Assault on the Empress Read online

  As one of the guards approached the driver’s side, O’Toole lowered the window, a rush of cold air and flurry of icy snowflakes filling the front seat compartment like a tiny whirlwind. “State your business,” O’Fallon hissed, his and O’Toole’s eyes meeting. Did O’Toole know he knew?

  The guard stopped by the open window.

  O’Toole spoke quickly enough. “Special Air Service. Here to run a night exercise, Sergeant.”

  “Right, sir! May I please see the Captain’s orders.”

  O’Toole looked at O’Fallon almost pleedingly. O’Fallon smiled and leaned across to be nearer to the open window. “I can take care of that, you vile motherfucking peeler!” His left hand snapped the cigarette neatly into the right eye of the RUC sergeant and his right hand stabbed the revolver forward, double actioning a shot into the same eye, the RUC sergeant already screaming from the cigarette burn to his eye.

  The RUC-er’s head snapped back. O’Toole started wrenching at his door handle. O’Fallon leaned back quickly and raised the muzzle of the little revolver to the level of O’Toole’s left temple and hissed, “Shootin’s too good for ya, ya bleedin’ bastard squealer. But it’ll have to be doin’ now, won’t it?” He pulled the trigger and O’Toole’s head, because of the angle at which O’Fallon had shot, rocked forward, slamming into the steering wheel, blood spraying onto the inside of the windshield. Already, O’Fallon heard the first submachine gun, the van charged with icy air now with the sliding side door open as it was. O’Fallon’s right hand rammed the revolver into the pocket of his jacket and he threw his body weight against O’Toole’s, the body rolling out as the driver’s-side door opened, into the snow. O’Fallon slipped behind the wheel. Two of his men were already over the deflection barrier, another two right behind them, young Martin one of them. More submachine-gun fire, the yellow-lighted windows of the twin guardhouses seeming to implode as his men riddled the structures with bullets.

  The deflection barrier lowered, O’Fallon taking up the radio set from between the seats, depressing the push-to-talk button. “Move, lads!” He threw the set down and stomped the accelerator as the barrier dropped flush to the roadbed, the exterior gate swinging open—young Martin. The interior gates swung open inward and he pulled the van through, hearing the breathless exclamations of the men as they clambored back aboard, the clicking and scratching of magazines being withdrawn, replaced with fresh ones. “Pass me up an AK, Martin.”

  “Yes, Seamus.”

  He extended his left hand, felt the front handguard and the chill of metal, drew the weapon toward him. “Thank ya, Martin.” Already, he was starting the van forward, the snow heavier here, making the driving actually easier. Inside his head, Seamus O’Fallon was ticking off the seconds. Thirty-four had gone by so far. Fifty-eight remained as he’d figured it.

  He caught a glimpse of the second lorry in the sideview mirror, speeding through the open gates. But this was no van, but what the Americans so picturesquely called an eighteen wheeler, the lorry picking up speed now.

  There were lights coming on in the barracks hall and in the smaller windows where the trainees slept.

  O’Fallon skidded the van to a halt, cutting the wheel sharp so the van would form a wall between them and the barracks building.

  He jumped from the driver’s seat, almost losing his footing, working the AK’s bolt, his men closing ranks around him as he opened fire toward every light he saw, the roar of gunfire around him deafening. He had spent his magazine and he threw the assault rifle into the opening in the side of the van as he walked away from where the others still stood to fire, the huge lorry still coming, faster and faster, the driver’s-side door opening, Keogh swinging out from the opening, his body wrapped in heavy padding and almost unrecognizable as being human at all.

  Keogh jumped, the lorry aimed right for the center of the barracks.

  O’Fallon had his whistle out and blew it sharply three times, then swung up behind the wheel, already getting the van into motion, his lads jumping in through the open side door, Martin among them as O’Fallon cut the wheel hard left and accelerated. His rear wheels were spinning, but then caught. The van’s rear end fishtailed as he fought the steering wheel, still counting seconds. Twenty-one remained.

  Keogh was running, looking positively ridiculous with his padding.

  O’Fallon slowed the van only minutely, Martin shouting, “We’ve got him safe, Seamus!”

