“When you called I expected the worst,” he admitted.
“When did you learn of this?”
Josef Solkov surveyed the network of lines in his friend’s coarse face. To Solkov’s KGB-trained eyes, Petr Grenchev was a man whose conduct would have betrayed him and made him suspect in any country other than socially and politically corrupt Turkey. Petr Grenchev made little effort to hide his loyalty to the Party; he looked, frequently discussed, and seemed to think only about matters of concern to the Party. A one-time member of the Presidium, he still maintained important contacts in the motherland, and it was Grenchev who had both helped develop the plan and obtained Party backing for the plot to assassinate Solkov considered the man a dichotomy. On one hand he was an inarticulate bull of a man who grunted his way through most of their discussions, yet it was the same Grenchev who had been the one to see to it that Sergi Doronkin’s physical likeness was sufficiently altered to make him able to pass for Ozal and ultimately trained to take over the role of the Turk. After that, it had only been necessary to keep the man he had arranged to become Ozal away from those who knew him best until it was time to initiate the final phase of their plan. In the teeming city of Istanbul, that had proven to be far easier than either of them had anticipated.
By the same token, it was Grenchev who had decided there would be no contact with Solkov until the final phase of their plan had actually been implemented. Now, sitting in the cafe, the two men were meeting for the first time since Doronkin had arrived in Istanbul and assumed Ozal’s identity.
“Everything is in place?” Grenchev asked. For Grenchev, he was exhibiting an unusual amount of caution.
“Da,” Solkov assured him.
“You will also be pleased to know that our comrade in Ammash has not yet revealed his identity to Comrade Ozal. This too is according to your instructions.”
Grenchev nodded, continued to smile, signaled to the waiter, and like the man sitting across from him, ordered a cup of the cok sekerii and a borek pastry. With the news that their man had finally arrived safely in Ammash, he felt suddenly somehow compelled to be even more furtive than usual.
“You have instructed Ozal that he will wait until he is given the order to proceed?”
Solkov nodded.
“He understands. There are others who must be notified, da?”
Grenchev took a sip of the sweet coffee and began to enumerate the members of the Party who had to be notified. The list was not that long, but in Grenchev’s mind, it was the sequence in which the individuals had to be informed that mattered.
Finally, he estimated that Ozal could be given the order to proceed within thirty-six hours.
When Solkov heard Grenchev’s estimate of time, he leaned back in his chair and smiled. Then he lifted his cup in a toast to his comrade.
“To the plan,” he said.
Grenchev looked quickly around the room to make certain his comrade had not drawn undue attention with his toast.
“And to the Party,” he added.
After that, both men sat in silence, savoring the hour that had finally come.
The stubby, Russian-built Kamov Ka-25 Hormone helicopter hovered at an altitude of five hundred feet over the burned-out village while the pilot scanned the terrain looking for a place to settle his aircraft. He had already made several passes over the village and each time Peter Langley was more appalled at the extent of the devastation. Finally, Langley pointed to an area several hundred yards downwind of the village and his Turkish pilot, a man by the name of Kizil Burgaz, acknowledged and gradually began to maneuver the Glushenkov-powered craft toward the clearing.
For Peter Langley it had been a frantic thirty-six hours spent mostly in the air. He had pulled a few strings and collected on a couple of overdue
IOUs to pull it off, but the real break came when Burgaz turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered. Mikos Asonokov had described Kizil Burgaz as a Cold War-vintage mercenary with the courage of a bush pilot, the agility of a mountain goat, and the cunning of a weasel. Burgaz had turned out to be all of that and more.
Taking off before dawn from a secluded landing strip near the village of Pasabachi, Burgaz had somehow threaded the Hormone around squads of Turkish border guards, avoided Baddour’s air patrols and radar, and finally sneaked through the narrow Koboli Pass to the site of the crash. They had already landed once for Langley to inspect the wreckage and then taken off again in search of the nearest village. Through it all Burgaz was grim and taciturn, but he was still everything Asonokov had promised.
Now, as Burgaz cut back on the power and squinted into the morning sun, he reached out for Langley’s arm as a warning. His English was barely decipherable, but the signal was something Langley understood. Burgaz used his index finger to make a circling gesture at the side of his head.
“Kurds — they sometimes…” He was searching for the right word. Finally he blurted out the words “non compos mentis.” That as much as anything told Langley something about his compatriot’s mental agility; in the short span of one sentence he had gone from a fractured kind of English to Latin, all in an effort to make certain Langley understood. Then, as Langley opened the door and started to jump down, Burgaz unbuckled his harness, reached behind his seat, unstrapped a Russian 5.45 mm light machine gun, and handed it to him.
“Need — maybe,” he warned.
Burgaz was right. The first shot whistled past Langley and ripped into the Hormone’s fuselage as he swung down from the flight deck. He managed to drop to the ground just as the second shot gouged out a hole in the ground near his feet. It had happened too late for Burgaz to alter his plans, Langley heard the chopper settle and the rotor begin to slow. At the same time he saw Burgaz hit the floor of the flight deck and point toward the village.
“There,” he shouted, “from near husea.”
Langley hugged the ground and waited for several minutes before he moved. There had been two shots, both close — but neither had done any real damage. He blinked into the sun, trying to estimate the distance up the rocky slope to where Burgaz indicated the shots had originated. At the most he figured it was two hundred yards. If whoever had fired the shots had been any kind of marksman or even halfway serious about what they were doing, they were close enough to have hit what they were aiming at. Langley was guessing that the shots had been a warning. He turned and looked back up into the Hormone’s flight deck at Burgaz. The Turk had an RPK74 and he was sighting.
“Hold your fire,” Langley shouted.
Burgaz slipped his finger away from the trigger and waited.
Langley reached around, fished his handkerchief out of his pocket, laid his weapon on the ground in front of him, slowly worked his way to his knees, and stood up. He held the handkerchief over his head and waved it in a slow circular motion.
Behind him, from the uncertain safety of the Hormone’s flight deck, Burgaz was muttering a string of what Langley figured was obscenities prefaced by the word “American.” The rest of the pilot’s tirade sounded mostly Turkish.
Several minutes passed and Langley figured he had waited long enough. He took a calculated step forward, still waving the handkerchief and continuing to scan what was left of the ravaged village.
There was a pile of sheep carcasses less than fifty yards from where Burgaz had set the Hormone down, and a crude line of what appeared to be grave mounds. He waited several more minutes before he shouted again.
“We come in peace! We mean you no harm! We are looking for someone!”
Behind him he could hear Burgaz climbing down from the flight deck of the Hormone amid another barrage of profanity. Even with the warmth of the sun, the cold wind whistling down from the pass seemed to be making the Turk even more surly.