Helen remembered the strange notation they’d seen scrawled around one of the nuclear weapon identifier codes. She shivered suddenly.
“Jesus, Peter. You think we might be tracking a loose nuke?”
He nodded, slowly at first and then more decisively. “Yeah. It’s possible. Maybe John spotted something during his inspection — something he wasn’t supposed to see.”
“But he and his team signed off on the Kandalaksha storage site before boarding that plane,” Helen pointed out. “Why not call a treaty violation right then and there?”
Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he wasn’t sure.” His voice sharpened. “Or maybe he thought it would be too dangerous to say anything at Kandalaksha. Even in Russia, nobody can just back a truck up to a weapons bunker for a quick pickup.
What would you do if you suspected the base commander and some of his top officers had sold one of the bombs in their care?”
“My God.” Helen swallowed hard. It sounded crazy at first — until you realized that nuclear weapons were the only commodity at Kandalaksha more valuable than a shipment of drugs.
“Would anyone believe us if we tripped the alarm?”
“Now? After Pechenga?” Peter asked. He shook his head grimly. “Not a chance. Between the MVD, our own government, and whoever set us up, we’ve been pretty thoroughly discredited.
We’d need hard evidence to set the nuke-hunting teams in motion not just some doodles in a notebook.”
His shoulders slumped. “And there’s the rub. We can’t get that kind of evidence. Once we’re on that flight to Andrews, we’re out of the picture.”
Helen knew he was right. Whether the people who’d tried to kill them in Pechenga had been smuggling drugs or a nuclear weapon, she and Peter needed more information, and they weren’t going to get it if they kept playing by the rules. She lay awake for hours, long after Peter had slipped into a fitful sleep, trying to decide just how far outside the regulations and the law she would be willing to go to discover the truth.
CHAPTER NINE
BREAKING STRAIN
The captain’s announcement came over the loudspeaker in Russian, German, and, finally, English. “We are now on final approach to Tegel International Airport. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened until we have reached the terminal and you are instructed to release them.”
Colonel Peter Thorn felt Helen Gray grip his hand tightly.
“You still want to do this?” he asked. He tried to put as much feeling into the question as he could, as if extra emphasis could pull Helen’s real desire out of her.
“We don’t have any other choice, Peter.” She was equally emphatic, but that didn’t reassure him. “You know that nobody else is going to do a damned thing more about this case. There’s just us, and we owe it to Alexei. Hell, we owe it to ourselves.”
Thorn shook his head. They’d had the same discussion, and the same arguments, for the entire two-hour flight from Moscow.
What had seemed reasonable late at night in the privacy of her empty apartment seemed a lot less sensible in broad daylight. His theory that they might be chasing a loose Russian nuclear weapon suddenly appeared the stuff of nightmares — and about as substantial.
The worst of it was that all the real risk of what Helen proposed would fall on her shoulders. Following his travel orders to the letter wouldn’t change his own fate one iota. No matter what he did, he was slated for the Army’s dust heap — for forced retirement.
But failing to report on time might give Helen’s own enemies inside the FBI hierarchy the excuse they needed to bounce her out of the Bureau altogether. He was risking a minor black mark on a service record already headed for the inactive list. She was risking her paycheck, her pension — everything that was left of her whole career.
It seemed a huge bet to make especially when the odds against getting to the truth were stacked so high. If they failed, or if the smuggled jet engines proved to be just that, smuggled jet engines, she was facing an unalterably bleak professional future.
And even if they faced it together, that wasn’t a future either of them could look forward to.
The passenger jet shuddered as its wheels touched concrete. Thorn took a deep breath. The first leg of their journey home was over.
He stood up, pulled a sport coat out of the overhead compartment along with his travel bag, and handed Helen her own carry-on suitcase. At the embassy’s insistence, he was traveling home in civilian clothes.
And from long habit, they were both traveling light.
They got off the plane and cleared German customs quickly.
No German bureaucrat felt much like wasting time on American travelers — not when they were confronted by a planeload of Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, and a host of other ex-Soviet ethnic minorities.
As always, Tegel was packed, jammed wall-to-wall with arriving and departing passengers.
Thorn took his stamped passport back and suddenly felt Helen nudge him gently in the ribs.
“George Patton, Jr at five o’clock,” she muttered.
He looked up, spotting who she meant with ease. A young Army captain wearing a crisply starched Class A uniform stood to one side of the hall leading to customs-craning his head as he searched the crowd. The captain was their ride to Ramstein Air Base, where they’d be spirited into the States aboard a military passenger plane.
Thorn squared his shoulders instinctively and then relaxed. It was time to doff the military habits of a lifetime. He glanced at Helen.
“Right, here we go.” He motioned her ahead. “You first, Miss Gray.”
She nodded and merged with a clump of other passengers — careful to stay on the far side of the group.
Thorn waited another thirty or forty seconds and then did the same thing. He walked right past the young captain without making eye contact and turned the corner.
Their would-be escort never saw them. He was looking for a man and woman traveling together — not apart. More to the point, Thorn realized, the younger man was expecting them to be looking for him just as hard as he’d been searching for them.
Helen joined him right around the corner. “How long have we got?” she asked.
“Unless they’ve bred all initiative out of junior officers, I’d say we’ve got about five minutes before he starts looking for us,” Thorn replied with a wry smile.
Helen started walking even faster.
It took them another few precious moments to sort through the welter of signs for Scandinavian Airlines System once they reached the main terminal and ticketing area. Thorn glanced back the way they’d come.
No sign of pursuit. Not yet, at any rate.
He shook his head. It felt damned strange to be relieved not to see an American army uniform. He didn’t like it. Like Helen, he’d always been secure in his actions — taking risks, but always sure of his course. His years of service with Delta Force had offered him the chance to escape the dull, grinding routine of the peacetime Army, but he’d still had the sense of being part of a larger whole. But now they’d both jumped completely outside the hierarchies that had provided purpose and direction for so much of their adult lives.
They got into line at the S.A.S ticket counter and scanned the monitor showing the airline’s scheduled departures.
Helen nodded toward the flickering display. “There’s a direct flight for Bergen at eight.”
“No good.” Thorn checked his watch. “We’re not going to get away with hanging around here for two hours. If we’re going through with this, we need to put some airspace between ourselves and our Army watchdog back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward customs.