  O’Fallon didn’t care, but evidently Martin did. O’Fallon stomped the accelerator to the floorboard, still counting seconds.

  He began mumbling them aloud when he reached only ten left. “Nine … eight … seven …” The guardhouses were just ahead, the gates still wide open and the deflection barriers still down. “Six … five … four … three …” Through the interior fence, then the outer fence and the van bumping and jostling as it crossed over the seams between the deflection barriers.

  “Two … one …”

  The explosion made the already bloodied glass of the windshield vibrate, all other sounds—the near-over-revving of the engine, the rattling of equipment, the siren that had begun wailing an instant before-masked beneath it. O’Fallon turned into the road and snapped a look right. A gratifyingly huge tongue of orange and yellow and white flame flicked skyward into the night, the road surface vibrating with the shockwaves.

  One hundred and twenty dead at least. All RUC.

  He screamed to his fellows,. “Ahh, a thing of beauty lads, a thing of beauty! Ha!”

  Chapter Two

  Nothing about it made sense. Meeting aboard the train which traversed the distance between Tirana and Durazzo was madness. And even if by some miracle all went well, once he was at Durazzo and had it, there were dangerous miles to be traveled down the Albanian coastline before reaching Valona and the quick transfer by night across the Strait of Otranto to the comparative safety of Italy. And once there, what?

  When the previous president had begun his one-man crusade to replace dangerously but usefully planted agents with long-distance electronic intelligence gatherers, a number of the old-timers had predicted just this sort of thing: When a man was needed on the spot, he wouldn’t be there; no one would be there and someone would have to be sent in.

  It was nice to know, Thomas Alyard thought as he gazed at his reflection against the night-black window of the train, that he was “someone.” He ran the fingers of both hands back through his dark brown hair.

  The phone had rung. The girl he’d been keeping company with for the last six months had leaned across him, her bare breasts brushing against his face, answered, roused him to full wakefulness, told him, “Somebody who says his name is Mario, Thomas. He wants to speak with you.”

  Thomas Alyard didn’t know a man named Mario, but he did know a code sequence that started that way. “This is Thomas Alyard. ”

  “This is Mario. You need to come at once. Signore Brownlee is very sick.”

  “What seems to be wrong with him?”

  “His fever is one hundred and two how you count it.”

  “Has the doctor been called?”

  “It took one hour to reach him.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Alyard hung up, reached for the Bible in the nightstand drawer beside the bed and glanced quickly at Appalonia. She was very beautiful and, more important at the moment, already asleep. He squinted in the yellow light from the bedside lamp as he flipped pages. At last, he turned to page 102 and read the first full verse on the page, the temperature of the nonexistent Mr. Brownlee giving him the page, the number one for how long it had taken to contact the doctor telling him the verse. Verse one of Leviticus, where the Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting. The basement intelligence suite at the Embassy. That had seemed to make poor sense as well, going to so obvious a location for his assignment. And after he had been told what his assignment was to be, it had seemed even more nonsensical than ever.

  It was a logical given that bacteriological work
was never done near large concentrations of people. Just in case. Or, at least, never done near large concentrations of your own people.

  Yet, a secure location was required. And the more remote the better.

  Hence, Albania, a ragged bite taken out of the west face of the Balkan Peninsula between Yugoslavia to the north and Greece to the south. Communist, of course, but separated from the chaotic democracy of Italy by only forty miles of the Adriatic at its nearest point.

  The compartment in which Thomas Alyard sat was empty except for him, the route between the capital of Tirana and the coastal city of Durazzo not the most heavily trafficked even during more conventional hours. Albania—a country comprised largely of farmers denied all but the most rudimentary contacts with the West, and hence stifled in the iron fists of a party leadership that was among the most reactionary of Communist governments.

  Central Intelligence Agency Case Officer Thomas Alyard had flown from Italy to Greece, leaving the Athens airport that was uneasily shared with Helenikon United States Air Force Base by private plane which, after too many stops, had gotten Swiss businessman Thomas Rheinhold to Tirana just three hours before the train was to depart. There had, as yet, been no sign of David Stakowski.

