Salomon arrived in Europe even earlier than the Witches had expected.
The Gulfstream G550 took off from Amílcar Cabral International Airport in Cape Verde and arrived at Zurich Airport in Switzerland after a long six-hour flight. He did not linger in Zurich. After the cargo was transported to the safe house and unloaded, he boarded the plane again.
Yelena Belova was extremely dissatisfied about being left behind in Zurich. However, both Natasha and Salomon pretended not to notice her glare, merely instructing her to guard the weapons, equipment, and various documents needed for disguise and infiltration that had been unloaded from the plane. Natasha claimed that the vacation was not over yet. Although she promised Yelena in the tone one might use to placate a child that she would be back soon, Yelena only became more irritable.
To watch over those supplies and important documents, Yelena could not stray too far from the safe house. She could not risk an intelligence leak just to call for delivery and enjoy a hot pizza, so lunch and dinner consisted only of US Army MRE field rations, with dry jalapeño beef burritos as the main course.
Yelena had expected the food during the operation to be unpleasant, but no one had told her until the moment she opened the crate that the French rations she had been hoping for had all been replaced with Latino-version MREs. By the unofficial exchange rate among European militaries, five US Army MREs were worth one French field ration. The gap between the two kinds of rations was obvious enough.
Natasha had no time to care about Yelena's dinner, however, because there was a more important piece of cargo aboard the plane.
It was a narrow wooden box bound with iron chains and parchment, just long enough to