the night, and two vehicles, an elderly, blunt-nosed Mercedes truck and a smaller and newer Range Rover, jounced slowly down the rutted beach access road, driving by the dim glow of their parking lights.
At the mouth of the access, the little convoy paused, and two men in the baggy trousers and rough leather jackets of the Albanian working class dropped from the tailgate of the Mercedes and took up positions to cover the road. Each man carried a Croatian-made Agram submachine gun with a heavy cylindrical silencer screwed to its stubby barrel.
It was highly unlikely that anyone would venture down to this desolate stretch of seaside in the small hours of the morning. But if they did, policeman or peasant, they would die.
The trucks ran half a mile up the beach to the broadest, straightest reach of sand and halted. Half a dozen more armed men disembarked from the Rover and the truck cab, setting about a long-practiced drill.
As two of the men lingered beside the hood of the parked Rover, watching the sky, the others fanned out, creating an airfield.
Chemical glow sticks were broken and shaken into life, their butt ends inserted into short lengths of copper tubing. The men then spiked the sticks into the sand at spaced intervals in a long double row. In minutes, the flare path of an ad hoc runway glowed a dim blue-green in the night, invisible from beyond the dunes but readily apparent to anyone passing overhead.
The men fell back to the vehicles and waited, fingering their pistols and SMGs.
As watch hands crept to the appointed hour, the drone of aero engines became audible, and a winged shadow swept past, paralleling the beach, its running lights extinguished. The leader of the party, a big red-bearded man in corduroy trousers and a thick Fair Isle sweater, aimed an Aldis lamp and blazed it at the aircraft. Two short flashes, a pause, and two short again.
This was another of Anton Kretek's survival mechanisms: to stay in the field and personally supervise as many of his operations as he could. It was a good way to know whom to trust and whom to purge.
The plane, a Dornier 28D Skyservant STOL transport with twin engines and a high-set wing, ran another circuit around the beach airstrip and came in to land. With its engines throttled back to an idling mutter, it flared and settled between the rows of glow sticks, its fixed landing gear kicking up a thin, hissing spray of wet sand.
Kretek aimed and flared his Aldis lamp again, guiding the plane in to a halt beside the trucks. The Dornier's propellers continued to flicker over, but its side cargo hatch swung open, disgorging a single figure.
The man was small, dark and slender, and nervous with the world. A Palestinian Arab, his eyes moved constantly, trusting neither his environment nor his company.
"Good evening, my friend, good evening," the larger red-haired man called over the sound of the aircraft engines. "Welcome to beautiful Albania."
"You are Kretek?" the Palestinian demanded.
"So I have often been accused," Anton Kretek replied, setting the lamp on the hood of the Range Rover.
The Arab was in no mood for jocularity. "You have the material?"
"That's why we are both here, my friend." The arms dealer started toward the Mercedes truck. "Come have a look for yourself."
By the beam of a single flashlight, heavy cases of dark, waxed cardboard were being unloaded from the rear of the truck, the cases marked in the Cyrillic alphabet and bearing the international bomb-burst warning symbol for high explosives. Indicating that one case was to be set aside, Kretek flicked open a folding-bladed hunting knife and slashed through the yellow plastic strapping.
Lifting the lid revealed tightly packed brick-sized blocks wrapped in waxed paper. Opening the wrapper revealed a dense, smooth puttylike material the color of margarine.
"Military-grade Semtex plastique." Kretek gestured at it. "Twelve hundred kilograms' worth, all of it less than three months old and completely stable. Guaranteed to kill Jews and send your dedicated volunteers on to their seventy-two virgins with smiles on their lips."
The Arab's head jerked up, a spark of anger in his dark, expressive eyes. The anger of the fanatic confronted with the shopkeeper. "When you speak of the holy warriors of Muhammad and of the liberators of the Palestinian people, you will speak with respect!"
The arms runner's eyes went opaque and cold. "Everyone is liberating something, my friend. As for me, I liberate money. You have your merchandise; now I will have my