THE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT outside Archangel mainly handled domestic flights, and few enough of those, except in the summer. More took the train south, which was cheaper and more accessible to the local citizens. Aeroflot hadn’t quite shaken its long-held reputation for substandard flight safety. But there was a rather more active air-freight terminal, used largely for fish that needed swift transport to various international restaurants. And so the package was loaded into the forward cargo hatch of a forty-year-old DC-8 belonging to Asin Air Freight. It would fly to Stockholm, and from there, with a new crew, it would fly farther south, stopping at Athens before its final leg to Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates.
“What’s this?” a customs officer asked, looking at the recently painted “battery” casing.
“Scientific gear, X-ray equipment, something like that,” his partner replied.
The official saw that the paperwork was properly filled out, and that was, really, all he cared about. It wasn’t a bomb. Those required different forms. So he signed on the long green line and affixed a stamp that made it official. Nobody even had to bribe him for this. For munitions, they would have, but this was not obviously any sort of weapon. He didn’t ask, and they didn’t offer. To their relief, and his indifference. A gas-powered forklift hoisted the package-it weighed about seven hundred kilos-and drove it to the platform sitting outside the cargo hatch. There it was manhandled aboard and tied down firmly to the aluminum deck.
The pilot and copilot were preflighting the aircraft, walking around, checking for fluid leaks, visually inspecting the airframe for anything amiss. The air-freight business was not known for the quality of its maintenance procedures, and the flyers, whose lives rode on the flight deck, did their best to make up for that troubling fact. The left outboard main-gear tire needed replacement in ten or so cycles. Aside from that, the airplane looked as though it would fly for the next eight hours. They walked back inside to the crew lounge to try some of the (miserable) local coffee and (pretty decent) bread. Their box lunches were already aboard, already stacked by their flight engineer, who was busily prepping the engines.
They walked back out thirty minutes later and climbed up the old-fashioned boarding ladder to get under way. That took another fifteen minutes, and then they taxied to the end of runway one-eight to start their takeoff roll. The old aircraft had thirty-seven thousand hours on the airframe-it had begun life as a passenger liner for United Airlines, mostly on cross-country runs from the East Coast to the West, along with a few stints as a Freedom Bird out of Saigon, which the aircraft, if it had a memory, would recall with a smile. It climbed to its assigned cruising altitude of thirty-two thousand feet, and headed west before turning south over Finland, slowing as it crossed the Baltic Sea, then descended to land at Stockholm. It was all entirely routine, ending on runway two-six and turning left for the cargo terminal. A fuel bowser pulled up at once to refuel the wing tanks, and a minute later came the relief crew, asking how things went and how the aircraft was. All answers were within acceptable limits, and the inbound crew walked down the steps to a car that would take them to the local hotel that flight crews used. It had a pub, they were pleased to see, with cold beer on tap. The relief crew had the DC-8 back in the air before they’d finished their first pint.
Back in Russia, Musa was at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in the main terminal building, the one that looks like an alien spacecraft (but it was an improvement on Stalin’s beloved wedding-cake school of design), on an international call to a friend in Berlin. When the connection was made, he told his friend that the car had been properly fixed, and that he would accept payment when next they met. His friend agreed, and the call was terminated. Musa and his men then walked to an airport bar, where they indulged freely in overpriced shots of Russian vodka, which was, at least, of a premium brand, as they waited two hours for their KLM flight to the Netherlands. The bar also served them cucumber slices and bread to accompany the vodka into their stomachs. They paid the bar bill in euros, leaving a niggardly tip for the bartender before boarding the KLM 747, in the first-class cabin, where the liquor was free, and they indulged themselves there, too. For his part, Musa’s thoughts did not linger on the two murders he had committed. It had been necessary. He’d accepted that part of the mission before traveling to Russia and chartering the infidel’s boat. Looking back, he was surprised that he and his friends had not indulged in drink while aboard, but there was an old adage about not mixing business with pleasure, and not mixing alcohol with business was surely even a more intelligent rule. Had that Vitaliy fellow remarked on his charter with some local friends? Impossible to know. But since he didn’t know their names or addresses, and no one had taken any photographs, what evidence had he left behind? Northern Russia had looked to him like old movies of the American West, and things there were manifestly too casual for a proper police investigation. The pistols used had been disposed of, and that, he figured, was that. With this decided, he rocked his seat back and let the alcohol take him off to sleep.
