by Larry Bond
“Wow, yourself,” Peter agreed gladly. But then he shifted slightly beneath her. “Who knows? Maybe retirement won’t be so bad, after all.”
Helen heard the worried undertone in his voice and felt sleep fade out of her reach again. She raised herself up on one elbow and tapped him on the ribs. “You don’t mean that, Peter, do you?”
He sighed. “No, not really.” His eyes looked over her head — off toward a horizon she couldn’t see. “I know what I am, Helen.
I can’t dodge it. I was born to follow the LIFE and the drum — not the lute and the tambourine. If I can’t be a soldier …” He fell silent.
“Then we have to find a way to beat these guys. To win our honor back.
To prove we were right to chase after Grushtin and Serov, and whoever murdered them,” Helen said angrily, feeling her mind starting to come fully alive for the first time since she’d left Randolph Clifford’s ornate office.
“Nice sentiment in theory. But probably impossible to carry out in fact,” he said reluctantly. “I think we’re licked, Helen.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“No,” Peter said finally. Then he shrugged. “But I really don’t know where the hell we go from here.”
“Back to the basics,” Helen suggested.
“Okay,” he said. He sat up in bed again. “The basics being: What’s worth sabotaging a passenger plane, murdering a high-ranking Air Force officer, and slaughtering an entire ship’s crew to keep secret?”
“Heroin?” she speculated. “Bulk quantities of heroin? Stashed inside one or more of those Su-24 engines Serov and his officers sold?”
“Maybe. It fits most of what we know,” Peter said slowly. “And the Russians and our own people have sure bought that as the motive behind all this.”
She heard the doubt in his voice. “But you haven’t?”
He shook his head. “Christ, Helen, I don’t know. Not for sure.” He grimaced. “All I do know is that I’m really tired of having heroin smuggling shoved in my face as a motive at every possible opportunity.”
She nodded. The same thing had been bothering her. The ambush aboard the Star of the White Sea made it clear that the bad guys had been one step ahead of them all the way. If that were so, and they were smuggling drugs, why hadn’t they tried harder to clear away the evidence?
When she asked that question aloud, Peter nodded himself.
“Good point. God knows those guys had plenty of time to themselves aboard that freighter-once they murdered the crew.” He leaned back against the pillow. “No, the more I think about it, the less I believe this whole thing is really about heroin smuggling.”’ “But what about the stuff we found in Gasparov’s suitcase?” Helen asked.
“Coincidence?” Peter suggested. “It could be a coincidence that the bad guys have been running with ever since — leading us down a bunch of blind alleys.”
Helen thought that over. “Maybe. The only real link we had between Captain Grushtin and Colonel Gasparov was that suicide note …”
“Which they forced Grushtin to write under torture,” Peter finished for her.
Helen grimaced. “Well, then, if we’re not chasing smuggled heroin — what the hell are we looking for?”
“Something else kept at Kandalaksha. Something valuable.”
“Su-24 bombers, maybe?” Helen wondered. “What if General Serov wasn’t just selling engines? What if he was selling whole aircraft?”
Peter shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Because Avery and his team weren’t there to count planes.
They’d have no reason to go anywhere near the flight line or the hangars. If Serov and his commanders were selling off their aircraft inventory, John and his inspection team would never have spotted it.”
“So there’d be no reason for Serov to have Captain Grushtin sabotage their transport plane,” Helen concluded.
“Exactly.”
“Then what do you think the inspection team could have uncovered that spooked Serov?” she asked again.
Peter hesitated for several seconds and then said, “Well, I keep thinking about that circle in John Avery’s inspection logbook.”
Helen remembered the strange notation they’d seen scrawled around one of the nuclear weapon identifier codes. She shivered suddenly.
“Jesus, Peter. You think we might be tracking a loose nuke?”
He nodded, slowly at first and then more decisively. “Yeah. It’s possible. Maybe John spotted something during his inspection — something he wasn’t supposed to see.”
“But he and his team signed off on the Kandalaksha storage site before boarding that plane,” Helen pointed out. “Why not call a treaty violation right then and there?”
Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he wasn’t sure.” His voice sharpened. “Or maybe he thought it would be too dangerous to say anything at Kandalaksha. Even in Russia, nobody can just back a truck up to a weapons bunker for a quick pickup.
What would you do if you suspected the base commander and some of his top officers had sold one of the bombs in their care?”
“My God.” Helen swallowed hard. It sounded crazy at first — until you realized that nuclear weapons were the only commodity at Kandalaksha more valuable than a shipment of drugs.
“Would anyone believe us if we tripped the alarm?”
“Now? After Pechenga?” Peter asked. He shook his head grimly. “Not a chance. Between the MVD, our own government, and whoever set us up, we’ve been pretty thoroughly discredited.
We’d need hard evidence to set the nuke-hunting teams in motion not just some doodles in a notebook.”
His shoulders slumped. “And there’s the rub. We can’t get that kind of evidence. Once we’re on that flight to Andrews, we’re out of the picture.”
