The Arctic Event by James H. Cobb Page B

with the flow of armaments bound for the Mideast. Beyond hating everyone else, Arabs love to hate the Jews. They will be happy to blame them for the loss of their munitions.”
    Kretek straightened, holding a gray metal box the size of a carton of cigarettes. He extended a telescoping aerial from the top of the box and flicked on a power switch, a green check light glowing in response.
    “You will tell them about the Jews, Anton?” Vlahovitch questioned skeptically.
    “Why shouldn’t I? It’s the truth, isn’t it? The Jews are responsible. Our terrorist friends are excellent clients. They pay us good money in exchange for the weapons and explosives we sell to them. They deserve to know the truth...” Kretek flipped a safety guard up and off the central key on the transmitter. “...just not quite all of it. There’s no need to mention all of the good money the Mossad is paying to see that those weapons and explosives never arrive.”
    Kretek pressed with a calloused thumb. Out in the night a receiver-detonator carefully grafted inside a doctored block of Semtex reacted to the electronic impulse.
    There was a flash like ruddy heat lightning over the Adriatic, and the distant thud of a massive explosion as the Dornier and its crew vaporized.
    “This is the secret of doing good business, Mikhail,” Kretek said with satisfaction. “You must always do your best to please as many clients as possible.”
    The ancient stone-walled farmhouse had been built before the birth of Napoleon and had been occupied by successive generations of the same family for almost three centuries.
    In the United States this would have made it a historic landmark. In Albania this made it just another weary, overused building in an overused land.
    For the past fifty-odd years, a variety of governments had promised the occupants of the farm electricity “soon,” but only now had it arrived, in the form of the snarling Honda generators of the Kretek Group’s headquarters.
    The straw pallets and crude homemade furnishings had been emptied from one of the damp sleeping rooms, replaced by the folding field desks, satellite phones, and civil sideband transceivers of the communications section. The guard force had made a billet of the barn, and their camouflaged pickets had the farm isolated from all contact with the outside world, from within or without, and the transport section had their vehicles concealed in the other outbuildings.
    The members of the headquarters unit were accustomed to such temporary quarters. They never remained in the same location for more than seven days at a time. One week in a resort villa on the Rumanian coast, the next on the rented top floor of a luxury hotel in Prague, the third aboard a fishing trawler cruising the Aegean, or, as now, a dank stone farmhouse in Albania.
    Never give your enemies a sitting target—that was yet another of Anton Kretek’s survival precepts. The temptation to relax and wallow in the good life provided by his successes was strong, almost overwhelming at times, but the arms merchant knew that to be a road that led to disaster.
    It was also beneficial for the lads to see that the Old Man still had a sharp eye and a stone fist and that he wasn’t afraid to get it bloody. It was good for discipline.
    “How did it go, Anton?” Kretek’s chief of communications asked as the arms dealer pushed through the low doorway into the farmhouse’s combined kitchen and living room.
    “No difficulties, my friend,” Kretek growled amiably. “You may contact the Palestinians and tell them their shipment is on its way. Whether it will arrive...” Kretek mugged a blank look and shrugged his broad shoulders.
    The men seated around the rough central table knew they should laugh.
    Barring the single glaring bulb of a safety light hung from an overhead beam, the room itself might have been a museum tableau from the eighteenth century with its low ceiling, its dingily whitewashed stone walls, and the broad