Day Of Wrath (20 page)

Nothing so easy, no. I’m afraid you will be taking a long and painful trip to hell.”

Serov started screaming even before the needle touched his skin.

King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Grateful for the air conditioning that kept the blast furnace heat of the Saudi summer at bay, Anson P. Carleton, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arab Affairs, strode forward to a podium inside the King Khalid Airport’s official reception area. His aides, U.S. Secret Service agents, and Saudi security personnel trailed after him and then filed off to either side.

Outside, the honor guard and band that had greeted him on his arrival began dispersing. Heat waves distorted their figures as they marched away under a merciless sun that baked the tarmac like pottery in a kiln.

Carleton noted the brandnew mural decorating the wall behind the podium—a stylistic rendition of a map of Saudi Arabia, its flag, and a verse from the Koran. It hadn’t been there on his last visit to Riyadh. The Saudis must be sprucing up their airport—yet again. He shrugged mentally. His hosts always seemed to have the money for bold and lavish interior decorating. Now it was his job to persuade them to move boldly in other, more important areas—to continue the process of making a full peace with Israel.

He looked down at the notes of his prepared arrival remarks.

His words would be carefully chosen and indirect, as was usual when dealing with sensitive political issues in Arab countries.

But they would leave his real audience, the ruling Saudi elite, in no doubt that the United States was committed to yet another serious and sustained effort to reconcile Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors.

Carleton cleared his throat, looked straight up into the unwinking lenses of the dozen or so television cameras assembled to record his statement, and opened his mouth—The mural behind him erupted in flame.

The fiery blast enveloped Carleton a millisecond before the fragments thrown by the explosion tore him to pieces and then sleeted outward-killing or maiming dozens of the aides, security guards, and reporters clumped near the podium.

Two rooms away, Yassir Iyad, an airport maintenance worker, felt and heard the short, sharp concussive thump that told him the explosive charge planted inside the new mural by the Radical Islamic Front had detonated. He smiled broadly and then wiped the smile off his face.

Working swiftly, the young Palestinian guest worker detached a small controller from the piece of wire hanging out of an electrical conduit inspection plate. He concealed the controller in his pocket. Next, he tugged on the wire—pulling it out through the conduit. Since the wire had only been attached to the bomb’s trigger mechanism, it came out easily. If it had hung up on the wreckage, Iyad had come prepared to cut it off and conceal it in place. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary.

Instead, the Palestinian simply reeled the wire in—all twenty meters of it—gathering it up on the same spool it had come from.

Then he clipped off the scorched, twisted end and dropped that in his pocket beside the controller. He planned to drop both pieces of incriminating evidence somewhere deep in the desert outside the Saudi capital.

After replacing the access plate, Iyad left the storage room—locking the door behind him.

Then, donning a look of anguished concern like a mask, the Palestinian hurried, along with everyone else, toward the scene of the tragedy.

Near Tail, Saudi Arabia (D
MINUS
15)

“Officials have characterized this as the most serious terrorist attack on the United States in two years—pointing out that Undersecretary of State Carleton is the highest-ranking U.S. official ever assassinated on foreign soil. The White House is preparing a statement … Prince Ibrahim al Saud snapped the television off. A slight smile graced his lips. Carleton’s death was only a fraction of what he hoped to accomplish, of what he planned to accomplish but the Americans had suffered today.

JUNE
7

MVD
Holding Area, Sheremetevo-1 Airport, Outside Moscow

The
MVD
holding area at Sheremetevo-1 showed signs of hard usage. Its black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor was scarred, scuffed, and still showed mud and other stains tracked in during the last spring rainstorm. Several of the overhead fluorescent lamps were burned out, and some of those that were left flickered at irregular intervals.

Puke-ugly, lime-green plastic chairs bolted around the walls provided the room’s only seating.

Colonel Peter Thorn sat stiffly upright in one of those hard plastic seats, studiously ignoring the young
MVD
private standing nearby. The kid looked barely old enough to shave, and Thorn earnestly hoped he’d been given enough training to know how to work the safety on the
AKSU
submachine gun he held cradled in both hands. From the way the private twitched whenever Thorn so much as shifted in his chair, he seemed to think he was guarding Bonnie and Clyde.

