“While we’re in Golbasi, I’d like to check it out,” Hannah said. “Turn left up here.”
Sonny turned off the main road and went east. He passed houses topped with clay, red-tiled roofs.
“This is a residential area,” Chris said.
“Maybe it’s an ambush,” Sonny said.
“Stop here,” Hannah warned. “We’re getting too close. We’re almost a hundred meters away.”
Chris pulled out the lighter he’d been carrying since his childhood abduction and flicked the lid anxiously.
Hannah read the distance on her GPS: “Fifty meters. Forty.”
They passed more houses.
“Thirty meters,” she said
“If this is an ambush,” Sonny said, “I won’t be pleased.”
“Twenty meters.”
Chris put away his lighter. “Only one way to find out.”
“Ten,” she said.
Sonny slowly applied the brakes. “Where is it?”
Hannah pointed to a white Renault parked in the driveway of a house. “The GPS tracker reads that it’s right there.” The lights in the home were on. Hannah stepped out of the car, strolled over to the vehicle, and laid down next to it. She tinkered underneath the vehicle before returning with an object in her hands. She got into her seat in the back and said, “Let’s go.”
Sonny released his foot from the brake and eased away from the curb.
Hannah looked at the tracking device in her hand. “I guess Syria is next.”
Sonny drove past the house with the Renault, made a couple turns, and returned to the main road. “Chris and I were lucky to blast through the border checkpoint terminals the first time,” he said.
“We might not be so lucky if we try that a second time,” Chris said.
“I know where the gaps are in Turkey’s border security,” Sonny said.
“Outstanding,” Chris said.
Hannah nodded.
Sonny made a pit stop in Golbasi to stock up on water before driving south. They drove straight through the night taking turns: one driving, one sitting as lookout/navigator, and one sleeping. In the early morning, Sonny came to a stop on the side of the road within sight of the Kasab Border Crossing Terminal. Turkey had beefed up security with barricades, canines, and extra guards. It seemed that the Turkish border patrol were doing thorough searches of each car leaving the country.
“There are more border patrol here on the main road than on the mountain,” Sonny said, “so our odds of sneaking around them are better if we hump over the mountain.” He turned around and backtracked away from the border patrol and further inland. Then he found a small road that led up a mountain on the border. “With all the recent shootings, the Turkish border patrol will have itchy trigger fingers, but they can’t shoot what they can’t see.”
“Turkish border patrol can shoot us for breaking the law, but we can’t shoot a NATO ally for upholding the law,” Hannah said.
Sonny flicked off the car lights. “That’s part of the challenge.”
“What’s the other part?” Hannah asked.
“In Syria, their border patrol shoots anything that moves,” Chris said. “If the shooting starts now, we may never reach Mordet in one piece, let alone with enough ammo to stop him.”
“I can get us past Turkish border patrol,” Sonny said with a serious face full of confidence.
“I’ll get us past Syrian border patrol,” Chris said.
Hannah nodded her head in agreement.
Sonny seemed to hesitate for a moment. Allowing Chris to lead them on the Syrian side was trusting Chris with his life. Sonny nodded in agreement, too.
The snaking paved road became a dirt road. Five klicks south of Yayladagi, on the Turkish border, Sonny drove the car off the road and into a grove, where he parked the vehicle. “We’re going to have to hoof it from here.”
They exited the sedan, gathered branches of evergreen needles, and camouflaged the car — not enough to conceal it from close, prying eyes but enough to conceal it from someone at a distance.
Sonny took the point. After him came Hannah then Chris. At a moderate pace, they hiked four klicks up the mountain, heading south toward Syria, until Sonny slowed.
If he saw something, he would’ve signaled, so we must be approaching a danger area.
Insects and occasional birds chirped but not nearly as loud as Chris’s heartbeat.
The trio slipped into a gully and continued slowly, lowering to a crouch. After fifty meters, Sonny quickly dropped to the earth. Hannah and Chris followed suit. Chris looked around, narrowing his gaze to try to spot the source of what spooked Sonny. There was no sound of rustling in the bushes or on the ground. A small, dark figure, an animal, swiftly waddled toward Sonny, who rose to his feet. The animal didn’t stop. Sonny spread his legs, and the animal passed under them. Hannah also rose to her feet and spread her legs. The dark little beast stood about one foot high and one foot across. Chris had already risen to his feet. He spread his legs apart to allow the animal passage. He turned to see if it would come back and harass them, but the creature disappeared around a bend in the gully.
Sonny resumed their journey at a crouch. Twenty-five meters later, he gradually lowered onto his hands and knees and signaled that there was a person ahead. Sonny led them in a crawl.
On top of the mountain, a few hundred meters above Chris and his teammates, a guard stood with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Although the sky was dark, the guard’s silhouette was darker, causing him to stick out. It wasn’t clear if the guard was facing toward the three or away from them. If the guard had chosen a spot ten feet down the mountain from his current position to stand, his silhouette would’ve been hidden by the darkness of the mountain. The pounding in Chris’s chest shot up his neck until it throbbed in his ears, hammering his skull.
The three followed the slanting gully to the right until Sonny low-crawled through a dip in the right bank, taking them out of the gully. Rather than go up the mountain and pass near the guard, they travelled a horizontal path on the mountain, creating distance between themselves and the guard. Tall, grassy weeds helped conceal their movement. After a hundred meters, the guard was no longer in sight, and Sonny eased into a ravine. The trio rose to a crouch, moving faster but still slowly, and followed the bottom of the ravine up the mountain. As they neared the top where two ridges dipped like a saddle, they dropped down on their bellies and crawled over the saddle, careful not to silhouette themselves against the sky. On the other side of the mountain, they slithered on their stomachs down into another ravine.
In the ravine, they patrolled at a crouch until they reached the bottom of the mountain, where they could walk upright. Finally, they crossed into Syria. Chris assumed the point and avoided the danger areas while finding safer routes.
The sun still lay hidden, but it changed the dark sky to grey as Chris and his team patrolled west until they arrived south of a Syrian town named Duz Aghaj. They stole another vehicle and headed south. Hannah drove the first leg with Sonny riding shotgun and Chris in the back.
Chris sucked on an energy gel pack and checked his GPS: seven and a half hours to Al-Bukamal. Located near the southeast end of the Euphrates River in Syria, near the Iraq border, Al-Bukamal was where Professor Mordet’s French plantation stood. He remembered the night he and his teammates had hidden in a field of wheat and first seen the back of that two-story building and its expansive roof. Each floor had those thin, white wooden columns, wide porches, and French doors. Still in Chris’s memory, the French colonial plantation house seemed so eerily out of place near the humble farmhouses that sat on small plots of land to the south. He had an uneasy feeling, but he tried to put it out of his mind and catch some sleep while it was his turn to rest. They still had a seven-and-a-half-hour drive, and there was no point to wearing himself out before they arrived. He was going to need every ounce of strength to stop Mordet from hacking into the Switchblade Whisper’s secrets and attacking America.