Day of Wrath

by Larry Bond

  “This man wanted to buy working Su-24 engines for export out of Russia,” Serov continued. He shifted uneasily. “Naturally, I refused.”

  “Naturally,” Koniev said cynically.

  Serov flushed again. “Call me what you wish, Major, but I am no traitor. I need every engine in working order just to keep some of my aircraft flying!”

  “But then you thought of the engines stored here?” Helen prompted.

  “Exactly!” Serov nodded vigorously. “Since Moscow will not provide the resources to repair them, they are all destined for the scrap heap sooner or later. So I decided to make some profitable use of them.”

  “How?” Koniev demanded. “Surely this arms merchant, Peterhof, did not pay you for useless jet engines?”

  “No.” Serov shook his head. “That is where Captain Grushtin and the others came in. Especially Grushtin.”

  “You cannibalized some of the engines to provide the parts to repair some of the others,” Thorn realized suddenly.

  “Yes,” the Russian general confirmed. “Captain Grushtin led the work crews we used to rebuild working Saturns from the wreckage of others.”

  “And just where did these rebuilt engines go, General?” Koniev asked.

  “I don’t know,” Serov said slowly. “It was never discussed. And I never asked. It was made clear that such a question would be unwelcome.”

  Thorn frowned, running over the most recent defense bulletins he’d read in his mind. Which countries flew the Su24? Iran? Iraq? Libya?

  Didn’t China have its own homebuilt copy of the Su-24, the Hong-7? Any of them would welcome the chance to obtain spare engines for their expensive, advanced attack jets.

  And none of them were exactly members of the friends of America hit parade.

  There was another possibility, he realized. One that was even more disturbing. Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency had been engaged in projects to acquire top-grade Soviet weaponry for evaluation and training. Did the U.S. Air Force Red Eagles Squadron based at Nevada’s Dreamland have Su-24s in its inventory now? Jesus.

  What if this was some kind of CIA-sponsored covert purchase gone wildly wrong? Langley would go ape if it had been sucked into a drug smuggling operation by accident.

  Thorn spoke up with a question of his own. “Exactly how many engines did you sell, General?”

  “Twenty,” Serov answered. “We transferred four separate shipments of five engines each.”

  “When?”

  The Russian general frowned. “I have the exact dates in my office, but the first shipment was made sometime in April. The last left by train late last month — around the twenty-sixth, I believe.”’ Thorn suppressed a whistle. The engine shipments roughly coincided with the wire transfers they’d found in Grushtin’s financial records. He stared hard at Serov. “And how much were you paid for these rebuilt engines?”

  The Russian general glanced uneasily at Koniev.

  “How much?” the MVD major ground out.

  Serov capitulated. “Two hundred thousand American dollars per engine,” he admitted softly.

  “And precisely how much of that did you pocket for yourself, General? In your impoverished circumstances, I mean?” Koniev asked in disgust.

  “Half,” Serov whispered.

  Helen took up the hunt. She turned toward the base commander.

  “Then how much did the other officers earn? Captain Grushtin, for example?”

  “Grushtin?” Serov’s lips pursed in thought. “Perhaps ten thousand dollars an engine. Something like that. Not more.”

  Thorn arched an eyebrow. If the Russian general was telling the truth, Grushtin’s four $250,000 wire transfers were wildly over the amount the murdered maintenance captain could have earned from refurbishing the Su-24 engines. Five times as much, to be exact. So what else had he been paid for?

  He looked more closely at the massive Su-24 engines laid out across the bare floor in front of them. You could hide one hell of a lot of heroin in any one of those babies. Was that what Grushtin’s game had been?

  “You say the last shipment left by train on May 26?” Koniev said.

  Serov nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do you know where that train was headed?” the MVD major asked.

  “Pechenga,” the Russian general said eagerly. “I remember that Peterhof wanted those engines due in Pechenga no later than the morning of May 28.”

  After he’d ordered Serov back to his headquarters to assemble both his records and the other officers involved in his scheme, Koniev turned back to Helen and Thorn. “Well,” he asked wearily, “what do you think? Did that corrupt swine tell us the truth?”

