Second Strike

CHAPTER 16

^{RURAL SOUTH CAROLINA,}

^{AUGUST 15, 7:17 A.M. EDT}

Allie Nichols had prepared omelets and hash browns and taken them out to the volunteers in the barn, who gratefully consumed them. She had prepared the same breakfast for Bor, who had slept in the den. When he came into the kitchen, his plate was warming on the stove and a grocery bag with about a dozen brown paper bags containing sandwiches for lunch was on the kitchen table.

Bor, seeming somewhat groggy, picked up the plate, dropping the fork behind the stove. He cursed under his breath, fumbled behind the stove for the fork, and, upon retrieving it, rinsed it in the sink before moving to the kitchen table, where he made fast work of the meal. He planned to be on the road in ten minutes.

Bor placed the dish and silverware in the sink and thanked Allie for her hospitality.

“Where’s George?” Bor asked.

“He went into the den. He’s going to sand and putty the floor where he dropped the door to the cellar last night. It left a little dent. I think he should just put a rug over it and be done with it. But he likes to fix things.”

Bor picked up the grocery bag from the counter and proceeded toward the door.

“Thank George for me.”

“Good luck,” Allie replied perfunctorily.

Bor stopped for a moment next to the door, turned, and nodded. Then he walked briskly onto the porch and saw that the volunteers had retaken their respective seats in the two vehicles. He looked at his watch, then scanned the countryside. Not another house, vehicle, or person in sight. They would make good progress today.

He rode in the passenger seat of the van again as it led the LaCrosse down the long driveway and onto the two-lane country road, heading north. They drove for a minute or so before they heard something that sounded like a rumble of thunder, but the skies were clear. Bor heard murmuring coming from the rear seats, followed by excited whispers. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the volunteers looking wide-eyed out the right window and slightly to the rear.

Rising above the tree line was a plume of thick black smoke in the general vicinity of the Nichols farmhouse. With no wind to disturb it, it billowed gently into a mushroom before the outer edges dissipated into a formless, ash-colored cloud.

The magnesium incendiaries had worked a bit faster than he’d expected, but not by much. From the time he flipped the thirty-second timer switch next to the front door to the time of the explosion, approximately two and a half minutes had elapsed. As expected, the extreme heat from the incendiaries was sufficient not only to incinerate the cellar, but to set the house ablaze also. In hindsight, tampering with the gas line behind the stove was probably superfluous and a bit of a risk. The couple might have smelled the odor of the tagging agent in the natural gas and attempted to escape. Besides, with some of the windows open on this warm morning, the volume of gas might not have built to a combustible critical mass. Regardless, the natural gas would lead any local fire investigators down a rabbit hole, causing them to conclude it was at least a contributing factor.

But Bor knew something the elderly couple and any local fire officials did not. Regardless of the natural gas or the open windows, the house was doomed the moment Bor initiated the thirty-second timer.

Inside the container with the stenciled markings were several kilograms of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, enough to level the entire farmhouse and leave a sizable crater. The searing heat from the magnesium incendiaries was more than seven times hotter than the ignition temperature of the white crystalline substance inside that stenciled container. The container would protect its contents against the heat of the incendiaries for a brief interval, but combustion was inevitable.

Bor knew this because the stenciled markings were the letters and numbers signifying the chemical formula for the explosive, an explosive with which the assassin was well familiar. His innocent farmhouse hosts were not. The container had likely been delivered for an operation that never received a green light, never transpired. No agents had come to collect it. Consequently, it sat unused and forgotten along with all of the other relics in the cellar.

So whatever remained of the pulverized and cremated bodies of Oleg Nikolin of Leningrad and Aleksandra Ivanova of Moscow was likely part of the ash-gray cloud hovering over the well-tended farm in a land that had become their home. It was a land upon which their assassin would soon visit execrable horror.