recovered twenty to thirty percent of the wreck.”
Thorn cut in with a question of his own — one that had been bothering him ever since he’d read the English- language transcripts of the An-3”-s last radio calls. “What are the odds of something going wrong with both engines like that? Accidentally, I mean?”
Nielsen chewed his lower lip for a moment, plainly reluctant to give them a hard and fast answer. Finally, he said slowly, “If this were an American plane flying from an American airport, I’d tell you the odds against losing both props accidentally were high — very high.”
Then the NTSB chief glanced quickly at Koniev and said quietly, “But a Russian aircraft? With Russian maintenance? Well, that puts us in a whole new ballpark, Colonel. I can’t rule anything out. Not a thing.”
Colonel Peter Thorn slid the contents of yet another black plastic bag out onto a folding table and began carefully sorting through the pile.
Scorched wallets. Broken watches. Torn clothing.
Razors. Other toiletries. Mangled paperback books. They were all personal effects recovered from the crash site — the belongings of the dozen men who had died when the doomed An32 fell out of the sky.
He sighed. Cataloging the victims’ possessions was a necessary and important part of any investigation. But that didn’t make it any easier. It raised too many ghosts. He flipped one of the wallets open and stared down at the happy faces of a man and woman surrounded by four smiling children — three adolescent boys and a much younger girl.
It was a picture of Marv Wright, one of John Avery’s team members, and his family.
Thorn shut the wallet and closed his eyes for an instant. He’d met Wright just before the ex-Navy diver shipped out for Moscow. The man had been eager and willing — ready for a new start, a new adventure.
Now what was left of him was lying on a slab inside the morgue tent … “Peter?”
Thorn looked across the tent to where Helen Gray sat sorting through her own pile of personal effects. “Yes?”
“Can you take a look at these for a second?” She held up a pair of battered leather-bound notebooks.
Thorn was at her side in seconds. He leaned over her shoulder and gently touched the front cover of one of the notebooks. Despite the scorch marks and mud stains, he could still make out the gold embossed seal of O.S.I.A. It was an arms inspection team logbook.
He nodded. “You just hit the jackpot, Helen.”
Helen opened the other logbook, carefully peeling torn and charred pages away from each other. She scanned one page and then another.
Her eyes narrowed.
“What’s up?” Thorn asked, leaning closer.
She showed him a page filled with row after row of eightdigit numbers.
All of them had a check mark beside them. “Are these what I think they are?”
“Bomb identifier codes? Yeah, they are,” Thorn agreed.
“Then what do you make of this?” Helen asked, turning the page.
Thorn stared down at more rows of serial numbers. Again, all were checked off. But this time one of the bomb ID codes was also circled boldly. Why? He looked at Helen. “Whose logbook is this?”
“It belonged to John Avery, Peter.”
Avery.
Thorn frowned. He’d known the inspection team leader for years — long before either of them wound up working for O.S.I.A.
As one of the Special Forces’ top nuclear weapons experts, Avery had briefed Thorn and other Delta Force officers on bomb types, security measures, and effects several times. He remembered the former Green Beret’s absolute precision his almost manic attention to detail. Hell, the man had practically charted his own blood/alcohol ratio over drinks at the Fort Bragg Sport Parachute Club. Why would Avery circle a weapon’s serial number after he’d already checked it off?
Thorn leafed through the second logbook and stopped on the same page.
Again, all the bomb codes were checked off. But none of them were circled. He silently showed it to Helen.
She shook her head in confusion. “What does it mean, Peter?”
“I’m damned if I know, but I’d sure like to find out—”
“Special Agent Gray? Colonel Thorn? I think you need to see this. Immediately!”
Alexei Koniev’s voice broke their concentration.
He sounded strained.
They turned around. The Russian major was on the far side of the tent they’d been assigned as a work space. He’d been going through the larger pieces of luggage recovered so far. Now he stood staring down into an open suitcase.
When they joined him, they could see that Koniev was looking at two clear plastic bags nestled carefully among folded clothes.
Both were full of a white, granular powder. He pulled out a penknife and made a small incision at the top of one of the bags.
The MVD major silently offered the bag he’d sliced open to Helen. She dabbed one finger in the powder and studied it closely.
Her face wrinkled. “Christ, Alexei! I think that’s pure heroin!”
Koniev nodded slowly. “Yes, I think so, too.”
Thorn looked down at the bags and then back up at the Russian policeman. “How much is this stuff worth?”
“Two kilos of heroin? On the street?” Koniev grimaced. “Perhaps six billion rubles. Roughly one million of your American dollars.”
“Whose suitcase is that?” Helen demanded.
Koniev looked as though he’d swallowed poison. “Colonel Anatoly Gasparov,” he said reluctantly. “The chief Russian liaison officer to your O.S.I.A inspection team.”
Helen Gray looked up at Thorn, worry written all over her face. “What do you think, Peter?”
He frowned. “I think our lives just got a whole lot more complicated.”’
CHAPTER THREE
IN TRANSIT
Rolf Ulrich Reichardt glanced out a dirty window toward the harbor below. Pechenga, he thought smugly again, was perfect for his purposes.
Located twenty kilometers from the Norwegian border, the dreary little town lay huddled between inhospitable frozen tundra and the frigid Barents Sea. Its only asset was the sheltered harbor built for Soviet Army units and amphibious ships based there during the Cold War. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the soldiers left and the ships were either scrapped or left to rot at the, pier. Now the town’s few thousand inhabitants struggled to survive on coastal trade and a meager fishing industry.
With so little activity to distract Pechenga’s harbormaster, Reichardt had his full attention as well as the only other chair in the dingy office overlooking the bay. The German lounged casually in the stiff-backed chair, making himself as comfortable as possible in the squalid circumstances. He had left behind his expensive suits and dressed instead in gray slacks and a navy pullover with a black leather jacket to protect him from the chilly winds that always blew off the Barents.
He checked his watch, a Rolex. Expensive, perhaps, but admirably precise. It was also a name people associated with wealth, and power, and success. So much so that many of those Reichardt dealt with saw only the
