The Arctic Event

Chapter Eight

Anacosta, Maryland

The big diesel cruiser materialized out of the Potomac mists and stood in toward the marina, ignoring the bright yellow PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING signs posted on the ends of the finger piers. A pair of marina employees, nondescript, long-haired young men in deck shoes, dungarees, and nylon windcheaters, stood by to accept the cruiser’s lines as it nosed alongside.

Nothing untoward hinted that both the pier hands carried automatic pistols under their jackets or that the cruiser’s helmsman had a submachine gun racked out of sight below the lip of the cockpit.

The rumble of the cruiser’s engines broke into an idling whine as the propeller clutches disengaged and the bow and stern lines were deftly snubbed off. A set of boarding steps were positioned, and the yacht’s lone passenger emerged from its streamlined cabin.

With a nod to the pier hands, Fred Klein disembarked and strode down the fog-dampened planks of the dock. Crossing the broad graveled expanse of the marina’s dry-storage area, past the silent, tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of beached pleasure craft on their trailers and stands, Klein continued toward what appeared to be a large windowless warehouse.

The dark green metal prefab building looked new. It should. It had not been there two years before. In all probability, in another year’s time, it or at least its contents would be repositioned somewhere else.

This was the headquarters and operations center of Covert One.

Concealed television cameras tracked Klein’s approach, and magnetic locks clicked open as he came to stand before the heavy steel fire door.

“Good morning, sir.” The duty “doorman” accepted Klein’s hat and topcoat, neatly hanging them up beside the racked assault shotgun. “It’s a clammy kind of day out there.”

“That it is, Walt,” Klein replied amiably. “Maggie in the shop yet?”

“About half an hour ago, sir.”

“One of these days I’ll beat her in,” Klein murmured in ritual. He continued down the length of the institutional-buff central corridor. No one passed him in the hall, but an occasional murmur of voices or muffled whine of electronics leaked from behind the double row of anonymous gray doors, hinting at the quiet functionality of the headquarters.

At the far end of the passageway lay the command suite.

The outer office was Maggie Templeton’s techno-lair. The entire room was a computer workstation, dominated by a large desk with no less than three twenty-one-inch flat-screen monitors positioned upon it. A second set of large-screen displays were inset on the far office wall. Her pet bonsai tree and a silver framed photograph of her late husband served as the sole reminders of Margaret Templeton’s essential humanity.

The blonde looked up from her master display and smiled as Klein card-swiped his way through the security entry. “Good morning, Mr. Klein. I hope it was a smooth voyage today.”

“It can never be smooth enough for me, Maggie,” Klein snorted. “Someday I’m going to hunt down the sadist who came up with the brilliant notion of putting the headquarters of the world’s worst sailor at a yacht club.”

She chuckled, “You have to admit, it makes for an excellent cover.”

“Not really; my being green and nauseated all of the time could give it all away. What have we got this morning?”

Templeton instantly toggled over to her professional mode. “The Trent Bravo insertion appears to be going well. The team leader is reporting that his personnel and equipment are on the ground inside of Myanmar and that his point man has successfully made contact with the leadership of the Karen National Union.”

Klein nodded. Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, he polished a few fog droplets from his glasses. “Anything new with the Wednesday Island operation?”

“Jon will be linking up with the American members of his team in Seattle tonight and with his Russian liaison in Alaska tomorrow. The equipment set has been pre-positioned, and the helicopter procured from Pole Star.”

“Any problems with Langley seconding Ms. Russell to us?”

“Only the usual moaning, whining, bitching, and complaining.” Maggie looked up from her screens. “If I may make a point, sir. President Castilla is really going to have to make some decisions about our working relationship with our former employers in the near future.”

Klein sighed and redonned his glasses. “Very possibly, Maggie, but in the words of the immortal Scarlett O’Hara, ‘I’ll think of it tomorrow.’ Anything else for today?”

“A planning meeting with the South American Operations group at ten hundred, and you might want to have a look at your ‘For your consideration’ file. I’ve compiled a list of known illicit armament dealers believed to have both the potential interest and available resources to deal themselves into the Wednesday Island situation. It makes for interesting reading. I’ve also red-flagged these men and their organizations with all of our available intelligence resources. Any unusual activity on their part is to be reported.”

“Well done, Maggie, as usual.”

Every director should have an executive assistant who could both read minds and foresee the future.

His office, smaller and far less elaborately outfitted, lay beyond Maggie’s. The few personalized decorations-the framed poster-sized photo of the Earth from orbit, the Elizabethan-era map prints, the large eighteenth-century globe of the world-served him as a reminder of his zone of responsibility.

There was only a single workstation monitor on his mid-grade desk, along with a tray bearing a coffee service for one, a steaming stainless steel thermos, and a single buttered English muffin on a covered dish.

Klein smiled. Removing his suit coat, he draped it neatly over the back of his chair. Settling behind his desk, he poured himself his first cup of coffee and tapped the space bar on his keyboard, calling the monitor to life.

As he sipped, a series of file headings flashed past on the screen. Maggie would have stacked the files in what she viewed as their order of priority.

