The Gray Man (21 page)
They came for him just after five. The minivan slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill. To the passengers, it seemed as if the driver had been out of control on the slick streets for virtually the entire two-and-a-half-hour drive from Zurich. The driver’s lack of skill in such conditions was understandable. There was black ice on the road, and the visibility was next to nil at times. Plus these Middle Easterners’ orders were to get to the blinking dot on their GPS as fast as possible, and the Tech was calling them on the satellite phone every ten minutes for an update.
There were five of them, Libyan external security officers from the Jamahiriya Security Organization, a fire team from the best of Qaddafi’s men. All ex-army commandos, each knew his Skorpion SA Vz 61 machine pistol like a trusted friend. The leader was forty-one, stern-faced and bearded, dressed in civilian adventure travel attire like the rest of his team. He sat in the passenger seat, incessantly barked admonitions at the commando behind the wheel, unforgiving of the man, though all knew the driver was more accustomed to negotiating desert dunes in an armored jeep than he was icy mountain switchbacks in a minivan.
Still, they made it to Guarda in good time and parked their vehicle in the lot by the train station at the bottom of the valley. The driver lifted the hood and quickly removed the distributor rotor and threw it into his gym bag, thereby rendering the vehicle useless until he returned. They then found the little road up the hill, spread their formation as wide as possible across it, and began their ascent on foot.
Each man carried his little Skorpion in a gym bag with its stock folded, and a backup pistol in a shoulder holster. Different operators carried grenades and breaching charges as well. They all wore knit caps, heavy cotton pants, and the same black parkas, an expensive name brand associated with professional athletes.
Also in their gym bags were night vision goggles; they remained stowed for now.
The five Libyans climbed the steep, winding road to the village in the dark. They moved quickly and efficiently. Any passerby would know from their near uniformity and the severe facial expressions bobbing up and down in the vapor of their exhalations that they were up to no good. But no locals walked the hillside road at five thirty in the morning in a snowstorm, so the Libyans arrived undetected into the cobblestone streets of the Swiss hamlet.
Each operator also had a small handheld radio attached to his belt and connected to an earpiece. With a single command from their leader, they separated on the western edge of Guarda, continued individually to the east, each through a different little pedestrian passageway. This tactic ensured that anyone looking out their window would only see one of the men. If an alarm was raised and the villagers began to talk about strangers, they all might well think they saw the same individual.
On the far end of the town the kill squad re-formed like a biologic entity, detached cells rejoining in a petri dish. The leader consulted his GPS and turned to the left at an unpaved track that continued from the ledge on which the tiny hamlet was situated, up the hillside and into the forest, only visible in the distance after they donned their night observation devices.
The leader updated the team from the information on his GPS.
“Four hundred meters.”
The snow had picked up even more; the swirling bands of flakes had turned to thickening sheets of falling white. The Libyans had seen snow before, during training in Lebanon or on other missions in Europe, but their bodies were wholly unaccustomed to this cold. Forty-eight hours earlier, this very team of operators had sat in a Tripoli apartment working with an electronic surveillance detachment to try to locate the source of a ham radio broadcast emanating from the city that had made comments critical of Colonel Qaddaffi. It had been nearly one hundred degrees in that cramped room, so the cold of the eastern Swiss valley was a shock to their systems indeed.
They almost passed the shack. Only the GPS coordinates provided by the Tech had saved them hours of wandering through the woods. By now their Skorpions were out of the gym bags, the bags were hanging from their backs, the weapon’s folding stocks were deployed, and the guns were raised to the low ready position, stocks pressed against shoulders and sights just below the sightline of their night vision goggles. Each man took a careful position around the cabin. They reported in one by one.
The leader was first. “One in position, ten meters from the front door. No movement. The windows are shuttered.”
“Two is with One.”
“Three on west side. One window. Shuttered.”
“Four at east side. One window. Shuttered.”
“Five at back. No windows, but there is a utility shed alongside the main building. A secure padlock on the outside. Nothing else back here.”
The leader said, “Five, stay at the back. Find cover and be ready. Three and Four, come to the front. We will enter as a team.”
“Understood.”
Gentry slept dreamless in his sleeping bag next to the hole in the floorboards that led to the earthen basement. The pain meds had dulled the ache in his thigh and given him the respite needed to relax. His sleep was deep, restful.
Brief.
