Once, Brown was known by a different name – his real name. As time passed, his name had changed. At this point, he’d gone by so many names he couldn’t remember them all. This latest one was his favorite: Brown. No first name, no last name. Just Brown. Brown was good enough. It was an evocative name. It reminded him of dead things. Dead leaves in late fall. Dead trees after a nuclear test. Wide open and staring dead brown eyes of the many, many people he’d killed.
Technically, Brown was on the run. He had ended up on the wrong side of history about six months ago, on a job that hadn’t even been explained to him. He’d had to leave his home country in a hurry and go underground. But after a period of uncertainty, he was back on his feet again. And as always, there was plenty of business to do, especially for a man with the kind of bounce-back ability he had.
Now, just before midnight, he stood outside a warehouse in a rundown section of this seafaring town’s port district. The warehouse was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire, but the gate was open. A chilly fog rolled in off the Mediterranean Sea.
Two men stood with him, both wearing leather jackets, and both with Uzi submachine guns strapped over their shoulders, and stocks extended. The guys would be nearly identical, except one of them had shaved his head completely bald.
Out on the street, headlights approached.
“Eyes open,” Brown said. “Here come the holy warriors now.”
A small box truck drove up along the deserted boulevard. There was a giant image of oranges along the side of it, with one sliced in half and showing the bright reddish-orange meat of the fruit. There were words on the side of the truck in Greek, probably a company name, but Brown didn’t read Greek.
The truck reached the gate and pulled straight into the yard. One of Brown’s men walked over and slid the gate shut along its track, then locked it with a heavy padlock.
As soon as the truck stopped, two men climbed out of the cab of the truck. The rear door opened, and three more clambered out. The men were dark-skinned, probably Arab, but clean-shaven. Their uniform consisted of blue jeans, light windbreaker jackets, and sneakers.
One man carried a large canvas bag, like a hockey equipment bag, over either shoulder. The weight of the satchels pulled the man’s shoulders down. Three of the men carried Uzis.
We have Uzis, they have Uzis. It’s an Uzi party.
The fourth man, the driver of the truck, was empty-handed. He approached Brown. His eyes were blue, and his skin was very dark. His hair was jet black. The combination of blue eyes and dark skin gave his face an odd effect, as if he wasn’t quite real.
The two men shook hands.
“Jamal,” Brown said. “I thought I told you to come with only three men.”
Jamal shrugged. “I needed one to carry the money. And I don’t count toward the total, right? So I did bring three. Three gunmen.”
Brown shook his head and smiled. It hardly mattered how many people Jamal brought. The two men with Brown could kill a busload of gunmen.
“Okay, let’s go,” Brown said. “The trucks are inside.”
One of Brown’s men – he called himself Mr. Jones – pulled an automatic opener from his pocket, and the garage door of the warehouse slowly rattled open. The eight men walked into the cavernous space. The warehouse was mostly empty, except for heavy green tarps thrown over two giant vehicles. Brown walked to the closest one and yanked the tarp halfway off.
“Voila!” he said. What he revealed was the front half of a large tractor-trailer, painted in green, brown, and tan camouflage colors. Jones yanked the tarp off near the rear of the truck, revealing a flat, four-cylinder missile launch platform. The two parts of the truck were separate and independent of each other, but were attached by hydraulics in the middle.
The trucks were called transporter-erector-launchers, or TELs, relics of the Cold War, mobile attack stations that NATO had used to target the old Soviet Union. The launchers fired smaller variants of the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the missiles could be outfitted with small thermonuclear warheads. These weapons were for a limited tactical nuclear strike – the kind that would take out a medium-sized city, or totally destroy a military base and its surrounding countryside, but maybe not bring about the apocalypse. Of course, once you started launching nukes at people, all bets were off.
In the old days, they called this missile system the “Gryphon,” after the ancient mythical creature with the legs and body of a lion, and the wings, head, and talons of an eagle – the protector of the divine. Brown got a kick out of that.
The system was decommissioned in 1991, and all of these units were supposed to have been destroyed. But there were still a few of them in existence. There were always weapons floating around somewhere. Brown had never heard of a missile class or a weapons system that had been entirely dismantled – there was too much money to be made misplacing them and having them turn up later. Retail stores called it “shrinkage.” Walmart and Home Depot experienced it. So did the military.
In fact, here were two of the mobile platforms, just parked in a warehouse in a Greek port city all this time, very close to Turkey, and less than a mile from the docks. Sitting snug inside each of the launch cylinders was a Tomahawk missile, each one operational, or likely to become operational with a little tender loving care.
Why, it was almost as if you could drive these trucks out of here and right onto a freighter or a ferry, then sail away for parts unknown. They were conventional weapons, certainly, but surely there were still nuclear warheads somewhere that would fit these missiles.
Then again, obtaining warheads wasn’t Brown’s department. That was Jamal’s problem. He was a capable guy, and Brown imagined he already knew where he might find some loose nukes. Brown wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Jamal was playing a dangerous game.
“It’s beautiful,” Jamal said.
“God is great,” said one of his men.
Brown winced. As a rule, he frowned on religious talk. And beautiful was a relative term. These trucks were two of the ugliest war machines Brown had ever seen. But they would pack a wallop – that much was certain.
“You like?” Brown said to Jamal.
Jamal nodded. “Very much.
“Then let’s see the money.”
The man with the heavy satchels came forward. He dropped them from his shoulders and onto the stone floor of the warehouse. He knelt and unzipped them, each in turn.
“A million dollars in cash in each bag,” Jamal said.
Brown gestured with his head to his other man, the bald one.
“Mr. Clean, check it.”
Clean knelt by the bags. He pulled random rubber-banded stacks of money from various sections of each bag. He took a small, flat digital scanner from his pocket and began to remove bills from each stack. He turned on the scanner’s UV LED light and placed the bills on the scanner window one at a time, revealing the UV security strip on each bill. Then he ran a light pen over each bill, revealing the hidden watermarks. It was a cumbersome process.
As Clean worked, Brown slipped a hand inside his jacket, touching his gun there. He made eye contact his man Jones, who nodded. If something funny was coming, it would happen now. The body language of the Arabs didn’t change – they just looked on impassively. Brown took that as a good sign. They were really here to buy the trucks.
Mr. Clean dropped a stack of money on the floor. “Good.” He picked up another stack, began riffling through it, checking bills with the device. Time crawled by.
“Good.” He dropped that stack and picked up another one. More time passed.