by Tom Clancy
The satellite’s optical sensors were capable of seeing objects just four inches across in broad daylight, but it also possessed thermal and infrared capabilities. Deployed primarily to assist U.S. and ISAF coalition military operations, it was sometimes tasked with drug interdiction assignments for the ISAF and the Afghan Army. Given their remote location, unless the KH-11 satellite was tasked with a mission specifically directed at them, they were likely safe. Still, as far as Cluzet was concerned, it never hurt to be too careful.
The first items that had been unloaded and restacked overnight from the trailers were pallets of BEGO-brand “Star Battles” toys—Chinese knockoffs of the famous LEGO Star Wars building-block sets. The rest were, as Cluzet told Khatloni, pallets of Chinese-manufactured DVD players and portable radios.
Once the cheap Chinese goods were unloaded, it was possible to remove the dozens of two-hundred-liter plastic drums of chemical precursors for the manufacture of heroin. Despite decades of American and European interdiction efforts, Afghan heroin production was at an all-time high at nearly 500,000 acres of poppies—the equivalent of 500,000 American football fields, not including end zones—producing an estimated 9,000 metric tons of refined product, the vast majority of global heroin sourcing.
While there was no shortage of poppies to produce the raw opium latex typically harvested by Afghan children, the largely agrarian and dysfunctional Afghan economy was incapable of producing the hydrochloric acid, acetic anhydride, and other chemical precursors required in the otherwise simple heroin manufacturing process.
European governments had successfully monitored legal shipments of these important chemicals used in many industrial and pharmaceutical applications, and had even managed to clamp down on the illegal distribution of them.
Chinese government officials who were secretly part of the global criminal enterprise known as the Iron Syndicate were more than happy to fill in the gap. The Iron Syndicate rerouted the heroin precursor chemicals into Afghanistan under official cover with all necessary documentation out of Kashgar, an ancient city along the original Silk Road of Marco Polo fame in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province. The city had enjoyed a great deal of German foreign investment of late, including with development of the largest and most sophisticated chemical plants in Central Asia, with managers on the Iron Syndicate payroll.
Cluzet and his team were hired to provide security for the illicit chemical shipment needed in the process to transform raw opium into a morphine base, then into brown tar heroin, and finally grade 4 “pure” white heroin.
Delivering the four tons of precursors was only half of Cluzet’s dangerous assignment. The second half was even more treacherous: delivering one metric ton of processed heroin to the shipyards in Gdańsk. The distribution and sale of the final heroin product would generate just over two hundred million dollars of profit for his employer and their Afghan producers.
The Afghans unloaded the pallets of radio cases with the aid of a rusted 1964 Massey Ferguson forklift–tractor conversion and stacked them inside a cinder-block storage shed, where young village women began their work. They first opened the cases of radios, then pulled out individual units, carefully opened the boxes, and removed the specially designed digital radios, mindful not to damage the packaging or lose the instructions.
Individual radios were pried open and a package of heroin was placed inside a storage compartment. Once a radio was loaded with heroin, it was placed back in its packaging box and the box was resealed. Then the box was marked with a small brown sticker, round and innocuous. The “heroin radio” was then put back in the case of “clean radios” and the process repeated. Only one in four of the radios carried the illicit drug. Once finished with the pallets of radios, the women moved on to the DVD players and finally the children’s toys.
While the women continued stashing heroin packets, men unloaded the heavy barrels of dangerous chemical precursors and transported them gingerly to the heroin-processing lab with the help of the wheezing tractor.
The Afghan in charge of the mobile heroin-processing station, Ahktar Hayat, was a twenty-four-year-old gray-eyed Pashtun with a chemistry degree from a university in Peshawar, Pakistan. He and Cluzet had worked together before.
Cluzet’s team was spread out around the camp, cleaning weapons, eating food, or catching up on sleep, including the Ingush mercs he’d hired for the job—murderous Caucasian cousins of the Chechens. Two of his men he kept on sentry duty. His walkie-talkie crackled with chatter in Pashtun. One of Hayat’s sentries called in over the radio:
“A Devil’s Chariot! Ten kilometers out!”
* * *
—
A Devil’s Chariot—the Afghan term for the hated Mi-35 Hind helicopters flown by the Afghan Air Force—was bad news for Hayat, Cluzet knew. His wasn’t a Taliban combat unit, per se. Hayat’s job was to cook heroin, bag it, and ship it on. His small band had only AKs and RPG-7s for defense against bandits or rival gangs. The forty-millimeter rocket-propelled grenades were powerful enough to blast away a rotor assembly even on the heavily armored Russian helicopter, but the RPG-7 had an effective range of only two hundred meters. Every helicopter pilot who had ever flown in Afghanistan over the last forty years knew to stay high off the deck, especially in the mountains.
Cluzet didn’t wait for Hayat’s panicked call. An attack by the heavily armed machine—called the “Flying Tank” by the Russians who built them—would be catastrophic.
A lone Hind, though, likely wasn’t on a combat mission. Quite possibly it was on a surveillance run, or even just a training exercise. But discovery of their operation or his convoy when it pulled out in the morning would be equally disastrous.