**KNOWN ILLICIT ARMS DEALERS-MULTINATIONAL-WMD INVOLVEMENT **

**KRETEK GROUP**

**ANTON KRETEK**

A photograph followed, computer enhanced and apparently taken using a long-range telephoto camera. It showed a man, a big, ruddy-featured man, standing on the deck of what appeared to be a large private yacht, scowling in the direction of the camera.

There were many contradictions built into Anton Kretek. The thinning of his rust-colored hair contrasted with the wild profusion of his gray-tinged beard. There was obvious power in his broad shoulders and wiry, long, muscled arms, countered by the furry pot gut of dissipation that bulged over the waistband of his minimal swimming trunks, and while there were thick clusters of laugh wrinkles gathered around his eyes, those eyes were as cold and opaque as those of a hooding king cobra.

Klein decided that this man might indeed laugh a great deal, but it would be at things most normal human beings would not find amusing.

One of Maggie Templeton’s deft file summaries followed, a distilled essence of the documentation on Kretek, her instincts targeting what Klein would actually want and need to know about the man and his organization:

Interpol and the other Western intelligence agencies concerned with Anton Kretek are unsure if this is the arms dealer’s true name or an alias. That datum had been lost in the chaos of a disintegrating Yugoslavia. It is known that he is Croatian, from somewhere near the Italian border of that failed nation.

In the tangled eugenic lexicon of the Balkans, a “Croat” is theoretically a Roman Catholic Southern Slav who uses the Latin alphabet, as opposed to a “Serb,” who is a Southern Slav following the Greek Orthodox religion and who uses Cyrillic.

Kretek, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, follows the tenets of no organized religion. The arms dealer is a rarity amid the deep racial, religious, political and tribal passions of Mittel Europa. He appears to be totally aracial, areligious, apolitical and atribal. As with the true criminal mentality, his own survival and well-being appear to be his sole concern. To date, in this endeavor, he has been eminently successful.

Kretek has boasted of starting his organization with a single car trunkload of rifle cartridges looted from a Yugoslavian Army depot. From this humble origin, over a period of fifteen years, he has built the Kretek Group into a multimillion-dollar criminal smuggling combine involved in the supplying and maintenance of every major and minor armed conflict in the Mideast and Mediterranean Basin.

The Kretek Group is amorphous, like an octopus that is continuously casting off and regrowing its tentacles. It is known that there is a definite head, a tight-knit trusted command cadre clustered around Kretek himself, and an ever-changing network of mercenaries, hirelings, and sub-gangs, drawn into the circle, utilized for a few operations, and then discarded.

The amorphous nature of the Kretek Group is a security measure. In addition, the liaison and contact men between these “subcontractors” and the Kretek core cadre have a striking history of violent death and sudden disappearance, rendering a court-viable chain of evidence between Kretek and his individual operations difficult if not impossible to establish.

There is also no known fixed headquarters for the Kretek Group. Like many despots before him, he has learned the survivability of mobility. His group headquarters are continuously on the move within the more loosely regulated and unstable of the Balkan states, never providing a sitting target. While still an essential blunt-force operator, Kretek has learned to appreciate and employ modern business telecommunications to keep a grip on his far-flung enterprises.

The corpse of his native Yugoslavia provided Kretek with profitable early pickings. In the Kosovo Province, Serbian militiamen and Albaniko guerrillas slaughtered each other with ordnance provided without prejudice by the Kretek Group, and Kretek was rumored to be the primary intermediary in the covert arms dealings between the dictatorships of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

With Milosevic unseated and with NATO forcing peace down the throats of the various Balkan combatants, Kretek has expanded his range of endeavor, the combatants of the Sudanese civil war and the terrorist factions of the Mideast becoming his new primary clients.

A more critical and immediate concern are the indications that Kretek is no longer content with the profit margins to be made with conventional munitions. There are now indications the Kretek Group is seeking a market entry into the ABCs: atomic, biological and chemical arms. It is feared that Anton Kretek might make as great a success of this new field of operation as he has his other criminal enterprises.

A brief segment had been highlighted at the end of the brief.

Personal Notes to the Director:

A: In the opinion of the Executive Assistant, the Kretek Group is a prime example of the kind of organization that would view the Misha 124 as a golden opportunity. They are fluid, highly adaptive, risk taking and totally ruthless.

B: Beyond the perameters of the current Wednesday Island situation, it should be pointed out that the Kretek Group is currently very much a “one man” operation. The elimination of Anton Kretek would, in all probability, lead to the direct dissolution of the Kretek Group and an increase in stability within a number of U.S. spheres of concern. Again in the opinion of the EA, this makes Anton Kretek a valid subject for a sanctioning operation, should a lock on his position ever be established and should suitable wet assets be available.

Klein smiled grimly-the female of the species was deadlier than the male. Maggie Templeton was probably correct. This was the face of the potential enemy. Men like Anton Kretek would view two tons of loose anthrax as a glittering possibility.

And Maggie was probably correct about something else. The world would likely be a better place without its Anton Kreteks.