The Skorpion Directive (33 page)

“You were there?”

Vukov rolled his head around on his thick neck, lifted his shoulders in a shrug, his muscles sliding under his T-shirt. His hands were folded together against the chain waist belt, his fingers curled slightly. He was breathing slowly and steadily, a machine.

“I was in mosque.”

“In the mosque. Bad decision. Not bright.”

He laughed.

“No. Not bright. In come rocket. I am in tunnel. Pow! Flames come and eat me all up. Now I am monster. You do this, Slick. Girls. I bet all girls like you, Slick. Pretty boy like you. I was pretty boy too. Girls, they all love me. Now not so much. Now I want girl, I pay or I just take. So. What happen to the Miklas whore? I not see her. Got new bitch now? Very fine. I would do her with big grin. Maybe some day, she get real dick, yeah? The Miklas girl, she not like you so much after she find out about Podujevo?”

“No. Not so much. How did you know I was in Podujevo?”

Vukov showed his teeth.

“Is for me to know.”

Dalton suddenly made the connection.

Colin Dale, the retired U.S. Army officer, the KGB mole that he and Mandy had hounded into the light last winter.

“Kirikoff’s mole. Colin Dale. He would have known. He told Kirikoff. Before he died. Kirikoff used it to recruit you.”

Vukov shrugged it off.

“Maybe. So what? Dale is dead. You execute him. Right on beach. All this means shit to me. Is politics. I am fighter.”

Dalton looked at Vukov for a while in silence.

“You were a Skorpion.”

His eyes grew wide and his skin changed.

“I
am
Skorpion.”

Dalton shook his head, a sideways, mocking smile.

“Not to us. We called you the Whack-a-Moles. It was like hunting gophers. You pop up, we take off your head. It was fun.”

Vukov sucked on the cigarette, shaking his head slowly.

“You believe in God, Slick?”

“I try. Doesn’t always work.”

“Believe in Jesus Christ, who die for our sins? Who gives us eternal life in Heaven? You believe in Him?”

“I’m a Christian.”

Vukov leaned forward into the haze of his own smoke, his great round head seeming to float inside the cloud, bodiless.

“Then you should kill
Muslims
. Not Christians.
This
is the big war, Slick. This is true crusade. There is no peace with Islam.
They
know this. Soon, or late, one day they know we will all go back under the boot. Is in their Koran. You know what
Dhimmi
is?”

“Yes.”

“No. You do
not
know
Dhimmi
. You never live under
Dhimmi
law. My people,
my
people,
we
live under that law. The Turks. The Moors. Six hundred years, we live under the boot. Since first battle of Kosovo. In Ottoman Empire, if you are infidel, there is no talking back to anyone Islam who insult you. No fight in court against anyone Islam. Wear
markings
to show you are
dhimmi
. Look away in street. No riding horses. Donkeys only. Islam man want your woman, he take her. You say nothing. Islam man want your house, he take it. You got business, Islam man want it, you say yes and look down at ground. Islam man strike you, you kneel and beg him stop. Islam man kill you, you die, say thank you. What is
dhimmi
? Fear is
dhimmi.
Fear is on the face of every man and child of my people. What nation are you? Who are your people?”

“My family came from Norway.”

Vukov smiled as if confirmed in a theory.

“Vikings. Good. Vikings never live under Islam boot. Macedonians, Serbs did. We were once rulers of earth. Alexander was Macedonian. Listen, Slick, you think there is peace with Islam? Only difference between al-Qaeda and ordinary Islam man? Al-Qaeda impatient. Ordinary Islam man, he can wait. They will
never
have peace with infidels. With Christians. Everywhere on earth where Islam man live near infidel is blood. It is in their book. Their Koran. Just like Hitler put his word in
Mein Kampf
. Is there for all to read. No peace until we kneel or die.”

Vukov sat back, breathing a little hard. He spat the cigarette out onto the floor, shaking his head at the madness of it.

“Then in Kosovo,” he continued, “where it all start, after six hundred years finally we Christians put fear on the faces of
their
wives,
their
children,
their
old men,
their
fathers and sons.
That
is what a Skorpion is.
That
is what I am. You. What are you, Slick?”

