Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  I’ll have to find out the hard way.

  To reach the Old City, the German driver with Mohr and the German chase car—a black Mercedes—were on the Ataturk Bridge. Mohr had predicted this, saying he’d realized from previous trips that the driver’s supposedly random choice of which bridge to take across the Golden Horn fit a pattern. Four vehicles now made an odd motorcade amid the traffic on the bridge: Mohr’s car was first, followed by the German chase car. Felix’s Mercedes followed the other Mercedes, and the beat-up Hyundai followed Felix. The Germans, while still in the New City, had already used standard techniques to locate and evade a tail. Felix was prepared for this: As long as Felix and Porto, or Costa in the Hyundai, held contact on the Germans’ black Mercedes chase car, they could rely on it to keep them within range of Mohr’s BMW. As long as Felix trailed the chase car, not Mohr, and worked with the Hyundai for mutual support, the American cars could avoid being spotted by the Germans, and could also better check that they weren’t themselves being tailed.

  On the bridge, with no cross traffic, their positions were locked in and Felix could take stock for a minute. He knew his reinforcements were already in place across the bridge. A highway, Kennedy Cadesi, ran like a giant U along the whole shoreline of the Old City peninsula. It could take the Germans close to the safe house by a long route, but one where traffic moved very fast—making it too easy for assassins with armor-piercing rounds to do a rolling drive-by hit. Felix thus expected that Mohr’s car and its trailing escort would use local streets that cut straight inland across the peninsula, since in the Old City maze, skirting the tangled warrens of Istanbul’s grand bazaar, they’d be better able to make sure no one was following Mohr. Felix was plagued by a similar concern, that he’d picked up an undetected tail, or series of tails.

  The Mossad is a main factor. Their tradecraft is superb and they’d have access to a large supply of vehicles if they wanted. They might be on us right now and we wouldn’t know. I’m praying they won’t interfere with us trailing the Germans, since from their angle we’re possibly about to do their work for them by getting rid of Mohr one way or another.

  Felix’s heartbeat started to rise. They were almost over the bridge. Soon he’d know if the Germans took the Kennedy Cadesi or local streets after all—this was essential to his plan to separate Mohr from his bodyguards soon without alerting the Kampfschwimmer. If he’d misread German intentions, and they did go onto the highway, the whole extraction plan would almost certainly collapse.

  When it happened, it happened fast, because Felix and all his men knew that once they sprang their trap, every second counted. They had to do it early, soon after the Germans came off the bridge, before their choice of paths became too varied, and coordinating the SEALs’ redeployments would become a mad and iffy scramble.

  For the first time, Felix and his men used their radios. The radios were digitally encrypted, and broadcast their spread-spectrum signals in a radar frequency band—the transmissions bounced around intervening buildings better, and were also much less likely to be overheard.

  Felix got right behind the German chase car, but then lagged back, allowing space to open up. He pressed his radio’s talk button, said a single word in Portuguese, and released the button. He heard two one-word responses quickly: The reinforcements were in position, and no Turkish policemen were visible. Felix pressed to talk again, and gave the go-ahead signal.

  A taxi came out of a side street and T-boned the German chase car. The impact was loud enough that Felix heard a bang even through his own car’s soundproofing. The momentum of the impact swung the German vehicle at an angle and carried the taxi into the middle of the intersection. A gypsy cab came from the opposite direction, and swerved and screeched to a halt in front of the German car, barely missing it. Felix floored the accelerator. The armored Mercedes rear-ended the German, hard enough to deploy air bags in Felix’s and Porto’s faces. Felix coughed from the dust kicked up.

  The drivers of the Istanbul taxi and the gypsy cab—both SEALs—got out and started shouting at each other, and at the Germans in the chase car. Felix and Porto also got out. Broken glass from smashed headlights and taillights littered the street.

  To passersby, yet another Istanbul fender-bender pileup had just occurred. Auto horns blared.

  The SEAL chase car, the Hyundai, added to the ruckus by driving onto the sidewalk to bypass the wrecks.

