by Chris Lowry
She brought a bottle of Perrier and Stella Artois and he shook his head at the humor of the Universe.
The plane took off without incident and when they reached cruising speed, the pilot reached back and opened his door.
“Call for you,” he passed a headset to the attendant.
She brought it to Brill and showed him where to plug it into the seat.
“Shadowboxer,” he said into the microphone.
“This is an unsecure line,” the voice told him. “Stand by for instructions.”
“Roger that.”
“A package is waiting at the airport with your credentials and supplies. Look for the logo.”
The call disconnected.
Shit, thought Brill. They didn’t tell him the password.
CHAPTER FOUR
The plane touched down with the gritty sound of rubber on tarmac as the wheels rolled over the sand dusted runway.
Brill unbuckled as they came to a step and met the attendant at the folded down stairwell.
"Enjoy our stay," she flashed a smile.
Brill nodded back.
He wondered briefly if she knew what kind of man she was transporting, or was she part of the network of operatives and support personnel working for Barraque. Was the offer to enjoy ironic? Was it sincere? Her pretty smile suggested she meant what she said, but Brill knew better to trust appearances.
He stepped out of the plane and into the musty heat.
A lone battered pickup truck with a plywood bed waited for him. A man sat on the plywood with his legs crossed. He wore cast off clothes under an open robe that billowed around him in the swirling wind.
Brill glanced around.
The airport was a private strip far from the noise and clutter of a town. A mountain range smudged the horizon to the sound and the ever-present wind left a gritty film on his skin.
"This isn't Syria," he told the man as he approached the truck.
Aslan hopped off the bed and opened the passenger door with a flourish.
"Welcome to Turkey," he grunted in clear English. "I am Aslan."
Brill paused before climbing in.
"You have something for me?"
Aslan smiled under a bristling mustache and lifted the seat forward to reveal an oilskin wrapped package. He placed it on the seat and moved around to the driver's side.
Brill opened up the cloth.
It was a Taurus 9, a heavy bulky pistol with three clips that held 15 rounds of ammunition. He quickly worked through the pistol, racking the slide and ejecting a fourth magazine. It needed to be cleaned but it was serviceable.
Aslan noticed the attention Brill paid to the action of the weapon and handed him a clean cloth. Brill grunted thanks and slid into the passenger seat. He began cleaning the weapon while Aslan drove them toward the smudge on the horizon.
CHAPTER FIVE
"I will distract them," said Aslan sensing the concern coming off Brill.
He almost asked how but instead gave the driver a nod.
"We are near a shallow gorge," Aslan continued. "Open your door and hide until I am gone. There is a trail beyond that that you can follow once darkness falls. It will lead you across the border. Mark the entrance on the other side for you must return on that same path."
Brill glanced out of the passenger side window. At first he couldn't see the hiding hole in the craggy landscape. the land rippled and folded as it marched toward the mountains in a slow steady rise. one dip about ten feet away showed bare earth where a flood had eroded the soil. The shadows played funny across the escarpment. It must be the small gorge his contact was speaking about.
Aslan passed him an oversized two-way radio wrapped in a plastic wrap ball.
"Hide this so that when you return I will come to this spot to meet you."
Brill took the soccer ball sized package, checked his weapon and a go back full of water, food and a first aid kit from the plane.
He grabbed the door handle.
"Stay low," Aslan warned.
Brill rolled out of the door and hunched down. He scooted across the hardscrabble dirt and dipped into the depression.
Aslan gunned the truck engine and shot toward the mountains. He lay on the horn, lights flashing as he raced a mile ahead. The truck slid to a stop and he hopped out to shove a box off the wooden bed. He executed a K turn on the dirt road and drove back in a dusty cloud of silence. He didn't slow as he passed Brill's hiding spot.
From his vantage point, Brill watched a group of robed men descend from the mountain pass. Six of them advance don the box and opened it with victory cries. They held up bottles of vodka to show the two men who had stayed a hundred yards behind as guards and lookouts.
Members of the patrol shouldered the box and the group disappeared back into the rocks.
"Outstanding," thought Brill. Aslan had ensured the men would be distracted as he made the crossing tonight. Now all he had to do was wait for dusk to make his way through.
Chapter Six
Brill waited for twilight before he moved.
He double checked that the plastic wrapped ball with the radio in the middle was secured under a small cairn of rocks, adjusted his pack and took off down the trail. The wash of stars that lit up the darkening sky provided a soft white glow that made it easy to pick his way through the mountains, only stumbling occasionally.
It took a few hours to top the rise and start descending. The path followed a gentle curve around an outcropping of stone, and Brill was thinking about a stop for water and fuel when he rounded the rock and froze. A young boy of twelve or thirteen stood on the path holding a shepherd's crook. Behind him, a string of goats stretched across the trail in eerie silence.
