Day of Wrath

Sometime later, exactly how long she wasn’t sure and didn’t really care, she lay still in the comforting circle of his arms. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, feeling her eyelids growing heavier by the second. “Wow.”

“Wow, yourself,” Peter agreed gladly. But then he shifted slightly beneath her. “Who knows? Maybe retirement won’t be so bad, after all.”

Helen heard the worried undertone in his voice and felt sleep fade out of her reach again. She raised herself up on one elbow and tapped him on the ribs. “You don’t mean that, Peter, do you?”

He sighed. “No, not really.” His eyes looked over her head — off toward a horizon she couldn’t see. “I know what I am, Helen.

I can’t dodge it. I was born to follow the LIFE and the drum — not the lute and the tambourine. If I can’t be a soldier …” He fell silent.

“Then we have to find a way to beat these guys. To win our honor back.

To prove we were right to chase after Grushtin and Serov, and whoever murdered them,” Helen said angrily, feeling her mind starting to come fully alive for the first time since she’d left Randolph Clifford’s ornate office.

“Nice sentiment in theory. But probably impossible to carry out in fact,” he said reluctantly. “I think we’re licked, Helen.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No,” Peter said finally. Then he shrugged. “But I really don’t know where the hell we go from here.”

“Back to the basics,” Helen suggested.

“Okay,” he said. He sat up in bed again. “The basics being: What’s worth sabotaging a passenger plane, murdering a high-ranking Air Force officer, and slaughtering an entire ship’s crew to keep secret?”

“Heroin?” she speculated. “Bulk quantities of heroin? Stashed inside one or more of those Su-24 engines Serov and his officers sold?”

“Maybe. It fits most of what we know,” Peter said slowly. “And the Russians and our own people have sure bought that as the motive behind all this.”

She heard the doubt in his voice. “But you haven’t?”

He shook his head. “Christ, Helen, I don’t know. Not for sure.” He grimaced. “All I do know is that I’m really tired of having heroin smuggling shoved in my face as a motive at every possible opportunity.”

She nodded. The same thing had been bothering her. The ambush aboard the Star of the White Sea made it clear that the bad guys had been one step ahead of them all the way. If that were so, and they were smuggling drugs, why hadn’t they tried harder to clear away the evidence?

When she asked that question aloud, Peter nodded himself.

“Good point. God knows those guys had plenty of time to themselves aboard that freighter-once they murdered the crew.” He leaned back against the pillow. “No, the more I think about it, the less I believe this whole thing is really about heroin smuggling.”’ “But what about the stuff we found in Gasparov’s suitcase?” Helen asked.

“Coincidence?” Peter suggested. “It could be a coincidence that the bad guys have been running with ever since — leading us down a bunch of blind alleys.”

Helen thought that over. “Maybe. The only real link we had between Captain Grushtin and Colonel Gasparov was that suicide note …”

“Which they forced Grushtin to write under torture,” Peter finished for her.

Helen grimaced. “Well, then, if we’re not chasing smuggled heroin — what the hell are we looking for?”

“Something else kept at Kandalaksha. Something valuable.”

“Su-24 bombers, maybe?” Helen wondered. “What if General Serov wasn’t just selling engines? What if he was selling whole aircraft?”

Peter shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Because Avery and his team weren’t there to count planes.

They’d have no reason to go anywhere near the flight line or the hangars. If Serov and his commanders were selling off their aircraft inventory, John and his inspection team would never have spotted it.”

“So there’d be no reason for Serov to have Captain Grushtin sabotage their transport plane,” Helen concluded.

“Exactly.”

“Then what do you think the inspection team could have uncovered that spooked Serov?” she asked again.

Peter hesitated for several seconds and then said, “Well, I keep thinking about that circle in John Avery’s inspection logbook.”

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.