that would bring more guards than Gregor and his team could handle.
And there was another, bigger problem. Even as Gregor began moving forward, toward the guard, he saw Andrei, the youngest and most impetuous member of his team, also moving toward the guard. And Andrei was drawing his gun.
Gregor could not allow that. Any shot — whether it came from the guard or from one of Gregor’s men — would draw more guards. For that reason, Gregor would have liked to have had his young team tackle this assignment unarmed… but that would have been tempting fate. Even the best laid plans could go wrong, and his team deserved every chance to survive a screw-up.
Gregor started to reach for his radio, but it was already too late. He could see Andrei bringing up his pistol.
Gregor had no choice. He didn’t hesitate. Drawing his gravity knife, he flipped it once in his hand and then threw it.
He could have gone for the guard, but he didn’t dare. He knew Andrei. Seeing the guard fall, Andrei would have simply assumed that he was ducking, and would have fired anyway. So Gregor did the only thing he could do. He threw the knife at Andrei.
The heavy blade went into Andrei’s throat, but Gregor wasn’t watching. As soon as he threw the knife, he started moving once more, heading toward the guard.
Andrei grunted, already strangling on his own blood. The guard, hearing the faint noise, started to turn, and Gregor’s hands closed around his neck. A squeeze, a twist, and the guard was dead, moments before Andrei, too, died.
“Shit,” Gregor said, softly. He lifted a crate from a nearby pile and leaned it against the guard’s neck. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he could do on such short notice. Besides, it wasn’t necessary to convince the authorities that this was an accident.
His job was to set this fire without making it obvious that it was arson. With luck and the usual Russian incompetence, the fire would still look like an accident. But if not, it wouldn’t matter. The people were starving and terrified. Even if the government pieced the puzzle together, they wouldn’t dare announce that these fires were deliberate. Not unless they wanted to start the very panic they were working so hard to avoid.
Turning to Andrei, Gregor retrieved his blade, cleaned it and sheathed it, and then hoisted Andrei’s body onto his shoulder. The rest of the team had finished placing their blocks, and it was time to leave.
Gregor settled Andrei’s body more comfortably on his shoulder and gave the signal to withdraw. His team met him at the door farthest from where the fire would begin. None of them said a word, but from the way they looked at the body he was carrying, Gregor knew they had all learned a valuable lesson tonight. None of them offered to carry the body.
Standing in the darkness beside the door, looking out into the night for signs of any guards, Gregor reached into his pocket and pressed the ignition switch. Moments later, he caught the first faint whiff of smoke.
The guards reacted quickly — more quickly than he’d expected — but that was good. The fire was already too well set for them to stop, and their quick response only let Gregor’s team slip out that much sooner, and increased their slim safety margin. Gregor knew grain, and how it burned, and he wanted to be well away from this area before the fire really got going.
Once more, he gave the signal to move out. Their job here was done, and Gregor had a report to call in. His masters would be very pleased with this night’s work, and with the work Gregor and his team would do over the next few days.
Slipping out into the night, Gregor tried not to think too much about the mistakes they had made as, behind them, the first orange flames leaped toward the night sky, and the first stores of grain exploded.
SIX
Dotting the banks of a waterway the Russians call the Amur, and the Chinese refer to as Heilongjiang, or the Black Dragon River, the handful of dwellings that compose the village of Sikachi-Alyan housed a population of indigenous Nanai tribesmen too small to be measured on any census, and more than glad to remain overlooked. Without a single hotel or restaurant, the settlement lay well off the major shipping routes, and drew few outsiders besides the scholars who occasionally arrived to inspect the thousand-year-old petroglyphs carved into the boulders scattered along its muddy shoreline.
This very isolation — and its proximity to the border — had made it an ideal place for the group to meet in secrecy.
Their rented wooden fishing trawler had left Khabarovsk at sunset and cruised some forty kilometers down- river through the gathering dusk, its half-century-old Kermath engines clanking and wheezing, the running lights at its bow gleaming like tiny red eyes in the mist and drizzle. It had been stripped to the handrails of all gear. There was no crew aboard. Its cubbyhole cockpit had room enough for just a single occupant, a Nanai wheelman who spoke little Russian and had been told to remain on deck as a strict condition of his payment.
Now, moored in the black offshore waters flowing past the village landings, the stout little vessel’s engine was silent. Behind the clamped door of the hold, its passengers sat on transom seats that had been set down along the bulkhead, bracing uncomfortably against the heave and sway of the boat.
All but one of them were men. The Russians, Romual Possad and Yuri Vostov, had arrived on separate commercial flights from Moscow earlier that day. Teng Chou had traveled a slower, more exhausting route, flying from Beijing to the airfield in Harbin, then riding through the night in the backseat of a military jeep. Having reached Fuyuan at 7 A.M., he’d gone directly to the river station and taken the hydrofoil to Khabarovsk on the Russian side of the Amur, where he had been met by members of the Chinese consulate three hours later. The little sleep he’d gotten in their guest quarters had hardly refreshed him.
Seated opposite him, Gilea Nastik, the only woman in the group, silently cursed the chill and dampness. In this part of the world, she thought with disgust, there were no seasonal transitions — it was summer one day, and winter the next. Her wiry, desert-tanned body had not been bred for such a miserable climate.
“Well, it’s up to you,” she said in Russian, tiring of Possad’s indecisiveness. He hadn’t uttered a word in almost ten minutes. “Will you obtain the approval of your superiors in the ministry, or are we wasting our time?”
He gnawed on his bottom lip.
“It depends,” he said. “Make no mistake, I see how it could work, providing we have the money. And a reliable network of contacts.”
She stared at him, the skin tightening over her cheekbones, giving her face a sharp, almost predatory appearance. Then she looked down at her hands, shaking her head.
“I have already guaranteed unlimited funding. And the necessary materials,” Teng Chou said in a clipped tone. “You should know I am as good as my word.”
Possad swung his gaze over his shoulder to Vostov.
“Your people in the United States… you’re certain they can be trusted?”
Vostov struggled to conceal his irritation; Possad’s thinly veiled superiority filled him with a dislike bordering on hatred. From the lowliest bureaucrats to the most highly ranked officials, government men were all hypocritical bastards, never looking in the mirror, as if they knew nothing of self-interest, greed, and betrayal.
“If everyone sticks to the bargain, there won’t be any problems,” he said. “Pure and simple.”
Possad worried his lip some more, tasting his own blood. The moment he’d met these three, he had felt as if he’d gone plunging off a bridge into a bottomless chasm. But he’d been given his instructions. What choice did he have except to follow them?
Communiques from the delegation in Washington indicated that Starinov had struck a quick agreement with the President, and that a majority of congressmen seemed inclined to give it their support. A hunger relief effort spearheaded by America would be under way before too long. And the Moscow press was already hailing Starinov as a political savior. He had used precious food aid to enhance his image and shuffle his critics into the background. And soon he would use it to sell the Russian people on more of his never-ending concessions to the West.