Either outcome would interrupt his assignment, something both he and the Iron Syndicate took very seriously. Failure was not an option.
The Hind had to be destroyed.
The lookout called in the incoming direction of the Hind as Cluzet whistled up his number two and designated spotter, the German, an ex-KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte) sergeant named Manstein. The two of them jogged over to the back of a Range Rover. Cluzet grabbed the FIM-92B Stinger MANPADS from its locker in the back of the vehicle and Manstein fetched range-finding binoculars.
The two of them scrambled to higher ground as the mountains began to echo with the whirring doom of the Hind’s rotors beating the thin, cool air.
“Got him,” Manstein said, pointing toward the southwest. “I’d say one thousand meters elevation above our position.”
With the five-foot-long launcher balanced on his shoulder, Cluzet slammed home the battery cooling unit into the stock’s pistol grip and twisted it, powering up the missile with a thermal battery and cooling the seeker to operating temperature with argon gas.
He lifted the launcher in the direction Manstein was pointing and glanced over the top of the sight.
“Yes, I see him. About four kilometers out and one kilometer altitude.” Well within range of the fearsome Stinger.
“Confirmed.” Manstein kept his binoculars fixed on the Hind.
Cluzet raised the launcher even higher and put his eye to the sight. In order to set the UV/IR tracker, he lined up the sight above the helicopter against the clear blue sky as he pressed down and in on the safety and actuator switch. This immediately initiated a howling tone over the small speaker that also shot through his skull, thanks to the vibration of the small transducer pressed against his cheekbone.
He lined up the Hind in the “canoe” between the forward range ring and the rear reticle. Once the tracker locked in the “negative UV”—the light blocked out by the chopper—the tone changed sharply, telling Cluzet his missile was also locked in.
Cluzet uncaged the missile with the press of his left index finger, releasing the missile’s seeker eye to follow the Hind independently. He super-elevated the launcher at an exaggerated angle and depressed the trigger, holding it
until—
WHOOSH!
The missile’s small ejection motor fired, spitting the twenty-two-pound missile out of the tube, just far enough to clear away safely from Cluzet before falling away. The now powerless missile dropped a few inches before the second, more powerful two-stage solid-fuel flight motor engaged, driving the missile toward the Hind at nearly 2,400 feet per second, almost ten times faster than its target. A plume of white rocket exhaust trailed behind the speeding Stinger.
The Hind instantly fired countermeasure flares and chaff, but the Stinger’s UV/IR homing system was impervious to them. In just over five seconds after launch, the missile’s 6.6-pound high-explosive fragmentation warhead ripped into the airframe. A secondary explosion erupted in the fuel tank, and the flaming nine-ton wreckage plummeted toward the earth.
Cluzet lowered the launcher, a smile plastered across his boyish face. His green eyes tracked the falling wreckage until it crashed in a fiery heap on the valley floor far down below.
The irony wasn’t lost on him that he’d just shot down a Russian helicopter flown by an Afghan pilot. It used to be Afghans that shot down Russian pilots.
But always, it was the Stinger that was the victor.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“Nice shot,” Manstein said, clapping him on the back.
“Hard to miss a flying brick.”
Cluzet checked his recently acquired Russian airborne watch. “Let’s get all hands on deck and help these mountain goats to finish up. We need to get this shipment loaded up fast and get out of here and on the road before another helicopter comes looking for their dead friends.”
“The Ingush won’t like it,” Manstein said. “They’re fighters, not stevedores.”
“They’ll like getting eighty-millimeter Russian rockets up the ass even less,” Cluzet said. “Now go!”
28
WARSAW, POLAND
Jack wasn’t embarrassed to admit that flying in the Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 was better than first-class commercial any day. No TSA lines at the terminal, no waiting to board, no coughing kids throwing snot and bacteria into the air, and no snoring seatmates—well, unless Ding Chavez was sacked out somewhere in the cabin.
It was expensive for Gerry to fly him over in an empty plane, but it was his call to make and Jack was grateful. It was a great time-saver on an assignment he really hadn’t wanted to take. He had an obligation to fulfill on the other side of the planet, and it bothered him like hell to put it off a single day longer than necessary.
The G550 executive jet kissed the tarmac under the steady hand of Captain Helen Reid and her first officer copilot, Chester “Country” Hicks, at Warsaw Chopin, the capital city’s principal airport and the largest one in Poland. Captain Reid taxied to a small private terminal of a local fixed-based operator that Lisanne Robertson, the director of transportation for Hendley Associates and The Campus, had contracted with for refueling and scheduled maintenance services in addition to landing rights.
Jack yawned as he pulled on his sport coat. The overnight flight had taken just over ten hours, nonstop, well within the range of the Gulfstream’s twin Rolls-Royce engines. He originally planned to sleep on the way over, but decided instead to dig a little deeper into the few files he had on Gage Capital Partners and the two dozen shell companies he’d found connected with Aaron and his son, Christopher. He finally managed to squeeze in a power nap an hour before they landed, and Lisanne had whipped up a couple of cups of strong black coffee and a spicy turkey-sausage-and-egg breakfast sandwich for him to wolf down before landing.