  The noise and chaos behind Mohr were impossible to miss. His driver halted in traffic, cursing, the moment he realized the chase car had been involved in a bad accident. The bodyguard in the front passenger seat reached for his radio, and Mohr reached for the special pen. Felix had said to just touch it to the skin at the back of the neck. He leaned forward, as if to speak to the bodyguard, and applied the pen. He belched to cover the slight hissing sound it made when pressure on the point activated the injection spray.

  The driver finished putting the gearshift in park. He looked backward as Mohr leaned toward him.

  “Wass?” What?

  Mohr pointed in the other direction, ahead of the car. The driver, confused, turned to look, and in that instant Mohr got him with the pen. Seconds later, both men were slumped forward against their shoulder belts, heavily sedated, with no needle marks on their necks. The compressed-air-powered, high-pressure spray drove the sleep drug through their epidermis, and capillary absorption did the rest. Mohr palmed the hip flask Felix had given him, and while pretending to see what was wrong with his driver and bodyguard, got high-proof schnapps on their chins and down their clothes. With a handkerchief he wiped his fingerprints from the empty flask, leaned farther forward, wrapped the bodyguard’s right hand around it, and rested the sleeping man’s hand in his lap. Still using his handkerchief, he unlocked the right front door.

  An old brown Hyundai pulled up on the sidewalk next to Mohr’s BMW. Mohr recognized Chief Costa; he’d been expecting him. With help from an enlisted SEAL riding with Costa, they moved the pair of Germans to the BMW’s backseat without taking them out of the car. Mohr switched to the Hyundai while the enlisted SEAL took the BMW driver’s seat.

  Salih, speaking rapid-fire Turkish, reassured pedestrians that no one was badly hurt. More SEALs, passengers in the gypsy cab and the taxi, joined the accusations and wild gesticulating that raged back and forth in German, Turkish, and Portuguese. Two of the SEALs, hamming up concern, reached out to calm the German driver and bodyguard. Felix knew both SEALs held knockout pens. The Germans staggered, increasingly woozy.

  Salih shouted in Turkish. Felix knew he was supposed to be saying. “They’re going into shock! Concussion! You, you, help me!” Salih pointed at Felix and Porto. Salih said something else to the gathering crowd; he was telling people that he and his friends would take the men to a hospital.

  They carried the nearly unconscious Germans and put them in the back of Felix’s Mercedes. The gypsy-cab driver and his passenger got back into the undamaged cab and moved it out of the way, into the street facing the halted German BMW and Costa’s Hyundai up ahead. The taxi driver, with help from other SEALs, pushed his ruined taxi to the corner of the intersection, blocking the crosswalk, but at least not blocking traffic, and left it there. He ran to the gypsy cab and crowded in.

  Salih got into the damaged German Mercedes, pretending that the drive train had been bashed out of commission—so no one would suspect it was armored and thus get too nosy or have the car stick in their mind. Salih worked the steering wheel while Felix prepared to push from behind with the SEALs’ own armored Mercedes, damaged superficially but totally driveable.

  Ahead of them, the BMW and Hyundai were both moving now, down the street. Felix used his knife to cut away his spent air bag, and tossed it onto the sleeping Germans’ legs. The SEAL in back arranged it like a blanket. Horns died down as traffic started crawling again. But Felix heard sirens in the distance, getting closer. Someone had phoned 155 or 112 or both, the Turkish equivalents of 911 for police or for an ambulance.

 
; A hundred yards farther on, Salih and Felix came to an alley. They both knew it would be there. As Salih steered the Germans’ Mercedes, Felix used his car to shove the other into the alley, to get it out of the way and more or less out of sight. Salih joined him, again in the front passenger seat. Now Felix’s Mercedes was chock-full, with two unconscious Germans and a very pumped-up SEAL in back.

  Felix took the first right turn he could. He knew the stolen gypsy cab, the rented Hyundai, and the commandeered German BMW would split up and take shortcuts to a nearby deserted industrial area. They’d avoid entanglement in a Turkish police investigation of the accident—they’d rendezvous again at a prechosen isolated point. Temporarily abandoned autos were a common sight in Istanbul after accidents, and drivers not lingering to be questioned by the cops was normal. What wasn’t normal was that the damaged taxi was stolen, and the damaged and dumped Mercedes had a license plate that might be traced to German consular ownership.