  Thorn thought about that for a moment, running Serov’s answers over in his mind. “Yeah. Some of it, anyway. A lot of what he said rang true.”

  Helen nodded. “He may be holding something back. But the basic story seems to fit what we already know.”

  “Then we talk to the rest of his officers now?” the MVD officer said.

  “Yes.” Helen narrowed her eyes. “Before they have any more time to coordinate their stories. And if they confirm what Serov says … “We head for Pechenga,” Thorn said flatly.

  “Uh-huh,” Helen agreed. “And we hope the trail hasn’t grown too cold in the meantime.”

  Satisfied, Thorn turned to Koniev. “Just one more question, Major. What’s likely to happen to Colonel General Serov? When you report this to Moscow, I mean?”

  Koniev’s mouth turned down. “Probably nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  The MVD officer shrugged ruefully. “Perhaps a slap on the wrist, if he’s unlucky.” He grimaced. “Compared to the recent activities of other senior officers in my country’s armed forces, I suspect his crimes will seem unimportant to my superiors.”

  Thorn nodded. In one case he’d read about, the commander of Russia’s entire Far Eastern Strategic Air Force had been arrested for using his long-range bombers as an air freight service.

  “In any event,” Koniev continued sadly, “Serov is no fool. I would be very surprised if a portion of his newfound fortune hasn’t already made its way up the ladder in Moscow.”

  Christ, Thorn thought grimly, contemplating the prospect that high-ranking officials could so easily be bribed — and worse, that a ranking police officer like Koniev could so easily imagine such a thing. He had the sudden, uneasy feeling they were walking into quicksand here — and that nobody would be standing by with a rope to pull them out if they started sinking.

  JUNE 5

  Wilhelmshaven, Germany (D MINUS 16)

  Just thirty miles east of the Netherlands and eighty-odd miles southwest of Denmark, Wilhehnshaven was one of several ports along Germany’s low, waterlogged North Sea coast. The city and its harbor lay just inside the mouth of a large, sheltered bay, the Jadebusen.

  Once home to warships of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet and Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, Wilhelmshaven had been eclipsed as a port in recent years by Bremerhaven, but supertankers still arrived regularly to off load oil destined for the heavy industries of the Ruhr.

  The city, often cold and wet with North Sea weather, wasn’t a big tourist draw. That suited Baltic Venturer’s owners perfectly.

  Shortly after she arrived from Bergen, harbor workers shifted the five steel cases to another Caraco-owned ship, the Caraco Savannah.

  This time, facilitated by a liberal exchange of deutsche marks, the cargo manifests were again magically altered. Instead of titanium scrap metal bound for a German metals recycling company, the crates now contained “gas turbines,” the sort used in factories and oil refineries to produce auxiliary power.

  Caraco Savannah was larger than Venturer. She was a thirtyknot container ship, modern in equipment and gleaming in a coat of white-and-red paint.

  Her destination was Galveston.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  RED STAR

  JUNE 5

  Yegorova Railway Station,
Pechenga

  Dmitry Rozinkin leaned against the station’s rough, cement block wall, scanning the passengers coming off the Murmansk train while pretending to read the local rag. He flipped through the thin, poorly printed pages and sneered to himself. It was pathetic, a weekly with fewer than ten pages. Why, Moscow had dozens of daily newspapers now — some of them pretty slick-looking.

  He didn’t read any of them himself, but he saw them stacked up at newsstands.

  He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the shoddy workman’s cloth coat he wore tighten across his shoulders. He’d be damned glad once this job was over and he could get back into his city clothes — the brown leather bomber jacket and American-made blue jeans that marked him as a young man on the way up. As one of the “new class” — those with enough guts and the right connections to prosper in today’s Russia.

  Rozinkin glanced up from a sports article, stared indifferently at the passengers alighting from the closest car, and then quickly lowered his eyes. There they were! Right on time. They were making his life easy.

