Day of Wrath

Kandalaksha had proved no exception.

Seen up close, much of the Russian air base had resembled a ghost town.

Trees killed by the harsh arctic weather had fallen across the rusting perimeter fence — tearing gaps that were left unrepaired. Few of the guard towers were manned. Fewer than half of the 125th Air Division’s one hundred and twenty Su24 Fencer fighter-bombers were combat-ready. Many of the aircraft shelters, maintenance hangars, headquarters buildings, and barracks were boarded up, or stood abandoned, with doors and windows gaping open and empty. Grass grew wild through cracked sidewalks and concrete runways.

It was an environment that invited corruption.

Avery grimaced.

After spending three years in Russia as the leader of a treaty compliance team for the U.S. government’s On-Site Inspection Agency, the O.S.I.A, he’d thought he’d run across every form of graft and crime imaginable. He’d met officers who stole their men’s paychecks and others who sold their units’ arms and equipment.

He’d found bordellos, gambling clubs, and bars being run out of barracks, armories, and headquarters buildings.

But Avery had never stumbled into anything remotely as dangerous as what he feared was going on at Kandalaksha. And he’d seen a lot of danger in his time.

Before joining O.S.I.A four years before, he’d served in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, first as a demolitions man and then as a “special weapons” expert. Very few people meeting him for the first time would have believed that.

The tall, lanky ex-soldier knew his open, round face, thinning brown hair, and thick glasses made him look more like a mildmannered professor than a former Green Beret. Others were often surprised at the intensity that lurked behind the soft cadences that were all that was left of his boyhood Alabama drawl.

Avery loosened his seat belt and leaned back, pondering his next move.

Should he brief the rest of his team now? He dismissed that notion as quickly as it arose. There was no way he could inform the other Americans without telling their Russian counterparts — and they were still on a Russian plane over Russian territory. There were still too many unanswered questions to take that chance.

He risked a quick look across the aisle at his own opposite number, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov. The squat, jowly Russian had his head back and his eyes closed — to all appearances dead to the world.

Every American arms inspector had an assigned Russian counterpart who accompanied him from Moscow. Gasparov had evidently finagled the assignment because it let him travel frequently. Rumor said the Russian colonel had shady contacts on bases all across the former Soviet Union. There were stories that he made tidy profits as a deal-maker in the black market buying and selling everything from Western cigarettes to Russianmade small arms and air-to-air missiles.

Some said he had contacts inside the Mafiya, the loose slang term covering Russia’s powerful organized crime syndicates.

Avery believed those rumors. Especially now.

He’d noticed Gasparov’s apparent chumminess with the commander of the 125th Air Division, Colonel General Feodor Serov, during both the welcoming dinner the night before and the inspection today. That could just be part and parcel of his counterpart’s usual brownnosing. Or it might be an indication that the two men were deeply involved in some shady business together.

Either way it made no sense to alert Gasparov to his findings.

Avery turned again to the window, trying to trace their course southward across the sunlit sea. Every kilometer the An-32 flew put them that much further out of any enemy’s reach.

He felt suddenly weary, wrapped in a haze of utter mental and physical exhaustion. The stresses and strains of the long day were finally taking their toll. Lulled by the unvarying roar of the plane’s engines, he felt himself starting to drift off. His eyes closed … Avery sat bolt upright. Something was wrong. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and checked his watch. He’d been asleep for less than half an hour. But what had startled him awake?

The sound came again. The steady, comforting drone of the An-3”-s starboard engine faltered, roared back to full power for a split second, and then died. The plane sagged to the right, drifting downward.

“Christ.” Avery yanked his safety belt tighter.

Seconds later, the portside engine revved higher and the An32 leveled out again, then banked gently to the left.

A calm voice crackled over the passenger compartment PA system. “This is Major Kirichenko, your pilot. I regret to inform you that we have a slight problem. Our starboard engine has failed. But there is no danger. I repeat, there is no danger. We can easily maintain flying speed with the remaining engine at full power.”

Kirichenko paused, muttered something inaudible to his copilot, and then continued. “However, as a precaution, we are diverting to an emergency field at Medvezhyegorsk. We should be on the ground in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.”