Damn, muttered Brill as his hand trailed up to his waist to rest on the pistol grip. Why didn't the goats make any noise? Normally the animal bleets could be heard for hundreds of yards. He could have hidden off the path and let them pass, or free climbed lower to go around. Goats in Africa had made plenty of noise, so much that his team learned to avoid them. The bleating cry of goats and cattle had betrayed more sneaking men than any sentry ever could.
This mission was going sideways early and all because he had been thinking about water.
The boy watched him, eyes wide in the darkness, just as quiet as the animals he tended. Brill almost shot him, and thought perhaps he would, but he didn't have a silencer on the pistol. If he pulled out the weapon and began screwing it on the barrel, the boy would run, maybe scream and scatter the goats, which would set off noise that would carry in the dark. He didn't know what was out there.
Which meant he had to kill the boy. If he was part of the rebel camp, he would alert them of Brill's presence and the mission would be compromised. If he belonged to a village nearby, it was the same outcome. Brill couldn't let him go because he was an unknown quantity.
He started to draw the pistol and the boy smiled.
A boy. Young and full of potential, not yet hardened by the life that was waiting for him. He was going to turn rebel or get killed by bombing. He was going to lose family and friends, and even if he survived past the civil war that was tearing at his country, he would have to scratch out a meager existence on this dirt his people were so loyal to. But he smiled with the guile of a child, only slightly afraid of the grizzled man he ran into on a dark path just past twilight.
Brill left the pistol in his waistband and slung his pack open. He twisted off a top of one of the bottles of water and held it out to the boy. After a few moments, the kid shuffled forward and reached for it with a tentative hand. Brill took a second bottle, opened it and tilted it up. The boy smiled again and mimicked him, giggling as a trickle of liquid sloshed past his lip and dribbled down his chin.
Brill tore off the end of a protein bar wrapper and passed it to the boy. This time he didn't need prompting and started chowing down on the chewy sweet bar with gusto.
Brill tried a smile. It must have worked because the boy smiled back, granola cover
ing his teeth.
The stood next to each other on the path drinking water and snacking on protein bars for a few moments.
Brill decided he couldn't kill a kid. It may cost him the mission. The boy would probably tell and that would bring hell down on him from who knew what. He'd deal with it when it happened, and if the boy came back with a Kalashnikov, that was his choice. But not on this path, not on this night.
The boy watched his face and shivered at the man's eyes. He may not have known how close he was to death, but something predatory in the eyes of the man beside him made him grip his staff tighter and hunch his head into his shoulders. There were legends of lions that once roamed the edges of the desert and the boy thought this man looked like one. Not his plain face which was hard to remember in the growing darkness, but his dark eyes that seemed to absorb the night and stare at him like a demon.
Brill held out a fist.
The boy stared at it unsure what to do. Brill demonstrated a fist bump with is other hand, popping the knuckles together lightly, and held out his hand again.
The shepherd complied, holding up his fist just like Brill. The man bumped his fist and the boy grinned. They repeated the gesture again, and Brill moved past him and kept going down the path. The boy watched him go one hand rubbing his tummy with the treat and water in it, the other still holding a fist that he used to wave at Brill's departing back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He worked his way through the darkness parallel to the highway. Out here in the desert the stars and gibbon moon lit up the landscape in a white ghostly glow making it possible to travel quickly. There were no city lights along the roadway to blot out the stars, no electric glow from the city turning the horizon an orange shade not normally found in nature. He moved at a fast pace, eight minute miles that ate up the distance until he reached the edge of Idlib. It was where Aslan arranged for a meet with a contact of his own.
Brill didn't like operating with unknown quantities, but there wasn't much to be done for it. Barraque had zero intel inside the borders of the nation, and their contact Aslan did. He had to rely on the man's knowledge. With the distraction he provided to the rebel mountain group, Brill thought he could be trusted.
If he wasn't using speed and stealth to strike fast and hard, Brill would have set up shop in an apartment and worked to gather additional intelligence. He would stand out in the neighborhood, but posing as a Canadian photojournalist to match his fake credentials could open a few doors to publicity hungry Islamists who just wanted to share their story.
Idlib was mostly dark, a few windows lit up on the horizon. He angled toward a darker part of the city toward a street Aslan gave coordinates to find. Southside of the village, three streets for the end of town. Look for the stone house with a green door. Someone would be waiting.
No instructions to knock, no secret password or handshake.
Just two men in a foreign country where he didn't speak the language and they were known to behead journalists giving him directions to save two lives. Three if he counted his own.
A dog barked as he approached the third street. So much for the stealth approach.
He found what looked like a green door on a stone house but he couldn't be one hundred percent confident. Green, black and blue, any dark color really, looked the same until the sun came up. There were no front lights burning to indicate it was the right house. But it was a stone house on a row of stone houses on the short street and the only one with a different door.
That had to be significant.
He took a chance and knocked.
Shouting from behind the door carried down the street. Brill put his hand on his pistol and prepared for a fight.
