Chapter 50
Safe House
The Medina
Tangier, Morocco
“We have thirty-seven minutes, people!” Clark shouted. “We need to be in position before that!”
All around the room the team was scrambling.
Ding and Charlie were bleary-eyed, having been roused from a sound sleep.
Boots were laced up and comm gear donned.
The mics they were using clipped inside their shirt collars and the earpieces were virtually invisible.
Everyone concealed their preferred sidearm beneath loose clothing.
Soon the team was gathered around their master map on the dining room table—a compilation of surveillance images sent by CC6 that had been spit out by a portable printer and taped together.
Clark thumped his index finger on ground zero, an expansive public plaza that fronted the city’s main beach. “La Corniche,” he said. “It’s wide open and nearly a mile long. That’s going to make concealment difficult.”
“Did the message say where exactly?” Ding asked.
“No,” answered Wu, who’d been interacting directly with ODNI. “Since it was a backup meet, the assumption was a high-threat environment. They wanted big spaces without a specific point. That makes it harder for the other team to surveille without blowing cover.”
“But equally hard for the blue team to join up and disappear after contact is made.”
“That’s our battlefield, like it or not,” Clark intervened.
“It’s a ten-minute walk from here. We move in our pre-briefed pairs.
Charlie, you relocate the van here for extraction.
Park and dark.” He pointed to a parking lot near a marina on the west side.
Park and dark meant no engine running and all lights off.
“Plan B is to rally back here. Bauer, you and Toussaint bracket west, somewhere near the marina with good angles. Hyori and Wu take the east side. Ding and I will flush from the middle.”
In the matter of pairing the teams, Clark had seen few options.
Wu was of Chinese heritage, Hyori South Korean.
Diversity could be an asset in many scenarios, but for a walk through the streets of Tangier common sense dictated putting the two Asians together.
Charlie, as the intel specialist, would maintain comm with headquarters, who hopefully could provide real-time backing.
“Everyone stays across the street from the plaza for as long as possible,” Clark went on. “It’s a mix of commercial and residential, so it’ll be busy this time of day. Eyes open for both Klaus and possible Russians.”
Charlie said, “That might be a tall order. This is a tourist area, and there were probably a good number of Russian civilians around before any of this hit.”
“True. But given our elevated levels of experience and cunning, I think we can distinguish between GRU thugs and kids who came here to dodge the draft.”
Sixty seconds later they were out the door. The three teams made a staggered departure, Clark and Chavez bringing up the rear. Charlie got stuck with cleanup duty—with any luck at all, the task force wouldn’t return.
She collected all their uneaten food and trash, planning to dispose of it in a dumpster at least a block away.
She filled one duffel with their slim personal effects.
A few clothes and toiletries, the maps, two laptops.
The place wasn’t exactly spotless, but the maid who came to clean the rental unit in three days would smile when she walked in.
Charlie locked the door on her way out, the keys to the Sprinter van in her pocket and her phone buzzing with new messages.
—
The sea sparkled in the late-day sun, languid and calm. As if the trouble brewing along the shoreline didn’t exist.
The elements of Task Force 99 reached the waterfront in eight minutes, out of breath and full of vigilance. The three teams spread to their assigned positions.
John Clark was no longer a military-age male.
The brutal truth was that he was the grandfather of a military-age male.
But that hadn’t changed his outlook on life.
He prided himself on being exceptionally fit, and his commitment to his country never wavered.
If there were threads of white in his hair, deep crinkles around his eyes, he made no effort to deny it.
In fact, it was quite the opposite. He was happy to put it to good use.
As he and Ding hit the sidewalk bordering the broad beachfront plaza, Clark stooped slightly and added a hitch to his gait.
Infirmity was hard to mask, simulating it far less so.
Ding was in a different category, still young enough to be considered a threat; yet he had his own angle to play.
His Latino heritage, sourced hundreds of years earlier from hidalgo conquistadors, was directly traceable to Spain.
And from where he stood at that moment, Spain was clearly visible across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Chavez’s dark features were a solid fit on the streets of Tangier.
Together, they seemed an unremarkable pair. A retired European strolling with a local. Friends perhaps, or business acquaintances. Anything but a pair of Tier-1 operators, which was what they could become in the span of a heartbeat.
They moved slowly, both to support their casual guise and to buy time. Until they got eyes on Klaus, they were in no particular hurry. Behind dark sunglasses their eyes swept the streets with radar precision.
“Two o’clock, thirty yards,” Ding said.
Clark shifted his gaze and saw a chubby crew-cut man with Slavic features. Next to him was a brunette woman, ten years younger. “I’d say Russian, but it’d be an odd couple for the GRU. I’d put them down as a fugitive expat and his girlfriend-for-hire.”
“Yeah, I can buy that.”
The comm net crackled to life. “Three is in place,” Toussaint transmitted.
“One copies. Two?”
“Two arriving on station,” Wu responded. “Negative contact with Fulcrum, but we’ve got a bead on two guys straight from a GRU recruiting poster.”
“One copies. Stay chill and keep an eye out for bailout routes. Zero is headed for the marina, but that might have been a mistake. It’s pretty open in that direction.”
Wu and Toussaint acknowledged. Zero was a reference to Charlie—a call sign that had drawn no small amount of pre-mission levity.
From the moment they’d turned onto the boulevard, Clark had been gauging the field of play.
It was useful to study surveillance before a mission, but he had never seen a battlespace that didn’t look different when viewed from ground level.
The plaza across the street was wide, and beyond that a hundred yards of beach led to the sea.
The shoreline was a hard constraint, cutting every option in half: ingress, egress, concealment.
The sidewalks and plaza were busier than he’d expected, but the crowds weren’t overwhelming.
It was 4:17. He saw no sign of Klaus.
“Zero is on station,” Charlie announced. “I’m in contact with Gamer.”
Clark acknowledged and canted his gaze west. He easily picked out the Sprinter in the distant parking lot. Gamer was headquarters—Clark didn’t know who’d chosen that call sign, but he suspected they were communicating directly with the crew running the DIA’s newest technological marvel.
“Is Gamer on our comm?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Charlie replied. “Working that link.” This had been discussed in the planning brief. Charlie would have a direct line to Gamer via a laptop, but she wasn’t sure she could tie them in on the tactical net.
Clark decided it was time to close in, and he gave the order.
He and Ding crossed the street and began meandering the plaza.
They checked benches and walking paths, paying particular attention to singletons—it was conceivable that Klaus could mix into a group or conjure up a walking partner, but given his limited operational experience Clark doubted it.
“Three o’clock, across the street,” Ding muttered.
Clark glanced to his right and saw a pair of thugs standing beneath a hotel awning. They might have been waiting for a cab. Except there were three cabs nearby, their bored drivers leaning on fenders.
“Yep,” Clark agreed. “Those are definites.” He advised the others over the net.
“Do you think the Russians saw Klaus’s message to us?” Ding asked. “Figured out that this is the meet point?”
“Doubtful. They’ve got a presence, but the place isn’t crawling with Russians or mercs or whoever we’re up against.”
“What do you reckon their orders are if they see Klaus? Capture or kill?”
“A good question. I think we’ll get an answer in the next few minutes.”
It was 4:28.