Chapter Nine
The Eastern Coast of the Adriatic
The tides were out, the seas were low, and stars glittered through a broken cloud cover above a broad strip of dark, hard-packed sand. Above the beach lay the dunes, anchored by a hog’s hair-thin scattering of rank grasses and studded with a row of crudely made concrete pillboxes. Long left to the nesting seabirds, the abandoned fortifications were a physical manifestation of the paranoid delusions of the late and unlamented government of Enver Hoxha.
Beyond the dunes brooded the sullen, forested hills of Albania.
Gears ground in the night, and two vehicles, an elderly, blunt-nosed Mercedes truck and a smaller and newer Range Rover, jounced slowly down the rutted beach access road, driving by the dim glow of their parking lights.
At the mouth of the access, the little convoy paused, and two men in the baggy trousers and rough leather jackets of the Albanian working class dropped from the tailgate of the Mercedes and took up positions to cover the road. Each man carried a Croatian-made Agram submachine gun with a heavy cylindrical silencer screwed to its stubby barrel.
It was highly unlikely that anyone would venture down to this desolate stretch of seaside in the small hours of the morning. But if they did, policeman or peasant, they would die.
The trucks ran half a mile up the beach to the broadest, straightest reach of sand and halted. Half a dozen more armed men disembarked from the Rover and the truck cab, setting about a long-practiced drill.
As two of the men lingered beside the hood of the parked Rover, watching the sky, the others fanned out, creating an airfield.
Chemical glow sticks were broken and shaken into life, their butt ends inserted into short lengths of copper tubing. The men then spiked the sticks into the sand at spaced intervals in a long double row. In minutes, the flare path of an ad hoc runway glowed a dim blue-green in the night, invisible from beyond the dunes but readily apparent to anyone passing overhead.
The men fell back to the vehicles and waited, fingering their pistols and SMGs.
As watch hands crept to the appointed hour, the drone of aero engines became audible, and a winged shadow swept past, paralleling the beach, its running lights extinguished. The leader of the party, a big red-bearded man in corduroy trousers and a thick Fair Isle sweater, aimed an Aldis lamp and blazed it at the aircraft. Two short flashes, a pause, and two short again.
This was another of Anton Kretek’s survival mechanisms: to stay in the field and personally supervise as many of his operations as he could. It was a good way to know whom to trust and whom to purge.
The plane, a Dornier 28D Skyservant STOL transport with twin engines and a high-set wing, ran another circuit around the beach airstrip and came in to land. With its engines throttled back to an idling mutter, it flared and settled between the rows of glow sticks, its fixed landing gear kicking up a thin, hissing spray of wet sand.
Kretek aimed and flared his Aldis lamp again, guiding the plane in to a halt beside the trucks. The Dornier’s propellers continued to flicker over, but its side cargo hatch swung open, disgorging a single figure.
The man was small, dark and slender, and nervous with the world. A Palestinian Arab, his eyes moved constantly, trusting neither his environment nor his company.
“Good evening, my friend, good evening,” the larger red-haired man called over the sound of the aircraft engines. “Welcome to beautiful Albania.”
“You are Kretek?” the Palestinian demanded.
“So I have often been accused,” Anton Kretek replied, setting the lamp on the hood of the Range Rover.
The Arab was in no mood for jocularity. “You have the material?”
“That’s why we are both here, my friend.” The arms dealer started toward the Mercedes truck. “Come have a look for yourself.”
By the beam of a single flashlight, heavy cases of dark, waxed cardboard were being unloaded from the rear of the truck, the cases marked in the Cyrillic alphabet and bearing the international bomb-burst warning symbol for high explosives. Indicating that one case was to be set aside, Kretek flicked open a folding-bladed hunting knife and slashed through the yellow plastic strapping.
Lifting the lid revealed tightly packed brick-sized blocks wrapped in waxed paper. Opening the wrapper revealed a dense, smooth puttylike material the color of margarine.
“Military-grade Semtex plastique.” Kretek gestured at it. “Twelve hundred kilograms’ worth, all of it less than three months old and completely stable. Guaranteed to kill Jews and send your dedicated volunteers on to their seventy-two virgins with smiles on their lips.”
The Arab’s head jerked up, a spark of anger in his dark, expressive eyes. The anger of the fanatic confronted with the shopkeeper. “When you speak of the holy warriors of Muhammad and of the liberators of the Palestinian people, you will speak with respect!”
The arms runner’s eyes went opaque and cold. “Everyone is liberating something, my friend. As for me, I liberate money. You have your merchandise; now I will have my payment-and Muhammad and the Palestinian people be damned.”
The Arab started to flare but then noted the circle of grim Slavic faces drawing in around the pool of flashlight. Sullenly he took a fat manila envelope from inside his jacket, tossing it down atop the open case of explosives.
Kretek caught up the envelope. Opening it, he counted the neat strapped bundles of euros, verifying the denominations. “It is good,” he said finally. “Load it.”
The ton and a half of high explosives went aboard the transport plane, the Dornier’s crew balancing and tying down the lethal cargo. In a matter of minutes the last case was stowed and the Arab payoff man scrambled after it without a parting word or a look back. The fuselage doors slammed shut, and the plane’s propellers revved to taxiing power, blasting the arms smugglers with its sand-loaded slipstream.
Again the Dornier raced down the faint flare path. Lifting into the black sky, it executed a climbing turn out over the Adriatic, its engines growing fainter with distance.
Kretek’s men dispersed once more to collect the glow sticks. In an hour or two, all evidence of the landing would be erased by the incoming tide.
Kretek and his lieutenant trudged back to the Range Rover.
“I’m not sure if I like this, Anton,” Mikhail Vlahovitch said, slinging his Agram over his shoulder. Squatter and balder than Kretek, the pan-featured ex-Serbian Army officer was one of a very elite cadre within the Kretek Group permitted to call the arms dealer by his first name. “You play a risky game with these people.”
Vlahovitch was also one of an even smaller cadre who had the ultimate privilege of questioning one of Anton Kretek’s command decisions without being killed for it.
“What’s to be concerned about, Mikhail?” Kretek chuckled fatly, slapping his second in command on his free shoulder. “We’ve met their airplane. We’ve delivered the merchandise as we promised. We received the payment agreed upon, and they flew away. We have fulfilled our contract completely. As for what happens afterward? Who can say?”
“But this will be their second shipment lost. The Arabs are bound to be suspicious!”
“Pish, pish, pish, the Arabs are always suspicious. They are always certain everyone is out to persecute them. This can be a good thing. We can make use of this.”
Kretek paused beside the passenger door of the Range Rover. Reaching in through the lowered window, he popped open the glove compartment. “When we negotiate our next series of arms sales to the Jihad, we will simply place the blame where it properly belongs. We will tell them that Israeli Mossad agents are operating in the Balkans and are attempting to interfere with the flow of armaments bound for the Mideast. Beyond hating everyone else, Arabs love to hate the Jews. They will be happy to blame them for the loss of their munitions.”