“Nope. Still on us.”
Chris turned to the front and saw an elderly woman crossing the street. Sonny drove around her. Chris turned behind to see if she made it across the street, but AQ drove through her like a plastic doll. There was no time for silent prayers or emotion for her.
“At the next street, turn right.”
“You’re taking us in a circle,” Sonny growled.
“The Turkish border patrol and cops want al Qaeda more than they want us. I’m giving the cops what they want.”
Sonny turned right. He avoided hitting any more parked cars but did lose another hubcap. The van picked up speed and caught air again. When the van came down on its bumper, the bumper fell off and crunched under the van’s wheels.
Al Qaeda fired a barrage of lead, and smoke rose from the engine. “What’s that?” Chris asked.
“Trouble.”
“Turn right again.”
At the next road, Sonny did as Chris instructed. They’d driven 180-degrees and were heading south to Syria, but now more law enforcement converged on al Qaeda and were shooting at them without any love.
“Another right,” Chris said.
Sonny turned the steering wheel, and they traveled down the same streets again, continuing in the clockwise direction. The police presence continued to grow. AQ must’ve seen the writing on the wall because they finally stopped shooting at Chris and Sonny and broke off from the deadly circle. The border patrol and police ignored Chris and Sonny, going after AQ instead.
“See?” Chris laughed, and Sonny joined in.
Then their smoking van came to an unexpected stop. “This van was becoming an eyesore anyway,” Sonny said.
“I’m gonna need some new wheels.”
Sonny looked down at his poncho. “I need some clothes.”
“Enjoy your shopping spree.”
“Enjoy your donkey-killing spree.”
Chris concealed his HK416 in the travel duffel, exited the van carrying the bag on his shoulder, and walked swiftly away from the vehicle so no one would connect him with the bullet-riddled van. He looked down at his GPS and touched the tracking icon. While it began calculating Switchblade Whisper’s coordinates in relation to him, he looked up from the monitor and noticed a taxi heading their way, so he flagged it down. When he turned back to see if Sonny wanted to share the ride, he was gone. For a moment, he wondered if Sonny was real, but there was no way those bullets and RPGs were anything but.
The taxi stopped next to the curb, and Chris hopped in. The GPS unit showed the Switchblade Whisper on the move, heading on a northerly route about an hour ahead of him. Chris didn’t know many Turkish words, so he told the driver in English to head north on the highway, but the man didn’t understand. He tried Arabic. The driver understood Chris that time. Chris looked around to see if anyone noticed him leaving in the taxi. At the moment, no one seemed to be following him.
He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes for the first time in what felt like ages. Hannah’s face permeated his mind. Where are you, Hannah? He didn’t want to believe that she was dead, but so much time had passed, the likelihood became more difficult to dispel. She had trusted him to help her, and he was determined to follow through on his promise.
Jim Bob had said he thought she was probably hunting down the Switchblade Whisper, and if she was still alive and free, Chris’s guess was the same. If the Chinese were transporting the Switchblade Whisper by vehicle, as Chris had surmised, they might drive the whole way to China, but driving would take too much time, and they’d have to risk customs and immigration inspections at multiple border crossings. Maybe the Chinese planned to link up with a ship. Going by sea would still require considerable time to reach China, and if that was their plan, they probably would’ve already sailed from Syria rather than drive out of their way to Turkey. It seemed flying out of Turkey was the most probable method of extraction.
He forced his eyes open and leaned toward the driver.
“Keep heading north,” Chris told the man in Arabic. “There’s a little something extra in it for you if you hurry.
At the mention of a bonus, the driver smashed the accelerator down to the floor, and the taxi punched forward. Chris fell in and out of a light combat sleep along the way — his senses were ready to wake him at the sign of anything unusual. Just north of Iskenderun, the sun glistened off the ocean to his left. On the edges of his consciousness, he and Hannah ran barefoot and carefree on the ocean-cooled sand.
Chris awoke as the taxi stopped in front of a three-story building decorated with faience panels at the main entrance and capped with a triangular roof. He checked his GPS to figure out exactly where he and the Switchblade Whisper were. According to the GPS, Chris was at the Adana gar, a railroad station in the city of Adana, but the Switchblade Whisper had continued north on the highway, and now he was only half an hour behind it, but the clock was ticking, and he was losing the time he’d gained.
“Why are we stopping here?”
“I can’t go farther today,” the driver said.
Chris argued with him, but the driver refused, so he paid him and got out of the car. He checked for Turkish authorities on his six but saw none. He smelled bad, but a Turkish woman stared hungrily at him, and he realized he didn’t look nearly as ragged as he thought he did — or he smelled like a kebab. She had two small children and more luggage than she could handle. He wanted to take a minute to help her with her luggage, but he didn’t have time to spare.
Then he hailed a new taxi, and the driver gave him a discount to take him over five hundred klicks northwest, passing Ankara, Turkey’s capitol. He looked down at the GPS. The SW symbol stopped moving at the Esenboga International Airport. Panic churned in his belly. If the Chinese boarded a plane, he’d lose them, and he still didn’t know where Hannah was.
15
For several minutes, the Switchblade Whisper remained stationary about a klick northeast of the main terminal. Chris directed the cab driver toward its location, but the main road diverged away from the Switchblade Whisper. There didn’t seem to be a public road between Chris and his destination, so when the taxi reached a private road leading to the northeast, he told the driver to take it.
At the end of the road was a shipping company and a parking lot filled with a fleet of trucks and trailers. Now Chris was within three hundred meters of the Switchblade Whisper.
“Stop in front of the office building,” he commanded.
When the taxi came to a rest, Chris paid the fare and jumped out. He wanted to run but didn’t want to attract attention, so he swiftly walked instead. He crossed the shipping fleet parking lot and found another road that appeared to lead toward the target and followed it until he arrived within a hundred meters of his destination. Only a private airplane hangar stood between him and the Switchblade Whisper.
The noise of nearly half a dozen AKs opened fire, then at least a full dozen rattled off.
Where are you, Hannah?
He ran the length of the hangar, unzipped his travel duffel, and pulled out his HK416. Turning the corner, he discovered a small runway that seemed connected to the larger runway. He took cover behind a plane and some SUVs just as six Chinese fired north at a dozen Arabs, some from inside vehicles and others on foot.
Chris scanned their faces for anyone he might recognize.
Professor Mordet.
Chris’s soul shuddered. Although he knew that good was more powerful than evil, he couldn’t shake the funk of fear the man’s presence conjured.
Truckloads of reinforcements, roughly thirty men, arrived next. Chris didn’t know if the reinforcements were from Turkey’s local bad guys, al Qaeda, or someone else entirely.