11:50 p.m. Eastern European Time (5:50 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Alexandroupoli, Greece
They were thirty miles from the Turkish border. The man checked his watch. Almost midnight.
Soon, soon.
The man's name was Brown. It was a name that was not a name, for someone who had disappeared a long time ago. Brown was a ghost. He had a thick scar across his left cheek-a bullet that had just missed. He wore a flattop haircut. He was big and strong, and had the sharp features of someone who had spent his entire adult life in special operations.
Once, Brown was known by a different name-his real name. As time passed, his name had changed. At this point, he'd gone by so many names he couldn't remember them all. This latest one was his favorite: Brown. No first name, no last name. Just Brown. Brown was good enough. It was an evocative name. It reminded him of dead things. Dead leaves in late fall. Dead trees after a nuclear test. Wide open and staring dead brown eyes of the many, many people he'd killed.
Technically, Brown was on the run. He had ended up on the wrong side of history about six months ago, on a job that hadn't even been explained to him. He'd had to leave his home country in a hurry and go underground. But after a period of uncertainty, he was back on his feet again. And as always, there was plenty of business to do, especially for a man with the kind of bounce-back ability he had.
Now, just before midnight, he stood outside a warehouse in a rundown section of this seafaring town's port district. The warehouse was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire, but the gate was open. A chilly fog rolled in off the Mediterranean Sea.
Two men stood with him, both wearing leather jackets, and both with Uzi submachine guns strapped over their shoulders, and stocks extended. The guys would be nearly identical, except one of them had shaved his head completely bald.
Out on the street, headlights approached.
"Eyes open," Brown said. "Here come the holy warriors now."
A small box truck drove up along the deserted boulevard. There was a giant image of oranges along the side of it, with one sliced in half and showing the bright reddish-orange meat of the fruit. There were words on the side of the truck in Greek, probably a company name, but Brown didn't read Greek.
The truck reached the gate and pulled straight into the yard. One of Brown's men walked over and slid the gate shut along its track, then locked it with a heavy padlock.
As soon as the truck stopped, two men climbed out of the cab of the truck. The rear door opened, and three more clambered out. The men were dark-skinned, probably Arab, but clean-shaven. Their uniform consisted of blue jeans, light windbreaker jackets, and sneakers.
One man carried a large canvas bag, like a hockey equipment bag, over either shoulder. The weight of the satchels pulled the man's shoulders down. Three of the men carried Uzis.
We have Uzis, they have Uzis. It's an Uzi party.
The fourth man, the driver of the truck, was empty-handed. He approached Brown. His eyes were blue, and his skin was very dark. His hair was jet black. The combination of blue eyes and dark skin gave his face an odd effect, as if he wasn't quite real.
The two men shook hands.
"Jamal," Brown said. "I thought I told you to come with only three men."
Jamal shrugged. "I needed one to carry the money. And I don't count toward the total, right? So I did bring three. Three gunmen."
Brown shook his head and smiled. It hardly mattered how many people Jamal brought. The two men with Brown could kill a busload of gunmen.
"Okay, let's go," Brown said. "The trucks are inside."
One of Brown's men-he called himself Mr. Jones-pulled an automatic opener from his pocket, and the garage door of the warehouse slowly rattled open. The eight men walked into the cavernous space. The warehouse was mostly empty, except for heavy green tarps thrown over two giant vehicles. Brown walked to the closest one and yanked the tarp halfway off.
"Voila!" he said. What he revealed was the front half of a large tractor-trailer, painted in green, brown, and tan camouflage colors. Jones yanked the tarp off near the rear of the truck, revealing a flat, four-cylinder missile launch platform. The two parts of the truck were separate and independent of each other, but were attached by hydraulics in the middle.
The trucks were called transporter-erector-launchers, or TELs, relics of the Cold War, mobile attack stations that NATO had used to target the old Soviet Union. The launchers fired smaller variants of the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the missiles could be outfitted with small thermonuclear warheads. These weapons were for a limited tactical nuclear strike-the kind that would take out a medium-sized city, or totally destroy a military base and its surrounding countryside, but maybe not bring about the apocalypse. Of course, once you started launching nukes at people, all bets were off.
