Straits of Power (32 page)

“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

U
nder 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 Kampfschwimmer 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.

He advanced and almost slipped in a dead German’s blood. Tear gas mixing with more and more gun smoke further obscured the view outside his mask. There was a sizzling blue-white flash and all the lights went out.

The fuse box must’ve been hit.

Muzzle flashes punctuated the dark.

Felix flipped down his night-vision goggles.

“Second floor clear,” Porto shouted.

The surviving Germans had retreated to the top floor.

The top floor, Mohr said, held his clean room and tools.

“Go! Go! Go!” Felix yelled. Four SEALs dashed up the rickety stairs, Costa and Porto tossing two more flash-bang tear-gas grenades. Felix heard the Kampfschwimmer coughing.

They got a strong dose already, even if they’ve pulled on gas masks by now.

Felix and his three other men rushed to a spot on the second floor and reloaded with custom armor-piercing ammo. Felix gestured upward to exactly where they should shoot. They began to fire straight through the ceiling. They were creating a wall of enfilading fire, to keep the Kampfschwimmer from moving into Mohr’s equipment clean room—if they hadn’t reached it yet.

But I can’t stop the Germans from firing into there, and my men must be very careful. Mohr’s modules aren’t bulletproof.

A body tumbled heavily down the stairs to the third floor. Felix kept pumping rounds along a perimeter in the ceiling. His magazine ran empty. Again he had to reload.

A stream of bullets came back through the ceiling. The man next to Felix was struck on the top of his bulletproof helmet, so hard he was knocked out. He fell, reflexively squeezing his trigger; his MP-5 fired as Felix ducked. Another burst from upstairs stitched the unconscious man’s chest. Rounds were stopped by his flak vest, but one leg jerked when it took a hit.

Felix had to keep firing through the ceiling at all costs. He was running low on ammo. He was afraid his armor-piercing rounds would punch through the roof, despite their reduced propellant charge, and come back down through the air and hurt or kill an innocent person somewhere. A main cross beam, too splintered, snapped, and part of the ceiling sagged.

“Cease fire!
Cease fire!
Third floor clear! Roof clear!” That was Chief Costa, still using Portuguese.

“Man down, second floor!” Felix shouted.

Da Rosa, the SEALs’ first-aid specialist, hurried from above and went to work on the wounded man’s leg.

“Sir,” he reported, “we lost a man.”

Oh, Jesus.
Even through the gas mask, Felix could hear da Rosa’s distress. “Who? Where?”

“Fernando, sir.” Fernando Gabrielli, one of Felix’s enlisted SEALs. Da Rosa said he’d been shot twice in the head as they’d assaulted the top floor.

That was him tumbling down the stairs.

Felix had no time for grief or regrets. His breathing inside his own mask was very ragged now.

“Find Mohr’s modules! Find his tools!” Without them, all this carnage would have been for nothing.

“We’re in the clean room!” Chief Costa’s voice came from upstairs. “Tool kit looks okay! No modules up here!”

“Check again!”

“We did, sir! Negative modules on roof or third floor!”

Felix felt a stab to his heart.
What if they’d left the field gear somewhere else, as a security measure?

Felix’s men from upstairs clambered down. Chief Porto was clutching a bullet wound through his forearm. Da Rosa helped him bandage it. Another SEAL held a box by the handle: Mohr’s tool case. One man just stood there in the dark. Even through his night-vision goggles, Felix could tell he was in a daze.

That’s one dead and two wounded. At least I didn’t see arterial blood spurt from either wound. But I think the chief’s got a broken bone in that arm.

He saw that da Rosa was putting a splint around Porto’s wound.

And where in hell are the modules?

“Switch to flashlights!” Felix pulled one out of his equipment vest and checked that it still worked. He raised his night-vision goggles on their bracket attached to his helmet front. Felix started to look around on the second floor.

He found the modules.

All four stood together on the debris-littered floor, on the far side of bullet-riddled couches. A German corpse lay draped across the computer boxes, as if the Kampfschwimmer died shielding them with his body.

Felix pulled the corpse off the modules. They were covered in blood.

“Sir,” Costa called. “There’s too much smoke . . . Something’s burning.”

“Find it,” Felix snapped. “And find a fire extinguisher.”

Felix left the drying blood where it was on the computer modules, so as to tamper with them as little as possible. He hefted each of the modules into a separate waterproof sack, to protect them and camouflage what they were.

“Chief! Did you find what was burning?”

“The fuse box, sir! I turned off the main. That stopped it sparking and smoking. I dug around with my knife, no sign of hot embers.”

“Get a body bag.” SEALs never left a man behind, dead or alive.

Gabrielli was placed in the body bag, one of a pair the team had brought just in case. As the shifting flashlight beams from Felix’s men weirdly lit the smoke and floating dust and lingering tear gas, he went into the kitchen. The plumbing was shattered, and water was spraying under the sink, forming a widening puddle on the floor. He looked around for a bucket or big pot that didn’t have a hole in it. He found one and managed to fill it with water.

He walked back to the body bag. His boots crunched on broken glass and splinters of wood. Spent shell casings clinked as he kicked them aside; they lay everywhere, the brass glinting brightly in his flashlight beam.

He used the water to wash the outside of the body bag of Gabrielli’s blood and brains. He and the others used more water to wash the blood and gore they’d stepped in off of their boots.

The SEAL with the leg wound, de Mello Vidal, had revived from the blow to his head. He complained of seeing double and feeling nauseous.

Concussion.

Between two wounded men, a full body bag, four heavy computer modules, and one tool-kit case—and all their weapons—Felix’s team had a lot to carry. They helped de Mello Vidal to stand up. His concussion didn’t seem too serious, but he needed to lean on da Rosa to be able to walk.

They went down to the first floor and left the building.

Felix was sure they were being watched from some of the darkened windows around them.

With luck it will take someone a while to call the police. After all, so far as they know we
are
the police.

Salih came up from the steps down to a basement apartment in the building next door. That little stairwell, which Mohr had told him about, had served as an effective foxhole during the raid.

Felix saw him do a head count and look at the body bag.

Salih said nothing.

“Could you hear us shouting in Portuguese out here?” Felix whispered in English. The real police were meant to think the attackers were splinter-group partisans.

“Plenty. Especially when your men were on the roof.”

“Hear any wounded civilians?” Felix noticed broken window glass on the sidewalk in front of the building.