Helen knew he was right. Whether the people who’d tried to kill them in Pechenga had been smuggling drugs or a nuclear weapon, she and Peter needed more information, and they weren’t going to get it if they kept playing by the rules. She lay awake for hours, long after Peter had slipped into a fitful sleep, trying to decide just how far outside the regulations and the law she would be willing to go to discover the truth.
CHAPTER NINE
BREAKING STRAIN
JUNE 9
Tegel International Airport, Berlin
The captain’s announcement came over the loudspeaker in Russian, German, and, finally, English. “We are now on final approach to Tegel International Airport. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened until we have reached the terminal and you are instructed to release them.”
Colonel Peter Thorn felt Helen Gray grip his hand tightly.
“You still want to do this?” he asked. He tried to put as much feeling into the question as he could, as if extra emphasis could pull Helen’s real desire out of her.
“We don’t have any other choice, Peter.” She was equally emphatic, but that didn’t reassure him. “You know that nobody else is going to do a damned thing more about this case. There’s just us, and we owe it to Alexei. Hell, we owe it to ourselves.”
Thorn shook his head. They’d had the same discussion, and the same arguments, for the entire two-hour flight from Moscow.
What had seemed reasonable late at night in the privacy of her empty apartment seemed a lot less sensible in broad daylight. His theory that they might be chasing a loose Russian nuclear weapon suddenly appeared the stuff of nightmares — and about as substantial.
The worst of it was that all the real risk of what Helen proposed would fall on her shoulders. Following his travel orders to the letter wouldn’t change his own fate one iota. No matter what he did, he was slated for the Army’s dust heap — for forced retirement.
But failing to report on time might give Helen’s own enemies inside the FBI hierarchy the excuse they needed to bounce her out of the Bureau altogether. He was risking a minor black mark on a service record already headed for the i
nactive list. She was risking her paycheck, her pension — everything that was left of her whole career.
It seemed a huge bet to make especially when the odds against getting to the truth were stacked so high. If they failed, or if the smuggled jet engines proved to be just that, smuggled jet engines, she was facing an unalterably bleak professional future.
And even if they faced it together, that wasn’t a future either of them could look forward to.
The passenger jet shuddered as its wheels touched concrete. Thorn took a deep breath. The first leg of their journey home was over.
He stood up, pulled a sport coat out of the overhead compartment along with his travel bag, and handed Helen her own carry-on suitcase. At the embassy’s insistence, he was traveling home in civilian clothes.
And from long habit, they were both traveling light.
They got off the plane and cleared German customs quickly.
No German bureaucrat felt much like wasting time on American travelers — not when they were confronted by a planeload of Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, and a host of other ex-Soviet ethnic minorities.
As always, Tegel was packed, jammed wall-to-wall with arriving and departing passengers.
Thorn took his stamped passport back and suddenly felt Helen nudge him gently in the ribs.
“George Patton, Jr at five o’clock,” she muttered.
He looked up, spotting who she meant with ease. A young Army captain wearing a crisply starched Class A uniform stood to one side of the hall leading to customs-craning his head as he searched the crowd. The captain was their ride to Ramstein Air Base, where they’d be spirited into the States aboard a military passenger plane.
Thorn squared his shoulders instinctively and then relaxed. It was time to doff the military habits of a lifetime. He glanced at Helen.
“Right, here we go.” He motioned her ahead. “You first, Miss Gray.”
She nodded and merged with a clump of other passengers — careful to stay on the far side of the group.
Thorn waited another thirty or forty seconds and then did the same thing. He walked right past the young captain without making eye contact and turned the corner.
Their would-be escort never saw them. He was looking for a man and woman traveling together — not apart. More to the point, Thorn realized, the younger man was expecting them to be looking for him just as hard as he’d been searching for them.
Helen joined him right around the corner. “How long have we got?” she asked.
“Unless they’ve bred all initiative out of junior officers, I’d say we’ve got about five minutes before he starts looking for us,” Thorn replied with a wry smile.
Helen started walking even faster.
It took them another few precious moments to sort through the welter of signs for Scandinavian Airlines System once they reached the main terminal and ticketing area. Thorn glanced back the way they’d come.
No sign of pursuit. Not yet, at any rate.
He shook his head. It felt damned strange to be relieved not to see an American army uniform. He didn’t like it. Like Helen, he’d always been secure in his actions — taking risks, but always sure of his course. His years of service with Delta Force had offered him the chance to escape the dull, grinding routine of the peacetime Army, but he’d still had the sense of being part of a larger whole. But now they’d both jumped completely outside the hierarchies that had provided purpose and direction for so much of their adult lives.
They got into line at the S.A.S ticket counter and scanned the monitor showing the airline’s scheduled departures.
Helen nodded toward the flickering display. “There’s a direct flight for Bergen at eight.”
“No good.” Thorn checked his watch. “We’re not going to get away with hanging around here for two hours. If we’re going through with this, we need to put some airspace between ourselves and our Army watchdog back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward customs.
“True.” Helen narrowed her eyes. “There, Peter.” She pointed to a string of letters and numbers at the top of the monitor. “There’s a flight to Oslo in half an hour. It’ll be boarding any time now.”
