THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (10 page)

He turned off the phone, slipped it into his vest, and wept. A rather portly man, with a low forehead, sloping shoulders and stubby legs, Gulzhan had a wide round face almost entirely covered by a thick black beard – spotted with gray – and bristling mustaches. He wiped his eyes, brushing the tears away. He had no time for tears. And then, as if on cue, a cold wind billowed across the bluff, born on the snowfields of the mountains of Kazakhstan, and blew the tears away. A young man approached from below.

Gulzhan turned his face, pitching his sorrow away. It was unseemly to appear so weak in front of his men. He was getting old, he thought. “Tell them I come.”

“Yes, Gulzhan.” With that, the young lieutenant disappeared.

Gulzhan stared out across the plain, now streaked with sunbeams from the gathering dawn. Uhud had finally returned. He could see him in his mind’s eye. He could visualize the tall lean figure riding through the valley on his cinder stallion, hear the signal as the sentries fired off a round, feel their jubilation as they recognized the rider – slung to the side to avoid the bullet wound that still troubled his left thigh – as they recognized his handsome face. Uhud was late but this only generated more anticipation. Uhud was popular with the men. Too popular. He had come along too fast, too soon. Just back from Iraq, where he’d assisted in the bombing of the Great Mosque of Samarra in an effort to stir up sectarian violence, he would become more popular still. And now this latest news. Gulzhan was heavy with despair, weighed down by what he knew he had to do.

He looked across the bluff to the east. There was no time to tarry. They still had a long way to drive before dying.

Gulzhan Baqrah was an Islamist fundamentalist. He had been fighting the Soviet-style autocrat – President Sergey Nazanov – for more years than he cared to remember, since the fall of the USSR. President Nazanov ruled the Newly Independent State with an iron fist, killing and maiming his political enemies through his ruthless Aristan secret police, hunting down so-called radicals, the Muslim warriors who believe in the
Ummah
, the transnational empire of Islam. Ironically, Gulzhan Baqrah had once assisted President Nazanov by kidnapping, torturing and – in some cases – killing over a dozen well-known journalists who’d spoken out against the Nazanov regime. It was alleged the Nazanov family had amassed a fortune in excess of one billion dollars squirreled away in some Swiss bank account, much of it earned by selling off bits of the country piece by piece, including vast armories of former Soviet weaponry left behind after the collapse of the Empire. Some said Nazanov had even helped facilitate the sale of nuclear technologies by his top military advisors, members of the Kazakh National Security Committee and the former KGB, renamed – inventively – the KNB: from designs and prototypes of explosive devices; to all manner of machinery, such as centrifuges used in the refinement of plutonium and uranium.

As a rule, the President’s henchmen afforded Baqrah a precarious sanctuary in the desolate mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan. But whenever an opportunity arose, the government wasted little time in harassing the villagers under the guerrilla leader’s care, throwing up roadblocks and tolls, taxing capriciously, mercilessly. Prominent citizens were always being fined for crimes which remained obscure even after they’d been found guilty and sentenced. Or worse, they simply disappeared, kidnapped and murdered by the Aristan police.

Gulzhan ran a camp in a small valley between two mountains northwest of the town of Taraz, a training farm for terrorists from throughout the Middle East and Africa – Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and the Occupied Territories; Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Somalia – made popular after the camps in Afghanistan and Iraq had been closed by the Americans. Whenever the Islamic Jihad or Hamas, whenever the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Iraqi insurgency had a need for extra training for their swelling ranks – generally following a heavy blood-letting surrounding an Israeli or American offensive – Gulzhan was there with cots and trainers. It was lucrative work for one who’d been cast out.

As they traveled in two battered Mercedes-Benz 814 diesel trucks to their destination, Gulzhan thought about his old friend El Aqrab. They knew the risks they ran each day, but El Aqrab’s arrest was still a cold awakening for Gulzhan. They had planned for it, of course, with the meticulousness with which El Aqrab drew each of his designs, years ago, the two of them, while hunting in the mountains, under the stars. If either of them were ever captured, the other would mount this mission. It was their insurance policy.