“What am I?” repeated Dalton. “I face men in combat. I don’t rape and torture crippled old Jews. I don’t run from a firefight and leave young boys to die. Branislav Petrasevic didn’t run. He faced me in the middle of the road. Neither did the Medic kid or his friend. Only one man ran from that fight, Vukov. You did. And that is what you are.”

Vukov looked down and became still.

“I did not run. It was . . .”

“Necessary?”

Vukov looked up, his skin rippling as the muscles under his cheek worked, his eyes bright and black.

“Yes. For the mission.”

“So you say . . .” said Dalton, leaning back, lighting up another Sobranie and blowing the smoke toward Vukov. “
Of course
I couldn’t stay. The
mission
was too important. I had to run away to save the mission
.
It’s all about the mission. Horseshit, Vukov, just plain horseshit. There is no mission. You’re a petty thief, a criminal, a junkyard dog. Captain Davit will put you in his jail, and stronger men will use you like you used Galan. Because, you know, when it comes down to it, Vukov, you run. But when you run in a prison, you don’t get far. Sooner or later, they’ll corner you in a cellar or in the laundry, and you’ll do whatever it takes to stay alive. That will be
your
story. Vukov. The man who ran.”

Vukov had gone somewhere else. His body was motionless, and he was not breathing. The scored wound on his temple, where Dalton’s bullet had glanced across the bone, had opened up and blood was running down the side of his face, a gleaming red snake under the overhead light. It was the only thing moving on the man.

Dalton stood up, brushing the ashes off his jeans, staring down at Vukov, his expression one of disgust, dismissal.

“The mission?” he said, smiling. “There is no mission.”

He turned to go, but Vukov stirred, pulling at his chains, his boots scraping on the steel floor. He looked up at Dalton.

“I need toilet.”

“So piss yourself.”

“No. Is not to piss, okay. Look. I give you something. You let me go to toilet. Is okay to bring guards. But I must to go.”

“Give me something and you can go to the toilet.”

Vukov was struggling with it.

Dalton waited, still, patient.

“You know Kirikoff ?”

“What about him?” said Dalton, his hand on the latch.

“We are to do something . . . something big.”

“The mission?”

“Yes. The mission.”

“What is this mission, Vukov?”

“I don’t know. Kirikoff keep it close. But I know where is Kirikoff.”

“Good. Where is Kirikoff ?”

“I can go to toilet, I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Honor as soldier?”

“I don’t give my honor to people who run.”

“I do not run! Is for mission!”

“I still need you to give me something.”

“Okay. Piotr Kirikoff. He is in Athens.”

 

 

 

DALTON
called in three hard-looking sailors and told them that Vukov needed to go to the toilet.

“Don’t take the shackles off. Just enough for him to get his business done. And you
stay
with him, follow? He is never alone.”

The oldest man there, a petty officer with lean, grizzled cheeks and tobacco-stained teeth, grinned at Dalton.

“Uri here can wipe his ass. Right, Uri?”

Uri shuffled his feet, his face reddening.

They gathered around Vukov while the petty officer keyed the lock holding the chain to the ringbolt. Dalton cleared the door as the chain gang shuffled down the narrow corridor toward the heads. He went back into the little storeroom, sat down on the bench, put his feet on Vukov’s chair, and lit another Sobranie, feeling reasonably pleased with himself. Military pride was a tender thing, even with a man like Vukov. Three minutes passed in this pleasant way. After five minutes, Dalton, suddenly feeling uneasy, got up and walked down the hallway to the head, where he opened the door and found three dead men. They searched the entire ship, from truck to kelson. They were sixteen klicks out of Kerch Harbor, in the middle of a night as dark as a dragon’s colon, the hull slicing through muddy chop, two white wings curling away from the cutwater, and Aleksandr Vukov had gone over the side. Dalton leaned on the taffrail for thirty minutes as Davit’s men played searchlights on the surging waves. Mandy stood nearby, intending to comfort but knowing there was none to be had. Finally he pushed himself upright and walked back into the cabin with Mandy, no longer feeling quite so pleased with himself.