  Two of the three were relatively inconspicuous. Just a well-dressed man and woman. Although the woman was a real looker, the Russian decided.

  He licked his lips. She was trim, lithe, and curvy. Just the way he liked them.

  The second man walking close by her side stood out like a sore thumb.

  Before he’d wound up in prison for theft, Rozinkin had done a short-lived stint in the armed forces. He could spot a military uniform two hundred meters away. But this man’s uniform was not Russian, it was American.

  Something about the American soldier caught Rozinkin’s attention as the trio walked right by him. It was his eyes, the Russian realized. They were the eyes of someone who had seen Death come in many guises. Someone who had stared back at Death without blinking.

  He shivered slightly — suddenly glad that he had drawn lookout duty only for this job.

  He folded his newspaper under his arm, settled an old blue cap on his head, and swung in behind them. They headed straight for the taxi stand — or what passed for one in this miserable flyspeck of a town.

  Two cabs sat idling outside the station — both weather-beaten sedans that were probably being held together with baling wire and chewing gum. He was close enough to them to hear the youngest, the Russian man in civilian clothes, tell the lead taxi driver their destination.

  Rozinkin waited until the beat-up cab turned the corner, then took out a portable phone and punched a button.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re on the way,” he reported. “And they’re alone.” He broke the connection.

  Pechenga Harbor

  Major Alexei Koniev let the door to the harbormaster’s office swing closed behind him. Still angry, he strode out onto the pier to where Helen Gray and Peter Thorn stood waiting.

  “Any luck?” Helen asked.

  Koniev frowned. “Not much,” he admitted.

  Harbormaster Cherga was all too typical of Russian officialdom, he thought sadly ― corrupt, lazy, and amoral. There were such people everywhere they turned in this case. People who would sell their honor or their country without batting an eyelash.

  Koniev shook his head tiredly. He’d become a policeman to help pull Russia out of its wicked past. To make the words “law and order” stand for something more than tyranny and mass murder. But sometimes it seemed a futile task something akin to mucking out a stable with the aid of a toothbrush and nothing more.

  What must Helen and this Colonel Thorn of hers think of his country and his countrymen? They both came from a nation where public officials generally respected the rule of law. He felt the hot flush of shame on his forehead.

  “Alexei?” Helen Gray asked again.

  Koniev pushed his emotions to the side and refocused his attention on the case in hand. “According to Harbormaster Cherga, Arrus Export loaded the last consignment of jet engines aboard a freighter called the Star of the White Sea.” He nodded toward the ship berthed at the end of the pier. “That’s it. The ship has just returned from Bergen.”

  “Bergen, Norway?” Helen wondered. “Why there?”

  “It’s a major port,” Koniev said. “One with many, vessels entering and leaving each day.”

  “A place where a small cargo could get lost in the shuffle?” Thorn suggested.

  “Perhaps.” Koniev shrugged his shoulders. “This Cherga also claims he dealt with a man named Peterhof.”

  “Imagine that,” Helen said flatly. “Any description?”

  “Gray hair. Gray eyes. Middleaged. Distinguished. looking.”

  Koniev snorted. “At least it matches what Colonel General Serov told us about this Peterhof.”

  “Which wasn’t much,” Thorn commented dryly.

  “True, Colonel.”

  With that, Koniev turned on his heel and led the way down the pier.

  This was his investigation, and the tramp freighter Arrus Export had chartered was the next link in the chain they were building.

  The hull of the old ship loomed over them as they drew nearer. Star of the White Sea looked more like an abandoned building than a merchant ship to Koniev. It was big enough, and gray and dirty enough.

  Inch-thick mooring lines held her to the pier, while a gangplank near the stern led up to the main deck. A forest of cranes covered the front two thirds of the deck, while the superstructure sat almost all the way back on the stern.

  Koniev went up the gangplank first. It angled steeply up to the main deck. The Star of the White Sea was empty, and with the tide in, they climbed almost two stories crossing the gap between the pier and the side of the ship.

