was too small for discussion or too trivial to troubleshoot. Hightower explained how the SLA, the Sudanese Liberation Army—an anti-Arab, anti-Abboud rebel force—would create a diversion the morning of the kidnapping of President Abboud that should distract the majority of his guard and force the president himself into the bank. CIA Sudan Station had an agent who was a former member of Abboud’s close protection detail, and he had indicated the standard operating procedure for an attack while walking to the mosque in Suakin was to get inside the bank and defend the inner sanctum until helicopter troops could come from Port Sudan. It was considered a low-probability location for an attack on the president. The SLA was nonexistent in the area, and Abboud had visited the town dozens of times without incident.
Court would be waiting in the bank to snatch the president and then take him out of the city, while Whiskey Sierra stayed on the outskirts of the town, doing their utmost to refrain from direct action if at all possible. They would then all be picked up by an inflatable Zodiac boat and ferried to the Hannah, at which time they would pull anchor and head north. Then Hightower would put Abboud in a mini-sub attached to the bottom of the yacht, and from there Sierra One and Oryx would link up with a CIA fishing trawler in international waters. This way, if the Hannah was boarded by Sudanese coastal patrol boats, there would be no evidence of this group’s involvement in the kidnapping.
The Hannah would then just motor up the Red Sea coast and eventually dock in Alexandria. By that time, Abboud would be imprisoned at the ICC facility in The Hague, Netherlands.
It was a bold, audacious plan. Court could see no specific part that seemed impossible or poorly thought out. That said, there were a tremendous number of things that could go wrong. Human error or failings might derail the op at any time. As could intelligence failures. So could the “shit happens” phenomenon, Murphy’s Law.
But more than anything, this smelled like an operation that, though it might well come off just as planned, was thought up by a department desperate to remain viable under an administration for whom covert, paramilitary-style operations had been all but ruled out.
On Court’s third night on his own, he called a number given to him by Sidorenko’s henchmen. Sid’s secretary answered, and Court told him he’d suffered a slight injury while training for the mission. He would require, Court declared, a small bottle of mild painkillers to get him through his recovery. Court went to a dark hallway in Vitebsk Metro Station, where he met one of Sid’s young skinhead goons. A paper bag was exchanged without a word.
Court downed two of the Darvocet while still on the platform waiting for his metro ride back to his hotel on Zagorodny Prospect. He had convinced himself, sort of, that he was in pain. The stomach wound he’d received four months earlier did seem somewhat aggravated by his abdominal exercises—the knot of scar tissue pulled at the muscles and caused them to stiffen in protest—but truly it was not pain he would have batted an eyelash at had he not developed his penchant for narcotics.
Court knew this, and he wondered if—despite all the big, bad men in this world who wanted him dead—in fact, that friendly old doctor in Nice who’d hooked him up with the morphine would end up being the man who would ultimately bring him down.
FOURTEEN
The Russian transport, an Ilyushin Il-76, was massive, with a tip-to-tail length of more than 150 feet, and a similar width from wingtip to wingtip. Court stood in front of the plane before dawn and inspected it through the faint illumination of frigid moonshine. Next to him stood Gregor Sidorenko. He’d flown with Gentry from Saint Petersburg to Grodno, Belarus, in the Hawker and landed at the main airport there just thirty minutes earlier. There was, unequivocally, no operational reason for Sid to be there; it was anathema to every relevant procedure and tactic that Court had learned in his sixteen years as an operative. But his Russian handler had wanted to go along for this part of the ride. Even though it was below freezing out here on the tarmac, Sid looked ridiculous bundled as he was in wool and cotton and leather and fur, his thin nose and his pointed chin jutting out from the mound of fabric and dead animal