rolling drive-by hit. Felix thus expected that Mohr’s car and its trailing escort would use local streets that cut straight inland across the peninsula, since in the Old City maze, skirting the tangled warrens of Istanbul’s grand bazaar, they’d be better able to make sure no one was following Mohr. Felix was plagued by a similar concern, that he’d picked up an undetected tail, or series of tails.
Felix’s heartbeat started to rise. They were almost over the bridge. Soon he’d know if the Germans took the Kennedy Cadesi or local streets after all — this was essential to his plan to separate Mohr from his bodyguards soon without alerting the Kampfschwimmer. If he’d misread German intentions, and they did go onto the highway, the whole extraction plan would almost certainly collapse.
When it happened, it happened fast, because Felix and all his men knew that once they sprang their trap, every second counted. They had to do it early, soon after the Germans came off the bridge, before their choice of paths became too varied, and coordinating the SEALs’ redeployments would become a mad and iffy scramble.
For the first time, Felix and his men used their radios. The radios were digitally encrypted, and broadcast their spread-spectrum signals in a radar frequency band — the transmissions bounced around intervening buildings better, and were also much less likely to be overheard.
Felix got right behind the German chase car, but then lagged back, allowing space to open up. He pressed his radio’s talk button, said a single word in Portuguese, and released the button. He heard two one-word responses quickly: The reinforcements were in position, and no Turkish policemen were visible. Felix pressed to talk again, and gave the go-ahead signal.
A taxi came out of a side street and T-boned the German chase car. The impact was loud enough that Felix heard a
The drivers of the Istanbul taxi and the gypsy cab — both SEALs — got out and started shouting at each other, and at the Germans in the chase car. Felix and Porto also got out. Broken glass from smashed headlights and taillights littered the street.
To passersby, yet another Istanbul fender-bender pileup had just occurred. Auto horns blared.
The SEAL chase car, the Hyundai, added to the ruckus by driving onto the sidewalk to bypass the wrecks.
The noise and chaos behind Mohr were impossible to miss. His driver halted in traffic, cursing, the moment he realized the chase car had been involved in a bad accident. The bodyguard in the front passenger seat reached for his radio, and Mohr reached for the special pen. Felix had said to just touch it to the skin at the back of the neck. He leaned forward, as if to speak to the bodyguard, and applied the pen. He belched to cover the slight hissing sound it made when pressure on the point activated the injection spray.
The driver finished putting the gearshift in park. He looked backward as Mohr leaned toward him.
Mohr pointed in the other direction, ahead of the car. The driver, confused, turned to look, and in that instant Mohr got him with the pen. Seconds later, both men were slumped forward against their shoulder belts, heavily sedated, with no needle marks on their necks. The compressed-air-powered, high-pressure spray drove the sleep drug through their epidermis, and capillary absorption did the rest. Mohr palmed the hip flask Felix had given him, and while pretending to see what was wrong with his driver and bodyguard, got high-proof schnapps on their chins and down their clothes. With a handkerchief he wiped his fingerprints from the empty flask, leaned farther forward, wrapped the bodyguard’s right hand around it, and rested the sleeping man’s hand in his lap. Still using his handkerchief, he unlocked the right front door.
An old brown Hyundai pulled up on the sidewalk next to Mohr’s BMW. Mohr recognized Chief Costa; he’d been expecting him. With help from an enlisted SEAL riding with Costa, they moved the pair of Germans to the BMW’s backseat without taking them out of the car. Mohr switched to the Hyundai while the enlisted SEAL took the BMW driver’s seat.
Salih, speaking rapid-fire Turkish, reassured pedestrians that no one was badly hurt. More SEALs, passengers in the gypsy cab and the taxi, joined the accusations and wild gesticulating that raged back and forth in German, Turkish, and Portuguese. Two of the SEALs, hamming up concern, reached out to calm the German driver and bodyguard. Felix knew both SEALs held knockout pens. The Germans staggered, increasingly woozy.
Salih shouted in Turkish. Felix knew he was supposed to be saying. “They’re going into shock! Concussion! You, you, help me!” Salih pointed at Felix and Porto. Salih said something else to the gathering crowd; he was telling people that he and his friends would take the men to a hospital.
They carried the nearly unconscious Germans and put them in the back of Felix’s Mercedes. The gypsy-cab driver and his passenger got back into the undamaged cab and moved it out of the way, into the street facing the halted German BMW and Costa’s Hyundai up ahead. The taxi driver, with help from other SEALs, pushed his ruined taxi to the corner of the intersection, blocking the crosswalk, but at least not blocking traffic, and left it there. He ran to the gypsy cab and crowded in.
Salih got into the damaged German Mercedes, pretending that the drive train had been bashed out of commission — so no one would suspect it was armored and thus get too nosy or have the car stick in their mind. Salih worked the steering wheel while Felix prepared to push from behind with the SEALs’ own armored Mercedes, damaged superficially but totally driveable.
Ahead of them, the BMW and Hyundai were both moving now, down the street. Felix used his knife to cut away his spent air bag, and tossed it onto the sleeping Germans’ legs. The SEAL in back arranged it like a blanket. Horns died down as traffic started crawling again. But Felix heard sirens in the distance, getting closer. Someone had phoned 155 or 112 or both, the Turkish equivalents of 911 for police or for an ambulance.
A hundred yards farther on, Salih and Felix came to an alley. They both knew it would be there. As Salih steered the Germans’ Mercedes, Felix used his car to shove the other into the alley, to get it out of the way and more or less out of sight. Salih joined him, again in the front passenger seat. Now Felix’s Mercedes was chock-full, with two unconscious Germans and a very pumped-up SEAL in back.
Felix took the first right turn he could. He knew the stolen gypsy cab, the rented Hyundai, and the commandeered German BMW would split up and take shortcuts to a nearby deserted industrial area. They’d avoid entanglement in a Turkish police investigation of the accident — they’d rendezvous again at a prechosen isolated point. Temporarily abandoned autos were a common sight in Istanbul after accidents, and drivers not lingering to be questioned by the cops was normal. What wasn’t normal was that the damaged taxi was stolen, and the damaged and dumped Mercedes had a license plate that might be traced to German consular ownership.
“Did they use their radio?” Felix demanded of Salih. “Or a cell phone?” He hadn’t noticed himself, and was afraid the Germans he’d rear-ended had called the consulate for help before they’d gotten out of their car.
“I couldn’t tell either,” Salih said.
Felix squeezed the steering wheel harder. “Time is of the essence now.” In minutes the consulate might figure out what was happening, talk to someone senior enough to make a decision, and then send a warning to the Kampfschwimmer in the safe house. Felix and his team had to beat that deadline or they’d lose the vital element of surprise.
But first, they had to dispose of these two drugged Germans.
Felix came to a pair of old, dark warehouses; he shut off his headlights and turned in between them. He, Salih, and Porto got out and hurried to remove the two Germans.
They arranged them side by side, slumped against one of the buildings. Porto splashed cheap whiskey in their mouths and on their clothes — he didn’t need to get any into their stomachs or their bloodstreams, since by the