  “Did they use their radio?” Felix demanded of Salih. “Or a cell phone?” He hadn’t noticed himself, and was afraid the Germans he’d rear-ended had called the consulate for help before they’d gotten out of their car.

  At least their air bags didn’t deploy, so I don’t think the crash set off an emergency signal.

  “I couldn’t tell either,” Salih said.

  Felix squeezed the steering wheel harder. “Time is of the essence now.” In minutes the consulate might figure out what was happening, talk to someone senior enough to make a decision, and then send a warning to the Kampfschwimmer in the safe house. Felix and his team had to beat that deadline or they’d lose the vital element of surprise.

  But first, they had to dispose of these two drugged Germans.

  The hardest part of murder is disposing of the bodies.

  Bloody corpses dumped somewhere would attract immediate attention.

  Felix came to a pair of old, dark warehouses; he shut off his headlights and turned in between them. He, Salih, and Porto got out and hurried to remove the two Germans.

  They arranged them side by side, slumped against one of the buildings. Porto splashed cheap whiskey in their mouths and on their clothes—he didn’t need to get any into their stomachs or their bloodstreams, since by the time they revived, the SEALs hoped to be long gone. He opened a canteen, which he and Felix had filled earlier to have ready. The chief poured stale human urine into the crotches of both unconscious bodyguards. Felix knew, per the plan, that the two drugged Germans from the other car would be dumped elsewhere the same way. The original Turkish civilian drivers of the taxi and the gypsy cab had been relieved of their vehicles in a similar manner by some of Felix’s men much earlier: The SEALs had hailed taxis repeatedly, chatting up drivers in fractured English during short rides, and picked ones who were self-employed and just starting the evening work shift—so the thefts wouldn’t be reported prematurely.

  Public drunkenness in Istanbul is an increasing problem, despite the many Muslims who don’t drink. One thing that doesn’t draw much notice is a wino or two conked out, especially when they’ve pissed themselves. Even a local cop is very unlikely to haul them in. They’re messy and they really stink.

  Chapter 37

  Under a railroad trestle, Mohr dashed from Costa’s Hyundai to the armored Mercedes that Felix and Salih had rented. The BMW and gypsy cab stood guard from farther off. Then, with four vehicles to work with now, they did a much more extensive check for tails—there were no signs of any.

  The autos drove on as a group, making no attempt at stealth now, running badly behind schedule. Felix parked the Mercedes in the shadows between the rare streetlamps in the seedy neighborhood near the safe house. Inside the car with the doors locked, Mohr ought to be fully protected from any hooligans who might bother him. Mohr was visibly nervous. Felix gave him a spare pistol just in case, and to make him feel more a part of the team.

  “We’ll be back. Sit tight.”

  “You have to kill them all before they can damage the computer modules.”

  Felix had a horrible thought for the first time. It comes from being so rushed. “Do the gadgets have self-destructs or booby traps built in?”

  “No. Too risky. But they aren’t bulletproof either.”

  “We have to go. Slouch like you’re taking a nap, but keep your eyes open.”

  “If I see Kampfschwimmer, not you, I’ll shoot myself.”

  Felix knew Mohr meant it. That’s probably the best thing for him, if this safe-house attack does come unglued. . . .

  Felix jumped into the back of the gypsy cab, and the little assault convoy roared off. They halted at their preselected staging area. Everyone piled out of the cars and opened the trunks.

  The Kampfschwimmer safe house was well chosen, in the middle of a dark street of old two- and three-story buildings. The entire block seemed to Felix to reek of neglect and poverty and crime. I wouldn’t want to walk down this street alone, even armed. Felix and his team were now geared up for battle. They wore black flak vests and ceramic-composite helmets, with equipment harnesses and lightweight night-vision goggles. Under the helmets and goggles they wore gas masks. The fighting would be at short range—no sniper rifle, no fragmentation or lethal-concussion grenades.

