Jack Coughlin - Clean Kill

The Russian should pay dearly for a workable cache of nuclear weapons already in place in Saudi Arabia.

Still, Ebara knew nothing about nuclear bombs and such. He had not been recruiting scientists, since they were part of the intelligentsia that he had been targeting and persecuting for being in league with the current regime. The military still was unreliable, so those officers could not be trusted. Might some foreign scientists be hired to make these things work? No, it would take too long and tempt foreign rivals to enter the fray.

Dieter Nesch was the one who funneled the money from Moscow that was making things happen, and it was Nesch who had personally found the terrorist known as Juba to run the tactical portions of the rebellion. So far, Juba had done a brilliant job. That was the answer. Juba would know how to use the missiles.

Ebara shouted, and a young servant appeared. The boy was instructed to go immediately to the seaside villa of the European businessman and escort him back to the mosque for a private meeting. No topic was given. Just tell him to hurry.

To impose a savage control on this new situation, Ebara would order Dieter Nesch to immediately get the terrorist genius to emerge from hiding, fly into Saudi Arabia, and take direct control of the nuclear arsenal. He would work directly for Ebara. No one else.

KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA

K YLE S WANSON INVADED S AUDIArabia all by himself, scrunched in a window seat on an ancient King Air 90 twin-engine turboprop that was grinding its way south down the coast of the Arabian Gulf over the one hundred kilometers from Kuwait to the oil patch semiautonomous city of al-Khobz. His documents identified him as a specialist in fiber optic sensor security systems and stated that he was on contract with a company within the massive al-Khobz Joint Operations petroleum complex.

The cream-colored plane was flying just out over the shoreline and Kyle watched as oil rigs, boats, piers and pipelines, storage tanks, and support facilities passed below the wing. There was a long, curving beach at the eastern edge of a cluttered city. At the western edge, bleached raw desert extended all the way to the horizon. Somewhere in between those borders, a nuclear-tipped missile was hidden. Kyle’s job was to find and destroy it.

The border town at the tip of Saudi Arabia was a neutral zone shared by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and foreigners were plentiful, for the worldwide oil business created its own polyglot culture wherever it drilled, built, and manned the rigs and support facilities.

Behind Kyle was a talkative Belgian engineer whose gabbing about his work on the offshore control system modifications filled the otherwise peaceful cabin. He was a geyser of meaningless statistics and acronyms and discussed at boring length how his company’s numeric instruments would work so much better in linking the digital measurements with onshore equipment so they could phase out the old tie-worm system. It was good cover. Swanson didn’t want to at talk all.

Kyle tuned him out and took in the passing panorama, trying to remember the background briefing about Khobz that had been sent to him a few hours earlier by the Lizard, Trident’s brainy intel officer back in Washington.

The city did not exist until a few decades ago. Back in those rough days, there was only a collection of a few huts near the beach, where traders did business with roving Bedouin tribes. Then the British discovered a huge reservoir of oil just offshore and money roared in. “Khobz” was the Arabic word for “bread” and was an appropriate name for the new settlement that had been created to farm the oil, which was on its own a guarantee of life-giving sustenance. Glittering new construction replaced the trader huts and the place grew daily. About two hundred thousand people now lived and worked there, with most of the foreigners residing in a special compound that was separated from the Arabs by a big fence, armed guards, and strict religious and cultural differences with their Saudi hosts.

He liked what he saw, for cities were his sanctuary. Since he was a child roaming the narrow streets of South Boston, Kyle Swanson had been accustomed to the deep, subtle rhythms of metropolitan areas, learning the advantages and dangers of shadows and corners, rooftops and doorways. Nothing focused the attention on the streets like being a short six-year-old Irish kid running one step ahead of a gang of older Italian boys. The Marines and special ops training and experience had intensified that knowledge. Although the names, languages, and skin colors of the people might change, all cities shared things in common and those things were etched in his memory.

Out in the open desert, a solitary man stands out in a landscape of nothing. Here, he could blend into the population as just another person. Swanson knew how to work cities and considered al-Khobz to be just another stop on the sniper bus, a new place in which he could be an urban predator. Something was going to happen here. He could smell it.

T HE PLANE WAS OPERATEDby the Boykin Group, one of the many small foreign contract companies that supported the oil operations, and it routinely made the hops between Khobz and Kuwait City, Qatar, Dubai, Bahrain, and the other nearby countries. It carried six passengers today: Kyle, the talkative Belgian, a Kenyan engineer working on the submarine fuel pipeline from a gas lift platform, two Malaysian rig rats, and a pleasant Chinese accountant from Hong Kong who was heading down for an audit.

Kyle had mentally examined them all and decided it would be worthwhile to exchange greetings with the Chinese guy seated directly across the narrow aisle. The man introduced himself as Henry Tsang, immediately producing a pale business card with dark embossed Chinese symbols on one side and the English translation on the other: Henry Tsang, an accountant from a Shanghai auditing company. He wore blue jeans, a maroon golf shirt, and a blue baseball cap with a faded Beijing 2008 Olympics logo. The English was fluent, with a British accent that indicated an education in Hong Kong, and his handshake was strong. The skin had been hardened by exposure to the weather and a thin scar ran just above his right eyebrow, like a healed wound. Accountant, hell. This guy was no pencil pusher. The Chinese were sniffing around the oil patch. “Call me sometime. Perhaps we could have a lunch or dinner together,” Tsang said. “Do you have a card?”

“Nope, but I do have a number.” Kyle scrawled his name and an 800 number on a slip of paper torn from the edge of a magazine and handed it over. They had opened a back channel: Muscle to muscle, spook to spook.

Everyone on board wore a necklace of plastic credentials. They were just men coming to work, part of the ongoing, ever-changing force required to keep the wells pumping out three hundred thousand barrels of oil every day. Routine jobs, routine flight, routine day. The twin-engine aircraft slowed, lowered its wheels and joined the landing pattern that came in straight over the bustling city.

A BULLET SMACKED INTOthe right engine with a loud, tearing thud and the Belgian screamed, “They are shooting at us!” The King Air plane jolted sharply to its right as the engine began to smoke and a spinning prop stuttered. Several more rounds popped through the right wing, boring holes in the thin metal but not striking any fuel or electrical circuits. The window beside the Chinese accountant sang as a bullet glanced off of it with a loud smack , webbing the thick Plexiglas with fracture lines. Henry Tsang did not flinch.

The pilot fought the aircraft under control and brought it level as a fire suppressant sprayed the smoking engine. Less than a minute after the shots were fired, the plane touched down on the long runway and began its roll to the terminal. The copilot leaned out of his seat and looked back down the aisle. “Emergency over. Anybody hurt back there?” he called.