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 fireplace that served for both cooking and heating, a vine-cutting fire smoldering on the blackened hearth. The puncheon plank floors were worn smooth from centuries of footsteps, and the outside entrance was a low-set, high-silled, "skull-cracker" doorway designed to slow the initial attacking rush of bandits and family enemies.
It served as no defense to bandits invited into the house, however. The farm's owner and his fourteen-year-old daughter stood silently near the fireplace, relying on the ancient peasant's defense of unobtrusiveness.
"Ah, Gleska, my sweet, you awaited your knight's return, and with hot tea. Just the thing for a cold morning."
Unspeaking, the girl lifted the kettle from the fireplace crane and brought it to the table, filling one of the grime-opaque glasses with powerful twice-brewed black tea. Kretek dropped into the free chair beside the glass, squeezing the girl's buttocks through her cheap cotton skirt. "Thank you, my love. I will warm myself with your good tea, and then in a little bit, when I have finished my work, I will warm you."
With a ferocious mock growl, he drew her in and buried his face between her almost non-existent breasts, eliciting another volley of coarse laughter from his men.
At the fireplace a flare of impotent fury flashed in her father's eyes, only to be masked instantly. He had been pleased when he had rented his farm to these men for more money than he could make with five years of hard labor. He had not known then that he would also be renting his only girl child. But he was Albanian, and he understood the rule of the gun. The men with the guns make the rules, and these men had a great many guns. The girl would survive, and they would survive as Albanian peasants had always survived: by enduring.
Releasing the girl, Kretek poured sugar into his tea from the cracked bowl on the table. "Anything new come in while I was delivering the shipment, Crencleu?"
"Only one e-mail, sir." The communications chief passed a single sheet of hard copy across the table. "On your personal address, in your house code."
Kretek flipped open the sheet and studied the message. Slowly a wolflike smile broke through the brush of Kretek's beard.
"It's good news from the family, my friends," he said finally. "Very good news, indeed."
The pretense of joviality passed, and he looked up, eyes distant and intent. "Crencleu, advise our Canadian point men that the arctic operation