Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Betrayal

“I have to call. They’re waiting,” she said.

“No one’s waiting.”

For the first time she really looked at him, at his shadowed profile lit only by the dashboard light. “What makes you so sure?”

“No crew. No links. No satellite van. You followed me from the mosque on your own.” He held out his hand. “Give me your cell phone-and don’t be cute. Any kind of a struggle at these speeds and we could both be killed.”

She found the cell phone in her handbag and handed it to him. He shut it off and slipped it into his pocket. He drove at high speed, truck lights flashing by in the darkness as he passed them. Neither of them spoke till they were well past Bremen, nearing Oldenburg.

“What are you going to do with me?” she asked finally.

“That depends on what’s waiting for us in Amsterdam,” he said.

Volgograd, Russia

Borya Khmelnitsky, aka Gospodin Kolbasa, or Mr. Sausage, was laughing as he poured them both another glass of Dovgan vodka, the only kind of Russian vodka he said wasn’t made out of piss. They were sitting at a window table of the Avgust restaurant on the Embankment overlooking the Volga River, where, though it was April, an occasional ice floe still floated by. It was said that Khmelnitsky got the nickname Kolbasa because of what he had done to a rival from the Tsentraly mafia gang at a sausage factory, like Sweeney Todd, feeding him to them at a so-called peace gathering.

“This guy, this Yuri guy, did it because his wife, she wasn’t happy with her neck, okay?” Khmelnitsky laughed. He was a big man. He wore a black leather jacket over a flashy Hawaiian-type shirt, the unofficial uniform of the Ekaterinburg Uralmash mafia. “She has, how you call it, neck like rooster, okay? So she wants operation to fix neck, make pretty like swan. Also Moskva. All the time she wants to go to Moscow; live better life. This is like Chekhov.

“So this guy, Yuri, is big shot in MOD, Federal Security Service for Atomics, da? We do deal for three kilos Cesium-137, make beautiful dirty bomb. Comes out with big truck and with MOD security team and two troop trucks from Twelfth Main Directorate of GUMO, Ministry of Defense. All official, da? They leave Ozersk. Is closed city. Secret place. No one can enter. Officially, doesn’t exist, Ozersk. People call city ‘Mayak,’ but is Ozersk. In Soviet times, say ‘Ozersk’ and you be in Lubyanka Prison, if they don’t kill you on the way.”

“Is that where the aerosol spray came from?” the Palestinian asked. “Ozersk? They moved it there from Vozrozhdeniya?”

Khmelnitsky looked at him sharply, and for a moment the Palestinian could see how dangerous he was. This was the first time he was meeting the man since they had done the deal for the aerosol apparatus with the three canisters of liquid pathogen culture three months earlier. All at once, Khmelnitsky grinned, showing his crooked satyr’s teeth.

“Who can say? When Soviet times end, many things disappear. Even people,” looking hard at the Palestinian, then smiling suddenly with his crooked teeth like they were best pals again. “So like I am telling, this guy Yuri and his MOD trucks, they go through five checkpoints, scan with dosimeter, alpha radiation detector, no problem. Everything fixed, you understand,” he said, making the universal sign for money, rubbing his thumb on his fingertips. “They drive through taiga, forests, villages, like army convoy right to middle of Ekaterinburg. Right down middle of Malysheva Street. I see him, Yuri. I say ‘bakapor.’ ” Dumbass. “‘What you doing?’

“He say, ‘We do business.’

“I say, ‘You crazy mudak. You want do business in middle of street?’

“He say, ‘Chto zahuy.’” What the fuck?

“So we go to Plotinka, big dam. Is like park, in center Ekaterinburg. We talk out in open away from everyone. See everything. No bugs, no FSB. I say, ‘Where is my Cesium-137?’

“He say, ‘Fuck that cesium govno shit. We do better deal. More money.’”

“What was in the truck?” the Palestinian asked.

“Two steel drums. Between is steel drums of water and big sheet lead. Heavy sukin-sin. Inside, you never believe. I never believe. No one believe.”

“So it was all there? Just like that?” the Palestinian said. He’d heard the story before, although each time the details changed, except for the part about the steel drums and what was in them, which had changed everything and added a second phase to his original operation.

“We go. See for yourself. All so his pizda wife’s neck be beautiful. Crazy, nyet?” Khmelnitsky said, getting up and pulling his Hawaiian shirt over the gun in his belt.

They left the restaurant and walked by a park with souvenir vendors on the tree-lined path selling Matryoshka dolls and cheap watercolor prints. They got into Khmelnitsky’s Mercedes and drove past tall apartment blocks to the Central Railroad Station, with its old-fashioned clock tower, and out toward the train yard.

On a hill in the distance the Palestinian could see an unbelievably huge statue of a woman with her upraised arm holding a sword. Someone had told him she was Mother Russia and that she was bigger than the Statue of Liberty in New York. It all had something to do with World War Two. During the Communist times, the concierge at the hotel had said, Volgograd had been called Stalingrad and was the scene of a great battle. But the Palestinian was from the Middle East, knew little of European history and believed even less. If there had ever been a battle here, unlike Gaza or Lebanon, he could see no sign of it, and in any case it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what was waiting for him in the railroad container car, and if he could pull it off, like World War Two itself, no one would ever forget it, he thought as they pulled into the train yard parking area and got out.

Khmelnitsky took out two railroad badges and handed him one. They pinned them on and showed them to a guard at a gate in the chicken wire fence around the railroad yard. The guard, who was sitting and reading a Russian comic book of Russian Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles led by a balalaika machine-gun-toting bear, didn’t bother to look at their badges. They walked into the yard and over to a section of freight, ore, and container railroad cars. Three of Khmelnitsky’s men, all in Hawaiian shirts and leather jackets, were squatting near one of the freight cars, smoking and sharing vodka from a bottle.

“Is okay, da?” Khmelnitsky said.

“I’ll let you know after I’ve had a look,” the Palestinian said.

Khmelnitsky gestured, and one of his men got up and opened the freight car door. The car was filled with steel drums, with ALUMINUM INGOTS painted on the sides in Russian Cyrillic lettering and seals from the VOLGOGRAD ALUMINUM FACTORY.

The Palestinian climbed up and approached one of the two drums marked SPECIAL ORDER 101 in Russian and removed the top, which hadn’t been welded shut yet. He turned on his handheld Geiger counter and it immediately began clicking, the needle spiking, but well within safe limits for alpha, beta, and gamma radiation levels. If it had been Cesium-137 or Plutonium-239, it would’ve been too radioactive to safely approach, not to mention the difficulty of handling something so radioactive, and which would burst into intense flames at the drop of a hat, like plutonium. He picked up the small beer-can-sized ingot of Uranium-235 and held it in the palm of his hand. It was a dull gray, cool and dry to the touch and very heavy for its size. That was the beauty of U-235, he thought. It was easy to work with, the radiation level safe enough so you could sleep with it under your pillow, and if it was pure enough, it would change the world. He put it back, opened the second drum and measured the second ingot.