In the old days, they called this missile system the "Gryphon," after the ancient mythical creature with the legs and body of a lion, and the wings, head, and talons of an eagle-the protector of the divine. Brown got a kick out of that.
The system was decommissioned in 1991, and all of these units were supposed to have been destroyed. But there were still a few of them in existence. There were always weapons floating around somewhere. Brown had never heard of a missile class or a weapons system that had been entirely dismantled-there was too much money to be made misplacing them and having them turn up later. Retail stores called it "shrinkage." Walmart and Home Depot experienced it. So did the military.
In fact, here were two of the mobile platforms, just parked in a warehouse in a Greek port city all this time, very close to Turkey, and less than a mile from the docks. Sitting snug inside each of the launch cylinders was a Tomahawk missile, each one operational, or likely to become operational with a little tender loving care.
Why, it was almost as if you could drive these trucks out of here and right onto a freighter or a ferry, then sail away for parts unknown. They were conventional weapons, certainly, but surely there were still nuclear warheads somewhere that would fit these missiles.
Then again, obtaining warheads wasn't Brown's department. That was Jamal's problem. He was a capable guy, and Brown imagined he already knew where he might find some loose nukes. Brown wasn't sure how he felt about that. Jamal was playing a dangerous game.
"It's beautiful," Jamal said.
"God is great," said one of his men.
Brown winced. As a rule, he frowned on religious talk. And beautiful was a relative term. These trucks were two of the ugliest war machines Brown had ever seen. But they would pack a wallop-that much was certain.
"You like?" Brown said to Jamal.
Jamal nodded. "Very much.
"Then let's see the money."
The man with the heavy satchels came forward. He dropped them from his shoulders and onto the stone floor of the warehouse. He knelt and unzipped them, each in turn.
"A million dollars in cash in each bag," Jamal said.
Brown gestured with his head to his other man, the bald one.
"Mr. Clean, check it."
Clean knelt by the bags. He pulled random rubber-banded stacks of money from various sections of each bag. He took a small, flat digital scanner from his pocket and began to remove bills from each stack. He turned on the scanner's UV LED light and placed the bills on the scanner window one at a time, revealing the UV security strip on each bill. Then he ran a light pen over each bill, revealing the hidden watermarks. It was a cumbersome process.
As Clean worked, Brown slipped a hand inside his jacket, touching his gun there. He made eye contact his man Jones, who nodded. If something funny was coming, it would happen now. The body language of the Arabs didn't change-they just looked on impassively. Brown took that as a good sign. They were really here to buy the trucks.
Mr. Clean dropped a stack of money on the floor. "Good." He picked up another stack, began riffling through it, checking bills with the device. Time crawled by.
"Good." He dropped that stack and picked up another one. More time passed.
"Good." He kept going.
After a while, it started to grow boring. The money was real. In ten minutes or so, Brown turned to Jamal.
"Okay, I believe you. That's two million."
Jamal shrugged. He opened his jacket and pulled out a large velvet purse. "Two million in cash, two million in diamonds, as we agreed."
"Clean," Brown said.
Mr. Clean stood and took the purse from Jamal. Clean was the money and valuables expert on this little team. He pulled a different electronic device from his pocket-a small black square with a needle tip. The device had lights on the side, and Brown knew it tested the heat dispersal and electrical conductivity of the stones.
Clean began to take stones one at a time from the bag and gently press the needle tip to them. Each time he did one, a warm tone would sound. He had done about a dozen before Brown said another word to him.
"Clean?"
Clean looked at Brown. He grinned.
"They're good so far," he said. "All diamonds."
He tested another one. Then another.
Another.
Brown turned to Jamal, who was already gesturing to his men to pull the tarps and board the trucks.
"It was a pleasure doing business with you, Jamal."
Jamal barely glanced at him. "Likewise." He was preoccupied with his men, and the trucks. The next part of their journey had already begun. Getting two mobile nuclear missile launch platforms with missiles included to the Middle East was probably not an easy proposition.
