Answering in the affirmative would be grounds for not being admitted into the country. “No, sir,” Jim Bob said politely. “Was I supposed to?”
Moustache shook his head. “What is the purpose of your trip?”
“We’re with Adventure Tours. We serve an elite clientele who are willing to pay large sums of money for unique travels filled with adventure around the world. Now we’re scouting Syria, hoping to include it in one of our tours.”
Moustache turned to Wolf. “Show me your logbook.”
Wolf calmly led Moustache to the bridge and showed him the book. After examining it, the officer went below. Chris and the others followed. Moustache opened their luggage and rifled through the contents. As he was making a mess of Hannah’s suitcase, he found something that made him stop.
Moustache homed in on one section of Hannah’s suitcase and examined it — her undergarments. He has an underwear fetish!
“You can have one, if you want,” Hannah said. “But you can’t have them all because I need something to wear.”
Moustache frowned then abruptly left the stateroom and ascended topside. He collected their money, stamped their passports — good for fifteen days — and attached an entry/exit card before hastily departing with his partner. Customs and immigration only came to the yacht club by appointment, and when their business was done, they didn’t stick around. Moustache and his partner hopped in a government car and departed.
Chris’s team arranged for Wolf to stay on board, and the other four climbed down a ladder and onto the pier. The warm, familiar scent of kebab halabi filled Chris’s nostrils, fresh tomatoes and Aleppo pepper wafting together. He inhaled deeply, dragging in its comfort, and a mass of Arabic voices filled his ears like sweet honey. The air was dryer here than in Dallas, relaxing him. He’d forgotten how much he liked it here. Syria could be poster-perfect. And scrotum-shrinkingly scary. He refocused his attention on his teammates.
Hannah, Jim Bob, and Victor joined Chris, stepped off the pier and walked across the beach with him. Although the customs and immigration officials worked for the Syrian government, the marina was privately owned and operated. The private security guard staring through his office window might intimidate hooligans and thieves, but he didn’t intimidate Chris. Behind the office area was a restaurant, the source of the palate party aromas.
Minutes later, two taxis picked up the four of them and their luggage. The taxis dropped them off at the entrance to the front lobby of the Afamia Rotana Resort. “We’ll check in before meeting in my villa,” Jim Bob said.
After checking in and picking up their card keys, they carried their bags into two adjacent two-room villas. Chris and Hannah shared one villa with separate rooms, and Jim Bob and Victor shared the other.
Chris and Hannah walked into the wide, well-lit space, passing a marble bathroom. Hannah continued to the window and looked out over the terrace. “With this view of the Mediterranean Sea and temperatures in the seventies, it’s perfect for a vacation,” she said.
It was ironic that he was with such a fearlessly gorgeous woman at a beach resort and yet they had such a dangerous job to do. “The Mediterranean looks better with you here.”
Delight spread across her face. “It’d look even better with both of us in the water.”
Chris smiled. “Syria would never be the same.”
She set her bags in a corner of the bedroom. “Sometimes I wish we could put the world on pause.”
Chris put his luggage in the opposite room and met her in the living room. “I was just thinking the same: What if we could put this mission on pause and just go for a swim?”
She picked up the television remote control and pressed a button. She laughed, but it seemed forced and cut off. If the look in her eyes meant the same thing he felt, it was an unresolved longing.
She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she reopened them, the look was gone. “We better get going.”
It saddened him, but he dutifully packed the unresolved longing back in its box and pushed it to the back of his mind. Consciously, he focused on the positive: being with Hannah on a mission was better than no time with her at all. “Yep.”
They left their villa and walked toward Jim Bob and Victor’s. As Chris and Hannah neared the other villa, Victor’s voice drifted through the thick shrubbery surrounding its terrace. Chris caught a glimpse of Victor through the foliage. He stood alone, talking quietly into his cell phone, but he wasn’t speaking English. They must’ve taken the wrong way, reaching the back of the villa instead of the front. Victor spotted them and stopped his conversation. Chris and Hannah changed direction and headed to the front.
“You recognize what language he was speaking?” she asked in a hushed voice.
“It sounded like he said Ras al-Basit, the name of a town near here,” Chris whispered. “The rest sounded Chinese. Why would he be speaking Chinese?”
“He seems to show more goodwill toward his Chinese phone caller than you. He’s been acting like you’re interrupting something. Thank you for agreeing to help me out on this one.”
Being around her delighted him. “Thank you for asking.”
They knocked on the front door of the villa. Jim Bob answered it, invited them in, and handed Hannah and Chris each a set of keys. “I’m giving both of you sets of keys to the SUV, courtesy of the Company. Inside are hidden compartments for your rifles and other goodies. Victor and I will take the van. We’re going to take a look at the mountain area near Tishreen Lake where reports say the Switchblade Whisper went down.”
Chris nodded, intensifying his focus on the mission.
“Then tonight, we’ll go back to retrieve it,” Jim Bob continued. “And Chris, you’ll blow up what we can’t carry out. Hannah, you’ll protect Chris while he blows the demo. Victor and I will carry the drone back to our vehicle. From there, we extract as planned.”
Chris and Hannah agreed.
Soon they were outside, and Hannah took the wheel of the SUV, and Chris sat shotgun as they followed Jim Bob’s vehicle out of the parking lot heading east until they turned right on Sports City Road. On their left, buildings rose high into the sky. A light breeze swayed the palm trees and alfa, Esparto grass, on the median dividing traffic lanes. To their right lay the ocean under an azure sky. They turned left onto Al Mahabba before reaching a roundabout and exiting to Route 1. The number of concrete high rises decreased, and farms appeared. The vehicles turned right and continued northeast, passing through a small town. After five klicks, the road narrowed, and they reached a military roadblock.
“Syrian Army,” Chris said. He felt uneasy, but he didn’t show it.
Jim Bob halted his van.
Hannah pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. “Not a good sign,” she said.
Jim Bob appeared to be trying to negotiate his way through the roadblock.
Chris continued to display a poker face, but his gut twisted. This could all go south very quickly.
“Maybe they already found the Switchblade Whisper,” Hannah said.
Jim Bob turned his vehicle around.
She followed him as he headed back. “We need to get farther up the mountain,” she said with a hint of frustration in her voice.
Chris’s gut continued to churn. Even so, he maintained a positive attitude. “We just have to find another route. There has to be more than one way to the top of this mountain.”
When they reached Route 1, they drove northeast, looking for another way to the top. Nine klicks later, just after Route 1 narrowed, they found a paved road to the east and turned onto it. After a few curves, the road straightened out, leading them to the base of a mountainous area. When the paving ended, they continued along the dirt road, climbing in elevation for a klick until Jim Bob slowed, pulled off the road, and stopped. Hannah parked behind him.