“See!” Riaz screamed, outraged. “See!” he fired at Mahmood. “It cannot be done now! We cannot wait six months. Six months!” He laughed. “Six more months, because of your incompetence! All the borders of Asia are being watched with ten times the attention they were before! Nothing will get through!”
“We must be patient, Riaz, if the—”
“No! You heard it! We have no time to be patient. We have been patient. It is time to act.”
Mahmood lowered his voice in desperation. “I will not have you ruin this. There is too much at stake.”
“You said it would all be in place by now, Mahmood. I believed you! Everything else is in place. I have taken irrevocable steps, and we must act now or we will never be able to. Do you not understand that? Are you so stupid?” Khan asked. He turned to one of the men next to him holding an AK-47 as if he had held it every day for years. “How many men can you send over the border?”
Mahmood interrupted. “No, Riaz! We must do things in order—”
“Shut up!” Riaz yelled in his native Pashto, the language of the northern frontier provinces, a language no one like Mahmood would ever understand.
The armed man said to Khan in Pashto, “He has done nothing for us.”
Khan agreed. “He had his chance. He brought us nothing except the international attention that we did not need. And now he has killed us.” He looked at Mahmood like a serpent. Khan’s huge, muscular neck was red with anger. “We do not need him. I know who his contact is in Washington. We can bring other pressure to bear.” He and the armed man exchanged a knowing glance.
Riaz turned suddenly to Mahmood and grabbed him by the throat with both meaty hands. He lifted him up off the floor and held him, choking the smaller man. “No more waiting! No more promises!” Riaz screamed in Urdu.
Mahmood’s eyes bugged out in surprise and terror as he tried to free himself. He began flailing his arms, trying to grab the ferocious hands that held him. His feet kicked vainly for something solid to give him leverage. His red face began to turn pale. The other men watched casually as Riaz lifted the man higher so everyone could see the life drain from his face. Mahmood’s feeble struggling lessened as his arms fell slack against his side. His hands twitched and his eyes rolled back into his head. Still Riaz held him high, as high as he could hold him. Finally Mahmood was still.
Riaz tossed him aside like a sack of meat. Mahmood’s head cracked against the stone floor as he landed in a heap in the corner of the room.
Riaz looked at the man he had begun addressing earlier. “How many men can you take across the border into Kashmir?”
“Two thousand,” the man replied softly, unmoved by Mahmood’s death.
Khan considered. “One week from tonight begin the infiltration. Gradually. They must not be detected. Remember. You are not to attack. That will come later. You are there only to be ready, and to recruit others. It will be some months’ time before the attack, but it will come.”
The man nodded. “We will be ready.”
Riaz pointed at Mahmood lying in the corner. “His failure has made it impossible to do what we had planned. Now we must do something different.” He looked at his subordinates. “Don’t worry about the details. You just do your job, and I promise I will do mine. I will get there, and I will do it.” He looked at the Russian, who was unable to speak from watching a man he knew murdered in front of his eyes. “I need to talk to your friends in Russia.”
The Russian continued to stare at Mahmood’s purple neck with clearly visible handprints and at his buggy, open eyes. Two flies had already begun circling the body. “They are not my friends.”
“True. They do nothing out of friendship.” Riaz smiled. “It is always for money. Or power. I can identify with them. They are my kind of people. I need to talk to them.”
The Russian scientist nodded, trying to ignore what he had just seen, trying not to throw up. He had never wanted to leave Russia. He was comfortable where he had been, working in a laboratory at the nuclear weapons plant at Trekhgornyy. He was content, until he got laid off from the plant. They had no more money to pay him. He’d tried to find other jobs in Russia, but there was nothing, and certainly nothing that would allow him to use his training, his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Moscow University. The local Mafia had offered him a job as a driver for more than he’d been paid as a scientist for the state, when he had the job.
He had refused. He knew he would never work for the Mafia. But then they had come back, offering him a position overseas, working in his field, helping them “solidify a relationship,” as they had put it. And he would be paid in gold, five times what Russia had ever paid him. He couldn’t resist.
Khan crossed over and stood in front of the Russian, looking up into his blue eyes. “You need to tell your friends to get me more material. Within a month.”
The Russian tried to hide his fear. “It is impossible—”
“I am sick of that word!” Khan screamed. “It is not impossible! They did it once, and they can do it again. Security in Russia is terrible. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Terrible, yes, but not nonexistent!” the Russian protested. “And getting it here would be doubly impossible.”
“We cannot wait!” Khan insisted, looking at Shirish.
Shirish replied, “We have only one more time we could do it. One and only one.”
“When?”
“October.”
The Russian knew he’d be the next bug-eyed corpse lying on the floor if he didn’t come up with some alternative. “You are doing it the hard way,” he said cryptically.
Khan looked at the rest of the men in the room, who were shifting their weight restlessly. He returned his stare to the Russian. “Oh. Really. You have an easier way and have just not told us about it.”
“I have only now thought of it,” he said, looking straight ahead, over Khan’s head.
Shirish stepped closer and listened with interest as the Russian spoke in English.
“What might it be?”
“You want to do serious, permanent, irreparable damage to the Americans with little risk?”
“Yes,” Khan answered slowly. “Obviously. That is the critical first step in our plan. You have known that!”
“You should listen to the Americans more. They are so open, so honest. They hang out their laundry for the entire world to see. If they find a weakness of their own, they have hearings. There are groups in America that do nothing but point out their own country’s weaknesses and faults. Such a weakness has been exposed for years. It would do much more damage than that nuclear warhead you were hoping to rescue at the border. And the rest of your plan could remain the same.”
Khan was intrigued. “We could do this from TOPGUN in Nevada?”
“Oh, yes. With ease.”
“And it would do as much damage as a nuclear weapon?”
“Perhaps not quite as spectacular, but equally deadly.”
“It must be too hazardous.”
“Far less dangerous than trying to smuggle a nuclear warhead into the United States.”
Khan turned away and walked toward the window. “I have no interest in biological killing. It is—”
“It isn’t biological.”
“What, chemical?”
“No. You need to carry nothing hazardous at all.”
“And you think we could do this with ease?”
“If you get to TOPGUN, you could do it.”
Khan pointed to the table where several air navigation charts and some papers lay. “Show me,” he said.
Luke sat in the instructor’s ready room at TOPGUN across the table from Lieutenant Quentin Thurmond, Thud, the only black instructor at the school and Luke’s best friend, who was eating a glazed doughnut as he drank coffee.