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The landing was more wrenching than he’d hoped, making it impossible to stay upright. Instead, he found himself rolling through the jagged debris, finally getting lucky when he came to a stop just short of a series of holes dropping to the level below.
Next door, he could hear chatter in Arabic and see the beams of rifle-mounted lights sweeping the area he’d jumped from. They’d found the bodies of Faadin and the man who’d killed him and were fanning out. One called out the name Matthieu Fournier and promised not to harm him if he showed himself.
Rapp slid on his stomach to the edge of the floor slab and looked down at a swarm of military vehicles that kept growing. Six men leaptfrom an armored personnel carrier and ran toward the building next door while taking fire from above. They made it safely inside thanks to the cover of a tracer-spewing chain gun that was pulverizing any position that looked even vaguely accommodating to a sniper.
The thirty or so men taking part in the operation were almost certainly the cream of Syria’s spec ops crop and their vehicles looked like they’d just rolled out of the army’s showroom. Clearly, the government was interested in having a sit-down with the infamous Matthieu Fournier, but not in the spirit of cooperation that Losa was promoting. If there was anything that the Syrians and Russians had in common, it was their insistence on doing everything the hard way.
A number of soldiers remained on the street, trying to set up a functional perimeter while a mob of locals inched closer. Their shouts were largely unintelligible, but their tone wasn’t. They’d mistaken this operation for an attempt by the government to close its fist around Saraqib and they weren’t going down without a fight.
Rapp slid back and dropped through a hole in the floor to the level below. Finding the stairs there more or less intact, he descended them. The walls of the space he found himself in were almost all missing, giving him a solid view of the hunt for him next door. Teams were moving systematically upward as they cleared their assigned areas, allowing him to peer down into the gap between the buildings without being seen.
Below, the man he’d shot had gone unnoticed and was still laid out on a concrete block jammed between support pillars. Rapp climbed down through the gap, with Syria’s ubiquitous exposed rebar once again making his life better.
It took a couple of minutes to free the corpse, but he finally managed to get the body into a fireman’s carry and climb back to the second level. Outside, the situation continued to deteriorate. To the east, the crowd now numbered as many as a hundred people and included everything from old women to young children. The west side had a similar group, maybe half the size, but growing. Sniper fire fromsurrounding buildings had been suppressed for the time being, but the Syrian forces were in danger of being surrounded.
Someone bounced a rock off a soldier’s body armor, prompting him to fire a warning burst over the heads of the crowd. Anywhere else in the world that would have caused people to scatter, but in Saraqib it just made the mob angrier. More rocks flew, many thrown by kids caught up in the moment. Likely not much different than the spray-can-armed ones who had started the war in the first place.
Rapp removed the AK from the body and checked the magazine. While he was doing so, a sniper opened up from a building near the end of the street. Once again, the chain gun erupted and once again people who should have been running their asses off were instead emboldened.
The crowd closed in, backing the soldiers into a tight group with weapons pointed outward. Rapp had seen similar scenes play out in various countries across the world. All it would take was one solid hit on a soldier and they’d open up on the crowd. If the government forces didn’t move on soon, this was going to turn into a bloodbath that the women and children in the mob would take the brunt of.
The problem was that they couldn’t move on. Not until they’d captured Matthieu Fournier.
Rapp’s jaw clenched and he stood motionless for a few seconds. Finally, he dropped the AK and backed up to give himself another running start. The gap between buildings wasn’t as long at this level—maybe ten feet—and the debris in his landing zone was significantly more diffuse. Not that it made his reentry any more palatable, but escape no longer seemed like an option. This wasn’t an Agency mission where collateral damage was an unavoidable by-product of pursuing the greater good. He was there representing the interests of a criminal cartel. He’d made the deal with Losa, and it wasn’t these people’s responsibility to pay for it.
Rapp managed to achieve a somewhat more graceful landing this time, jogging to a stop before tossing the pistol stuffed down the back of his pants.
“Don’t hurt me! I’m unarmed! I swear!”
The randomly sweeping lights visible on the landing above froze for a moment and then refocused on the steps leading down to him.
Rapp tried to decide how a Canadian lawyer would behave in a situation like this and opted to drop to his knees. A little spit on his finger allowed him to create streaks in the dust beneath his eyes that would approximate the path of tears. Overly melodramatic? He’d soon find out. At least three Syrians were already charging down the stairs, blinding him with their rifle-mounted spots.
Rapp shrank from the glare, raising his hands. “Please! I don’t have a gun! I swear! Don’t hurt me!”
Apparently his performance was credible because he was immediately grabbed beneath the arms and dragged to the ground floor. Five men surround him as they broke into the open, protecting him from the rocks, chunks of concrete, and the occasional bottle arcing through the air.
He was hustled toward a Russian Tigr infantry vehicle parked across the street. They’d almost reached the rear doors when a single shot sounded from the east and one of the soldiers to his left went down.
Rapp was lifted completely off his feet and propelled forward at a full sprint as the men around him began shooting blindly into the mob. The Tigr was already starting to move when he was thrown in the back, followed by two operators. The driver floored it and the 4x4 surged into the street while one of the Syrians struggled to close the rear doors. He lost his grip when a dull thud rocked the vehicle, but managed to get hold of it just as the body of a civilian was spit out from beneath the rear tires.
The sound of gunfire was constant now, and one of the soldiers rose through a hole in the roof to man the machine gun there. He managed to get off a short burst, but then jerked left and sank back into the vehicle with a hole in the side of his head.
The driver made a hard turn and Rapp was slammed into one of the steel sides, ending up with the body on top of him.
“Stay down!” the surviving man shouted before taking control of the weapon.
Rapp was content to follow orders, lying on his back and holding the bleeding corpse on top of him to protect against any rounds that might penetrate the vehicle’s armor. For the moment, everyone seemed to have the same goal: keeping Syria’s favorite Canadian attorney alive.
CHAPTER 18
SOUTHEAST OFKHANASER
SYRIA
THETigr was a perfect example of Russian technology: all brute force and no subtlety. The massive wheels made short work of the badly rutted road, but the suspension felt like it had been pulled from a covered wagon. Every impact created a symphony of grinding rattles that suggested the entire thing was about to fall apart, but it muddled on.
The sun had cleared the horizon and was heating the steel enclosure at the back of the vehicle. In another hour or so, it would turn into an oven, but they didn’t have that much longer. A shouted conversation between the driver and the surviving man in the back with Rapp suggested that they were running out of gas.
