up any audio from it at all. If there is anyone in there, then they aren’t talking, and they aren’t moving around.”
Annika thought it over for a moment. “This might be some sort of a staging area. He dropped his burner off with some other things and left.” She looked out the smoked window here in the rear of the van. “There is nothing going on on this street. Let’s give it another thirty minutes.”
“Until what?” Moises asked.
“Until I go over there and take a peek.”
Upon hearing this, Yanis looked out the front windshield. “It’s black over there. Run-down. Abandoned.”
Moises echoed this. “Scary.”
Dittenhofer belted out a scoffing laugh. “If there is no noise and no movement, then that means there’s no Quds Force. We will wait awhile to be sure, but I’m not afraid to walk over there.” She waved at the audio gear in front of them. “Just pay attention to your headphones.”
* * *
• • •
Court and Zack had turned the Audi’s running lights off as soon as they got within a half mile of the now-stationary tracking device, and they rolled to a quiet stop in a small residential community just a couple blocks north of the lake. Parking in an elementary school parking lot, the two men were struck by the heavy mist hanging over the lot and the adjacent two-laned street.
They opened their car doors quietly; Zack had already disabled the interior light. They were stealthy here not because they were worried that Annika Dittenhofer or even Haz Mirza might hear or see them but rather because, even in the heavy mist, there were a lot of homes in sight, and they didn’t want some busybody coming out and confronting them or, worse, calling the local police.
At the rear of the vehicle, Zack said, “Do we gear up?”
The two men had Heckler & Koch UMP submachine guns and extra magazines in the trunk, and chest rigs with body armor inserts, in addition to the pistols they wore on their bodies.
Court thought it over. They had a few blocks to walk still, and they would have to pass numerous homes between here and their objective. He didn’t see any way they could kit up with big ceramic plates in their chest rigs, magazines strapped to their bodies, and subguns on their shoulders. Instead he said, “UMPs and extra mags in our backpacks. No armor. We’re doing a recon. If we have something to hit, we’ll call Travers.”
Zack said, “Roger that,” and both men got to work collapsing down the guns and loading the mags into the packs.
This done, they put in their earpieces and Court called Zack to open a phone line between them, and then they set out in the darkness towards their objective.
* * *
• • •
A half hour to the minute after Annika arrived, she pulled a flashlight out of a utility pack in the van and turned back to the two young men. “I’m going to take a look.”
“You sure about that? This guy is Quds Force, or used to be, anyway.”
Miriam said, “I’m not going to get too close. I’ll put my earpiece in, and you guys can call me if you hear anything.”
“Be careful,” Yanis said, and then Annika climbed out of the van. Looking up the dimly lit street through the nighttime mist, she felt the scene to be like something out of a Cold War spy novel.
Soon she began walking slowly through the vapor.
SIXTY-TWO
When Court had checked the GPS while Zack drove, he’d noticed that the tracking device was parked next to a lake and near a very large structure. From the satellite imagery on Google, it seemed to be some sort of abandoned factory.
The two men followed the tracker on Court’s phone up Kiefernweg to the lake, and then they turned left. Squinting into the thick fog, the men knew they were close. They separated, one on each side of the road, both ready to duck down in foliage for concealment if necessary.
When they were only forty yards from their target, Zack balled his fist and held it above his head, and Court stopped in his tracks.
“There it is,” Zack said softly into his mic.
“I see it.” The blue moving van was parked under trees, its nose pointing towards the black lake and its rear towards the street.
Both men moved into bushes on opposite sides of the road, and they maintained communication through their earpieces.
Zack said, “You want to just hit it? If our girl’s got company,