An older car with three colors of paint on it drove up slowly, stopped for a moment, then moved on. Chen was near the Odessa port district that fronted on the Black Sea. Odessa had once been the busiest port and main southern outlet for the Soviet Union in the glory days. Chen had heard that ships from all over the world had lined up to get dock space. Now the new nation that had split off when the Soviet Union fragmented was known as Ukraine, and it struggled to keep its economy going well enough to maintain its independence. Chen knew that ships still stopped here to discharge and take on cargo, but not in the volume they used to.
The smells assaulted him again. It wasn’t the night-soil odor of the Chinese country, but more a cloying smell of unwashed bodies and decomposing garbage. He hated it here in Ukraine. He hated any place that wasn’t China.
Chen Takung had come to Odessa on board the Star of Asia, of Chinese People’s Republic registry, a beaten-up and weathered freighter, which now sat at a dock awaiting its special cargo. Chen eased against the building, not letting the two-hour wait drag at his senses. He saw everything that went on in the area, evaluated the actions, and determined that none of them held any danger for him.
He tried to relax tense muscles. His senses were on instant alert, searching for anything dangerous. He had made covert buys of sensitive goods from foreign nations before, but nothing of this magnitude.
Chen glanced where his backup crouched in the darkness across the street. The other man had a sniper rifle and was deadly accurate. No one would see him until they should see him.
Chen was highly trained in his field of international relations and secret operations. He was extremely efficient when dealing with those who worked outside of the law of their own countries.
He squeezed his left arm against his body and felt the reassuring bulge of the 9mm pistol. The two men he was to meet were late, which he had expected. He had played that role often in his dealings.
He faded to the left out of the mouth of the dark alley, and edged into the doorway of the run-down building. The door was inset two feet, giving him plenty of room to vanish completely in the shadows of the Ukrainian summer night.
The smell came again. Something dead, maybe a rat or a cat. He pushed it out of his mind.
Time dragged. Tension knotted a muscle in Chen’s neck, and he rotated his head trying to calm it. Sweat beaded his forehead even in the cool night. Where were they? They should have been here a half hour ago.
He heard them first. Footfalls on the cobblestones coming from the right. Slowly two men materialized out of the darkness from the downtown direction, and paused at the side of the same building that shielded Chen.
“Nabokov?” Chen whispered the password. He felt better now, more sure of himself. Only two of them.
The men walked toward him slowly with nervous caution.
“Yes, I am Nabokov. Are you Chen?”
“Yes, I’m Chen.” They spoke in Russian. Chen stepped away from the doorway. The two men stopped three paces from him.
“You are early,” he said, still in Russian.
“Yes, we are ready to do business.”
“First I need to inspect the merchandise. Then I’ll show you the payment.”
“You have the seventy-two million U.S. dollars we agreed upon?”
“Yes, the equivalent in gold bars, diamonds, and U.S. currency. I’ll show you it after we see the goods.”
“Yes, we agree. Come with us.”
Chen had expected more than two of them. He made a curt motion, telling his backup rifleman to return to their headquarters.
Chen and the two Ukrainians walked down a block, where the three entered a ten-year-old Ziv auto.
A short drive later, the car stopped at a large run-down warehouse near the docks.
“The merchandise is inside,” the taller of the square-cut Ukrainians said. “We have security. We tell you so you won’t be surprised.”
“I would wonder if you didn’t.”
Six Ukrainian soldiers stood just inside the warehouse’s first door. They had the newer Russian-made AK-74 rifles. A Russian RK-46 machine gun stood on its mount of sandbags, and a soldier trained it on the door. At each of the next four locked doors there were three soldiers armed with the Portuguese-made stubby Lusa A2 submachine guns. They had an interesting closed configuration. Chen counted twenty-four guards before he came to the last locked door. They had worked their way to the far side of the warehouse. This last section was bathed with bright lights. Chen could smell a salty dampness in the air, so this area must be right next to the water.
When the door opened, he stared at the contents of the huge room. Chen caught his breath, but made sure the two Ukrainians didn’t notice. The merchandise was as negotiated. Six of the Russian Satan intercontinental ballistic missiles. The six lay on shipping dollies with wheels for easier movement. All looked identicaclass="underline" painted brown and green in a camouflage pattern, eighty feet long, and should weigh a little over thirty tons each. Chen knew that when fired from a land-based mobile launcher or silo, one missile could travel over 6,500 miles and dump nuclear bombs on ten different independently targeted cities.
Chin shivered. Right in front of him were six of the large missiles waiting for him. They looked to be as ordered, with the correct Russian words and configuration. Ten nuclear warheads should be inside each of the sleek nose cones.
“I’ll need to inspect each missile, to be sure there have been no changes, no sabotage,” he said.
The two Ukrainians nodded. Chen crawled over and around the missiles for a half hour. The long-range ICBMs were in mint condition. He had trained at the Karkoff Institute of Scientific Research in Moscow for two years, specializing in the Russian ICBM system and its missiles. There was no evidence that any of the nose cones had been tampered with or the warheads removed. Good.
Back with the two Ukrainians, he nodded. “They appear to be in good condition and unaltered. We do not need the auxiliary launching and guidance systems. If we find any irregularities after we take possession, we’ll come back and kill you.”
“Have no worries. These missiles are as you ordered.”
“Where do I go to make payment?” Chen asked.
“Do you have it in a vehicle?”
“Yes, a truck with the U.S. dollars, the diamonds, and the gold. Together it has a value of seventy-two million dollars.”
“Bring it here.”
“First our freighter must be under way so it can redock here.”
The Ukrainian who did most of the talking smiled. “There is no need for that. Your ship, the Star of Asia, has been redocked just beyond those large doors.”
Chen smiled. “Ukrainian efficiency. I’ll go and bring the payment. We must have our ship loaded and be ready to cast off our lines before daylight.”
“There should be no problem. Our harbormaster has been told of your departure.”
“And compensated?” Chen asked.
They all laughed.
“I understand that not all levels of your government have been informed of this sale.”
Nabokov, the larger man, chuckled. “This is a private sale.”
“Good. If this works out, perhaps we can do business again.”
Chen went with the other two back through the locked and guarded doors to the street. They loaned him a car and driver to take him where he needed to go. He had the driver drop him off two blocks from the small office he had rented two months ago when negotiations first began with Nabokov, director of the Nuclear Arms Arsenal just outside of Odessa. Chen knew that these were missiles that Ukraine had kept out of the inventory of the large numbers of nuclear weapons, missiles, and warheads that were transferred to Russia in 1994 and slated for destruction. That had been part of the disarmament accord between Russia and the United States. Chen had been told that now the hoarded nuclear weapons were orphans, known about only by a few men high in the government. Six of the missiles would not be missed due to the sloppy management.