  And meetings delayed were frequently meetings compromised.

  Alyard sometimes wished he was living in a book or a movie. As an American “agent,” he was certainly the good guy, and in books and movies, the good guy was easily able to enter enemy-occupied territory with all sorts of weapons. There was occasionally some daring-do required, but there was always the slavishly loving heroine to fall into bed with afterward. But this was reality and he had no weapon but his wits, and the edge of this solitary weapon was dulled by the lack of sleep and the sudden, prolonged travel since “Mario’s” wake-up call. He had left word that Appalonia be told some convenient lie so she wouldn’t be angry with him when he returned, but there was no way to know if anyone had bothered to tell her anything. He didn’t want to lose her. He was not in the market for a lovestruck gypsy girl or a defecting Russian cipher clerk. Appalonia satisfied him more than any woman ever had.

  More cheerful thoughts were needed, but there were none to be had. So Alyard focused his attention on the details of the assignment, running them over again in his head. David Stakowski, age twenty-nine, was a CIA Case Officer as well, but assigned to the United States Embassy in Moscow as a cultural attache, the universal euphemism for “spy.” Stakowski had been running an Eastern European newsman named Wilton Voroncek. Voroncek had requested money through Stakowski, a quite large sum with which Voroncek would pay his agent-in-place who held a position of some responsibility at The Peoples’ Institute For Biological Progress, a biowarfare laboratory on the Drina, the river which knifed through the northernmost portion of Albania out of Yugoslavia, the laboratory all but inaccessible because of the rugged mountains which surrounded it. What Voroncek had paid his man for was the solitary existing sample (supposedly) of an as-yet-unnamed virus, as well as the destruction of the laboratory notes and tapes and any other data vital to its efficient duplication by the Soviet scientists who had created it from the work of a now dead (natural causes, it was presumed) German scientist of considerably advanced age.

  It was estimated that it would take Soviet scientists at least three months to duplicate their work without the inspirational leadership of the dead German, about as long as it would take the teams of scientists already being assembled in the United States scheduled round-the-clock to analyze the sample of the viral agent and duplicate it. Each nation would quietly let the other know that it had the virus and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction would once again spare mankind enduring a weapon of unimaginable destructive capabilities. What the virus caused was something Alyard had not been told, if anyone knew.

  The trick was to get the sample from Stakowski, who was as hot as a two-dollar pistol, and then spirit it to America. Stakowski would never be able to get out of Albania with it, might well have to sit it out in Albania for months until he could quietly slip over into Greece or get across the Adriatic to Italy.

  The problem arose out of Stakowski’s inexperience. The logical procedure, once Stakowski was approached by Voroncek, would have been to get the agent-in-place out from under Voroncek’s control and put him under control of someone experienced in clandestine operations of such delicacy, cutting out Voroncek and Stakowski completely. If the agent-in-place would work for no one but Voroncek (some private liaison, for example; or, something as basic as a sense of comfortable security), then Voroncek would be put under direct control of the more experienced field officer. But any way the problem was viewed, logic would have to dictate Stakowski’s quick and total exclusion. Logic had not only been unable to prevail, but as Alyard understood, logic had never once been considered.

  Alyard lit his pipe, watching the grey smoke as it curled round his reflection on the window.

  Voroncek would have pocketed the bulk of the money for his own profit, of course. What would some laboratory supervisor who had spent the last decade or so living in the mountains of Albania do with that kind of money anyway? Why add to the fellow’s troubles? A hundred thousand dollars was allocated, likely meaning the agent-in-place who did all the dangerous dirty work had gotten a quarter of that or less. But, as Alyard understood it, the issue of money was academic now. The theft of the specimen and the destruction of the notes and lab tapes were discovered more quickly than any of the wizards planning the thing had supposed, the agent-in-place getting as far as Split on the Yugoslav coast where Voroncek was to have met him to receive the specimen and where Stakowski was to have met Voroncek. A boat was to have taken Stakowski across the Adriatic to San Marino. But nothing ever really got that far.

  Once the theft at the laboratory was discovered—the security at the laboratory was KGB—the agent-in-place was immediately pegged as the culprit.