It was too bad Midas—Bartosz Jankowski—was stuck in the Philippines on a Campus assignment. He’d never heard the former Ranger talk about his parents’ native homeland, nor did he ever mention spending time in Poland. But Midas spoke the language fluently, as well as Russian. The former Delta recce was damned handy to have in a gunfight, too, though the only wounds Jack anticipated receiving on this trip were paper cuts from an accounts receivable ledger if he could ever lay his hands on one.
“We’re wheels up in eight hours. Any chance you’ll be done by then? Happy to give you a lift back if you don’t mind an overnight in London.”
Jack tried to hide his disappointment. Ysabel was still in London, staying with her parents. It would be a convenient excuse to visit her without actually being invited and try to figure out what was going on between the two of them.
If anything, Jack thought. He was beginning to wonder if her radio silence was more than just rest and recuperation. Their time together in Afghanistan proved they both still cared for each other. On the other hand, it also proved they still had unresolved issues. Right now, he wasn’t sure which side would win out in the end.
“Sadly, no. Could be eight hours or eight months before I get to the bottom of this thing.”
“What can I do to help?”
Jack smiled. Lisanne knew how to handle weapons, how to clear a room, and how to kick ass, generally, besides being fluent in Arabic. However, as far as he knew, she had no forensic accounting skills, so there wasn’t much she could do to help, and even if she could, she hadn’t been read in to his assignment. But it was her nature to be helpful, no matter the circumstances. It was just one of the many reasons she’d been the perfect person to replace Adara Sherman as the director of transportation.
“Maybe a short prayer for patience. I’ll be pushing on a string, uphill, in the dark until I can figure this thing out.”
“Beats shoveling shit in Louisiana, to borrow a phrase.”
“Couldn’t say. I’ve never been to Louisiana.”
Jack poked his head in the cockpit to shake hands with Reid and Hicks and thank them for the great flying before Lisanne handed him his leather satchel and laptop case.
“Safe travels,” she said.
“You, too.”
Jack descended the cabin stairs to the tarmac. The darkening sky threatened rain and a slight breeze tousled his dark hair. The gloomy weather didn’t particularly bother him, but neither did it help his mood. He proceeded into the private hangar and offices of the FBO, where he passed through customs quickly and without incident—another check mark in the private-charter column. With his two bags and a freshly stamped passport, he headed out the front door of the mini-terminal in search of his Polish contact, Jerzy Krychowiak, the fifty-seven-year-old ABW agent Gerry had arranged for him to meet.
Jack approached the curb. Scanned the street.
Where the hell was he?
* * *
—
Jack Ryan?” A woman’s voice.
Jack turned around. He was greeted by the confident but exhausted gaze of a striking blond, blue-eyed woman about his age. She stood in front of a silver Audi A5 coupe parked at the curb behind her. A shoulder holster printed beneath her loose-fitting blue blazer.
Not what he was expecting. But better than a kick in the head.
“Yeah. That’s me.”
She thrust out her hand. “Hello, Mr. Ryan. My name is Liliana Pilecki. I’m with the ABW.”
Jack hesitated. This was highly unusual. “Where is Mr. Krychowiak?”
“I’m sorry, he can’t be here. He was struck by a car in a hit-and-run last night. He was put into a medically induced coma just an hour ago.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that. My grandfather was a cop. Is he going to pull through?”
“Jerzy is a strong man. I pray he will survive this.”
No wonder she looks exhausted, Jack thought. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer. He must be your partner.”
“I sat with his wife during surgery. It was a long night.”
“Was it an accident or intentional?”
“We’re still investigating. The car was found three kilometers away from the crime scene, burned to the ground.”
&nbs
p; “How did you identify the car?”
“We tracked it through CCTV traffic cameras. The car was stolen. We couldn’t identify the driver.”
“I hate to ask, but how about you show me your credentials?”
“Yes, of course.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small leather billfold and handed it to Jack. It was all in Polish, naturally. He had a little Russian under his belt, but it didn’t help.
“Thanks.” He handed it back to her. “Look, you’ve got a lot going on. I can catch an Uber to my hotel and—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. My supervisor briefed me on the assignment and forwarded me Gerry Hendley’s e-mail request. I’m just driving you around and translating when necessary. It’s not a problem for me. Honestly.” She frowned. “Didn’t you get Mr. Hendley’s text?”
Crap.
Jack hadn’t checked his phone since landing. He powered it up. There it was. With her name in the address next to his.
Change of plans. Agent Liliana Pilecki will be taking care of you over there. Call me if there’s a problem.
Jack rubbed his tired eyes. “Sorry about that, Ms. Pilecki. I’m a little off my game this morning. I appreciate you picking me up and dragging my sorry butt around.”
“Can I help you with your bags?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.” Jack stifled a jagged yawn with the back of his hand.
“You look jet-lagged. I’ll drop you off at your hotel and we can get started later this afternoon perhaps.”
“No, I’m fine. I want to get after it right away.”
“As you wish.”
Liliana popped the trunk of her Audi and Jack dropped in his bags. Minutes later they were on a tree-lined four-lane road crowded with commuters, heading for the city center, where modern skyscrapers loomed in the distance.
