The Arctic Event

by James Cobb

  A brief segment had been highlighted at the end of the brief.

  Personal Notes to the Director:

  A: In the opinion of the Executive Assistant, the Kretek Group is a prime example of the kind of organization that would view the Misha 124 as a golden opportunity. They are fluid, highly adaptive, risk taking and totally ruthless.

  B: Beyond the perameters of the current Wednesday Island situation, it should be pointed out that the Kretek Group is currently very much a “one man” operation. The elimination of Anton Kretek would, in all probability, lead to the direct dissolution of the Kretek Group and an increase in stability within a number of U.S. spheres of concern. Again in the opinion of the EA, this makes Anton Kretek a valid subject for a sanctioning operation, should a lock on his position ever be established and should suitable wet assets be available.

  Klein smiled grimly-the female of the species was deadlier than the male. Maggie Templeton was probably correct. This was the face of the potential enemy. Men like Anton Kretek would view two tons of loose anthrax as a glittering possibility.

  And Maggie was probably correct about something else. The world would likely be a better place without its Anton Kreteks.

  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 chuckl
ed 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.”

  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 ho
ur 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.

  He couldn’t blame Fred Klein for his personnel selection. The director’s choice had been a logical one. He’d worked with Randi Russell before. They had been thrown together on a number of missions, almost as if fate were perversely entangling their life paths. Smith recognized her as a first-class operator: experienced, dedicated, and highly intelligent, with a weirdly diverse set of talents and a useful capacity for total ruthlessness when required.

  But she came with a penalty.

  The elevator doors split and rumbled apart, and Smith stepped out into the dusty rose-and-bronze-themed entry of the rooftop restaurant and lounge. The hostess looked up from her podium expectantly.

  “My name is Smith. I’m here to join the Russell party.”

  The hostess’s brows lifted, and there was a moment’s open and curious appraisal. “Yes, sir. Right this way, please.”