Thorn reached out and gently turned her to face him. She didn’t pull away.
“Look, Helen. This is where it gets real. We can still find that captain and make up some excuse for missing him at customs. We’d be home by tomorrow morning.”
“There’s no time for this, Peter,” she protested softly. “I’ve made up my mind.” Shifting in his grasp slightly, she pulled him toward the counter as the line moved forward.
Office of the Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy, Moscow
“What?”
Deputy Chief of Mission Randolph Clifford stared at Charlie Spiegel in disbelief.
Spiegel could only restate what he’d already said. “I saw them to the airport. I saw them board the plane.”
“Then why weren’t they on the plane when it landed in Berlin?”
The CIA officer shrugged. “I can’t answer that, sir. If the Army’s telling the truth about having somebody there to meet them, then Colonel Thorn and Special Agent Gray obviously got past him somehow.”
“Why? And where did they go?”
Spiegel grinned. “I understand Bavaria’s nice in the summer.”
Clifford was not amused. “You assume this disappearance was voluntary. What if they were abducted?”
Spiegel turned serious. “Unlikely, given their background. You saw my report on Pechenga, sir. If somebody tried to take Helen Gray or Thorn off that plane against their will, believe me, we’d have heard of it by now.”
Clifford nodded stiffly. He rubbed at his temples, evidently fighting the beginning of a world-class headache. “I can’t believe this. A senior Army officer. Hell, and a senior FBI agent! Violating travel orders, vanishing off the face of the earth …” He looked up at Spiegel in disbelief. “Have Thorn and Gray both gone crazy?”
“It doesn’t sound like they’ve got much to lose by going off on their own,” the CIA officer responded. “Have you notified the German authorities?”
“No.” The diplomat rubbed harder at his forehead. “We won’t get any help there. Thorn and Gray haven’t committed any crimes — none that matter to the Germans anyway. The most I could do was get our own embassy and military to agree to report to us if they turned up.” The frustration in Clifford’s voice was clear.
“If I’d been through what they’ve been through, I’d take some time off before going home to face the music,” Spiegel said flatly. “This may be their way of telling us all to go to hell.”
Clifford reddened. “I suggest you get back to work, Mr. Spiegel.” He nodded toward the door. “Just figure out what Thorn and Gray are doing. And why.”
Spiegel headed back to his own office suspecting that the other man wasn’t going to like the answers he would probably come up with. He’d worked long enough with Helen Gray to appreciate just how stubborn and determined she could be once she had her sights on an unsolved puzzle — or an enemy. What he couldn’t figure out was what she hoped to accomplish. Drug trafficking was a major crime, but it was so widespread that blocking one smuggling route just pushed the stuff somewhere else. Trying to stop it completely was as futile as good old King Canute ordering the tide back with a wave of his royal hand.
Besides, Helen and Peter Thorn weren’t going to be allowed back into Russia — not legally. So where were they going to pick up the trail they’d followed so disastrously to Pechenga?
The CIA officer closed the door to his office and turned toward the wall map pinned up behind his desk. His eyes fell on Norway and he nodded to himself. He’d bet that Helen and the colonel were on their way to the only link left in the chain they’d been tracing — to Bergen.
Well, Spiegel decided, he’d take some time before reporting back to Clifford. The Agency didn’t have many people on the ground in Norway — certainly not enough to waste their tim
e and efforts looking for a couple of government employees who’d only broken a few travel regs. Besides, he thought, Helen Gray might just get lucky.
JUNE 10
Bergen, Norway
The high northern sky over Bergen glowed a deep, rich golden orange — a color that touched the steep green slopes above the city with fire.
The same golden hue danced across the waters of the harbor — softening the outlines of the oil tankers, container ships, and fishing trawlers packed along Bergen’s piers. Although it was already evening, only a few lights gleamed from the windows of the city’s red-gabled houses, shops, bars, and restaurants.
Helen Gray glanced toward the moored ships and then back along the narrow street stretching up from the harbor toward the mountains. The season was working to their advantage. This close to the start of summer, Norway’s warm eighteen-and twenty-hour days attracted streams of tourists. To the casual observer, she and Peter would be just two more vacationers eager to take in the spectacular scenery and amble through the historic sites.
She turned to Peter. “All set?”
He showed his teeth in a quick grin and tapped the Canon EOS camera he’d purchased that afternoon. “You bet.”
With Peter tagging along a couple of steps behind her, Helen walked toward the first waterfront tavern they’d located earlier in the afternoon — after arriving by train from Oslo. They’d waited until now, after the dinner hour, when the men they were looking for would be relaxing, gossiping, and griping after their day working on the docks.
The Akershus was named after the historic fortress that guarded Oslo’s harbor. This was no tourist attraction, though.
The bar’s exterior was weathered, clearly not painted since the winter’s passing, and winters in Norway could be very hard.
Aside from the sign, a small anchor and a Viking longship painted on the front window were the only decorations. Still, it looked clean, and large enough to give them a good chance of finding the witnesses they needed.