The door cracked open and a young woman stared at him with sleepy eyes. Almost immediately a hand slapped the back of her head and jerked her back behind the door. A man took her place, just out of his teens from the wispy mustache and beard that stained his face. He held the door halfway open to show one arm, the other hand gripping the edge of the frame while he yelled at the girl. He glanced at Brill and shouted at her again, the rapid-fire pace of words sputtering out in a guttural growl.
He stopped talking and nodded at Brill.
"You are the American?" his accent was thick on the verge of undecipherable.
"Canadian," said Brill.
The man grunted.
"Same thing."
"Syrian, Kurd, Turk," Brill wiggled his hand back and forth.
The frown on the contact's face popped into a grin.
"I get it," he slurred. "Canadian."
He held out his hand.
Brill passed him an envelope from Aslan. He didn't bother to look inside, just placed it inside the house and pulled the door shut as he stepped out into the street with Brill.
"You know Aleppo?" he asked as he led Brill down the empty road.
Brill shook his head.
"The people you are looking for were at Aleppo."
Brill remembered the city name from the map, and the report Barraque provided indicated it was a hotbed of rebel activity and Syrian government response. Bombing runs were a nightly occurrence and the groups were starting to wall off the city to outsiders.
"Are they there now?"
"Outside."
He led Brill to a small building with one room. There were no doors, the windows were narrow slits, designed to let in the breeze and keep out the sun. It was an empty shell, just debris from former occupants on a simple wooden table against one wall. No bed, no chairs, no signs of ever having held life except for the table and a plate and cup on it.
His contact moved to one side of the table and reached into his jacket. Brill's hand snapped to his pistol.
"It's okay," the contact said as he pulled out a map and tiny flashlight. "It's okay."
Brill watched him spread the map on the table and highlight Aleppo with the narrow flashlight beam.
"Aleppo is here," the man told him. "Journalists are here."
He pointed to a spot on the map several kilometers outside of the city.
"Is that confirmed?"
"What does mean?" the man looked confused.
"Are you certain they are located there?"
"Yes," the man grinned. "One hundred percent. Confirmed is the word?"
"Confirmed means yes."
"Confirmed then."
"Does it have a name?"
"Is not a city. Is a house, a waddi."
"Walled compound."
"Yes, walls. And guards. It will be very difficult for you to get to your friends. But I can help."
"For the right price?"
"Yes for good price. I can help you get in."
Brill knew this was the shakedown. It happened in every Third World country he had ever been in. The bribe was a cultural expectation, and negotiating for more was part of the DNA.
"I'll manage," he told the man and got a shrug.
"Okay then."
The man rolled up the map around the flashlight and slipped it back into his pocket. Despite the weak light, it took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Brill heard the man shuffle and his silhouette blotted out the starlight in the doorway. Then he was gone.
"Guess we're done," he muttered as he checked the exterior before following.
It was one a.m. He still had time to make the compound and scope out the rescue. If he played it fast and loose, he could be back in Turkey before dawn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was easier to run on the road than in the hard-packed sand ten yards off the asphalt, though it would be difficult to argue which was less technical. The asphalt was sunbaked and damaged, a series of cracked and crumbling surfaces covered by a fine layer of gritty sand. Off road there were rocks and holes hidden in the sand, little fingers meant to reach up and snag a toe or punish the bottom of a foot.
Since traffic was non-existent the road made more sense. It also made for better time and Brill settled into a seven-minute mile that he could h
old comfortably for several hours. He knew it was an average and he needed some gas in his tank when he reached the compound because he wasn't sure what to expect, but the cool desert wind, the silence of the night so different from the jungle he was used to hearing, lulled him into a cadence and the miles disappeared.
The compound was easy to locate. It was the only structure between Idlib and Aleppo. He noticed the walls as black marks on the horizon that blocked out a portion of starlight in an unnaturally square pattern. That was his training kicking in, noticing when something didn't fit in.
He approached the walls in a soft walk, listening for sounds of life as he made his way around the back of the structure. He relied on the late hour and his ears to pick up any guards before he reached them as he slow stepped the compound, one hand trailing on the stonework of the wall.
There were enough niches he could climb it if needed, though he hadn't practiced climbing in some time. He made a note to put that on the workout list and kept going. A wooden back gate was closed to the night, the splintered surface covered in peeling paint. There were no windows, no other access points other than the front gate which was blocked in a similar fashion.
The rebels were stupid, he thought. Two squads could take the compound in five minutes by smashing through the front gate and setting up a crossfire along the backroad to catch the occupants as they peeled out of the back. Not a good sign. Dealing with stupid soldier's meant too much could go wrong because their patterns were hard to predict.
For all he knew, he could be walking into a nest of suicide bombers all standing around in their vest waiting to blow themselves and the compound to hell.
He wanted more intel.
But the eastern horizon was beginning to turn dark purple, starlight winking out as the fringe of the sun scraped across the earth just below the sight line. He was out of time and didn't want to hide in the desert to bake all day.