, because he’d stumbled face-first in knee-high water at least a dozen times on his trek. Now he lay on semidry ground just south of the canal, and even though the hazy green image in front of him was narrow because of the optics he wore, he nevertheless had a perfect view of his target, because while his side of the canal was covered in trees and brush, the other bank had been cleared.
Just feet from the water’s edge on the north side of the canal was an unpaved parking area. Court could see the black BMW he’d tailed earlier parked in the darkness there, along with a few other cars and trucks, and a few scooters and motorcycles, most of them covered with tarps. Beyond the vehicles was thirty yards of open ground, and then a large French Colonial villa in the center of the property that looked to Court like a slightly more ornate antebellum plantation home. Vines covered the walls of the three-story structure, weaving around the decorative architectural molding, much of which had chipped or cracked through the effects of weather and age. Old black shutters hung off half the windows, and the tiled roof appeared to be original, meaning it was probably a hundred years old, and it looked every single day of it.
Ahead to his left was a low wooden barn, and while there was substantial light coming from the big villa itself, the barn was dark and ramshackle and it appeared to be uninhabited.
Two sentries walked the three-acre property along individual routes; each moved alone in a predictable and lazy pattern, and they wielded flashlights. The long white beams moved up and down, not side to side, and this gave Court the impression they were just walking, not actively searching the grounds.
Through his NODs Court could see the shape of a human form appear from time to time in a southern window on the third floor of the big villa, and it looked to him like this person was probably guarding some room or a hallway in front of a room but had also been tasked with eyeing the waterlogged area to the south of the villa.
The front of the large building faced east; Court couldn’t see the entrance from the south, so he had no idea if there were other guards at or near the front door. He could just see a bit of a porch at the back door on the western side, along with the closer portion of the western wall of the villa.
On his laborious sloshing walk here through the rice paddies he’d remained a couple hundred yards west of the one road to the villa, but through his night vision gear he had seen a pair of sedans set up as a checkpoint on the dirt road. Several men stood around each vehicle with shotguns, controlling access to the villa. Court imagined this roadblock had been put in place after the attack in Saigon today.
Yes, there was a decent security posture in place to warn of or even repel an attack up the road, but apparently the Wild Tigers here had no major concerns that a lone man just might splash, swim, and stagger overland through the slop for hours to get here on foot.
Not that it had been a cakewalk. Court now took his eye from his binos to pull yet another leech off his body, and he thought his feet would hurt for days where he’d rubbed sores into his waterlogged skin.
He’d been given a malaria shot on the CIA aircraft before he landed in Hong Kong, administered by the flight attendant, and he was glad for it now, because his arms and neck were covered in mosquito bites.
As he looked through his NODs he listened again to the night around him. It was full of the normal noises one might expect on most any farm anywhere in the world: dogs barked in the distance, a chicken clucked somewhere, and an airplane flew high overhead towards Ho Chi Minh City.
But there was one unnatural sound in the air; it wasn’t loud but still it dominated the entire scene, and Court could not have been happier about that. A sixty-thousand-watt diesel generator the size of a car sat alongside the back wall at the southwestern corner of the villa. It was dead ahead of Court’s layup position here, and it hummed along, covering the scene with a soft but prevalent white noise. This was the source of the lights inside the main building, obviously, and Court imagined that a generator of that size could power the entire house with ease, even providing electricity for televisions, radios, and computers.
Court scanned the corner of the house around the generator, then looked higher above the big rectangular device. Soon he decided this area would be his target. If he could cross the large parking area and make his way over a swath of open ground and then along the vine-covered wall of the old building, he could tuck himself between the generator and the building’s wall and hide from sentries as they passed. Then he could shut off the device and wrap the entire location in darkness. A window two stories directly above the generator was open; Court could make his way up there by climbing on top of the generator, then using the architectural molding on the French Colonial building as hand- and footholds the rest of the way.
It would take time to make his way up; he was sure the wall would have weak or slippery handholds, but it looked like his best bet.
He felt certain once inside he could either find Fan or eliminate the possibility that he was even here.
This plan of his required an incredible amount of stealth, but Court had made it into and out of more secure locations populated by better-trained opposition, so while it was a definite risk, he had confidence in his abilities.
His confidence was blunted by only one hurdle. It was just now ten p.m. He’d rather wait until much later, just an hour or two before dawn. But every fiber of his being told him he had no time to spare, and he had to move now. The Wild Tigers could relocate Fan at any time, or they could improve their security setup here. Or else Dai’s men or even the other force out there involved in the hunt for Fan could find this location on their own and hit the place at any time.
Court was here now, he was here first, and he knew he needed to get his ass in gear and take advantage of it.
After stowing his equipment back in his slime-covered pack, he shimmied forward on his elbows through the brush and then pulled himself down into the canal, slowly and silently. Here he grabbed hold of a cluster of free-floating water hyacinth and used it for extra cover as he crossed to the other side.
Even though he’d made it the entire evening without encountering a single snake, Court had snakes on his mind now. Of course there would be snakes here, somewhere. This was their world, not his. Court’s dad had talked about encountering pit vipers during his time in Nam, and he tried to picture his father swimming across this very canal forty-something years ago. Try as he might he couldn’t see it, couldn’t imagine his dad as a scared kid.
It took just moments to cross the canal, and when he made it to the other side he clawed into the mud and reeds at the water’s edge to keep himself perfectly stationary so he didn’t float off. Here he listened to the sounds around him, and he grew more confident in his ability to mask his own approach thanks to the humming diesel generator.
Court pulled his NODs out of his pack again, and with them he crawled up to the lip of the canal. He looked ahead, up to the window where he’d seen the lone sentry, and just caught the man as he moved out of view. Then Court waited a minute for a passing sentry to make his way across the open ground in front of the old villa.
When the slow-moving sentry and his lazy flashlight disappeared to the northwest, Court started a low crawl forward.