* * *

The train moved slowly through the mountain pass, chugging through the snow-flecked slopes, transporting a turbine and a shipment of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City. Inside the first car, a member of the Aristan secret police, Vladimir Petronov, was thinking about his sorry career, how everything had gone downhill since his wife had left him for another man – a schoolteacher, of all people. It wasn’t fair. He’d always been a good husband, faithful and understanding. A good provider. But she had left him anyway. And all that she could tell him was that she did not love him anymore. As if, somehow, that really mattered.

As he ruminated, Petronov spotted a tall bearded man, one of the soldiers, Shafir, ambling down the aisle. There was something about him today – the way he walked, the way his eyes darted about the car. Petronov had been working this run for over a year now. He knew all of the soldiers . . . better than he knew his own wife, it appeared. Shafir was likeable enough, quiet, a bit shy. He was unmarried and a devout Muslim. His mother had died recently after a short illness.

Petronov yawned, got up from his uncomfortable wooden seat, and followed Shafir back through the car. The train was practically empty. In addition to the engineer, only a dozen soldiers guarded the shipment, and seven were dozing in the first car, waiting out the journey to Kurchatov City. Three guarded the rear car in which the HEU was stored. And then there was Shafir and Altynbayev, the old cook.

Shafir retreated down the aisle, and vanished through the door that led into the dining car. Petronov followed, glancing down at the sleeping soldiers as he walked. They were kids mostly, barely old enough to shave. They were dressed in heavy woolen coats, pea green, drawn tightly around their bodies to ward away the cold. Petronov opened the rear door of the car and felt a frigid wind cut through him. He shuddered. The noise of the old diesel was deafening. It was amazing the train moved at all, given the condition of the engine. She had been overhauled so many times that it was fair to say none of the parts had been together very long. Like a new brigade, he thought. The pieces grated against each other. They heaved and groaned, trying to find their proper place within the jumble of machinery.

Petronov stepped into the dining car; it was really more of a baggage car with a makeshift galley in the rear. Altynbayev, the old cook, lay on the counter, a pair of dirty towels stuffed underneath his head for a pillow. He was snoring so loudly that Petronov could hear it over the groaning of the engine. His huge belly heaved and jiggled as the train climbed through the pass. Petronov looked down at him for a moment, at the stubbly beard, the bushy eyebrows, and resisted a sudden urge to heave him from the counter. This is where the men ate their meals. It was disgusting to see the old cook sleeping on this surface, with his filthy boots and grimy hair. Petronov had reported Altynbayev so many times that it hardly seemed to matter anymore. Nobody cared. Nobody gave a damn, so why should he?

He looked up and noticed Shafir only a few feet distant through the door. He was standing on the flatbed car, directly in front of the turbine, looking down at something by his feet. Then Petronov heard a dull explosion. The train rocked underneath him. He almost lost his footing for a second. He looked up and saw Shafir look back . . . and grin. The flatbed car began to pull away. Petronov cursed. He opened the rear door and almost tumbled from the train.

Shafir had blown the coupling. The last two cars were slowing down. Without even thinking, Petronov leapt across the chasm, across the glistening rails, and landed roughly on the open car.

The wind almost threw him from the train. It was blisteringly cold. Petronov turned to see the engine and the first two cars speed off, climbing through the narrow pass now at a startling speed. Then he felt a sharp blow on his back. He stumbled to his knees. Shafir was standing over him, a shovel in his hand.

The bearded soldier swung at him again, but Petronov shimmied to the side, and the shovel deflected off the surface harmlessly. Petronov kicked, connecting with Shafir’s stomach. The soldier staggered backward, tripping on one of the metal cables that held the giant turbine in place. Then he went down.

Petronov leapt to his feet. He felt the wind propel him, toss him like a piece of paper across the flatbed car. He crashed against the soldier and Shafir punched him hard in the face – once, twice. Petronov punched back. Suddenly, a second explosion, much louder than the first, reverberated through the pass.

Petronov caught a vague glimpse of flames as first the engine, and then the first car and the dining car skidded from the rails. There was a mighty crash as they ground against the stone embankment.