  The agent-in-place (no name had been supplied Alyard at his briefing and he suddenly wondered if anyone knew it or thought it even important enough to bother knowing) had been cornered in Split. But whoever the nameless fellow had been, he had to have been tough. When Voroncek had rendezvoused—late—his agent-in-place had already been shot to death, twice in the throat and once in the chest, but managed to stab to death his assassin. Voroncek had taken the specimen and then compounded all the foregoing stupidity with a stroke of unbelievable idiocy: Voroncek had gone directly to the pre-arranged meeting with Stakowski. The KGB or the Albanian secret police—no one was sure yet—had been at Voroncek’s heels and an actual gunfight had broken out. The results included Voroncek’s death, Stakowski’s getting control of the virus and barely getting away, and some assorted deaths and gunshot wounds, Stakowski almost miraculously not among them.

  Stakowski had then done something moderately intelligent. Instead of heading for freedom, he had gone into Albania, like a purposeful salmon going against the flow of the security stream. It had worked, up to a point. If Stakowski didn’t show up soon, apparently it hadn’t worked that well.

  Alyard’s pipe had gone out and he started to refill it when he heard the knock at the compartment door, sharper sounding over the rattle of the train car as it sped over the tracks.

  Thomas Alyard asked in German, the agreed upon language since Stakowski spoke it, and as a Swiss Thomas Rheinhold would speak it too, “One moment, please?”

  He approached the door, his pipe stem turned outward in his hand. He wasn’t entirely weaponless, the stem a tough phenolic resin material and, when used properly, capable of inflicting considerable injury when thrust to a vital area.

  Alyard opened the door a crack and peered into the corridor. It was Stakowski, looking a bit shopworn and rather tired but otherwise just as bland as his photograph. Hair that if a woman had worn it would have been called ash blonde, a little on the longish side for anything but a musician, an actor or a college boy; a chubby face with cheeks that in the photograph had seemed almost rosy but now seeme
d merely flushed with exertion, the lips grey and parched looking, gold-wire-rimmed glasses adding to the look of confused innocence the face seemed almost to exude; narrow shoulders under a rumpled, once-expensive looking Harris Tweed sportcoat, a khaki trench coat folded neatly over the left forearm; a double chin all but obscured the Windsor knot of the tie, some phantom regimental or old school stripes.

  But the code phrase was still required, if only Stakowski knew it. “I, er, was needing to exchange a large note for smaller denominations so I could purchase cigarettes. Could I trouble you?”

  “I have little on me in Albanian leks, I’m afraid. Only Swiss francs. Wait!” And Alyard started to dig in his pockets. “I may have a bit extra.”

  “You would save my life.”

  Thomas Alyard took his left hand from his jacket pocket and switched the pipe to it. He opened the door the rest of the way, Stakowski almost collapsing inside. “Thank God,” Stakowski whispered hoarsely. “I had no picture.”

  “Here—sit down,” Alyard told the fellow, guiding him to the opposite seat from his own, then sitting down on the edge, staring intently at Stakowski for a moment. It almost seemed as though Stakowski was beginning to hyperventilate. “Wait …” And Alyard stood, pulled over his overnighter and dug into it for a moment, the pipe going back into his teeth. He found the beaten metal hip flask and opened it. “Here. Have some of this.” Stakowski seemed to hesitate. “It’s all right. I don’t have diseases or anything. And let’s hope you don’t.” Stakowski nodded then, taking the flask. “Looks like you’ve had a rough time.” Stakowski drank from the flask, coughed, wiped the mouthpiece on his sleeve and handed it back. Alyard wiped it again and took a swallow from it himself. “Do you have it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you followed?Or do you know?”

  “I was followed to the train, but not to your compartment.”

  “Do you have any kind of a weapon?”

  “Yes, this.” Stakowski reached under his jacket, Alyard tensing just in case, Stakowski’s right hand reemerging with a pistol, but in no position to shoot it, the gun—a Walther PPK—hetd as though it were radioactive. “Here.” Stakowski offered it to him, Alyard nodding, pocketing it as he went to the compartment door and locked it. He took the gun back out and began to examine it. “I’m scared to death.”