No Survivors (37 page)

N
ight had fallen in Macedonia, and Carver had just taken possession of the quintessential Balkan car, one of the countless battered old Mercedes sedans that are shipped south from Germany to poorer, less discerning markets. This was an eight-year-old C-class diesel, with a creamy-beige paint job that made it look like a motorized crème caramel, and a broken exhaust that spewed thick, gray-blue smoke into the atmosphere. An MI6 agent in Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, name of Ronan Biddle, had given it to Carver when he flew in that evening, along with the passport, visas, and accreditation papers that identified him as a BBC radio news reporter. The pockets of a scuffed leather fisherman’s bag held the tape recorder, laptop, phone, map, and notebooks that backed up his cover. He’d also been provided with the standard equipment he required as an assassin and saboteur: a selection of tools, plastic explosives, knife, gun, and ammunition. Underneath his clothes, he wore, as ever, the money belt containing the cash, bonds, and passports that were his constant companions. His hair had been clipped short, a basic barbershop crew cut, just before he left France. He was fed up with seeing Kenny Wynter every time he looked in a mirror.

“It isn’t a SIG, I’m afraid,” said Biddle, sounding more pleased than apologetic about this inability to deliver the weapon Carver wanted. “Grantham said you liked them, but you’ll have to make do with a Beretta Ninety-two—best we could drum up at short notice. It’s good enough for the U.S. Army, so it can’t be too bad. We got you a silencer, too.”

Biddle looked at Carver resentfully.

“Don’t know why London had to send someone,” he continued. “We’ve got plenty of first-rate people here, and there are special forces chaps hanging around the place who know Kosovo like the back of their hand. But they never trust the men on the ground, do they?”

Carver just shrugged and opened up the trunk of the car, looking for the best place to hide the plastique. He had no interest in starting a conversation. Minutes later he was on the road out of the airport, on the way to the Kacanik Defile, the gorge that provides one of the few passes between Macedonia and southern Kosovo.

The line at the border was ninety minutes long, a motley gaggle of trucks, vans, and family cars, their roof racks piled high with goods from Macedonia that had become unavailable as violence and anarchy descended on Kosovo—everything and anything, from fresh fruit to video recorders. The people in the line were standing around by their vehicles, smoking, drinking, and talking to the other drivers. Carver couldn’t tell which ones were ethnic Albanians and which were Serbs. There was no sign of any tension or polarization. Everyone was getting on just fine, grumbling about the delay, sharing their bottles and cigarette packets, good-naturedly joshing the kids who ran about between the cars. But as soon as they crossed the line into Kosovo, they’d be divided into warring tribes, each out to obliterate the other.

Carver had seen plenty of communal violence in his time. He’d served in Northern Ireland and Iraq. And no matter where or when it happened, it never made any more sense.

The border guards were shaven-headed thugs in blue paramilitary uniforms. One of them took Carver’s passport and papers and disappeared into a low-slung building decorated with the crest of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which stood beside the checkpoint. A few minutes later, he reemerged and signaled to Carver to move his car out of the way and park it to one side so that other travelers could come through the checkpoint: This was going to take some time.

It was getting late, but there was still a duty-free store and café open in the no-man’s-land between the Macedonian and Kosovan sides of the border post. Carver went in to take a leak and get a double espresso. Four more guards were sitting at a table, their submachine guns propped against their chairs. They were sharing a bottle of plum brandy. It was standing on the table next to a couple of empties. The guards simmered with the brooding tension of drunks who were a long way down the road that leads from cheerful inebriation to unrestrained violence. As Carver passed by on the way to the men’s room, they looked at him with a malevolence that sought out any excuse—a single, inadvertent glance or gesture would do—that would allow them to attack.

When his coffee arrived, he took it outside. He wanted to be able to think in peace. The truth was, he was so angry himself, that if the border guards even looked like they would give him a fight, he might take them up on the offer. And that would just be one more entry on his long list of stupid mistakes.