Shafir staggered to his feet. He started running but Petronov caught him by the ankle and the bearded man went down. Petronov leapt on top of him. He pummeled his back, his neck. He grabbed him by the chin. Shafir began to crawl away but Petronov wouldn’t let go. He rode him like a horse. He twisted the mighty neck, one hand around the soldier’s forehead, the other clasping his beard. He pulled and pulled until he heard a brittle
snap
, and the soldier slumped to the deck.

Petronov collapsed on top of him. They had only fought for a minute or two, but he was completely exhausted. He felt his chest heave, struggle for gasps of freezing air. He pushed Shafir aside. The dead soldier’s body rolled across the flatbed car, over the edge, and vanished out of sight. The car began to crawl. Without the engine, the steep grade of the mountain pass was acting like a break. Petronov sat up. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, then turned and saw another bearded man beside him standing on a rock, immediately beside the train.

The man was short and squat and held an automatic weapon in his hand. Petronov opened his mouth to shout something but the sound never made it past his lips. Before it had even formed inside his throat, a bullet had entered his mouth, passed through his neck, and blew out the back of his head. Petronov collapsed onto the flatbed car, remembering his wife, at last, remembering the blue and yellow dress she’d worn that first day he had seen her in the market square, the way she’d turned her head and looked at him, with the conception of a new world in her eyes.

Thursday, January 27 – 6:18 PM

Queens, New York

Jerry Johnson, Decker’s boss, was furious. He had been dragged away from Otto Warhaftig’s lecture – which had been cut embarrassingly short. He’d rushed across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, all the way to Long Island City, without any direction from headquarters, mind you, to check out the situation personally. And he’d arrived just in time to see Bartolo being hoisted up into the Coroner’s meat truck.

Special Agent in Charge (SAC) for the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, Johnson was the kind of boss who believed that each mistake his agents made was a personal affront to him. He had no patience for imperfection, least of all in himself. And his penchant for intolerance had only grown worse since 9/11. The stakes were higher now, he told his men. Sloppiness was a greater enemy than Al Qa’ida. It was “the enemy within.”

So it came as no surprise to Decker when the SAC began to reprimand him publicly, in front of Williams and Kazinski, in front of Warhaftig too, as Bartolo’s body was being lifted up into the meat truck. “What the fuck happened?” Johnson kept saying.

Decker didn’t know where to begin, so he didn’t. He was pondering why meat trucks were always made to look like ambulances. No hospital could ever fix their grisly occupants.

The Coroner was anxious to get going. He wanted nothing to do with Jerry Johnson. The SAC looked as though he would lash out at anyone who happened across his path. The Coroner slammed the doors of the meat truck shut, muttered something indecipherable, and scurried back into the cab. A moment later, the meat truck disappeared around the block.

He wanted to hear it all, SAC Johnson said. Every last fucking detail. And so Decker told him. When he had finished, Johnson continued to rail. “What a fucking mess, a fucking disaster. Why didn’t you shoot the prick
before
he stabbed your partner? Jesus Christ. My grandmother would have handled this better. It was a simple stakeout. Mark my words, Decker, there’s going to be an inquiry on this. I ought to take your gun and badge right now. Jesus fucking Christ.”

Decker could feel himself grow angrier by the second. When he’d finally had enough, he said, “Well, perhaps, sir, if you hadn’t ordered Williams and Kazinski to attend that lecture this evening – no disrespect, Warhaftig – this might have been avoided. We were shorthanded, sir, and now I’ve lost my partner and a friend . . . ”

Johnson looked at Decker with a look of such penetrating venom that Decker felt the words stick in his throat. Decker had only just gotten out of the doghouse for sending those photographs of the PC wallpaper to Washington without apprising Johnson first.

Tall and thin, with pale gray eyes and even grayer hair, Jerry Johnson had a handsome, suntanned face, a black and gray mustache, well coiffed, and a polished nut-brown tonsure. His forehead was furrowed by meditation. He wore a jaunty brown tweed cashmere blend with natural shoulders, and a rust cravat in his breast pocket. His raincoat was Aquascutum. He cultivated the look of the 1960s British character actor typecast as “the Colonel,” home from the Raj. But his chin was surprisingly weak. It tended to slip into the warm folds of his neck and all but disappear.