“I’ll ignore that.”
Ding grinned. He did enjoy poking the bear. The engines spooled up, and the jet began its takeoff roll.
“Any idea how we’re going to find Klaus?” Ding asked.
“That’s the sticking point,” said Clark. “We have no clue as to where he’s holed up, and the seven of us aren’t going to find him by roaming the streets. We need a vector, some kind of intel. I’m told all the agencies are working on it, including Cyber Cell 6.”
“Kyle Ryan’s unit?”
“Yep. His new AI platform has been on a roll.”
“Let’s hope it keeps going. Without some direction, we’re going to be playing a lot of gin rummy.”
Clark gave Ding a hard stare. “I thought snipers were supposed to be patient.”
“And I thoughtabueloswere supposed to be retired.”
“Yeah, well…that’s the thing about being anabuelo. It makes you think about the next generation, what you’re leaving behind.”
“Making the world a better place and all that?”
“I guess.” Clark looked out the oval window, saw the tawny coastline of Sicily falling away. “But some days it does wear on you. The world is changing fast, and we humans aren’t handling it well. AI, social media, surveillance states. It’s like civilization is riding a centrifuge that keeps going faster and faster.”
“Technology’s not all bad—it depends how you use it. You just mentioned that Kyle’s team is leveraging our latest and greatest to find Klaus.”
“True. But we’re not the only ones with technology.”
“Malenkov?”
“Could be. He used to be the jefe of the SSD.”
“But he’s gone private,” Ding argued. “A guy like that wouldn’t have deep cyber for finding Klaus.”
“A guy like that shouldn’t have had a state-of-the-art electronic device that could bring down an airliner.”
To that Chavez had no response. Silence took hold as the Gulfstream streaked high into the gathering Mediterranean dusk.
42
Novy Urengoy Airport
Western Siberia
0921 Local Time
The hulking Il-76 transport squatted on the ramp like the weary traveler it was. Its paint was dulled by sun, its skin pockmarked by hail. Black stains swept back from various panels and seams, the fluids that were the jet’s lifeblood having dribbled into the slipstream during flight. The Il-76T was a commercial variant of the venerable Soviet-era military transport, which itself was a design reverse engineered from the American C-141. With thirty million miles on her airframe, the wings of the “C-141-ski” sagged in the frigid morning air. By any measure, the aircraft was nearing the end of its service life.
The same could be said of her captain. The weathered Belarusian stood askance in the forward cargo hold, keeping a wary eye on the proceedings. A big forklift belched black smoke as it struggled up the aft ramp with the final load. The airplane settled lower on its oleo struts from the added weight.
Like the pilot in command of any cargo aircraft, the captain was intimately familiar with transporting hazardous materials.He knew the rules chapter and verse for handling corrosives, explosives, infectious substances, and flammable gases. The load he was carrying today, however, was none of those things.
He looked down at his clipboard and saw a manifest with only basic information. They were hauling twenty-nine shipping casks, each weighing slightly over five hundred kilograms. Sixteen metric tons. This information was vital, dictating where the casks would be placed and how they would be secured. Yet the greater question—and the one that was adding new filaments of gray to his crewcut dark hair—was the issue of what was inside them.
For the first time in his long and checkered career, he would be flying a jet with no direct knowledge of what he was carrying. The story he had been given, that they were hauling empty casks to be donated to the provisional government in eastern Libya, was pure bullshit. He’d flown a number of missions to the same airfield in recent months, flights that had carried more typical cargo. Machinery, stores, crates of food, fuel bladders. On one occasion, a consignment of drones from Iran. Never had there been anything like this—a complete void of information.
He guessed they were hauling some manner of radiological agent, even though none of the casks were marked with the standard trefoil symbol—the internationally recognized emblem for ionizing radiation. Admittedly, he had drawn this conclusion on purely circumstantial evidence. The way the forklift strained under the weight of the casks. And far more damningly, the way the man overseeing the loading process had checked each container with a Geiger counter.
The question of what to do about it loomed menacingly.