It went against all his principles, but he couldn’t help thinking of the past, wishing he’d done things differently. If he’d done a better job back at the Inuvik airport . . . if he’d just told the Consortium to screw their assignment when they’d ordered him onto the plane to Paris . . . if he’d never let himself become involved with Alix . . . if he’d put his business before his balls and just handed that bloody list over to Grantham . . . so many ifs, and nothing he could do about any of them.

Alix wasn’t coming back to him, not now. She’d made her decision and she wasn’t going to change it. He didn’t blame her for what she’d done. When she’d left him at the clinic, he’d been a vegetable. Then she’d been told he was dead. It was hardly surprising she’d fallen for the healthy, successful, powerful guy standing right next to her. He hoped he’d have the chance to tell her that, let her know he understood and bore her no ill will, no matter how much he was hurting. But when were they going to meet again? He couldn’t believe Vermulen would involve her in whatever he was planning to do with the bomb, so she wouldn’t be anywhere near Trepca. And by the end of the night, the chances were that either he or Vermulen would be dead, maybe both. Even if he survived, what then?

Presumably she’d been kept on the boat. He imagined coming aboard: “Hello, darling—sorry I topped your old man. No hard feelings.”

That wasn’t going to go down too well, however he tried to play it.

He could just turn back, of course. If he didn’t get Vermulen, someone else would, and sooner rather than later. Too many people had reasons to want the man dead. If Alix was back on the market again, he could try to win her over.

But that wasn’t exactly a classy idea, hitting on the grieving widow. And it wasn’t going to happen, anyway. The only way to atone for all his mistakes was to clear up the mess he’d made. That meant tracking Vermulen down and taking him, and his bomb, out of commission, whatever the cost. But what about the list? Did Vermulen have it with him? The answer came to Carver in a moment of absolute certainty. No, he’d have kept it safe on the yacht, with Alix.

A sardonic, humorless smile twisted the corners of his mouth. Maybe they would meet again, like it or not.

Across the floodlit no-man’s-land, he could see an official waving at him. His papers had been accepted. He was into Kosovo.

E
arlier that afternoon, when everyone onboard was fully occupied preparing for Vermulen’s expedition, Alix had slipped into the ship’s galley and found a large plastic garbage bag, a number of smaller food bags, and a couple of yards of twine. Now the men were all gone and she was alone in the master bedroom, preparing her getaway.

She was wearing a bathrobe, and beneath that a swimsuit. The yacht was moored less than two hundred yards from the shore. Alix was a strong swimmer—she felt sure she could cover the distance without any trouble, even allowing for the bag she’d have tied around her waist. She was taking the absolute minimum she would need: her wallet, passport, and phone; a sweatshirt; a pair of jeans; and her lightest pair of flat, slip-on shoes. Aside from the jeans and sweatshirt, each item was individually wrapped in a food bag, and then everything went inside the garbage bag, which she’d sealed with packing tape. She planned to leave around one in the morning, when there’d be only one man keeping watch from the bridge. If she could make it to shore, she’d be long gone by the time the sun came up.

There was a knock on the door and the steward’s voice. “Mrs. Vermulen?”

She shoved the bag under her pillows and called back, “Yes?”

“Message from your husband, ma’am. Captain asked me to hand it to you in person.”

“Just coming . . .”

She walked to the door and opened it. The steward was standing there. But he held no message in his hand. Instead, he was pointing a gun at her, and there was not a trace of his former servility in his voice as he said, “Put some clothes on. You’re going on a trip.”

She stepped back into the room, opening the door wider to let him in. As far as the steward was concerned, she was just the little blond wifey. He was taken completely by surprise when she slammed the door back in his face, flung it open again and kicked him hard in the crotch. As he bent double in agony, Alix stepped forward and drove her knee into his face. She had no idea why the crew had suddenly turned on her, but there was no time to worry about that now. She ran back to her bed, grabbed the garbage bag, and hurried out into the passageway.

The master bedroom was on the main deck. Alix raced through the saloon where Vermulen had held his briefing and out into the open air. She had got as far as the stern rail, and was just about to leap over the side when a burst of gunfire exploded just a few feet above her, and a line of bullets tore through the planking at her feet.