The leader retrieved a fragmentation grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin and moved slowly to the front door with his hand on the spoon. Two was in front and preparing a breaching charge when he noticed the door was not completely shut. He turned to his leader and motioned to the crack in the door.
The leader nodded, turned to the two men behind him, and whispered “It’s open. Get ready.”
Number Two pushed the door open quickly and knelt down so that other weapons could train on any targets inside. It was completely dark at first; even the night vision equipment could not make out the features inside.
One lobbed the grenade into the room underhanded. Two, Three, and Four stepped to the edges of the cabin to avoid the blast. The grenade left the leader’s hand and disappeared into the dark, but the sound of the missile’s impact with a hard surface came too early. As the leader made to turn away from the door, the grenade reappeared in his night vision goggles, bounced out of the cabin, and landed in the snow in front of the door.
Fortunately for the Libyans, all four saw the sputtering grenade in time. They dove for cover, either to the snowy ground or around the edges of the cabin. The explosion whited out the goggles of the three men facing in the weapon’s direction, and a fourth man was hit in the elbow and knocked down by a small piece of shrapnel. Collecting himself quickly, the leader ripped his now-useless goggles from his eyes, returned to the edge of the door, and entered, firing into the dark. Number Two and then Three followed, but within two seconds the leader’s shout made the others stop dead in their tracks.
“Mantrap!”
SEVENTEEN
Moments before Gentry had dropped exhaustedly to his sleeping bag for the night, he’d slid the large wall of rusty mesh to its position two feet inside the front door. The seven-foot-high contraption weighed over two hundred pounds and slid along a three-foot track on the floor. On each end of the fence there was a hinged wing, and each wing locked to a clasp on either side of the door. This effectively created a barricade capable of slowing down a breaching team, forcing them to bottleneck at the most dangerous point of any breach, the doorway. The mantrap was here when Court inherited the cache, and he had not placed much value in its capabilities due to the fact that it could easily be blown apart with explosives or knocked over with a battering ram or even a few serious blows from a boot heel, but as he leapt out of his sleeping bag to a crouch after the grenade went off out the front door, he immediately knew the rusty old barricade had just saved his soundly sleeping ass.
Frantically he kicked the two duffels of gear by his sleeping bag back down the hole to the tiny basement. He grabbed the Brügger & Thomet and fired a full magazine at the front door with one hand before sliding down into the hole. Once in the six-foot-deep cellar, he reached above and pulled the floorboard lid over himself.
Number Three knelt over bloody snow to the left of the shack’s entrance. The grenade fragment had hit him squarely in the elbow and passed through both meat and bone. But he was a disciplined soldier; he made little noise and quickly packed a handful of snow on the wound, wincing only with the shock of cold on skin, because he could not yet feel the pain he knew was soon to come.
Number One ignored his injured man as he ordered Two to set the fuse on his entire stock of breaching explosives and toss them through the doorway. A few seconds later a tissue-box-sized block of Semtex came to rest at the edge of the mantrap’s slide rail on the floor. The three uninjured Libyans at the front of the shack turned to run, and numbers Two and Four each grabbed Three under an arm and lifted him off the ground as they scrambled for cover.
It was quiet in the black forest for a few seconds. The only sounds to be heard were the gentle hiss of snow-flakes striking pine needles and their fallen brethren already on the ground, and the panting of the kill squad from Tripoli, now tucked tightly behind a fallen oak.
The black night and the soft sounds were replaced with a white flash and an earsplitting explosion that made the earlier hand grenade blast sound like the pop of a champagne cork. The doorway to the cabin, from the floor below to the slat roof above, blew to pieces, and lumber and fresh pine trees blew forward, landing as far away as one hundred feet from the building.
Bits of burning debris floated down with the snowfall through the pines as One, Two, and Four penetrated the wreckage of the cabin. Each man fired a burst or two as they entered the torn hole in the front wall. One went to the right, Two to the left, and Four moved straight through the small building. They used the light from burning fabric and paper to negotiate their footfalls over a blown-down metal fence, a smashed bookcase and table, several boxes and cooking utensils, and myriad unrecognizable objects.
Once the three were sure there was no one alive in either the main room or in the little bathroom, they began kicking over and through the debris on the floor, searching for the scorched and shredded body that surely must lie among the ruins. Five checked in to confirm all was quiet at the back of the cabin as the three Libyans inside began to worry. It was a small shack. Even in the deep shadows from the fires, it took less than ten seconds to verify there was no body to be found.
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