Voclaine grumbled, but reached into another pocket and produced a small Ziploc bag. It contained a micro camera, bugging equipment, a tiny flashlight, and a roll of US dollars. “You’ll want this, I expect. I requisitioned it from the station when I picked you up.”
Bridge took her emergency SIS bag and smiled. “Thank you. Now, what’s the smallest local airport that can get me to Greece?”
67
Finding a boat to take her from Cyprus to the Syrian coast with no questions asked was easy. Even getting to Homs wasn’t too hard, just a matter of offering a few dollars to drivers heading there anyway. But finding someone in the city willing to drive her into the desert was difficult. In fact, finding anyone who would even talk to Bridge was proving to be a challenge.
Picking her way through the ruined streets, shocked at the sheer scale of destruction from the bombings, it was hard to be surprised. Language wasn’t the problem, as almost everyone here spoke either French or English. It was that she was an outsider, a Westerner, one of the many who’d abandoned the people here to die, and that created a default state of hostility she’d never encountered before.
She eventually found a man who collected and stockpiled military equipment, lost or abandoned by both government and rebels during the city’s long siege. His compound was the shell of an old building that might once have been a centre of local administration, but it was impossible to say for sure. Remove a building’s windows, decor, and signage, and replace them with shrapnel scars, shell craters, and fallen rubble, and pretty soon they all look the same.
Getting in to see the collector required bribe upon bribe to various levels of armed guards, and when she finally reached his inner sanctum Bridge’s stockpile of cash had a serious dent. A couple of American dollars here was a small fortune. She could only imagine the chaos if she had to ask armed gangsters to break a fifty.
As the complex hierarchy of guards gatekeeping their boss led her through the black-market compound, she glimpsed the stockpile. A stack of assault rifles here, a row of grenade launchers there, mortars and grenades arranged for viewing, and handguns laid out by size and calibre. Was all of this really from the streets of Homs, looted from the bodies of soldiers or abandoned by retreating forces? Or was some of it smuggled in through the old Iraqi supply lines, the very place Bridge wanted to go? Worse still, could some items have been bought from Europe’s own black-market traders? She wasn’t naive enough to think she could trust anyone here, but could this trader really give her what she needed? More importantly, would he?
Then they crossed a central courtyard, and she saw the rows of vehicles. Land rovers, troop trucks, jeeps (rear-mounted M60 machine gun optional), a US-style humvee, all in differing states of repair.
To his credit, the trader didn’t seem surprised to see this pale Western woman, all in black except for the hair-covering keffiyeh she’d bought in Latakia, on mysterious business at what was once the epicentre of Syrian violence. Instead he merely asked, in perfect French, what he could do for her.
Bridge told the trader where she wanted to go, and asked for one of his men to drive her there and back. He lost his composure, and laughed in her face. So she offered instead to buy one of his jeeps, and drive herself. He laughed again, but this time more politely. He asked how much money she had. Bridge offered him a fifth of what she was carrying. If they frisked her, they’d find double that. The remainder was inside her underwear, and if things went that far Bridge would happily use the loaded Grach she’d also tucked in there. Perhaps it was detecting that attitude, a dead-eyed fatalism betraying no fear, which made the trader think twice.
They eventually settled on just under half of her ‘visible’ cash for a fully-fuelled jeep, one of the better models, plus a desert blanket and two canisters of extra petrol. Bridge wasn’t sure that would leave her with enough cash to return home, but right now she wasn’t thinking that far ahead. If she made it out of the desert in one piece, maybe she could sell the jeep in Tartus — albeit for a fraction of what she’d just paid — and bum around Egypt for a while. Perhaps then she’d finally tell Giles where she was, and he could formally fire her over the phone. But not before she’d found what she was looking for.
One of the collector’s guards tried to feel her up as she walked to the jeep, but she broke his shin with a swift kick, disarmed him, and stripped his pistol while the other guards hooted with laughter.
Night fell as she reached the desert, but Bridge switched on the headlamps and kept driving. The closer she got, the less anxious she became, as if she was returning to a familiar place that she knew well. Still, night driving in the desert was risky, and lacked peripheral vision. Anyone could come at you from the sides or rear and you wouldn’t know it until they were on top of you. Or shot out the windscreen.
Around midnight, she parked in the shadow of a rock formation, using her matchstick flashlight to see. She climbed into the back of the jeep, placed the Grach within easy reach, pulled her keffiyeh tight, and swaddled herself in the blanket. The stars out here were bright and beautiful, and she fell asleep with their after-image dancing inside her eyelids.
She awoke to the sound of something knocking against the body of the jeep. She jerked upright with the Grach in hand — and recoiled at the overwhelming smell of dung. A curious gazelle had come to investigate the jeep, and