  They knew from Mohr that the safe house appeared to not have any external security cameras, and he’d never seen displays for them inside, but one of Felix’s chiefs made as sure as he could with image-intensified binoculars. Then Salih walked down the street, still in casual civilian clothes, and tried to see if there were miniaturized surveillance lenses after all. Past the safe house, he gestured that he didn’t spot any up close. Felix thought it would be hard to tell with the little moonlight to go by. But, lenses in a slum? Everyone knows how to spot them these days. Here, with nosy and paranoid neighbors, they might make a safe house less safe. . . . In sixty seconds we’ll find out.

  Felix’s team moved up both sides of the street, hugging the shadows, in a tactical formation. Most of their magazines were loaded with flat-nosed bullets, to avoid any chance of overpenetrating two structural walls and going into the occupied buildings on either side. On the back of their flak vests they had stenciled “EMNIYET,” Turkish for police, in white.

  When they were near the targeted building’s front, Felix used an infrared scanner to locate people inside by their body heat. No image. He turned it off and on again. Nothing.

  The damn thing’s broken. . . . Mohr said to expect ten men.

  A chief with a directional mike also had it aimed at the building. He tried different windows, then made hand signals.

  No conversations overheard. Not even radios playing.

  Salih knocked on the door of the safe house. Somebody on the other side said something, and Salih answered, disguising his voice. His tone was sniveling, pathetic, but persistent—as if he refused to go away. He got louder, on the verge of hysteria.

  Expecting Klaus Mohr momentarily, and wanting to be rid of this nuisance before Salih might make a scene, a Kampfschwimmer unlocked the heavy, rusty, metal-slab front door.

  Felix knew Salih would start in Turkish, then switch to fractured German if the Kampfschwimmer didn’t speak Turkish. He was pretending to want to make a heroin buy, and a friend had said this was the place. The German would assume he had the wrong address, causing a moment’s hesitation.

  Felix gave the signal. His men dashed forward, their MP-5 shoulder stocks unfolded, rounds in the chambers, safeties off.

  On the run, shoving Salih aside, Felix authoritatively yelled “Polis!”—another Turkish word for police.

  “Lutfen,” Salih begged as he fell to the ground and rolled out of the way. Please. Then in his normal voice he yelled up and down the block in Turkish. Felix knew he was announcing a police raid, and telling everyone to stay inside and stay down.

  On this block, a drug-house raid is believable. Most of the residents are probably glad it’s not them being raided.

  For another crucial moment, the Kampfschw
immer would be confused. They knew one thing—their safe house was not a heroin connection. They’d assume a Turkish SWAT team had followed Salih, and thus also had the wrong address.

  Felix’s team poured through the door, shouting “Polis!” over and over, fanning out and climbing the staircase as the metal door slammed shut behind them. Felix picked a human target and his weapon barked, the recoil pounding against his shoulder as spent brass flew. On that cue his team opened fire.

  Kampfschwimmer darted for their weapons. Felix’s chiefs both threw flash-bang gas grenades. They detonated, and Felix saw spots even though he’d known to close his eyes. Military tear gas filled the air.

  Felix was panting and his gas-mask lenses were fogging already. He pumped round after round into every Kampfschwimmer’s face or abdomen he saw, with his weapon set on two-round bursts. He wasn’t sparing of ammo, and quickly had to change magazines.

  A bullet struck his flak vest, knocking him backward. SEALs on either side fired past him; another German screamed and fell, dead.

  “First floor clear!” Porto shouted in Portuguese. His voice was muffled by his gas mask.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Felix bellowed, also in Portuguese.

  “Cellar clear!” came from below.

  Felix’s ears were ringing painfully now, from the grenades and loud reports of weapons indoors. But the noise was part of the plan. Through the mental tunnel vision of combat, Felix caught glimpses of his men moving from room to room, covering each other, looking down the sights of their weapons. They swept their gazes and MP-5s in unison from side to side. Their muzzles spit fire as they shot at Kampfschwimmer, and more muzzles flamed as the Germans shot back. Chipped plaster fell from the walls where stray bullets hit, and upholstery stuffing flew around like windblown snow. Felix heard breaking glass and smashing porcelain.