Cyprus
Fifteen Years Ago
Famagusta was on the far eastern edge of the buffer zone. Morgan drove while Conley talked on the cell phone with Plante. It took a few hours to drive there, with a stop at their hotel in Nicosia to get their gear.
The general was planning something. There had been suspicious troop movements, as well as the movement of some heavy equipment. It could be the early stages of an invasion, or some sort of reconstruction of Famagusta.
The second option wouldn’t be much better than an attack, considering how bitterly the town was contested. Morgan’s money was on military action. The analysts at Langley were convinced that an invasion was imminent. And Morgan had seen enough of the intel himself to believe it.
The agents had less than an hour of darkness left by the time they parked the car. They grabbed their duffel bags and walked to the beach, which was in Greek territory. Low fencing separated it from the Turkish section.
On the plus side, the Greeks still had the beach. On the other hand, the beach gave them an excellent view of what they’d lost.
Famagusta was another graveyard, but in some ways it was much worse than the airport.
Transportation hubs were among the first targets in any invasion. They were simply a casualty of war. The empty airport and rusting aircraft were a symbol of the struggle between two powers.
Famagusta was different. It was a small city where 40,000 Greeks had lived and worked literally on the beach. During the Turkish airstrikes, those forty thousand had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
What they left was not an unfortunate but normal by-product of military conflict. Here the ghosts weren’t planes and airport facilities.
In Famagusta, the ghosts were beachfront high-rise hotels and apartment buildings, as well as street after street of homes, shops, and restaurants that had been abandoned for forty years. This wasn’t transportation hardware or infrastructure; this was people’s lives.
Now the town was on the Turkish side of the border, fenced off and slowly decaying. The fencing was shoddy, four or five feet of a mix of chain link, corrugated metal, and plastic netting.
It was easy enough to avoid the Turkish army lookout. They simply ducked under the fencing until they were out of the line-of-sight and found their spot. Morgan tossed his duffel bag over the fence and followed it, with Conley right behind him.
With twenty minutes until dawn they hurried to the hotel that Conley had chosen based on the general’s expected route.
Officially, the general would be making an inspection tour. He would be traveling with only half a dozen soldiers and—if their intelligence was good—would be outside and vulnerable for quite some time.
Morgan and Conley found the first hotel and headed up to the fifth floor. It was just a couple of blocks from the beach. They found a broken window that had a good line-of-sight to the avenue below. They planted some light charges and a few other surprises, and then headed downstairs. Outside, they headed to the hotel across the street.
It was getting light outside as they found a fourth floor spot to wait.
There were a lot of variables here. The intelligence was new—if it was accurate, they were in business. If not, it was back to the drawing board.
Normally, Morgan preferred plenty of time to plan an operation. And they just hadn’t had time given how late this new intelligence had come in.
Within two hours, they had movement. Conley checked with Plante, who gave them a fire-at-will authorization.
They could see soldiers in the distance. Morgan scanned them through his binoculars as Conley took position behind his sniper rifle.
“Five total,” Morgan said.
“I have them,” Conley replied.
“I see a general’s uniform,” Morgan said.
“I see it,” Conley said. Then he added, “Kang’s identity is confirmed, it’s General Ketenci.”
Morgan quickly got into position behind his own sniper rifle. He found the men in his scope and chose his targets.
“Ready,” Morgan said.
“I have him,” Conley said. “On three….two…one.”
Conley fired at the general while Morgan fired at his first target, the soldier to the general’s immediate right. Without waiting, he swung the rifle and fired again. Each of Morgan’s shots hit the soldiers in the shoulder.
He had no doubt that Conley had hit the general center mass and that it was a kill shot. But Morgan was only aiming to injure, and both men went down—as did, of course, the general. The injured men were out of the fight and would distract the remaining soldiers.
The two uninjured soldiers reacted with admirable speed and drew their weapons, scanning the buildings around them, searching for the source of the gunshots.
And that’s when Conley pulled out the remote and set off the first of the charges in the room across the street. There were flashes of light and even a bit of smoke to complete the illusion.
The men were well-trained and fired at the window as Morgan and Conley threw their weapons into their duffel bags.
With their equipment secure, Morgan checked on the soldiers. They were dragging their injured friends and dead leader to cover.
Conley hit another two charges and the soldiers moved faster, dragging the three men the last few feet into a building.
Morgan and Conley didn’t wait anymore, they sprinted down the stairs. Their simple trick would only work if they got out of the building and the area before it was swarming with Turkish soldiers.
They took the stairs at a run and hit the east exit of the hotel. They kept running until they had put a few blocks between them and the general’s team. Morgan could hear commotion behind them as they cut toward the fence. In another two blocks they were there. They found a section of chain link that was nearly falling down and simply stepped over it. Then they hopped down from the short cinder block wall and were standing on the beach.
They were now safely on the Greek side…with four older Greek men staring at them.
Without hesitating, Conley glanced over his shoulder, shouted something in Greek, and made a hand gesture at the Turkish side: he opened his hand, splayed the fingers and shoved it, palm out, toward the occupied territory.
The Greek men nodded approvingly and then mimicked the gesture.
That done, the agents didn’t tarry. They headed down the beach and back to their car. They kept their pace to a casual stroll to keep from drawing attention to themselves.
Morgan allowed himself to relax a bit when they reached the car. It was surprisingly quiet around them. Whatever commotion there was in the occupied city, he couldn’t hear it over the morning din of activity around them.
They headed back to the hotel and stowed their gear in the room. They called Plante, to confirm that they had completed the mission, and then made sure they were seen having breakfast at the hotel café.
Morgan realized he was tired. It had been a long night and the adrenalin that had kept him going from the fight at the inn until now was wearing off. The smart thing to do was to sleep before they left, but Morgan found that he didn’t want to wait.
“I’m heading to the airport,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” Conley said.
“I thought you were going to make another visit to the west coast, hit those beaches.”
“This place has lost its allure for me,” Conley said. “Maybe I’ll come back another time.”
Morgan understood. Then he decided to bring up a subject that he and Conley very rarely discussed.
“Do you think it will do any good?” Morgan asked.
“One less bad guy, who was on his way to being a very bad guy with a lot of power. Yeah, I think it will do some good. It won’t fix much over here. And we’ll see about Turkey, but I think things will be a little better.”
“We did take out the trash, but that’s the problem with garbage. As soon as you take it out, it starts piling up again,” Morgan said.