Tracks (47 page)

“So what convinced him?” Elena
asked.

“We all ganged up on him, told
him he would be a liability.”

“Poor Sam,” Elena said
again.  “He probably can’t trust anyone by now.”

“He finally conceded but it
was a battle.”

The girls fell silent for a short
while quietly sipping their coffee.

“I guess I should turn in,”
Natasha said with a big yawn.

“You do that,” Elena
said.  “Use my bed. Aziz should be here in the morning.”

Aziz turned up with two of his
men the following evening.  Devlin was extremely antsy by then.  They
shook hands all around and had a round of coffee.  Aziz had several
cigarettes before he began talking.

“Our target is in the center
of town, several blocks in from the port,” he began slowly in Arabic with Elena
translating.

“The information we got was
initially uncertain but it seems to be accurate after all.  It is a
complex of buildings with a mosque on one end and a five-storey residential
block on the other.  In between is a long single-storey structure that
connects the mosque and the apartment building.  The entire complex takes
up a full block and is walled off from all sides.”

Aziz took a long drag from his
cigarette and continued.

“There are three entrances
that I was able to detect.  A main one from the street that leads to the
single-storey structure and two side entrances, one to the mosque and one to
the apartment building.  All three entrances are guarded around the clock
with at least two armed guards each.”

Another long drag from his
cigarette and Aziz went on.

“The place is well
camouflaged.  It gives a sense of being just another building complex in
an upscale area but when you look closely you find there is nothing around the
particular area that can pose a threat to whoever’s inside.  There are no
cars parked anywhere around its walls, no peddlers, no stores, no markets, no
playgrounds, nothing!  The area around the perimeter of the complex is
squeaky clean and there are armed personnel and undercover cops routinely
combing the area.  No one stops to look and no one gets in without a
thorough check at the main gate and very few people get in at all.”

Aziz was done with his
cigarette.  He stuffed it in the ashtray and lit another.

“I spent the last week looking
around there as much as I could without being spotted and found it nearly
impossible to survey from street level.  You can drive by but you can’t
stop or park anywhere.  You can also walk by but after one too many times
you would be flagged.  So I searched the area for a good vantage point and
found only one place close enough and high enough to survey the complex.”

Another
quick drag on his cigarette.

“It is a ten-storey apartment
building two blocks away to the
south,
I’d say about
200 meters in a straight line.  I went up on the roof and found that with
proper surveillance equipment we can keep reasonable watch on the complex.”

“Can you see the main gate
from there?” Devlin asked.

“Yes, you can.  That is
the good news.  The bad news is that the side entrances are both
obscured.” 

“Can you see inside the complex?”

“Yes.  The one-storey
compound is actually a square built around an open space in the middle.  I
was able to see people in that middle square but obviously we cannot see what
is going on inside the internal area.  I figured we would attract too much
attention spending time on the roof there, so I went to see the building
manager and got a break.  He had a vacant apartment under renovation on
the ninth floor looking in the right direction.  So I offered to pay rent
for a month and asked him to hold off on the renovation.   Your two
colleagues are already there.” 

“Well done, my friend,” Devlin
remarked.  “Now how do we find our boy?”

“We work in shifts,” Aziz
explained, “until we get a break.”

“We need to know what to look
for,” Natasha said.

Devlin was shaking his head.
“We need to break in!”

Everyone looked at him
including Aziz after Elena translated Devlin’s comment.

“We need files.  We need
lists of names, addresses, photos.  How else are we going to find the
boy?”

“I am afraid that is impossible,”
Aziz said.

“Can we clear the walls?”
Devlin pressed on. “Is there barbed wire on top?”

“We may be able to climb up,
but then we’ll run into armed guards patrolling the top of these walls.”

“Can we disguise our way in
through the gates?”

“That will be suicide!” Aziz
exclaimed.

“What about the sewer system?
Are there any blueprints?”

“You must be joking. 
This is Beirut, not London.”

“What about the mosque? 
Can anyone get in there to pray?  Surely it’s connected to the compound.”

Aziz hesitated. 

“I’m not sure,” he finally
said.

“Can we get some men in there
to
recce
the place?  See if there’s a passage?”

Aziz eyed Fiad who eyed Saeed.

“We are not regulars,” Saeed
commented.  “We’ll raise suspicion.”

“Can you bribe some regulars?”
Devlin inquired.

“We can try,” Aziz said
thoughtfully.  “They’ll be risking their lives.”

“Then make it worthwhile!”

CHAPTER
FORTY FIVE

Captain (retired) Malcolm Rolston
was a Special Air Service veteran of twelve years before he was recruited at
the age of thirty-two by the late Colonel Joe Harley to do covert work in Her
Majesty’s Service.

Rolston spent most of his
childhood in the Blackpool area, in Western England.  They lived on base
in Warton where his father flew jets for the Royal Air Force.  Young
Malcolm loved to watch from the family’s front porch as the jets took off and
landed.  The F-4 Phantoms would take off in a heap of noise, his dad, the
squadron commander leading the charge, and land like a flock of stones crashing
the tarmac before releasing the satin white parachutes that would guide them to
a halt.  It always amazed him how they managed to stop.

