He nodded toward the window. “Bring him.”
Woerner grunted his assent and bent to his task. Together they manhandled the guard’s body through the gap and dumped it into the corridor beyond.
Nose wrinkling at the smell of blood and voided bowels, Duroc wiped his gloves clean on the grass and checked his watch. They were behind their timetable — but still well within the planned margin for error. “Right, Michel. Let’s finish this and get home to our beds, eh?”
“Oui, m’sieu.”
A humorless smile ghosted across the big man’s face. “I’ve had enough excitement for this night.”
Thirty seconds later, Duroc glided down the dark hallway alone while Woerner waited outside to guard his retreat. The Frenchman was tired of unpleasant surprises.
A thick, fireproof steel door blocked access to the computer center. And a tiny red light blinked steadily on a nearby ten-key panel controlling the door’s electronic lock. Security might be lax everywhere else, but the Sopron plant’s data banks held information that Eurocopter’s Japanese and American competitors would dearly love to see — production schedules and costs, precise formulas for rotor metal and plastic composites, reports on advanced R&D projects, and all the thousands of other facts and figures generated by any major industrial concern.
Duroc focused a small penlight on the keypad and carefully punched in the six-digit security code he’d memorized. Yesterday’s security code. As he’d expected, the massive steel door stayed obstinately shut. Good. He tried the code again. This time the panel’s tiny red light stopped blinking. Even better. The simpleminded computer controlling the lock would now have a record of two failed attempts using a code that would have worked just a few hours before.
He snapped the penlight off and clipped it back in place on his web gear. Moving quickly, he molded an ounce of pliable plastic explosive around the lock control panel. More ounces covered the door’s hinges. When he was finished, the Frenchman stepped back and eyed his work appreciatively. Wires ran from igniters buried inside each piece of plastic explosive to a small, inexpensive, and old-fashioned wristwatch set for a two-hour delay. He nodded to himself. It had the right feel to it. Effective but amateurish. Even the type of explosive he’d used was appropriate. Czechoslovakia’s old communist government had doled out odorless, colorless Semtex to terrorists around the world.
Duroc moved back up the corridor. Time for the finishing touches to this night’s work. He uncapped a small can of red paint, shook it, and sprayed. “Death to French pigs!” and “Liberty, not slavery!” in meter-high letters across one wall. Duroc had been careful to memorize the nationalist slogans in Hungarian, and even used the characteristic lettering. Even the smallest details were important in a job of this kind. All of the signs would point to Hungarian terrorists, angry with French “economic colonialism.”
Woerner was waiting for him at the window. “It’s still quiet.”
“Not for long.” Duroc dropped onto the grass and stood waiting while the big man rerolled their black steel mat and carefully set the cut-out piece of glass back in place. Then the two men turned and trotted back toward the hills rising above the factory complex.
The watch-driven bomb they’d left behind clicked another minute closer to detonation.
Duroc and his team were forty kilometers away when the timer reached zero.
The Sopron factory administration building rocked on its foundation, torn by a powerful explosion. A searing white light flared behind every ground-floor window milliseconds before the shock wave blew them apart. Behind that first shock wave, a wall of fire and superheated air roared outward from the detonation point, killing five Hungarian maintenance workers who had just come on-shift and setting everything flammable ablaze.
Even before the first emergency sirens wailed over the Eurocopter complex, flames could be seen dancing eerily through the shattered building.
Pale sunshine streamed over a scene of barely contained chaos. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles surrounded the bomb-damaged administration center — parked seemingly at random on its scarred, wreckage-strewn lawn. Workers carrying salvaged office equipment and furniture outside mingled with weary firemen, structural engineers, and worried-looking company officials. Restless security guards armed with automatic weapons instead of their standard-issue pistols stood watch at the main gate and near the explosion site.
A thin, acrid smell of smoke and charred paper lingered in the muggy, windless air. The computer room’s halon fire extinguishers and steel doors had saved the factory’s data processing systems, but they hadn’t stopped blast-sparked fires from roaring through the rest of the ground floor.
Fifty meters from the building, a short, round-faced man fought hard to control his temper. Even during the best of times, Colonel Zoltan Hradetsky had never much liked Francois Gellard, the Eurocopter factory’s general manager. The Frenchman had always been officious, arrogant, and all too ready to look down a long, thin nose at everything and everybody Hungarian. At the moment, the man’s worst traits were magnified a thousandfold.
“For the last time, Colonel, I must refuse your request to investigate this affair.” The manager folded his arms. “Your presence here is unnecessary… and disruptive.”
“Disruptive? You…” Hradetsky swallowed the string of curses that rose in his throat. “You misunderstand me, M. Gellard.”
He jabbed a finger toward the wrecked administration center. “That is a police matter. So is the cold-blooded murder of five of my countrymen. As the ranking police officer for this district, I am not making a ‘request.’ I’m issuing an order.”
“Impossible,” Gellard sneered. “Your orders carry no weight within this compound, Colonel. I suggest you reread the terms of the contract between your government and my company. For all practical purposes, this is French soil. This terrorist crime has been committed against a French corporation. And it will be investigated under French authority.”
That damned contract! Hradetsky ground his teeth together. He didn’t need to peruse the fine print to know that the factory manager was on safe ground. When the Sopron plant was being built, Hungary’s shaky military junta had been desperate for French and German financial assistance. To the generals in Budapest, meeting Eurocopter’s demands for tax-free status and complete control over its facilities had appeared a small price to pay for the jobs and low-interest loans its factory would provide. And they’d granted the same special privileges to dozens of other Franco-German business interests.
The police colonel shook his head. He’d supported the two-year-old Government of National Salvation as a regrettable but necessary emergency measure. Hungary’s weak, faction-riddled, post-communist democracy couldn’t cope with economic chaos and failing harvests. Heavy-handed rule by soldiers had seemed better than misrule by inept, quarreling politicians. Now he was starting to have second thoughts about that. In effect, the generals had mortgaged their nation’s sovereignty to feed the hungry, unruly people who had put them in power. After forty-five years of military and political domination by the Soviets, his poor country had staggered into the grasp of a new set of masters — France and Germany, Europe’s new economic and military superpowers.
“Well, Colonel?”
Hradetsky looked up. “What you say may be legally correct, but I do not think it is especially wise.” He tried to keep his voice dispassionate. “If there are terrorists operating in this region, surely you can see that it will take all our combined efforts to hunt them down?”