| |
Skull woke to the sound of cowbells before dawn. After checking the video to make sure the Chairman’s plane wasn’t being prepared for departure, he stepped outside the shed to relieve himself, then ate sparingly from his dwindling stores. The coffee was cold but it revived him. As morning broke he examined the ground below his hill.
The two farmhouses showed activity, the routine of the agrarian – a milk cart with stainless steel cans pulled to a barn, hay loaded from shed to trailer, a tractor refueled from a standing tank. There was no way a kill team was at either of them; everything looked far too peaceful.
He focused on the construction materials yard, with its trucks and its large tin-roofed shed. There was no activity at all that he could see until a man stepped into view to light a cigarette. He wore a watch cap and a clean, expensive-looking bush jacket; Skull recognized the model. The man took a long look around, and then stared in the direction of the airport less than a quarter mile away. A commercial turboprop took off, and the man followed the airplane with his gaze.
Not exactly normal clothing for a worker at a construction materials business; an expensive jacket would not stay in such good shape for long. Not exactly normal behavior, either; he would expect a local worker to ignore the aircraft they saw by the dozens every day.
Gotcha.
He reset his optics for daytime, then took a reading with another toy he had purchased, a laser rangefinder. He read off 473 meters to the corner of the construction shed. He checked several points with his binoculars – the wind sock at this end of the airport, the tops of trees below him, smoke from the farmhouses – and estimated the wind at six knots from the northeast. Neither range nor wind would challenge the limits of his skills.
More observation of the construction yard told him there were three men in the team. They stepped out to look over the ground, using binoculars and laser rangefinders of their own. He watched them select their firing position and clear the backblast area of anything burnable. The missile exhaust could ignite flammables on the ground, as it would be launched at a steep angle, sending flame and smoke driving downward.
Skull made sure all of his optics remained deep in the shade of the interior of his own shed, to eliminate any chance of a reflection. Then he waited and watched.
He couldn’t simply engage and kill them now. He had no way of knowing whether Markis was going to depart in hours or days. Someone would be checking on the kill team, by radio or perhaps physically. There might be a backup kill team in case this one was discovered. He had to do it right before, or during, the takeoff.
On the other hand he didn’t see any sign of the Swiss security forces; this indicated that the Chairman wasn’t departing right away. They wouldn’t waste man-hours staking the ground out days in advance.
Speak of the devil. Several marked paramilitary police cars and trucks drove into view, exiting off of the main road and deploying into the surrounding area. The Swiss spread out, sending a vehicle to each of the three widely separated structures and others taking positions at the intersections of the farm and access roads to control traffic.
The kill team members scurried inside the shed as soon as they noticed the security forces. Skull wondered how they were going to put off the Swiss team assigned to the construction yard. It was going to be an interesting exercise in timing; the kill team had to hide, then either fool or neutralize the Swiss, buying themselves a minute or two before the other Swiss forces reacted as they exposed themselves in the open next to the metal-roofed shed to place themselves in position for the missile shot.