Malcolm was ready to join the
RAF at eighteen but a lazy eye stopped him from achieving his dream so he
joined the next best thing, the SAS, where at the end of a twenty-four month
grueling course, he was assigned to Harley’s Brigade and sent off to the
Falklands for a two-year tour of duty, before applying for officer training
back in the motherland.  A platoon commander for five years, then a
company commander for three, Rolston had taken part in numerous conflicts
before Harley tracked him down and made him a salary offer he could not refuse.

It fitted his lifestyle to
stay anonymous.  He never had an address other than his parents’ who had
by then moved to London where his father, then an Air Commodore, had taken a
desk job in Equipment Capability for the RAF in the Ministry of Defence. 
His occupation did not allow him to stay in one place for too long, nor to
develop lasting relationships with women.

Now, pushing forty, Rolston
was beginning to wonder if it was time to settle down. Being a hardened SAS
veteran who had seen his share of casualties, Harley’s death shook him.

Harley was supposed to be
invincible yet there it
was,
a fate like all mortal
men.

He looked at Mai-Li who was
busy in the kitchen trying to light the single rundown stove to boil some water
for coffee. 

Aziz had promised to come by
in the morning with a supply of binoculars and surveillance equipment. 
They had a clear line of sight to the compound but it was too far for the naked
eye. 

Mai-Li had confided in Rolston
on the way over to Beirut, admitting her feelings for Harley who was ten years
Rolston’s senior.

Rolston, who had no idea of
the brewing romance between his commander and the diminutive Chinese-American
woman, was quite surprised to realize that he himself had developed quite a
liking to her.

He could not tell if it was
the objective situation of having her along for so long among the group of men,
or if he was really smitten by her.  Still, over that last three months as
they waited to be given the go ahead for the mission, he had begun to develop
very tender feelings and kept finding excuses to be with her including the
current mission which he had indistinctly arranged for the two of them to be
paired up.

Now he was alone with her in a
small, confined room in a high-rise apartment building in Beirut with no idea
what to do about the way he felt, especially now that he knew how she had felt
towards his late commander.

He watched her move around in
the kitchen, a slight figure dressed in simple shorts and an oversized bright
yellow blouse which enhanced her delicate oriental features.

At the base she lived with
Ali, so this was the first time he would actually sleep in the same enclosed
space with her, though he was to sleep on a rundown couch in the living room while
she used the narrow bed in the apartment’s single bedroom.

“Shall I prepare something?”
she asked, bringing two mugs of coffee to the couch where he slouched. 
Aziz had equipped the place with a working refrigerator stocked with some basic
provisions.  There was coffee, tea, sugar, cheese, eggs, bread, some
vegetables and a carton of milk.  He had also managed some mugs, plates,
cutlery, a pot and a pan and apparently had fixed the gas stove.

“We haven’t eaten since that
awful meal they served on the plane,” Rolston said, sipping his coffee
thirstily.

He looked at Mai-Li sitting
cross legged on the couch next to him staring out the window, holding her mug
with both hands.  He was generally a man of few words but somehow with
her, he felt a great need to talk.

“I miss him too,” he said to
her.

She did not reply, just kept
staring.

“I thought he was
bulletproof,” she said after a while.

“No one’s bulletproof,”
Rolston reflected.  “Not even Harley, though he certainly behaved as if he
was.”

There was a knock on the door.

Rolston jumped up from the
couch and quickly crossed the room.   He stood by the door listening,
signaling Mai-Li to remain silent.

A few seconds passed before
additional knocks disturbed the silence.  Rolston heard voices then the
door handle was tested without success.  Two locks safeguarded the door
and both were secured.

Seconds later Rolston heard
the voices move away from their door.

He waited several seconds to
make sure there was no further disturbance before he eased open the lock and
looked outside.

The narrow hallway was
empty.  In his shorts he quickly ran through it and looked down the
stairway.

He saw no one.

Aziz came late in the evening
with his men hauling surveillance equipment and an interpreter.

“We don’t have any night vision
equipment for now,” he apologized.  “I should be able to get it later in
the week but I doubt it will be good enough from this distance.”

”We’ll have to try and sneak
by during the night then,” Rolston proposed, looking around the room.  “At
least to monitor what goes on at the gates.”

“It’ll be tricky but we may be
able to do it once or twice,” Aziz said nodding his head.

“We had a visit this
afternoon,” Rolston divulged attracting curious glances from their hosts.
“Someone knocked on the door a few times and left.  We kept quiet.”

“They could be back,”
  Mai
-Li asserted.

“It could be unsuspecting
neighbors or the superintendent but we’ll keep an eye downstairs,” Aziz
reassured them giving his men quick succession of orders in Arabic.

It took another half hour to
set up the telescope with its unique set of optics before the welcoming party
left leaving Mai-Li and Rolston alone once again.

In the morning they tested the
telescope and found they could see clearly inside the compound and along the
perimeter.  The mosque was partially obscured as well as the bottom floors
of the apartment building on the other side of the compound.  The front
gate was in full view but the other entrances were obscured as well.

They decided to take two-hour
shifts from sunrise to sunset.  Not much happened during the day. 
Several people came and went and few cars entered and left, their license
plates hard to decipher.