Thorn looked across to where Helen Gray sat. Another soldier stood watching her, and a burly, hardfaced
MVD
captain occupied the chair right next to hers.

She looked pensive, sad, and utterly weary. There were shadows under her blue eyes—shadows that had darkened in the two days since Alexei Koniev had died.

He sighed inaudibly. Losing a partner was one of the toughest things that could ever happen to anyone in law enforcement or the Special Forces. It was something you never really got over.

He knew that only too well. One of his closest friends, his old sergeant major, had been killed in the Delta Force raid on Teheran. He still had occasional nightmares about that—nightmares that lingered on in a sadness that was hard to shake when he woke up.

Thorn shook his head somberly. This investigation had already exacted a bitter price from the woman he loved—and they still weren’t much closer to the truth they’d been seeking. He leaned toward her, hoping he could find the right words to tell her how sorry he was. “Helen, I—”

“Silence!” the
MVD
captain barked in heavily accented English.

“No talking! It is forbidden.”

Thorn bit down on a savage curse. Damn it. This was ridiculous.

He rubbed angrily at his wrists, fiercely massaging the abrasions left by handcuffs that had been locked down too tight for too long.

He hadn’t been very surprised when the first militia units arriving on the scene at the Star of the White Sea put them under arrest. That had been a reasonable precaution for any policeman faced with a shipload of corpses and two armed foreigners. But what followed next hadn’t been reasonable. Not by a long shot.

They’d been held under lock and key at the Pechenga militia headquarters for hours, denied any contact with the American embassy, and ignored whenever they demanded information on the state of the investigation down at the docks. When this
MVD
captain and his men showed up earlier today, Thorn had at first thought the wheels of Russia’s ponderous bureaucracy were finally starting to spin in the right direction.

Big mistake, boyo, he thought bitterly. If anything, their situation had gone from bad to worse. He and Helen had been hustled out of militia custody, handcuffed like common criminals, and plopped onto a military transport plane bound for Moscow.

And now they’d been left sitting in this dingy, godforsaken waiting room for more than two hours. He grimaced. What kind of game was the
MVD
playing here? Somebody, probably that smug son of a bitch Serov, had set the three of them up, and every minute that passed gave whoever it was more time to either cover his tracks or vanish.

Thorn swiveled slightly in his chair as the door to the holding area swung open.

A young man cautiously poked his head through the opening.

Wary brown eyes blinked owlishly behind his horn-rim glasses.

“Captain Dobuzhinsky?”

“Da.” The
MVD
captain lumbered to his feet. “You are from the American embassy?”

“Yes.” The young man nodded rapidly. He strode forward. “My name is Andrew Wyatt. I’m with the administrative affairs section.”’ It was about time the pinstriped cavalry rode over the ridge, Thorn thought sourly.

Wyatt turned toward them. “Special Agent Gray? Colonel Thorn ? I’ve been sent to bring you back to the embassy.” He glanced at the
MVD
officer. “I assume that’s all right, Captain?”

Dobuzhinsky nodded dourly. “First, you must sign for them.”

The captain held out a clipboard and watched impassively while the young embassy staffer hurriedly read through the official form attached to it—moving his lips as he sounded out some of the Russian legal jargon.

Once Wyatt scrawled his signature across the bottom of the form, the
MVD
officer uncuffed them—first Helen and then Thorn . He scowled at them and then nodded abruptly toward the door. “Very well. You are free to leave. But only to go with this man from your embassy.

Nowhere else. You understand?”

Thorn restrained his anger until they were outside the terminal and on their way to the embassy car waiting at the curb for them. Then he swung around on Wyatt. “What the hell is wrong with the Russians?

First, we’re almost aced by some of their frigging Mafiya types and then they throw us in the slammer!

Don’t they give a damn about why one of their best officers was murdered?”