  A darkhaired man in worn overalls and a filthy jacket lounging against the bulkhead straightened up as Koniev reached the top.

  Koniev flashed his identity card. “Major Koniev. MVD.” He nodded toward the superstructure. “I want to see the captain of this ship.”

  The sailor, unsmiling, nodded silently and sauntered over to an intercom built into the bulkhead. He punched one of the buttons.

  “There’s an MVD officer here to see you, Captain.”

  The sailor had a thick Georgian accent, Koniev noted. Odd.

  Few natives of that mountainous republic went to sea.

  He heard Helen and Thorn reach the top of the gangplank.

  He wondered how much of the conversation the two Americans were going to catch if this ship captain didn’t speak English fluently.

  Few people outside Moscow and the other major cities did.

  It was inconvenient.

  The intercom squawked something unintelligible.

  “Yes, sir.” The sailor turned to Koniev and muttered, “He’s in his cabin. Come with me.”

  He led the three of them to a set of steeply sloped stairs on the aft end of the ship’s superstructure and climbed up to the second deck.

  The three decks of the superstructure were arranged like the layers of a wedding cake, each smaller than the one below it.

  Glancing up to the third deck, Koniev could see a glassed-in space — almost certainly the bridge — topped by a small mast, radio aerials, and a radar antenna. A small funnel for the engines’ exhaust grew out of the aft end of the superstructure.

  The entire superstructure was painted white, with the funnel in blue.

  Close up, he could see the effects of the harsh Barents and Norwegian Seas on the vessel. Rust, dirt, and grease streaked the sides. More used to the signs of neglect than his American friends, he still wondered about that. Was this captain abnormally sloppy or careless?

  If so, that could be a useful clue to the man’s character.

  Their guide opened an exterior door in the center of the second deck and entered, with Koniev close behind.

  Down a short corridor, they came to a passageway running fore and aft the length of the deck. Doors lined both sides. Stenciled signs showed that they were in the crew’s quarters. The smell of burnt grease and overcooked potatoes wafted out from under the door
marked “Galley.”

  The captain’s cabin was at the forward edge of the second deck, right under the bridge, Koniev realized. Logical.

  The Georgian sailor rapped three times on the door, then waited until a gruff voice from inside called, “Come.” Then he opened the door and stepped aside — allowing Koniev and the two Americans in first. He followed them inside and shut the door.

  The cabin was fairly large but sparsely furnished. A cot bolted to one wall showed where the ship’s captain slept. A desk and single chair in the middle of the compartment showed where he handled his paperwork when he wasn’t on the bridge.

  One sailor, a thin and rough-looking sort with dirty blond hair, stood facing the desk holding his cloth cap in his hands. A second man got up from behind the desk when Koniev and the others came through the door. He offered his hand. “I am Captain Tumarev.”

  Again, Koniev caught the faint trace of another accent underlying the Russian words. Was Tumarev from one of the Baltic States?

  Certainly the captain of the Star of the White Sea contrasted sharply with his crewmen. Better dressed, he was also better groomed. He was short, even shorter than Koniev, and powerfully built. He was also younger than the MVD officer would have expected, in his late thirties at most.

  Was this ship his first command?

  Automatically, Koniev shook the other man’s hand, aware that Helen and Thorn were right at his back. Large by shipboard standards or not, six people crowded the cabin.

  He showed his identity card again. “My name is Major Alexei Koniev, Captain.”

  The man calling himself Tumarev smiled, showing a mouthful of perfect teeth. “And what can I do for you, Major?”

  “You carried a shipment of jet engines from this port on May 28,” Koniev stated.

  The other man nodded. “Yes, that’s true.” He shrugged. “What of it?”

  Koniev frowned. Tumarev’s informal, indifferent attitude irked him.

  He should show more respect to an officer of the law, especially one asking questions about a shipment that, at best, skirted the edge of legality. Perhaps it was time to show this seaman who was in charge here. He sharpened his tone. “Then I want to see your manifest for those engines, Captain. And I want the name and address of the firm you delivered them to in Bergen. Immediately. Understand?”