The 747 landed at Berlin’s Templehoff International at 0100 local time. Musa and the others deplaned separately, went through the rigmarole of immigration, using their Dutch passports, then walked to collect their baggage, and from there out to the taxi stand, where a German in a Mercedes took directions, delivered in English, to a certain street location. It was in what was locally called Dish City, called that for the plethora of satellite-TV receiving dishes. These allowed the mainly Arabic residents to watch TV in their own native language.
His host was already expecting him, flagged by a friend in Amsterdam, and so it took only one knock. Hands were taken and kisses exchanged, and Musa went into the living room of the small apartment. Mustafa, the host, held a finger to his lips and then to his left ear. The apartment might be bugged, he thought. Well, you had to take precautions in an infidel country. Mustafa turned on the TV to a same-day repeat of a game show.
“Your mission was successful?” Mustafa asked.
“Completely.”
“Good. Can I get you anything?”
“Wine?” Musa asked. Mustafa went into the kitchen and produced a tumbler full of a white Rhine wine. Musa took a long pull on it, then lit a cigarette. He’d had quite a long day, plus the two murders, which, he found, tended to unsettle him for no reason he could understand. In any case, sleep came quickly once Mustafa had rolled out the sleeper bed, and he’d finished off his Rhine wine. Tomorrow he’d go to Paris, await word that the package had arrived safely, then follow. Once in Dubai, he could enjoy some leisure time; the engineer assigned to the package was reliable and competent, and would need little supervision. Then again, Musa thought, what supervision could he offer? What had to be done with the package was beyond his skill level.
It was a strange name for a town, Kersen Kaseke thought. The site of Napoleon’s final defeat at the hands of Wellington. Perhaps an apt metaphor: a divinely ordained reversal of fortune for a tyrant who had kept much of the world under his thumb. Still, to find such a place here, in the middle of the “corn belt,” had been a surprise, as had much of America. The people here seemed decent enough and had treated him well, despite his funny name and heavily accented English. It had helped, he was sure, that he’d managed to pass himself off as a Christian, the adopted son of Lutheran missionaries who had died two years earlier during a mortar attack outside Kuching. Repugnant as he found it to overtly deny Islam and the One True Prophet, the story had, in fact, softened the hearts of the most suspicious of the town’s residents, most of whom were blue-collar workers or farmers. No, it wasn’t the people he despised but rather their government, and sad as it might be, citizens had been paying the price for flawed and brutal policies for millennia. For the people here, it was simply a matter of fate finally catching up with them. Fate and Allah’s will. Besides, he reminded himself, what was coming for these people was but a fraction of what his own country had suffered. While the tragic tale of his missionary parents was technically false, it was, in spirit, true enough. The streets of Zagreb and Rijeka and Osijek and dozens of others had been awash in the blood and misery of Muslims for decades, while the West did nothing to help. What would have happened, Kaseke wondered, if it had been blond-haired and blue-eyed Christian children being slaughtered in the streets of London or Los Angeles? What then?
As the e-mail instructed, Kaseke drove his 1995 Ford Ranger to the Trailways bus station on Sycamore between Third Street and Park Avenue. He pulled the Ranger into the parking lot of Doyle’s Pub, then walked back down the block to the bus station and went inside. The key he’d received in the mail a week earlier fit locker number 104. Inside he found a thick cardboard box wrapped in brown kraft paper. It was heavy, nearly thirty pounds, but reinforced with filament tape. There was no writing on the paper. He removed the box, placed it on the floor between his feet, then looked around to ensure that no one was watching before using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe off the locker key. Had he touched anything else? Left fingerprints anywhere nearby? No, just the key.
Kaseke picked up the box and walked outside, then back down the block to his truck. The box went in the passenger-side door and on the seat. He got in on the other side and turned the ignition key, then paused, briefly wondering if he should put the box on the floorboards. If he got in an accident… No, he thought. Not necessary. He knew what was in the box, or at least he had a good idea, given the training curriculum he’d been put through in the camp. They’d trained him well to do one thing and one thing only.
This cargo was perfectly harmless. For now.