Page 9 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight

Walib sat in the cab, riding shotgun. He checked his watch. The timer had worked perfectly. He imagined the bunker’s thick steel doors melting like butter beneath the withering torch of the white-hot gases, and the explosive flames exhausting harmlessly through the quarry, scorching acres of nothing but granite and dust without a single civilian casualty.

Not only had Walib destroyed the rest of the thermobaric arsenal, he had also found a way to cover their tracks. There would be nothing left of the corpses—not even ash—or any hint that the crates of missiles they carried in the truck had been stolen. All of the missing personnel—the Russian guards, Grechko, Dzhabrailov, and him—would be presumed killed in an attack by Israeli Sayeret Matkal or Iranian Quds Force commandos. The Russians wouldn’t allow the possibility of an accident.

For the first time in a long time, Walib was happy. Killing Grechko with his own hands had done that. That surprised him. He was an artillery officer, not an infantryman. He’d never killed in anger before, or at close distance. Before tonight he wasn’t sure if he could do it. But it had been shockingly easy to kill the raging bastard, and satisfying to force the guards at gunpoint to load the heavy missile crates before Dzhabrailov’s vicious blade dropped them like slaughtered lambs. Walib felt no guilt about them, either. Revenge had a sweetness he hadn’t expected.

And tonight was only the beginning.

He smiled.

“Something funny, brother?” Dzhabrailov asked.

“The Russians will probably award us medals of valor for our glorious sacrifice.”

“A medal would be nice,” the Chechen joked. “Too bad we can’t collect it.”

“Neither can Grechko.”

The thought of the Russian’s head cracking on the concrete made Walib smile again. Perhaps Dzhabrailov was right after all. Perhaps they really were doing the will of Allah. Walib had never known a plan to survive first contact with the enemy. That alone was a miracle.

All of the pieces were in play now. So long as the checkpoint guards up ahead had been bribed as promised, they’d be home free. The foreign Chechen—a violent and unlikely ally—had proven as good as his word so far. Walib looked forward to meeting this mysterious commander of Dzhabrailov’s when the real work began.

Walib was, no doubt, a changed man now. A man on a mission.

But did that make him a mujahid?

Walib checked his watch again. They were even ahead of schedule. “We’ll make the coast before sunrise.”

“Inshallah,”the Chechen said.

Walib patted the heavy black Pelican case between them, an object of even greater importance than the other device they had stolen, or even the ordnance stacked in the covered bed behind them. “Yes, indeed.”

Inshallah.

6

AHTOPOL, BULGARIA

It was a modest house with a priceless view, high on the ridge of a finger of land thrusting into the Black Sea.

Vladimir Vasilev owned many more houses far grander and with even more magnificent views all over Europe, but Bulgaria was home and he had wanted to die here.

Each morning, Vasilev woke to a shimmering sunrise above a wine-dark sea, the light pouring through his plate-glass window. The dawn was not so much a promise of the day to come as it was a sparkling reminder that he had managed to survive one more fearful night. Another day to realize his last and final wish.

The short Ghanaian contract nurse changed his catheter with practiced economy, neither smiling nor frowning as she completed the intimate task. Her large breasts strained against her tight-fitting green scrubs, which were barely able to contain her enormous posterior. Exactly the kind of womanVasilev favored. Even just a year ago, he would have taken her with a seduction of Ossetra sturgeon caviar and a fine champagne on his yacht, or, if she resisted his charms, raped her as she wept. But he felt no stirring in his loins this morning, despite her gloved hands fingering his flaccid manhood.

She finished her work, removed her gloves, and cleansed her hands with antiseptic gel before asking him if he needed anything else in nervous, lilting English.

Vasilev shook his enormous head, his withered jowls stubbled with white. His flesh was pale gray and mottled brown with moles, like a mushroom cap. He had no appetite, only an unquenchable thirst from the cannula constantly blowing oxygen into his nose. Drinking fluids directly nearly drowned him. He could only soothe his parched throat with ice chips from the large cup on the table beside him.

“Is he here yet?”

The nurse nodded. “He arrived fifteen minutes ago. I thought you would prefer for him to wait until—”

“Send him in now.” He was paying her too much to be polite.

“Of course.”

Vasilev elevated his bed with a remote control as his number two appeared, a tall Czech—Sudeten German from the Ore Mountains, in fact—with brittle, yellowed skin like old parchment. The lifelong smoker was only five years younger than Vasilev, and despite his cadaverous appearance, healthy as an ox. Never a day in hospital in all the years Vasilev had known him.