The young embassy staffer spread his hands apart. “I’m afraid that’s out of my bailiwick, Colonel. My orders were to bail you out and get you back to the embassy—pronto. The Deputy Chief of Mission wants to see you in his office ASAP” Partly mollified, Thorn pulled open the rear door on the embassy car and held it for Helen. “Fine.” He slid in beside her and said, “Maybe the State Department can light a fire under those idiots in the Kremlin.”

Helen simply shook her head and stared out the window of the car as they sped out of the airport-heading southeast for
MOSCOW
.

U.S. Embassy, Moscow Randolph Clifford was the Deputy Chief of Mission, the number two man at the American embassy in Moscow. His office, richly furnished with carefully selected czarist-era and American colonial antiques, was meant to endorse his authority, to remind visitors of his position as a high-ranking representative of the U.S. government. It was not meant to serve as the setting for a shouting match.

Colonel Peter Thorn supposed that Clifford, a portly man with a thick mane of white hair, might be called distinguished under less stressful circumstances. Right now, though, the badtempered twist of the diplomat’s mouth and the vein throbbing dangerously on his temple ruined his image as an urbane shaper of American foreign policy.

“Look, Special Agent Gray,” Clifford said in exasperation. “As far as Washington is concerned, the only thing that happened aboard the Star of the White Sea is that two of our citizens stumbled onto a Russian Mafiya drug buy that went sour. It was just an unhappy coincidence that you, the colonel here, and Major Koniev went aboard the ship at that particular time and got caught in the crossfire.” His tone was final, almost dictatorial, but then he was used to having the authority to back up his dictates.

“Is that the story the MVD’s trying to peddle?” demanded Helen angrily, glaring back at the red-faced diplomat with unblinking eyes.

“If so, only a moron would even pretend to believe it!”

Thorn hurriedly tamped down a wry grin. He’d wondered what it would take to shake Helen out of her depression over Alexei Koniev’s death.

He should have guessed it would be contact with one of the State Department’s “best and brightest” at his most obnoxious. Now Thorn was just glad she didn’t still have the Tokarev automatic she’d picked up aboard the Russian freighter. If she’d been armed, he had the feeling Randolph Clifford might already have been on the receiving end of a full eightshot magazine.

Clifford bristled, and then visibly relaxed his facial muscles.

He adopted a more soothing, almost fatherly, tone. “I’ll overlook that unfortunate comment, Miss Gray. You’re overwrought. And I know you’ve been through hell—”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Clifford!” Helen interrupted. “What I’m overwrought about, if anything, is the way we, the U.S. government that is, seems to be papering this whole thing over.”

Evidently too mad to sit still, she got up and started pacing the room.

Thorn leaned forward. It was time to stick his own oar in.

“What happened in Pechenga wasn’t an accident, sir. It was a cold-blooded ambush. They were waiting for us.”

“Perhaps so,” the embassy official replied, and clearly glad to talk to him while Helen cooled off. “But the
MVD
claims that the ambush could have been set up in thirty seconds when one of the Mafiya lookouts spotted you coming down the pier.” He shook his head. “Given the odds against you, I’m still amazed you managed to escape at all.”

Helen snapped, “I’m sure that whoever planned all this is even more amazed!”

Clifford ignored her remark and went on. “You have to view this matter from the Russian perspective, Colonel. The evidence the
MVD
found aboard that tramp freighter seems quite clear.”

He tapped the bulky manila folder he’d told them contained the official Russian government crime scene report. “First they discover nearly fifty kilos of what looks like heroin in one of the ship’s storage lockers. Then they find out that these drugs are really just milk sugar laced with a small percentage of the real stuff. And finally, they stumble across all nineteen of her crew, including the real Captain Tumarev, gagged and bound with duct tape, shot in the back of the head execution-style, and then dumped in a cargo hold!”

The diplomat shuddered involuntarily, evidently remembering the photographs he’d said were included in the
MVD
report.

He was a bureaucrat, not a man of action.

Helen, who’d seen worse sights in her tour with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, stopped pacing and shrugged. “All of which proves nothing.” She leaned over the diplomat’s desk.