The Arctic Event

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 chuckled 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.”