you should be lying dead on that bridge.”
“Yes, sir,” Smith agreed. “By the way, the police here share your assessment of the situation.”
Klein snorted. “So I imagine that the Czech authorities have been asking awkward and inconvenient questions about just how you managed to survive this melee?”
“You could say that,” Smith said wryly. “Add the words non grata to my persona and you’ll get a pretty clear picture of my current status. They’re shipping me out on the next available flight to London.”
“Which is embarrassing, but not fatal. Either to your career or your cover,”
Klein commented. “More to the point: Are you still at risk from these men?”
Smith considered the question carefully. It was one he had been chewing on for most of the past night. Just how far would the agents who had murdered Petrenko go? Had eliminating the Russian scientist himself satisfied their orders or were they expected to silence anyone Petrenko had contacted? “It’s possible,” he admitted. “Not likely, maybe, but possible.”
“Understood,” Klein said quietly. The line went dead again. He was back in less than a minute. “I’m going to arrange some backup for you. It won’t be much, not given the tight time frame, but I don’t want you hanging out there all on your own. Can you sit tight for an hour or so?”
Smith nodded. “No problem.”
“Good. Call me back before you leave that police station.” Klein hesitated briefly. “And do try your best not to get killed, Jon. Filling out all the paperwork involved is pure hell on my end.”
Smith grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised.
A middle-aged man wearing a thick brown overcoat, gloves, a fur hat, and mirrored sunglasses hurried out the front entrance of the Konviktska police station. Without looking back, he walked briskly away, heading southwest toward the river.
Not far off, a black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows sat waiting for him in a narrow side street. Although the Mercedes was parked illegally, the diplomatic tag displayed prominently on its windshield had so far kept Prague’s notoriously overzealous traffic wardens at bay. Despite the overcast day, sunshades were drawn down across the sedan’s rear windows.
Still moving quickly, the man pulled open the driver’s-side door and slid inside behind the wheel. He took off his hat and sunglasses and tossed them onto the leather seat beside him. With one gloved hand he nervously smoothed down spiky tufts of newly cropped brown hair.
“Well?” asked a grim voice from the rear seat. “What did you find out?”
“The municipal police are still holding the American,” the driver, a Romanian whose name was Dragomir Ilionescu, replied, looking up into the rearview mirror. He could just barely make out the shape of the man sitting behind him. “But not for much longer. As you anticipated, they have arranged a flight out for him later today. First to London and then on to New York.”
“With what official security?”
“None, apparently. The Czechs expect him to make his own way to the airport.”
“How far can we trust our informant?” the voice asked.
Ilionescu shrugged. “He has always been reliable in the past. I have no reason to doubt him now.”
“Excellent.” Teeth gleamed in the shadowed interior as the man in the rear seat smiled coldly. “Then we will be able to provide Colonel Smith with a most exciting journey. Signal the rest of the unit. I want everyone readv to hove immediately. They know their parts.”
Obediently, Ilionescu reached for the car phone. He flicked the switch that activated its scrambler. But then he hesitated. “Is taking this risk necessary?” he asked. “I mean, Petrenko is dead and the material he stole is gone forever, washed away in the river. We have accomplished our primary mission. Given that, what real difference does the life of one American doctor matter one way or the other?”
The man in the rear seat leaned forward out of the shadows. Pale light streaming in through the tinted windshield danced off his shaven skull. Gently, very gently, he touched the thick bandages covering his shattered nose.
They were stained with patches of brown, dried blood. “Do you think the man who did this to me was only a doctor?” he said softly. “]ust a simple physician?”
Ilionescu swallowed suddenly.
“Well, do you?”
Sweating now, the Romanian shook his head.
“You show some sense, then. Good. So, whatever this man Smith really is, let us make an end of him,” the other man went on. His voice was now dangerously low. “Besides, our recent orders from Moscow were quite specific, were they not? No witnesses. None. You do remember the penalties for failure, I trust?”
A muscle around Ilionescu’s left eye twitched at the memory of the gruesome photographs he had been shown. He nodded urgently. “Yes. I remember.”
“Then carry out my instructions.” With that, Georg Liss, the man who bore the code-name Prague One, sat back again, hiding his ruined face in the darkness.
Chapter Four
Four twin-tailed Su-34 fighter-bombers roared low over the rolling, wooded hills west of Bryansk. Advanced onboard radar systems allowed the attack aircraft to fly just high enough to clear the tallest trees and power pylons in the area. Streams of incandescent flares designed to decoy heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles blazed in their wake, wafting slowly downward toward the snow-covered ground.
Suddenly the Su-34s popped up, briefly gaining altitude while their onboard systems acquired multiple targets, transferred the data to their weapons, and calculated release points. Seconds later a cloud of precision- guided bombs and missiles fell away from beneath their wings and plunged onward toward the distant forest below. Instantly the four jets broke hard right, again diving for the deck to shake off any hostile radars as they exited the strike area and vanished to the north.
Behind them the woods began exploding, erupting in huge pillars of blinding orange and red flame. Shattered trees were thrown high into the air, tumbling end over end for hundreds of meters before crashing back to earth.
Billowing clouds of smoke and lighter debris drifted downwind.
Nearly a dozen high-ranking Russian army and air force officers stood on the roof of an old concrete bunker dug into the forward slope of a nearby ridge, watching intently through binoculars. More than one hundred heavily armed airborne assault troops wearing snow smocks and bodv armor were deployed along the ridge, guarding the generals. Command and electronics vans were set up behind the bunker, well hidden among the trees beneath Infrared-resistant camouflage netting. Newly laid fiber-optic cables snaked awav through the forest, feeding back to a secure communications network.
To help preserve complete operational and strategic secrecy for this special set of maneuvers, dubbed WINTER CROWN, all radio, cellular, or standard landline transmissions were being severely restricted.
An army colonel, listening intently through a headset, turned to the short, slender man standing beside him. Alone among all the observers crowded onto the bunker roof, this man wore civilian clothes. He was snug in a plain black overcoat and scarf. The wind ruffled his sparse brown hair. “The exercise computers report all simulated enemy artillery batteries and mobile fire control radars destroyed, sir,” the colonel told him quietly.
Russian president Viktor Dudarev nodded calmly, still watching through his binoculars. “Very good,” he murmured.
A new wave of sleek ground-attack aircraft?ultramodern Su-39s?raced low over the nearest hills with their powerful turbojet engines howling. They flashed past the bunker at high speed, flying down the wide valley below the ridge. Hundreds of unguided rockets rippled out from the pods slung beneath their wings, streaking onward on trails of smoke and fire. The whole eastern edge of the forest vanished in a rolling series of thunderous explosions.