She looked up and saw the captain standing by the rail of the upper deck, looking down at her over the top of an automatic rifle.

“You better stop right there, Mrs. Vermulen,” he said. “Or the next burst goes through you.”

F
ifteen years earlier, the Zvečan lead smelter had been part of a thriving enterprise that had employed twenty thousand workers and provided wealth for a nation. Now it was just another ramshackle old Communist enterprise, brought even lower by the combined effects of corrupt mismanagement and social anarchy. The whole place, nestled at the floor of a valley between thickly wooded, mineral-laden hills, purveyed an air of irreversible decline: rusting pipes, stationary conveyor belts, office windows broken and unrepaired. A few desultory puffs of bitter smoke emerged from the giant red-and-white-striped chimney that towered over the plant, in feeble acknowledgment that this was, in theory, a round-the-clock operation. Occasional lights overhead shone a weak orange glow over their surroundings. But there was no one to check Vermulen’s team as their Land Cruisers rolled through the main gates, no sign of workers on the roadways between the giant processing sheds.

The bomb was behind another false wall, this one in the basement office of the maintenance worker in charge of the central-heating boilers. Vermulen was struck by the contrast between the drab banality of the leather case and the astonishing power of its contents. He was accustomed to systems whose capacity was evident in their appearance, be they mighty battle tanks or thunderous artillery pieces. But this was the ultimate stealth weapon. It gave no clue as to its powers of destruction.

The feeble bulbs in the office lights and the gray-green paint on the walls combined to create a grim, ghostly atmosphere, but Vermulen could see that Frankie Riva’s eyes were glittering with the fever of a treasure-hunting archaeologist who had stumbled into a pharaoh’s tomb.

“Ammazza!”
he muttered, opening the case and seeing the metal gun barrel. “After all these years . . . incredible!”

“So it is a nuclear weapon?” Vermulen asked.

“Oh yes, General, most certainly it is that.”

“In working order?”

Riva raised his hands in a classic Italian shrug.

“Who can say? There is only one way to know for sure, and that is to set a detonator and see what happens. But, just looking at it, I can see no reason why it should not work. Fundamentally, this is a very simple device. One piece of uranium is smashed into another . . .”

He spread his arms wide. “Boom!”

 

 

 

Don Maroni had been a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Rangers, a member of one of the finest light-infantry forces in the world, trained to the highest levels of fitness and competence. But the operative word was “had.” He’d been out of the service five years, working for a civilian security corporation, wearing a suit instead of a uniform. He still went to the boxing gym three times a week and kept his shooting up to standard. By any normal measure, he was not a man you’d want to mess with. But he wasn’t as sharp as he’d once been. He certainly wasn’t as battle-fit as the men who were slipping through the great, rusting hulks of the smelting works all around him, men who had spent a decade fighting hand to hand in conflicts of vile, unfettered ferocity.

Dusan Darko’s most trusted killers had confronted conventional armies, desperate civilians, and fanatical mujahideen flown in from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, whose total absence of scruple equaled their own. They had battled knowing that death was a mercy, far preferable to the torture and mutilation that inevitably followed capture, and they had dealt out as much agony as they had received. More than that, they came from mountain villages where the culture of knife and gun had ruled for centuries. Murder was in their blood.

So as good as he was, Donny Maroni was taken by surprise as he patrolled the perimeter of the office block in which the bomb had been hidden. He caught a brief scent of tobacco and garlic from the hand that clamped across his mouth to stifle his screams, and then the knife was drawn across his throat and blood spurted from the gaping mortal wound.

Reddin’s men were scattered around the immediate vicinity of the office building. They were all well armed, all equipped with radios with which they could summon immediate support. And they all died without a word being spoken.

 

 

 

The video camera had been set up in the basement office, with a light that shone on Kurt Vermulen and the opened bomb case that he and Frankie Riva had lifted onto the maintenance man’s desk.