If spring had come late to Prague, it was long gone in Athens. The sprawling white city, terra-cotta-roofed, spread itself out across the huge valley, from the mountains to the sea, in a crazy maze of circular streets, hexagonal blocks, squares, grids, arches, highways, byways, alleys, dead ends, all piled up around the limestone Acropolis and Parthenon, with fluttering palms along the coast and cypress spikes marching down the hillsides. Today, Athens was baking and shimmering under a noonday sun that blazed down from a sky so light it looked like glass. A single contrail moved slowly across the blue, the jet itself a diamond sparkle at the tip, trailing a line of snow-white lace, like the blade of a glass cutter moving over a crystal bowl, catching the sun and glowing like pale fire even as it spread slowly out and faded away into wisps of cloud.

Nikki, shading her eyes from the knife-edged glitter off the sea, watched the contrail as it cut its path slowly into the west. She thought briefly of her home in Seven Oaks, her cats and her plants, and—this thought, uncalled, unwelcome, breaking through her defenses—of Hank Brocius, in the early winter of last year, on a roof deck overlooking the parking lot at Crypto City, the winter light shining on the unscarred side of his face, his gentle eyes on her as she wrapped a gold-and-blue scarf around his neck and kissed him on the lips for the first time.

The memory stung, bit deep, brought down all her defenses, and the Flisvos Marina in Athens dissolved at once into a blur of white and blue and yellow limestone. Her throat closing up, her chest tight, she looked down at her hands, a watery blur, folded around the stem of a glass of chilled white wine. She picked up a pink linen napkin, lifted her sunglasses, and dabbed at her eyes. There was someone at her shoulder, a soft male voice, warm, caring. “Miss Gandolfo, are you okay?”

She set her sunglasses back in place, adjusted them, and only then turned to smile brightly up at the lean brown boy in the crisp white mess jacket and creased black slacks who was hovering over her, his handsome face full of concern.

“I am fine, Tomás,” she said, “just the glare off the water.”

“Let me fix the umbrella,” he said, leaning in to move the shaft, swinging the heavy shade around to shield her from the reflections in the harbor. As he did so, he cut her off from the long window of the Serenitas Restaurant. There, alone at a table for four, Piotr Kirikoff sat, all in baggy, shapeless white, with a large bib spread over his spinnaker belly. He was leaning forward and ripping a large lobster apart with his bare hands, stuffing gobbets and bits into his mouth, his greasy purple lips working, juices dripping from his sausage fingers, oblivious to the nauseated stares of a tourist party across the aisle.

Nikki thanked Tomás and, when he was gone, shifted her chair to the left to regain her view. It had taken a while for Kirikoff to surface, and her station here at the Serenitas, after a full day, an evening, and the morning of the second day, was becoming obvious, if only to Tomás, who was sure this stunning Italian girl was falling madly for . . . him. But of course. How could she not?

But Kirikoff had finally made an appearance, less than an hour ago, arriving on a long gleaming-white motor yacht that proceeded into Flisvos Marina like a swan. It glided regally past rows and rows of other equally magnificent yachts, many of them larger, all of them just as sleek, finally making a ponderous swing into a berth halfway up the mole. The yacht, the
Dansante
, would have been a sensation in Bar Harbor or Newport. Here among the riches of Athens it was, if not ordinary, then at least unremarkable.

Tomás, watching it arrive, informed Nikki in a careful aside that the yacht was owned by some large corporation. Many of the yachts at Flisvos were corporate. But as they watched the mountainous figure of Piotr Kirikoff waddle along the quay toward them, Tomás’s expression altered into one of guarded hostility, and he pulled back into his more formal pose as the solicitous waiter. Kirikoff rumbled past the table, his small hooded eyes fixed on the glass doors, his thighs shaking under the thin linen of his pleated slacks, his leather flip-flops shuffling across the tiles, his great dimpled ass visibly vibrating with every step.

“Peter Christian,” said Tomás in an over-the-shoulder whisper as he stepped briskly over to open the door for Kirikoff, “he is part owner of this place.” Kirikoff sailed past Tomás without so much as a sideways glance and disappeared into the cool shadows behind the tinted glass, only to emerge a few seconds later and take his place at the table where he now sat, dismembering a crustacean with the fixed attention of a seasoned glutton.