Kretek straightened, holding a gray metal box the size of a carton of cigarettes. He extended a telescoping aerial from the top of the box and flicked on a power switch, a green check light glowing in response.
“You will tell them about the Jews, Anton?” Vlahovitch questioned skeptically.
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s the truth, isn’t it? The Jews are responsible. Our terrorist friends are excellent clients. They pay us good money in exchange for the weapons and explosives we sell to them. They deserve to know the truth…” Kretek flipped a safety guard up and off the central key on the transmitter. “…just not quite all of it. There’s no need to mention all of the good money the Mossad is paying to see that those weapons and explosives never arrive.”
Kretek pressed with a calloused thumb. Out in the night a receiver-detonator carefully grafted inside a doctored block of Semtex reacted to the electronic impulse.
There was a flash like ruddy heat lightning over the Adriatic, and the distant thud of a massive explosion as the Dornier and its crew vaporized.
“This is the secret of doing good business, Mikhail,” Kretek said with satisfaction. “You must always do your best to please as many clients as possible.”
The ancient stone-walled farmhouse had been built before the birth of Napoleon and had been occupied by successive generations of the same family for almost three centuries.
In the United States this would have made it a historic landmark. In Albania this made it just another weary, overused building in an overused land.
For the past fifty-odd years, a variety of governments had promised the occupants of the farm electricity “soon,” but only now had it arrived, in the form of the snarling Honda generators of the Kretek Group’s headquarters.
The straw pallets and crude homemade furnishings had been emptied from one of the damp sleeping rooms, replaced by the folding field desks, satellite phones, and civil sideband transceivers of the communications section. The guard force had made a billet of the barn, and their camouflaged pickets had the farm isolated from all contact with the outside world, from within or without, and the transport section had their vehicles concealed in the other outbuildings.
The members of the headquarters unit were accustomed to such temporary quarters. They never remained in the same location for more than seven days at a time. One week in a resort villa on the Rumanian coast, the next on the rented top floor of a luxury hotel in Prague, the third aboard a fishing trawler cruising the Aegean, or, as now, a dank stone farmhouse in Albania.
Never give your enemies a sitting target-that was yet another of Anton Kretek’s survival precepts. The temptation to relax and wallow in the good life provided by his successes was strong, almost overwhelming at times, but the arms merchant knew that to be a road that led to disaster.
It was also beneficial for the lads to see that the Old Man still had a sharp eye and a stone fist and that he wasn’t afraid to get it bloody. It was good for discipline.
“How did it go, Anton?” Kretek’s chief of communications asked as the arms dealer pushed through the low doorway into the farmhouse’s combined kitchen and living room.
“No difficulties, my friend,” Kretek growled amiably. “You may contact the Palestinians and tell them their shipment is on its way. Whether it will arrive…” Kretek mugged a blank look and shrugged his broad shoulders.
The men seated around the rough central table knew they should laugh.
Barring the single glaring bulb of a safety light hung from an overhead beam, the room itself might have been a museum tableau from the eighteenth century with its low ceiling, its dingily whitewashed stone walls, and the broad fireplace that served for both cooking and heating, a vine-cutting fire smoldering on the blackened hearth. The puncheon plank floors were worn smooth from centuries of footsteps, and the outside entrance was a low-set, high-silled, “skull-cracker” doorway designed to slow the initial attacking rush of bandits and family enemies.
It served as no defense to bandits invited into the house, however. The farm’s owner and his fourteen-year-old daughter stood silently near the fireplace, relying on the ancient peasant’s defense of unobtrusiveness.
“Ah, Gleska, my sweet, you awaited your knight’s return, and with hot tea. Just the thing for a cold morning.”
Unspeaking, the girl lifted the kettle from the fireplace crane and brought it to the table, filling one of the grime-opaque glasses with powerful twice-brewed black tea. Kretek dropped into the free chair beside the glass, squeezing the girl’s buttocks through her cheap cotton skirt. “Thank you, my love. I will warm myself with your good tea, and then in a little bit, when I have finished my work, I will warm you.”
With a ferocious mock growl, he drew her in and buried his face between her almost non-existent breasts, eliciting another volley of coarse laughter from his men.
At the fireplace a flare of impotent fury flashed in her father’s eyes, only to be masked instantly. He had been pleased when he had rented his farm to these men for more money than he could make with five years of hard labor. He had not known then that he would also be renting his only girl child. But he was Albanian, and he understood the rule of the gun. The men with the guns make the rules, and these men had a great many guns. The girl would survive, and they would survive as Albanian peasants had always survived: by enduring.
Releasing the girl, Kretek poured sugar into his tea from the cracked bowl on the table. “Anything new come in while I was delivering the shipment, Crencleu?”
“Only one e-mail, sir.” The communications chief passed a single sheet of hard copy across the table. “On your personal address, in your house code.”
Kretek flipped open the sheet and studied the message. Slowly a wolflike smile broke through the brush of Kretek’s beard.
“It’s good news from the family, my friends,” he said finally. “Very good news, indeed.”
The pretense of joviality passed, and he looked up, eyes distant and intent. “Crencleu, advise our Canadian point men that the arctic operation is on and that they are to proceed with preparations with all speed. Call in the selected force team and have them rendezvous at our point of departure in Vienna. Mikhail…”
“Yes, sir,” his executive officer spoke crisply. It was obvious the old wolf was on the track once more, this time for the richest prize in the group’s history. Vlahovich had been unsure a few days before, when he had first heard of the arctic plan. It had seemed extreme, a wild long shot. But if it could be made to work, the payoff could be astronomical. Now even the dour Serb began to catch the fever.
“Inform all headquarters sections to load and prepare to move out. I wish to be on the road in…” Kretek paused, and his eyes flicked toward the fireplace and the slim, silent figure standing beside it. The Albanian race had never been known for producing great beauties from among its women, and this little chit wasn’t much even at that, but she was here and she was young and she was paid for. “…an hour and a half.”
He might as well get his money’s worth out of little Gleska before she and the rest of her family perished in their tragic house fire.
Chapter Ten
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
Fall meant fog in the Pacific Northwest. The landing lights of the jetliners sweeping in to the runways cut like slow comets through the sinking overcast, and the tops of the hotels along the airport strip faded out of existence in the gathering dusk, illuminated windows diffusing into a golden glow within the mist.
As the bubble elevator climbed the exterior of the Doubletree Hotel tower, Jon Smith watched the sharp edges and details fade from the night. He wore knife-creased army greens, and he was alone for the moment. That would change presently. He was en route to link up with the other members of his team, one a stranger and the other not exactly a friend.