De Payns listened to the soft purrs of the heating system and the small groans of the old building. Romy was deep in sleep beside him, barely making a sound. It was shortly before 3 a.m. and he was not going to stalk around the apartment with his handgun. His ritual was to make mental laundry lists before he went into the field, not unlike the checklists he’d been trained to make as a pilot. Mechanical failure and acts of God such as the weather were certainly real risks. But as all pilots were told, the most likely cause of a crash was human error.
Reduce the errors, decrease your risk.
He thought through the operational aspects of the Azzam infiltration. The overwatch team at Port Hercules marina were solid professionals, and not only did they have the best video and audio equipment to capture the guests boarding the yacht, but Danny and Jéjé were the core of the mission team and they were capable people with special forces backgrounds. He thought about the product-drop protocol, if one was needed while he was aboard: Danny and Jéjé would be following Azzam on a small cruiser, and for the period of an hour around midnight, they’d close in on the superyacht and wait for three long flashes of an infrared torch that de Payns carried disguised as a key ring. Having flashed the light, de Payns would drop the prod in waterproof canisters that looked like cigar tubes and emitted an infrared light beacon. In order to see the infrared light, the mission team would wear night-vision goggles. There was also a protocol if de Payns found himself in danger, but he didn’t dwell on it.
His main concern was spending two days on Azzam with a strong enough ID to survive a spy hunt. Frédéric Ruesche was an identity he’d used before, but it didn’t give him access to persons of interest in the way that his ‘consultant’ personas did. When presenting himself as a service professional who worked at ski resorts and major hotels, his access became one of proximity and eavesdropping, which in many regards was riskier than making himself the ‘star’ of the show. Under the Ruesche cover, he’d have to be dominant enough to get close to the POIs, while remaining insignificant enough that no one suspected him of absorbing their conversations.
Most importantly, he’d have to ‘be’ Frédéric Ruesche by the time he fronted up at the labour hire office in Nice in six and a half hours’ time. He’d stepped into Ruesche’s world a few days earlier when he did his gardening, but by the time he walked onto that superyacht he’d have to have all the mannerisms absolutely nailed, because once on the boat it was a totally immersive mission zone for two days.
He slipped out of bed and padded to the kitchen, where he poured a glass of water from the tap and made himself breathe properly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. He could do this, he told himself; he had the skills and he had the background. He thought back to the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s, when he was a special operations pilot ferrying generals, spies and paratroopers around the Balkans. Most flights were conducted in violation of at least one rule of aviation and international airspace. He flew with transponders off, false tail numbers, no flight plan and no landing lights. He landed on closed runways and took off against the demands of the air traffic controllers. Dangerous, illegal flying conducted under great secrecy.
One night, he was transporting a senior French official known as Sabre into the former Yugoslavia, for a crucial meeting. The flight was initially delayed because there was a monster storm front moving across the Adriatic and Sarajevo tower had closed the airport. However, Sabre insisted on making the meeting so de Payns flew the anonymous TBM 700 over the Alps and across the Adriatic and hit the storm at the Olympic mountain ranges that surround Sarajevo. The plane was thrown around like a balsawood toy as they entered the storm and de Payns took radio updates from Bologna advising there was twenty centimetres of snow on the Sarajevo runways, the runway lights were off and visibility was one hundred feet.
Using the only electronic aid operating at Sarajevo—the VOR, or VHF omnidirectional range signal system—de Payns conducted a K navigation which relied on a radio-beacon signal from Sarajevo airport called TACAN that gave the pilot direction and distance to the transmitter, and nothing else. De Payns calculated a rate of descent, which would have to be manually controlled. The lengthy flight had pushed the plane to the limits, and they’d have only two attempts at the landing and still have enough fuel to fly to Mostar for a refuel that would get them back to France.
De Payns adjusted his approach for wind, then let the TBM drop through the storm for what might have been the most frightening five minutes of his life. Sometimes diving, other times thrown sideways, he held his nerve as they plunged through the darkness, unable to look at anything except his TACAN numbers and his rate of descent. There was nothing else to see.
When the altimeter reached fifteen hundred feet, and he was committed to the flight path, he let down the landing gear and heard a sound from behind: Sabre was vomiting, the violent motion of the aircraft proving too much. At two hundred feet he flared the TBM, hoping to have the plane ready for landing, if he was over the runway. They broke through at one hundred and fifty feet into a sea of white, with the only visible feature through the blizzard the red light of the Sarajevo tower to their left and several lights to their right, which would be the hangars of the airport’s military section. He lined up with what looked like a runway under the snow and as they touched down, he reversed the props to slow their speed, throwing up clouds of snow which blinded him even further. As he slowed the plane to a stop, two Audi SUVs, blue lights flashing, drove to the TBM and ordered de Payns to follow. He complied, Sabre green with motion sickness and de Payns’ flight suit soaked in sweat, both of them panting from the stress and adrenaline.
Sabre made his meeting and de Payns was noticed by DGSE. He’d subsequently been approached to join the Company.
De Payns walked across the living room with his glass of water and looked down onto the street. He had spent his career engaging in dangerous activities. But it wasn’t the danger that was important, he realised; what saved him was the de-risking and the attention to detail. The key was his own mental preparation. That was how he’d endured high-risk situations in the sky and in his intelligence career. He reminded himself that he’d put in the work and he could trust his own process. He’d prepared for Azzam and now he was ready to do his job.