Brown raised a finger. "Hey, Jamal!"
The thin man turned back to him. He made an impatient hand gesture, as if to say, "What?"
"If you get caught with those things…"
Now Jamal did smile. "I know. You and I never met." He backed away toward the nearest of the two trucks.
Brown turned to Mr. Jones and Mr. Clean. Jones was on one knee, stuffing the money back into the heavy bag. Clean was still testing diamonds from the velvet bag, handling them one at a time, the needle device still in his hand.
They had made one whale of a score. Things were looking up finally, after the fiasco that had run Brown out of his own country. He smiled.
All in a day's work.
And yet, something about the scene here disturbed Brown. His guys were not paying attention to their environment-they were distracted by all the money. They had let their guard down, badly. And so had he. On a different operation, that could come back to bite them. Not everyone was as trustworthy as Jamal.
He turned to look at the Arabs again.
Jamal was there, near the truck, holding one of the Uzis. Two of his guys were with him. They stood in a line, pointing their guns at Brown and his men.
Jamal smiled.
"Clean!" Brown shouted.
Jamal fired, and his men did the same. There came the ugly blat of automatic gunfire. To Brown, it seemed like they were almost spraying him with a fire hose. He felt the bullets piercing him, biting into him like stinging bees. His body did an involuntary dance, and he struggled against it, to no avail. It was almost as if the bullets were holding him up, pinning him in an upright position, making him jitter and jive.
For a moment, he lost consciousness. Everything went black. Then he was lying on his back, on the concrete floor of the warehouse. He could feel the blood flowing from him. He could feel that the floor was wet where he lay. A puddle was spreading around him. He was in a lot of pain.
He glanced over at Mr. Clean and Mr. Jones. They were both dead, their bodies riddled, their heads half gone. Only Brown was still alive.
It occurred to him that he had always been a survivor. Hell, he had always been a winner. There was no way, after more than two decades of combat, madcap adventures, and narrow escapes, that he was going to die now, like this. It was impossible. He was too good at his job. So many men had tried to kill him before now, and failed. His life wouldn't end like this. It couldn't.
He tried to reach inside his jacket for his gun, but his arm didn't seem work right. Then he noticed something else. Despite all the pain, he couldn't feel his legs.
He could feel the burning in his gut where he had been shot. He could feel the ringing pain in his head where he had smacked it on the stone floor when he fell down. He swallowed, then lifted his head and stared down at his feet. Everything was still down there and still attached-he just couldn't feel any of it.
The bullets severed my spine.
No thought had ever caused him such horror. Valuable seconds passed as he saw his future-rolling in a wheelchair, trying to climb from the chair to the driver's seat of his handicapped accessible car, emptying the colostomy bag that drained the shit from his useless digestive system.
No. He shook his head. There was no time for that. There was only time for action. Clean's gun was above his head and behind him somewhere. He reached back there-it hurt just to raise his arms like that-but he couldn't find it. He started crawling backwards, dragging his legs after him.
Something caught his eye. He looked up and here came Jamal, swaggering toward him. The bastard was grinning.
As he approached he raised his gun. He pointed it at Brown. Now Brown noticed Jamal's two men were with him.
"Don't try to do anything, Brown. Just lay still."
Jamal's men took the big heavy bag with the money, and the small purse with the diamonds. Then they turned and headed back to the trucks. They climbed into the cab of the lead truck. The headlights came on. The engine farted and belched, black smoke pouring from a stack on the driver's side.
"I like you," Jamal said. "But business is business, you know? We're not leaving any loose ends on this one. Sorry about that. I really am."
Brown tried to say something, but he didn't seem to have his voice. All he could do was gurgle in response.
Jamal raised the gun again.
"Do you want a moment to pray?"
Brown nearly laughed. He shook his head. "You know something, Jamal? You crack me up. You and your religion are a joke. Do I want to pray? Pray to what? There is no God, and you'll find that out as soon as you-"
Brown saw fire lick the end of the gun's barrel. Then he was flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the warehouse high above his head.
