I glanced up toward the gardener, and down in the direction of the gendarmerie, but both were out of sight. I slipped over the bench and onto stony ground above it.
Moving into a possible OP site from the front was something that I would never normally do: it leaves sign in the very place you are trying not to draw people’s attention to. But it didn’t matter here; there was enough human and dog sign about already.
I scrabbled up the bank and into the bushes, settling behind a large palm bush that branched into a perfect V at about head height. The field of view wasn’t bad; I could see the whole of the marina, and the binos (binoculars) would get me right onto the Ninth of May, wherever it parked. I could also see all three exit points.
The vehicles by the traffic circle were now deserted and the uniforms had split into two groups, each with a hyperactive spaniel on a lead. I watched as the dogs scurried about the piers as if they were demented, darting, stopping, pointing their noses toward the backs of the boats. It had to be drugs; they were carrying out spot checks or looking for some stuff that had been smuggled in. I sat and thought about the three million U.S. dollars that was headed toward the Ninth of May, a vast amount of U.S. bills that would be contaminated with drug residue, as most U.S. cash is. Tens of thousands of them bundled together would send even a half-bored sniffer dog crazy.
Was that what they were aiming for now? Were they checking for the cash? No, they couldn’t be. They would be more proactive; there would be a lot more support. This looked like a routine operation.
I let them get on with it, and stood up to take a look over the four-foot-high hedge. There was an asphalt sidewalk, and beyond that a narrow strip of garden on the level ground before the road, and, maybe fifteen yards downhill, about ten nose-in parking spaces. Just over a hundred yards farther was the marina’s main entrance.
I took off my shades and sat back in the OP, taking a few pictures of the target area before checking traser. There was plenty of time before the safe house meet to stay static and tune in to the place. Could I be seen, for example, from the sidewalk above or the path in front if somebody walked past?
I listened to the traffic, which was constant but not heavy, and started to visualize what I wanted the other two to do when I triggered the collectors off the boat.
I looked down at the uniforms and dogs as they worked their way around the marina, and wondered if French intelligence were on to the collectors as well. Their External Security Service hadn’t messed about in the mid- eighties when Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior had parked for the night in Auckland, New Zealand, as it campaigned against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. DGSE’s (La Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure — the French equivalent of the C.I.A.) Operations Division, using divers from their Swimmer Combat Command, just blew up the boat, no messing around. I was glad these people weren’t allowed to operate on French soil — but then again, we weren’t either, and these were strange times.
Chapter 15
I continued to play around with ways we could take the collectors from the boat to wherever they were going to pick up the money. I needed a half-decent plan I could present to the other two at the safe house. We needed a structure, orders that would be the template for the operation. It would change as more information was gathered or the collectors did something we didn’t expect, but at least we would have something to guide us.
A few old women gossiping at warp speed in high-pitched French were walking behind me with their dogs. I could hear claws scratching the asphalt as they moved past.
I sat for nearly an hour as the police dogs wagged their tails and sniffed like mad things down in the marina. The old guy was still digging his way downhill, unperturbed by the activity going on below us. I wasn’t worried; he shouldn’t see me, and if he did, so what? I’d just pretend to take a piss and hope he wouldn’t be back to tend this part of the garden for another three days.
When I checked traser again it was one-forty-seven. The safe house was no more than an hour away, so I’d stay a little longer. Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.
A bit of a wind had come up, and the boats were swaying from side to side now. The cry of a seagull took me straight back to the Boston yacht club, and to the thought that I could be working there now, serving Sam Adams in a place where the dogs weren’t allowed to shit, and I wouldn’t have to spend all day in a bush.
Just after two o’clock, a while since the uniforms had gone, I decided to make a move, thinking it was a shame that the gardener hadn’t made it this far along. It would have been a good test of the position.
Not wanting to destroy the very bit of vegetation behind me that was hiding me from the road, I moved right, along the hedge about four or five yards, and, after checking the other side, climbed over. I pulled the brim of my baseball cap down some more and replaced my shades, as I followed the sidewalk back to the marina entrance. Once at the traffic circle, I turned left, past the stores and cafe on the way to the car. I played the tourist as ever, taking a lot of interest in the boats and how wonderful they were, looking around and enjoying myself as some more Kronenbourgs were being summoned from the tabac. The boys were going to have to wait a while before they kicked some al-Qaeda butt.
I drove back toward Nice. Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi would both have checked their e-mails at one-ish, and be on their way to the safe house. Each of us had no idea where the other was staying, and, just like on the Algerian job, we didn’t know what names we were using as cover.
We’d come into France at different times, but had been operating as a team for the last four days. I alone knew how to contact George. Anything they didn’t need to know I wouldn’t be telling them, just in case they ended up hanging upside down as a nice man read them their horoscopes with a length of two-by-four on the soles of their feet.
Even though I hardly knew these guys, I couldn’t help liking them. It was obvious that they knew each other well, and they made me feel as if I’d been sort of adopted by them. But operational security was something we all understood and, fuck it, I’d never see them again after Sunday, so we weren’t exactly aiming to be friends for life.
In preparation for this job I’d cut the TAOR (tactical area of responsibility) into three areas, allocating one for each of us to familiarize himself with in depth, or at least as much as we could in such a short time. Then we had a day in each other’s areas. Hubba-Hubba had to recce the area from Monaco to the west side of Nice, ending at the airport. I took over from there to the west side of Cannes, and Lotfi took from Cannes down to St. Raphael, about twenty miles along the coast. We’d now read enough guidebooks and travel information on our TAOR to start our own travel agency. But it had to be done; from the moment the boat arrived, we needed to be able to operate as if we’d lived in this part of the world for years. We could have done with a few more weeks to bed in properly, but as usual we were victims of life’s two fuckers: not enough information, and not enough time.
We now had to learn how the buses and trains worked here, even down to the fare structure. If Greaseball was right, it was highly likely that we’d find ourselves following these people on public transport. At the very least, we’d need to have the correct change or tokens ready so as not to draw attention to ourselves.
To operate successfully, a team like ours had to achieve three goals. The first was to establish efficient communication and information flow within the unit, and then separately between the unit leader and the command structure.
The second was to limit the chances of discovery by outsiders, by minimizing the number of communication links between the members. That meant no phone calls, no meetings other than at the safe house, and even then only when operationally necessary. There had to be no communication other than my contacting them by their individual e-mail, and no marked road maps, in fact nothing on paper. Everything had to be committed to memory. The less of a trail we left, the better our chance of survival.
The third goal was to limit the damage that might be done if one member of the team was discovered and removed from the network, which meant minimizing the number of direct links with each other, and only sharing information on a need-to-know basis. That was why we had split up and done our own thing so far: if one of us got lifted, he didn’t know where the other two were, he didn’t know their full names, he didn’t know anything apart from my Canadian e-mail address.
Working within these constraints had meant that we had to sacrifice efficiency in communications, intelligence-gathering and planning, but it kept us alive. Now, as the job started getting into gear, we had no choice but to operate more visibly as a team, which made us more effective, but more vulnerable to discovery.
