of some sort. They are all moving east toward Ural’sk at around eight}- kilometers an hour. There is nothing coming west just now.”
His companion, Warrant Officer Pausin, obediently jotted down his find-ings in a small notebook, adding them to the long list detailing the vehicle and rail traffic they had observed over the past forty-eight hours. “Got it, sir,” he muttered.
“How much longer do we have to sit on our asses here, counting goddamned cars and locomotives?” groused a third Spetsnaz soldier, this one concealed a few meters off to the side. He cradled a short-barreled AKSU-74 submachine gun, a cut-down variant of the standard Russian assault rifle.
“As long as I say so, Ivan,” Timofeyev told him bluntly. Then he shrugged.
“And I say we stay here until headquarters sends me new orders on this little machine.” He gently patted the long-range portable radio set up beside him in the withered grass.
The three Russian commandos, all hard-bitten veterans of the endless fighting in Chechnya, were members of a special long-range reconnaissance group. They had slipped across the border with Kazakhstan two nights ago and established this hidden observation post overlooking the junction of two major roads and the only major stretch of railroad along the northwest Kazakh frontier. Their orders were to monitor all traffic moving on those lines of communication, paying special attention to any military or border patrol units. So far they had seen very few. Most of Kazakhstan’s small, poorly equipped army was stationed far to the east, along its border with the People’s Republic of China.
“It’s still a waste of time,” the third soldier, a sergeant named Belukov complained, still clearly unhappy and bored.
“Would you rather be out chasing after the Mujs?” Pausin asked with a grin, referring to the tough Chechen guerrilla fighters.
“Christ, no,” Belukov admitted with a shiver. Their last combat tour in Chechnya had been a prolonged nightmare, full of sudden, vicious ambushes and costly hit-and-run raids by both warring sides. “But I don’t see the point of this reconnaissance. The only way this crap makes sense is if we’re going to invade. And why should we bother fighting over this dump?” He waved a hand over the desolate, empty steppe stretching off into the gray, half-lit distance.
“Because Kazakhstan once was ours. Nearly half of those who live here are ethnic Russians, people of our own kindred,” Timofeyev said quietly. “And because it is sitting on huge deposits of oil, natural gas, bauxite, gold, chrome ore, and uranium ?all the precious stuff President Dudarev’s dreams are made of?”
He broke off suddenly, hearing a horse whinny behind them. The Spetsnaz lieutenant and his two men swung round in surprise ?and saw a voung boy staring down at them in astonishment from the top of the hill.
The boy, no more than twelve or thirteen years old, wore the long wool coat, loose white shirt, and baggv brown trousers tied at the waist of a typical Kazakh herdsman. He held the reins of a shaggy steppe pony, which was busy nuzzling the withered grass. A bedroll, tent, and supplies were piled up behind the pony’s saddle.
Carefully, Timofeyev and his men rose to their feet. “What are you doing here?” the Russian snapped. His hand edged slowly, almost imperceptibly, toward the holster at his side. “Well?”
“My father and I are scouting the land, preparing for the spring,” the boy said quickly, still staring with wide eyes at the three camouflage-smocked soldiers. “When we move our herds out of their winter pens around Ural’sk, we need to know where the best forage and water will be found.”
“Your father is with you?” Timofeyev asked gently.
“Oh, no.” The boy shook his head proudlv. “He is riding the land to the west. This stretch of hill country is my responsibility.”
“You are a good son,” the Spetsnaz lieutenant agreed absentmindedly.
Smoothly, he drew his pistol ?a silenced P6 Makarov ? worked the slide to chamber a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
Hit high in the chest, the bov rocked back under the impact. His eyes widened even further, now in horror, as he stared down at the blood running down his torn white shirt. Then, slowly, he fell to his knees.
Timofeyev chambered another round and shot him again, this time in the head. The Kazakh boy crumpled and went down. He lay curled up among the tall stalks of dead grass.
His pony whinnied in alarm. Panicked by the hot, coppery smell of fresh blood, the small sturdy horse reared up on its hind legs and then broke free, galloping back over the hill and out of sight. Belukov, the Spetsnaz sergeant, snarled and sprinted toward the crest, followed a second later by his two comrades.
At the top, he tucked the AKSU-74 against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel, drawing a bead on the steppe pony racing away down the reverse slope. He flipped the firing selector to full automatic.
“No!” Timofeyev knocked the submachine gun down before the sergeant could open fire. “Shooting the beast now would make too much noise. Let it go. The farther that horse runs the better for us. This way, when the Kazakhs come looking for the boy, they won’t know where to start.”
Belukov nodded sullenly, accepting the reproof.
“You and Pausin dig a hole over there,” the lieutenant continued, jerking his thumb toward the closest stand of trees. “While you’re burying the body, I’ll signal headquarters that we’re moving to our alternate position.”
“Shouldn’t we head back across the border?” Belukov asked in surprise.
“Before the Kazakhs start their search for the kid?”
“We have our orders,” Timofeyev reminded him icily. He shrugged. “One regrettable death makes no difference to our mission. After all, when the balloon goes up, other innocents will die. That is the nature of war.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ranch Russell took the steps up to the embassy’s third-floor two at a time. She paused briefly at the landing to clip her Central Intelligence Agency photo ID
card to the breast pocket of her navy blue jacket. Then she pushed open a fire door and turned left, marching fast down a wide corridor. Harried-looking embassy file clerks carrying armloads of visa applications and reams of other official correspondence from one busy office to another saw her coming and moved quickly out of her way.
The tall, square-jawed Marine corporal on duty outside the secure conference room stepped forward to meet her. With one hand on his bolstered sidearm, he peered closely at her ID and then nodded. “You can go right on in, Ms. Russell. Mr. Bennett is expecting you.”
Inside the conference room itself, Curt Bennett, the head of the technical team sent out from the CIA’s Langley headquarters, barely glanced up when she came in. Red-eyed with fatigue, unshaven, and thoroughly disheveled, he sat hunched over a pair of linked personal computers set up at one end of a long table. He and his team had spent all of last night and the morning so far dissecting the material she had copied from the Bundeskriminalamt archives.
Cups of cold coffee and half-full soda cans were scattered around the room, some on the table, some on the floor, and some perched precariously on chairs. Even the air smelled stale.
Randi pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. “I got your page, Curt,” she told the senior analyst?a short, fidgety man with very little hair and a pair of thick, wire-rimmed spectacles. “What can you tell me?”
“That your wild-eyed guess was on target,” he replied, with a quick, toothy grin. “Someone inside the BKA has been a bad, bad boy?at least where Herr Professor Wulf Renke is concerned.”
Randi breathed out, feeling verv much as though an enormous weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The more she had studied Renke’s past, the more she had become convinced that someone high up in German law enforcement was protecting him. How else had the biological weapons scientist so easily avoided capture after the Wall came down? And how else was he able to travel, seemingly at will, to so many of the world’s rogue states ?Iraq, North
Korea, Syria, and Libya, among others?
Of course, being sure of her hunch was one thing. Risking her career and the Agency’s relationship with its
