One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [160]
Back on the street we linked up with Jennifer at the parking lot. I told her what we had, then read off the phone number to Knuckles.
She asked, “What’re you going to do, try to call that and trick him?”
“No,” I said, “we’re going to try to pinpoint it. The landline infrastructure here was pretty much demolished during the war, so this number is probably a cell phone. Just about every single cell phone built now comes with a GPS feature. What we’re going to do is try to turn it on and have it send us its location. It might not work, because we need a digital network to slave on, and the phone needs a GPS. If we have both, we can dial the phone without it ringing and do some black magic.”
While I was talking one of the team had pulled out a normal looking cell phone, telling it to boot up a hidden program. He said, “We’re good. We have a digital signal.”
He dialed the number, watching the screen. “It’s a cell.”
He spent thirty seconds thumbing the keypad as if he were texting a friend.
“Got a GPS.”
He continued to work it for another half minute.
He looked up with a smile. “We’re in business. Got a grid.”
He read the grid reference out to another man working a laptop computer with a world mapping program.
“It’s a house in Sarajevo,” he said, “north of the river about middle way through the city.”
“That’s outside the Republic of Srpska part of Sarajevo. It’ll be a Muslim neighborhood,” I said. “That fits. We need to get moving. He’s got a few hours’ head start.”
Knuckles said, “Well, unless he’s flying, we can beat him. We sent the 427 to the old Eagle base. No Americans there now, since SFOR left, but it is an operational airport. We can probably beat him to Sarajevo. The key question is whether that’s where he’s going.”
“Won’t know that until we get there. Let’s load up. You can follow me. I still remember the way to Eagle base.”
An hour and a half later we were flying south, with me fuming over the bureaucratic nightmare of getting the helicopter fueled up and ready to go at the old air base. Third-world bullshit. Maybe we should chase Carlos right into that damn terminal. Give ’em a sense of urgency. Watching the ground race underneath, I relaxed. It would take less than forty-five minutes to get to the Sarajevo airport, even taking into account more bureaucracy. We should be very close behind him.
My mind wandered to the team we had killed, and how they had managed to find Jennifer and me. Eliminating everything I could think of, I was left with one possibility: They had somehow managed to track Kurt’s pager. I couldn’t see how on earth that would be true, since the pagers were treated as sensitive items in the Taskforce, but there simply wasn’t any other explanation. Short of some miraculous new technology, it was the only weak point I could find, and if Kurt’s pager was compromised, they were all probably vulnerable. With the team dead or bleeding on the side of the road, it was no longer a threat on this operation, but the compromise would need to be explored after we finished here.
95
Bakr waved his arms at a cloud of smoke spewed out by the departure of an inner-city bus. He surveyed the area, getting his bearings. Juka had given him directions to the house from the Sarajevo bus station, and Bakr had researched the city while waiting on Sayyidd to answer, but the image he had created in his mind didn’t fit the reality on the ground. Finding a map on the wall, he quickly located the tram that would take him to the city center.
The trek back to his hotel room had been little trouble; the man from Guatemala and his henchmen were nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t pushed his luck, spending less than three minutes in his room, packing up his things and taking the detonator. The bus ride itself had been inside a bouncing, belching machine that should have been retired years ago, but that was quickly forgotten in his eagerness to find the safe house.
Riding the tram parallel to the Miljacka River, he could still see the scars of war throughout the city, with mortar impacts slashing the street and bullet